Ron Stallworth Quotes

I spent a whole career infiltrating places.

I concluded that infiltration of the Klan was the only way to get evidence that would stand up in court. There was no one else around to do it.

The CIA in real life, we know, is looking for new kinds of cover. It's looking for new platforms, as they like to say, and it's trying to use the revolution in communications technology, the ability to use all sorts of corporate entities in ways that are hard to detect to get our spies in the places where they need to be.

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

Like acting, undercover detective work requires a lot of performance. There's just more pressure because it's life-or-death situations.

Breaking a cardinal rule of spy craft, I actually let it be known that I wanted to work for the CIA.

They won't talk to you because I'm undercover.

I love the spy genre.

Tact ops is a unit which breaks into homes and offices to plant bugging devices. They get into mafia hangouts, they go into embassies, they go into terrorist hangouts, and they describe themselves as court-sanctioned burglars.

Some of the bravest and the best men of all the world, certainly in law enforcement, have made their contributions while they were undercover.

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.

It's rather fun writing a female spy, because she has so much more kit. Bond never carried a hair dryer or a makeup bag. And he certainly didn't wear an uplift bra.

I've been a spy for almost all of my adult life - I don't like being in the spotlight.

Female spies typically represented one of two extremes: the seductress who employed her wiles to manipulate men, and the cross-dresser who blended in by impersonating them.

A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.

It was awesome and liberating to play a Russian spy.

I've always wanted to play a spy, because it is the ultimate acting exercise. You are never what you seem.

Drug people are the very vermin of humanity.... Occasionally we must adopt their dress and tactics.

If you want to know what a terrorist is doing, you have to put an agent in their camp.

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 are more FBI undercover agents in the ranks of the Communist Party than there were actual communists.

Intelligence is about lies. If something is legal and above board, you would not need the CIA to do it.

The Demographics Unit is at the heart of a [New York City] police spying program, built with help from the CIA, which assembled databases on where Muslims lived, shopped, worked and prayed. Police infiltrated Muslim student groups, put informants in mosques, monitored sermons and catalogued every Muslim in New York who adopted new, Americanized surnames.

I learned serving under William J. Casey, that the Clandestine Service is the heart and soul of the agency [the CIA]. It is also the part that can land you in jail.