Quotes About Espionage

I like detective stories and spy novels, but I also like nonfiction, and of course cookbooks.

I would love to play a crazy Russian spy, run with a gun. That's something I would love to do.

Imagine a 'Mission: Impossible'-style spy or infiltration mission into the core, the very heart of the Empire's military-industrial complex, the most secure facility in the Empire. You have a small band of experts with complementary skills who, together, are able to do these amazing things.

Spying has always gone on since ancient times.

Since real spies are so good, you never really know what actual spying is. But I do think spying is a lot more dangerous than we are led to believe.

Once you've lived the inside-out world of espionage, you never shed it. It's a mentality, a double standard of existence.

I didn't appreciate how special and sometimes strange my CIA world was - until it suddenly and spectacularly ended in a newspaper column.

Our adversaries are utilizing espionage campaigns disguised as business interests right next door to U.S. military instillations, which cannot be allowed to stand.

During the Cold War of the 1950s, American spies were issued eyeglasses with thick, clunky frames. If captured, they were trained to casually chew the curved earpieces, where fatal doses of cyanide were cast inside the plastic. It's these same horn-rimmed suicide glasses, the wrangler says, that inspired the look of Buddy Holly and Elvis Costello. All those young hipsters wearing death on their nose.

It was unthinkable that the Soviet Union admit that a serial killer was loose.

JALALABAD, AFGHANISTAN THE four dead men were lined up on the living room floor of the safe house. Mitch Rapp started with the one on the left. The bearded face, the dark, lifeless eyes, and the dime-sized bullet hole

We're in the business of collecting secrets, not giving them away.

flanks. The pocket scope penetrated the dark shadows that his eyes could not. He paid particular attention to the base of the trees that bordered the path. He was looking for the telltale shoe of someone who was seeking to conceal himself. After five minutes

about an hour and a half I'm going to have the president call him. The president is going to tell Jack that he wants you to look through all of the logs the Secret Service has on Ross and Alexander going back to this past September. I especially want you to look at the two weeks prior to the attack. I want to know if they had any foreign visitors, and I want you to keep an eye out for any mention of Stu Garret.

Magellan brought with him many of Portugal's most precious and sensitive secrets: information about secret expeditions

The historical record is unequivocal. The United States is ham-handed and brutal in conceiving and executing clandestine operations, and it is simply no good at espionage; its operatives never have enough linguistic and cultural knowledge of target countries to recruit spies effectively. The CIA also appears to be one of the most easily penetrated espionage organizations on the planet. From the beginning, it has repeatedly lost its assets to double agents.

You know, you should never catch a spy. Discover him and then control him, but never catch him. A spy causes far more trouble when he's caught. Harold Macmillan

Honor among thieves, perhaps. Honor among spies, never.

In its report, the Cox Committee concludes that China is using stolen U.S. design information to speed up its deployment of a new nuclear missile force.

collecting secrets was and is crucial to solving foreign policy puzzles.

At the Long Island plant, no one was concerned about espionage—neither

The crisis of the 1860s represented a far greater threat to the survival of the United States than did World War I, World War II, Communism in the 1950s, or terrorism today. Yet compared with the draconian enforcement of espionage and sedition laws in World War I, the internment of more than one hundred thousand Japanese Americans in the 1940s, McCarthyism in the 1950s, or the National Security State of our own time, the infringement of civil liberties from 1861 to 1865 seems mild indeed.

It's one of his rules, his super-secret-spy mind-set. No discussing business in front of strangers.

Mainly, when I go see a show, unfortunately it's more industrial espionage than it is going to actually enjoy a show.