Sun Tzu Quotes

Spies cannot be usefully employed without a certain intuitive sagacity.

Spies could be invaluable in peacetime, once the fighting actually started, their value dropped steeply. When the swords were out, it was the information your own scouts provided that mattered, not reports from unknown people whose veracity you couldn't prove.

It was given for all purposes to which a secret service fund should or could be applied to the public benefit—for spies, if the gentleman pleases.

Spies go undercover. They take on different personas.

But first, my friends, I need you to do something for me. We have two spies in the back of the auditorium.

Spies are the ears and eyes of Princes.

Spies cannot be usefully employed without a certain intuitive sagacity; They cannot be properly managed without benevolence and straightforwardness; Without subtle ingenuity of mind, one cannot make certain of the truth of their reports; Be subtle! be subtle! and use your spies for every kind of warfare; If a secret piece of news is divulged by a spy before the time is ripe, he must be put to death together with the man to whom the secret was told.

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

'The Man Who Never Was,' by Ewen Montagu, remains the best book about wartime espionage written by an active participant - incomplete, and dry in parts, it nonetheless summons up the ingenuity and sheer eccentricity of those who played this strange and dangerous game.

The Secret Intelligence Service I knew occupied dusky suites of little rooms opposite St James's Park Tube station in London.

In basic training we had been told to watch out for Japanese spies.

Spy plots are hard, really hard.

From the outside, the CIA seems pretty exotic, but from the inside, it's a big, bureaucratic place. Think 'post office with spies.'

Espionage takes place in the world. Even we commit espionage.

I thought that you guys [the CIA] had people everywhere, that you knew about everything, and now you don't even know anything about a raggedy-ass, little fourth rate country. All you have to do is get some Chinese coolies from a San Francisco laundry shop and drop them over there and use them.

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 a global and totalitarian war, intelligence must be global and totalitarian.

I am unable to tell a quarter of a billion Americans what we are doing on their behalf, because if I did, it would become the table of contents of the training manual of the enemy.

Nobody [at the CIA] had any idea of who was doing what where

Intelligence services exist to do things that are illegal abroad. They exist to tell lies.

One of the things that distinguishes the CIA from the State Department is that the CIA is both asked to, and authorized to, steal secrets. So if the question is whether the CIA steals secrets, the answer is yes.

The members of the National Clandestine Service of the CIA are called the collectors of last resort. They are tasked to seek the truth when all other avenues of intelligence collection have failed.

By 'intelligence' we mean every sort of information about the enemy and his country - the basis, in short, of our own plans and operations.

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.

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.