Double Agents Quotes

It is important to seek out the spies that the enemy has sent to spy on you so you can bribe them to really spy for you.

Foreign Ministry guys don't become agents. Party officials, the Foreign Ministry nerds, tend not to volunteer to Western intelligence agencies.

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

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

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.

Deception can cost billions. Think Enron, Madoff, the mortgage crisis. Or in the case of double agents and traitors, like Robert Hanssen or Aldrich Ames, lies can betray our country. They can compromise our security. They can undermine democracy. They can cause the deaths of those that defend us.

It is a little-known fact about covert operations that you will spend a lot of time with people you can’t really trust. They may be traitors and liars. We call them assets or informants. But mostly, in those days, I called him Zach.

It is essential to seek out enemy agents who have come to conduct espionage against you and to bribe them to serve you. Give them instructions and care for them. Thus doubled agents are recruited and used.

I saw a limit to what I was giving as kind of a scam I was running on the KGB, by giving them people that I knew were their double agents fed to us.

The members of our secret service have apparently spent so much time under the bed looking for communists that they haven't had the time to look in the bed.

I've known several spies who have wanted to become novelists. And novelists who became spies, of course.

He who serves two masters has to lie to one.

I could have stopped it after they paid me the $50,000. I wouldn't even have had to go on to do more than I already had: just the double agents' names that I gave.

Le Carre's voice - patrician, cold, brilliant and amused - was perfect for the wilderness-of-mirrors undertow of the Cold War, and George Smiley is the all-time harassed bureaucrat of spy fiction.

There can scarcely be a more difficult thing than to play a double game. It is dangerous, and it is at times, a nice point to draw the distinction between such a game and dishonor.

Espionage and counterespionage go together like horse and carriage.

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

I always loved the idea of a spy movie and part of it came from my personal love of spy movies. It started when I was growing up as a little kid in the 60s.

All I can say is in the world of 'The Americans,' like in life, if you're not dead, there's hope.

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.

The sovereign must have full knowledge of the activities of the five sorts of agents. This knowledge must come from the double agents, and therefore it is mandatory that they be treated with the utmost liberality.

That world of spies and espionage, there's a coldness to it. That's what makes those worlds fascinating - and what makes le Carre's work so interesting.

I would have loved to have met some former spies, but they don't readily advertise themselves unless they're not living in Moscow, and even then. I'm sure I've met some without realizing it.