Ronald Kessler Quotations

Because of the terrorist threat, the FBI and CIA have become as important as the military in preserving our freedom. Yet while thanking our military is standard practice in American life, no one thinks of thanking the FBI, the CIA, or the rest of the intelligence community for keeping us safe since 9/11.

Love him or hate him, no one has been able to figure out Donald Trump.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, decisions made by President John F. Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev could have plunged both countries into thermonuclear war.

When 'The Washington Post' ran the first national story about FBI profiling in 1984, no one outside of law enforcement recognized the term.

As the Marine One helicopter lifts off from the White House, the Prowler team watches for snipers. The team also responds to any threat that may arise at the White House itself.

Rather than use the term 'profiling,' the profilers prefer to say they engage in criminal investigative analysis. That is because, besides developing profiles, the analysts offer a range of other advice, including personality assessments and interview techniques tailored to a particular offender.

While most Americans know about the Boston Tea Party, few are aware of the Liberty Tree and how important it was to fanning the flames of rebellion that led to the revolution in 1775 and the Declaration of Independence.

As you can tell from the titles of my books, I like to probe secret organizations, secret subjects. And this sometimes gets me into trouble.

If FBI agents can't be trusted to wiretap within the law, why trust them to carry weapons or make arrests?

In the sweep of history, George W. Bush will be seen as one of our greatest presidents because of the decisions he made to keep us safe after 9/11.

In typical Washington fashion, nothing gets reformed until a disaster happens.

My mother, Minuetta Kessler, was a concert pianist and composer who performed at Carnegie Hall and Town Hall.

Pension funds, endowments, and private investors trust Mitt Romney's former company Bain Capital enough to hand it billions of dollars in assets.

The FBI Academy teaches new agents that the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.

When I was doing interviews at the FBI, my tape recorder battery died. They gave me a new one, and I said, 'Of course, this is bugged?'

Agents who have left the Secret Service to join other federal law enforcement agencies report that training in firearms and counterterrorism tactics in those agencies in many cases far exceeds the quality of what the Secret Service offered.

Complex man that he was, J. Edgar Hoover left nothing to chance. The director shrewdly recognized that building what became known as the world's greatest law enforcement agency would not necessarily keep him in office.

Despite constant vilifying by the media and congressional threats to take away the tools needed to uncover plots, FBI agents and CIA officers work silently around the clock and risk their own lives to keep us safe.

'Fox lies' has become a favorite mantra of the Left, yet there is a reason Fox News blows away the other cable networks in ratings and is more trusted as a news source than any other television network.

Hiking taxes on the so-called wealthy would help send us into a recession because so many small businesses report their income on individual tax returns. If taxes are raised, they will be less likely to be able to hire new workers and make new capital investments.

I have one anecdote about the FBI breaking into an embassy in Washington, and under Hoover, they had this sort of ruse whereby they didn't want to recommend a break-in that might be a big flap and cause all kinds of problems.

I like a challenge. The fact that these are secret organizations, and also very important organizations that can engage in abuses that are so important to our national security - all that attracts me.

I sat next to Carl Bernstein throughout Watergate, and Woodward would come over, and they would argue everything out, so I was really tuned into what happened.

Usually, it's hard to get organized before the fact, but we're hoping that this is the beginning of a cumulative process that will enable us to learn as much as we can about disasters.

With the selection of Acting Secret Service Director Joseph P. Clancy as the director, President Obama has guaranteed that the agency will continue to lurch from one shocking security failure to another.

Walk around any shopping mall, and you will see stores and restaurants opened six months ago and are - that are now closing. In the life of a company, eight years is an eternity.

One of my books, called 'Moscow Station,' revealed that a KGB archivist had defected from Russia to the FBI. And I knew that he was safe, and revealing this would not jeopardize him. But nevertheless, the FBI started a leak investigation.

Should Hillary Clinton run for president, voters who ignore the difference between the image she seeks to project and the reality will have only themselves to blame if her presidency turns into a disaster.

Since 9/11, the U.S.A. Patriot Act has torn down the invisible wall that was perceived as preventing the FBI and CIA from sharing information.

Only when you are self-employed do you fully realize how much more efficient you become when your output directly correlates with how much money you make.

Bush's aides made the point that not everyone reads the Washington Post and the New York Times. Rather, the Bush people were like antimatter: rather than having the normal inclination to feed their egos by garnering attention, they had the opposite orientation and were nearly impervious to press criticism.

Whatever they do, criminals and non-criminals act in particular ways. Some writers, for instance, use computers, others pen and paper. Some write in the morning, some at night. Each writer has a distinct style, with variations in grammar, sentence structure, and voice.

Lacking a profit motive, workers in the government by and large have a different work ethic from those in private industry. When they could make one call, federal workers take a meeting. When they could find an answer on the Internet, they form a study committee. Instead of appointing one supervisor, they appoint five.

Over the years, maybe one person has been uncovered by the FBI, and that was really a matter of luck, ... The CIA at War: Inside the Secret Campaign Against Terror.

Like Jon Voight, Pat Boone, Kelsey Grammer, and Gary Sinise, Clint Howard is one of the few courageous enough to identify himself publicly as a conservative.

The 9/11 commission recommended the appointment of a national intelligence director with budgetary authority to better coordinate the work of the intelligence community and resolve differences.

Voters who disregarded Richard Nixon's involvement in the questionable ethics issue that led to his Checkers speech should not have been surprised when he orchestrated the Watergate cover-up as president.

When I interviewed profilers in 1984 in the basement of the FBI Academy at Quantico, VA., there were just four of them - Roger Depue, John Douglas, Roy Hazelwood, and Robert Ressler.

To become a Secret Service agent, applicants must pass a polygraph exam. But after being hired, agents are never required to undergo regular lie detector testing again.

We plan to stay with this group over the next two years so that we can keep our fingers on the psychological pulse of this population.

The really hard thing is how do you get the information in the first place? How do you get someone to rat on someone like bin Laden? That is so difficult and that requires years and patience and money, ... Inside the CIA.

To reform the Secret Service, the agency needs a director from outside the agency who will be immune from that culture and not beholden to entrenched bureaucrats within the agency.

This isn't like your mother dying, where you grieve for three months and then move on. These people have had their entire world shifted beneath them.

This initiative is a unique opportunity to help policy makers monitor the unmet needs of people whose lives were, and may continue to be, severely impacted by this unprecedented disaster. Following 9/11, policy makers have wanted to have just this kind of assessment tool to guide policy. This initiative is the result of much discussion and modeling on how to reach survivors of disasters, and is the first attempt to provide actionable information through an advisory group model.

It's a great loss for Harvard and a great gain for Yale. I came to Harvard in part because of him. He's a wonderful guy and a great scientist.

Tact ops is a unit which breaks into homes and offices to plant bugging devices. They get into mafia hangouts, they go into embassies, they go into terrorist hangouts, and they describe themselves as court-sanctioned burglars.

On a regular basis, to appease White House or campaign staffs, Secret Service officials order agents to ignore basic security rules and let people into events without being put through a magnetometer or metal detector.

Incredibly, whenever I have proposed the theory that half of government workers could be cut, current and former federal employees I know have all agreed.

If Madison Avenue advertising executives were to pick a song that would best represent America, the last one they would choose is 'The Star Spangled Banner.'

In a series of articles beginning on Oct. 2, 1966, I wrote about the long-forgotten history of the Liberty Tree. To call attention to how obscure the site had become, I interviewed waitresses at the Essex Delicatessen below the plaque on Washington Street. None knew what the Liberty Tree was.

In the case of the FBI, I revealed that William Sessions, the FBI director, had been engaging in abuses of all kinds, and I exposed that. And that led to his dismissal by President Clinton.

The truth is that no internal reviews or congressional hearings will change the Secret Service's broken management culture. It needs better leadership.

The colonists' first protest against the British unfolded on Aug. 14, 1765 at the Liberty Tree. A magnificent elm towering over the other trees nearby, the Liberty Tree stood at the corner of what is now Washington and Essex Streets in downtown Boston.

The media are always on the lookout for possible sightings of D.B. Cooper, the man who parachuted from a plane with $200,000 in ransom money in November 1971. But the truth is, the mystery man wearing dark sunglasses almost certainly died during the jump, according to the FBI agents on the case at the time.