72 Quotes by Ben MacIntyre

Vivian was not alone in thinking that a man who spent so much time discussing table tennis was probably a spy.

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.

And he began recruiting sluggish British carrier pigeons to be sent on this secret mission to infiltrate the German pigeon service and destroy it from within. Soon there was a force of 350 double-agent pigeons at his disposal, disguised as German pigeons, ready to do their bit.

The trickiest aspect of lying is maintaining the lie. Telling an untruth is easy, but continuing and reinforcing a lie is far harder. The natural human tendency is to deploy another lie to bolster the initial mendacity. Deceptions – in the war room, boardroom, and bedroom – usually unravel because the deceiver lets down his guard and makes the simple mistake of telling, or revealing, the truth.

Constructed almost entirely of wood, with a two-man crew and no defensive guns, the little plane could carry four thousand pounds of bombs to Berlin. With two Rolls-Royce Merlin engines and a top speed of four hundred miles per hour, it could usually outrun enemy fighters. The Mosquito, nicknamed “the Wooden Wonder,” could be assembled, cheaply, by cabinetmakers and carpenters.

This was a wonderfully surreal moment: the real Montagu addressing his fictional persona, in a work of filmic fiction, based on reality, which had originated in fiction.

Quisling, vague, inefficient, and fanatical, won the rare distinction of being so closely associated with a single characteristic – treachery – that a noun was created in his name. At.

William Gerbers” was a German-Swiss businessman living in Liverpool who had been conjured into being by Garbo before he even arrived in Britain.

As the Battle of Normandy raged, the Germans held fast to the illusion, so carefully planted and now so meticulously sustained, that a great American army under Patton was preparing to pounce and the German forces in the Pas de Calais must remain in place to repel it.