Dwight D. Eisenhower Quotes

In the espionage world whenever something works, it looks brilliant. Whenever it goes wrong, it always looks like a terrible bungle.

In intelligence work, there are limits to the amount of information one can share. Confidentiality is essential.

Secrecy now beclouds everything about CIA—its cost, its efficiency, its successes, and its failures.

Secrecy now beclouds everything about the Central Intelligence Agency—its cost, its efficiency, its success, its failures.

The necessity of procuring good Intelligence is apparent & need not be further urged-All that remains for me to add, is, that you keep the whole matter as secret as possible. For upon Secrecy, Success depends in most Enterprizes of the kind, and for want of it, they are generally defeated, however well planned & promising a favourable issue.

Famously, the CIA is somewhere where marriages hardly ever last because it's obviously such a strange lifestyle.

Intelligence agencies keep things secret because they often violate the rule of law or of good behavior.

Perhaps my information hurt the Soviet Union more than it helped. I have no idea. It was not something I ever discussed with the KGB officers that I was dealing with.

I had been involved in U.S. intelligence in Berlin, Germany, while in the military and had worked with a contact with the Central Intelligence Agency office there.

I would have loved to have met some former spies, but they don't readily advertise themselves unless they're not living in Moscow, and even then. I'm sure I've met some without realizing it.

I've consciously tried not to romanticize anything, especially not intelligence work. I've always said that I've been writing a series of episodic, naturalistic novels. The people just happen to be spies, politicians, civil servants.

You can say that I lived in Asia for a long time and in Japan I became close to several CIA agents. And you could say that I became an adviser to several CIA agents in the field and, through my friends in the CIA, met many powerful people and did special works and special favors.

When people ask me if I have worked for the C.I.A., I often answer: what good to you is my answer? Because if I did, I might not say so.

The shadowy world of foreign intelligence-gathering – the American government’s most secret and least accountable enterprise – is now the Bush administration’s main legal weapon in the war on terrorism.

One of my own guiding principles in intelligence work was ... not to make a mystery of what is a matter of common knowledge or obvious to friend and foe alike.

There is only one law of espionage—there are always going to be spies.

Secrecy is as essential to Intelligence as vestments to a Mass, or darkness to a spiritualist seance, and must at all costs be maintained, quite irrespective of whether or not it serves any purpose.

The nation must to a degree take it on faith that we [the CIA] too are honorable men devoted to her service.

We will just have to tell the House that they will have to accept our judgment and we cannot answer a great many questions that might be asked

Everybody spies on everybody.

Our agency (the Central Intelligence Agency) is the last refuge of organizational privacy available to the U. S. Government.

You can probably forgive the top spy for lying about spying. Lying is part of the job description. It’s what spies do.

I am unable to tell a quarter of a billion Americans what we are doing on their behalf, because if I did, it would become the table of contents of the training manual of the enemy.

When I blew the whistle on the whole thing, it was [William J.] Casey who, I felt, regarded what I had done as treason.

I learned serving under William J. Casey, that the Clandestine Service is the heart and soul of the agency [the CIA]. It is also the part that can land you in jail.