Vladimir Bukovsky Quotes

Waiting. Like it or not, it's a skill all spies have to master eventually.

Military intelligence interrogators, however, their goal is to get information, to save lives, to stop the war, to find Saddam - whatever the information is going to be used for, at whatever cost.

We got valuable information from debriefing of Al Qaeda detainees, and I don't think it's knowable whether interrogation techniques played a role in that.

There's something wonderful about that sort of Poirot, Agatha Christie-style investigation: cross-questioning all the witnesses and checking their stories, looking for means, motive, and opportunity.

Like acting, undercover detective work requires a lot of performance. There's just more pressure because it's life-or-death situations.

A lot of black people worked with the police as snitches. We used to call them bimpees where I grew up. And, you know, they were afforded special privileges. They may have been paid by the police. But you never knew who was informing on you. We lived either next door to or - two doors away from us was a known informant in Soweto.

It is a little-known fact about covert operations that you will spend a lot of time with people you can’t really trust. They may be traitors and liars. We call them assets or informants. But mostly, in those days, I called him Zach.

Someone responding to the story said 'real spies do not speak like that'. Well, I am a spy and that is how they talk. Whenever we had a debate in the office on how to handle crimes, they do not defend due process - they defend decisive action. They say it is better to kick someone out of a plane than let these people have a day in court. It is an authoritarian mindset in general.

The FBI doesn't sit around all day and read tweets. The FBI's going to do their job. Robert Mueller's going to do his job.

My name is Sherlock Holmes. It is my business to know what other people do not know.

He who is not sage and wise, humane and just, cannot use secret agent.s. And he who is not delicate and subtle cannot get the truth out of them.

I don't trust American intelligence. You look at the torture report from the Senate: People inside the CIA are saying that it doesn't work, and we're getting the information not from torture, but simply from questioning people.

[Barack Obama] pledged to end torture, but he has continued the CIA renditions where you kidnap people and send them to another country to be interrogated.

You can't be an FBI agent without being cautious and thinking things through. That's just part of the training.

Mr. Sherlock Holmes, who was usually very late in the mornings, save upon those not infrequent occasions when he was up all night, was seated at the breakfast table. I stood upon the hearth-rug and picked up the stick which our visitor had left behind him the night before.

Every day I wrote in my journal: "How am I going to win today?" So that when the guys are talking about water-boarding I'm telling them they haven't even got the right towels.

I'm a spy. It's not really... I worked for the CIA 15 years. The cover was I worked for the insurance business.

Torture, as the art of discovering the truth, is barbaric nonsense; it is the application of a material means to a spiritual end.

I can try to wheedle information out of people," Holly offered. "For which I'll need a lower-cut top.

You seem to have quite a taste for discussing these horrible subjects," she said, rather scornfully; "you ought to have been a detective police officer.

I was enamored of detectives as a teenager. I liked what they did - piecing things together, thinking about situations. But to get there? Eight to ten years in a patrol car? I didn't have that in me. I didn't want to tell people what to do.

Torture gives you reliable and unreliable information. That's the reason why most people in the world don't do it. So this idea that you have to torture people in order to protect national security is a false argument, and I reject it.

All the public business in Congress now connects itself with intrigues, and there is great danger that the whole government will degenerate into a struggle of cabals.

A person who searched rooms, brandished pistols, dangled promises of half a million franc fees for nameless services and then wrote instructions to Polish spies might reasonably be regarded with suspicion. But suspicion of what?

A murderer is less loathsome to us than a spy. The murderer may have acted on a sudden mad impulse; he may be penitent and amend; but a spy is always a spy, night and day, in bed, at table, as he walks abroad; his vileness pervades every moment of his life