Jeffrey Donovan Quotes

That’s the thing about spies. Most of the secrets we keep are from each other.

Sylvia loved secrets and even if she didn't have any secrets she made sure that you thought she did. Amelia had no secrets, Amelia knew nothing. When she grew up she planned to know everything and to keep it all a secret.

There are many difficult things in this world to hide, but a secret is not one of them.

He that has a secret should not only hide it, but hide that he has it to hide.

Secrecy is the soul of all great designs. Perhaps more has been effected by concealing our own intentions than by discovering those of our enemy.

The best way of keeping a secret is to pretend there isn't one.

We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will. We've got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies... That's the world these folks operate in, and so it's going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.

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.

You couldn't trust anyone or anything that belonged to the world of espionage.

Only the small secrets need to be protected. The large ones are kept secret by public incredulity.

So this was how secrets got started, I thought to myself. People constructed them little by little.

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

In my head, I think I'd make a perfect spy, but in reality, I don't think I'd fare very well.

In intelligence work, there are limits to the amount of information one can share. Confidentiality is essential.

A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.

The only thing I ever withheld from the KGB were the names of two agents whom I personally had known and handled and had a particular feeling for.

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.

Perhaps my information hurt the Soviet Union more than it helped. I have no idea. It was not something I ever discussed with the KGB officers that I was dealing with.

When people ask me if I have worked for the C.I.A., I often answer: what good to you is my answer? Because if I did, I might not say so.

There is only one law of espionage—there are always going to be spies.

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.

This town leaks like a sieve. Sometimes I think that the easiest thing on the world would be to be a spy against the United States of America

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

If you are completely transparent, then you have no intelligence service.

Spies go undercover. They take on different personas.