Clandestine Activities Quotes

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.

Spies cannot be usefully employed without a certain intuitive sagacity.

I'm clearly not an international man of mystery.

I wasn't a spy. I'd have been spotted in five seconds. Yes, I was in intelligence, but that covered a multitude of things.

Intelligence is about lies. If something is legal and above board, you would not need the CIA to do it.

From the outside, the CIA seems pretty exotic, but from the inside, it's a big, bureaucratic place. Think 'post office with spies.'

Blackwater's work with the CIA began when we provided specialized instructors and facilities that the Agency lacked. In the years that followed, the company became a virtual extension of the CIA because we were asked time and again to carry out dangerous missions, which the Agency either could not or would not do in-house.

I've always wanted to be a spy, and frankly I'm a little surprised that British intelligence has never approached me.

Plan and conduct covert operations which are conducted or sponsored by this government against hostile foreign states or groups or in support of friendly foreign states or groups but which are so planned and conducted that any US Government responsibility for them is not evident to unauthorised persons and that if uncovered the US Government can plausibly disclaim any responsibility for them. Covert action shall include any covert activities related to: propaganda; economic warfare; preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition, and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance movements, guerrillas and refugee liberation groups, and support of indigenous anti-Communist elements in threatened countries of the free world

I would be a terrible CIA officer in real life.

Oh, I can keep many secrets, so I would be a phenomenal secret agent. I love secrets.

It will be the CIA's mission and my own if confirmed to ensure that the agency remains the best in the world at its core mission - collecting what our enemies do not want us to know. In short, the CIA must be the world's premier espionage organization.

Decisions concerning covert actions are not often easily reached.

I'm always leery about bumping into somebody. One time I was with my wife in a restaurant, I saw somebody from my undercover days, and I got up and we just walked out.

I spent a whole career infiltrating places.

Few secret undertakings ever did any nation any good.

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

The king hath note of all that they intend, by interception which they dream not of.

My name is E. Howard Hunt. I'm currently retired from more than 22 years in the profession of espionage.

In my head, I think I'd make a perfect spy, but in reality, I don't think I'd fare very well.

Even if corners were cut, (Iran-Contra) was a brilliant scheme. There is no possibility that anyone in any Democratic administration would have gone to such lengths to fund anti-Communist forces. When Democrats scheme from the White House, it's to cover up the President's affair with an intern. When Republicans scheme, it's to support embattled anti-Communist freedom fighters sold out by the Democrats.

Every time I walk by a spy shop, I think that I need to put some surveillance on somebody. Rick's been acting fishy! I need to buy a safe that looks like a Spray 'N Wash can. "Hey, Mitch, can I use the Spray 'N Wash?" "Yeah, if you want to spray your shirt with documents!"

There exists a shadowy Government with its own Air Force, its own Navy, its own fundraising mechanism, and the ability to pursue its own ideas of the national interest, free from all checks and balances, and free from the law itself.

The desire for success lubricates secret prostitution in the soul.

When I first used to tour, guys would come up and say, 'Where's the fight club in my area?' and I would say, 'There isn't one.' And they'd say, 'No, no, you can tell me, you can tell me.'