Secret Agents Quotes

007

The Fifth Column.

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.

One of the things that distinguishes the CIA from the State Department is that the CIA is both asked to, and authorized to, steal secrets. So if the question is whether the CIA steals secrets, the answer is yes.

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

The CIA in real life, we know, is looking for new kinds of cover. It's looking for new platforms, as they like to say, and it's trying to use the revolution in communications technology, the ability to use all sorts of corporate entities in ways that are hard to detect to get our spies in the places where they need to be.

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.

An intelligence service is the ideal vehicle for a conspiracy [against its own government]. Its members can travel about at home and abroad under secret orders, and no questions are asked. Every scrap of paper in the files, its membership, its expenditure of funds, its contacts, even enemy contacts, are state secrets.

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

Whenever you read a spy story in the press, you know you are being spun.

The broad outlines of the Double Cross deception have been known since 1972, when Sir John Masterman, the former chairman of the double agent committee, controversially published his account of the operation in defiance of official secrecy.

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

Who would have thought that in the 1950s, Burbank was a hotbed of international espionage?

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

There is no such thing as a former KGB man.

Spies are the ears and eyes of Princes.

What the Hell do those clowns do out there at Langley? Get the CIA jerks working on Cambodia.

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.

I've always been baffled by critics of the CIA, who are horrified that it does illegal things. That is the purpose of an intelligence service: to perform illegal acts.

He who is not sage and wise, humane and just, cannot use secret agent.s. And he who is not delicate and subtle cannot get the truth out of them.

The members of the National Clandestine Service of the CIA are called the collectors of last resort. They are tasked to seek the truth when all other avenues of intelligence collection have failed.

The Secret Intelligence Service I knew occupied dusky suites of little rooms opposite St James's Park Tube station in London.

This week the Obama administration warned China to remove its secret agents from the U.S. Then in the middle of Obama's announcement a plant behind him got up and walked away.

Spy plots are hard, really hard.

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.