Tim Weiner Quotes

#1. He was arguably the best-qualified FBI director since J. Edgar Hoover; he thought Clinton was the most talented politician since Richard Nixon. That made their mutual contempt all the more tragic. It undermined the FBI and ultimately damaged the United States.

Tim Weiner

#2. 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.

Tim Weiner

#3. Freeh infuriated the White House almost every day for more than seven years. One case among many was the FBI's immense investigation into allegations that China's intelligence services had bought political influence at the White House through illegal campaign contributions.

Tim Weiner

#4. A deep-cover squad tried to infiltrate the far left by posing as politically radicalized Vietnam veterans well supplied with guns and drugs. Four or five of them liked their new lives so much that they never came back.

Tim Weiner

#5. They might not love Big Brother, but they knew he was part of the family now.

Tim Weiner

#6. Yeah, it's a cover-up," Nixon said. "The cover-up is worse than whatever comes out. It really is - unless somebody is going to jail.

Tim Weiner

#7. [Re: J. Edgar Hoover] His knowledge was enormous, though his mind was narrow.

Tim Weiner

#8. The director of the National Security Agency, General Michael V. Hayden, had told tens of thousands of his officers in a video message: "We are going to keep America free by making Americans feel safe again.

Tim Weiner

#9. 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

#10. Hoover had installed 738 bugs on his own authority since 1960; the Justice Department's attorneys had been informed about only 158 of them, roughly one in five.

Tim Weiner

#11. The FBI was not incompetent or indifferent. It did not know what it did not know.

Tim Weiner

#12. 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

#13. To his enduring sorrow, Bill Clinton chose yet another pious judge to run the Bureau.

Tim Weiner

#14. 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.

Tim Weiner

#15. To the CIA, everyone's an outsider.

Tim Weiner

#16. The American people are suckers," Nixon said. "Gray Middle America - they're suckers.

Tim Weiner

#17. Washington was a small town run by people who believed that they lived in the center of the universe.

Tim Weiner

#18. Intelligence fails because it is human, no stronger than the power of one mind to understand another. (480)

Tim Weiner

#19. The great sadness," Helms said in an oral history recorded for the LBJ Library, "was our ignorance - or innocence, if you like - which led us to mis-assess, not comprehend, and make a lot of wrong decisions.

Tim Weiner

#20. 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.

Tim Weiner

#21. The ability to represent failure as success would become an Agency tradition.

Tim Weiner

#22. Truman said he only needed a daily intelligence digest to keep from having to read a two-foot stack of cables every morning.

Tim Weiner

#23. The Bureau had conducted uncounted break-ins and black-bag jobs on Hoover's say-so. The

Tim Weiner

#24. There weren't any moderates left in the government of Iran.

Tim Weiner

#25. The Vietnamese have a saying that you can't use a basket to cover a lion or an elephant.

Tim Weiner

#26. 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.

Tim Weiner

#27. 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.

Tim Weiner

#28. The spectacle of the United States Army chasing the unarmed veterans, their wives, and their children out of the shadow of the Capitol was a scene of American urban combat without parallel since the Civil War.

Tim Weiner

#29. At the root of this failure of intelligence was "our national ignorance of Vietnamese history, society, and language," he said.

Tim Weiner

#30. Their attempts to make sense of the world had carried heat but little light.

Tim Weiner

#31. The FBI had been a man's world - usually men of Irish or Italian heritage schooled by Jesuits and raised in a closed culture of police and priests.

Tim Weiner

#32. He started the damn thing!" Nixon said in a taped telephone conversation with his spiritual adviser, the Reverend Billy Graham. "He killed Diem!

Tim Weiner