Personal files

People

Officers, agents, defectors and spymasters, told from trial records, declassified files and official histories. We write only about people who have died; claims that rest on memoirs or a defector's word are marked.

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Morris and Lona Cohen 1910–1995New York communists who worked for Soviet intelligence in the 1940s, vanished in 1950, and resurfaced in a London suburb as the booksellers Peter and Helen Kroger, radio hub of the Portland spy ring.
Yuri Andropov 1914–1984Soviet ambassador in Budapest in 1956, KGB chairman for fifteen years and Soviet leader for fifteen months; the man who launched the RYAN war-scare alert and died in February 1984.
James Jesus Angleton 1917–1987CIA counterintelligence chief from 1954 to 1974. A poetry editor turned molehunter, he ran the Agency's mail-opening program, distrusted Soviet defectors and was forced out after the revelations of 1974.
George Blake 1922–2020SIS officer who volunteered to the Soviets as a prisoner in Korea, betrayed the Berlin tunnel and many agents, received a record 42-year sentence in 1961, and escaped from Wormwood Scrubs in 1966.
Elizabeth Bentley 1908–1963Vassar graduate who ran Soviet espionage contacts in wartime Washington, defected to the FBI in November 1945 and became the most prominent and most disputed witness of the early Cold War.
Anthony Blunt 1907–1983Art historian and Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures who spied for Moscow inside MI5 during the war, confessed in 1964 under a grant of immunity, and was publicly named in 1979.
Guy Burgess 1911–1963BBC producer, wartime intelligence hand and Foreign Office official who spied for Moscow from 1935 and fled to the Soviet Union with Donald Maclean in May 1951.
John Cairncross 1913–1995Scottish civil servant recruited at Cambridge who passed Soviet intelligence material from the Cabinet Office, Bletchley Park and SIS, confessed in part in 1964, and was publicly named only later.
Wilhelm Canaris 1887–1945Admiral who ran the Abwehr, Germany's military intelligence service, from 1935 to 1944. Early supporter of Hitler, later a protector of the military opposition, hanged at Flossenbürg in April 1945.
Whittaker Chambers 1901–1961Former Communist courier and Time editor whose 1948 testimony, documents and 'pumpkin papers' led to Alger Hiss's perjury conviction and made him a central figure of the early Cold War.
Eli Cohen 1924–1965Egyptian-born Israeli agent who lived in Damascus from 1962 as a returning émigré businessman, cultivated Syria's Ba'athist elite, and was caught at his transmitter in January 1965 and publicly hanged.
William Colby 1920–1996OSS parachutist, CIA station chief in Saigon and head of the Phoenix program, Colby became Director of Central Intelligence in 1973 and chose to open the Agency's files to the investigations of 1975.
William J. Donovan 1883–1959Buffalo lawyer, Medal of Honor soldier and founder of the OSS, who argued for a central US intelligence service and lost the fight to lead it when Truman abolished his agency in 1945.
Allen Dulles 1893–1969OSS spymaster in wartime Switzerland and Director of Central Intelligence from 1953 to 1961, Allen Dulles presided over the CIA's era of coups and covert wars until the Bay of Pigs ended his tenure.
Felix Dzerzhinsky 1877–1926Polish-born revolutionary who founded and ran the Cheka and its successors, the GPU and OGPU, from 1917 until his death in 1926, presiding over the Red Terror and the Trust deception.
Rudolf Abel (William Fisher) 1903–1971British-born KGB illegal who lived in Brooklyn as an artist, was arrested in 1957 under the name Rudolf Abel, and was exchanged for U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers in 1962.
Klaus Fuchs 1911–1988German-born physicist who gave Soviet intelligence the design of the plutonium bomb from inside Britain's atomic project and Los Alamos, confessed in 1950 and served nine years.
Juan Pujol García (GARBO) 1912–1988A Catalan former poultry farmer who invented a spy network for the Abwehr, became MI5's double agent GARBO, and helped persuade Hitler that Normandy was a feint.
Reinhard Gehlen 1902–1979Hitler's chief of army intelligence on the Eastern Front, who sold his files and staff to the Americans in 1945, ran a spy network for the US Army and the CIA, and became the first president of West Germany's BND.
Harry Gold 1910–1972Philadelphia chemist who served as a Soviet courier for fifteen years, carried Klaus Fuchs's atomic secrets in 1944–45, and whose confession led the FBI to Greenglass and the Rosenbergs.
Igor Gouzenko 1919–1982Soviet military-intelligence cipher clerk who defected in Ottawa in September 1945 with documents exposing a GRU spy network in Canada, then lived for decades under an assumed name.
Günter Guillaume 1927–1995East German intelligence officer who posed as a refugee, rose through the Social Democratic Party and became an aide to Chancellor Willy Brandt. Convicted of treason in 1975, he was returned to East Germany in 1981.
Theodore Hall 1925–1999Teenage Los Alamos physicist who volunteered atomic secrets to Soviet intelligence in 1944, was identified through Venona as MLAD, and was never charged.
Virginia Hall 1906–1982American who ran SOE's first lasting network in Vichy France, escaped over the Pyrenees, returned with the OSS in 1944, and was the only civilian woman awarded the Distinguished Service Cross in World War II.
Robert Hanssen 1944–2023FBI counterintelligence agent who sold secrets to the GRU, KGB and SVR in three bursts from 1979 to 2001 without ever revealing his name. Arrested in 2001, he died in a federal supermax prison in 2023.
Isser Harel 1912–2003First head of Israel's Shin Bet and director of the Mossad from 1952 to 1963, the only man to command both services at once. He ran the 1960 capture of Adolf Eichmann and resigned in a dispute with Ben-Gurion.
Richard Helms 1913–2002A career clandestine officer who rose from OSS to Director of Central Intelligence (1966–73), Richard Helms ran the CIA through Vietnam and Chile and later became the only DCI convicted over testimony to Congress.
Alger Hiss 1904–1996State Department official and UN founding-conference secretary-general, accused in 1948 of passing documents to Soviet intelligence and convicted of perjury in 1950; his guilt is still argued.
J. Edgar Hoover 1895–1972Director of the Bureau of Investigation and then the FBI for 48 years, from 1924 until his death in 1972. He built a modern police agency and a secret domestic intelligence apparatus that the Senate later condemned.
Frank Church 1924–1984Idaho senator who chaired the 1975–76 Senate investigation of the CIA, FBI and NSA. His committee exposed assassination plots, COINTELPRO and Shamrock, and led to permanent intelligence oversight.
John Anthony Walker 1937–2014US Navy communications warrant officer who sold cipher keys to the KGB from the late 1960s until 1985 and drew his friend, brother and son into the ring. He died in prison in 2014.
Noor Inayat Khan 1914–1944SOE's first woman wireless operator sent into occupied France, she kept transmitting from Paris after her network collapsed in 1943, was betrayed, and was killed at Dachau in September 1944.
Donald Maclean 1913–1983Foreign Office diplomat and Soviet agent, identified as the Washington source HOMER through Venona decrypts, who fled to Moscow with Guy Burgess on his 38th birthday in May 1951.
Erich Mielke 1907–2000East Germany's minister for state security from 1957 to 1989, who built the Stasi into a vast surveillance machine. After unification he was convicted not for its crimes but for a 1931 police murder.
Vasili Mitrokhin 1922–2004KGB archivist who spent twelve years secretly copying foreign-intelligence files by hand, defected to Britain in 1992, and left the Mitrokhin Archive: hugely valuable to investigators, still debated by historians.
Konon Molody (Gordon Lonsdale) 1922–1970Soviet intelligence officer who lived in London as the Canadian businessman 'Gordon Lonsdale', ran the Portland spy ring, was jailed in 1961 and was exchanged for Greville Wynne in 1964.
Oleg Penkovsky 1919–1963GRU colonel who spied for the CIA and MI6 in 1961–62, supplying the missile manuals behind the IRONBARK reporting of the Cuban crisis; arrested in October 1962 and shot in May 1963.
Kim Philby 1912–1988SIS officer and Soviet agent from 1934 who served as British intelligence liaison in Washington, was publicly cleared in 1955, and fled from Beirut to Moscow in January 1963.
Dmitri Polyakov 1921–1988GRU major general who spied for the FBI and CIA from 1961 to 1980, under the code names TOPHAT and BOURBON. Betrayed by Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames, he was arrested in 1986 and shot in 1988.
Duško Popov (TRICYCLE) 1912–1981Yugoslav lawyer recruited by the Abwehr in 1940 who became MI5's double agent TRICYCLE, carried a German questionnaire about Pearl Harbor to the FBI, and fed D-Day deception.
Francis Gary Powers 1929–1977Air Force pilot turned CIA U-2 flier, shot down near Sverdlovsk on 1 May 1960, tried in Moscow and swapped for Rudolf Abel in 1962. Cleared by a CIA board, he was long treated coldly at home.
Sidney Reilly 1874–1925Russian-born British agent whose 1918 plot against Lenin made him famous and whose 1925 return to Soviet Russia, lured by the OGPU's Trust, ended in his execution. Much of his legend is invention.
Ethel Rosenberg 1915–1953Wife of Julius Rosenberg, convicted in 1951 of conspiracy to commit espionage largely on her brother's testimony that she typed atomic notes, testimony he later said he could not stand behind.
Julius Rosenberg 1918–1953New York electrical engineer who ran a Soviet espionage ring of fellow engineers and recruited his brother-in-law at Los Alamos; convicted of conspiracy and executed in 1953.
Melita Norwood 1912–2005Secretary at a London metals research association who passed atomic-project papers to Soviet intelligence for decades, was exposed by the Mitrokhin archive in 1999 at the age of 87, and was never prosecuted.
Richard Sorge 1895–1944German journalist and Soviet military intelligence officer who ran the Tokyo spy ring of 1933–1941, was hanged by Japan in 1944 and made a Hero of the Soviet Union twenty years later.
Adolf Tolkachev 1927–1986Moscow radar engineer who volunteered to the CIA and from 1979 to 1985 photographed secret Soviet military research documents. Betrayed in 1985, he was executed in September 1986.
Alan Turing 1912–1954Mathematician who designed the British Bombe, led the attack on German naval Enigma in Hut 8 at Bletchley Park, and was later prosecuted for homosexuality and pardoned posthumously.
Vladimir Vetrov (FAREWELL) 1932–1985KGB technology-intelligence officer who in 1981–82 gave French counterintelligence thousands of documents on the Soviet Line X network. Arrested for a killing in 1982, he was exposed as a spy and shot in 1985.
Ruth Werner (SONYA) 1907–2000German communist and Soviet military-intelligence officer who worked in Shanghai, Poland and Switzerland and, as SONYA, was Klaus Fuchs's courier in wartime Oxfordshire.
Markus Wolf 1923–2006Head of East Germany's foreign intelligence service, the HV A, for more than three decades. The West had no usable photograph of him until 1978. After unification he was convicted of treason, a verdict later quashed.