Angelo M. Codevilla Quotes

Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.

Spying is a like a game of chess: Sometimes you have to withdraw, sometimes you have to sacrifice one of your pieces to win - preferably a knight rather than a king or queen.

There is only one law of espionage—there are always going to be spies.

Espionage is largely separate from the mainstream of foreign policy … you nail the spy and you punish him, and you move on.

I am always up to steal secrets from smart people.

For some, the very act of intelligence gathering seems illegitimate when applied to the crime of terrorism.

The skills of the British intelligence community are a great national asset.

Since real spies are so good, you never really know what actual spying is. But I do think spying is a lot more dangerous than we are led to believe.

The safety and security of the nation depends more so than ever before on intelligence.

This town leaks like a sieve. Sometimes I think that the easiest thing on the world would be to be a spy against the United States of America

The purpose of an intelligence service is to avoid war, not to promote one.

It’s [the CIA] an organization that thrives on deception. How do you manage an organization like that?

Bill Stephenson taught us all we ever knew about foreign intelligence.

I would be a terrible CIA officer in real life.

I really wanted to be a spy. I guess it's a bit like acting, where you play a role.

Intelligence services all over the world, in order to retain their competitive edge, have to adapt or they won't survive.

Putin is not a politician. Putin is a KGB agent. And whatever he does is provocations, which KGB is usually involved in.

Exposing the activities of a foreign intelligence service renders them ineffective, since it removes plausible deniability, which is the hallmark of covert intelligence operations.

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

The human spy, in terms of the American espionage effort, had never been terribly pertinent.

Throughout my career, I had the great fortune to experience firsthand as well as to witness what it means to be a CIA officer.

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

Improving our national intelligence capabilities should remain a top priority and a continual process.

I saw a limit to what I was giving as kind of a scam I was running on the KGB, by giving them people that I knew were their double agents fed to us.

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