Details, Explanation and Meaning About Espionage

Espionage Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description

Espionage is the practice of obtaining secrets (spying) from rivals or enemies for military, political, or economic advantage. It is usually thought of as part of an organized (ie, governmental or corporate) effort. A spy is an agent employed to obtain such secrets. The definition has been restricted to a state spying on potential or actual enemies, primarily for military purposes, but this has been extended to spying involving corporations, known specifically as Industrial espionage. Many nations routinely spy on their enemies, and allies, although they generally deny this. Black's Law Dictionary (1990) defines espionage as: "...gathering, transmitting, or losing...[information related to the national defense]."

Incidents of espionage are well documented throughout history. The wisdom of Sun-Tzu contains information on deception and subversion. The ancient Egyptians had a thoroughly developed system for the acquisition of intelligence. And more recently, in Elizabethan times, there was a deeply entrenched network of intelligence gathering (run by Sir Francis Walsingham).

Espionage, by a citizen of the target state, is generally considered to be a form of treason. In many countries espionage is a crime punishable by death or life imprisonment, e.g. espionage is still a capital crime in the USA.

In Britain a foreign spy would face up to 14 years imprisonment under the Official Secrets Act while a Briton who spied for a foreign country would face a maximum life sentence for treason if it could be proved they were aiding Britain's enemies. Spying for proscribed terrorist organisations violates the Terrorism Act 2000. During the Second World War German spies in Britain were executed for treachery, a special offense covering any aid given to the enemy, including by foreign nationals.

The Cold War involved intense espionage activity between the United States of America and its allies and the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China and their allies, particularly related to nuclear weapons secrets.

Recently, espionage agencies have targeted the illegal drug trade and those considered to be terroristss. Spies have also engaged in assassination and kidnap of people their country doesn't like, for example the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad. Intelligence agencies have also been involved in covert and overt paramilitary activity (including assassination, kidnap, sabotage, guerrilla warfare, more convential warfare behind enemy lines and coup d'etats), this included many CIA operations during the Cold War and the current "war on terrorism".

See: Cold War espionage

Table of contents
1 Noteworthy Incidents in the History of Espionage
2 Spies in various conflicts
3 Notable spies or alleged spies
4 Espionage organizations
5 Intelligence disciplines
6 Espionage technology and techniques
7 Counter-espionage technology and techniques
8 See also

Noteworthy Incidents in the History of Espionage

Spies in various conflicts

Notable spies or alleged spies

Czechoslovakia (StB)

East Germany (Stasi)

France

Germany

Israel (Mossad)

Poland

United Kingdom (MI5/MI6)

  • Robert Baden Powell, operated as a spy during the Boer War while fronting as a rather goofy naturalist who chased butterflies around Boer fortifications and drew his intelligence on the pictures of the specimens he caught.
  • Michael Stokes and Harold Shergold SIS (Secret Intelligence Service/MI6) officers who helped run Penkovsky, Shergold debriefed George Blake
  • Janet Chisholm wife of UK diplomat and courier contact for Penkovsky
  • Noel Coward, joined the secret service at his own insistance and used his society connections and reputation to his advantage.
  • Sidney Reilly the so-called 'Ace of Spies', may have ended as defector to Soviets during last penetration mission
  • Sir William Stevenson (codenamed Intrepid) Canadian championship boxer and businessman who ran British Security Coordination in NYC from before to near the end of WWII (see British Security Coordination: The Secret History..., NY, Fromm International, 1999: A Man Called Intrepid, 1976, is entertaining but often unreliable)
  • Greville Wynne UK international businessman recruited by SIS as a courier to and from Penkovsky, arrested in Budapest and tried with Penkovsky
  • Francis Walsingham was one of the earliest known spymasters. He worked for Queen Elizabeth I.

United States (CIA)

  • Robert Amory Deputy Director of CIA (& WWII Marine officer) during Bay of Pigs planning, excluded by Allen Dulles from the project
  • Moe Berg
  • Joseph Bulik CIA case officer helped with Penkovsky
  • Adamski cover name for Polish trade official recruited by Clarridge
  • James Jesus Angelton CIA counter intelligence chief for decades
  • Richard Bissell CIA Deputy Director of Operations who planned Bay of Pigs operation, and who worked with Kelly Johnson of the Lockheed Skunk Works to develop and deploy the U-2 aircraft before schedule and under budget (see J T Richelson, Wizards of Langley: Inside the CIA Directorate of Science and Technology, 2001)
  • Charles Bohlen an 'anti-spy' as ambassador; when his CIA station chief and several others were compromised by Soviet female agents, he asked that all CIA personnel be withdrawn
  • Duane 'Dewey' Clarridge longtime CIA field agent (NE & SE Asia) and administrator pardoned by GHW Bush for Iran-Contra involvement; was Aldrich Ames' supervisor (See A Spy for All Seasons, 1997, Scribner's).
  • Jack Downing CIA case officer who ran Ogorodnik
  • Allen Dulles OSS spymaster in Bern, Switzerland, during WWII, later Director of the CIA
  • Sheffield Edwards CIA officer who liased with Mafia boss Sam Giancana regarding the assassination of Fidel Castro (early 60s)
  • Jake Esterline CIA Bay of Pigs trainer/planner
  • William King Harvey CIA (though first FBI) officer whose idea the Berlin Tunnel (Operation Gold) was while Chief of the Berlin Operations Base; debriefed Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley, supposedly demanded recall of Kim Philby from the US in the early 50s (see Murphy, Kondrashev, and Bailey, Battleground Berlin: CIA v KGB in the Cold War, Yale Univ Press, 1997)
  • George Kisevalter CIA case officer/handler who 'ran' both Popov and Penkovsky
  • Ryszard Kuklinski - was a Polish-born colonel and "Cold War" masterspy, who passed top secret Warsaw Pact documents to the CIA between years 1971 and 1981
  • Jack Hawkins CIA Bay of Pigs trainer/planner (former Colonel)
  • Aleksandr Dmitrievich Ogorodnik code name TRIGON, Soviet diplomat who 'walked in' to work for CIA in Bogota Columbia in 80s and later in Moscow
  • Oleg Penkovsky GRU Colonel who became an agent in place for the CIA (after an attempt at contact via students in July 1960 on the Moskvoretsky Bridge in Moscow) and whose information was very important during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Influenced by the example of Colonel Charles Maclean Peeke, US Army, whom he met in Ankara Turkey ('55-'56) (see Schecter and Deriabin, The Spy Who Saved the World, Scribner's, 1992)
  • Pyotr Popov GRU Major who became an agent in place for the CIA beginning in 1953
  • Gary Powers pilot of U-2 which crashed in the Soviet Union. Exchanged for Colonel Abel after trial and conviction
  • Paul Redmond the 'George Smiley' of the CIA; helped uncover Ames
  • Konstantin Volkov Soviet diplomat in Turkey whose attempted defection to the US was betrayed (probably by Philby). He was kidnapped back to Moscow.
  • Diana Worthen CIA colleague of Ames in Mexico, reported suspicions about him in 90
  • Harriet Tubman
  • Fritz Kolbe German diplomat who passed secret Nazi documents to the US embassy in Berne from 1943 until 1945. Described by the CIA as the most important spy of the Second World War

Soviet Union (KGB)

  • Rudolf Abel
  • Aldrich Ames, CIA agent spying for the Soviet Union beginning in 1985 as a 'walk-in' to the Soviet Embassy in Washington DC
  • Rosario Ames, wife of Aldrich Ames
  • Elizabeth Bentley courier messenger for CPUSA spy rings in and around US East Coast in the 30s, testified about her activities in hearings in the 40s and 50s
  • George Blake, UK SIS officer who betrayed existence of the Berlin Tunnel under the Soviet sector and who probably betrayed Popov
  • Felix Bloch US State Department economic officer in Vienna (1981) probably blackmailed by Soviets into supplying information; not prosecuted quite likely because Hanssen warned Soviets about the investigation into him
  • Christopher John Boyce and Daulton Lee - A pair of American walk-in spies for the Soviet Union known as the Falcon and the Snowman.
  • Cambridge Five
    • Harold 'Kim' Philby eventually, a senior British Secret Service officer (autobiography is My Silent War, widely regarded to have been ghost written by the KGB)
    • Anthony Blunt art advisor to the Queen after WWII (see Miranda Carter, Anthony Blunt: His Lives, NY, Farrar Straus, 2001)
    • Guy Burgess
    • John Cairncross British Secret Service officer
    • Donald Maclean British diplomat
  • Larry Wu-Tai Chin CIA officer and Chinese agent for 33 years, discovered in 70s
  • Arnold Deutsch 30s 'recruiter' in UK, a Hungarian Jew who received a PhD at 24 in Vienna
  • William Fischer aka Rudolf Abel
  • Klaus Fuchs, physicist who supplied information about the British and American atomic bomb research to the Soviet Union
  • Theodore Hall, physicist who supplied information from Los Alamos during WWII, a NYC walk-in
  • Robert P Hanssen, FBI agent convicted of spying for the Soviet Union, betrayed tunnel under new Mt Alto Soviet Embassey in Washington DC; may have done most damage since Philby
  • Reino Hayhanen Finn who worked in the US as a Soviet spy directed by Rudolf Abel, used the VIC cypher, defected to the US
  • Edward Lee Howard ex CIA officer who sold info and escaped to Soviet Union
  • William Kampiles, sold KH-11 spy satellite info
  • Sergei Kondrashev KGB Rezident for Berlin at Karlshorst at the time of the Berlin Tunnel
  • Clayton J. Lonetree US Marine Embassy guard Sergeant suborned by female KGB agent ('Violetta Sanni') in Moscow, turned himself in in Dec 86, convicted 87
  • Alan Nunn May, physicist who supplied information about the British and American atomic bomb research to the Soviet Union
  • Theodor Maly 30's 'recruiter' in UK esp at Cambridge University
  • Rudolf Roessler chief of the very successful, and very odd, Lucy spy ring of WWII
  • Yuri Modin 30s 'recruiter' in UK
  • James Nicholson CIA officer who supplied information to the Soviets for a time in 1994
  • Alexander Orlov KGB advisor to the Republican government during the Spanish Civil War who defected to the United States in 1938.
  • Earl Edwin Pitts
  • Geoffrey Prime employee of GCHQ, UK cryptography agency
  • Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, American civilians executed for espionage for the Soviet Union
  • Alfred Redl Austrian General Staff Colonel who worked for Russian intelligence prior to WWI
  • Saville Sax college friend of Theodore Hall assisted with Hall's disclosure to the Soviets of Los Alamos research and development
  • Richard Sorge German 'journalist' who worked for the Soviet Union as a spy throughout East Asia in the 30's and 40's. He was also on the Abwehr rolls -- almost certainly falsely -- while in Japan in WWII.
  • John Anthony Walker US Navy senior enlisted man who spied for the Soviet Union for decades, enlisting family and friends to do so as well

Unknown affiliation

  • James Armistead
  • Mansfield Cummings 'C' of the UK SIS, earliest director
  • Ian Fleming worked in UK Naval Intelligence during World War II; author of a plan — not in the end carried out — for capturing Naval Enigma material: Operation Ruthless.
  • Reinhard Gehlen worked in German Army Intelligence on the Eastern Front in WWII, later director of West Germany's Intelligence Agency
  • Anatoli Golitsin
  • David Greenglass engineering draftsman who worked at Los Alamos in WWII, gave engineering data to his sister Ethel Rosenberg
  • Noor Inyat Khan, WWII, executed by the Nazis
  • Gordon Lonsdale
  • Ana Montes
  • Harold Nicholson
  • John Vassall
  • Michael Goleniewski Pole who defected to the West, exposed Blake as double agent
  • Mata Hari The infamous Dutch exotic dancer in World War I of questionable affiliation. She may or may not have been intentionally spying for Germany. Her naïveté sealed her fate; she was executed for spying in 1917.

Fictional spies

Espionage organizations

See also Intelligence agencies and Special Operations Executive

Intelligence disciplines

See List of intelligence gathering disciplines
  • SIGINT — Intelligence gathered by intercepting communications.
  • HUMINT — Intelligence gathered by a person on the ground.
  • ELINT — Intelligence gathered from electronic sensors.
  • OSINT — Intelligence gathered from open sources.
  • IMINT
  • MASINT

Espionage technology and techniques

Counter-espionage technology and techniques

  • TEMPEST — Protection devices for communication equipment.

See also


This is an Article on Espionage. Page Contains Information, Facts Details or Explanation Guide About Espionage


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