Quotes About Espionage

she was faced with not only Pavel Kedrov, the director of the SVR, but with the president of Russia himself.

CIA HEADQUARTERS LANGLEY, VIRGINIA USA

Jordi Cardenas, the head of Spain's national intelligence agency, held out a hand and Rapp took it.

Detective Sergeant Jonathan Searle, a Cambridge-educated art historian who worked at Special Branch, the muscle behind British intelligence on national security and espionage.

If you don't want them to find you, changing your last name seems a fairly elementary first step. Trust me, I'm an expert. I've watched a lot of spy movies.

In intelligence work, there are limits to the amount of information one can share. Confidentiality is essential.

Prior to the arrival of both the president and prime minister, listening devices and directional microphones had been concealed in the principal rooms of both the Villa Vorontsov and the Livadia Palace. Members of the British Military Mission in Moscow—all too familiar with eavesdropping—recommended discussing sensitive issues in the bathrooms, with the taps gushing water to drown out their conversations.

The hacking practice is quite widespread in its own right: one NSA document indicates that the agency has succeeded in infecting at least fifty thousand individual computers with a type of malware called "Quantum Insertion." One map shows the places where such operations have been performed and the number of successful insertions:

Much of the Snowden archive revealed what can only be called economic espionage: eavesdropping and email interception aimed at the Brazilian oil giant Petrobras, economic conferences in Latin America, energy companies in Venezuela and Mexico, and spying by the NSA's allies—including Canada, Norway, and Sweden—on the Brazilian Ministry of Mines and Energy and energy companies in several other countries.

adviser, repeatedly requested that the NSA spy on the internal discussions of key member states to learn their negotiation strategies. A May 2010 SSO report

Two departments of the PLA—the General Staff Department's Third and Fourth Departments, respectively—are organized to systematically penetrate communications and computer systems, extract information, and exploit that information.15 It is far faster, cheaper, and more efficient for the PLA to steal new technology than to devote vast amounts of time and money to develop it.

Perhaps the only thing worse than having a mole is the fear of having a mole.

That's the first rule of survival in enemy waters: volunteer nothing.

Ghormley wary about the threat of espionage. No doubt mindful of the role that spies played in the surprise attacks at Pearl Harbor and the Philippines, Ghormley wrote his staff, "Loose talk is a stupid habit.… Some would risk the lives of their friends by a silly effort to impress others in public places.

Spies go undercover. They take on different personas.

I spent close to a decade as an undercover officer in the CIA and have spent most of my adult life collecting intelligence and protecting sources and methods.

I think I would love to do a role where I completely transform myself and look completely different, act completely different, and do some crazy, cool, action drama where I was undercover and saving the world.

I spent almost a decade as an undercover officer in the CIA. I was the guy in the back alleys at four o'clock in the morning collecting intelligence on threats to the Homeland.

I was in the underground until I left Germany.

Out of every 10 scripts I get sent, seven are fairly generic about an American guy who gets the girl and is involved in underground espionage activity.

Maybe it's the spy novelist in me looking for a future plot, but I hope the U.S. and its allies are thinking how to operate 'unconventionally' in Iraq and Syria in ways that undermine the Islamic State.

It's necessary to understand what real intelligence work is. It will never cease. It's absolutely essential that we have it. At its best, it is simply the left arm of healthy governmental curiosity. It brings to a strong government what it needs to know. It's the collection of information, a journalistic job, if you will, but done in secret.

I began writing when I was still in the British Foreign Service, and it was then understood that even if you wrote about butterfly collecting, you used another name.

The role of women has always been undervalued in the spy world, always undermined in terms of recognition. Unfairly so. It's a world that needs women.