Quotes About Intelligence

MI5 had once worried Churchill might go "off the deep end" if he knew too much about espionage matters. It can only be imagined how far off the deep end he would have plunged had he learned not only that the Double Cross system was in danger of unraveling but that the invasion itself was in jeopardy.

Like long-distance running, successful espionage requires patience, stamina, and timing.

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

Instead of introducing keen new spies into Britain, the Germans would be helping to recruit, train, finance, and transport a stream of ready-made double agents, precooked and ready to serve.

The author of these reports was one Flight Lieutenant Richard Melville Walker, who headed one of the most secret and peculiar units of MI5: "The Pigeon Service Special Section, B3C," charged with disrupting the enemy's use of pigeons and deploying Allied pigeons for passing on secret intelligence.

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.

As the war raced to its bloody finale, Ursula was swept up in an exhausting whirlwind of espionage, child-rearing, and housework: on any given day she might be coordinating intelligence gathered from her father, brother, Tom, the chemist, and others in her network, gathering intelligence from the Tool missions, while hanging out the washing, doing the dishes, and struggling to keep the domestic ship afloat at Avenue Cottage.

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.

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.

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 counterintelligence—a complex test of brain and brawn, a game of honor interwoven with trickery, played with ruthless good manners and dependent on minute gradations of physics and psychology, with tea breaks.

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.

Philby, the veteran Soviet spy, was now in charge of Britain's anti-Soviet intelligence operations, in a position to inform Moscow not only of what Britain was doing to counter Soviet espionage but also of Britain's own espionage efforts against Moscow. The fox was not merely guarding the henhouse but building it, running it, assessing its strengths and frailties, and planning its future construction.

The policemen agreed they were living with a most peculiar fellow. One moment he was reading classical literature in the original French and quoting Tennyson, and the next he would be discussing the best way to blow up a train.

The fatal conceit of most spies is to believe they are loved, in a relationship between equals, and not merely manipulated.

Secrets are the currency of intelligence work, and among professional spies a little calculated indiscretion raises the exchange rate.

By passing your GCSEs you prove that you're not an idiot… But by passing your A levels you prove that you're smart

my mother was, though intelligent, not particularly intellectual.

It was academic rigor meeting street smarts, which Hank possessed in abundance.

I found him to be smart and very tough. (His heavy New York accent contributed to that impression.)

I recall Lina as extremely intelligent, with refined European tastes.

That's the problem with educating girls. They never stop resorting to fact.

Money is best left in the hands of government. The citizens of the United States are too stupid to save for the future.

As historian Richard Tarnas writes, "As the means by which human intelligence could attain universal understanding, the Logos was a divine revelatory principle, simultaneously operative within the human mind and the natural world." And philosophers were tasked with uncovering this Logos; by doing so, they would be fulfilling both their own telos and discovering the telos of mankind more broadly.14

In fact, if your opponent thinks you're not worthy of debating, he isn't worthy of debating.