Quotes About Deception

For this I find, where jealousy is fed, Horns in the mind are worse than on the head.

Maybe only my fraudulence was fraudulent.

one I had— The feeling of a fiction collapsing inside you. A fiction you'd forgotten was there.

The lie described my life better than the truth,' I added. 'Until it became a kind of truth.

Quisling, vague, inefficient, and fanatical, won the rare distinction of being so closely associated with a single characteristic—treachery—that a noun was created in his name. At

wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.

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.

For an intelligence service, there is no process more painful and debilitating than an internal hunt for an unidentified traitor. The damage Philby did to MI6's self-confidence was far greater and more enduring than anything he inflicted by spying for the KGB. A mole does not just foment mistrust. Like a heretic, he undermines the coherence of faith itself.

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

All spies need to feel they are loved.

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.

The KGB had long excelled in the dark art of manufacturing "fake news.

Far from being repelled by the duplicity around him, Elliott felt ever more drawn to the game of skulduggery and double cross. The Venlo debacle had been "as disastrous as it was shameful," but he also found it fascinating, an object lesson in how highly intelligent people could be duped if persuaded to believe what they most wanted to believe. He was learning quickly.

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:

Many of Philby's colleagues in MI6 would cling to that presumption of innocence as an article of faith. To accept otherwise would be to admit that they had all been fooled; it would make the intelligence and diplomatic services look entirely idiotic.

Despite the misgivings of some at FHW, and Kühlenthal's blustering excuses for the gaps and contradictions in the story, the lie had by now firmly embedded itself in German strategic thinking and was beginning to metastasize, spreading out through the veins of Axis intelligence. Important and exciting information, whether true or false, develops its own momentum. So far from being questioned, the expected attacks in Greece and Sardinia were fast becoming accepted wisdom.

While Bevan controlled the business of deception from within the Cabinet War Rooms, the fortified underground bunker beneath Whitehall, his counterpart in the Mediterranean was Lieutenant Colonel Dudley Wrangel Clarke, the chief of "A" Force, the deception unit based in Cairo. Clarke was another master of strategic deception, but of a very different stamp. Unmarried, nocturnal, and allergic to children, he was possessed of "an ingenious imagination7 and a photographic memory.

If the deception before D-Day was composed of subtle hints and nudges, the second phase was spoon-fed to the Germans with a spade.

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.

To retain German confidence, Agent Skoot would need to feed his handlers some true but harmless information—known in spy jargon as chicken feed, filling and substantial but lacking in real nourishment.

The deception had succeeded beyond every expectation, and Montagu was jubilant: "We fooled those of the Spaniards5 who assisted the Germans, we fooled the German Intelligence Service both in Spain and in Berlin, we fooled the German Operational Staff and Supreme Command, we fooled Keitel, and, finally, we fooled Hitler himself, and kept him fooled right up to the end of July.