Quotes About Intrigue

Any closer would unravel her mystery, the very thing which made her so truly beautiful...It was her mystery that he adored. He was in love with everything that he did not know about her... No real sexual encounter could ever match the secret one that he could nurture in his imagination... No living flesh could ever be the erotic equal of flesh kept private, untouchable and unknowable

McCue: Now, Mrs. Margolies, this is Mr. McCue of the City News Bureau— City News Bureau— is it rue, Madame that you were the victim of a peeping tom? Kruger: Ask her if she's worth peeping at? Wilson: Has she got a friend?

And so began a bizarre situation in which Philby told Moscow the truth and was disbelieved because the truth contradicted Moscow's expectations.

The Double Cross system was now not only self-financing but profitable, to Masterman's delight: "The actual cash supplied by the Germans to maintain their and our system between 1940 and 1945 was something in the region of £85,000"—the equivalent of more than £4.5 million today.

The mystery of Hitler's monkeys remains unsolved.

Colonel Vivian had convinced himself that Ivor Montagu's enthusiasm for Ping-Pong was a cover for something more sinister.

William Gerbers" was a German-Swiss businessman living in Liverpool who had been conjured into being by Garbo before he even arrived in Britain.

Vivian was not alone in thinking that a man who spent so much time discussing table tennis was probably a spy.

When informed that a clerk at the Portuguese embassy was spying for both the Germans and the Italians, he wrote: "Why don't you shoot him?

Richard Brooman-White, Elliott's chum who had eased Philby into Section V, came to stay in 1946 and was very nearly immolated when a waitress in Elliott's favorite restaurant attempted to flambé an omelet at the table by pouring brandy onto a heated pan, causing a violent explosion that set fire to the hair of a Swedish diner. Elliott extinguished her with three glasses of white wine. Philby made a point of stopping off in Switzerland during his

Major Müntzinger's boast that Germany had "many agents in England" was entirely correct. But so far from being "excellent," most of them were hopeless, many were actively disloyal, and a number were already working against Germany as double agents.

Far from being an anticlimax, Garbo's carefully timed non-warning had achieved its purpose. He had passed over what must be seen, in German eyes, as the most important intelligence tip-off of the war, and they had missed it. Like the Madrid radio operator, the Germans had been caught napping.

John Cecil Masterman:

While Bevan and Clarke began weaving together the strands of Operation Barclay, Montagu and Cholmondeley went hunting for a dead body. In his initial plan, Cholmondeley had assumed one could simply pop into a military hospital and pick a bargain cadaver off the shelf for ten pounds. The reality was rather different.

Anthony Blunt: His Lives (London, 2001), p. 273. 24 That's what Tiggers: Ibid. 25 He was a very nice: Andrew, Defence of

If this is Upper Silesia, one wonders what must Lower Silesia be like

By the end of 1946 Philby had achieved something no other spy could boast: the award of three separate medals from nationalist Spain, the communist Soviet Union, and Britain.

If Baron von Roenne was the best way of planting an idea in Hitler's head, then Baron Oshima was the most reliable way of finding out if it had taken root there.

Ben Macintyre

It is hard to say which reflected better on Hillgarth: the admiration of Fleming and Churchill or Philby's animosity.

Tangle within tangle, plot and counter-plot, ruse and treachery, cross and double-cross, true agent, false agent, double agent, gold and steel, the bomb, the dagger and the firing party, were interwoven in many a texture so intricate as to be incredible and yet true. —WINSTON CHURCHILL

The most remarkable new arrival was Eddie Chapman, the British safecracker parachuted into East Anglia in December 1942, who would become "Agent Zigzag." Each fresh arrival, each intercepted spy, each potential new double agent, added to the strength of the system and the mountain of paper.

John Masterman, an Oxford history don, part-time detective novelist, and sportsman, was appointed chairman of the Twenty Committee, which included directors of intelligence for the army, navy, and RAF and representatives of MI5, MI6, Home Forces, and Home Defence.

Walker prepared his flock, and in August more than a thousand homing pigeons, each carrying a list of questions deliberately framed to suggest a looming attack, were dropped in a flapping deluge on Calais and Brittany. "The mere fact of increasing the number of pigeons used has a certain deceptive value," Robertson gleefully reported.