Gena Showalter Quotes

There will always be spies. We have to have them. Without them we wouldn't have got Osama bin Laden - it took us years, but it happened.

I've always wanted to be a spy, and frankly I'm a little surprised that British intelligence has never approached me.

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

Ask yourself: if I were a Chinese spy, why wouldn't I have flown directly into Beijing? I could be living in a palace petting a phoenix by now.

I always liked spy stories.

Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.

The world of spying is my genre. My struggle is to demystify, to de-romanticise the spook world, but at the same time harness it as a good story.

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.

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

There are few archbishops in espionage. He's on our side and that's all that matters. Besides, one needn't ask him to one's club.

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.

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.

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

Spies go undercover. They take on different personas.

It will be the CIA's mission and my own if confirmed to ensure that the agency remains the best in the world at its core mission - collecting what our enemies do not want us to know. In short, the CIA must be the world's premier espionage organization.

I'm not a spy for Russia or China or any other country for that matter.

There are some who become spies for money, or out of vanity and megalomania, or out of ambition, or out of a desire for thrills. But the malady of our time is of those who become spies out of idealism.

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.

When I cleared out Moscow apartment after stepping down as president, they found all kinds of wiring in the walls. It turned out that they had been spying on me all along.

It's the oldest question of all, George. Who can spy on the spies?

I love the spy genre.

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

You could say that all novels are spy novels and all novelists are spy masters.

With stealth technology, the U.S. could spy on its Cold War adversaries without running the risk of getting caught.