More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
It was a truism in the intelligence service that the better you were in the field, the less London wanted to know you.
you learned to give London what it needed and not much more. The Foreign Office cannot bear too much reality. When you travel between a world of reports and the one that people die in, intelligence product becomes a dubious thing.
Like a lot of jobs, ninety-five percent of espionage came down to who you knew. Swapping thumb drives in underground car parks can be fun, but an astonishing amount of the work simply involved belonging to a group of people able to exchange information that others didn’t have. Like a journalist, you cultivated a network of off-the-record sources, only for a paper with the smallest distribution possible.
“Is it politically stable?” “It’s a dictatorship. You don’t get much more stable than that.”
So within the most classified of government sites they had created an enclave of enhanced secrecy. That usually meant the technology involved was sensitive, or the ethics. Often both.
The best cover for deceit is deceit; people always look for a secret, but they usually only look for one.
And I felt the tingle again: entering a country as a spy, your own mystery momentarily equal to the world’s.
After another twenty minutes, the bottle and glasses came out. Ten thirty a.m. I’d had worse. And I respected the tradition. The vodka in the drawer was like a confession: Of course, none of this is really bearable. It made you conscious of its absence in Western offices, and wonder what psychopathy replaced it.
“Someone once described the world to me as countries with long histories but no oil, and countries with lots of oil but little history.”
“This country has a problem: It’s called forty-dollar barrels. The price of oil has sunk. That means the sweetener’s running out, economic brakes slammed on. Which is fine for those strapped in.” He gestured at the dance floor. “But the people outside . . . People start to care about democracy when they can’t buy what they want.”
“They like the Russians here. There’s an old Kazakh proverb: ‘To be the captive of the Chinese is a tight noose—with the Russians, it is a wide-open road.’”
Every expat is an exile of sorts, looking for something to grip on to. You’re free to remake yourself, try things out, which means you end up confronted with who you really are.
reflexive control theory. It means feeding an opponent specially prepared information so that they make a decision of your choosing.
