Quotes About Espionage

The double agents were now controlling their controllers.

By the end of 1946 Philby had achieved something no other spy could boast: the award of three separate medals from nationalist Spain, the communist Soviet Union, and Britain.

For Kim Philby too the political frontiers shifted, though his convictions altered not at all. For most of the war he had spied on behalf of Britain's ally; now he was spying for Britain's sworn enemy, and from within the very heart of the British intelligence machine.

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.

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.

Ben Macintyre

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

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.

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

The evidence on enemy intelligence officers and agents grew to more than twenty volumes, a veritable who's who of German spying. The Garbo case alone would swell to twenty-one files, more than a million pieces of paper.

The most remarkable new arrival was Eddie Chapman, the British safecracker parachuted into East Anglia in December 1942, who would become "Agent Zigzag." Each fresh arrival, each intercepted spy, each potential new double agent, added to the strength of the system and the mountain of paper.

reality he worked for MI6, recruiting agents and potential double agents and, with his wife, Peggie, also an MI6 officer, organizing a rich range of skulduggery to confound German espionage in the Iberian peninsula.

One of the oldest gambits in intelligence is "the dangle," when one side appears to make a play for someone on the other, lures him into complicity, and gains his trust, before exposing him.

Whatever his reasons, and despite his reputation as an intelligence guru, by 1943 von Roenne was deliberately passing information he knew to be false, directly to Hitler's desk.

MI5 had once worried Churchill might go "off the deep end" if he knew too much about espionage matters. It can only be imagined how far off the deep end he would have plunged had he learned not only that the Double Cross system was in danger of unraveling but that the invasion itself was in jeopardy.

Like long-distance running, successful espionage requires patience, stamina, and timing.

In addition twelve real, and seven imaginary persons have been foisted upon the enemy as Double Cross spies.

Instead of introducing keen new spies into Britain, the Germans would be helping to recruit, train, finance, and transport a stream of ready-made double agents, precooked and ready to serve.

The author of these reports was one Flight Lieutenant Richard Melville Walker, who headed one of the most secret and peculiar units of MI5: "The Pigeon Service Special Section, B3C," charged with disrupting the enemy's use of pigeons and deploying Allied pigeons for passing on secret intelligence.

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.

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.

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.