Harold Adrian Russell "Kim" Philby was a British intelligence officer and a spy for the Soviet Union. In 1963, he was revealed to be a member of the Cambridge Five, a spy ring that had divulged British secrets to the Soviets during World War II and in the early stages of the Cold War. Of the five, Philby is believed to have been the most successful in providing secret information to the Soviets.
Edward Arnold Chapman was an English criminal and wartime spy. During the Second World War he offered his services to Nazi Germany as a spy and subsequently became a British double agent. His British Secret Service handlers codenamed him Agent Zigzag in acknowledgement of his erratic personal history.
The Cambridge Five was a ring of spies in the United Kingdom that passed information to the Soviet Union during the Second World War and the Cold War and was active from the 1930s until at least the early 1950s. None of the known members were ever prosecuted for spying. The number and membership of the ring emerged slowly, from the 1950s onwards.
Operation Mincemeat was a successful British deception operation of the Second World War to disguise the 1943 Allied invasion of Sicily. Two members of British intelligence obtained the body of Glyndwr Michael, a tramp who died from eating rat poison, dressed him as an officer of the Royal Marines and placed personal items on him identifying him as the fictitious Captain William Martin. Correspondence between two British generals that suggested that the Allies planned to invade Greece and Sardinia, with Sicily as merely the target of a feint, was also placed on the body.
Operation Goldeneye was an Allied stay-behind plan during the Second World War to monitor Spain after a possible alliance between Francisco Franco and the Axis powers, and to undertake sabotage operations. The plan was formed by Commander Ian Fleming of the Naval Intelligence Division (NID). No German takeover of Spain took place, nor an invasion of Gibraltar, and the plan was shelved in 1943. Fleming later used the name for his Jamaican home where he wrote the James Bond stories.
Ewen Edward Samuel Montagu was a British judge, Naval intelligence officer, and author.
Captain Alan Hugh Hillgarth (1899–1978) was a British adventure novelist and member of the intelligence services, perhaps best known for his activities in Spain during and after the Spanish Civil War. Hillgarth appears as one of the actual historical figures in C. J. Sansom's 2006 novel, Winter in Madrid, and also in María Dueñas's 2009 novel, El tiempo entre costuras, as well its Spanish-language 2013 television adaptation.
The Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography was established in 2003 in memory of Elizabeth Longford (1906-2002), the British author, biographer and historian. The £5,000 prize is awarded annually for a historical biography published in the preceding year.
John Nicholas Rede Elliott was an MI6 intelligence officer. His MI6 career was notable for his involvement with the Lionel Crabb affair in the 1950s and the flight of double agent Kim Philby to Moscow in 1963.
Ronald Thomas Reed was a BBC radio engineer who became an MI5 officer in 1940, and ran double agents during World War II.
Major Karl-Erich Kühlenthal was a German spy and one of the most senior Abwehr agents in Spain during World War II.
Johann-Nielsen Jebsen, nicknamed "Johnny", was an anti-Nazi German intelligence officer and British double agent during World War II. Jebsen recruited Dušan Popov to the Abwehr and through him later joined the Allied cause. Kidnapped from Lisbon by the Germans shortly before the Normandy landings, Jebsen was tortured in prison and spent time in a concentration camp before disappearing; he was presumed killed at the end of the war.
Operation Waterfall was part of Operation Barclay, which was a deception to try to trick the Germans into thinking the Allies would land elsewhere in the Mediterranean other than Sicily, where they were going to land. It involved creating a decoy army in the eastern Mediterranean to make it look like they were targeting the Balkans. The Anglo-American force also created some dummy inflatable tanks and vehicles.
James Smith & Sons is an umbrella shop in London. The premises in New Oxford Street is Grade II* listed.
The Man Who Never Was is a 1953 book by Ewen Montagu about the World War II Operation Mincemeat. Montagu played a leading role in the 1943 scheme to deceive the Germans about the planned Allied invasion of Sicily. The scheme entailed releasing a dead body just off the coast of Spain, where strong currents caused it to drift ashore in an area where a skilled German secret agent was known to operate. The corpse was to appear to be the victim of an airplane crash, the non-existent Royal Marine Captain William Martin, who had letters in a briefcase that hinted at a forthcoming Allied invasion of Greece and Sardinia, rather than the obvious target of Sicily.
Alexis Freiherr von Rönne was a German Army colonel and senior intelligence analyst. He became one of Hitler's favoured officers in the Abwehr, despite secretly being of anti-Nazi persuasion.
The Great Betrayal may refer to:
The faked sabotage at De Havilland Factory was a successful British deception operation of the Second World War at the De Havilland Mosquito aircraft factory in Hatfield, England. The fake sabotage was conducted during the night of January 29–30, 1943 and was designed to fool German reconnaissance aircraft into believing that a large bomb had detonated inside the factory's power plant. With the help of Jasper Maskelyne, a professional magician, and a team of camouflage experts, replica sub-transformers were created out of wood and papier-mâché, buildings were camouflaged, and debris was littered around the plant to create the appearance from the air that it was damaged by an explosion. Eddie Chapman, a British double agent, was used to inform the Abwehr of the success of the "attack", which is what his German handlers sent him to England to do. The ruse proved successful in fooling the Abwehr, and Chapman was even awarded the Iron Cross as a reward for his work.
SAS: Rogue Heroes is a 2022 British historical drama television series created by Steven Knight, which depicts the origins of the British Army Special Air Service (SAS) during the Western Desert Campaign of World War II. The storyline is a broadly accurate representation of real events, as described by Ben Macintyre in his 2016 book of the same name.
Charles Christopher Cholmondeley was a British intelligence officer known for his leading role in Operation Mincemeat, a critical military deception operation which misdirected German forces' attention away from the Allied invasion of Sicily in Operation Husky.
