Quotes About Espionage

My CIA godfather told me he'd never heard any American speak Japanese so well.

A lot of the people who are hacking on behalf of governments are doing so on a contract basis. And they also do other things. They will hack on behalf of spammers, and will just be hired for a specific job.

A Bond movie falls into a specific genre, and you have to provide certain elements. You must respect the fact it's essentially about girls, guns, gadgets, and big action.

Fancy Bear actually went after opposition research and, specifically, research related to the Trump candidacy.

I populated 'The Bourne Identity' with real characters from American history, specifically characters from the Iran-Contra affair, which my father ran the investigation of. But at the heart of it was a fictional character.

I would have loved to have met some former spies, but they don't readily advertise themselves unless they're not living in Moscow, and even then. I'm sure I've met some without realizing it.

I've consciously tried not to romanticize anything, especially not intelligence work. I've always said that I've been writing a series of episodic, naturalistic novels. The people just happen to be spies, politicians, civil servants.

There will always be spies. We have to have them. Without them we wouldn't have got Osama bin Laden - it took us years, but it happened.

There is no such thing as a former KGB man.

How could your cover be blown in Canada? Why even bother going dark there? How could you tell?

Waterhouse's new roommate is out of town just now, but by glancing over his personal effects, Waterhouse estimates that he is paddling a black kayak from Australia to Yokosuka Naval Base, where he will slip on board a battleship and silently kill its entire crew with his bare hands before doing an Olympic-qualifying dive into the bay, punching out a few sharks, climbing back into his kayak and paddling back to Australia for a beer.

IT HAD BEEN with mixed feelings that Olivia Halifax-Lin had learned that Abdallah Jones had absconded from Mindanao and turned up in Xiamen. For Olivia had just devoted the better part of a year, and MI6 had spent half a million quid, on setting her up with a false Chinese identity so that she could work under deep cover within the borders of the Middle Kingdom. And she really hated Abdallah Jones a lot. But hunting Islamic bombers was not supposed to be her job

CIA types are so into deceit, deception, double and triple crosses, paranoia, and bullshit, that you never knew what they knew

more complicated, and that awaited further Intel.

Russia's intelligence network did its utmost to damage his rival's reputation

I've always thought that there is a great female James Bond movie to be done. I'm not literally calling her Jane Bond, I mean, but a female secret agent.

Everyone I know who used to be in the intelligence community is moving into the corporate world.

Soviet spies were among the best in the business, but the semiconductor production process required more details and knowledge than even the most capable agent could steal.

You're losing your touch , Natasha. An unencrypted pay phone? Amateur hour.

She eluded detection and relieved the rebels of one of their hyperspace-capable vessels.

Beta Males make excellent spies. Not the "James Bond, Aston Martin with missiles, boning the beautiful Russian rocket scientist on an ermineskin bedspread" sort of spy—more the "bad comb-over, deep-cover bureaucrat fishing coffee-sodden documents out of a Dumpster" spy.

When a spy sells something entirely new, all he needs to do is recount something you could find in any second-hand book stall.

Il n'y a rien de tel pour épier les actions des gens que ceux qu'elles ne regardent pas.

From now on, she was Juliette Gervaise, code name the Nightingale.