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The 10 best real-life spies in pictures | Culture

The 10 best real-life spies – in pictures

From Melita Norwood and Klaus Fuchs to Francis Walsingham and Harold 'Kim' Philby

• Red Joan, Jennie Rooney's novel inspired by the true story of Melita Norwood, is published by Chatto & Windus and available from the Guardian bookshop

Jennie Rooney

Sat 13 Apr 2013 16.00 BST First published on Sat 13 Apr 2013 16.00 BST

  • Melita Norwood

    1912–2005She was the seemingly innocuous assistant to the director of one of Britain’s atomic research centres, who coolly passed the secrets of the atom bomb to Russia for 37 years, before finally being identified in 1999. Daughter of a Latvian-born father and a communist-sympathising mother, she became known in the press as “the spy who came in from the Co-Op” as a result of the shopping bags she was carrying when her true allegiance was exposed at the age of 87. Her initial response: “Oh dear. I thought I had got away with it.”

  • Fritz Joubert Duquesne

    1877–1956A native South African, Duquesne was disgusted by the actions of the British army during the Boer war, in particular Lord Kitchener’s scorched earth policy and the imprisonment of his mother and sister in concentration camps. After a stint as the personal hunter of Theodore Roosevelt while on safari in Africa, he became a German spy in 1914. Disguised as a science researcher, he planted time bombs on numerous British ships, faked his own death and later claimed he had been responsible for the sinking of the ship carrying Kitchener on his fatal trip to Russia in 1916.

  • Virginia Hall

    1906–1982A US-born volunteer with the Special Operations Executive during the second world war, Hall operated in occupied France. She co-ordinated the activities of the Resistance in Vichy working as a correspondent for the New York Post, and appeared on the Gestapo’s “most wanted” list as “the limping lady”. This referred to the fact that she had shot herself in the foot in 1932, causing her lower leg to be amputated and replaced with a prosthetic limb (named “Cuthbert”), in which she hid numerous documents

  • Klaus Fuchs

    1911–1988A German nuclear physicist who came to England in 1933, Fuchs worked on the top-secret British atom bomb project, codenamed "Tube Alloys", and later on the American Manhattan Project. He was arrested and imprisoned in 1950 after it became clear that he was passing information to the USSR, motivated by anti-Nazi feelings and a complicated view of how best to achieve postwar equilibrium. According to reports, he was an extremely academic and gentle man; he once drew a diagram of the workings of a spin-washer on a prison laundry receipt to demonstrate its workings to his fellow prisoners

  • Belle Boyd

    1844–1900Born in Virginia, Maria Isabella “Belle” Boyd became a spy for the Confederates at the age of 17, after having been put under guard for shooting a drunken Union soldier who, according to her memoirs, insulted both her and her mother. “We ladies were obliged to go armed in order to protect ourselves as best we might from insult and outrage.” Charming and beautiful, she extracted secrets from the Unionist sentry charged with her imprisonment. “To him,” she wrote, “I am indebted for some very remarkable effusions, some withered flowers, and a great deal of important information.”

  • Francis Walsingham

    c1532–1590Move over, Thomas Cromwell; Walsingham was the ultimate Tudor spymaster. Principal secretary to Elizabeth I and a staunch Protestant, he made it his business to stamp out Catholicism by any means necessary. His record is formidable: he intercepted letters, employed professional forgers of seals and ordered the torture and execution of Mary, Queen of Scots and many poor old Catholic priests, along with numerous other suspected conspirators. If history weren’t always written by the victors, she’d have ended up as Bloody Queen Elizabeth

  • Sidney Reilly

    1873–1925Dubbed the “Ace of Spies” and made into a household name through the writings of his friend Robert Bruce Lockhart, Reilly was the prototype for Fleming’s James Bond. A known womaniser, many of the exploits he claims to have performed are unverifiable, but he is most famous for his involvement in a British-backed plot to overthrow Lenin’s Bolshevik government in 1918 with the help of the Latvian army charged with guarding the Kremlin. This plot earned him a death sentence in absentia, which was finally carried out when he returned to Soviet soil in 1925

  • Harold “Kim” Philby

    1912–1988Taking his nickname from the character in Rudyard Kipling’s picaresque novel, Philby came to inhabit his appellation. He became a communist at Cambridge during the early 1930s and is the most famous of the “Cambridge Five”. He rose to be head of the Soviet counterespionage section of the Secret Intelligence Service, was awarded an OBE and, for a while, his influence in the upper echelons of power was so staggering that Stalin refused to believe it was true. He defected to the Soviet Union in 1963 and remained there until his death

  • Oleg Gordievsky

    1938–presentThe only spy I have ever actually met, Gordievsky was the London resident for the KGB in the 1980s, during which time he was in contact with the British secret service. Disillusioned with Soviet politics after the Prague Spring, he was one of the highest-ranking KGB officers ever to work for western intelligence. After coming under suspicion as a result of information given to the KGB by Aldrich Ames, he was recalled to Moscow and interrogated. He escaped with the help of the British – smuggled out during his morning jog. Like Reilly, he was sentenced to death by the Russian authorities in absentia

  • Ursula Kuczynski

    1907–2000A German Jewish communist, Kuczynski committed to the cause from an early age. In 1930, she moved to China, where she practised radio techniques, and subsequently lived in Switzerland and England, before fleeing to East Berlin in 1950 after the arrest of Klaus Fuchs, one of the spies she was running for the KGB. She later became a writer of children’s books. from www.cia.gov
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    Martina Birk

    Update: 2024-05-27

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