Mark Mazzetti > Quotes

“The CIA is actually a fragmented, cliquish culture, more like a public high school than many inside the agency care to admit.”
― Mark Mazzetti, The Way of the Knife

“Even if a phone was switched off, JSOC had the ability to turn the phone on; it would then give away the precise coordinates of whoever was carrying it.”
― Mark Mazzetti, The Way of the Knife

“Jockish paramilitary officers tend to shun the nerdy analysts, who regard the paramilitary operatives as knuckle-draggers. At the top of the pyramid are the case officers—the spies who go out into the world—who believe they are doing the real work of the CIA and like to boast that they don’t follow orders from desk jockeys at headquarters.”
― Mark Mazzetti, The Way of the Knife

“wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase, shed his parachute and walked away from the landing zone in his wingtip shoes.”
― Mark Mazzetti, The Way of the Knife

“Groups that had focused most of their energies dreaming up bloody attacks against India had begun aligning themselves closer to al Qaeda and other organizations with a thirst for global jihad. Some of these groups had deep roots in Lahore, which was the very reason why Raymond Davis and a CIA team had set up operations from a safe house in the city.”
― Mark Mazzetti, The Way of the Knife

“the Predator spotted a truck convoy driving into the camp. Out walked a tall man in long white robes. The video was grainy, but every person standing around the video monitor at the CIA was convinced that the camera was trained on bin Laden. CIA analysts scrambled to alert the Pentagon and the White House to get approval to launch missiles from the submarines. But officials at the National Security Council demanded to know whether bin Laden was going to be at Tarnak Farms for at least six hours—the time it would take to go through the launch protocols and for the Tomahawk missiles to fly from a submarine in the Arabian Sea to southern Afghanistan. The CIA had no clue, and so Sandy Berger and his staff declined to approve the strike.”
― Mark Mazzetti, The Way of the Knife

“position an exploding seashell near where Fidel Castro snorkeled in Cuba. The iconic image of the hearings came when committee members passed around a pistol that the CIA had built to shoot poison darts and Senator Barry Goldwater pointed the gun into the air as he looked through its sights. CIA director William Colby tried to make clear that the weapon had never been used, but the image endured. Before the committee had even wrapped up its work, President Ford signed an executive order banning the government from carrying out assassinations of foreign heads of state or other foreign politicians.”
― Mark Mazzetti, The Way of the Knife

“American temperament demands quick and spectacular results, while the British policy is generally speaking long-term and plodding.”
― Mark Mazzetti, The Way of the Knife

“Clinton paid little attention to intelligence issues and had private meetings with his spy chief only once a year. “We had very little access, frankly,”
― Mark Mazzetti, The Way of the Knife

“David Blee won the fight and successfully penetrated the KGB with dozens of highly placed moles during the 1970s. Now his son was at the front of a very different CIA war.”
― Mark Mazzetti, The Way of the Knife

“No longer a traditional espionage service devoted to stealing the secrets of foreign governments, the Central Intelligence Agency has become a killing machine, an organization consumed with man hunting.”
― Mark Mazzetti, The Way of the Knife

“Why is this bird following me?” Nek Muhammad Wazir sat inside a mud building in South Waziristan, surrounded by his followers and talking on his satellite phone to a BBC reporter. Looking out the window, the young commander with long, jet-black hair noticed something hovering above, glinting in the sun. He asked one of his lieutenants about the coruscating metal object in the sky. Nek Muhammad had just humbled Pakistani troops, and the CIA was following him. He had emerged as the undisputed rock star of Pakistan’s tribal areas, a brash member of the Wazir tribe who had raised an army to fight government forces in the spring of 2004 and brought Islamabad to the negotiating table. His rise had taken Pakistan’s leaders by surprise, and now they wanted him dead.”
― Mark Mazzetti, The Way of the Knife