Top 35 Covert Quotes

Under the 1991 Intelligence Authorization Act, US intelligence agencies cannot engage in covert actions abroad without a presidential finding that these operations are important to US national security.

‘Basic Black with Pearls’ contains overt references to Virginia Woolf and covert ones to feminist classics like Kate Chopin’s ‘The Awakening’ and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.’ The scholar Ruth Panofsky, who writes extensively about Weinzweig, sees echoes of George Eliot.

The pleasure in lovers’ gifts is that they are often covert and secretive, worn next to the skin, hidden under pillows.

If Adam Schiff is able to review covert operations and intelligence, and if we have to be able to rely on his representations, our whole system is broken.

When I was outed on July 14th, 2003, I was, until that moment, covert. That means no one outside of a very small circle knew where I really worked.

I have covered Israeli hostage and M.I.A. cases for more than 15 years, including the covert ways in which Israel’s powerful espionage agencies operate to bring soldiers home alive or dead. Over that time, the issue has come to dominate public discourse to a degree that no one could have predicted.

There is not much of a bureaucratic leap, if history is any guide, between a seemingly benign call for ‘continuous situational awareness’ and the onset of a covert and illegal campaign of domestic surveillance.

Without a clear picture of where the military’s covert forces are operating and what they are doing, Americans may not even recognize the consequences of and blowback from our expanding secret wars as they wash over the world.

You begin to realize that hypocrisy is not a terrible thing when you see what overt fascism is compared to sort of covert, you know, communal politics which the Congress has never been shy of indulging in.

In an unconstitutional partnership with the state, the church can impose the most irresistible, if covert, controls conceivable.

I first learned the power of trust in the CIA. There is no question that when I joined the Agency as a covert operations officer, it was still run along the ‘old boys’ network’ model.

In reality the workings of your governing system are opaque and covert, while hiding in the chattering spotlight of an ostensible transparency, even though the ultimate objective is clear.

My approach to parenting is that everything is open – everything. I’m not very good at covert, or subtle, and I’ve had to learn timing. I do blunder in a bit.

The Congress has historically played covert communal politics in order to create what in India we call vote banks where you pit one community against another and so on in order to secure votes.

Exposing the activities of a foreign intelligence service renders them ineffective, since it removes plausible deniability, which is the hallmark of covert intelligence operations.

What I really found was that the one similarity between ‘Covert Affairs’ and ‘Fair Game’ is a deep love and admiration and fascination with the home life of a spy.

When you’re told to go brief a United States senator on a covert operation, you go do it. And you trust the information isn’t going to leak.

When a black man is stopped by a cop for no apparent reason, that is covert racism. When a black woman shops in a fancy store and is followed by security guards, that is covert racism. It is more subtle than 1960s racism, but it is still racism.

The ISI is above all a paramilitary organization. It doesn’t do all that much collection of intelligence. It’s not a very good spy agency, but it’s good at running covert action.

Even as the whole world tries to hang on to its job, there is also this weird parallel sense – almost a covert longing – that the old corrupt structures on which that job depends needs to be, ought to be, swept away.

The film ‘The Queen’ came about with a producer saying to me that he wanted me to write about the circumstances behind Diana’s death. I think he was hoping that I would come up with some journalistic scoop that would identify an MI5 covert plot.

No one wants to friend or follow covert info about Pakistan’s nuclear policy.

I am still profoundly troubled by the war in Nicaragua. The United States launched a covert war against another nation in violation of international law, a war that was wrong and immoral.

Hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.

Jim Crow laws stripped blacks of basic rights. Despite landmark civil rights laws, many public schools were still segregated, blacks still faced barriers to voting, and violence by white racists continued. Such open racism is mostly gone in America, but covert racism is alive and well.

My literal responsibility as director of the CIA with regard to covert action was to inform the Congress – not to seek their approval; to inform.

For decades, the men at Area 51 thought they’d take their secrets to the grave. At the height of the Cold War, they cultivated anonymity while pursuing some of the country’s most covert projects. Conspiracy theories were left to popular imagination.

Parents of all girls must simultaneously explain overt and covert sexism, name it whenever they see it, and teach their daughters to do the same.

Of a truth, there is an inward, formless, inarticulate, almost unconscious, prayer, the very breath of love, whereby the soul is knit fast to the God whom it has tracked, amidst the tangled underwood of human life, to his covert on the eternal hills.

In examining the CIA’s past and present use of the U.S. media, the Committee finds two reasons for concern. The first is the potential, inherent in covert media operations, for manipulating or incidentally misleading the American public.

I wouldn’t even know – and I spent three years in the CIA – I wouldn’t even know how you’d start a covert action program in a place like Iran. It would be extraordinarily difficult.

Our plans for ‘Superman?’ I can’t say. This is the most super secret thing ever. It’s like working for the government, like I’m on a covert mission.

Men are much more up-front with their friends. There isn’t as much maneuvering, back-stabbing and covert campaigning. It is what it is at face value.

You cannot deny the fact that, in the United States, there are some really great guys with rich experience in overt and covert special operations in Latin America, Asia, and Africa.

Stuxnet, Duqu and Flame are not normal, everyday malware, of course. All three of them were most likely developed by a Western intelligence agency as part of covert operations that weren’t meant to be discovered. The fact that the malware evaded detection proves how well the attackers did their job.