I put myself and my company at the C.I.A.’s disposal for some very risky missions...But when it became politically expedient to do so, someone threw me under the bus... He is incredulous that U.S. officials seem willing, in effect, to cut off their nose to spite their face. “I’ve been overtly and covertly serving America since I started in the armed services...I’m through... Every time an American goes through security, I want them to pause for a moment and think, What is my government doing to inconvenience the terrorists? Rendition teams, Predator drones, assassination squads. That’s all part of it... I’m going to teach high school... History and economics. I may even coach wrestling. Hey, Indiana Jones taught school, too.

I'm a spy... I worked for the CIA 15 years. The cover was I worked for the insurance business.

I grew up in the shadow of government. Both my parents worked for the government, and I expected that I would, as well. September 11th happened when I was 18 years old... And when everybody else was protesting the Iraq War, I was volunteering to join it. And that’s because I believed the things that the government was saying — not all of them, of course, but I believed that the government was mostly honest, because it seemed to me unreasonable that the government would be willing to risk sort of our long-term faith in the institution of government for short-term political advantage. As I said, I was a very young man. And I ended up going to work for the CIA undercover overseas out in the diplomatic platforms. Then I moved into contracting... because most people go into contracting still working for the government in these classified spaces because you make basically twice as much for the same work....

Another former official characterized counterintelligence as “an independent power in the C.I.A. Even people in the agency aren't allowed to deal directly with the C.I. [counterintelligence] people. “Once in it,” he said, “you're in it for life.”

The C.I.A. was never satisfied with the F.B.I. and, can't blame them," the former official said. "We did hit or miss jobs... "We just went through the motions on our investigation. It was just a brushoff.

The former C.I.A. official said that he could not reconcile Mr. Angleton's decision to permit the studies, which reported no evidence of foreign involvement, while being involved in an elaborate and secret domestic security operation to root out alleged foreign activities in the antiwar movement

When in 1951 I was inducted into the CIA as a deep cover agent, the procedures for disguising my affiliation and my work were unsmilingly comprehensive. It was three months before I was formally permitted to inform my wife what the real reason was for going to Mexico City to live. If, a year later, I had been apprehended, dosed with sodium pentothal, and forced to give out the names of everyone I knew in the CIA, I could have come up with exactly one name, that of my immediate boss (, as it happened). In the passage of time one can indulge in idle talk on spook life. In 1980 I found myself seated next to the former president of Mexico at a ski-area restaurant. What, he asked amiably, had I done when I lived in Mexico? "I tried to undermine your regime, Mr. President." He thought this amusing, and that is all that it was, under the aspect of the heavens. We have noticed that Valerie Plame Wilson has lived in Washington since 1997. Where she was before that is not disclosed by research facilities at my disposal. But even if she was safe in Washington when the identity of her employer was given out, it does not mean that her outing was without consequence. We do not know what dealings she might have been engaging in which are now interrupted or even made impossible. ... In my case, it was 15 years after reentry into the secular world before my secret career in Mexico was blown, harming no one except perhaps some who might have been put off by my deception.

From both progressives and conservatives who mistrust the government, I often hear comments such as, “Once in the CIA, always in the CIA”—as if onetime employment in the agency forms an unbreakable bond.*Those familiar with both the national-security community and the peace movement are aware that something like the reverse is true. Individuals who were attracted to careers in intelligence, law enforcement, or the military are often sticklers for doing what is right rather than what is expedient. That often puts them at odds with their political masters, leading sometimes to resignations and a resulting overrepresentation of former national-security professionals in the anti-war movement.
One manifestation of this is an organization of former national-security officers, including myself, called Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, or VIPS.

Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.

I never would have agreed to the formulation of the Central Intelligence Agency back in forty-seven, if I had known it would become the American Gestapo.

I don't complain about "the military" because of inconvenience or discomfort … I complain about how perilous it feels to attempt an authentic Christianity in the midst of "exploiting persons of their intelligence value," and then listening to the news, hearing of the bombing campaign just undertaken in the town that I just wrote an intelligence report on only days previous. Those bombs are given coordinates by my reports.

In his book Pakistan: Before and after Osama (2012)], Imtiaz Gul, executive director of the Centre for Research and Security Studies, a think tank in Islamabad, wrote that he’d spoken to four undercover intelligence officers who – reflecting a widely held local view – asserted that the Pakistani military must have had knowledge of the operation. The issue was raised again in February, when a retired general, Asad Durrani, who was head of the ISI in the early 1990s, told an al-Jazeera interviewer that it was ‘quite possible’ that the senior officers of the ISI did not know where bin Laden had been hiding, ‘but it was more probable that they did [know].

Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency from 2012 to 2014, offered this view as he was leaving his post: When asked if the terrorists were on the run, we couldn’t respond with any answer but “no.” When asked if the terrorists were defeated, we had to say “no.” Anyone who answers yes to either of those questions either doesn’t know what they are talking about, they are misinformed, or they are flat out lying.

The official also raised question about the bureaucratic procedures of the C.I.A. under Mr. Helms and suggested that his penchant for secrecy apparently kept the most complete intelligence information from being forwarded to the White House.