Churchill and Secret Service Quotes

“Hopkins was powerfully impressed. Churchill, he reported to Roosevelt, was the government, the one and only person he needed to have a full meeting of minds.”
― David A.T. Stafford, Churchill & Secret Service

“Harry Hopkins when he arrived in London early in January 1941 for a first-hand view of Britain’s needs and morale. This frail Iowan had directed the New Deal Emergency Relief Administration and was Roosevelt’s troubleshooter, a man so close to the President that he lived in the White House as part of the family household. He arrived in Britain with the self-defined mission of being the ‘catalytic agent between two prima donnas’.”
― David A.T. Stafford, Churchill & Secret Service

“Coventry remains the focus of a persistent story about Churchill’s ruthless determination to protect the Ultra secret. The city was victim of a massive bombing raid on the night of 14 November 1940 when over 500 civilians were killed, the city centre flattened and the cathedral destroyed. Although Ultra had revealed the target, so this tale runs, Churchill refused to allow countermeasures for fear of revealing to the Germans that their ciphers had been broken. Coventry, in short, was deliberately sacrificed to preserve Ultra. This is a myth. Three days before the raid Ultra revealed Luftwaffe plans for a major operation code-named Moonlight Sonata, but gave no date or targets.”
― David A.T. Stafford, Churchill & Secret Service

“Attempts at smuggling in explosives disguised as chocolate, biscuits or rubber through Norway having failed, Section D finally shipped them direct to Stockholm labelled as military and technical books. The military attaché who collected them disguised as a French chauffeur described the operation as ‘real Edgar Wallace stuff, in a dark dirty wood at midnight’.”
― David A.T. Stafford, Churchill & Secret Service

“Churchill worked hard to bring Savinkov to London in late 1921. It was not easy. Foreign Office officials regarded him as unreliable, even crooked, and refused him a visa. SIS chief Mansfield Cumming also declined to help, but Churchill leaned on his intelligence contacts in France. Before the Foreign Office had woken up, the British Passport Office in Paris had issued a visa and Savinkov was in London.”
― David A.T. Stafford, Churchill & Secret Service

“If his aim is roast pork he is quite willing to burn the house down to get it.”
― David A.T. Stafford, Churchill & Secret Service

“Backbench MP Edward Pickersgill captured the Liberal temper when he denounced the affair as a sordid business. ‘I suppose secret service work is necessary’, he conceded. ‘But it is dirty work, and when a man has been at the business for twenty years … [his hand] is imbued with that dirty work as is the dyer’s hand.”
― David A.T. Stafford, Churchill & Secret Service

“I do not see how any patriotic men can continue to support a party which is kept in power by the unnatural combination of Little Englandism, disloyal Fenian Roman Catholics, Welsh and English non-conformists, Temperance fanatics, miscellaneous cranks, and traitors of the Keir Hardie type’,”
― David A.T. Stafford, Churchill & Secret Service

“In agreeing to head the espionage inquiry he hoped to reassure public opinion. Instead, within a matter of weeks, both he and his committee had become convinced that the threat was real.”
― David A.T. Stafford, Churchill & Secret Service

“There is required for the composition of the great commander’, he wrote in The World Crisis, ‘not only imagination but also an element of legerdemain, an original and sinister touch, which leaves the enemy puzzled as well as beaten.”
― David A.T. Stafford, Churchill & Secret Service

“Sunday 8 August. The next day it declared: ‘Workers! You”
― David Stafford, Churchill & Secret Service