Quotes from Ben Macintyre

Walker prepared his flock, and in August more than a thousand homing pigeons, each carrying a list of questions deliberately framed to suggest a looming attack, were dropped in a flapping deluge on Calais and Brittany. "The mere fact of increasing the number of pigeons used has a certain deceptive value," Robertson gleefully reported.

Yet this honesty demanded emotional deception, fraud in a virtuous cause, a sacred duplicity. He was telling MI6 every secret truth he could find while lying to his colleagues and his bosses, his family, his best friend, his estranged wife and his new lover.

One does not look twice at an offer of enrollment in an elite force.

Everything was totally normal and the countryside was gorgeous, and in a few days' time one would be going into an absolute charnel house.

Secretly, he began to smuggle the family library out of the country: about two-thirds of the fifty thousand volumes would be saved.

With victory, the denizens of Room 13 emerged, blinking, into the light. An anonymous poet in Section 17M marked the occasion with a verse entitled "De Profundibus." In the depths of the fusty dungeons, In the bowels of NID Where wild surmise or blatant lies Are digested for those at sea, The in-trays are all empty, The dreary toil is done, And with mental daze and bleary gaze The Troglodytes see the sun.

The central plank of the deception was to be nailed down by planting false information through the double agents. Cockade was not quite the grand roll of the dice envisaged by Masterman, but it was the most ambitious gamble so far.

Philby, the veteran Soviet spy, was now in charge of Britain's anti-Soviet intelligence operations, in a position to inform Moscow not only of what Britain was doing to counter Soviet espionage but also of Britain's own espionage efforts against Moscow. The fox was not merely guarding the henhouse but building it, running it, assessing its strengths and frailties, and planning its future construction.

What is the use of living if you cannot eat cheese and pickles?

The policemen agreed they were living with a most peculiar fellow. One moment he was reading classical literature in the original French and quoting Tennyson, and the next he would be discussing the best way to blow up a train.

Lenin is often credited with coining the term "useful idiot," poleznyi durak in Russian, meaning one who can be used to spread propaganda without being aware of it or subscribing

It is perfectly possible for two people to listen to the same words and hear entirely different things.

The fatal conceit of most spies is to believe they are loved, in a relationship between equals, and not merely manipulated.

Deception is a sort of seduction. In love and war, adultery and espionage, deceit can only succeed if the deceived party is willing, in some way, to be deceived.

Sam Brewer enjoyed discussing Middle Eastern politics with Philby; Philby enjoyed sleeping with his wife.

The word most consistently used to describe Kim Philby was "charm", that intoxicating, beguiling and occasionally lethal English quality.

The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything.

Well you stick the dynamite in the keyhole and you don't damage the safe, only sometimes you put a little too much in and blow the safe door up, but other times you're lucky and the safe just comes open. Thus the scion of a great banking dynasty learned how to rob a bank.

Paranoia is born of propaganda, ignorance, secrecy and fear.

In a brilliant lecture written in 1944, C. S. Lewis described the fatal British obsession with the 'inner ring', the belief that somewhere, just beyond reach, is an exclusive group holding real power and influence, which a certain sort of Englishman constantly aspires to find and join.

Here, then, was a truly bizarre situation: Philby was telling Moscow the truth, but was disbelieved, and allowed to go on thinking he was believed; he was deceiving the British in order to aid the Soviets, who suspected a deception, and were in turn deceiving him.

The trickiest aspect of lying is maintaining the lie. Telling an untruth is easy, but continuing and reinforcing a lie is far harder. The natural human tendency is to deploy another lie to bolster the initial mendacity. Deceptions—in the war room, boardroom, and bedroom—usually unravel because the deceiver lets down his guard and makes the simple mistake of telling, or revealing, the truth.

Britain might be in the grip of rationing, but buying the materials for a homemade bomb was a piece of cake. (In fact, obtaining the ingredients for a decent cake would have been rather harder.)

For the D-Day spies were, without question, one of the oddest military units ever assembled. They included a bisexual Peruvian playgirl, a tiny Polish fighter pilot, a mercurial Frenchwoman, a Serbian seducer, and a deeply eccentric Spaniard with a diploma in chicken farming.