Quotes About Espionage

The most fun I've had on 'Burn Notice,' I think it would have to be working with China Chow and Lucy Lawless.

I never wanted to be a Cold War novelist.

I liked Live and Let Die, where money was no object.

The aim of a foreign intelligence service is to find and convince individuals to help them achieve intelligence objectives.

From the KGB's point of view, the most appealing quality about Trump was probably that he had a personality that was ideal for a potential asset—vain, narcissistic, highly susceptible to flattery, and greedy.

The cardinal principle was: 'A double agent should, as far as possible, actually live the life and go through the motions of a genuine agent.

Women have always been spies.

I use the furniture of espionage to amuse the reader, to make the reader listen to me, because most people like to read about intrigue and spies. I hope to provide a metaphor for the average reader's daily life. Most of us live in a slightly conspiratorial relationship with our employer and perhaps with our marriage. I think what gives my works whatever universality they have is that they use the metaphysical secret world to describe some realities of the overt world.

Miriam Rothschild's cousin Ewen Montagu had helped run Operation Mincemeat, which in April 1943 used the staged death of a British officer—complete with false identification and intelligence documents—to convince the Germans that the Allies were planning to invade Greece.)

about superspies and

It's rather fun writing a female spy, because she has so much more kit. Bond never carried a hair dryer or a makeup bag. And he certainly didn't wear an uplift bra.

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

From logos to software - you name it, the Chinese have stolen it - and they'll keep stealing it, if left unchecked.

The merit of 'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold,' then - or its offence, depending where you stood - was not that it was authentic, but that it was credible.

I could have stopped it after they paid me the $50,000. I wouldn't even have had to go on to do more than I already had: just the double agents' names that I gave.

Cyberespionage and cyberattack is exploding from our adversaries inside our country. We don't seem capable of stopping it.

When I think of a story, somehow it just always seems to come out involving spooks and spies and government skullduggery.

I think everyone's always interested in playing a spy, right? That's something we grow up admiring, which is so strange, but it's just a very clever and quick world that we all want to be a part of.

To the CIA, everyone's an outsider.

As the technology of espionage expanded its horizons, the CIA's vision grew more and more myopic. Spy satellites enabled it to count Soviet weapons. They did not deliver the crucial information that communism was crumbling. The CIA's foremost experts never saw the enemy until after the cold war was over.

Bush casually pronounced a political death sentence upon the CIA in 2004 when he said that the agency was "just guessing" about the course of the war in Iraq. No president had ever publicly dismissed the CIA that way.

Americans who know nothing of Andropov may be nonetheless familiar with aspects of the work of Service A—as is anyone who has ever heard that the CIA killed President Kennedy, or that the FBI assassinated Martin Luther King, or that the army invented the AIDS virus in a germ-warfare lab, all falsehoods broadcast and published and perpetuated by Andropov's officers and agents.

Donovan told the president that he could learn the "capabilities, intentions and activities of foreign nations" while running "subversive operations abroad" against America's enemies.

They were appalled by his idea of making a spy service out of a scattershot collection of Wall Street brokers, Ivy League eggheads, soldiers of fortune, ad men, news men, stunt men, second-story men, and con men.