Agents of disruption, subversion, sabotage and disinformation tunnelers and smugglers, listeners and forgers, trainers and recruiters and talent spotters and couriers and watchers and seducers, assassins and balloonists, lip readers and disguise artists.

You have no idea how humiliating it was, as a boy, to suddenly have all your clothes, your toys, snatched by the bailiff. I mean we were a middle-class family, it's not as if it was happening up and down the street. It made me ashamed, I felt dirty.

Ideologies have no heart of their own. They're the whores and angels of our striving selves.

It's easy to forget what intelligence consists of: luck and speculation. Here and there a windfall, here and there a scoop.

History keeps her secrets longer than most of us. But she has one secret that I will reveal to you tonight in the greatest confidence. Sometimes there are no winners at all. And sometimes nobody needs to lose.

...also took for granted that secret services were the only real measure of a nations political health, the only real expression of its subconscious.

Without a pen in my hand I can't think.