In fact, Kim Philby, who spied for the Soviets during the hottest period of the Cold War, observed in his 1968 book, My Silent War, that secret documents, though glamorous, are frequently a snare and a delusion.
Quote, “Is it a first draft, a second draft or the finished memorandum? Was it written by an official of standing, or some dogsbody with a bright idea? Even if it is unmistakably a direct instruction to the United States Ambassador from the Secretary of State dated last Tuesday, is it still valid today? In short, documentary intelligence, to be really valuable, must come as a steady stream, embellished with an awful lot of explanatory annotation.”
Philby concluded, “An hour’s serious discussion with a trustworthy informant is often more valuable than any number of original documents.”
— Spoken by Brooke Gladstone of WNYC’s “On The Media” on National Public Radio, Dec. 3, 2010.
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