Quotes from Ben Macintyre

As controlling officer, Bevan would become the mastermind of wartime deception, overseeing a worldwide web of deceit and mystification from the underground warren beneath Whitehall known as the Cabinet War Rooms.

Lo peor que puede sucederle a un espía es creer que lo aman, que se halla en una relación entre iguales, que no lo están manipulando.

One of the most powerful forces in espionage and intelligence work... is the emotional bond between the spy and spymaster, agent and handler.

Kühlenthal perfectly exemplified the qualities that John Godfrey had identified as the two most dangerous flaws in a spy: "wishfulness" and "yesmanship." He would believe anything he was fed, and he would do whatever he could to suck up to the boss and preserve his own skin.

A professional soldier with formidable powers of recall, after each cozy and informal chat with the Führer, Oshima compiled a detailed update on Hitler's military thinking and planning, which was encrypted and sent by wireless, with German approval, to the Japanese Foreign Office. These reports were read with avid interest in Tokyo—and Washington and London.

clerihew: Fuchs Looks Like an ascetic Theoretic

He was small, thin, greedy, clever, morally void, and monstrously bent. March "took corruption for granted,37 and used it casually and openly." He had been imprisoned for bribery and escaped to France, and by 1939 he was the richest, and dodgiest, man in Spain, nicknamed "the last pirate of the Mediterranean

If Baron von Roenne was the best way of planting an idea in Hitler's head, then Baron Oshima was the most reliable way of finding out if it had taken root there.

It is hard to say which reflected better on Hillgarth: the admiration of Fleming and Churchill or Philby's animosity.

astonishing array of technical gadgets for spies, including secure radios, secret ink, and even garlic-flavored chocolate—issued to spies parachuting into occupied France to ensure their breath smelled convincingly French on landing.

Ernest Hemingway based Robert Jordan, the main character in For Whom the Bell Tolls, partly on Umar Mamsurov.

Patra was trying to read Hegel's Science of Logic. This is something no one should ever feel obliged to do.

Tangle within tangle, plot and counter-plot, ruse and treachery, cross and double-cross, true agent, false agent, double agent, gold and steel, the bomb, the dagger and the firing party, were interwoven in many a texture so intricate as to be incredible and yet true. —WINSTON CHURCHILL

Most Secret Sources showed that Garbo's reports, five or six a day, were being relayed to Berlin, promptly and almost verbatim, along with his analysis of their meaning. The hoax was being injected straight into the central nervous system of the Third Reich.

Eccentricity is one of those English traits that looks like frailty but masks a concealed strength; individuality disguised as oddity.

Like Elliott, Angleton cultivated a brand of high eccentricity: he gave his agents botanical code names such as "Fig," "Rose," or "Tomato" and sported a fur cape with a high collar, which made him look "like a British actor emulating a Thirties spy.

He revealed nothing about Ursula's activities and his own work on behalf of Soviet intelligence.

People sometimes thought him heartless because he was more often interested in others than attached to them.

As the intelligence historian Michael Handel writes in his assessment of Operation Mincemeat: "It is very unusual and very difficult17 for deception to create new concepts for an enemy. It is much easier and more effective to reinforce those which already exist.

Like most people who proclaim themselves free spirits, she was fiercely conventional.

One of the hazards of having a good idea is that intelligent people tend to realize it is a good idea and seek to play a part. Like most novelists, Montagu did not like the editing process. He did not like the way Operation Mincemeat was being watered down. He did not like senior officers pulling rank and tinkering with a project in which he had invested so much of his time, energy, and personality.

but you just know what to trust and what not to trust.

The plan was born in the mind of a novelist and took shape through a most unlikely cast of characters: a brilliant barrister, a family of undertakers, a forensic pathologist, a gold prospector, an inventor, a submarine captain, a transvestite English spymaster, a rally driver, a pretty secretary, a credulous Nazi, and a grumpy admiral who loved fly-fishing.

a Hungarian girl with a completely unjustified belief in her own genius.