- Alger Hiss
Alger Hiss was a U.S. State Department official involved in the establishment of the United Nations. He was accused of being a Soviet spy in 1948 and convicted of perjury in connection with this charge in 1950. Evidence revealed after Hiss's conviction has added a variety of information to the case, and the question of his guilt or innocence remains controversial.
- Kim Philby
Harold Adrian Russell "Kim" Philby or H.A.R. Philby, (1 January, 1912 – 11 May, 1988) was a high-ranking member of British intelligence, a communist, and spy for the Soviet Union's NKVD and KGB. In 1963, Philby was revealed as a member of the spy ring known as the Cambridge Five, along with Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross. Of the five, Philby is believed to have done the most damage to British and American intelligence, …
- Klaus Fuchs
Emil Julius Klaus Fuchs (December 29, 1911 - January 28, 1988) was a German-born theoretical physicist and atomic spy who was convicted of surreptitiously supplying information on the British and American atomic bomb research to the USSR during, and shortly after, World War II. Fuchs was an extremely competent scientist, …
- Anthony Blunt
Anthony Frederick Blunt (26 September 1907 - 26 March 1983), known as Sir Anthony Blunt, KCVO between 1956 and 1979, was an English art historian, formerly Professor of the History of Art, University of London and director of the Courtauld Institute of Art, London (1947-74). He was the "Fourth Man" of the Cambridge Five, a group of spies working for the Soviet Union from sometime in the 30s, to the early 50s.
- Guy Burgess
Guy Francis De Moncy Burgess (16 April, 1911 - 30 August, 1963) was a British-born intelligence officer and double agent who worked for the Soviet Union. He was part of the Cambridge Five spy ring that betrayed allied secrets to the Soviets before and during the Cold War. Burgess and Anthony Blunt contributed to the Soviet cause with the transmission of secret Foreign Office and MI5 documents that described Allied military strategy.
- Aldrich Ames
Aldrich Hazen Ames (born May 26 1941) is a former Central Intelligence Agency counterintelligence officer and analyst, who, in 1994, was convicted of spying for the Soviet Union.
- Oleg Gordievsky
Oleg Antonovich Gordievsky, CMG (born 10 October 1938 in Moscow, Russia), was a Colonel of the KGB and KGB Resident-designate ("rezident") and bureau chief in London, who defected to the United Kingdom. He became the highest-ranking KGB defector ever.
- Elizabeth Bentley
Elizabeth Terrill Bentley (January 1, 1908-November 18, 1963) was an American spy for the Soviet Union from 1938 until 1945. In 1945 she defected from the Communist Party and Soviet intelligence and became an informer for the U.S. She exposed two networks of spies, ultimately naming over 80 Americans who had engaged in espionage for the Soviets.
- Richard Sorge
Richard Sorge (Russian: Рихард Зорге) (October 4, 1895 - November 7, 1944) is considered to have been one of the best Soviet spies in Japan before and during World War II, which has gained him fame among spies, and espionage enthusiasts. His NKVD codename was "Ramsay". He was also a journalist, working in Germany and Japan.
- George Blake
George Blake (born Georg Behar, November 11, 1922) is a former Dutch-British spy who was actually a double agent for the Soviet Union. Born in Rotterdam of mixed parentage; his mother was Dutch and his father was an Egyptian who was a naturalized British citizen.. He was born as George Behar to one of the eminent Jewish families of Amsterdam.
- David Greenglass
David Greenglass (b. 2 March 1922 in New York City) was an atomic spy for the Soviet Union
- Vasili Mitrokhin
Vasili Nikitich Mitrokhin (March 3 1922-January 23, 2004) was a Major and senior archivist for the Soviet Union's foreign intelligence service, the First Chief Directorate of the KGB, and co-author with Christopher Andrew of "The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West", a massive account of Soviet intelligence operations based on copies of material from the archive. Work on the second volume, "The Mitrokhin Archive II: The KGB in the World", …
- Pavel Sudoplatov
Pavel Sudoplatov was a member of the intelligence services of the Soviet Union who rose to the rank of lieutenant general. He was involved in several famous incidents of the early Cold War, including the assassination of Leon Trotsky, and the Soviet espionage program which obtained information about the atomic bomb from the Manhattan Project. His autobiography, "Special Tasks", made him well-known outside Russia, …
- Atomic Spies
Atomic Spies and Atom Spies are terms that refer to various people in the United States, Great Britain, and Canada who are thought to have illicitly given information about nuclear weapons production or design to the Soviet Union during World War II and the early Cold War. Exactly what was given, and whether everyone on the list gave it, is still a matter of some scholarly dispute, …
- Harry Gold
Harry Gold (December 12, 1910-1974) was a laboratory chemist who was convicted of being the "courier" for a number of Soviet spy rings during the Manhattan Project. Gold was born in Switzerland to poor Russian Jewish immigrants. As a young man he became interested in Socialism which eventually led him to contacts within the Communist movement. After leaving school, Gold worked for the Pennsylvania Sugar Company as a laboratory assistant.
- Melita Norwood
Melita Norwood, née Sirnis was a British civil servant who, for a period of about 40 years following her recruitment in 1937, supplied the KGB (and its predecessor agencies) with state secrets from her job at the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association (a cover for nuclear research), including the schematics for the British atomic bomb in 1945, which the Soviet Union successfully duplicated in one year.
- John Cairncross
John Cairncross (25 July, 1913 - 8 October, 1995) was a British intelligence officer during World War II who passed secrets to the Soviet Union during the war. He was alleged to be the fifth member of the Cambridge Five.
- Theodore Hall
Theodore Alvin Hall (October 20, 1925 - November 1, 1999) was an American physicist and an atomic spy for the Soviet Union who, during his work on Allied effort to develop the first atomic bombs during World War II (the Manhattan Project), gave a detailed description of the "Fat Man" plutonium bomb, and of processes for purifying plutonium, to Soviet intelligence.
- William Remington
William Walter Remington (1917-1954) was an economist employed in various federal government positions until his career was interrupted by accusations of espionage made by the Soviet spy and defector Elizabeth Bentley. He was convicted of perjury in connection with these charges in 1953, and murdered in prison in 1954.
- Morris Cohen
Morris Cohen a.k.a. in London as Peter Kroger (2 July 1910 - 23 June 1995), was born in New York. His father was from an area near Kiev in present-day Ukraine, and his mother was born in Vilnius in present-day Lithuania. Cohen received an athletic scholarship as an outstanding rugby player to attend Columbia University.
- Harold Glasser
Harold Glasser, was an economist in the United States Department of the Treasury and spokesman on the affairs of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) 'throughout its whole life' and he had a 'predominant voice' in determining which countries should receive aid. Glasser was a member of the Perlo group of Soviet spies during World War II and worked closely with Harry Dexter White.
- Noel Field
Noel Field, an American citizen, worked in the Western European Division of the United States Department of State in the 1930s. His early history---a Quaker with Communist sympathies who rose steadily in the world of American diplomacy---offers an informative window on its era. But it does not hint at the explosion to come, in postwar Eastern Europe, for which Field unwittingly would serve as the detonator.
- Judith Coplon
Judith Coplon (born 1922) was one of the first major figures tried in the United States for spying for the Soviet Union; problems in her trials had a profound influence on espionage prosecutions during the McCarthy era. Her disclosures to the Soviet intelligence agencies were the first information to alert them to the size of the U.S. counter-intelligence operation against them.
- Morton Sobell
Morton Sobell (born April 11 1917 in New York City) was an American engineer who worked for General Electric and Reeves Electronics on military and government contracts. Sobell was the third defendant along with Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, at their 1951 espionage trial. (He and his family had earlier fled to Mexico in June 1950, but had been forcibly repatriated by an armed gang two months later.) He was found guilty along with the Rosenbergs, and sentenced to 30 years.
- Frank Coe
Virginius Frank Coe (1907-1980) worked in the Board of Economic Warfare and later became the Director of Monetary Research in the United States Department of the Treasury. Coe also worked in the Board of Economic Warfare and the Foreign Economic Administration. Coe was technical secretary at the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire in 1944. Coe was a member of the Soviet spy group known as the Silvermaster ring.
- Nathan Gregory Silvermaster
Nathan Gregory Silvermaster, an economist with the United States War Production Board (WPB) during World War II, was the alleged head of a large ring of Communist spies in the U.S. government. It is from him that the FBI’s “Silvermaster file”, documenting the Bureau’s investigation into Communist penetration of the Federal government during the Cold War, takes its name. Silvermaster was identified as a Soviet agent in the WPB operating under the code names Pel, Pal, …
- Jacob Golos
Jake Golos (birth name Jacob Rasin or Jacob Raisen) (1890 - November 27, 1943), was a Ukrainian-born Bolshevik revolutionary and Soviet secret police operative in the USSR. He was also a longtime senior official of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) involved in covert work and cooperation with Soviet intelligence agencies.
- Solomon Adler
Solomon Adler (or Sol Adler was born in Great Britain and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1936, when he obtained employment in the United States Department of the Treasury. Adler also was a Soviet spy who supplied information to the Silvermaster espionage ring. Adler served in China and shared a house with Chi Ch’ao ting and "China hand" John S. Service.
- Sidney Reilly
Lieutenant Sidney George Reilly, MC (c. March 24, 1873? - November 5, 1925), famously known as the "Ace of Spies", was a Russian-born adventurer and secret agent employed by the British Secret Intelligence Service. He is alleged to have spied for at least four nations. His notoriety during the 1920s was owed in part to his friend, British diplomat and journalist Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart, …
- Ruth Greenglass
Ruth Printz was born in 1925 in New York City, and grew up in the same neighborhood as her future husband, David Greenglass. Although they were quite young, they wanted to marry before David was drafted and the ceremony was held in late November 1942, when the groom was 20 and the bride just 17. Ruth and David both had an interest in politics and they both joined the Young Communist League.
- Edward Lee Howard
Edward Lee Howard (1951 - 2002) was a CIA case officer who defected to the Soviet Union. Howard served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Bucaramanga, Colombia. There he met Mary Cedarleaf in 1973 and they were married three years later in St. Paul, Minnesota. In 1976, Howard earned a master's degree in business administration from the American University in Washington, DC and Howard joined USAID. In February 1977, the Howards left for two years in Lima, Peru, …
- Donald Hiss
Donald Hiss was the younger brother of Alger Hiss. From 1929 to 1930 he was secretary and law clerk to a Supreme Court justice. From 1930 until 1933 he engaged in the private practice of law. From 1933 to 1935 he was employed by the Agricultural Adjustment Administration. In 1934 he was also attached to a special Senate committee investigating the munitions industry. In 1935 he was employed as a special attorney by the United States Department of Justice.
- Petrov Affair
The Petrov Affair was a Cold War spy drama in Australia in April 1954, involving the defection of Vladimir Petrov, third secretary in the Soviet embassy in Canberra.
- Vitaly Yurchenko
Vitaly Yurchenko (b. 1936) was a KGB agent in the Soviet Union. In 1985, after twenty-five years of service in the KGB, he defected to the United States during an assignment in Rome. In the following interrogations by the CIA, he accused two American agents of working for the KGB, Ronald Pelton and Edward Lee Howard. While Pelton was later convicted, Howard fled the US before he could be questioned.
- Lee Pressman
Lee Pressman was an American attorney and activist. He worked for Federal government agencies and labor unions, and is known for admitting his role in the Ware group of Communist-led government employees aiding Soviet intelligence agents. Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace appointed Pressman assistant general counsel of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) in 1933. In 1934 he became active in the Ware group.
- Mark Zborowski
Mark Zborowski (January 27 1908 - April 30 1990) was an NKVD agent (Venona codenames TULIP and KANT) and an anthropologist. He was the NKVD's most valuable mole inside the Trotskyist organization in Paris during the 1930s and in New York during the 1940s. Zborowski was one of four children born into a Jewish family in Kuman, Kiev Gubernia, in 1908.
- John Vassall
William John Christopher Vassall was a British civil servant who, under pressure of blackmail, spied for the Soviet Union. In World War II, Vassall worked as a photographer for the Royal Air Force. After the war, he became a clerk at the Admiralty. In 1954, he was posted as Naval Attaché at the British embassy in Moscow. The year after he arrived, Vassall (who was homosexual) was encouraged by the KGB to become extremely drunk at a party, …
- Lona Cohen
Lona Theresa Cohen, Leontine, a.k.a. in London as Helen Kroger (11 January 1913 - 23 December 1992) was born in Adams, Massachusetts. She was an American citizen and member of the Communist Party USA who was recruited into Soviet espionage in 1939 by her husband, Morris Cohen. She worked for Soviet case officers, including Anatoli Yatskov, out of the New York Rezidentura during World War II. After Morris was drafted in 1942, …
- Christopher John Boyce
Christopher John Boyce (born 1953 February 16) was convicted of spying against the United States for the Soviet Union. He was arrested in January 1977 for selling U.S. spy satellite secrets to the Soviet Union. Boyce, the son of a security chief at McDonnell Douglas, along with childhood friend Andrew Daulton Lee, were raised in the very affluent seaside community of Palos Verdes Peninsula near Los Angeles.
- Donald Duart MacLean
Donald Duart Maclean became a career British diplomat, after having been recruited as a straight penetration agent while still a student at Cambridge University, by the Soviet intelligence service. Maclean, in fact, was one of the Cambridge Five, members of MI5, MI6 or the diplomatic service who acted as spies for the Soviet Union in the Second World War and beyond.