Sun Tzu Quotes

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.

Spies cannot be usefully employed without a certain intuitive sagacity.

The trouble is, when professional spies go out of their way to make a definitive statement about one of their own, the public tends to believe the opposite: which puts us all back where we started.

I have great respect for the people in intelligence and CIA. I don't have a lot of respect for in particular one of the leaders. But that's OK. But I have a lot of respect for the people in the CIA.

Everybody thinks it's glamorous and this spy versus spy stuff is so exciting, but working in that industry and being a CIA operative, like a field officer, is tough. That's a difficult job that usually dismantles their lives in some capacity.

The way the United States intelligence community operates is it doesn't limit itself to the protection of the homeland. It doesn't limit itself to countering terrorist threats, countering nuclear proliferation. It's also used for economic espionage, for political spying to gain some knowledge of what other countries are doing.

I got nothing. Even the spies I'm spying on who are spying on other spies got nothing.

'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 difficulties of conducting espionage against the Soviet Union in the Soviet Union were such that historically the Agency had backed away from the task.

My name is E. Howard Hunt. I'm currently retired from more than 22 years in the profession of espionage.

Clandestine intelligence operations involve a constant breaking of all the rules.. To put it baldly, such operations are extra legal and sometimes illegal.

Secrecy now beclouds everything about the Central Intelligence Agency—its cost, its efficiency, its success, its failures.

Oh, I can keep many secrets, so I would be a phenomenal secret agent. I love secrets.

I could have been a top notch spy. People confess the most amazing secrets to me, even when I am not fishing for those nuggets. I must look trustworthy because I sit there with a video camera or a tape recorder while the stories pour out.

When you're dealing with espionage and covert affairs, sometimes the secret is more exciting than the knowledge.

I was the British spy who had come out of the woodwork and told it how it really was, and anything I said to the contrary only enforced the myth. And since I was writing for a public hooked on Bond and desperate for the antidote, the myth stuck.

Spies are a most important element in water, because on them depends an army's ability to move.

The end and aim of spying in all its five varieties is knowledge of the enemy; and this knowledge can only be derived, in the first instance, from the converted spy. Hence it is essential that the converted spy be treated with the utmost liberality.

I was trained in Army Intelligence, but spent most of my army career in the infantry. But like many people of my generation, I was very much caught up in the Cold War, and books and movies about espionage.

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.

From that point on, the extraordinary system of spies and informers which has played an important part in the political work of the French state into our own time took shape. (Sartine, who became lieutenant general de police in 1759, is supposed to have said to Louis XV, "Sire, when three people are chatting in the street one of them is surely my man.") Eighteenth-century police manuals like those of Colquhoun in England or Lemaire in France are no less than general treatises on the government's full repertoire of domestic regulation, coercion, and surveillance.

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.

We sit for a week and listen to an extraordinary amount of people talk about what they do in the intelligence world. It's pretty overwhelming.

Spies are the ears and eyes of Princes.

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