Sun Tzu Quotes

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

I am always up to steal secrets from smart people.

I could have stopped it after they paid me the $50,000. I wouldn't even have had to go on to do more than I already had: just the double agents' names that I gave.

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.

Every department in Washington…contained numerous traitors and spies.

Having watched the form of our traitors for a number of years, I cannot think that espionage can be recommended as a technique for building an impressive civilization. It's a lout's game.

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

Espionage is largely separate from the mainstream of foreign policy … you nail the spy and you punish him, and you move 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

You can probably forgive the top spy for lying about spying. Lying is part of the job description. It’s what spies do.

That’s the thing about spies. Most of the secrets we keep are from each other.

In the old days, spies had done they'd done because they loved their country, because they believed in what they were doing. But he'd never been given a choice. Nowadays, spies weren't employed. They were used.

"We're going to be okay." Here's the thing about being a spy: sometimes all you have are your lies. They protect your cover and keep your secrets, and right then I needed to believe that it was true even when all the facts said otherwise.

You couldn't trust anyone or anything that belonged to the world of espionage.

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

Betrayal, in one form or another, is at the very heart of the world of intelligence.

All women are natural born espionage agents.

The enemy's spies who have come to spy on us must be sought out, tempted with bribes, led away and comfortably housed. Thus they will become double agents and available for our service. It is through the information brought by the double agent that we are able to acquire and employ local and inward spies. It is owing to his information, again, that we can cause the doomed spy to carry false tidings to the enemy.

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