Quotes from Ben Macintyre

Maurice Oldfield, the most senior spy in Britain, signed himself "C," in green ink, a practice first adopted by the founder of MI6, Mansfield Cumming, who imported it from the Royal Navy, where ships' captains customarily write in green ink.

Aberbargoed was a grim place a century ago, a brooding village of coal-dusted sadness.

Indignor quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus, often translated as "Even Homer nods.

retribution [sic] for the wrongs I have committed.

Graham Greene, a wartime intelligence officer in West Africa, based his novel Our Man in Havana, about a spy who invents an entire network of bogus informants, on the Garbo story.

malodorous, and always supremely entertaining. Here too

When told to do something, he tended to "obey not the order which he had actually been given by a superior, but rather the order which that superior would have given if he had known what he was talking about.

As the war raced to its bloody finale, Ursula was swept up in an exhausting whirlwind of espionage, child-rearing, and housework: on any given day she might be coordinating intelligence gathered from her father, brother, Tom, the chemist, and others in her network, gathering intelligence from the Tool missions, while hanging out the washing, doing the dishes, and struggling to keep the domestic ship afloat at Avenue Cottage.

later, the Channel Islands earned the unhappy distinction of becoming the only part of Britain to be occupied by Germany during the Second World War.

To overcome frailty is one definition of courage; to acknowledge it with honesty is another.

As it was, D-Day was a damn close-run thing and a brutal struggle: Allied casualty rates averaged 6,674 a day for the seventy-seven days of the Normandy campaign. Those numbers would have been far higher, had it not been for a small and most peculiar band of men and women fighting a secret battle.

In the film, Montagu makes a cameo appearance as an air vice marshal with doubts about the plan's feasibility. At one point in the film, Montagu leans over to Webb, looks him in the eye, and declares: "I suppose you realise, Montagu, that, if the Germans see through this, it will pinpoint Sicily." This was a wonderfully surreal moment: the real Montagu addressing his fictional persona, in a work of filmic fiction, based on reality, which had originated in fiction.

Ashenden admired goodness, but was not outraged by wickedness," wrote Maugham.

Imitation docks and an oil storage complex were constructed by set builders from Shepperton Studios following plans drawn up by the architect Basil Spence. King George VI's tour of this impressive and entirely unusable installation was duly reported in the press for the Germans to read.

live a double life, to love those around you while concealing your true inner self, to appear to be one person to the external world and quite another inside.

Angleton was a little like one of the rare orchids he would later cultivate with such dedication: an exotic hybrid, a Mexican-Apache-Midwestern English-sounding poet-spy, rare and remarkable, alluring to some but faintly sinister to those who preferred simpler flora.

Only a physical barrier, reinforced by armed guards in their watchtowers, could keep the East Germans in their socialist paradise and stop them fleeing to the West.

John Masterman, an Oxford history don, part-time detective novelist, and sportsman, was appointed chairman of the Twenty Committee, which included directors of intelligence for the army, navy, and RAF and representatives of MI5, MI6, Home Forces, and Home Defence.

While Robertson and the case officers of B1A would be responsible for the day-to-day running of the double agents, the Twenty Committee would manage overall strategy and cook up a diet of harmless truths, half-truths, and uncheckable untruths to feed to the enemy.

The full might of the German secret services on the Iberian Peninsula was now unleashed in an effort to obtain the British documents that the British, with equal determination, were trying to put into their hands.

In wartime, the truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.

The relationship between cricket (that most English of sports) and spying (at which the British have always excelled) is deep rooted and unique. Something about the game attracts the sort of mind also drawn to the secret worlds of intelligence and counterintelligence—a complex test of brain and brawn, a game of honor interwoven with trickery, played with ruthless good manners and dependent on minute gradations of physics and psychology, with tea breaks.

the end, the difference between them is a matter of moral judgment: Gordievsky was on the side of the good; and Ames was on his own side.

Separation from her two-year-old son would leave a permanent scar. Ursula defended that bleak decision for the rest of her life. But she never quite forgave herself.