Mathias Rust Quotes

Everybody calls everybody a spy, secretly, in Russia, and everybody is under surveillance. You never feel safe.

Moscow had this incredible, intense atmosphere of intrigue and darkness and secrecy.

Remember that J. Edgar Hoover’s secret files began in the interests of national security and ended up being used for blackmail.

One of the problems is that there are people in the shadows. There are people afraid of their own government

In the Soviet Union, you always have the feeling someone is watching you.

I remember, I used to get off a bus, and if there was someone sitting in the station, I remember thinking maybe they were from Shin Bet and came for me.

My paranoia never ends, but I haven't been paranoid about being spied on my shadowy forces for some time now.

I've met enough KGB colonels in my life.

My notion of the KGB came from romantic spy stories. I was a pure and utterly successful product of Soviet patriotic education.

We knew we were talking about spies. I knew he knew I knew. I was digging my own grave.

In Iraq during the days of Saddam, I had a government minder who followed me everywhere, reported on my activities.

I played Laura Bush in a Tony Kushner piece, and afterward, I think my phones got tapped.

The FSB's invisible presence continued; the agency became an intangible part of my Moscow life - sometimes loudly, sometimes quietly, with someone in a back room clearly turning the volume of minor persecution up and down.

I don't let my picture be taken. I'm on too many hit lists.

If you live with death threats, you need friends. So you have to risk that they might spy on you.

I worked for MI6 in the Sixties, during the great witch-hunts, when the shared paranoia of the Cold War gripped the services.

The genuine desire to prevent acts of sabotage or of espionage, a highly necessary concern in the face of danger, takes the form of attempts to control and punish the spread of ideas whose radical flavor is believed to cause the acts.

There is only one law of espionage—there are always going to be spies.

Everything I say and do, I assume that I am being spied on.

This town leaks like a sieve. Sometimes I think that the easiest thing on the world would be to be a spy against the United States of America

The KGB is by far the world's largest, the Israeli probably the best, and the Iranian and the South Korean the deadliest.

The different forces, however, which are doing secret service work, or investigation of different kinds are not the parts of the government which it would seem wise to me to consolidate. There have grown up under various forms of government in different parts of the world, secret investigation branches under one head, and they times have practically superseded all the other arms of the government and have spread terror among the population …. As long as they remain separate there will, however, be no danger of a secret octopus growing up to control in harmful ways.

For an old spy and codebreaker like myself, nothing in the world happens by coincidence.

We shall soon be obliged to meet in cellars, or in darkened rooms with closed doors, and speak in whispers lest our next door neighbors should hear that freeborn citizens dare not speak in the open.

they had come to a time when no one dared speak his mind, when fierce, growling dogs roamed everywhere, and when you had to watch your comrades torn to pieces after confessing to shocking crimes.