Quotes About Espionage

The creation of George Smiley, the retired spy recalled to hunt for just such a high-ranking mole in 'Tinker, Tailor,' was extremely personal. I borrowed elements of people I admired and invested them in this mythical character. I'm such a fluent, specious person now, but I was an extremely awkward fellow in those days.

As you can tell from the titles of my books, I like to probe secret organizations, secret subjects. And this sometimes gets me into trouble.

There's nothing closer than a diplomat and a spy.

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.

An amazing thing about our digital age is that the person next to you at Starbucks might just be hacking into a Swiss bank or launching multiwarhead nuclear missiles continents away.

When a room at the CIA headquarters is secret, a secret from people who spend their lives creating and breaking secrets, that's some pretty serious black-ops shit.

The members of our secret service have apparently spent so much time under the bed looking for communists that they haven't had the time to look in the bed.

Magic is used in espionage, all the time, for clandestine things. I've got a whole library from a gentleman who was hired by the CIA to create magic technology for the use of anti-terrorism.

Twenty-five years in the KGB and an agent used a turtle's name as his password. Lenin wept.

Between 1956 and 1961 more than 35,000 Moroccan Jews left clandestinely for Israel under the auspices of the Mossad. In 1960, the same year that he masterminded the capture of Adolf Eichmann in Argentina, Isser Harel, travelled to Morocco as a tourist. His visit there convinced him that manyJews wished to leave, and he appointed Alex Gatmon to be in charge of the Mossad operations in Morocco, under Ephraim Ronel in Paris.

It seems that the great majority of these men and women are still employed in the organisations, and are capable of handing over information which would put their targets at risk from attack. 

There hasn't been a scandal this big at the C.I.A. since (CLASSIFIED) committed (CENSORED) to (REDACTED).

Since spies must survive by telling lies, it can be hard to know when they are telling the truth.

Finally, he said, "Anything. He was capable of anything. The truth is, even though they had his name on a plaque on the wall at Langley, Frenchy sold me to the Russians in 1974, when I was in Kurdistan. There were unpleasant consequences. He had no conscience. He was a great man who was capable of great evil, not that uncommon a combination. Whatever you think he did, he probably did. And worse.

If I could rub a genie and anything could happen? Truthfully, my other love, and this is a complete 180, but I'd love to do a spy or an espionage pic, like a James Bond movie.

By using these informal informers, the MI have become incredibly effective, he said. The reason the system works so well is very simple: it is hard to tell who is an informer and who is not. The

Foaly: Anyone see you come in here? Holly: The FBI, CIA, NSA, DEA, MI6. Oh, and the EIB. Foaly: The EIB? Holly: (smirking) Everyone in the building.

A person who searched rooms, brandished pistols, dangled promises of half a million franc fees for nameless services and then wrote instructions to Polish spies might reasonably be regarded with suspicion. But suspicion of what?

For instance, Visser, the Dutchman, had sold German machine guns to the Chinese, spied for the Japanese and served a term of imprisonment for killing a coolie in Batavia. He was not an easy man to handle.

It was Napoleon who said that one spy in the right place was worth twenty thousand men in the field. He was speaking of his own spy, Schul-meister, a man of amazing courage, skill, and loyalty. But when the time came to reward Schulmeister for his services it was the same Napoleon who refused him the Legion of Honor for which he had been recommended, and the same Napoleon who commented that money was the only suitable reward for

Jason Bourne was the name of someone in American military intelligence—a traitor who was shot dead for his crime. When the present Bourne was recruited into Treadstone he was given the name of the dead man.

Clearly, their application had been rejected, or merely ignored, on the longstanding principle that anyone who applies to join an espionage service should be rejected.

And so began a bizarre situation in which Philby told Moscow the truth and was disbelieved because the truth contradicted Moscow's expectations.

The Double Cross system was now not only self-financing but profitable, to Masterman's delight: "The actual cash supplied by the Germans to maintain their and our system between 1940 and 1945 was something in the region of £85,000"—the equivalent of more than £4.5 million today.