Gilbert W. Fitzhugh Quotes

One is to ensure that the war fighters and the intelligence analysts get the information that they need when they need it, in a format that's useful to them.

As an intelligence analyst you have to tell the president what you know, what you think you know and what you don’t know.

Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.

Intelligence collection has its place—no question—… But no matter how important collection is, in the short and even the long run, it just doesn’t cost very much.

In politics, information is superabundant—what is needed is judgement and selectivity in dealing with that information.

The manner in which intelligence indicators were handled in the Cuba situation may well be the most serious flaw in our intelligence system, and one which, if uncorrected, could lead to the gravest consequences

One cannot guarantee that if we have good intelligence, good policy will necessarily follow. But we can guarantee that if we have poor intelligence, poor policy will necessarily follow.

We're flooding people with information. We need to feed it through a processor. A human must turn information into intelligence or knowledge.

Information is a source of learning. But unless it is organized, processed, and available to the right people in a format for decision making, it is a burden, not a benefit.

You have multiple intelligence agencies. They all ultimately report to the director of national intelligence but, you know, it never comes in neat packages. So you have to make judgments on what you have, and it's not easy to do.

Collecting intelligence information is like trying to drink water out of a fire hydrant. You know, in hindsight It's great. The problem is there's a million dots at the time.

I was an intelligence officer, not a policy-maker.

Policymakers have to make judgments based on the best intelligence they get.

Distinguishing the signal from the noise requires both scientific knowledge and self-knowledge.

We… need to recalibrate our expectations for what we access as actionable intelligence. We need to lower that threshold to the appropriate level and we need to have a higher threshold tolerance for pain in the event that we miscalculate or things go wrong or people get caught or something happens.

You don’t know what you don’t know. That’s the nature of the intelligence business.

The United States Intelligence community collects too much information.

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.

Intelligence, like any other aspect of national security, has to be under civilian control.

I do not believe that reorganization will fix what is wrong with our intelligence community….Failures were caused by performance, not organization.

In the intelligence business you are almost never completely wrong or completely right.

Moving from general intelligence to specific targets is the most difficult part of the intelligence business.

The FBI didn’t have a mechanism to know what it knew.

The operational tail will wag the intelligence dog. The top people will be forced to take up all their time in the direction of operations and will neglect intelligence.

When I first deployed as a military intelligence officer my resources were a map, a grease pencil and two corporals.