Secret Agents

"I lost many of my friends because they talked to much"

"I received my ration card for the month of September today. As I understand it Iam allowed ten ounces of bread per day. Beyond that, my allotments for the month area as follows: 2 ounces of cheese, 25 ounces of fats, 20 ounces of sugar, 10 ounces of meat, and 6 ounces of coffee. And by coffee they mean 2 ounces of real coffee and 4 ounces of some kind of substitute material. No rice, noodles, or chocolate are available during the month of September as these are reserved for colder months. France would be a paradise for a vegetarian if there was milk, cheese, and butter; but I haven’t seen any butter, and there is no milk."

"I was told by a senior officer that before the Seoul Olympics we would take down a South Korean airliner. He said it would create chaos and confusion in South Korea. The mission would strike a severe blow for the revolution."

"North Korea won’t give up its nuclear weapons. They’re its lifeline."

"When I was given the mission, my role was to disrupt the Seoul Olympics. North Korea thought that hosting the Olympics would permanently divide the Koreas ... and make South Korea more economically powerful than the North. So I was ordered to harm the ‘South Korean puppets’ by hitting the flight."

"Kim Il-sung was a god-like figure. Anything that was ordered by him could be justified. Any order would be carried out with extreme loyalty. You were ready to sacrifice your life."

"My mission was personally signed by Kim Jong-il. At the time, he oversaw all matters relating to South Korea. Living in North Korea is like being in huge prison and being treated like slaves. You didn’t question an order."

"In North Korea, I lived as Kim Il-sung's robot. In South Korea, I got to live a new life."

"North Korea is using the Olympics as a weapon. It’s trying to escape the sanctions by holding hands with South Korea, trying to break free from international isolation."

"I was brainwashed that giving my life carrying out a mission ordered by the Kim family is an honor. So I took the mission thinking that the bombing will bring revolution in Korea and will contribute to the reunification of the Koreas."

"There is no other country like North Korea. People outside can't understand. The whole country is set up to show loyalty to the Kim royal family. It's like a religion. People are so indoctrinated. There are no human rights, no freedoms."

"I wasn't even allowed time to say goodbye to my friends, I was just told to pack. I was given one last night with my family."

"The moment I boarded the flight I was thinking, 'This is an enemy state'. But then, placing the bomb, I was nervous, anxious, scared of being caught. I had a brief moment thinking that all the people in this plane will die, but I was frightened to even have such feelings. I wasn’t supposed to have such feelings. I was trained only to take orders like a robot. I tried to get rid of the feelings by thinking that for the sake of reunification these people had to be sacrificed. In North Korea, you can’t have these doubts, because if you do, it means your ideology has been corrupted and you’ll be executed or sent to a prison camp."

"Can my sins be pardoned? They probably won't be."

"North Korea is in a desperate situation. Discontent with Kim Jong-un is so high; he has to put a lid on it. The only thing he has is nuclear weapons. That's why he has created this sense of war, to try to rally the population. He's doing business with his nuclear weapons."

"When I confessed, I did so reluctantly. I thought my family in North Korea would be in danger; it was a big decision to confess. But I began to realise it would be the right thing to do for the victims, for them to be able to understand the truth."

"But to Stern at that moment it wasn't a hand grenade at all but a no longer distant cloud high above the Temple of the Moon, a driftin memory in the desert of dim pillars and fountains and waterways, mysterious places where myrrh grew, the ruins of his youth. Blinding light then in the mirror behind the bar, sudden death merging the stars and windstorms of his life with darkness in the failure of his seeking, bright blinding light in the night sky at last and Stern's once vast vision of a homeland for all the peoples of his heritage gone as if he had never lived, shattered as if he had never suffered, his futile devotion ended on a clear Cairo night during the uncertain campaigns of 1942 when the eternal disguise he wore to his last clandestine meeting, his face, was ripped way and thrown against a mirror in the half-light of an Arab bar, there to stare at a now immobile landscape fixed to witness his death forever."

"Now I think you'll both agree that through my various illicit enterprises," Cairo Martyr said, "I control the Moslem Quarter in this city." "The mummy dust king is about to strike," muttered O'Sullivan Beare. But at the same time he knew the claim was true, just as was his own secret control over the Christian Quarter and Munk Szondi's over the Jewish Quarter, religious symbols and trading in futures being just as essential to Jerusalem as mummy dust. "Now then, that's my bet. Control of the Moslem Quarter. I'm putting the Moslem Quarter on the table. If either of you wins, which you won't, it belongs to you. But first you have to match my bet. No openers. The real thing."

"Why is it the Mongols of this world always tell us they're defending us against the Mongols?"

"The Great Jerusalem Poker Game for secret control of the city, the ruin of so many adventurers in the period between the two world wars, continued for twelve years before it finally spent itself. During that time thousands of gamblers from around the world lost fortunes trying to win the Holy City, but in the end there were only three men at the table, the same three who had been there in the beginning."

"A strongly antiagency ambassador can make problems for the CIA chief of station."

"The men who control the CIA are of an older, conservative generation which has kept the agency fifteen or twenty years behind the progress of the nation at large."

"Case officers most fear the US ambassador and his staff, then restrictive headquarters cables, then curious gossipy neighbours in the local community, as potential threats to the operation. Next would come the local police, then the press. Last of all is the KGB."

"I once watched an angry Zairian official very nearly strip and search the person of a CIA GS 17 who had forgotten to speak politely"

"Case officers are subject to the same embarassments any tourist suffers-snarled schedules, lost passports, lost money and luggage, and getting off the plane at the wrong destination"

"The KGB is by far the world's largest, the Israeli probably the best, and the Iranian and the South Korean the deadliest."

"Kissinger was, as always, preoccupied with other matters of state and his rather complicated social life."

"The CIA maintains prepackaged stocks of foreign weapons for instant shipment anywhere in the world."

"Customs and immigrations officials are trained to detect the unusual. In some countries they are especially alert to CIA officers"

"Smiley was not opposed to social distinctions but he liked to make his own."

"Was she really so angry when Stella refused to take part in the rat race of gentility?"

"I thought it would be valuable to record the events—even if they did not take place."

"Obscurity was his nature, as well as his profession. The byways of espionage are not populated by the brash and colourful adventurers of fiction. A man who, like Smiley, has lived and worked for years among his country’s enemies learns only one prayer: that he may never, never be noticed. Assimilation is his highest aim, he learns to love the crowds who pass him in the street without a glance; he clings to them for his anonymity and his safety."

"It was a peculiarity of Smiley’s character that throughout the whole of his clandestine work he had never managed to reconcile the means to the end. A stringent critic of his own motives, he had discovered after long observation that he tended to be less a creature of intellect than his tastes and habits might suggest; once in the war he had been described by his superiors as possessing the cunning of Satan and the conscience of a virgin, which seemed to him not wholly unjust."

"He hated the Press as he hated advertising and television, he hated mass-media, the relentless persuasion of the twentieth century. Everything he admired or loved had been the product of intense individualism."

"Why was London the only capital in the world that lost its personality at night? Smiley, as he pulled his coat more closely about him, could think of nowhere, from Los Angeles to Berne, which so readily gave up its daily struggle for identity."

"“These small, out-of-the-way villages are pretty strange places,” he concluded. “Often only three or four families, all so inbred you can no more sort them out than a barnful of cats. That’s where your village idiots come from. They call it the Devil’s Mark. I call it incest.”"

"“Look,” he said. “We talk academic here, you know, wear academic dress and hold high table dinners in the Common Room; we have long graces in Latin that none of us can translate. We go to the Abbey and the wives sit in the hencoop in their awful hats. But it’s a charade. It means nothing."

"I shall have to wear the special grin I reserve for bearing really disastrous tidings."

"Carne isn’t a school. It’s a sanatorium for intellectual lepers. The symptoms began when we came down from University; a gradual putrefaction of our intellectual extremities. From day to day our minds die, our spirits atrophy and rot. We watch the process in one another, hoping to forget it in ourselves."

"But so many men learnt strength during the war, learnt terrible things, and put aside their knowledge with a shudder when it ended."

"Can’t you see it’s the same? The same guns, the same children dying in the streets? Only the dream has changed, the blood is the same colour."

"What the hell do you think spies are? Model philosophers measuring everything they do against the word of God or Karl Marx? They’re not. They’re just a bunch of seedy, squalid bastards like me, little men, drunkards, queers, henpecked husbands, civil servants, playing cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten little lives. Do you think they sit like monks in a cell, balancing right against wrong? (from a clip from the film adaptation of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, starring Richard Burton as Alec Leamas, an alcoholic cynical British spy)"

"Every writer wants to be believed. But every writer knows he is spurious; every fiction writer would rather be credible than authentic."

"Sometimes she thought Alec was right—you believed in things because you needed to; what you believed in had no value of its own, no function."

"I am afraid that as a nation we tend to over-organise. Abroad that passes for efficiency."

"The English! The rich have eaten your future and your poor have given them the food—that’s what’s happened to the English."

"“And this is a prison for spies?” Liz persisted. “It is a prison for those who fail to recognize Socialist reality; for those who think they have the right to err; for those who slow down the march. Traitors,” she concluded briefly. “But what have they done?” “We cannot build communism without doing away with individualism. You cannot plan a great building if some swine builds his sty on your site.”"

"“Then the people in this prison are intellectuals?” The woman smiled. “Yes,” she said, “they are reactionaries who call themselves progressive: they defend the individual against the state. Do you know what Khrushchev said about the counter-revolution in Hungary?” Liz shook her head. She must show interest, she must make the woman talk. “He said it would never have happened if a couple of writers had been shot in time.”"

"It was no use relating reports to probability when there was no quantum of knowledge from which to start."