Quotes About Espionage

Long after the fall of the Soviet Union, the Russian state and its security operatives still know who their long embedded human assets are, recruited by a mixture of bribery and blackmail. Some of those human assets are still in positions of influence.

I knew quite well, when I gave the names of our agents in the Soviet Union, that I was exposing them to the full machinery of counterespionage and the law, and then prosecution and capital punishment.

When I handed over the names and compromised so many CIA agents in the Soviet Union, I had come to the conclusion that the loss of these sources to the U.S. would not compromise significant national defense, political, diplomatic interests.

I handed over names and compromised so many CIA agents in the Soviet Union.

Perhaps my information hurt the Soviet Union more than it helped. I have no idea. It was not something I ever discussed with the KGB officers that I was dealing with.

The difficulties of conducting espionage against the Soviet Union in the Soviet Union were such that historically the Agency had backed away from the task.

I don't know if the European Union contributes a great deal to espionage. At the union level, they talk about commerce and privacy. But to keep citizens safe, that remains a responsibility back in national capitals.

TacOps is a unit which breaks into homes and offices to plant bugging devices. They get into mafia hangouts, they go into embassies, they go into terrorist hangouts, and they describe themselves as court-sanctioned burglars.

There are two kinds of big companies in the United States. There are those who've been hacked by the Chinese, and those who don't know they've been hacked by the Chinese.

Both cyber and old-fashioned human-intelligence industrial espionage has occurred for decades without any significant retribution by the United States.

There are serious and legitimate concerns about academic espionage at our universities.

Since that time I have had continuous contact with the persons who were completely unknown to me, except that I knew they would hand whatever information I gave them to the Russian authorities.

The men and women of the CIA are a national treasure.

Edward Snowden copied and leaked information from inside the world's most protected spy agency, and then fled to Russia, but yet, because a small part of the data he expropriated was provided to a news organisation, journalism conventions readily accord him lone whistleblower status.

Put plainly, China seems determined to steal its way up the economic ladder, at our expense.

Every single day, agents of certain foreign governments are relentlessly and methodically trying to hack into our corporations' computer networks and steal blueprints for next-generation equipment and products from some of America's largest exporters.

Xi agreed to the American definition of legitimate espionage. In other words, you don't use the power of the state to steal secrets for profit.

I am always up to steal secrets from smart people.

The Chinese need to be held accountable for their continued attempts to steal IP and trade secrets through cyber-intrusions into commercial companies.

To be perfectly candid, we're better at stealing other people's secrets than anyone else in the world. But we self-limit. We steal secrets to keep our citizens free and safe.

The FBI frequently arrests Chinese nationals for stealing research-and-development secrets.

One of the things that distinguishes the CIA from the State Department is that the CIA is both asked to, and authorized to, steal secrets. So if the question is whether the CIA steals secrets, the answer is yes.

Agents and spies playing deep and dangerous games of intelligence and counterintelligence also soon made their way to the Ritz.

'North by Northwest' was a big influence for 'The Bourne Identity.'