Bourne Takes a Break: The Greatest Double Agents in Human History
Do you like spy movies? Chases, secret meetings, code ciphers, riddles and investigations. And someone actually “lives” in such movies.
In this article, we want to tell you about the seven most famous double agents that existed in history. And believe me, James Bond, Jason Bourne, Kingsman and others are just "smoking nervously on the sidelines" next to them.
The legendary Soviet spy Kim Philby managed to successfully serve in MI6 for several decades and even become the head of British counterintelligence. Philby was one of the members of the famous "Cambridge Five" - a group of Soviet agents in Great Britain recruited by Arnold Deitch in the 1930s. By the way, today the names of only four members of the spy core are known. Philby was their leader at one time.
From his youth, Kim held communist views, so one could say he worked for the idea. During the war alone, he handed over more than 900 valuable documents to Moscow. Because of his secret activities, Philby's first wife, an activist of the Austrian Communist Party, Litzi Friedman, turned away from him. The woman was sure that her husband had betrayed Lenin and the idea of Marxism.
However, after some time, the double agent married again. This time to an employee of the Soviet research institute Rufina Pukhova (she became his fourth and last wife). After the exposure of the "Cambridge Five", he and two other members of the group were secretly taken to Moscow. There he spent the rest of his life and died on May 11, 1988. After the death of her husband, his widow published several memoirs in which she described in detail the years of their life together, moments from Philby's biography and his secret thoughts.
Oleg Penkovsky earned the nickname "Hero" because it was thanks to his merits that it was possible to prevent the outbreak of a nuclear war. The man served as a colonel in the GRU of the General Staff of the Armed Forces and was one of the most important spies of the West. At one time, he passed more than 5 thousand documents to MI6 with information about nuclear forces and Khrushchev's plans. Thus, the Americans learned exactly what type of missiles the enemy had and in what quantities.
In 1961, Penkovsky first came under suspicion from the Soviet authorities. In 1962, he was arrested and charged with treason. According to official data, the double agent was executed in 1963, but there is also information that Penkovsky was burned alive in a crematorium for the severity of his crime.
There is also an alternative version regarding the subsequent fate of Oleg Penkovsky. Scientist Peter Wright, who worked for MI5, is sure that the man acted in the interests of. In his opinion, the story of betrayal and execution was invented, and Penkovsky was simply “gifted” a new identity, under which he may still be living.
Dusan Popov is considered the prototype of the well-known agent 007. He was tall, self-confident, charismatic, easily charmed girls and also easily... lied. Many even called him a champion of lying, because he spoke German perfectly and collaborated with the German secret services, while hating Hitler with all his heart.
Dusan worked for MI6. At one time, in order to win the favor of British intelligence, he had to give away another agent - German officer Johann Jebsen. After that, their close cooperation began - Dusan transmitted all information using a secret code he had developed himself and invisible ink! Just like in spy movies!
The German side trusted Dusan so much that even when the informant Jebsen was exposed, they continued to work with him. In 1941, the agent was sent to the US with orders to obtain information about missile systems, but immediately upon arrival he contacts the CIA director and begins working "on two fronts."
True, Dusan's cooperation with the US did not last too long. The Americans did not approve of the man's dissolute lifestyle. And when he gave them information about the impending attack on Pearl Harbor, they simply ignored them and he was thrown out.
Humam al-Balawi was also called "Zigzag" because he was not a double agent, but a triple agent. The Americans found him while he was studying medicine in Istanbul. Al-Balawi had never hidden his extremist views, so the CIA decided that he would be ideal for the role of a double agent.
The man was sent to Afghanistan, where he was supposed to cooperate with Al-Qaeda and pass on all valuable information to the CIA. Over time, Al-Balawi fully gained the trust of the American side, and promised to pass on information about one of the terrorist leaders, Ayman Zawahiri, appointing a meeting for the agents at the Champaign base.
As it turned out later, Al-Balawi did not come there alone - he took several kilograms of explosives with him. The man blew himself up, but in doing so killed seven more CIA agents and two officers.
Arthur Owens became the first double agent during World War II. During this time, he managed to try on many different names and pseudonyms: the Germans knew him as "Johnny" and "Beerman", the British called him "Snow". Arthur Owens was Welsh by origin and held anti-British views from an early age. The man began his cooperation with the German authorities even before the war.
The Germans paid him to provide information about British weapons, the location of their depots and airfield plans. Thanks to the large amount of information he passed on, Owens soon managed to make a decent fortune. Arthur obtained the information by pretending to be a salesman of electrical equipment.
But after the war began, Owens decided to take things to the next level. He contacted MI6 and signed a contract with them. Now he sold false information about the British military to Germany, and in turn passed information about German spies to Britain. When the war ended, Arthur retired, having received a generous reward for not revealing state secrets.
Aldrich Ames was one of the most outstanding Soviet spies and at the same time worked as the head of the CIA counterintelligence department. His father, who himself served in this organization, arranged for him to join American intelligence. But the agent was pushed to begin collaborating with the KGB by ordinary mercantilism. At that time, Ames was going through a divorce and paying off the huge debts of his mistress.
Then he decided that he could earn money by passing secret CIA information to the KGB, and he was absolutely right. For the first package of documents, he asked for 50 thousand dollars; in the future, Ames's fee was calculated in millions. For example, he once wrote a denunciation of his "colleague" Sergei Fedorenko and became the owner of 4 million dollars.
But the man did not have time to spend all his wealth. He bought a luxurious house near Washington, a Jaguar, many paintings and antique figurines, shares worth $165,000, two apartments and a farm in his wife's name. And in 1994, he was sentenced to life imprisonment with confiscation of property.
To this day, Aldrich Ames serves his sentence in a maximum-security prison in Pennsylvania. When information about him was widely publicized, relations between the United States cooled significantly, although Boris Yeltsin continued to insist that he was not aware of Ames's secret activities.
Juan Garcia Pujol is a great swindler, spy and adventurer who came to his "success" completely by accident. During the Spanish Civil War, the man worked as a simple salesman and wanted to improve his life by joining British or American intelligence. However, the information that Pujol offered did not interest the special services of Britain and the USA, so, in despair, the novice spy turned to Germany.
The German side accepted his proposal and ordered him to organize an agent network in Britain. It turned out that Pujol, who did not know English, came to Lisbon instead of London... But the man did not lose his head - he armed himself with various maps, telephone books, guidebooks and began to pass fictitious information to his superiors, supposedly from England.
When the Germans spent a large sum of money to figure out his deception, British intelligence became interested in him. So Pujol began working for Britain, continuing to develop a fictitious agent network, allegedly consisting of 27 employees. A Dutch stewardess, a Welshman, an American soldier, an office clerk and many others "worked" for him. Just imagine what a rich imagination the man has!
Everyone believed Pujol's lies! The man even managed to receive two awards from Britain and Germany! In 1945, he faked his death and "retired" to Venezuela. There he opened a small bookstore and lived for about 40 more years.
Would you like to work as a secret agent?