- Valerie Plame
Valerie Plame was no CIA paper-pusher. She was searching out intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
- April Fool
"April Fool" is the codename for the spy and double agent who allegedly played a key role in the downfall of the Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. According to General Tommy Franks, the commander of the U.S. military in the 2003 Iraq war, "April Fool", an American officer, was approached by an Iraqi intelligence agent working undercover as a diplomat. "April Fool" then sold to the Iraqi false "top secret" invasion plans provided by Franks' team.
- Mata Hari
Mata Hari was the stage name of Margaretha Geertruida (Grietje) Zelle (7 August, 1876, Leeuwarden, The Netherlands - 15 October, 1917, Vincennes, France), a Dutch exotic dancer and courtesan who was executed by firing squad for alleged espionage during World War I.
- John Henry
John Henry (c. 1776 - 1853), was a spy and adventurer of mysterious origins. It is reputed that he was born in Dublin, Ireland, probably between 1750 and 1775, although 1776 is the more accepted year. Henry came to Philadelphia about 1793, edited "Brown's Philadelphia Gazette", and afterward was commissioned a captain in the United States Army, in 1798, during the Quasi-War with France. Henry commanded an artillery company under General Ebenezer Stevens, …
- Graham Henry Greene
Graham Greene / Graham Greene , who was in the staff of The Times from 1926 to 1940, and served in the Foreign Office during WWII, is the author of many important novels, several of which were made into movies. Critics often refer to a turning point in his writing when he converted to Catholicism, and often wonder as to why he continues to elude the Nobel Committee. His first work, Babbling April , appeared in 1925.
- Jonathan Pollard
Jonathan Jay Pollard (born August 7 1954 in South Bend, Indiana) is a convicted Israeli spy and a former United States Naval civilian intelligence analyst. Pollard waived the right to trial in return for restrictions on sentencing, pleaded guilty and was convicted on one count of spying for Israel, receiving a life sentence in 1986 with a recommendation against parole. Israel publicly denied that Pollard was an Israeli spy until 1998, …
- 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.
- John Brown
John Henry Owen Brown was a Non-Commissioned Officer in the Royal Artillery in the British army, who served in France at the beginning of the Second World War. He was captured on 29 May 1940 and remained a prisoner of war until 1945. He volunteered to serve at Blechhammer camp in Upper Silesia, and generally ingratiated himself with the Germans. In due course he was transferred to the camp at Genshagen, which he effectively ran for the Germans.
- Benedict Arnold
Benedict Arnold V was a successful Connecticut merchant who fought for American independence from the British Empire as a general in the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War. In the United States, Arnold is best known for his betrayal of the rebel cause by plotting to surrender the American fort at West Point, New York to the British during the American Revolution.
- Joseph McCarthy
Joseph Raymond McCarthy was a Republican U.S. Senator from the state of Wisconsin between 1947 and 1957. Beginning in 1950, McCarthy became the most visible public face of a period of extreme anti-communist suspicion inspired by the tensions of the Cold War. He was noted for making unsubstantiated claims that there were large numbers of Communists and Soviet spies and sympathizers inside the federal government.
- Harriet Tubman Harriet Tubman
Harriet Tubman (1820 - 1913) escaped slavery in Maryland in 1849 and traveled north. She then helped hundreds of other slaves flee to the north to freedom via the Underground Railroad. Mrs. Tubman helped John Brown recruit soldiers for his raid on Harpers Ferry (1859). She spied for the Union (in South Carolina ) during the US Civil War. After the war, she lived in Auburn, New York , and founded the Harriet Tubman Home for Aged Negroes.
- Noel Coward
Sir Noel Peirce Coward was an English actor, playwright, and composer of popular music. His forename is sometimes spelled with a diaeresis on the 'e' ("Noël"). Coward himself used this spelling only in later life.
- 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, …
- Gary Powers
Francis "Frank" Gary Powers (August 17, 1929 - August 1, 1977) Capt. USAF; was an American pilot whose U-2 spy plane was shot down while over the Soviet Union, thus causing the U-2 Crisis of 1960. He was born in Jenkins, Kentucky and was raised in Pound, Virginia, on the Virginia-Kentucky border. After graduating from Milligan College in Eastern Tennessee, Gary was commissioned in the United States Air Force in 1950.
- Joe Conason
Joe Conason (born 1954 in New York City) is a Jewish-American journalist, author and political commentator, who usually holds liberal views. He writes a column for the weekly "New York Observer" newspaper, for Salon.com and has written a number of books, including "Big Lies" (2003), which addresses what he says are myths spread about liberals by conservatives. Conason received a B.A. in History from Brandeis University in 1975.
- John Howe
John Howe (October 14, 1754 - December 27, 1835) was a loyalist printer during the American Revolution, a printer and Postmaster in Halifax, the father of the famous Joseph Howe, a spy prior to the War of 1812, and eventually a Magistrate of the Colony of Nova Scotia. He was born in Boston, Massachusetts Bay colony, the son of Joseph Howe, a tin plate worker of Puritan ancestry, and Rebeccah Hart.
- Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St Alban was an English philosopher, statesman, and essayist, but is best known as a philosophical advocate and defender of the scientific revolution. Indeed, his dedication brought him into a rare historical group of scientists who were killed by their own experiments. His works established and popularized an inductive methodology for scientific inquiry, often called the "Baconian method" or simply, the scientific method.
- Tricycle
Tricycle was the codename of both Dušan "Duško" Popov (1912 Titel, Serbia - 1981 Opio, Alpes-Maritimes, France) and the spy network with which he was involved.
- Nathan Hale
Nathan Hale (June 6 1755 - September 22 1776) was a captain in the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War. Widely considered America's first spy, he volunteered for an intelligence-gathering mission, but was caught by the British. He is best remembered for his speech before being hanged following the Battle of Long Island, in which he purportedly said, "I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country".
- E. Howard Hunt
Everette Howard Hunt, Jr. (October 9 1918 - January 23 2007) was an American author and spy. He worked for the CIA and later the White House under President Richard Nixon. Hunt, with G. Gordon Liddy and others, was one of the White House's "plumbers" - a secret team of operatives charged with fixing "leaks". Information disclosures had proved an embarrassment to the Nixon administration when defense analyst Daniel Ellsberg sent a series of documents, …
- Kurt Andersen
Kurt Andersen (born August 22, 1954) is a American novelist who is currently a columnist for "New York Magazine" ("The Imperial City"), and host of the public radio program "Studio 360", which he co-created. In 1986 with E. Graydon Carter he co-founded "Spy" magazine, which they sold in 1991; it continued publishing until 1998. Previously he was a columnist for "The New Yorker" ("The Culture Industry") and "Time" ("Spectator").
- Daniel Defoe
Daniel Defoe was an English writer, journalist and spy, who gained enduring fame for his novel "Robinson Crusoe". Defoe is notable for being one of the earliest practitioners of the novel and helped popularize the genre in Britain. In some texts he is even referred to as one of the founders, if not the founder, of the English novel. A prolific and versatile writer, he wrote over five hundred books, pamphlets, and journals on various topics (including politics, crime, …
- Larry Franklin
Lawrence Anthony Franklin is a U.S. Air Force Reserve colonel who has pleaded guilty to passing information about U.S. policy towards Iran to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the foremost pro-Israel lobbying organization in the U.S, while he was working for the Defense Department in an attempt to get the information passed on to the United States National Security Council, which he could not do through regular Pentagon channels.
- John Birch
John Morrison Birch (May 8, 1918 - August 25, 1945) was an American Military Intelligence Officer and a Baptist Missionary in World War II who was shot by armed supporters of the Communist Party of China. A portion of the American right consider him a martyr, the first victim of the Cold War. The conservative John Birch Society, formed 13 years after his death, is named in honor of him. His parents joined the society as life members.
- Whittaker Chambers
Jay Vivian (David Whittaker) Chambers was an American writer, editor, Communist party member and spy for the Soviet Union who defected and became an outspoken opponent of communism. He is best known for his testimony about the perjury and espionage of Alger Hiss.
- Graydon Carter
Edward Graydon Carter (born 14 July 1949) is a Canadian-born American journalist and author. He is editor of "Vanity Fair". He also co-founded, with Kurt Andersen, the satirical monthly magazine "Spy" in 1986. Carter began his career at "Time" as a writer-trainee where he met Andersen. After "Spy" closed down, Carter would become editor at the "New York Observer" before being invited to "Vanity Fair" to take over from Tina Brown, …
- W. Somerset Maugham
William Somerset Maugham, CH (January 25 1874 - December 16 1965) was an English playwright, novelist, and theatre writer. He was one of the most popular authors of his era, and reputedly the highest paid of his profession during the 1930s.
- Dick White
Sir Dick Goldsmith White, KCMG, KBE (20 December 1906-21 February 1993), was a British intelligence officer. He was Director-General (DG) of MI5 from 1953 to 1956, and Head of the Secret Intelligence Service from 1956 to 1968. White was born in Tonbridge, Kent.
- David Shayler
David Shayler born 24 December 1965, is a former MI5 (British Security Service) officer who was prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act after passing documents to the "Mail on Sunday" newspaper in August 1997 that alleged that MI5 was paranoid about socialists and that it had previously investigated Labour Party ministers Peter Mandelson, Jack Straw and Harriet Harman.
- David Williams
David Williams was an officer in the Continental Army in the American Revolutionary War who, with John Paulding and Isaac Van Wart, was one of the captors of British spy John André. André was on a mission carrying secret papers from Benedict Arnold when he was stopped by an armed group consisting of Williams, Paulding, and Van Wart. Believing them to be Tories, André told them he was a British officer who must not be detained, when, to his surprise, …
- 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.
- Richard Tomlinson
Richard Tomlinson (born 1963) is a New Zealand-born former British MI6 officer who was famously imprisoned in 1997 for breaking the 1989 Official Secrets Act by attempting to publish a book detailing his career in the SIS. He was first approached by MI6 in 1984 after graduating from Cambridge University with a First Class Honours Degree in aeronautical engineering. Not interested in joining the organisation at this point, …
- John Mason
Sir John Mason was an English diplomat and spy. Mason was born in Abingdon in Berkshire (now Oxfordshire). He was educated at the school at the abbey in his native town, where his uncle was abbot. Later, he went to All Souls College, Oxford and was ordained a priest. He became Chancellor of Oxford University for the periods 1552-1556 and 1559-1564. He worked for several Tudor monarchs collecting information from the Continent and as a diplomat.
- Michael Frayn
Michael Frayn (born 8 September 1933) is an English playwright and novelist. He is best known as the author of the farce "Noises Off" and the dramas "Copenhagen" and "Democracy". His novels, such as "Towards the End of the Morning", "Headlong" and "Spies", have also been critical and commercial successes, making him one of the handful of writers in the English language to succeed in both drama and prose fiction.
- Chevalier D'Eon
Charles-Geneviève-Louis-Auguste-André-Timothée Éon de Beaumont, usually known as the Chevalier d'Eon was a French diplomat, spy, soldier and Freemason who lived the first half of his life as a man and the second half as a woman.
- Bumblebee
Bumblebee is the name of a fictional character from the various Transformers universes.
- Peter Wright
Peter Maurice Wright was a scientist and former MI5 counterintelligence officer noted for writing the controversial book "Spycatcher" (ISBN 0-670-82055-5), which became an international bestseller with sales of over 2 million. "Spycatcher" was part memoir, part exposé of what Wright claimed to be serious institutional failings in MI5 and his subsequent investigations into it.
- Eric O'Neill
Eric M. O'Neill (born 1973) is a former American FBI operative. He worked as an Investigative Specialist, of the Special Surveillance Group (SSG), and played a role in the arrest and life imprisonment conviction of FBI agent Robert Hanssen for spying on behalf of the Soviet Union and Russia. O'Neill graduated from Gonzaga College High School in Washington, D.C. in 1991, and earned dual degrees in political science and psychology from Auburn University in 1995.
- 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.
- Stephen Cambone
Stephen A. Cambone (born 1951) was the first United States Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, a post created in March 2003. He was said to be very close to former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld as the Pentagon's top man in intelligence. Cambone first came to the attention of the public at large during the testimony of Major General Antonio Taguba before the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee, …