"I worked for MI6 in the Sixties, during the great witch-hunts, when the shared paranoia of the Cold War gripped the services."
-John le Carre
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"The Secret Intelligence Service I knew occupied dusky suites of little rooms opposite St James's Park Tube station in London.“
-John le Carre
posted in Intelligence
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"In every war zone that I've been in, there has been a reality and then there has been the public perception of why the war was being fought. In every crisis, the issues have been far more complex than the public has been allowed to know."
-John le Carre
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"During the Cold War, we lived in coded times when it wasn't easy and there were shades of grey and ambiguity."
-John le Carre
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"The Cold War was over long before it was officially declared dead."
-John le Carre
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"If there is one eternal truth of politics, it is that there are always a dozen good reasons for doing nothing."
-John le Carre
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"Until we have a better relationship between private performance and the public truth, as was demonstrated with Watergate, we as the public are absolutely right to remain suspicious, contemptuous even, of the secrecy and the misinformation which is the digest of our news."
-John le Carre
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"I wasn't privy to all of the intelligence that was coming in about Guatemala, but I did see the traffic that was coming in from Guatemala City, because it was very relevant to me, and of course I exchanged what I had with the chief of station in Guatemala City."
-E. Howard Hunt
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"Foreign Ministry guys don't become agents. Party officials, the Foreign Ministry nerds, tend not to volunteer to Western intelligence agencies."
-Aldrich Ames
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"We had periodic crises in this country when the technical intelligence didn't support the policy. We had the bomber gap, the missile gap."
-Aldrich Ames
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"The resistance of policy-makers to intelligence is not just founded on an ideological presupposition. They distrust intelligence sources and intelligence officials because they don't understand what the real problems are."
-Aldrich Ames
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"There are so many things a large intelligence espionage organization can do to justify its existence, that people can get promotions for, because it could result in results."
-Aldrich Ames
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"Our Soviet espionage efforts had virtually never, or had very seldom, produced any worthwhile political or economic intelligence on the Soviet Union."
-Aldrich Ames
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