Espionage

Espionage is the practice of surreptitiously obtaining information about an organization or a society that is considered secret or confidential.

Quotes

Alphabetized by author or source

• What would be the real damage if Washington stopped spying on Moscow and Moscow stopped spying on Washington, and both on Beijing? The result would be a draw. Immense sums of money would be saved, since a large part of the efforts of every spy agency is devoted to obstructing the intrigues of the competition. How many diseases could be overcome? How many hungry people fed, how many illiterates taught to read and write?
  • Uri Avnery, "Dubious in Dubai", Gush Shalom. (20 February 2010).

• Because something is not what it is said to be, Ma'am, does not mean it is a fake. It may just have been wrongly attributed.
  • Alan Bennett, in A Question of Attribution; said by Anthony Blunt

• Satellite reconnaissance and other intelligence breakthroughs also contributed to the obsolescence of major wars by diminishing the possibility of surprise in starting them, and by eliminating opportunities for concealment in waging them. Surprises could still happen, like Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in August, 1990, but only because the interpretation of intelligence failed, not its collection. Once the liberation of that country began early in 1991, Saddam Hussein found his military deployments so visible, and therefore so exposed to attack, that he had no choice but to withdraw. Transparency—a by-product of the Cold War strategic arms race—created a wholly new environment that rewarded those who sought to prevent wars and discouraged those who tried to begin them.
  • John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History, (2005), pp. 262-263

• Eric Swalwell's spy scandal underscores the URGENT need for a ban on enemy foreign nationals as congressional interns!
  • Lance Gooden, Twitter], (December 10, 2020)

• Need I say the C.I.A. be Criminals In Action
  Cocaine crack unpacking, high surveillance tracking
  Prominant blacks and whites giving orders for mass slaughters
  but I want all my daughters to be like Maxine Waters
  When they flooded the streets with crack cocaine, I was like Noah
  now they lower cause the whole cold war is over
  Communism fell to the dollars you were grabbing
  All the assault and battering in the name of intelligence gathering?
  • KRS-One, "C.I.A. (Criminals In Action)", Lyricist Lounge, Volume One (1998).

• Mrs O'Grady has been sentenced to death. Personally I doubt whether she is guilty of anything more than collecting information. She probably pictured herself as a master spy, and cannot bring herself to say that there was really nothing behind it all.
  • Guy Liddell, (17 December 1940)

I played it slightly tongue-in-cheek because I never quite believed that James Bond was a spy because everybody knew him, they all knew what he drank. He’d walk into a bar and it would always be, 'Ah, Commander Bond, martini, shaken not stirred.’ Spies are faceless people. ~ Roger Moore

• I played it slightly tongue-in-cheek because I never quite believed that James Bond was a spy because everybody knew him, they all knew what he drank. He’d walk into a bar and it would always be, 'Ah, Commander Bond, martini, shaken not stirred.’ Spies are faceless people.
  • Roger Moore in "Roger Moore interview: 'I was never very confident with girls'" by Tim Auld, The Telegraph, 23 May 2017.

Excuse me, can you help me? I'm a spy. ~ Terry Nation

• Excuse me, can you help me? I'm a spy.
  • The Doctor as interpreted by Tom Baker in "Genesis of the Daleks", Doctor Who, (8 March - 12 April 1975); written by Terry Nation

• The Espionage Act is being abused by the government to selectively prosecute sources and whistleblowers.
  • Laura Poitras, The Intercept, "Open Letter", (January 14, 2021)

• “We’re the intelligence community,” he said. “We don’t have rules. You don’t play by rules and win this game. And we don’t have emotions. We’re soldiers. If we wench a girl at night, and the orders come through to shoot her next day, we shoot.
  “When you’re laying your life on the line to protect the country you love, you don’t ask if what you do is fair—or even pretty. We take orders that are no more than a flick of an eyebrow, and we don’t ask questions—we get the job done.
  “I don’t think you know how to play that way. I don’t think you belong in the intelligence community.”
  • Walt & Leigh Richmond, The Probability Corner (1977), pp. 134-135

• His spies are seated round about.
  • Rigveda, m. 1, hymn XXV (trans Griffith)

• No spy, however astute, is proof against relentless interrogation. Some unforseen circumstance, some trivial lapse, is pounced upon, exploited by the interrogator, until a break is complete.
  • Lt-Col Robin Stephens in Camp 020: MI5 and the Nazi spies (2000) by the Public Record Office, p. 105

• The spies of the underworld are legion. Craven crooks, for the most part, they are prey to blackmail.
  • Lt-Col Robin Stephens in Camp 020: MI5 and the Nazi spies (2000) by the Public Record Office, p. 106

• Indeed, there may well be many who will agree that death by hanging is almost too good for a sailor who will encompass the death of thousands of his shipmates without qualm.
  • Lt-Col Robin Stephens, Camp 020: MI5 and the Nazi spies (2000) by the Public Record Office, p. 198

• An awful symbiosis emerged between the main actors of the Cold War, a rhythm of escalation between the Pentagon and the Soviet strategic rocket forces, and along secret war between the KGB and the CIA which helped make the spy thriller into the distinctive cultural genre of the period. The two sides became locked into the roles of hero and villain in one another's morality play, as two distinct theories of social and political organisation believed they were grappling for nothing less than the inheritance of the planet.
  • Martin Walker, The Cold War: A History (1994)

• And we did have fun. For five years we bugged and burgled our way across London at the State's behest, while pompous bowler-hatted civil servants in Whitehall pretended to look the other way.
  • Peter Wright, "Spycatcher" (1987), p. 54

• To MI5, if you steam this open you are dirty buggers.
  • Anonymous letter sent to a prominent member of the Communist Party of Great Britain; quoted in "Spycatcher" (1987) by Peter Wright, p. 46