American - Journalist | May 26, 1950 -
A world in which there are no secrets that can be protected at all is going to be a pretty dangerous world.
David Ignatius
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Machiavelli did believe that it was better to appear to be good than to be good. If you're good, you're just too vulnerable, but if you appear to be good, you get all the benefits plus you can be sneaky and, when necessary, stab someone in the back.
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If you walk into the front hallway of the CIA, you will see, on your left, a statue of William 'Wild Bill' Donovan. Bill Donovan was the person who created the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, which was America's spy agency during World War II and then kind of morphed into what's now the CIA.
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The truth is, as you know, people like us look at what's happening in the world, and then we project it forward. We think, 'If I know A and B, then I've got to know that C and D are coming,' and that's kind of the way it's been with my fiction.
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The world has changed, the CIA is having to change, and again, the challenge for someone like me as a spy novelist is to write realistically about where they're actually going.
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Sometimes James Bond movies drive me crazy. They're fun to watch, but they don't have anything to do at all with what intelligence officers really do.
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I began writing fiction because it was the only way to tell all the intricacies of a real-life spy story.
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This experience of getting so lost in my writing that I lose track of time, or of anything outside the imagined world, is a release for me.
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Empty political space will be filled by extremists unless the United States and its allies build strong local forces that can suppress terrorist groups and warlords both. When the U.S. creates such local forces, it must be persistent. If it withdraws from these efforts, as America did in Iraq in 2011, it invites mayhem.
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Intelligence services exist to do things that are illegal abroad. They exist to tell lies.
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The ISI is above all a paramilitary organization. It doesn't do all that much collection of intelligence. It's not a very good spy agency, but it's good at running covert action.
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We have a complicated intelligence relationship with France. We have a complicated intelligence relationship with other - with other allies.
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