Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes
Secrecy is as essential to Intelligence as vestments to a Mass, or darkness to a spiritualist seance, and must at all costs be maintained, quite irrespective of whether or not it serves any purpose.
Malcolm Muggeridge, 1903-1990, British Writer & Editor, Officer of British Intelligence
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
He was referring to the testimony given before the Senate of James R. Clapper, U. S. Director of National Intelligence. He denied that the NSA was collecting data on millions of American communications. Then Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA was capturing data on ALL U. S. phone calls and e-mails. See {634917} for details on the false testimony.
The American Embassy in Berlin had wiretapped the telephone and telegraph wires of the German Foreign Ministry. The man who did that was hired by Secretary of State Lansing as the first employee of the new unit.
Intelligence agents tend to prefer covert activities to the less dramatic, non-exciting, activity of gathering and analyzing intelligence. Most national intelligence services tend to enlarge their portfolio to include covert activities regardless of what the national leaders intended. Because of the secrecy, they can often get away with this.
Thomas Malcolm Muggeridge was an English journalist and satirist. His father, H. T. Muggeridge, was a prominent socialist politician and one of the early Labour Party Members of Parliament for Romford, in Essex. In his twenties, Muggeridge was attracted to communism and went to live in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, but the experience turned him into an anticommunist.
