High profile cases such as the chemical poisonings of Alexander Litvinenko and Sergei Skripal, the unmasking of Anna Chapman as a Russian agent and the whistleblowing activities of Edward Snowden have kept spycraft in the headlines in the twenty-first century. But the heady days of wartime resistance and Cold War espionage are the true Golden Age of spying, and the thirty (well, technically thirty one) individuals featured in this chronological list all lived thrilling lives of intrigue, deception and almost unimaginable danger. From the glamour of Mata Hari to the greed of Aldrich Ames, and from the resilience of Odette Sansom to the ruthlessness of Markus Wolf, here is a selection of the twentieth century’s most fascinating spies and spymasters.
YEVNO AZEF (1869-1918)
By the turn of the twentieth century, Yevno Azef had risen through the ranks of a number of high profile European revolutionary organisations, taking charge of the combat wing of the Socialist Revolutionary Party in 1903. But at the height of the age of anarchism and assassination, Russia’s premier terrorist was also the Okrahna’s leading informant. Maintaining a suspiciously high profile at a time when other revolutionaries had gone to ground, Azef was unmasked in a court of honour presided over by veteran revolutionaries in 1909 and fled to Germany where he died nine years later.
SIDNEY REILLY (c. 1873-1925)
With his origins shrouded in secrecy, Reilly was the quintessential amoral, reckless adventurer and one of the many candidates for the inspiration for James Bond. Amongst the myriad exploits attributed to him are the theft of Russian naval plans during the Russo-Japanese war and the switching of a groundbreaking magneto from a German air show plane. However, it was his cloak and dagger work to undermine the Bolshevik government, and an audacious plot to assassinate Lenin, that assured him a place in espionage folklore.
MATA HARI (1876-1917)
Her name may be a byword for the female spy as glamorous seductress but, in truth, the Dutch exotic dancer Mata Hari was a woefully inept spy. Recruited by the French to seduce the German Crown Prince during World War I in the hope he would reveal crucial military secrets, Hari clumsily attempted to play both sides by also offering her services to the Germans. When French suspicions were aroused, she was caught in an elaborate sting operation and, an easy scapegoat for French losses in the field, was executed by firing squad in 1917.
FRITZ JOUBERT DUQUESNE (1877-1956)
As a spy for Germany during both World Wars (not to mention a constant thorn in the side of the British in the Second Boer War), Duquesne adopted multiple identities and aliases, and managed to evade justice a staggering amount of times in the most dramatic ways imaginable. It has been claimed he was responsible for responsible for the death of Lord Kitchener by signaling to the German submarine that sank the HMS Hampshire. His activities were finally curtailed when his 32 man spy ring was exposed by the FBI in 1941, seeing the charismatic con-man spend the next fifteen years behind bars.
WILLIAM J. DONOVAN (1883-1959)
Overcoming the hostility of highly placed individuals to the creation of an intelligence gathering department, Wild Bill Donovan was the first head of the American Office of Strategic Services. A hard-headed, courageous man, he launched major espionage operations in Europe and parts of Asia during the Second World War, recruited everyone from John Ford to Julia Child to his vast networks of agents and ensured that Allied forces had exceptional intelligence ahead of the D-Day landings - in which he personally took part.
WILHELM CANARIS (1887-1945)
After witnessing Nazi atrocities in Poland, the head of the Abwehr began playing a very dangerous and heroic double game. Passing Nazi plans to the British and intervening to save hundreds of Dutch Jews from the gas chambers, Canaris liaised with MI6 to negotiate an end to the war were Hitler removed. Sadly, he became implicated in the July 20th plot to assassinate the Fuhrer and was hanged at Flossenburg concentration camp just weeks before the end of the war.
RICHARD SORGE (1895-1944)
Hard-drinking, narcissistic and one of the most accomplished spymasters of the twentieth century, German Sorge was Stalin’s man in Japan for eleven years from 1933. Using both his deep cover as a pro-Nazi journalist and his tightly controlled network of agents to disprove suspicions of a Japanese invasion of the Soviet Union, Sorge also obtained vital intelligence proving that Nazi Germany was planning just such an operation. Unfortunately, his warnings went unheeded, Operation Barbarossa went ahead and Sorge was exposed and hanged by the Japanese in 1944.
WILLIAM STEPHENSON (1897-1989)
Much admired by Ian Fleming, Stephenson was an unflappable Canadian spymaster known by the code name Intrepid, whose unerring skill for propaganda and media manipulation and close working relationship with William Donovan ensured American support for the British war effort. A superb spotter of talent, he recruited legions of agents and also established highly influential training schools for spies and code breakers.
ALGER HISS (1904-1996)
The case of Alger Hiss still provokes heated reaction to this day; could the handsome, all-American boy with decades of service to the US state department really be a Communist spy? That was the accusation levelled by Time journalist Whittaker Chambers before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1948. With the case hinging on the use of a specific typewriter which may have been used to transcribe government documents passed to the Russians, Hiss was convicted and served three years of a five year sentence. He maintained his innocence till his dying day.
VIRGINIA HALL (1906-1982)
Not only did American SOE agent Virginia Hall maintain a sophisticated spy network deep in the heart of Occupied France, help to break a dozen operatives out of the Mauzac prison, disguise herself as a peasant woman to arrange safe houses, access to escape lines to downed airmen and distribution of wireless equipment, flee across the Pyrenees in two days and equip and lead numerous ‘maquis’ resistance units in the run-up to D-Day - she did it all with a prosthetic leg which she wryly christened Cuthbert. Forget Mata Hari; the Limping Lady was the real deal.
URSULA KUCZYNSKI (1907-2000)
A fanatical Communist and gifted radio operator who proved equally adept at spying on Nazi Germany and post-war Britain, Kuczynski, aka Agent Sonja, spent the majority of the Second World War sending coded messages to the Soviet Union from a succession of quaint villages in the Oxfordshire countryside. Her proximity to both the Atomic Research Centre and British intelligence services at Blenheim enabled her to become the handler of atomic spy Klaus Fuchs until his capture in 1949, whereupon she fled to East Berlin and a middle age writing children’s books.
VERA ATKINS (1908-2000)
Recruited by spymaster supreme William Stephenson, the formidable Vera Atkins was engaged on a number of daring missions before the outbreak of World War II but is best known as Britain’s first unofficial spymistress, after becoming SOE section head Maurice Buckmaster’s trusted assistant. Assuming responsibility for the SOE’s female agents in Occupied France, Atkins proved herself a model of efficiency and quick-wittedness, as well as great loyalty and compassion when she conducted a post-war odyssey to determine the fates of her agents who remained unaccounted for.
KRYSTYNA SKARBEK (1908-1952)
The longest serving of all SOE’s female wartime agents, Krystyna Skarbek was a passionate Polish patriot with a glamorous reputation for both sexual and undercover adventure. Travelling between Poland and Hungary, she was able to provide priceless information about Nazi activities in occupied territories, but it is the tales of derring-do - such as her securing the release of two condemned agents hours before their execution and her feigning of the symptoms of tuberculosis to ensure her own release from prison - that made her reputation. Tragically, she was murdered in a London hotel room by a spurned lover in 1952.
KLAUS FUCHS (1911-1988)
Despite the fact that he was German, Fuchs’ genius for theoretical physics ensured he was granted British citizenship at the height of World War II to enable him to work on the British atomic bomb research project, euphemistically called Tube Alloys. Yet during his top secret work both in Britain and as part of the American Manhattan project from 1943, Fuchs was passing integral information to the Soviet atomic bomb project. After GCHQ cryptographers discovered incontrovertible proof of his guilt, Fuchs confessed to being a Communist spy in 1950 and was sentenced to fourteen years in jail. He was released in 1959 and promptly emigrated to the Soviet Union.
MELITA NORWOOD (1912-2005)
Whilst Karl Fuchs was busily betraying his adoptive country from inside the British atomic bomb project, Melita Norwood was smuggling out key documentation on the Tube Alloys programme to the Russians as well. Her position as secretary to G.L. Bailey, who sat on an advisory committee to the project, gave her free access to sensitive information which helped to hugely speed up the Soviet atomic effort. Named as a spy by KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin in 1999, the 87 year old Norwood was sensationally unmasked in the small Kent town she had lived in quietly since 1937.
KIM PHILBY (1912-1988)
Blunt. Burgess. Maclean. Philby. The names of the Cambridge Spies live long in infamy and Kim Philby was the most notorious - and effective - of the quartet of double agents. Inveigling himself into positions of immense power within the British secret service, Philby was able not only to provide the Soviets with premium intelligence but also quash any potential threats to other traitors. His risky ploy to aid the flight of Burgess and Maclean to Moscow fatally compromised his position and he resigned from MI6 in 1951. But it was not until 1962 that Philby’s treachery was finally exposed, and he defected the following year. He died in Moscow in 1988.
DUSAN POPOV (1912-1981)
Another name to add to the list of potential inspirations for 007, Popov was a flamboyant, promiscuous Serbian triple agent - code name Tricycle - who spied for the Abwehr, MI6 and the Yugoslav security service during World War II. An avowed anti-Nazi, he passed himself off as a double agent for the Abwehr in order to feed them crucial misinformation - chief among which was the false location of Calais as the location of the D Day landings. His Abwehr contacts also gave him advance knowledge of the Japanese attack on Pear Harbor but his warnings were disastrously overlooked by J Edgar Hoover, who doubted Popov’s loyalty. Popov’s hard-living finally caught up with him and he died in 1981, aged 69.
ODETTE SANSOM (1912-1995)
Recruited by SOE by pure chance after she sent a communication to the wrong government department, the sparky and enthusiastic Odette Sansom wound up in Occupied Cannes with a rapidly disintegrating network called SPINDLE headed up by Peter Churchill. After another agent was tricked into revealing her identity and whereabouts, she and Churchill were captured by the Abwehr. Sansom remained resolute under torture and solitary confinement in Fresnes prison before being condemned to death and moved to Ravensbruck concentration camp, where she nearly died of scurvy and tuberculosis. In 1945 the camp commander handed her over to the British in exchange for his own life. She married Peter Churchill in 1947.
EDDIE CHAPMAN (1914-1997)
A career criminal dubbed Agent Zigzag due to his unpredictability and shifting loyalties, Chapman’s espionage adventure began when he volunteered his services to the Abwehr after the Nazi occupation of Jersey (where he was holed up). Sent back to England with orders to wreck the de Havilland aircraft factory, he surrendered to the British police immediately after a disastrous parachute drop and spent the rest of the war as a British double agent. His most noteworthy escapade was feeding the Nazis misinformation about the accuracy of the V2 rocket programme which saved countless lives. After the war he was pardoned for his past crimes but soon slipped back into his old lawbreaking ways.
JULIUS & ETHEL ROSENBERG (1918-1953/ 1915-1953)
Implicated indirectly by Karl Fuchs’s confession, Julius Rosenberg, an engineer-inspector at the radar and electronics laboratory at Fort Monmouth, and his wife Ethel were put on trial for passing information to the Soviet Union in 1951. Amidst claims that the evidence against them was at best flimsy and at worst manufactured, they were sentenced to death and executed in the electric chair at Sing Sing in June 1953; the only two American civilians to be executed for espionage related reasons during the entire Cold War. After the fall of Communism declassified documents did indeed prove that Julius had provided the USSR with significant intelligence and recruited a number of others into a Soviet spy ring.
JAMES JESUS ANGLETON (1917-1987)
Alert and perceptive operator or dangerous paranoid who ran the Central Intelligence Agency into the ground? As head of CIA counterintelligence for two decades, Angleton oversaw countless operations both foreign and domestic but his career is inextricably entangled with two Soviet defectors - Anatoliy Golitsyn and Yuri Nosenko - whose allegiances were called into question multiple times, and the bitter betrayal of Kim Philby. Subjecting the CIA to ever more obsessive hunts for ‘moles’ and double agents, Angleton became a figure of vitriol for many who considered him fuelled by personal vendettas. Yet subsequent infiltration of the CIA in decades to come appears to have at least partially vindicated his profound suspicion.
R.N. KAO (1918-2002)
The self-proclaimed ‘philosopher-spymaster’ took his job as head of India’s Research and Analysis Wing (which he founded in 1968) extremely seriously, only dropping his guard enough to be photographed twice in his lifetime. His primary achievement was covertly arming and training Bengali insurgents in the run up to the 1971 Indo-Pakistani war which resulted in East Pakistan breaking away to become Bangladesh and removing a major geopolitical threat along India’s Eastern border. Kao pulled a similar trick when the state of Sikkim merged into India in 1975, as well as reportedly arming Tamil guerrillas during the 1980s.
LARRY WU-TAI CHIN (1922-1986)
Immersed in the heart of America’s most important institutions since 1944, Larry Wu-tai Chin was the most damaging Chinese Communist mole in the postwar West. Acting as a translator during the Korean War, Chin misinformed the US about statements made by captured North Korean soldiers costing the lives of numerous American troops. As a prized Chinese linguist, Chin joined the CIA after the Korean War where he had access to vast amounts of highly sensitive information; most notably about President Nixon’s overtures of friendship towards China as a bulwark against the Soviet Union. Exposed by a Chinese defector, Chin killed himself in his jail cell on the day of his sentencing in 1986.
GEORGE BLAKE (1922-2020)
Converting to Communism whilst a prisoner of war in North Korea, George Blake rivalled the Cambridge Spies as one of the most notorious - and damaging - postwar British traitors. Posted by MI6 to Berlin to recruit Soviet officers as double agents, Blake betrayed at least forty British agents to the KGB as well as plans to tap the Soviet military’s telephone lines via a tunnel under East Berlin. Exposed as a Soviet mole by Polish defector Michael Goleniewski, Blake was sentenced to 42 years in prison but sensationally broke out of Wormwood Scrubs in 1966 and defected to the Soviet Union where he lived to the grand old age of 98.
MARKUS WOLF (1923-2006)
As head of foreign intelligence for the East German Stasi for 34 years, Markus Wolf was one of the most influential - and elusive- spymasters of the Cold War. A master manipulator, he pioneered the concept of ‘Romeo agents;’ handsome male spies sent to form long term relationships with prominent women in the West German government apparatus, and he also pulled off the coup of inveigling a mole as West German Chancellor Willy Brandt’s trusted advisor - which led directly to Brandt’s resignation. After reunification, Wolf was convicted of treason but had the sentence overturned due to the fact that East Germany was a separate country at the time of his crimes.
ELI COHEN (1924-1965)
Posing as a Muslim businessman, Egyptian Jew Eli Cohen spied on Syrian military strategy and defences for Israel in the first half of the 1960s. Getting important officials drunk at debauched parties, he passed on key plans to Mossad until he was caught red-handed transmitting coded messages from his Damascus apartment and hanged in 1965. Two years later, Israel won a swift victory in the Six Day War using invaluable intelligence Cohen had relayed about the security of the crucial Golan Heights, on the border between Israel and Syria.
ADOLF TOLKACHEV (1927-1986)
Sentiment is not a trait often associated with the CIA but their treatment of Soviet engineer Adolf Tolkachev appears to have been uniquely protective and indulgent. The information that he passed to the Americans was certainly of vital importance; not for nothing was Tolkachev known as the Billion Dollar Spy. A principled anti-Communist who requested necessities for his son rather than cash, he was allowed face to face meetings with American agents (rather than dead drops) and regular medical checkups. Betrayed by at least two US traitors, Tolkachev was arrested by the KGB and executed in 1986; his photograph hangs in CIA headquarters at Langley.
OLEG GORDIEVSKY (1938- )
Subject of one of the most sensational rescue missions in espionage history, Oleg Gordievsky was Britain’s most valuable double agent of the postwar period. Assigned to the Soviet embassy in London in 1982, Gordievsky was ideally placed to communicate to MI6 the mood in the Kremlin at any given time. Amongst his greatest successes were revealing how petrified the Soviets were of an impending NATO nuclear strike and paving the way for the successful talks between Mikhail Gorbachev and Margaret Thatcher that greatly contributed to the thawing of the Cold War. By 1985, Gordievsky had been recalled to Moscow having had his cover fatally compromised. In an operation worthy of 007, the spy was smuggled out of the Soviet Union under the noses of the KGB and made it safely to Britain via Norway. His death sentence in absentia has never been revoked.
ALDRICH AMES (1941- )
In the 1980s the US was haemorrhaging intelligence to the Soviet Union due chiefly to two incredibly productive moles. At the same time as Robert Hanssen was leaking vast amounts of information from the FBI, Aldrich Ames was doing the same from within the CIA. Motivated purely by money, counterintelligence officer Ames first sold information to the Soviet Union to pay off debts incurred by a costly divorce but then became addicted to the extravagant lifestyle his treachery afforded him. Implicated in the exposure of both Adolf Tolkachev and Oleg Gordievsky, Ames was eventually rumbled when his Colombian wife’s parents standard of living in Bogotá rose dramatically. Ames is currently serving a life sentence in an Indiana federal correctional institution.
JONATHAN POLLARD (1954- )
Jonathan Pollard is unique in this list in that he was exposed as a double agent working for an ally of his native country. In 1984, Pollard approached a veteran of the Israeli Air Force to offer his services passing on US intelligence related to Israel. Pollard claimed that crucial information was being withheld from Israel and that he was the man to provide it. After Pollard had removed one too many files without the relevant clearance or authorisation, he was questioned and confessed to spying for Israel. It has also been alleged that Pollard attempted to sell his services to South Africa, Pakistan and Australia. After serving 30 years in jail, Pollard was released in 2015 and emigrated to Israel five years later.
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