The Spy and the Traitor Quotes

“It is perfectly possible for two people to listen to the same words and hear entirely different things.”
― Ben Macintyre, The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War

“Lenin is often credited with coining the term “useful idiot,” poleznyi durak in Russian, meaning one who can be used to spread propaganda without being aware of it or subscribing”
― Ben Macintyre, The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War

“Paranoia is born of propaganda, ignorance, secrecy and fear.”
― Ben Macintyre, The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War

“In a craven and hierarchical organization, the only thing more dangerous in revealing your own ignorance, is to draw attention to the stupidity of the boss.”
― Ben Macintyre, The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War

“In launching Operation RYAN, Andropov broke the first rule of intelligence: never ask for confirmation of something you already believe. Hitler had been certain that the D-day invasion force would land at Calais, so that is what his spies (with help from Allied double agents) told him, ensuring the success of the Normandy landings. Tony Blair and George W. Bush were convinced that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, and that is what their intelligence services duly concluded. Yuri Andropov, pedantic and autocratic, was utterly convinced that his KGB minions would find evidence of a looming nuclear assault. So that is what they did.”
― Ben Macintyre, The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War

“The KGB, however, was convinced that the entire Soviet embassy was the target of a gigantic and sustained eavesdropping campaign, and the fact that this snooping was invisible confirmed that the British must be very good at it.”
― Ben Macintyre, The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War

“At the age of nineteen, Gordievsky took up cross-country running. Something about the solitary nature of the sport appealed to him, the rhythm of intense exertion over a long period, in private competition with himself, testing his own limits.”
― Ben Macintyre, The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War

“The decision to leave his family behind was either an act of monumental self-sacrifice, or one of selfish self-preservation, or both. He told himself he had no choice, which is what we all tell ourselves when forced to make a terrible choice.”
― Ben Macintyre, The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War

“When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.”
― Ben Macintyre, The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War

“The KGB had long excelled in the dark art of manufacturing “fake news.”
― Ben Macintyre, The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War

“All spies need to feel they are loved.”
― Ben Macintyre, The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War

“In May 1981, Yuri Andropov, chairman of the KGB, gathered his senior officers in a secret conclave to issue a startling announcement: America was planning to launch a nuclear first strike, and obliterate the Soviet Union. For more than twenty years, a nuclear war between East and West had been held at bay by the threat of mutually assured destruction, the promise that both sides would be annihilated in any such conflict, regardless of who started it. But by the end of the 1970s the West had begun to pull ahead in the nuclear arms race, and tense détente was giving way to a different sort of psychological confrontation, in which the Kremlin feared it could be destroyed and defeated by a preemptive nuclear attack. Early in 1981, the KGB carried out an analysis of the geopolitical situation, using a newly developed computer program, and concluded that “the correlation of world forces” was moving in favor of the West. Soviet intervention in Afghanistan was proving costly, Cuba was draining Soviet funds, the CIA was launching aggressive covert action against the USSR, and the US was undergoing a major military buildup: the Soviet Union seemed to be losing the Cold War, and, like a boxer exhausted by long years of sparring, the Kremlin feared that a single, brutal sucker punch could end the contest. The KGB chief’s conviction that the USSR was vulnerable to a surprise nuclear attack probably had more to do with Andropov’s personal experience than rational geopolitical analysis. As Soviet ambassador to Hungary in 1956, he had witnessed how quickly an apparently powerful regime might be toppled. He had played a key role in suppressing the Hungarian Uprising. A dozen years later, Andropov again urged “extreme measures” to put down the Prague Spring. The “Butcher of Budapest” was a firm believer in armed force and KGB repression. The head of the Romanian secret police described him as “the man who substituted the KGB for the Communist Party in governing the USSR.” The confident and bullish stance of the newly installed Reagan administration seemed to underscore the impending threat. And so, like every genuine paranoiac, Andropov set out to find the evidence to confirm his fears. Operation RYAN (an acronym for raketno-yadernoye napadeniye, Russian for “nuclear missile attack”) was the biggest peacetime Soviet intelligence operation ever launched.”
― Ben Macintyre, The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War

“The Soviet Union was in effect an enormous prison, incarcerating more than 280 million people behind heavily guarded borders, with over a million KGB officers and informants acting as their jailers. The population was under constant surveillance, and no segment of society was more closely watched than the KGB itself: the Seventh Directorate was responsible for internal surveillance, with some 1,500 men deployed in Moscow alone. Under Leonid Brezhnev’s inflexible brand of Communism, paranoia had increased to near Stalinist levels, creating a spy state pitting all against all, in which phones were tapped and letters opened, and everyone was encouraged to inform on everyone else, everywhere, all the time. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the resulting spike in international tension, had intensified KGB internal scrutiny. “Fear by night, and a feverish effort by day to pretend enthusiasm for a system of lies, was the permanent condition of the Soviet citizen,” writes Robert Conquest.”
― Ben Macintyre, The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War

“the KGB was working hard to try to ensure that Thatcher lost the 1983 general election. In the eyes of the Kremlin, Thatcher was “the Iron Lady”—a nickname intended as an insult by the Soviet army newspaper that coined it, but one in which she reveled—and the KGB had been organizing “active measures” to undermine her ever since she came to power in 1979, including the placing of negative articles with sympathetic left-wing journalists. The KGB still had contacts on the left, and Moscow clung to the illusion that it might be able to influence the election in favor of the Labour Party, whose leader, after all, was still listed in KGB files as a “confidential contact.” In an intriguing harbinger of modern times, Moscow was prepared to use dirty tricks and hidden interference to swing a democratic election in favor of its chosen candidate.”
― Ben Macintyre, The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War

“For an intelligence service, there is no process more painful and debilitating than an internal hunt for an unidentified traitor. The damage Philby did to MI6’s self-confidence was far greater and more enduring than anything he inflicted by spying for the KGB. A mole does not just foment mistrust. Like a heretic, he undermines the coherence of faith itself.”
― Ben Macintyre, The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War

“Jens was small with a long fair mustache. Winter was enormous, roughly the size of a large door. I called them Asterix and Obelix. We got on frightfully well.”
― Ben Macintyre, The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War

“Spies come in many shapes. Some are motivated by ideology, politics or patriotism. A surprising number act out of avarice, for the financial rewards, can be alluring. Others find themselves drawn into espionage by sex, blackmail, arrogance, revenge, disappointment, or the peculiar oneupmanship and comradeship that secrecy confers.
Some are principled and brave. Some are grasping and cowardly. Pavel Sudoplatov, one of Stalin's spymasters, had this advice for his officers seeking to recruit spies in western countries: 'search for people who are hurt by fate or nature - the ugly, those suffering from an inferiority complex, craving power and influence but defeated by unfavourable circumstances... in cooperation with us, all these find a particular compensation. The sense of belonging to an influential and powerful origination will give them a feeling of superiority over the handsome and prosperous people around them.'... Espionage attracts more than its share of the damaged, the lonely and the plain weird. But all spies crave undetected influence, that secret compensation: the ruthless exercise of private power. A degree of intellectual snobbery is common to most, the secret sense of knowing important things unknown to the person standing next to you at the bus stop. In part, spying is an act of the imagination.”
― Ben Macintyre, The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War

“Everyone rehearses their recollections, believing that the more often an event is remembered, the closer we come to its reality. This is not always true. Most people tell a version of the past, and then either stick to or embellish it.”
― Ben Macintyre, The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War

“Ashenden admired goodness, but was not outraged by wickedness,” wrote Maugham.”
― Ben Macintyre, The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War

“astonishing array of technical gadgets for spies, including secure radios, secret ink, and even garlic-flavored chocolate—issued to spies parachuting into occupied France to ensure their breath smelled convincingly French on landing.”
― Ben Macintyre, The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War

“Gordievsky’s letter was his testament. I must emphasize that my decision is not the result of irresponsibility or instability of character on my part. It has been preceded by a long spiritual struggle and by agonizing emotion, and an even deeper disappointment at developments in my own country and my own experiences have brought me to the belief that democracy, and the tolerance of humanity that follows it, represents the only road for my country, which is European in spite of everything. The present regime is the antithesis of democracy to an extent which Westerners can never fully grasp. If a man realizes this, he must show the courage of his convictions and do something himself to prevent slavery from encroaching further upon the realms of freedom.”
― Ben Macintyre, The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War

“exposure”
― Ben Macintyre, The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War

“Bettaney was given the code name PUCK, an unpopular choice among the Nadgers. "The Shakespearean connection was deemed highly inappropriate by all members of the team and the world itself was too close to a well-known Anglo-Saxon expletive for comfort.”
― Ben Macintyre, The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War

“Ames learned: that morality can be malleable; the laws of the US overrode those of other countries;”
― Ben Macintyre, The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War

“Instead, they seem to have done what timeservers do in every autocracy that punishes honest failure: they did nothing at all, and hoped the problem would go away.”
― Ben Macintyre, The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War

“Lenin is often credited with coining the term “useful idiot,” poleznyi durak in Russian,”
― Ben Macintyre, The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War

“There was some snorting in Century House when a CIA cable accidentally revealed that the American code name for MI6 was UPTIGHT.”
― Ben Macintyre, The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War

“huge, bloated lump of a man, with a mediocre brain and a large reserve of low cunning.”
― Ben Macintyre, The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War

“A similarly close eye should be kept on slaughterhouses: if the number of cattle killed at abattoirs increased sharply, that might indicate that the West was stockpiling hamburgers prior to Armageddon.”
― Ben Macintyre, The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War

“Under Leonid Brezhnev’s inflexible brand of Communism, paranoia had increased to near Stalinist levels, creating a spy state pitting all against all, in which phones were tapped and letters opened, and everyone was encouraged to inform on everyone else, everywhere, all the time. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the resulting spike in international tension, had intensified KGB internal scrutiny. “Fear by night, and a feverish effort by day to pretend enthusiasm for a system of lies, was the permanent condition of the Soviet citizen,” writes Robert Conquest.”
― Ben Macintyre, The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War