Quotes About Espionage

While I cannot take the time to name all the men in the State Department who have been named as members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring, I have here in my hand a list of 205.

War is ninety percent information.

During the Cold War, we lived in coded times when it wasn't easy and there were shades of grey and ambiguity.

All warfare is based on deception. There is no place where espionage is not used. Offer the enemy bait to lure him.

Knowledge of the enemy's dispositions can only be obtained from other men.

The Cold War isn't thawing; it is burning with a deadly heat. Communism isn't sleeping; it is, as always, plotting, scheming, working, fighting.

Secret operations are essential in war; upon them the army relies to make its every move.

Don't fall in love with a spy.

The failed experiment, the bird that could repeat human speech, that had been a tool for espionage until the rebels had figured out its abilities and sent it back carrying false information. Now the useless creatures were creating an echo chamber filled with the Avoxes' pitiful wails.

When you're in the CIA, you anticipate the possibility that you'll be betrayed by a foreign government or a source, but you never anticipate that it would be by your own government.

The thing about the Russian secret police and the Soviet secret police is that one never leaves the secret police. Once a KGB man, always a KGB man.

In 1972-73, the Soviets began running operations against me. In 1977, these operations became very serious.

Syverstad was at Vemork, and Nielsen in an Oslo hospital, awaiting an appendectomy that his sister, a nurse there, had arranged for him to have on Sunday—the perfect alibi.

A week later, Tronstad's courier was seized at the wharf's edge. Fortunately he was able to swallow the cigarette paper before being hauled away.

and I was reminded....of the everday boredom of a life in espionage. One is always waiting for someone who does not show up,for something that does not happen.

the truth was that I had become a secret agent because I could not bear for another minute the pointlessness of life in the real world.

Russian espionage directed against the West has been rising since 2001. We kind of forgot that you don't need communism to set up an east/west squabble between the Russian Empire and Western Europe—in fact, communism was a distraction.

Secretary of State Henry Stimson disbanded the Black Chamber in 1929, with the immortal phrase, "gentlemen do not read each other's mail," but that didn't stop the Black Chamber's secrets

This is serious business: you're representing the Laundry in front of the Black Chamber and some very big defence contractors, old school tie and all that." "I went to North Harrow Comprehensive," I sat wearily, "they didn't trust us with neckties, not after the upper fifth tried to lynch Brian the Spod.

'Mission' was a mind game. The ideal mission was getting in and getting out without anyone ever knowing we were there.

Moscow had this incredible, intense atmosphere of intrigue and darkness and secrecy.

I mostly gave away what I had from the James Bond movie.

The KGB still killed people, the KGB would not execute its last prisoner until the final days of its existence in 1991, but by the eighties a termination required paperwork and signatures and a post-action review.

Clancy comments that the subtleties of national character can impact the world stage by making espionage more difficult. Americans were quirky by nature, making the sorts of eccentric moves that had to be followed up on as potential espionage cues. Russians, on the other hand, were too orderly by nature to make such distractions appear natural.