Markus Wolf Quotes

When I cleared out Moscow apartment after stepping down as president, they found all kinds of wiring in the walls. It turned out that they had been spying on me all along.

There is no place where espionage is not possible.

The Confederates had suspected Wild Bill of being a spy for two or three days, and had watched him closely.

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

With stealth technology, the U.S. could spy on its Cold War adversaries without running the risk of getting caught.

I am always up to steal secrets from smart people.

The world of spying is my genre. My struggle is to demystify, to de-romanticise the spook world, but at the same time harness it as a good story.

There will always be spies. We have to have them. Without them we wouldn't have got Osama bin Laden - it took us years, but it happened.

The NSA's business is 'information dominance,' the use of other people's secrets to shape events.

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.

I knew quite well, when I gave the names of our agents in the Soviet Union, that I was exposing them to the full machinery of counterespionage and the law, and then prosecution and capital punishment.

There was a possibility I could have been under surveillance.

Spying has always gone on since ancient times.

Most of the results of using technical bugging devices were of little importance for my service. It may have been different in counter-intelligence, where bugs in flats, etc., were used to obtain a lot of information about what counter-intelligence was interested in.

…historically, the official personnel of the Soviet bloc countries assigned to this nation, including those at the United Nations, have been used extensively for espionage purposes…

Espionage takes place in the world. Even we commit espionage.

It would be highly useful to government espionage to have reports from all our bookstores, all our hardware and retail stores, all our drugstores…. What one buys at the hardware and retail stores may furnish clues to potential uses of wires, soap powders, and the like used by criminals.

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

[Wiretapping is] a dirty business…. [Espionage] has been employed by every tribe and state since the beginning of history.

I thought that you guys [the CIA] had people everywhere, that you knew about everything, and now you don't even know anything about a raggedy-ass, little fourth rate country. All you have to do is get some Chinese coolies from a San Francisco laundry shop and drop them over there and use them.

] The vast industry of mutual surveillance that grew up alongside the industry of mutual destruction is not about to disappear. The spies, like the weapons, are here to stay. And proliferate, sooner or later, whether we like it or not.

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

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

Intelligence without counter-intelligence is useless.

It is important to seek out the spies that the enemy has sent to spy on you so you can bribe them to really spy for you.