Quotes About Intelligence

The relationship between cricket (that most English of sports) and spying (at which the British have always excelled) is deep-rooted and unique. Something about the game attracts the sort of mind also drawn to the secret worlds of intelligence and counter-intelligence – a complex test of brain and brawn, a game of honour interwoven with trickery, played with ruthless good manners and dependent on minute gradations of physics and psychology, with tea breaks.

British intelligence was not above "bumping off" enemy spies, to use the cheery euphemism favored by MI6.

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.

Major Felix Cowgill was the model of the old-style intelligence officer: a former officer in the Indian police, he was rigid, combative, paranoid, and quite dim. Trevor-Roper dismissed him as a "purblind, disastrous megalomaniac," and Philby, privately, was equally scathing. "As an intelligence officer, he was inhibited by lack of imagination, inattention to detail and sheer ignorance of the world.

agents abroad. Within MI6, Section V played

This is the intelligence technique known as "coat trailing," dangling a potential recruit before the opposition in the hope that, if recruited, he or she can then be put to work as a double agent.

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.

In launching Operation RYAN, Andropov broke the first rule of intelligence: never ask for confirmation of something you already believe. Hitler had been certain that the D-Day invasion force would land at Calais, so that is what his spies (with help from Allied double agents) told him, ensuring the success of the Normandy landings.

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

The pantheon of world-changing spies is small and select, and Oleg Gordievsky is in it: he opened up the inner workings of the KGB at a pivotal juncture in history, revealing not just what Soviet intelligence was doing (and not doing), but what the Kremlin was thinking and planning, and in so doing transformed the way the West thought about the Soviet Union. He risked his life to betray his country, and made the world a little safer.

America and Britain were working on the bomb together, at astonishing scientific speed and in deepest secrecy. Neither was helping, or informing, its other main ally, the Soviet Union. But Moscow was secretly obtaining that help anyway, through its spies. Not only did Stalin know all about the bomb, but he knew that Britain and America did not know he knew (which is the gold dust of intelligence). And he demanded that his spies find out more.

The double agents were now controlling their controllers.

One of the most powerful forces in espionage and intelligence work... is the emotional bond between the spy and spymaster, agent and handler.

Like Elliott, Angleton cultivated a brand of high eccentricity: he gave his agents botanical code names such as "Fig," "Rose," or "Tomato" and sported a fur cape with a high collar, which made him look "like a British actor emulating a Thirties spy.

He revealed nothing about Ursula's activities and his own work on behalf of Soviet intelligence.

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.

One of the hazards of having a good idea is that intelligent people tend to realize it is a good idea and seek to play a part. Like most novelists, Montagu did not like the editing process. He did not like the way Operation Mincemeat was being watered down. He did not like senior officers pulling rank and tinkering with a project in which he had invested so much of his time, energy, and personality.

The evidence on enemy intelligence officers and agents grew to more than twenty volumes, a veritable who's who of German spying. The Garbo case alone would swell to twenty-one files, more than a million pieces 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.