Intelligence - Quotes
Intelligence is the practice and theory of collecting information about an enemy or competitor to ensure one's security and gain advantages in the military, political or economic field.
There is nothing that spies cannot be used for. (Sun Tzu, “The Art of War”) Knowledge in advance cannot be obtained from gods and demons, nor can it be obtained by inference from similarities, nor can it be obtained through any calculations. Knowledge of the enemy's position can only be obtained from people. (Sun Tzu, “The Art of War”) The use of spies is the most essential thing in war; this is the support on which the army operates. (Sun Tzu, “The Art of War”) To begrudge titles, awards, money and not know the position of the enemy is the height of inhumanity. (Sun Tzu, The Art of War) They [spies] are a treasure for the sovereign. (Sun Tzu, “The Art of War”) Among the enemy officials there are people who have great intelligence, but have lost their positions; people who have been guilty of something and have been punished; there are selfish favorites; ambitious people engaged in secondary activities; lazy people who are unable to complete the work assigned to them; people who are not satisfied with their official position and dream of a wider field of activity, who are ready to walk on the bones of others; people prone to cunning and deceit, double-minded and unprincipled. You should come into contact with such people, give them gifts, attracting them to your side, and through them learn about the situation in their countries, find out enemy plans and aspirations, and with their help sow discord within the ruling circles. (Du Mu) As spies... one should choose people who are internally enlightened and intelligent, but stupid in appearance; in appearance - base, but in heart - brave; it is necessary to choose people who can walk well, who are healthy, hardy, brave, versed in simple arts, who can endure hunger and cold, insults and shame. (Du Mu)
| …Let him “the king” achieve victory over the senses by rejecting the six enemies, by communicating with scientists let him achieve the mind, with the help of spies - by sight, by tension - by the stability of possession, by indicating what must be done - by establishing appropriate laws, by true behavior - through teaching science, love among people - by increasing their property, doing good - a prosperous life. |
| - "Arthashastra" |
| ...Let the king appoint secret agents who take the form of wandering disciples, renounced monks, householders, merchants, hermits, spies, robbers, poisoners, nuns. Knowing the weak points of others, the determined student is the wandering student. Having attracted him with money and attention, let the adviser say to him: “Guided by the (instructions) of the Tsar and mine, tell him immediately what you see bad.” One who has given up hermitage, is intelligent and honest - this is a monk who has renounced his vows. Let him conduct his business on the plot allocated to him for farming, having (at his disposal) a lot of gold and students. From the income from this business, let him provide all the hermits with food, clothing and housing. Let him persuade those seeking to obtain a means of living: “In such and such clothes, you must carry out the king’s business and appear to receive food and maintenance at the appointed time.” And let all the hermits persuade their group in the same way. The farmer, deprived of his means of subsistence, intelligent and honest, will be a spy disguised as a householder. Let him conduct his business in the area assigned to him. Continue as before. A merchant who has lost his means of living, is smart and honest, will be a spy who has taken on the appearance of a merchant. Continue as before. |
| - "Arthashastra" |
| If the testimonies of the three (spies) agree, then they are trusted. In case of repeated discrepancies in the testimony, secret punishment or removal of the spy is applied. |
| - "Arthashastra" |
| ...Let him "the king" sow spies from the enemy, the friend and the ruler of the adjacent (to him and the enemy) country and from the neutrals, as well as among their 18 types of officials. And such spies, installed by the enemy, must be identified by others like them... |
| - "Arthashastra" |
| And (spies) must know everything that is said (in the crowd). Let the spies, disguised as hermits, shaven or with braided hair, know their contentment and discontent. |
| - "Arthashastra" |
I rarely used spies in my campaigns; I did everything by inspiration: I foresaw everything as if, I moved with the speed of lightning - the rest was a matter of luck. (Napoleon, “Maxims and Thoughts of the Prisoner of Saint Helena,” CCXLIII) Of all the professions, the profession of intelligence officer is perhaps the least understood and misunderstood. (Allen Dulles, “The Art of Intelligence”) Intelligence vigilance and its advance warning of danger could in themselves be one of the most effective means of deterring the aggressive aspirations of a potential enemy. Therefore, the fact that such a means exists should not be kept secret, but, on the contrary, it should be widely known to the world, but the methods and means used by intelligence must be kept secret. (Allen Dulles, “The Art of Intelligence”) Open information is grist for the intelligence mill. (Allen Dulles, "The Art of Intelligence") The spies described in books are rarely encountered in real life... A career intelligence officer, at least in peacetime, is almost never sent incognito or under a mask into the territory of a potential enemy to carry out a dangerous mission. […] The adventures of the famous James Bond from Ian Fleming’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, which I read with great pleasure, bear very little resemblance to the modest and cautious behavior of the Soviet spy in the United States, Colonel Rudolf Abel. A career intelligence officer, unlike a literary hero, usually does not carry weapons, camouflaged recording devices, encrypted messages sewn into the lining of his trousers, or anything else that could lead to his exposure if captured. He should not be tempted by the advances of chic ladies who sit next to him at the bar or appear from the closets in hotels. If this happened, he would in all likelihood be recalled, since one of the basic principles of intelligence is that no one, except a limited number of people working with him, should know that he is an intelligence officer. (Allen Dulles, “The Art of Intelligence”) ...Good fishermen make good intelligence workers... The moment when a fish is hooked is truly exciting, even a person far from this hobby can understand it. However, he will not be interested in all the preparatory measures. At the same time, the fisherman is interested in them, because they are extremely important for his art, since without this preparation the fish cannot be lured and pulled out. (Allen Dulles, “The Art of Intelligence”) People in my profession are accustomed to listening more and talking less. (V. G. Fischer (Colonel Abel), from the introductory word to the film “Dead Season”) ...As long as there is a secret war with an irreconcilable enemy, the basic principles of our activities remain of paramount importance. The first of these principles, roughly speaking: keep your mouth shut! (Kim Philby, “My Secret War”) There is an opinion that everyone can judge intelligence quite professionally. This misconception is based on deep study of detective novels. Meanwhile, the conversation between these two intelligence officers would be as incomprehensible to the uninitiated as the conversation between two mathematicians or astronomers. ("Low Season") Chatterbox is a godsend for a spy. (Soviet slogan)
| Good intelligence can delay wars. Strong enemy reconnaissance and our weakness are a provocation of war. |
| - Joseph Stalin |
| ...There are direct enemies and there are possible enemies. All allies are possible enemies - and allies must also be checked. From an intelligence point of view, we cannot have friends; we have immediate enemies, and there are possible enemies. |
| - Joseph Stalin |
| ...If among fifty million Englishmen and two hundred million Americans there is one intelligence officer, say Longsdale, and he does not shout with good obscenities that he is Russian, he will never be caught. They can catch him in action, in his work, when he transmits or receives information, recruits or carries out an operation. This means you have to work cleanly. I worked like this for twelve long years: concentrated, not thinking about outsiders, including danger... I also didn’t think about the birch tree in front of the porch of my home, as they say in modern heroic stories. |
| - Konon Young (quoted from: Agranovsky V. Profession: foreigner. - Vagrius, 2000) |
| Bards and minstrels will never write odes about us, and not a single dog will know about our deeds. This is our lot. We do our deeds in the darkness, and in the darkness we dissolve like ghosts. |
| — Roman Kim, “Burn After Reading” |
| Our work takes place in complete secrecy, hidden from human eyes. Ordinary people are measured by their visible deeds, their visible qualities. The more famous their deeds are, the higher they are valued. And we are measured by our secret deeds, our secret qualities. The less they know us, the more highly we should be rated. Our destiny is to be invisible, we are knights of the Order of Invisible Causes, we are a caste of ghosts standing above mere mortals. We are true supermen, because we influence the lives and affairs of people, influence history and move it. It cannot develop without us. Just as a performance cannot go on without stage drivers - they raise the curtain, change the backdrops, turn the stage, open the hatches from which the actors rise and fall into - everything is done by the stage drivers. And we act in exactly the same way behind the scenes of politics, while heads of government, ministers and generals move on stage in front of the public. They are written about in newspapers, their voices are broadcast on the radio, their deeds are recorded by historians, and our lot is complete obscurity. Remember the words from Kipling's “Kim”: “We who take part in the game stand outside the defense. If we die, that's the end of it. Our names are being erased from the books." We are beings of zero existence, we live in the plane of Wu - this Chinese word means Nothing, it is spoken of in the teachings of the Buddhist sect Tseng. We must believe only in U - Nothing. No romance, no feelings, ideals, patriotism, moral code, sacred principles - all this is nonsense, for us there is only the Cause - the fight against the enemy, whom we must defeat at any cost, even at the cost of turning the whole world into the Great U. You understand in Spanish ? Nada y pues nada. |
| — Roman Kim, “Ghost School” |
| You must believe us. We are noble people. |
| — Richard Helms, US Director of Central Intelligence (1966−1973), from a speech at the National Press Club on December 30, 1971 (quoted from the book: Agee Philip. Behind the Scenes of the CIA) |
| “It is absolutely fair to say... that much of our work is either useless or duplicated by open media.” The only difference and problem is that the intelligence services are not called upon to educate the general public, but to serve their governments. And governments, like all of us, trust only what they paid for and are suspicious of free cheese... Espionage is eternal... It would be nice for governments to do without it, but they have never succeeded. They adore him. If one day the day comes when we don’t have a single enemy left in the world, the government will certainly invent one, and therefore we have nothing to worry about. And further. Who said that we only work against enemies? History itself teaches us through clear examples that today’s ally is quite possibly tomorrow’s enemy. Fashion can dictate to us only a temporary choice of priorities, but there is also a foreknowledge of the future situation. Therefore, as long as crooks can become heads of state, we will continue to spy. While impostors, liars and crazy people rule the world, we will continue to monitor them. While nations compete with each other, politicians engage in deceit, tyrants start wars, a consumer society needs resources, the homeless are looking for whose land to occupy, the hungry are hungry for food, and the rich strive to increase their fortunes, your chosen profession will not go anywhere, I can firmly believe in you assure this. |
| — John Le Carré, The Secret Pilgrim |
| No one knows how to rot as a whole team more unnoticed than scouts. No one is more willing to be distracted by unimportant tasks. No one knows better how to create the illusion of mysterious omniscience and hide behind it. No one can so convincingly pretend to look down on this entire public, which has no choice but to pay the highest prices for second-class intelligence, and its beauty is not that it is objectively valuable, but that the process of obtaining them is shrouded in gothic mystery. |
| — John Le Carré, The Pigeon Tunnel |
| Intelligence officers are not police officers, and they also cannot be called sound in matters of morality, no matter what they think about themselves. If your task is to recruit traitors and use them for your own purposes, you are unlikely to complain when it turns out that one of your own was lured away, even if you loved him like a brother, valued him as a colleague and devoted him to all the details of his secret work. When I wrote The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, I had already learned this lesson. And when I started writing “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy!”, the gloomy star of Kim Philby illuminated my path. Espionage and writing go hand in hand. Both require a trained eye that sees human misdeeds and the many paths leading to betrayal. Whoever has been inside the secret tent will never leave it again. And if before this you did not have the habits of its inhabitants, now you will learn them forever. |
| — John Le Carré, The Pigeon Tunnel |
| They say that John Edgar Hoover, with unusual wit, reacted to the news that Kim Philby was a Soviet double agent: - Say there that Jesus Christ had only twelve and one of them turned out to be double. |
| — John Le Carré, The Pigeon Tunnel |
| Spies spy because they have the opportunity to do so. |
| — John Le Carré, The Pigeon Tunnel |
Sun Tzu. Art of War. - M.: Tsentrpoligraf, 2011, ISBN 978-5-227-03046-7 Dulles, Allen. The art of reconnaissance. - M.: International Relations, MP "Ulysses", 1992, ISBN 5-7133-0524-4 Agee F. Behind the scenes of the CIA. - M.: Voenizdat, 1978
The traitor to Russian intelligence officers has emerged from the shadows
Russian intelligence agents in the United States were betrayed by a SVR colonel. The Kommersant newspaper revealed the details of the scandalous case about the failure of ten secret employees at once, whom American counterintelligence exposed this summer. Until now, it was not known how the US intelligence services managed to carry out this operation. However, a number of sources point to a traitor from Russia, who fled to America shortly before the exposure. Official departments do not confirm the information, since the investigation into the spy scandal has not yet been completed. And sources from the Vesti FM radio station told how they recruit and continue to recruit Russians abroad. Details in the material of Vesti FM correspondent Nikolai Osipov.
Colonel Shcherbakov is the recent head of the American department for working with illegal immigrants. It is this person who is now called the main culprit in the failure of Russian agents in the United States. Until now, it remained a mystery how American counterintelligence managed to carry out such a successful operation. The summer scandal was a strong blow to the SVR and the reputation of Moscow. Arrests then took place in several US cities at once. Even then they said that failure was the result of betrayal, but the name of the traitor remained in the shadows, says one of the authors of the publication in Kommersant, Vladimir Solovyov. Even now not much is known:
“Everyone spoke on this topic with reluctance and, as can be seen from the note, we were not able to find out even the name: only the last name, rank and place of work, which is also quite a lot in this situation.”
Many SVR employees were tested; it was necessary to find out how this became possible. The official results of the investigation were not announced, but anonymous sources point to the alleged “mole,” as traitors are called. A certain Colonel Shcherbakov previously led illegal immigrants, but made a deal with the American authorities, gave them secret information for some time, and then completely left for the states, taking a dossier on the agents. Unofficial information is all that the media has so far. A series of arrests of Russian illegal immigrants in the United States began just after Colonel Shcherbakov, and a little earlier his son, an employee of the State Drug Control Service, went abroad.
American counterintelligence immediately began the operation, fearing that Moscow, suspecting betrayal, would take the agents out of the attack. The only one who escaped detection was a certain Robert Christopher Metsos. His name was mentioned later, it is known that he hid in Cyprus, but no one knows where he went after that. No traces. It is possible that now a person under this name no longer exists at all.
Later, experts began to analyze and it became clear: the figure of Colonel Shcherbakov should have aroused suspicion in the SVR, but he managed to remain a traitor in his own ranks. Now they are pointing out some facts - his daughter, it turns out, has been living in the USA for a long time, a very strange circumstance for an intelligence officer, he himself refused a promotion, probably in order to avoid a lie detector test - this is a mandatory procedure in such cases. Foreign intelligence veteran Igor Prelin admits that such miscalculations were not allowed in his time:
“It was impossible for any of the relatives to live abroad, for someone to get married... And his daughter married an American and lived in the States. And he worked here. This is completely ruled out. Employees of all intelligence services are now free to travel abroad on vacation. It was completely unimaginable then.”
Miscalculations in working with personnel are compensated after the failure of illegal immigrants. The entire department was subject to scrutiny, to the point where the question of the status of the Foreign Intelligence Service was raised. The service became a separate structure in the 1990s, when it emerged from under the wing of the KGB. Now there is talk that intelligence should be returned to its previous position.
Perhaps the most media person among those detained was Anna Chapman. The young spy appeared either at public events or in glossy magazines, although this rather indicated that she no longer existed as an intelligence officer. All this time, another figure remained in the shadows, as it now turns out, a more experienced employee. This is Mikhail Vasenkov, aka Juan Lazaro. He worked abroad since the 1960s, that is, under the KGB. First in Spain, then in South America, then moved to the USA. He married a Peruvian journalist, officially worked as a photographer, and worked well, under this cover and obtained valuable information, for which he became a Hero of the Soviet Union in the 1980s. His cover was one hundred percent, if not for the betrayal. He had an ideal biography; by the age of 65, he had almost forgotten his native Russian language. After his arrest, he was forced to give his real name only after Colonel Shcherbakov himself put his own dossier in front of him. At the same time, Vasenkov himself, after the exchange of spies, refused to stay in Moscow, saying that he was going to leave for South America. For him, as a veteran, such a betrayal was shocking. However, attempts to recruit Russian employees have been and are continuing, veteran intelligence officer Igor Prelin tells us. He himself was the target of recruitment:
“And now, for myself, several years ago I went abroad with my former colleague, and they approached us for recruitment. Right to two. They offered a lot of money for the information we have. And people are divided into two categories. Those who are capable of betraying and those who will not betray under any circumstances. That's all".
It should be noted that official departments do not comment in any way on information leaked to the press. And the sources of information are almost always anonymous, so doubts about the reliability of many details remain. Like, for example, a quote from one of these sources that Russian intelligence allegedly knows where Colonel Shcherbakov is, with a hint that retribution awaits him. But it’s difficult to judge how serious this phrase is, admits Kommersant correspondent Vladimir Solovyov:
“There is a feeling that this is such a figure of speech. More wishful thinking than reality. The intelligence officers may well make such a joke so that Shcherbakov does not live too calmly in the States.”
Punishment for a traitor should not at all correspond to bloody movie scripts. Moreover, scenario repetitions rarely occur in intelligence. Every case is special. Our expert, intelligence service veteran Igor Prelin, gives an example from history indirectly related to the latest spy scandal:
“The operation was like this, there was a Zaporozhye SVR officer, I knew him well. Similar situation. He retired, he had a joint business with the Americans, he also had a son who lived there, and he left for the States. I sold the information for a lot of money and invested it in business. We found out what exactly he betrayed. There was an excuse, a good legend, and they managed to arrange for him to come to Moscow on his business. He was arrested, tried, and given 18 years. He served eight years, and then he, along with three other people, was exchanged for illegal employees who were betrayed by Shcherbakov.”
Obviously, the traitor was blacklisted by Russian intelligence officers for life. It won't be easy to find him. The witness protection program works well in the United States. Colonel Shcherbakov most likely already lives under a different name, as do his children and other close people. They came up with a different biography for him, and perhaps also his appearance. If you study the history of such betrayals and the history of defectors, then usually such moments turned into large PR campaigns. There are almost no traces of him in Russia and cannot be found at all in the USA, just like his children. That’s what makes this story special, continues Kommersant correspondent Vladimir Solovyov:
“The US behaved uncharacteristically. If earlier, on the contrary, every flight of a Russian or Soviet security officer to the West was presented as a great success and was widely publicized, then in the case of Shcherbakov there was nothing like that, complete silence, they were silent.”
It is quite possible that a few months ago in some American town a seemingly respectable citizen appeared, with an inconspicuous job, who, most likely, continues to advise US intelligence agencies on Russian intelligence activities.
