Spies during the war. The best spies
On June 19, 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed in the American Sing Sing prison on charges of transferring nuclear secrets to the USSR. About them and about other famous spies - in our selection.
(Total 12 photos)
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1. Ethel and Julius Rosenberg
In 1950, the infamous couple were charged by the FBI with passing nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union. Their trial received extensive media coverage and added fuel to the Cold War. Many had doubts whether the couple, especially Ethel, were really guilty, but despite this, the couple were subjected to capital punishment on June 19, 1953 in Sing Sing prison in New York.
2. Lavrenty Beria
Beria was the head of the NKVD under Stalin. He is responsible for several party "purges" and for the death of a huge number of people. In 1953, shortly after the Rosenbergs were executed in America, he was accused of collaborating with British intelligence and shot.
3. Elizabeth Bentley
In 1938, Bentley began spying on the Nazis in New York for the benefit of the Communist Party of the United States, and through it for the benefit of the Soviet Union. Later, she led two separate groups of scouts. In 1945, after a conflict with her Moscow leadership, she herself went to the FBI and "surrendered" more than 100 agents that made up her network.
4. Rudolf Abel
The famous illegal Abel operated in the US from 1947 to 1957, when he was exposed after the failure of his assistant, Reino Hayhanen. Abel (real name William Genrikhovich Fisher) and Hayhanen used hollow coins and other tricks to convey messages and information. The collapse came when one of these drilled coins with a ciphered message accidentally fell into the hands of a paperboy in Brooklyn. Abel was tried and sentenced to five years in prison, but in 1962 was exchanged for U2 pilot Gary Powers and an American student. After returning to the USSR, Abel was revered as a hero and awarded the Order of Lenin, the highest award of the Soviet Union.
5. Kim Philby
In 1941, Philby joined the British intelligence service, MI6, despite the fact that he had already been a Soviet intelligence officer since 1933. The British realized that he was playing a double game only in 1963. For twenty years in MI6, Philby managed to get high ranks and positions, and to transfer as much top-secret information as he could to where necessary. Philby managed to escape to the USSR, where he lived out the rest of his life in high esteem as a Hero of the Soviet Union. He died in 1988.
6. Anthony Blunt
A member of the infamous Cambridge Five (of which Kim Philby was a member), Blunt passed classified information to the Soviet Union during World War II while serving in MI5. Blunt secretly confessed to the British in 1964, and his collaboration with the USSR remained a state secret until 1979, when Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher publicly dismissed him and Queen Elizabeth II stripped him of his knighthood.
7.Morris and Lona Cohen
The husband and wife were born in the USA and became Soviet spies in the late 1930s. The center ordered them to freeze their activities after they threatened to fail. A few years later, they opened a second-hand bookshop in London under the pseudonyms Helen and Peter Kroger. The couple were arrested in 1961 for ties to the Portland Spy Ring group, and in 1969. released in exchange for Gerald Brook, a British citizen detained in the Soviet Union. Upon arrival in the USSR, the couple were awarded the title of Heroes of the Soviet Union, and participated in the training of new scouts.
8. Christopher Boyes
Boyce, the prototype of Robert Lindsey's famous novel The Falcon and the film of the same name, passed information to the Soviets through his friend Andrew Dalton Lee. Boyce was arrested in 1977 after Lee was tied up in front of the Soviet embassy in Mexico. After escaping from prison in 1980, Boyce turned to bank robbery and planned to flee to the Soviet Union. He was arrested again in 1981. Boyce was released on bail in 2003.
9. Nerve center
The picture shows the KGB building in Moscow. After the collapse of the Soviet system, the service was renamed the FSB. The headquarters of one of the departments, the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), is located in the Moscow district of Yasenevo.
10. Aldrich Ames
The former CIA counterintelligence agent received about $4.6 million from the Soviet Union for his services. After college, Ames went to work for the CIA. Soon he faced financial difficulties - a ruinous divorce and a second marriage, for which he did not have enough funds. To pay off his debts, he even considered robbing a bank, but found it easier to simply sell state secrets to the KGB. Before being taken by the gills in 1994, Ames had failed more than 100 CIA operations.
11. Robert Hanssen
In the picture - his photo in honor of the 20th anniversary of service in the counterintelligence of the FBI. Hanssen sold out to the Soviets in 1979 after only 3 years of service. He continued to pass on classified information even after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Hanssen was caught red-handed only in 2001, at a turnout in Virginia. As he was being taken to prison, he asked, “Why did it take you so long to catch me?”
On June 19, 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed in the American prison Sing Sing on charges of transferring nuclear secrets to the USSR.
About them and about other famous spies - in this collection ... 
Ethel and Julius Rosenberg
In 1950, the infamous couple were charged by the FBI with passing nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union. Their trial received extensive media coverage and added fuel to the Cold War.
Many had doubts about whether the spouses, especially Ethel, were really guilty, but despite this, the couple were subjected to capital punishment on June 19, 1953 in Sing Sing prison in New York. 
Elizabeth Bentley
In 1938, Bentley began spying on the Nazis in New York for the benefit of the Communist Party of the United States, and through it for the benefit of the Soviet Union.
Later, she led two separate groups of scouts. In 1945, after a conflict with her Moscow leadership, she herself went to the FBI and "surrendered" more than 100 agents that made up her network. 
Rudolf Abel
The famous illegal Abel operated in the US from 1947 to 1957, when he was exposed after the failure of his assistant, Reino Hayhanen. Abel (real name William Genrikhovich Fisher) and Hayhanen used hollow coins and other tricks to convey messages and information.
The collapse came when one of these drilled coins with a ciphered message accidentally fell into the hands of a paperboy in Brooklyn. Abel was tried and sentenced to five years in prison, but in 1962 was exchanged for U2 pilot Gary Powers and an American student.
After returning to the USSR, Abel was revered as a hero and awarded the Order of Lenin, the highest award of the Soviet Union. 
Kim Philby
In 1941, Philby joined the British intelligence service, MI6, despite the fact that he had already been a Soviet intelligence officer since 1933. The British realized that he was playing a double game only in 1963.
For twenty years in MI6, Philby managed to get high ranks and positions, and to transfer as much top-secret information as he could to the right place. Philby managed to escape to the USSR, where he lived out the rest of his life in high esteem as a Hero of the Soviet Union. He died in 1988. 
Anthony Blunt
A member of the infamous Cambridge Five (of which Kim Philby was a member), Blunt passed classified information to the Soviet Union during World War II while serving in MI5.
Blunt secretly confessed to the British in 1964, and his collaboration with the USSR remained a state secret until 1979, when Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher publicly dismissed him and Queen Elizabeth II stripped him of his knighthood. 
Morris and Lona Cohen
The husband and wife were born in the USA and became Soviet spies in the late 1930s. The center ordered them to freeze their activities after they threatened to fail. A few years later, they opened a second-hand bookshop in London under the pseudonyms Helen and Peter Kroger.
The couple were arrested in 1961 for ties to the Portland Spy Ring group, and in 1969. released in exchange for Gerald Brook, a British citizen detained in the Soviet Union. Upon arrival in the USSR, the couple were awarded the title of Heroes of the Soviet Union, and participated in the training of new scouts. 
Christopher Boyes
Boyce, the prototype of Robert Lindsey's famous novel The Falcon and the Snowman and the film of the same name, passed information to the Soviets through his friend Andrew Dalton Lee. Boyce was arrested in 1977 after Lee was tied up in front of the Soviet embassy in Mexico.
After escaping from prison in 1980, Boyce turned to bank robbery and planned to flee to the Soviet Union. He was arrested again in 1981. Boyce was released on bail in 2003. 
Aldrich Ames
The former CIA counterintelligence agent received about $4.6 million from the Soviet Union for his services. After college, Ames went to work for the CIA. Soon he faced financial difficulties - a ruinous divorce and a second marriage, for which he did not have enough funds.
To pay off his debts, he even considered robbing a bank, but found it easier to simply sell state secrets to the KGB. Before being taken by the gills in 1994, Ames had failed more than 100 CIA operations. 
Robert Hanssen
In the picture - his photo in honor of the 20th anniversary of service in the counterintelligence of the FBI. Hanssen began working for the USSR in 1979, after only 3 years of service. He continued to pass on classified information even after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Hanssen was caught red-handed only in 2001, at a turnout in Virginia. As he was being taken to prison, he asked, “Why did it take you so long to catch me?” 
The picture shows the KGB building in Moscow. After the collapse of the Soviet system, the service was renamed the FSB. The headquarters of one of the departments, the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), is located in the Moscow district of Yasenevo.
History is written by the victors, and therefore it is not customary for Soviet chroniclers to mention German spies who worked behind the lines in the Red Army. And there were such scouts, and even in the General Staff of the Red Army, as well as the famous Max network. After the end of the war, the Americans transferred them to their place, to share their experience with the CIA.
Indeed, it is hard to believe that the USSR managed to create an agent network in Germany and the countries occupied by it (the most famous is the Red Chapel), but the Germans did not. And if German intelligence officers during the Second World War are not written in Soviet-Russian histories, then the point is not only that it is not customary for the winner to confess his own miscalculations. In the case of German spies in the USSR, the situation is complicated by the fact that the head of the Foreign Armies - East department (in the German abbreviation FHO, it was he who was in charge of intelligence) Reinhard Galen prudently took care of preserving the most important documentation in order to surrender to the Americans at the very end of the war and offer them a "goods face".
His department dealt almost exclusively with the USSR, and in the conditions of the beginning of the Cold War, Gehlen's papers were of great value to the United States. Later, the general headed the intelligence of the FRG, and his archive remained in the United States (some copies were left to Gehlen). Having already retired, the general published his memoirs “Service. 1942-1971", which were published in Germany and the USA in 1971-72. Almost simultaneously with Gehlen's book, his biography was published in America, as well as the book of British intelligence officer Edward Spiro "Ghelen - Spy of the Century" (Spiro wrote under the pseudonym Edward Cookridge, he was a Greek by nationality, a representative of British intelligence in the Czech resistance during the war). Another book was written by American journalist Charles Whiting, who was suspected of working for the CIA, and was called Gehlen - German Spy Master. All of these books are based on the Gehlen archives, used with the permission of the CIA and the German intelligence BND. They contain some information about German spies in the Soviet rear.
(Gelena's personal card)
General Ernst Kestring, a Russian German born near Tula, was engaged in "field work" in Gehlen's German intelligence. It was he who served as the prototype of the German major in Bulgakov's book Days of the Turbins, who saved Hetman Skoropadsky from reprisals by the Red Army (in fact, the Petliurites). Koestring was fluent in the Russian language and Russia, and it was he who personally selected agents and saboteurs from Soviet prisoners of war. It was he who found one of the most valuable, as it turned out later, German spies.
On October 13, 1941, 38-year-old Captain Minishkiy was taken prisoner. It turned out that before the war he worked in the secretariat of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, and earlier in the Moscow City Party Committee. From the moment the war began, he served as a political instructor at the Western Front. He was captured along with the driver when he was driving around the advanced units during the battle of Vyazemsky.
Minishky immediately agreed to cooperate with the Germans, citing some old grievances against the Soviet regime. Seeing what a valuable shot they got, they promised, when the time came, to take him and his family to the west with the provision of German citizenship. But first, business.
Minishki spent 8 months studying in a special camp. And then the famous operation "Flamingo" began, which Gehlen carried out in collaboration with the intelligence officer Bown, who already had a network of agents in Moscow, among which the radio operator with the pseudonym Alexander was the most valuable. Baun's men ferried Minishkiy across the front line, and he reported to the very first Soviet headquarters the story of his capture and daring escape, every detail of which was invented by Gelen's experts. He was taken to Moscow, where he was hailed as a hero. Almost immediately, mindful of his previous responsible work, he was appointed to work in the military-political secretariat of the GKO. 
(Real German agents; other German spies could look something like this)
Through a chain through several German agents in Moscow, Minishki began to supply information. The first sensational message came from him on July 14, 1942. Gehlen and Gerre sat all night, drawing up a report based on it to the Chief of the General Staff, Halder. The report was made: “The military conference ended in Moscow on the evening of July 13th. Shaposhnikov, Voroshilov, Molotov and the heads of the British, American and Chinese military missions were present. Shaposhnikov declared that their retreat would be as far as the Volga, in order to force the Germans to spend the winter in the area. During the retreat, comprehensive destruction should be carried out in the territory being abandoned; all industry must be evacuated to the Urals and Siberia.
The British representative asked for Soviet assistance in Egypt, but was told that the Soviet manpower resources were not as great as the Allies believed. In addition, they lack aircraft, tanks and guns, in part because part of the supply of weapons destined for Russia, which the British were supposed to deliver through the port of Basra in the Persian Gulf, was diverted to protect Egypt. It was decided to conduct offensive operations in two sectors of the front: north of Orel and north of Voronezh, using large tank forces and air cover. A distraction attack must be carried out at Kalinin. It is necessary that Stalingrad, Novorossiysk and the Caucasus be kept.”
It all happened. Halder later noted in his diary: “The FCO has provided accurate information on the enemy forces newly deployed since June 28, and on the estimated strength of these formations. He also gave a correct assessment of the energetic actions of the enemy in the defense of Stalingrad.
The above authors made a number of inaccuracies, which is understandable: they received information through several hands and 30 years after the events described. For example, the English historian David Kahn gave a more correct version of the report: on July 14, the meeting was attended not by the heads of the American, British and Chinese missions, but by the military attaches of these countries. 
(Secret intelligence school OKW Amt Ausland/Abwehr)
There is no consensus about the real name of Minishkia. According to another version, his surname was Mishinsky. But perhaps it is not true either. For the Germans, it passed under the code numbers 438.
Coolridge and other authors report sparingly on the further fate of agent 438. The participants in Operation Flamingo definitely worked in Moscow until October 1942. In the same month, Gehlen recalled Minishkiy, arranging, with the help of Bown, a meeting with one of the leading reconnaissance detachments of the Wally, which ferried him across the front line.
In the future, Minishkia worked for Gehlen in the information analysis department, worked with German agents, who were then transferred across the front line.
Minishkia and Operation Flamingo are also named by other respected authors, such as the British military historian John Eriksson in his book The Road to Stalingrad, by the French historian Gabor Rittersporn. According to Rittersporn, Minishkiy really received German citizenship, after the end of the Second World War he taught at an American intelligence school in southern Germany, then moved to the United States, having received American citizenship. The German Stirlitz died in the 1980s at his home in Virginia.
Minishkia was not the only super spy. The same British military historians mention that the Germans had many intercepted telegrams from Kuibyshev, where the Soviet authorities were based at that time. A German spy group worked in this city. There were several "moles" surrounded by Rokossovsky, and several military historians mentioned that the Germans considered him as one of the main negotiators for a possible separate peace at the end of 1942, and then in 1944 - if the assassination attempt on Hitler would be successful. For reasons unknown today, Rokossovsky was seen as a possible ruler of the USSR after the overthrow of Stalin in a coup of the generals. 
(This is how the unit of German saboteurs from Brandenburg looked like. One of its most famous operations was the capture of Maykop oil fields in the summer of 1942 and the city itself)
The British knew well about these German spies (it is clear that they know now). This is also recognized by Soviet military historians. For example, former military intelligence colonel Yuri Modin, in his book The Fates of Scouts: My Cambridge Friends, claims that the British were afraid to supply the USSR with information obtained by decoding German reports, precisely because of the fear that there were agents in the Soviet headquarters.
But they personally mention another German superintelligence officer - Fritz Kauders, who created the famous Max intelligence network in the USSR. His biography is given by the aforementioned Englishman David Kahn.
Fritz Kauders was born in Vienna in 1903. His mother was Jewish and his father was German. In 1927 he moved to Zurich, where he began working as a sports journalist. Then he lived in Paris and Berlin, after Hitler came to power he left as a reporter in Budapest. There he found himself a profitable occupation - an intermediary in the sale of Hungarian entry visas to Jews fleeing Germany. He made acquaintances with high-ranking Hungarian officials, and at the same time met the head of the Abwehr station in Hungary, and began working for German intelligence. He makes acquaintance with the Russian emigre general A.V. Turkul, who had his own intelligence network in the USSR - later it served as the basis for the formation of a more extensive German spy network. Agents are thrown into the Union for a year and a half, starting in the autumn of 1939. The accession of Romanian Bessarabia to the USSR helped a lot here, when at the same time they “attached” dozens of German spies, abandoned there in advance. 
(General Turkul - in the center, with a mustache - with fellow White Guards in Sofia)
With the outbreak of war with the USSR, Kauders moved to Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, where he headed the Abwehr radio post, which received radiograms from agents in the USSR. But who these agents were has not been clarified so far. There are only fragments of information that there were at least 20-30 of them in various parts of the USSR. The Soviet super-saboteur Sudoplatov also mentions the Max intelligence network in his memoirs.
As mentioned above, not only the names of German spies, but also the minimum information about their actions in the USSR is still closed. Did the Americans and the British pass information about them to the USSR after the victory over fascism? Hardly - they needed the surviving agents themselves. The maximum that was then declassified was secondary agents from the Russian émigré organization NTS.
Nathan Hale
Considered the first American spy. At home, he became a symbol of the struggle of his people for independence. As a young patriotic teacher, with the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War, Hale joined the army. When Washington needed a spy, Nathan volunteered. He obtained the necessary information in a week, but at the very last moment he signaled not to his own, but to the English boat, which resulted in the death penalty.
Major John Andre
The British intelligence officer was well known in the best houses of New York during the American Revolutionary War. After he was caught, the scout was sentenced to death by hanging.
James Armistead Lafayette
Became the first African-American agent during the American Revolution. His reports played an important role in the defeat of the British troops at the Battle of Yorktown.
Belle Boyd
Miss Boyd became a spy at the age of 17. She served the Confederacy throughout the American Civil War in Dixie, the North, and England. For her invaluable help during the campaign in the Shenandoah Valley, General Jackson awarded her the rank of captain, took her as an adjutant and allowed her to attend all the reviews of his army.
Emeline Pigott
She served in the Confederate Army in North Carolina. She was arrested several times, but each time after her release she returned to her activities.
Elizabeth Van Lew
Elizabeth was the Northerners' most valuable intelligence agent during the American Civil War in 1861. After her retirement in 1877, for the rest of her life, she was supported by the family of a federal soldier, whom she once helped to escape.
Thomas Miller Beach
He was an English spy who served in the Northern Army during the American Civil War. He was not officially caught, but he had to give up his espionage activities.
Christian Snook Guerhronye
The Dutch traveler and Islamic scholar undertook a scientific journey to Arabia and spent a whole year in Mecca and Jida under the guise of a Muslim lawyer.
Fritz Joubert Ducaine
For 10 years, he managed to organize the largest German spy network in the country. He himself explained this by a desire to take revenge on the British for the burning of his family estate. The spy spent the last years of his life in poverty in a city hospital.
Mata Hari
The modern prototype of the femme fatale. An exotic dancer, she was executed in 1917 for spying for Germany.
Sydney Reilly
The British spy was nicknamed the "King of Spy". The super agent organized many conspiracies, in connection with which he became very popular in the film industry of the USSR and the West. It is believed that James Bond was written off from him.
Cambridge Five
The core of the network of Soviet agents in the UK, recruited in the 1930s at the University of Cambridge. When the network was exposed, none of its members were punished. Members: Kim Philby, Donald McLean, Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess, John Cairncross.
Richard Sorge
Soviet spy during the Second World War. He also worked as a journalist in Germany and Japan, where he was arrested on charges of espionage and hanged.
Virginia Hall
An American volunteered for special operations during World War II. Working in occupied France, Hall coordinated resistance activities in Vichy, was a correspondent for the New York Post, and was also on the Gestapo's most wanted list.
Nancy Grace Augusta Wake
With the German invasion of France, the girl and her husband joined the ranks of the Resistance, becoming an active member. Afraid of being caught, Nancy left the country herself, ending up in London in 1943. There she was trained as a professional intelligence officer and returned to France a year later. She was engaged in organizing the supply of weapons and recruiting new members of the Resistance. After her husband's death, Nancy returned to London.
George Koval
In the mid-1940s, a Soviet atomic intelligence officer obtained for Moscow the most valuable information on the Manhattan nuclear project in the United States and was recently posthumously awarded the title of Hero of Russia for this.
Elyas Bazna
He worked as a valet to the British ambassador in Turkey. Taking advantage of the ambassador's habit of taking secret documents home from the embassy, he began to make photocopies of them and sell them to the German attache Ludwig Moisisch.
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg
Spouses Julius and Ethel, American communists, became the only civilians executed in the United States for transferring American nuclear secrets to the USSR.
Klaus Fuchs
A German nuclear physicist came to England in 1933. Klaus worked on the top-secret British atomic bomb project, and later on the American Manhattan project. He was arrested and imprisoned after it became clear that he was passing information to the USSR.
This post is about spies who achieved the most serious results in their work in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, and much earlier.
Top 10 most successful spies in world history
1. Aldrich Ames
CIA veteran recruited by the KGB. In 1994, he was arrested by the FBI along with his wife, Maria del Rosario Casas Dupi, who is believed to be his accomplice. Ames pleaded guilty and said that the information he passed to the East led to the arrest of several people who worked for the CIA and the FBI, as a result of which some of them were executed. The investigation into the double agent continued for a year. Investigators determined that Ames began working for the USSR in 1985. Through special caches, in exchange for millions of dollars, he transmitted information about Soviet citizens recruited by the Americans, about the secret operations of his country's special services, and a large amount of other secret information. Counterintelligence came on the trail of the Ames family precisely because of their suspicious spending. However, by that time the American spy network in Russia had already been practically destroyed. Aldrich Ames continues to serve a life sentence today. His wife took advantage of the plea agreement and only served five years.
2. Virginia Hall
Virginia Hall, also known as "The Lame Lady", was one of the most successful spies of World War II. She is the only non-military woman to have been awarded the Distinguished Service Cross (USA). She created intelligence networks, recruited the local population in the territory of France occupied by the Germans, organized safe houses, and helped prisoners of war who had escaped from the camps. Despite the fact that "Lame" she was nicknamed not by chance - she did not have one leg. She was recruited by British agent Vera Atkins to track the movements of German troops and recruit fighters into the ranks of the French Resistance. In 1944, after the Allied landings in Normandy, Virginia began organizing sabotage operations. It is estimated that she has more released prisoners, sabotage and reports on the movement of enemy troops than any other agent who worked during the war in France.
3. Harriet Tubman
In the United States, this black woman is a national heroine, personifying an indomitable desire for freedom. Having escaped from slavery in 1849, she helped to do the same to a huge number of her fellow tribesmen. In many ways, her efforts organized the so-called Underground Railroad, along which former slaves moved to the north of the United States. When the civil war began, the woman entered the territory of the enemy and became an agent of the northerners. Previous experience in the actual underground had taught her to track complex details and gather information, learn troop movement routes, and arrange clandestine meetings. These skills allowed her to create an effective spy network. She was the only woman to lead a military operation during the American Civil War - based on information gathered, she led northerners' ships through Confederate-mined waters. During the ensuing battle, at least 700 slaves were freed, many of whom later joined the army of the North.
4. George Blake
George Blake joined the Secret Intelligence Service, otherwise known as MI6, during World War II. Participating in the Korean War, he was captured by the northerners. After staying there for three years, he became a staunch communist and went over to the side of the enemy. In 1953 Blake was returned to the UK. Compatriots accepted him as a hero, not suspecting that he was already secretly working for the KGB. During his espionage activities, he uncovered more than 40 MI-6 agents and practically stopped the organization's activities in Eastern Europe. In 1961 he was betrayed by a Polish defector. Blake was arrested and sentenced to 42 years in prison. However, in 1966 he escaped from prison and managed to cross the Iron Curtain to Moscow. He will soon be 100 years old, and he is still alive.
5. Agent 355
During the American Revolutionary War, several American spy groups operated in British-controlled territory. However, there were almost no women among these agents. Inside one of the most effective networks, which went down in history as the "Culper Ring", the representative of the weaker sex, however, was. She is known as "Agent 355". The name of this mysterious lady was kept secret for obvious reasons. According to the surviving documents and evidence, she took part in several counterintelligence operations. In particular, the information she obtained helped arrest Major John Andrew, the head of British intelligence in New York, and also expose the traitor Benedict Arnold. There are suggestions that "Agent 355" was a shopkeeper or tradeswoman who learned information about the British military plans from chatty customers. It is also claimed that she gave it directly to George Washington. Be that as it may, her contribution to the victory was very significant.
6. Rose Greenhow
A Confederate spy who is credited with greatly contributing to the Southern success in the early years of the American Civil War. Having settled in Washington, she found out about the plans of General Irving McDowell, who led the troops during the Manasas campaign. Greenhow passed intelligence to General Pierre Beauregard of the Southerners, who, having requested reserves, met the advancing northerners fully armed. The Battle of Bull Run was the first major ground engagement of this bloody war, and the Confederate victory gave them a lasting lead. After the battle, their president, Jefferson Davis, personally sent a letter of thanks to Greenhow. The northerners were soon able to expose the spy. She spent some time in prison, but after her release she continued to fight. Rose Greenhow died in 1864 while carrying dispatches aboard the British ship Condor.
7. Oleg Gordievsky
Some experts believe that the West owes its victory in the Cold War to this man. Gordievsky worked for MI6 for 11 years, leaking information of great importance to her. According to him, he became disillusioned with the USSR after the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, and decided to fight it from the inside. He was recruited in 1972, on the recommendation of a Czech intelligence officer who defected to Canada. For the next decade, Gordievsky transmitted data on current and past operations to the KGB. In the end, Aldrich Ames, already mentioned, pointed out to him as a double agent. Having fallen into the hands of Soviet counterintelligence, Gordievsky managed to hold out and not incriminate himself during many hours of interrogation using psychotropic drugs. He was released, but he did not linger in the USSR - with the mediation of British diplomats, he went to the West through the Finnish border.
8. Francis Walsingham
Most spies work in secret, but Francis Walsingham served Queen Elizabeth I quite openly. This staunch Protestant was a minister and a member of the Privy Council. It was thanks to his efforts that intelligence and counterintelligence appeared in the UK. In 1586, he uncovered the so-called "Babington Conspiracy", as a result of which Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, went to the chopping block. Anthony Babington entered into correspondence with Mary, who was imprisoned in England, suggesting that she overthrow Elizabeth. However, the letters were intercepted, and it was they who made it possible to convince the queen that while her rival was alive, the Protestant throne would not see peace. According to contemporaries, Walsingham was a real genius of intrigue and espionage. His agents worked both in the UK and abroad. This allowed him to keep abreast of everything that was happening on the continent and be ready for the most unexpected turns of events.
9. Robert Hanssen
FBI agent Robert Hanssen worked first for the Soviet and then for the Russian intelligence services from 1979 to 2001, during which time he caused great damage to his historical homeland. The number of secret documents forwarded by him, including those on US nuclear projects, is in the thousands of pages. He helped expose dozens of infiltrated agents. On Hannsen's "account" is the arrest and execution of Dmitry Polyakov, a Soviet general recruited by the CIA. For his work, the spy received over $1.4 million in cash and diamonds. After the FBI uncovered Hanssen, he was charged with 21 cases of spying for the USSR and Russia. He pleaded guilty to 15 counts and received 15 life sentences.
10. Rosenbergs
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg became the first US citizens to be convicted and executed for peacetime espionage. They were found guilty of transferring secret technologies for the manufacture of an atomic bomb to the USSR. Julius was an engineer in the signal troops, and his wife worked there as a secretary. The information was transmitted to them by David Greenglass, Ethel's younger brother, who worked in the secret Los Alamos laboratory, where, in fact, atomic weapons were developed. According to the investigation, the Rosenbergs handed over to the potential enemy not only information on the Manhattan project, but also the latest developments of American scientists in the field of sonar and radar. The arrest was followed by a controversial and scandalous trial, which ended with the death sentence. Many prominent figures, including Albert Einstein and the Pope of Rome, called for pardon for the Rosenbergs, but the exposed spies were still executed in the electric chair on June 19, 1953.
