One of the most striking aspects of the countries’ intelligence services was just how little each side knew about the other.

The instincts of the spy and the thief are not so different: both trade in stolen goods, on similar principles. The value of information depends on the buyer’s hunger, but it is a seller’s market.

It is far easier, under interrogation, to tell part of the truth than to sustain a latticework of pure lies.

A dead enemy spy can do no more harm, but neither can he (or she) do any good.

General Archibald Wavell, the imaginative commander of British forces in North Africa, realized that Maskelyne’s talents might be applied to the battlefield. Maskelyne was sent to the Western Desert, where he assembled “the Magic Gang,” possibly the most eccentric military unit ever formed, whose members included an analytical chemist, a

Find out what the Germans desire, and we will know what they lack.

Each credited the other with extreme efficiency and advanced preparations, and both were wrong.

ALL WARS—BUT this war in particular—tend to be seen in monochrome: good and evil, winner and loser, champion and coward, loyalist and traitor. For most people, the reality of war is not like that, but rather a monotonous gray of discomforts and compromises, with occasional flashes of violent color. War is too messy to produce easy heroes and

He traveled a little, drank a lot, and took no physical exercise of any kind (he rode a bicycle only once in his life, but declared the experience “uncomfortable”16 and never repeated it).