on dissembling

"No one can flatter you more than when they hate you."
- A John le Carré character

espionage

Alec Leamas

What the hell do you think spies are? Moral philosophers measuring everything they do against the word of God or Karl Marx? They're not! They're just a bunch of seedy, squalid bastards like me: little men, drunkards, queers, hen-pecked husbands, civil servants playing cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten little lives. Do you think they sit like monks in a cell, balancing right against wrong?

From the 1965 screenplay adaptation of John Le Carré's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.