Quotes from Scott Anderson

In recounting the saga of Sasha Orlov, Peter Sichel gave a weary sigh. "It was a classic example of case officers falling in love with their agents. I tried to tell them they were being played. Unfortunately, in this case they refused to listen." But of course, everything in the intelligence shadow world can be interpreted from at least two different angles, because everything has the potential of being the precise opposite of what it first appears.

He found Frank Wisner much harder to read. "He was extremely polite, and obviously very intelligent, but there was a kind of tension, a nervousness, about him. And he was a Southerner, of course. I hadn't really been around many Southerners at that point, so it was hard for me to square his energy level, his dynamism, with this soft accent, this gracious quality of his.

there was just one person in the world who knew the full details of both the McMahon-Hussein Correspondence and the emerging Sykes-Picot compact, and who might have grasped the extent to which Arab, French, and British goals in the region had now been set on a collision course: Mark Sykes.

Burke was also gripped by a more generalized melancholy, one familiar to many who return from war, but which can't be easily explained to civilians, let alone to home-front loved ones. Along with its horrors, war is thrilling, exhilarating, it propels the prosaic concerns and nagging chores of everyday life into inconsequence.

Among the handful of British diplomats and military men aware of their government's secret policy in the Middle East—that the Arabs were being encouraged to fight and die on the strength of promises that had already been traded away—were many who regarded that policy as utterly shameful, an affront to British dignity.

By popular account, on the morning of June 5, 1916, Emir Hussein climbed to a tower of his palace in Mecca and fired an old musket in the direction of the city's Turkish fort. It was the signal to rebellion, and by the end of that day Hussein's followers had launched attacks against a number of Turkish strongpoints across the length of the Hejaz.

Earlier than most, Lawrence seemed to embrace the modern concept that history was malleable, that truth was what people were willing to believe.

since all my letters are equally bare of personal information. The buildings I try to describe will last longer than we will, so it is only fitting that they should have the greater space.

This system had begun to crumble in the nineteenth century, buffeted by both the rise of nationalism and dramatic advances in communications and commerce.

Always my soul hungered for less than it had. T. E. LAWRENCE, SEVEN PILLARS OF WISDOM

Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not to win it for them. Actually also, under the very odd conditions of Arabia, your practical work will not be as good as perhaps you think it is. T. E. LAWRENCE, ADVICE TO BRITISH OFFICERS, IN TWENTY-SEVEN ARTICLES, AUGUST 1917

Even if an Arab uprising was somehow launched, Prüfer suggested in his usual trenchant way, it would receive little mass support "due to the frivolousness of the population.

the Egyptian capital remained a deeply exotic and mysterious place, unknowable in the way of all truly grand cities.

He was a master of the PowerPoint presentation nearly a century before it existed.

The modern Middle East was largely created by the British. It was they who carried the Allied war effort in the region during World War I and who, at its close, principally fashioned its peace. It was a peace presaged by the nickname given the region by covetous British leaders in wartime: 'The Great Loot.'

Iraq is going to go down as one of the greatest blunders in American history.

In keeping with original Mormon teachings, much of the property in Hildale and Colorado City is held in trust for the church. Striving to be as self-sufficient as possible, the community grows a wide variety of fruits and vegetables, and everyone, including children, is expected to help bring in the yield.

The peculiarities of my childhood, of constantly moving through so many different cultures, of always being the outsider, may have made me extraordinarily self-sufficient, but it had also bred a certain detachment, a sense that the world was a place to explore rather than truly inhabit. This manifested as a kind of shyness, even timidity.

I'd been to a number of war zones before in my life, but I had never been in one as terrifying as Chechnya.

The principle of plural marriage was revealed to the Mormons amid much secrecy. Dark clouds hovered over the church in the early 1840s, after rumors spread that its founder, Joseph Smith, had taken up the practice of polygamy. While denying the charge in public, by 1843 Smith had shared a revelation with his closest disciples.

Even if he was happier in Asia than he'd been in Latin America, the wanderlust still worked on my father's insides like a disease. One of the most recurrent memories of my childhood is of him sitting in his armchair in the evenings, poring over atlases the way other fathers read newspapers or books.

As a journalist, I try to avoid talking to American diplomats, because I am stunned again and again by just how little grasp they have of what people are really feeling in a country. Especially CIA guys. Maybe they're just really good at playing stupid, but I don't think so.

My father suffered from chronic wanderlust. When I was 14, he set out on a yearlong road trip across Europe and Asia - and decided to take me along for company.