Spy story

Britain’s 'toughest secret agents’ during the Second World War who went behind enemy lines to seek revenge

After 15 months of hell, Alfred and Henry Newton were lucky to still be alive – but only just.

It was 11 April 1945 when American tanks arrived outside the Nazi concentration camp at Buchenwald in central Germany. A reconnaissance troop soon entered the camp, and among the prisoners they found were the two brothers.

They looked more like skeletons than “Britain’s toughest secret agents”, as a newspaper would label them in the 1950s. The British officers could barely walk, but suppressed emotion was also choking them, for they had been liberated.

I first came across their story in 2008 when I bought Alfred’s medals. He had served during the Second World War with the Special Operations Executive, the secret organisation set up in 1940 to insert spies and saboteurs behind enemy lines in Nazi-occupied Europe.

As a passionate historian of that war, I wanted to know more, not least why Alfred and his older brother – both former cabaret artists – had joined the SOE in the first place.

Spy story

The KGB's 3 most sensational operations

This was the largest and most complex intelligence operation in Soviet history. In 1981, the KGB and GRU [Soviet military intelligence] were entrusted with carrying out Operation Nuclear Missile Attack, [RYAN is its Russian acronym].

The purpose of RYAN was to find out about possible U.S. preparations for a nuclear strike against the USSR and to develop the best strategy to counter such an attack. The Soviet leadership's fears intensified soon after ardent anti-Communist Ronald Reagan came to power in Washington and toughened U.S. policy towards the USSR.

As part of the operation, the activities of Soviet intelligence agents living outside Warsaw Pact countries sharply increased. Surveillance was set up to watch those with the authority to give orders to launch a nuclear missile attack or who were responsible for launching ballistic or cruise missiles, as well as senior officials in the air force command of NATO countries. In addition, a whole network of "sleeper" agents was set up who were supposed to spring into action in the event of a nuclear war.

Spy story

Mystery surrounds Swiss arrest of suspected Russian spy

A suspected Russian agent was arrested and sentenced in Switzerland in January according to media reports. As details emerge about the case, the circumstances surrounding the conviction and eventual release remain mysterious.

According to the German language paper SonntagsZeitungexternal link, which acquired a summary of the charges, police officers stopped a man in Geneva in July 2019 who had fake license plates and was traveling with six cell phones, a drone, a camera and a laptop.

After a few months, an investigation by the federal prosecutor concluded that the man was a Russian spy. In January, the prosecutor sentenced him to a six-month prison sentence for espionage, without a public trial. Because the man was charged in pre-trial detention, he was released.

The short investigation time and the light punishment raise suspicions that the prosecutor wanted to close the case as quickly and quietly as possible in order to brush aside a diplomatically sensitive matter.

According to the paper, the man was on a mission to spy on dissidents or oligarchs, who fell out of favor with the Kremlin. Several parts of the document are blacked out but the smartphone messages from the investigation indicate that the man was a low-level officer in the Russian foreign intelligence service SVR.

Spy story

In search of the real Christine Keeler

Christine Keeler was just 19 when she became embroiled in a sex scandal that would bring down the British government. Not only was she vilified at the time, but the affair stalked her throughout her life. For the first time, a new drama reappraises her character by telling the story through her eyes, writes Tanya Gold.

The Profumo Affair, with its ingredients of sex, aristocrats and espionage, was a scandal so perfect it remains one of the most enduring in modern British political history. It is also a story that is often remembered as an overture to the Swinging Sixties - a tale of sexual liberation and hope, but one in which everyone who took part was punished.

It was 1961 in London and 19-year-old model Christine Keeler was sleeping with both John Profumo, 46, the Conservative Secretary of State for War, and Yevgeny Ivanov, 31, a naval attaché at the Soviet embassy, and a spy. Keeler's enabler was her friend Stephen Ward, an osteopath and amateur artist who moved in aristocratic circles and introduced her to both men.

Spy story

Thatcher’s Spy: MI5’s man in Sinn Féin looks back over his shoulder

History is, in many ways, a series of stories. Historical perspectives depend on who is telling the story, and on who is hearing it. Willie Carlin, the MI5 agent who worked within Sinn Féin in the 1970s and 1980s for the benefit of Margaret Thatcher’s government, is telling this particular story, and he tells it well, insofar as a story of troubled times can ever be well told.

Billed as a real-life tale of espionage worthy of John le Carré where the Cold War meets Northern Ireland’s so-called “Dirty” War, Thatcher’s Spy details Carlin’s existence in two worlds; the covert world of MI5 and the political and paramilitary realities of Sinn Féin and the IRA.

Carlin grew up in a working-class republican family in Derry but swam against the cultural tide of his peers and followed his father into the ranks of the British army in the 1960s. In the early 1970s, he made his return to his home city after numerous postings abroad, and was quickly embroiled in the conflict and chaos ravaging not only the city but the lives of his family, his friends and the wider Derry community.

Spy story

‘Chinese Spies’ Review: The People’s Secret Service

Mr. Faligot has been chronicling the activities of various intelligence agencies—a notoriously difficult subject to research—for almost 40 years. He estimates that at the height of the Cold War between 40% and 60% of Chinese diplomats were involved in intelligence, compared to 20% of their Russian counterparts. This in addition to the many Chinese students and business executives operating under what is known as “nonofficial cover.”

China has since become one of the world’s major intelligence players, especially in the area of signals intelligence, by eagerly forging alliances with whichever country serves its purpose. At first this was the Soviet Union, which in the 1920s and ’30s helped train many of China’s operatives. Then it was the U.S. and West Germany, which during the Cold War assisted China in monitoring the Soviet Union. Now Beijing is again aligned with Moscow in their common efforts to spy on the U.S.

According to Mr. Faligot, China’s intelligence services are focused on protecting the state, suppressing dissent within the state (internet users, for example, are required to register with the government), and involving itself in the domestic affairs of other countries. Each of the three services—state security (guoanbu), public security (gonganbu) and army intelligence (PLA2)—is appointed a technical director, who handles the daily operations, and a political commissar, who is responsible, we are told, “for ensuring that the organization’s ideological orientation conforms to the strategy decreed by the CCP.” Between them the three services ran—indeed, often owned—Beijing’s largest hotels, where all the public rooms and bedrooms were bugged. At the Beijing Hotel, for instance, “telephone ladies” were constantly on call, ready to translate whatever language was being intercepted.

Spy story

The Spy Who Failed

Reports that the CIA conducted an emergency exfiltration of a long-time human intelligence source who was highly placed within the Russian Presidential Administration sent shock waves throughout Washington, D.C. The source was said to be responsible for the reporting used by the former director of the CIA, John Brennan, in making the case that Russian President Vladimir Putin personally ordered Russian intelligence services to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election for the purpose of tipping the scales in favor of then-candidate Donald Trump. According to CNN’s Jim Sciutto, the decision to exfiltrate the source was driven in part by concerns within the CIA over President Trump’s cavalier approach toward handling classified information, including his willingness to share highly classified intelligence with Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov during a controversial visit to the White House in May 2017.

On closer scrutiny, however, this aspect of the story falls apart, as does just about everything CNN, The New York Times and other mainstream media outlets have reported. There was a Russian spy whose information was used to push a narrative of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election; this much appears to be true. Everything else that has been reported is either a mischaracterization of fact or an outright fabrication designed to hide one of the greatest intelligence failures in U.S. history — the use by a CIA director of intelligence data specifically manipulated to interfere in the election of an American president.

Spy story

Double-Edged Source: Why Alleged Kremlin Mole May Pose Danger to IC & Top Obama Officials

The latest spy story, broken by the CNN’s Jim Sciutto on Monday, is growing more and more detailed with one question remaining unanswered: Why did the US mainstream media rush to expose a former CIA mole in the Kremlin whose life, by their account, was in danger?

According to the stories told by CNN, The Washington Post, and The New York Times, the CIA extracted its "highly valuable" source in 2017.

These three flagships of the US MSM cited different reasons behind the move. While CNN and WaPo insisted the intelligence agency had been driven by the fear that President Trump might accidentally expose the asset, The New York Times revealed that the plan to evacuate the source had emerged under Barack Obama's presidency. The CIA later denounced CNN's version of the events as being "misguided" and simply "false".

...Commenting on the possible reasons behind the sudden exposé, Philip Giraldi, a former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer, does not rule out that it could be an intentional move by the White House and the CIA.

"The deliberate leak of the Smolenkov story is intended to provide cover for another, much more high level American spy in the Kremlin", the CIA veteran suggested. "The US government hopes that the disappearance of Smolenkov will end the search for a mole in Moscow, protecting the spy in place".

As for the coverage by the media, Giraldi continues, "it is to be expected that they would use the story to embarrass Trump".

Spy story

Virginia Residents Question Whether Their Neighbor Was A Russian Informant

As U.S. and Russian officials cast doubt on the accuracy of U.S. media reports that two years ago the CIA extracted a Russian intelligence asset who allegedly provided top-secret information on President Vladimir Putin, efforts to identify the man led to an estate an hour's drive southwest of Washington, D.C.

No one answered when an RFE/RL reporter rang the doorbell of 78 Partridge Lane in Stafford, Virginia, listed in public records as being owned by Oleg Smolenkov, the same name given by Kommersant and other Russian media as the alleged informant.

The drapes on the windows of the large home on a leafy cul-de-sac were pulled tight, and only a basketball court was visible in the back.

Homeowners in the neighborhood, described by one resident as full of current and former FBI and military personnel, were unable to positively identify the family that lived at the home.

Spy story

RUSSIA SCRAMBLES TO DENY 'HIGHEST LEVEL' ACCESS OF 'CIA SPY' EXTRACTED FROM MOSCOW IN 2017

The Russian government has been scrambling to address reports that a CIA spy with access to the highest levels of the Kremlin was extracted from the country in 2017, after years of feeding intelligence to Langley.

CNN reported on Monday that a Russian official—since named by the Russian Kommersant newspaper as Oleg Smolenkov—had served as a covert CIA source within Russia's presidential administration. According to The New York Times, Smolenkov had been on the U.S. payroll for decades.

But on Tuesday, senior Russian officials released statements characterizing Smolenkov as a low-level staffer who was fired from his post in 2017 before disappearing.

According to Kommersant, Smolenkov went missing along with his wife and children while on holiday in Montenegro in 2017, and is now believed to be living in Virginia.

Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov gave a blanket denial of any contact with Smolenkov. "I have never seen him, I have never met him, and I have neither kept track of his career nor his movements," the minister said, according to state news agency Tass.

Earlier on Tuesday, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov confirmed that Smolenkov had worked in the Russian Presidential Administration, but that "a few years ago he was dismissed through an internal instruction," Tass reported.

Spy story

Exclusive: US extracted top spy from inside Russia in 2017

In a previously undisclosed secret mission in 2017, the United States successfully extracted from Russia one of its highest-level covert sources inside the Russian government, multiple Trump administration officials with direct knowledge told CNN.
A person directly involved in the discussions said that the removal of the Russian was driven, in part, by concerns that President Donald Trump and his administration repeatedly mishandled classified intelligence and could contribute to exposing the covert source as a spy.
The decision to carry out the extraction occurred soon after a May 2017 meeting in the Oval Office in which Trump discussed highly classified intelligence with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and then-Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak. The intelligence, concerning ISIS in Syria, had been provided by Israel.
The disclosure to the Russians by the President, though not about the Russian spy specifically, prompted intelligence officials to renew earlier discussions about the potential risk of exposure, according to the source directly involved in the matter.
At the time, then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo told other senior Trump administration officials that too much information was coming out regarding the covert source, known as an asset. An extraction, or "exfiltration" as such an operation is referred to by intelligence officials, is an extraordinary remedy when US intelligence believes an asset is in immediate danger.

Spy story

Are Spies More Trouble Than They’re Worth?

Is intelligence intelligent? This is the question that runs or, rather, leaps through the mind of the reader struggling with Christopher Andrew’s encyclopedic work “The Secret World: A History of Intelligence” (Yale). Andrew, who is a longtime history don at Cambridge, begins his book—as long and thorough as Diarmaid MacCulloch’s classic “A History of Christianity,” though less violent—with one of the most appealing opening lines in recent nonfiction: “The first major figure in world literature to emphasize the importance of good intelligence was God.” The Israelites’ reconnaissance mission to the promised land of Canaan is the first stop in Andrew’s tour of four thousand years of spying; the last is the American failure to anticipate 9/11. For anyone with a taste for wide-ranging and shrewdly gossipy history—or, for that matter, for anyone with a taste for spy stories—Andrew’s is one of the most entertaining books of the past few years.

Spy story

An anti-fascist spy who defied Hitler's Nazis, was betrayed by Stalin

Dr. Richard Sorge, a German communist who penetrated the innermost political and military circles of the Japanese and German governments for a decade from the mid-1930s, only ever had one good thing to say about the Nazis. His earliest party writing (a turgid pamphlet on The Accumulation of Capital and Rosa Luxemburg) "was", he jokingly said, "so clumsy and immature I hoped the Nazis burned every last copy".

Everything else Sorge did, like stealing the secret war plans of the two biggest anti-communist World War II Axis powers, was dedicated to the defeat of fascism.

Journalist Owen Matthews begins his spy tale with a young Sorge, head full of the nationalistic and romantic notions of war typical of his petit-bourgeois upbringing, tasting disillusionment on his first day of action in World War I when his German student battalion was machine-gunned to shreds in an advance from the trenches.

A radical political transformation of Sorge was incubated in hospital as he recovered from three partially-amputated fingers (and a shattered leg that gave him a permanent limp). It came courtesy of a left-wing nurse who provided him with works by Karl Marx, Federick Engels and Georg Hegel ("the ladder to Marx").

Spy story

How Will Netflix Portray Israel’s Most Famous Spy?

Netflix’s The Spy is a six-episode series about real-life Israeli Mossad hero Eli Cohen. The Spy stars Sacha Baron Cohen, most famous for his 2006 adult-oriented comedy movie Borat, as the legendary Mossad agent, and will debut on September 6.

When Eli Cohen was publicly executed by the government of Syria on May 18, 1965, it was clear to Israelis and Syrians that he had succeeded in becoming a friend of the president of Syria, and had penetrated the innermost Syrian government circles. What was not yet known, however, was that he had gathered the intelligence that would later save the State of Israel from being destroyed.

More than any other one man, Eli Cohen, an Egyptian-born Jew, earned the Mossad its reputation as one of the best intelligence services in the world, and paved the way for Israel to win on the Golan front in the Six Day War of June 1967.

Spy story

True tales of treachery - stories of real spies, lies and the KGB

The most extensive and dangerous network ever uncovered was the Cambridge Five.

Recruited at the city's university, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt and Kim Philby worked their way into the heart of the establishment - while passing secrets to their Russian bosses.

The identity of the fifth Cambridge spy has never been revealed.

Thousands of confidential documents made their way to Moscow. But in 1951 - as the net closed in on Burgess and Maclean - they were tipped off by Philby, who had been the head of British intelligence's counter espionage unit.

The pair disappeared, surfacing five years later in Moscow.

It took years before the roles of all five were revealed and decades more for the British security services to fully recover.

Spy story

True story behind Red Joan - the KGB spy who leaked British secrets for 40 years

Norwood was the most important British female agent in the whole of the KGB's history as well as the longest-serving of all the Soviet spies in Britain.

Her KGB file gave her a glowing review calling her "committed, reliable and disciplined agent, striving to be of the utmost assistance.

"She handed over a very large number of documents of a scientific and technical nature, and these found practical application."

But what Melita exactly did is up for debate.

The how is known, the what is mostly conjecture, which makes Judi Dench's film a controversial adaptation - it opts for a more romantic take on the tale that has been called everything from "preposterous" to "inaccurate".

Spy story

Operation Whitewash: Judi Dench’s latest role sees her play a suburban widow who ‘nobly’ leaked secrets to Soviets to ‘ensure world peace’…but who in reality gave Russia the keys to the atom bomb

In 1932, Norwood, aged 20, began working in the clerical department of a metallurgy research group — the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association (BN-FMRA) — where she remained until her retirement in 1972.

Her appointment had fateful consequences during the forthcoming nuclear age, as BN-FMRA soon developed close links with the British top-secret project to develop a nuclear weapon codenamed ‘Tube Alloys’. Two years later, Norwood started to spy for the Soviet NKVD — the forerunner of the KGB.

The man who recruited her? None other than Andrew Rothstein, the son of Theodore — the founder of the CPGB. 

Tellingly, as Norwood would later admit to her biographer, David Burke, in 2000, it was she who approached the Russians, and not the other way round.

‘I must have thought if any of the work the BN-FMRA was doing, not secret stuff, might be useful,’ she said. ‘But I didn’t immediately think of pinching it. I made the approach.’

So began almost four decades of treachery, motivated by what Professor Christopher Andrew accurately describes as a ‘myth-image of the Soviet Union which bore little relationship to the brutal reality of Stalinist rule’.

Spy story

An Impeccable Spy — a thrilling biography of Stalin’s secret agent

Richard Sorge was the Soviet spy who stole one of the biggest secrets of the second world war: the precise details of Hitler’s invasion of the USSR in June 1941. Through brilliant espionage “tradecraft” that involved penetrating the highest military and political levels in Germany and Japan, Sorge supplied Moscow with the battle plans of Operation Barbarossa weeks before it happened. History is full of what ifs. Sorge and his spy ring might have changed the direction of the war. But Stalin would not believe Hitler was planning to invade. Though he was also receiving similar warnings from other Soviet sources, as well as British and US ones, the most suspicious of men would not see he could be betrayed. The Soviet leader distrusted Sorge, convinced his most able and loyal agent was a traitor on the verge of defecting. Stalin relied more than most dictators on secret intelligence but seldom trusted his spies — especially if they told him something he didn’t want to hear. He made no extra defence provisions and Russia was almost knocked out of the war within days. It was one of the worst military mistakes of all time.

Spy story

Streisand Effect? UK Government Solicitor Worried About FBI/MI5 Infiltrator Book

'The Accidental Spy', by Sean O'Driscoll, is published this week by Mirror Books.

A book about David Rupert, the FBI and MI5 agent working inside Northern Irish Republican terror groups, has attracted the attention of the UK Government Solicitor.

Rupert — a 6'5, 21-stone former wrestler from Florida, who managed a trucking company in upstate New York — was recruited by the domestic UK and US intelligence to infiltrate the Continuity IRA, and later the Real IRA.

In a letter — seen by the Belfast Telegraph — sent by the UK Government Solicitor to the book's publishers, he expresses concern the book may contain "sensitive information" about the activities of Rupert which remain "strictly confidential", and asks for a copy of the book to be supplied urgently so the Department "can take instruction as to the extent any disclosures may put the personal safety of others at risk, or otherwise be damaging to national security".

Spy story

When the KGB Wanted You Dead, This Is How They Killed You

The KGB Spy Museum, which had a soft opening in early January on West 14th Street in New York City, calls itself “The Largest KGB Spy Collection in the World.”

It’s in a long narrow street-level space with overhead pipes which previously housed a contemporary art gallery, and its ominous contents live up to the billing.

Installations include a wooden sculpture, colored like a child’s toy, of Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s secret police capo and rapist of teenage girls, standing above a KGB safe, spilling with rubles. Another Beria, this time a bespectacled white marble bust, sits above a replica of the killer umbrella with which Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian dissident, was shot with a ricin pellet on London’s Waterloo Bridge in 1978. He died three days later.

The KGB Spy Museum, which had a soft opening in early January on West 14th Street in New York City, calls itself “The Largest KGB Spy Collection in the World.”

It’s in a long narrow street-level space with overhead pipes which previously housed a contemporary art gallery, and its ominous contents live up to the billing.

Installations include a wooden sculpture, colored like a child’s toy, of Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s secret police capo and rapist of teenage girls, standing above a KGB safe, spilling with rubles. Another Beria, this time a bespectacled white marble bust, sits above a replica of the killer umbrella with which Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian dissident, was shot with a ricin pellet on London’s Waterloo Bridge in 1978. He died three days later.