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1 " It takes 5 to 7 years to turn a novice into a case officer capable of working in the capitals of the world. "
― Tim Weiner , Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
2 " Their attempts to make sense of the world had carried heat but little light. "
3 " The ability to represent failure as success would become an Agency tradition. "
4 " Intelligence fails because it is human, no stronger than the power of one mind to understand another. (480) "
5 " From 1966 to 1976 ... The primary cause in [the] decline in FBI counterespionage and counterintelligence cases was the ceaseless demand by Presidents Johnson and Nixon to focus on the political warfare against the American left.... - "Espionage Against the United States by American Citizens, 1947-2001, Defense Personnel Security Research Center, July 2002 "
― Tim Weiner , Enemies: A History of the FBI
6 " To the CIA, everyone's an outsider. "
7 " Washington was a small town run by people who believed that they lived in the center of the universe. "
8 " [Re: J. Edgar Hoover] His knowledge was enormous, though his mind was narrow. "
9 " For sixty years tens of thousands of clandestine service officers have gathered only the barest threads of truly important intelligence—and that is the CIA’s deepest secret. "
10 " Never had so much intelligence meant so little. The conduct of the war had been set by a series of lies that the leaders of the United States told one another and the American people. "
11 " The CIA’s officers in Baghdad and in Washington tried to warn that the path the president was pursuing in Iraq was disastrous. They said the United States could not run a country it did not understand. Their words carried no weight at the White House. They were heresy in an administration whose policies were based on faith. "
12 " The CIA not only missed the invasion, it refused to admit that it had missed it. Why would anyone in his right mind invade Afghanistan, graveyard of conquerors for two thousand years? A lack of intelligence was not the cause of the failure. A lack of imagination was. "
13 " In the cold war, the CIA was condemned by the American left for what it did. In the war on terror, the CIA was attacked by the American right for what it could not do. The charge was incompetence, leveled by such men as Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld. Say what one may about their leadership, they knew from long experience what the reader now knows: the CIA was unable to fulfill its role as America’s intelligence service. "
14 " The American people are suckers,” Nixon said. “Gray Middle America—they’re suckers. "
― Tim Weiner , One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon
15 " At the root of this failure of intelligence was “our national ignorance of Vietnamese history, society, and language,” he said. "
16 " The answer was Stellar Wind. The NSA would eavesdrop freely against Americans and aliens in the United States without probable cause or search warrants. It would mine and assay the electronic records of millions of telephone conversations—both callers and receivers—and the subject lines of e-mails, including names and Internet addresses. Then it would send the refined intelligence to the Bureau for action. Stellar Wind resurrected Cold War tactics with twenty-first-century technology. It let the FBI work with the NSA outside of the limits of the law. As Cheney knew from his days at the White House in the wake of Watergate, the NSA and the FBI had worked that way up until 1972, when the Supreme Court unanimously outlawed warrantless wiretaps. Stellar Wind blew past the Supreme Court on the authority of a dubious opinion sent to the White House the week that the Patriot Act became law. It came from John Yoo, a thirty-four-year-old lawyer in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel who had clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas. Yoo wrote that the Constitution’s protections against warrantless searches and seizures did not apply to military operations in the United States. The NSA was a military agency; Congress had authorized Bush to use military force; therefore he had the power to use the NSA against anyone anywhere in America. The president was “free from the constraints of the Fourth Amendment,” Yoo wrote. So the FBI would be free as well. "
17 " By ordering the director of central intelligence to conduct a program of domestic surveillance, Kennedy set a precedent that Presidents Johnson, Nixon, and George W. Bush would follow. "
18 " We’re not going to lose it. That’s all there is to it,” Richard Nixon said to Kissinger on February 18, as Lam Son 719 became a debacle. “We can’t lose. We can lose an election, but we’re not going to lose this war, Henry.… North Vietnam can never beat South Vietnam. Never. "
19 " They said Indonesia was a failure," Al Pope reflected bitterly. "But we knocked the shit out of them. We killed thousands of Communists, even though half of them probably didn't even know what Communism meant. "
― Tim Weiner
20 " There weren’t any moderates left in the government of Iran. "
