Quotes from Ben Macintyre

Signing off on the daily execution lists, Stalin was heard to remark: "Who is going to remember this riffraff in ten, twenty years' time? No one.

The Double Cross idea had always been based on lateral thinking without boundaries, a willingness to contemplate plans that others would dismiss as unworkable or, frankly, barmy.

bon viveur, wit, raconteur, mimic, linguist—endowed with a vast range of knowledge, both serious and ribald.

Everyone rehearses their recollections, believing that the more often an event is remembered, the closer we come to its reality. This is not always true. Most people tell a version of the past, and then either stick to or embellish it.

Spies tend to make extravagant claims for their craft, but the reality of espionage is that it frequently makes little lasting difference.

Anthony Blunt: His Lives (London, 2001), p. 273. 24 That's what Tiggers: Ibid. 25 He was a very nice: Andrew, Defence of

The pantheon of world-changing spies is small and select, and Oleg Gordievsky is in it: he opened up the inner workings of the KGB at a pivotal juncture in history, revealing not just what Soviet intelligence was doing (and not doing), but what the Kremlin was thinking and planning, and in so doing transformed the way the West thought about the Soviet Union. He risked his life to betray his country, and made the world a little safer.

Early in March, in the midst of discussions over the form of Operation Mincemeat, Montagu mounted a full-scale assault on Bevan, accusing him of being incompetent, mendacious, inefficient, and "almost completely ignorant25 of the German Intelligence Service, how they work and what they are likely to believe.

If he has confessed, one would have expected that some of the Abwehr officials closely connected to Artist and Tricycle would have ceased to carry out their normal functions"—like breathing.

America and Britain were working on the bomb together, at astonishing scientific speed and in deepest secrecy. Neither was helping, or informing, its other main ally, the Soviet Union. But Moscow was secretly obtaining that help anyway, through its spies. Not only did Stalin know all about the bomb, but he knew that Britain and America did not know he knew (which is the gold dust of intelligence). And he demanded that his spies find out more.

journalists (another tribe adept at misremembering the past)

As Oscar Wilde remarked: "It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.

As "a spur to rumor-spreading,"32 the crew was solemnly sworn to secrecy.

Never run away," Jock Lewes instructed them. "Because once you start running, you've stopped thinking.

The essence of espionage is betrayal of trust," Ames declared. He was wrong: the essence of successful agent running is the maintenance of trust, the supplanting of one allegiance by another, higher, loyalty.

Lying is wrong, son, but if it serves a greater good, it's OK.

If this is Upper Silesia, one wonders what must Lower Silesia be like

The double agents were now controlling their controllers.

plausible deniability.

The problem with buttering up the boss is that bosses tend to move on, which can mean a lot of wasted butter.

By the end of 1946 Philby had achieved something no other spy could boast: the award of three separate medals from nationalist Spain, the communist Soviet Union, and Britain.

For Kim Philby too the political frontiers shifted, though his convictions altered not at all. For most of the war he had spied on behalf of Britain's ally; now he was spying for Britain's sworn enemy, and from within the very heart of the British intelligence machine.

It was rumored that Sir Bernard could identify the cause of death simply by smelling a corpse. In 1938, the Washington Post hailed him as "England's modern Sherlock Holmes.

His writing is odd but poetic, a tumbling scree of half-built phrases and hiccuping grammar, vividly redolent of his own chaotic life.