Cia Role Quotes

The CIA was set up by me for the sole purpose of getting all the available information to the President. It was not intended to operate as an international agency engaged in strange activities.

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.

The CIA should best serve the U.S. by being an unbiased reporter of the truth and if it were a fighting organization, that would affect its ability to analyze and report intelligence.

I’m William Colby and I was the head of the CIA. The job of intelligence is to warn us of dangers to our military. Now the Cold War is over, and the military threat is far less. Now it’s time to cut our military spending by 50 percent and invest the money in our schools, health care, and our economy.

Essentially Rumsfeld wins, Cheney wins, and the CIA and State Department lose. Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld have more centralized control over intelligence, analysis, and operations than ever before. And the way they interpret the law, if the President authorizes an intelligence mission to be run covertly by the Pentagon, they don't have to tell anybody, including Congress, about it because the President is the commander in chief.

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.

For some time I have been disturbed by the way the CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy making arm of the government.

We need to make is to strengthen the position of the director of the CIA.

Well look, CIA is an agency that has to collect intelligence, do operations. We have to take risks and it's important that we take risks and that we know that we have the support of the government and we have the support of the American people in what we're doing.

What the Agency [CIA] does is ordered by the President and the NSC [National Security Council]. The Agency neither makes decisions on policy nor acts on its own account. It is an instrument of the President.

Let's remember, the CIA's job is to go out and create wars.

President Eduardo Frei’s election was a triumph for democracy achieved partly as a result of the good work of the CIA.