Quotes About Espionage

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Britain's counterespionage officers saw signs of treachery in everything Ivor Montagu did: they saw it in his friends, his appearance, his opinions, and his behavior. But above all, they saw it in his passionate, and dubious, love of table tennis.

Fast-paced from start to finish, 'The Honourable Schoolboy' is fired by le Carre's conviction regarding evil done and its consequences.

We're trying to reinvent Bond. He's 28 - no Q, no gadgets.

I find it really hard to relate to the Bond women or Angelina Jolie in 'Salt.' And of course it's informed by my experiences and the people I've met along the way and the places I've been.

'Homeland' is not a sensationalist show.

There's a high head count on 'Homeland.'

Espionage and counterespionage go together like horse and carriage.

The work was to be done 'by undercover men, spies and saboteurs, who, if caught, would be neither acknowledged nor defended by their government'. They would be working outside the law and were to borrow their tactics from guerrillas and gangsters like Michael Collins in Ireland and Al Capone in America. In signing up for Section D, they were effectively signing away their lives.

Sabotage and subversion represented the only possible way of striking back and Churchill instructed Dalton to establish – as he called it – a Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.

It wouldn't have done to cable the details of his true career, that before he died he had been responsible for at least fifty deaths

What about a Luger ? I suppose you had a Luger. Or an explosive fountain pen ? No. We've never been very James Bond minded here. I wasn't allowed to carry a gun, and my only car was a secondhand Morris Minor.

You ever read American Tabloid, by James Ellroy?