Asha Rangappa Quotes

A major theme in all my books is that the CIA is not only the first line of defense but they should also be the first line of offense.

Ask yourself: if I were a Chinese spy, why wouldn't I have flown directly into Beijing? I could be living in a palace petting a phoenix by now.

Another factor is the decision, made in 1976, to sharply divide the FBI and the foreign intelligence agencies. The FBI would collect within the United States; the foreign intelligence agencies would collect overseas.

I've always been baffled by critics of the CIA, who are horrified that it does illegal things. That is the purpose of an intelligence service: to perform illegal acts.

It is incontestable that even under the best of circumstances and when dealing with the friendliest and most stable of allies that intelligence organizations of foreign powers must not be permitted to become established on American soil and should be discouraged wherever possible from taking root any place in this Hemisphere.

[Referring to the CIA:] We coexist. They work, and we work.

The United States is the only country in the world that has ever released the operations files of its intelligence agency.

Prior to the present war [WWII], the United States had no foreign intelligence service. It never has had and does not have a coordinated intelligence service.

The only remaining superpower doesn’t have enough interest in what’s going on in the world to organize and run an espionage service.

We want our spying agencies spying on foreigners. That’s why we have them.

No one would argue that it's in the United States' interest to have independent knowledge of the plans and intentions of foreign countries. But we need to think about where to draw the line on these kind of operations so we're not always attacking our allies, the people we trust, the people we need to rely on, and to have them in turn rely on us.

I was in government for 13 years and in that time only once met the head of the German security services, and that was because he was an old friend. Otherwise, I carefully avoided having anything to do with these people. They are unavoidable but not really necessary.

Reasonable people can disagree about the authorities the NSA should have, when it's appropriate for the CIA to use drone strikes, and how assertive U.S. foreign policy and intelligence should be.

SIS, the Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6, also has no executive powers and operates abroad on CIA lines, but with a tiny percentage of the budget and a tiny percentage of the personnel.

The human spy, in terms of the American espionage effort, had never been terribly pertinent.

I think all governments engage in intelligence gathering vis-a-vis other governments.

I've been called a spy of Israel since 1996, and since I made my documentary film in 2000 the FBI has investigated me as an agent of Iraq. The FBI has also opened up an investigation into my wife calling her a KGB spy.

You can't come forward against the world's most powerful intelligence agencies and be completely free from risk.

When I was about, I'd say, 18 or 19 years old, I wanted to be a part of the CIA just because they know those intimate secrets... So I was just always into knowing. I like to know things.

Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.

There will always be spies. We have to have them. Without them we wouldn't have got Osama bin Laden - it took us years, but it happened.

In my professional work with the Agency, by the late '70s, I had come to question the value of a great deal of what we were doing, in terms of the intelligence agency's impact on American policy.

By the late '70s I had come to question the point of a great deal of what we were doing, in terms of the CIA's overall charter.

When you join the CIA, you have to make some peace with whether you are comfortable psychologically and philosophically, with the use of force and using it clandestinely.

…the CIA has never carried out any action of a political nature, given any support of any nature, to any persons, potentates or movements, political or otherwise, without appropriate approval at a high potential level in our government outside the CIA.