Quote

My mother is not a CIA agent, but she's an Italian mother, and she'd do anything for her son.

I learned later, just as a footnote, that the World Assembly of Youth was a CIA front.

If the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies were private companies and were chronically unable to accomplish one of their key missions, their shareholders would have long ago revolted, fired their management, and their stock would be trading at values near zero.

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

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.

The men and women of the CIA are a national treasure.

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

People in the CIA, they marry each other. They're like actors! We have to travel without much warning to far-flung places, and it's very hard to communicate what our experiences are like to those in the outside world.

When it comes to the assignment of blame, the CIA has by and large been a luckless organization.

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.