Before he played CIA Director Saul Berenson on 'Homeland,' a much younger Mandy Patinkin gained some fame as Inigo Montoya, a legendary swordsman, in 'The Princess Bride.'

This program has been successful in detecting and preventing attacks inside the United States.

President Obama and his successors are dependent on the 100,000-plus people inside the American intelligence community - the people Edward Snowden betrayed.

Our inaction created the opportunity for the Russians to reenter the Middle East in a powerful way for the first time since 1973.

The Constitution defends all of us against unreasonable search and seizure. What constitutes reasonableness depends upon threat.

I'm not hugging the Guantanamo location, but our right to hold people under the laws of war as enemy combatants, I think, is unarguable, and we need to stand up for that.

Xi agreed to the American definition of legitimate espionage. In other words, you don't use the power of the state to steal secrets for profit.

Al Qaida changes; Al Qaida adapts. We have to adapt as well. We rely on resources to do that. Reducing resources beyond a certain point will make us less able to adapt as our enemy adapts.

One might oppose the CIA program, but Abu Ghraib it ain't.

George Tenet was actually a very strong centralizing force. If you met George by personality, George met with the president six days out of seven: nontrivial attribute inside the federal government. And George was head of the CIA.

In the Cold War, a lot of Soviet actions could be explained as extensions of Czarist imperial ambitions, but that didn't stop us from studying Marxism in theory and Communism in practice to better understand that adversary.

If we are going to conduct espionage in the future, we are going to have to make some changes in the relationship between the intelligence community and the public it serves.

Our nation counts on us to have the expertise and the insight to flag the risks and the opportunities that lie ahead, and to keep our eye on all the critical international concerns that face our nation right now.

As much as we might look for opportunities to keep Iraq together, we need to be prepared for the reality that it's not going to stay together.

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.

After the attacks on September 11th, we all learned lessons.

Responsibility demands action, and dealing with the immediate threat must naturally be a top priority.

For all of its well-deserved reputation for pragmatism, American popular culture frequently nurtures or at least tolerates preposterous views and theories. Witness the 9/11 'truthers' who, lacking any evidence whatsoever, claim that 9/11 was a Bush administration plot.

The question is how much of your privacy and your convenience and your commerce do you want your nation's security apparatus to squeeze in order to keep you safe? And it is a choice that we have to make.

It's hard to brief in the Oval. You know, you can't - no visual aids, hard to roll out something in front of somebody.

Despite a campaign that was based on a very powerful promise of transparency, President Obama, and again in my view quite correctly, has used the state secrets argument in a variety of courts, as much as President Bush.

When the intelligence is making a policymaker too happy, he ought to challenge it, and even if he doesn't, the intelligence briefer needs to launch a red team against his own conclusions to see if he can hold his ground.

'Islamist terrorism.' The very phrase is contentious. No one wants to make this problem harder by unfairly branding and alienating a quarter of the world's population, and even in this construction, no one should be thinking this means all of Islam or all Muslims.

When at the CIA, I was fond of saying that many jihadis join the movement for the same reasons that young Americans join the Crips and the Bloods: youthful alienation, the need to belong to something greater than self, the search for meaningful identity. But it also matters what gang you join.