Quotes About Deception

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

The essence of espionage is betrayal of trust," Ames declared. He was wrong: the essence of successful agent running is the maintenance of trust, the supplanting of one allegiance by another, higher, loyalty.

Lying is wrong, son, but if it serves a greater good, it's OK.

The double agents were now controlling their controllers.

plausible deniability.

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.

As controlling officer, Bevan would become the mastermind of wartime deception, overseeing a worldwide web of deceit and mystification from the underground warren beneath Whitehall known as the Cabinet War Rooms.

Lo peor que puede sucederle a un espía es creer que lo aman, que se halla en una relación entre iguales, que no lo están manipulando.

Kühlenthal perfectly exemplified the qualities that John Godfrey had identified as the two most dangerous flaws in a spy: "wishfulness" and "yesmanship." He would believe anything he was fed, and he would do whatever he could to suck up to the boss and preserve his own skin.

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

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

Most Secret Sources showed that Garbo's reports, five or six a day, were being relayed to Berlin, promptly and almost verbatim, along with his analysis of their meaning. The hoax was being injected straight into the central nervous system of the Third Reich.

As the intelligence historian Michael Handel writes in his assessment of Operation Mincemeat: "It is very unusual and very difficult17 for deception to create new concepts for an enemy. It is much easier and more effective to reinforce those which already exist.

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.

One of the oldest gambits in intelligence is "the dangle," when one side appears to make a play for someone on the other, lures him into complicity, and gains his trust, before exposing him.

Whatever his reasons, and despite his reputation as an intelligence guru, by 1943 von Roenne was deliberately passing information he knew to be false, directly to Hitler's desk.

Lenin is often credited with coining the term "useful idiot," poleznyi durak in Russian, meaning one who can be used to spread propaganda without being aware of it or subscribing to the goals intended by the manipulator.

In addition twelve real, and seven imaginary persons have been foisted upon the enemy as Double Cross spies.

Graham Greene, a wartime intelligence officer in West Africa, based his novel Our Man in Havana, about a spy who invents an entire network of bogus informants, on the Garbo story.

In the film, Montagu makes a cameo appearance as an air vice marshal with doubts about the plan's feasibility. At one point in the film, Montagu leans over to Webb, looks him in the eye, and declares: "I suppose you realise, Montagu, that, if the Germans see through this, it will pinpoint Sicily." This was a wonderfully surreal moment: the real Montagu addressing his fictional persona, in a work of filmic fiction, based on reality, which had originated in fiction.

Imitation docks and an oil storage complex were constructed by set builders from Shepperton Studios following plans drawn up by the architect Basil Spence. King George VI's tour of this impressive and entirely unusable installation was duly reported in the press for the Germans to read.

While Robertson and the case officers of B1A would be responsible for the day-to-day running of the double agents, the Twenty Committee would manage overall strategy and cook up a diet of harmless truths, half-truths, and uncheckable untruths to feed to the enemy.

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