Joseph D. Pistone Quotes

I knew with Snape I was working as a double agent, as it turns out, and a very good one at that.

It's a very dangerous and lonely thing, I imagine, to be a spy: to have friendships that are deceptions, that are not honest.

They won't talk to you because I'm undercover.

Andrew Warren was a rarity in the CIA's Clandestine Service - African-American, fluent in Arabic, and relatively young for an agent who'd already spent nearly a decade chasing terrorists in Afghanistan, Egypt, Iraq and Algeria, so deep undercover that few of his friends or family knew the nature of his work.

We knew we were talking about spies. I knew he knew I knew. I was digging my own grave.

However I dress it up, I was a spy and I am not proud of it.

If you’re going to be involved with espionage, you’ve got to be motivated. It’s not fun and games. It’s dirty and dangerous. There’s always the chance that you’re going to get burned.

If I were to discover that my valet was I spy, I shouldn’t discharge him for that fact—assuming he was a good valet.

A good undercover agent stays as close to the truth as possible, as close to your own personality and your own values as possible. This is the way you stay in character - you try to be yourself.

I spent a whole career infiltrating places.

In 'A Scanner Darkly,' as in 'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold,' all intersubjective relations devolve into webs of suspicion and betrayal.

Breaking a cardinal rule of spy craft, I actually let it be known that I wanted to work for the CIA.

I'm not a spy, which is the real question

She wasn't here to gawk. She was an infiltrator, a sneak, an ugly. And she had a mission.

The situation they [journalists and Edward Snowden] were in was incredibly heightened. The stakes were high. There was a lot of pressure, a lot of tension, a lot of sense of claustrophobic, clandestine energy that I think was exhilarating for us to explore and recreate. We were fortunate to shoot a fair amount of our stuff at the actual hotel where it all happened in Hong Kong. That added another element of very similitude to the situation, so I feel like it was exciting.

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.

I really wanted to be a spy. I guess it's a bit like acting, where you play a role.

I loved singing something like 'I've Got My Eye On You' when it's really about the FBI. It turns a love song into something else!

Imagine a 'Mission: Impossible'-style spy or infiltration mission into the core, the very heart of the Empire's military-industrial complex, the most secure facility in the Empire. You have a small band of experts with complementary skills who, together, are able to do these amazing things.

I was Donnie Brasco, the Mafia guy, in character. But in my head, I was a special agent. I never lost sight of who I was or why I was there.

I wanted to be an undercover cop, blending in with the public, looking like a black militant or a long-haired hippie yet having a gun on my hip, a badge in my wallet, and able to enforce the law. To me, that was the neatest thing in the world. It was also challenging.

I recall my first foreign agent meeting was on a dark, moonless night with an agent I'd never met before. When I picked him up, he passed me the intelligence and I passed him extra money for the men he led. It was the beginning of an adventure I had only dreamed of.

Former CIA employee Joseph Weisberg's 'An Ordinary Spy' may attract attention for how much it redacts - whether by authorial choice or by CIA design - but its power comes from the growing frustration Weisberg's fictional alter ego feels at a system designed to betray seeming innocents in the most casual and cruel manner possible.

If I was a spy, I would have a watch that would cloak me in invisibility.