A dead man deceived Nazi commanders. A fake Hollywood movie helped Americans escape Iran. Soviet agents used music to transmit secret orders. These stories emerged from intelligence agencies and archives long after the events took place. As world marks Foreign…
He was also, for much of his life, a man of the left and a convinced pacifist. That’s what brought him to MI5’s attention. By 1944, one MI5 officer had made up his mind about where the real concern lay. In a…
The Online Military Channel The generals had been warned: say nothing. But in a secret London mansion, hidden microphones recorded what captured German generals said to each other when they believed no one was listening. For more than half a…
Her spying earned her France’s Croix de Guerre and was credited with saving the lives of Allied troops pressing in on the Reich. And more than 50 years later, after French officials took a fresh look at her military record, she…
Redwood. By Ben Macintyre. Crown; 416 pages; $35. Viking; 464 pages; £25 VLADIMIR KUZICHKIN, a KGB spy who defected to Britain after a harrowing escape from Iran in 1981-82, asked for two things: a horoscope and a circumcision. “Recruiting a vetted circumciser had been hard…
By Jaycee Gudoy | Published 11 seconds ago Most people keep a few things private. The figures on this list kept entire second identities, some for a few years and some for most of their adult lives. Their cover stories ranged from…
Major Gus March-Phillipps, an elite British officer and devout Catholic, led some of the most daring covert operations of World War II before dying in combat. Source: British Army, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons On the night of September 12–13, 1942, a…
Helping to fight crime in the 19th century, Allan Pinkerton built a detective agency that took on high-profile cases and even prevented a presidential assassination. In the 1840s, Scottish cooper Allan Pinkerton arrived in Illinois, seeking to create a new life for…
In pre-trial detention, this is how Spielmann described his state of mind at the time: The above story puts the fortunate end of Spielmann’s criminal case back in August 1957 into a new perspective: just a few days after his release,…
But perhaps the most shocking case is that of Reinhard Gehlen, Hitler’s top spy chief on the Eastern Front. Our government did not merely turn a blind eye to his past. It bankrolled an entire intelligence apparatus, headquartered near Munich,…
Codes, spies, signals, and covert action shaping strategy and policy.
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