Jonathan Franklin Quotes

Oh, I can keep many secrets, so I would be a phenomenal secret agent. I love secrets.

In intelligence work, there are limits to the amount of information one can share. Confidentiality is essential.

I'd be a terrible secret agent. I can't keep a secret and I'm not sneaky.

If you are completely transparent, then you have no intelligence service.

The life of spies is to know, not bee known.

That’s the thing about spies. Most of the secrets we keep are from each other.

There is nobody I know by name who is concerned with collecting information for the Russian authorities. There are people whom I know by sight whom I trusted with my life.

The only thing I ever withheld from the KGB were the names of two agents whom I personally had known and handled and had a particular feeling for.

If you think you might have secret information listening to me, you're lost.

Intelligence agencies keep things secret because they often violate the rule of law or of good behavior.

People tell me the most extraordinary things. I've noticed it for years. Perhaps they know I won't be shocked. Or judgmental.

The CIA claims that secrecy is necessary to hide what it's doing from enemies of the United States ... the real reason for secrecy is to hide what the CIA is doing from the American people.

Secrecy is as essential to Intelligence as vestments to a Mass, or darkness to a spiritualist seance, and must at all costs be maintained, quite irrespective of whether or not it serves any purpose.

If you set foot on your enemies' land, get spies on them. Choose those whom you count on for their truthfulness and advice, whether Arabs or inhabitants of that land. Liars' accounts would not benefit you, even if some of them were true; the deceiver is a spy against you and not for you.

If this was a graduating class of CIA case officers my advice would be short and to the point: Admit nothing, deny everything, and make counteraccusations.

Hollywood does tend to portray CIA officers as totally the honey trap. Looks matter as they do in any profession. But the most important thing for me when I was working was blending into my environment.

I would be a terrible CIA officer in real life.

Former CIA employee Joseph Weisberg's 'An Ordinary Spy' may attract attention for how much it redacts - whether by authorial choice or by CIA design - but its power comes from the growing frustration Weisberg's fictional alter ego feels at a system designed to betray seeming innocents in the most casual and cruel manner possible.

Of all those in the army close to the commander, none is more intimate than the secret agent.

You couldn't trust anyone or anything that belonged to the world of espionage.

I'm a pretty private person, so I'd like to say I'm a good ear and that I keep my mouth shut.

I think I would have been a hopeless spy. I love telling stories and am almost entirely unable to keep a secret.

You could say that all novels are spy novels and all novelists are spy masters.

In my head, I think I'd make a perfect spy, but in reality, I don't think I'd fare very well.

I'm a pretty bad liar, and I'm not very good at keeping secrets.