Vincent Astor Quotes

Agents of disruption, subversion, sabotage and disinformation tunnelers and smugglers, listeners and forgers, trainers and recruiters and talent spotters and couriers and watchers and seducers, assassins and balloonists, lip readers and disguise artists.

Follow the money, and one arrives at a basic fact: the CIA’s edge is paramilitary.

Exposing the activities of a foreign intelligence service renders them ineffective, since it removes plausible deniability, which is the hallmark of covert intelligence operations.

It is essential to seek out enemy agents who have come to conduct espionage against you and to bribe them to serve you. Give them instructions and care for them. Thus doubled agents are recruited and used.

Perhaps my information hurt the Soviet Union more than it helped. I have no idea. It was not something I ever discussed with the KGB officers that I was dealing with.

It is clear that in some instances the use of microphone surveillance is the only possible way of uncovering the activities of espionage agents, possible saboteurs and subversive persons. In such instances I am of the opinion that the national interest requires that microphone surveillance be utilized by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

An intelligence service is the ideal vehicle for a conspiracy [against its own government]. Its members can travel about at home and abroad under secret orders, and no questions are asked. Every scrap of paper in the files, its membership, its expenditure of funds, its contacts, even enemy contacts, are state secrets.

There are more foreign intelligence officers inside the US now, working against US interests, than there were at the height of the cold war.

In the espionage world whenever something works, it looks brilliant. Whenever it goes wrong, it always looks like a terrible bungle.

What the Hell do those clowns do out there at Langley? Get the CIA jerks working on Cambodia.

There is no place where espionage is not possible.

The Confederates had suspected Wild Bill of being a spy for two or three days, and had watched him closely.

I've met enough KGB colonels in my life.

The human spy, in terms of the American espionage effort, had never been terribly pertinent.

Andrew Warren was a rarity in the CIA's Clandestine Service - African-American, fluent in Arabic, and relatively young for an agent who'd already spent nearly a decade chasing terrorists in Afghanistan, Egypt, Iraq and Algeria, so deep undercover that few of his friends or family knew the nature of his work.

I saw a limit to what I was giving as kind of a scam I was running on the KGB, by giving them people that I knew were their double agents fed to us.

I am always up to steal secrets from smart people.

I've known several spies who have wanted to become novelists. And novelists who became spies, of course.

I handed over names and compromised so many CIA agents in the Soviet Union.

Since that time I have had continuous contact with the persons who were completely unknown to me, except that I knew they would hand whatever information I gave them to the Russian authorities.

I love the combination of the words 'spies' and 'Balkans.' It's like meat and potatoes.

When I handed over the names and compromised so many CIA agents in the Soviet Union, I had come to the conclusion that the loss of these sources to the U.S. would not compromise significant national defense, political, diplomatic interests.

Who would have thought that in the 1950s, Burbank was a hotbed of international espionage?

The NSA's business is 'information dominance,' the use of other people's secrets to shape events.

Since real spies are so good, you never really know what actual spying is. But I do think spying is a lot more dangerous than we are led to believe.