John Herbert King, alias 'MAG', was a British Foreign Office cypher clerk who provided Foreign Office communications to the Soviet Union between 1935 and 1937. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison as a spy in October 1939. [1]
King was recruited by the Foreign Office as a temporary clerk in 1934 and sent to the British Delegation at the League of Nations in Geneva. There his financial problems made him vulnerable to an approach by Henri Pieck, a Dutch citizen who was working for Soviet intelligence. Pieck recruited him as a spy, pretending the information he gave was only to be used for commercial advantage by a Dutch bank. King returned to London in early 1935. Pieck continued to run the case by visits to London until 1936, when the job of running King was transferred to Theodore Maly. King continued to pass copies of Foreign Office telegraphic traffic to Maly until June 1937, when Maly was recalled to Moscow. In September 1939 the Soviet defector Walter Krivitsky exposed King's name as a spy for the Soviet Union to the British Embassy in Washington. Coincidentally a business associate of Pieck's in London reported suspicious activities by him and described a man like King who had given information to Pieck. King was subsequently interrogated, resulting in a confession.
Although the official British archives only implicate King with passing information to the Soviets from 1935 to 1937, information passed on by King is elsewhere credited with giving Joseph Stalin valuable insight into British diplomatic activities aimed at containing Adolf Hitler as late as 1939. At times this information was passed on by the Soviets to the German Embassy in London, with the aim of increasing the tension between Britain and Germany. [2] Sometimes as little as 5 hours elapsed between a telegram being received at the Foreign Office and a summary of its contents being transmitted to Berlin. [3]
Ulrich Friedrich-Wilhelm Joachim von Ribbentrop was a German politician and diplomat who served as Minister of Foreign Affairs of Nazi Germany from 1938 to 1945.
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.
Richard Sorge was a German journalist and Soviet military intelligence officer who was active before and during World War II and worked undercover as a German journalist in both Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan. His codename was "Ramsay" (Рамза́й).
Fritz Kolbe was a German diplomat who became a spy against the Nazis in World War II.
Robert Gilbert Vansittart, 1st Baron Vansittart,, known as Sir Robert Vansittart between 1929 and 1941, was a senior British diplomat in the period before and during the Second World War. He was Principal Private Secretary to the Prime Minister from 1928 to 1930 and Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office from 1930 to 1938 and later served as Chief Diplomatic Adviser to the British Government. He is best remembered for his opposition to appeasement and his strong stance against Germany both during and after the Second World War. Vansittart was also a published poet, novelist and playwright.
As early as the 1920s, the Soviet Union, through its GRU, OGPU, NKVD, and KGB intelligence agencies, used Russian and foreign-born nationals, as well as Communists of American origin, to perform espionage activities in the United States, forming various spy rings. Particularly during the 1940s, some of these espionage networks had contact with various U.S. government agencies. These Soviet espionage networks illegally transmitted confidential information to Moscow, such as information on the development of the atomic bomb. Soviet spies also participated in propaganda and disinformation operations, known as active measures, and attempted to sabotage diplomatic relationships between the U.S. and its allies.
Rudolf "Dolf" von Scheliha was a German aristocrat, cavalry officer and diplomat who became a resistance fighter and anti-Nazi who was linked to the Red Orchestra.
Ivan Mikhailovich Maisky was a Soviet diplomat, historian and politician who served as the Soviet Union's ambassador to the United Kingdom from 1932 to 1943, including much of the period of the Second World War.
Erich Kordt, was a German diplomat who was involved in the German Resistance to the regime of Adolf Hitler.
Pierre Jules Cot, was a French politician and leading figure in the Popular Front government of the 1930s.
Brian Goold-Verschoyle was an Irish member of the Communist Party of Great Britain who was recruited by the Soviet NKVD as a courier between its moles and their handlers in London. After being sent as a radio technician to Republican Spain, in 1937 he revealed his disaffection with the Moscow party line. Abducted by being lured aboard a Soviet freighter, he was smuggled to the USSR and died as a prisoner in the Gulag in 1942. He is one of only three Irish people who can be formally identified as victims of Stalin's Great Purge.
The Abwehr was the German military-intelligence service for the Reichswehr and the Wehrmacht from 1920 to 1945. Although the 1919 Treaty of Versailles prohibited the Weimar Republic from establishing an intelligence organization of their own, they formed an espionage group in 1920 within the Ministry of Defence, calling it the Abwehr. The initial purpose of the Abwehr was defense against foreign espionage: an organizational role that later evolved considerably. Under General Kurt von Schleicher the individual military services' intelligence units were combined and, in 1929, centralized under Schleicher's Ministeramt within the Ministry of Defence, forming the foundation for the more commonly understood manifestation of the Abwehr.
Ernest Holloway Oldham was, a British traitor, employed as a cipher clerk and cypher expert in the British Foreign Office. Along with his wife Lucy Oldham he spied for the Soviet Union between 1929 and his death in 1933, in return for money. His job gave him access to highly sensitive communications between Britain and it’s foreign embassies, and the material he passed to his handler Dmitri Bystrolyotov was highly regarded in Moscow. He had no apparent ideological interest in helping the Soviet Union, but was driven by the large amounts of money paid to him to betray his country. By 1933, the pressures of his activities had led to his sacking from the Foreign Office, alcoholism, domestic violence and ultimately suicide.
The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact was an August 23, 1939, agreement between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany colloquially named after Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov and German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. The treaty renounced warfare between the two countries. In addition to stipulations of non-aggression, the treaty included a secret protocol dividing several eastern European countries between the parties.
The foreign relations of Third Reich were characterized by the territorial expansionist ambitions of Germany's dictator Adolf Hitler and the promotion of the ideologies of anti-communism and antisemitism within Germany and its conquered territories. The Nazi regime oversaw Germany's rise as a militarist world power from the state of humiliation and disempowerment it had experienced following its defeat in World War I. From the late 1930s to its defeat in 1945, Germany was the most formidable of the Axis powers - a military alliance between Imperial Japan, Fascist Italy, and their allies and puppet states. Adolf Hitler made most of the major diplomatic policy decisions, while foreign minister Konstantin von Neurath handled routine business.
The Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), commonly known as MI6, is the foreign intelligence service of the United Kingdom, tasked mainly with the covert overseas collection and analysis of human intelligence on foreign nationals in support of its Five Eyes partners. SIS is one of the British intelligence agencies and the Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service ("C") is directly accountable to the Foreign Secretary.
Kathleen Maria Margaret Sissmore, MBE (1898–1982), was known as Jane Sissmore and then Jane Archer after her marriage in 1939. In 1929 she became the first female officer in Britain's Security Service, MI5, and was still their only woman officer at the time of her dismissal for insubordination in 1940. She had been responsible for investigations into Soviet intelligence and subversion. She then joined the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), but when Kim Philby, later to be exposed as a double agent, became her boss he reduced her investigative work because he feared she might uncover his treachery.
Sexpionage is the involvement of sexual activity, intimacy, romance, or seduction to conduct espionage. Sex, or the possibility of sex, can function as a distraction, incentive, cover story, or unintended part of any intelligence operation.
Percy Eded Glading was an English communist and a co-founder of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). He was also a trade union activist, an author, and a spy for the Soviet Union against Britain, an activity for which he was convicted and imprisoned.
Aleksandr Mikhaylovich Korotkov was a Soviet intelligence officer and operative with the rank of major general. He became chief of foreign reconnaissance in the Soviet occupation zone of Germany in 1947 and chief of the KGB while he was stationed in East Germany in 1957. Korotkov was most notable as the intelligence officer who recruited Arvid Harnack in September 1940 and Harro Schulze-Boysen later in Berlin during the Nazi regime, effectively changing a resistance organisation who fought against Hitler into the espionage organisation known as the Red Orchestra. Korotkov was an associate of Ivan Serov.