Friday, October 30, 2015

Excerpts from Mary Bancroft's "Autobiography of a Spy"

Excerpts from Bancroft, Mary. “Autobiography of a Spy” (William Morrow & Co., 1983) 

“Towards the end of the summer of 1930 I went up to spend a few days with Ruth Paine at her family’s summer home on Naushon Island off the coast of Massachusetts.” – p. 55

“…In the summer of 1933…I…went abroad with Ruth Paine…” (and met Jean Rufenacht) – p. 59

On homosexuals – “A colleague of my generation had told me how essential it was for us to tap this homosexual underground by having, as he put it, ‘Washington send us a guy with a pretty behind,’” 
– p. 132-133

On useful – “Useful was a word that was constantly on (Allen Dulles’) his lips. He judged everyone and everything by the yardstick of its usefulness in the war effort…” – p. 134

The Mosaic -  “It may seem to those nourished on the exploits of James Bond, the spy novels of Jean Le Carre and Graham Greene, to say nothing of the factual postwar memoirs of feats of derring-do, that the journalist activities….have little to do with intelligence work. But intelligence is a mosaic. General material about background and people’s interrelationships can be both illuminating and important. Quite often missing pieces of the mosaic emerge that make a previously incomprehensible picture unexpectedly clear.” – p. 150


“Remember that facts are not the truth. They only indicate where the truth may lie!” – C. W. Barron  - p. 292 

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