Covert Affairs Quotes

There's only one woman I want.

He'd made a decision today that he wasn't letting her push him out of his life again.

If you want to stop, tell me now," he said as he ripped open a condom wrapper. "Stop and I kill you.

The attraction between them was incendiary, yet somehow twelve years ago she'd walked away from as if he meant nothing.

Is it weird that I think it's hot when you boss me around?" Her gaze snapped up to his, her blue eyes darkening with unmistakable hunger.... "I can take bossing you around to a whole other level if you'd like," she murmured.

Carl Franzoni perhaps summed it up best when he declared rather bluntly that, “the Byrds’ records were manufactured.” The first album in particular was an entirely engineered affair created by taking a collection of songs by outside songwriters and having them performed by a group of nameless studio musicians (for the record, the actual musicians were Glen Campbell on guitar, Hal Blaine on drums, Larry Knechtel on bass, Leon Russell on electric piano, and Jerry Cole on rhythm guitar), after which the band’s trademark vocal harmonies, entirely a studio creation, were added to the mix. As would be expected, the Byrds’ live performances, according to Barney Hoskyns’ Waiting for the Sun, “weren’t terribly good.” But that didn’t matter much; the band got a lot of assistance from the media, with Time being among the first to champion the new band. And they also got a tremendous assist from Vito and the Freaks and from the Young Turks, as previously discussed.

She stood there, rooted to the spot, until he murmured, “Relax, this is all part of our cover.” His words were like ice water right in the face. He’d just kissed her as part of their cover. That brief brush over her lips and she didn’t want to relax, she wanted to take all his clothes off. Peel that charcoal gray suit off him and kiss every inch of his ripped, naked body. Instead of indulging in that insanity and getting arrested for public indecency—and tearing open old wounds—she took a small step back. Just like that, she could breathe again.

For thousands of years a debate has been going on in the shadowy background of human affairs. The issue to be resolved: “What should we say about being alive?” Overwhelmingly, people have said, “Being alive is all right.” More thoughtful persons have added, “Especially when you consider the alternative,” disclosing a jocularity as puzzling as it is macabre, since the alternative is here implied to be both disagreeable and, upon consideration, capable of making being alive seem more agreeable than it alternatively would, as if the alternative were only a possibility that may or may not come to pass, like getting the flu, rather than a looming inevitability. And yet this covertly portentous remark is perfectly well tolerated by anyone who says that being alive is all right. These individuals stand on one side of the debate. On the other side is an imperceptible minority of disputants. Their response to the question of what we should say about being alive will be neither positive nor equivocal. They may even fulminate about how objectionable it is to be alive, or spout off that to be alive is to inhabit a nightmare without hope of awakening to a natural world, to have our bodies embedded neck-deep in a quagmire of dread, to live as shut-ins in a house of horrors from which nobody gets out alive, and so on. Now, there are really no incisive answers as to why anyone thinks or feels one way and not another. The most we can say is that the first group of people is composed of optimists, although they may not think of themselves as such, while the contending group, that imperceptible minority, is composed of pessimists.

First, accord with what he likes in order to accommodate his wishes. He will eventually grow arrogant and invariably mount some perverse affair. If you can appear to follow along, you will certainly be able to eliminate him. "Second, become familiar with those he loves in order to fragment his awesomeness. When men have two different inclinations, their loyalty invariably declines. When his court no longer has any loyal ministers, the state altars will inevitably be endangered. "Third, covertly bribe his assistants, fostering a deep relationship with them. While they will bodily stand in his court, their emotions will be directed outside it. The state will certainly suffer harm. "Fourth, assist him in his licentiousness and indulgence in music in order to dissipate his will. Make him generous gifts of pearls and jade, and ply him with beautiful women. Speak deferentially, listen respectfully, follow his commands, and accord with him in everything. He will never imagine you might be in conflict with him. Our treacherous measures will then be settled.

The reader who is only superficially familiar with Caribbean affairs may find the materials of this volume strange. The extent to which violence, both open and covert, is a constant factor in the life of the region may cause surprise. The incongruous and rather unreal quality of many events, whether fanciful or farcical in appearance, may also prove unexpected. If the reader is inclined to doubt the authenticity of certain events, viewing them as too implausible to be true, he may be assured that many things even more strange, which are possibly and even probably true, have been omitted because their accuracy could not be satisfactorily established. Nothing is included here that does not come from sources considered sound. Nothing is included that has not been subjected to every possible verification.

Gibraltar Steamship Corporation never did any trading, and never owned or operated any ships, however it did operate a 50,000-watt, pirate radio station. Its president was Thomas Dudley Cabot, who in reality was the U.S. Department of State’s Director of the Office of International Security Affairs. In actual fact, the radio station, called Radio Swan, was a Central Intelligence Agency covert, black operation, known in intelligence circles as “Black Ops.” The station was in operation from 1960 to 1968. Pretending to be a normal radio station, it had commercial accounts including R. J. Reynolds, Philip Morris Tobacco, and Kleenex. It broadcast religiously-oriented programs, such as “The Radio Bible Class,” “The World Tomorrow” and a Christian program from the Dominican Republic, as well as others. Their news broadcasts were sponsored by the Cuban Freedom Committee, a part of Christianform, an anti-communist foundation. In May of 1960, the pirate radio station started transmitting Spanish language broadcasts to Cuba from Swan Island, or Islas del Cisne, in the western Caribbean Sea, near the coastline of Honduras. In 1961, Radio Swan became Radio America, with its headquarters in Miami.

Luckily for her, Lucia was not the only target of Donna Prassede’s beneficence, so these quarrels were infrequent. In addition to the rest of the servants, whose thoughts, to varying degrees, all required correction and guidance, in addition to all the other opportunities to lend these same services, out of the goodness of her heart, to the many toward whom she had no obligations—opportunities that she sought out if they did not volunteer themselves—she also had five daughters. None of them lived at home, but for all the worries they gave her, they might as well have. Three were nuns, and the other two were married. So of course Donna Prassede found herself with three convents and two households to supervise: a vast and complicated enterprise made even more arduous by the fact that the two husbands, with the backing of fathers, mothers, and siblings, and the three Mothers Superior, supported by other dignitaries and many nuns, refused to accept her oversight. It was war, or rather five separate wars: covert and courteous, to an extent, but still intense and without respite. On all five fronts, it took constant vigilance to evade her attentions, shut out her opinions, ignore her demands, and keep her in the dark about everything as much as possible. Not to mention the resistance and difficulties she encountered in managing the affairs of others with whom she had even less business. For everyone knows that people usually don’t know what’s good for them and have to be forced to accept it.

Indeed, quite sweeping disparagements of the claims of ‘‘conceptual authority’’ have invaded the academic humanities in recent years, to generally deleterious effect (we shall examine a case in point in 2,v). Within this strain of self-styled post-modernist critique, most appeals to ‘‘conceptual content’’ are dismissed as rigorist shams, representing scarcely more than polite variants upon schoolyard bullying. Run-of-the-mill appeals to ‘‘conceptual authority’’ tacitly masquerade prejudiced predilection in the form of falsely constructed universals which, in turn, covertly shelter the most oppressive codes of Western society. But such sweeping doubts, if rigorously implemented, would render daily life patently unworkable, for we steer our way through the humblest affairs by making conceptual evaluations as we go. In what alternative vocabulary, for example, might we appraise our teenager’s failings with respect to his calculus homeworks? Forced to chose between exaggerated mistrust and blind acceptance of every passing claim of conceptual authority (even those issuing from transparent charlatans), we should plainly select gullibility as the wiser course, for the naïve explorer who trusts her somewhat inadequate map generally fares better than the doubter who accepts nothing. We will have told the story of concepts wrongly if it doesn’t turn out to be one where our usual forms of conceptual evaluation emerge as appropriate and well founded most of the time. Of a milder, but allied, nature are the presumptions of the school of Thomas Kuhn, which contends that scientists under the unavoidable spell of different paradigms often ‘‘talk past one another’’ through their failure to share common conceptual resources, in a manner that renders scientific argumentation more a matter of brute conversion than discourse. We shall discuss these views later as well. Although their various generating origins can prove quite complex, most popular academic movements that promote radical conceptual debunking of these types draw deeply upon inadequate philosophies of ‘‘concepts and attributes.’’ Such doctrines often sin against the cardinal rule of philosophy: first, do no harm, for such self-appointed critics of ‘‘ideological tyranny’’ rarely prove paragons of intellectual toleration themselves.

In fact, the CIA used BCCI for various illegal covert operations, including funding the Mujahideen in Afghanistan (which would later morph into Al Qaeda), as well as the Contras in Nicaragua (which became part of the infamous Iran-Contra affair).510 BCCI also worked with Saddam Hussein, Manuel Noriega, the Medellin Cartel, and a long list of shady characters.

When very stressed or lonely, internalizers can start to exhibit attitudes and behaviors associated with externalizers. Occasionally, self-sacrificing internalizers can start acting out their distress by having affairs or superficial sexual relations. They feel a lot of shame and guilt about this and are very much afraid of being found out, But they are still attached to these actions, these affairs as a means of escape from an emotionally barren life. Engaging in an affair helps them to feel alive and special and it also offers the possibility of their needs for attention being met outside of their primary relationship. Internalizers first try by speaking to their partners about their unhappiness but if their partner does not listen or instead rejects these overtures, then internalizers may go out looking for someone else to save them which is a characteristic behavior of an externalizer

It took Fitzgerald three years of litigation to get to a place where he charged, tried, and convicted Libby of making false statements in a federal investigation, perjury, and obstruction of justice. Republican loyalists howled that he was persecuting Libby because prosecutors could never prove the underlying crime—the intentional leaking of a covert agent’s name with prior knowledge of its illegality. Of course, these were the same Republicans who passionately believed that President Bill Clinton’s lies under oath over an affair with an intern simply had to be pursued, because obstruction of justice and perjury strike at the core of our system. Meanwhile, Democrats, who six years earlier attacked the case against Bill Clinton as a silly lie about sex, had discovered in the Libby case that they cared deeply about obstruction of justice crimes—when the obstructers were Republicans.

attendance at the gala a hint that she was sympathetic to the West? Did she have her eye on the bigger art scenes of New York and LA? The agency couldn’t be sure, but they were sure of one thing: they’d never know if they didn’t ask. The job of “wooing Wu,” as one low-level Langley technician described it, fell naturally into the hands of Taiwan-based field agent David Parsons. Not only was Parsons a veteran of covert affairs, but he was also markedly handsome. And while the glamorous side of intelligence was often overplayed in espionage films, it certainly didn’t hurt when trying to build rapport and gather information. “Come on.” Parsons pushed the bowl toward her with a finger. Remember, it has to be her decision to leave. “I know you can do better than that.” “I guess I’m just a little too excited,” Mei confessed. His pulse quickened. Was that the green light he’d been looking for? They had already planned to return to his flat after dinner, but he needed to make sure he didn’t push too hard.

What can make this covert betrayal so much more dangerous than something like a lie or an affair is that we can’t point to the source of our pain—there’s no event, no obvious evidence of brokenness. It can feel crazy-making.