Cold War espionage describes the intelligence gathering activities during the Cold War between the Western allies and the Eastern Bloc. Both relied on a wide variety of military and civilian agencies in this pursuit.
The Venona project was a United States counterintelligence program initiated during World War II by the United States Army's Signal Intelligence Service and later absorbed by the National Security Agency (NSA), that ran from February 1, 1943, until October 1, 1980. It was intended to decrypt messages transmitted by the intelligence agencies of the Soviet Union. Initiated when the Soviet Union was an ally of the US, the program continued during the Cold War, when the Soviet Union was considered an enemy.
Julius Rosenberg and Ethel Rosenberg were an American married couple who were convicted of spying for the Soviet Union, including providing top-secret information about American radar, sonar, jet propulsion engines, and nuclear weapon designs. Convicted of espionage in 1951, they were executed by the federal government of the United States in 1953 at Sing Sing in Ossining, New York, becoming the first American civilians to be executed for such charges and the first to be executed during peacetime. Other convicted co-conspirators were sentenced to prison, including Ethel's brother, David Greenglass, Harry Gold, and Morton Sobell. Klaus Fuchs, a German scientist working at Los Alamos Laboratory, was convicted in the United Kingdom.
Aldrich Hazen Ames is an American former CIA counterintelligence officer who was convicted of espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union and Russia in 1994. He is serving a life sentence, without the possibility of parole, in the Federal Correctional Institution in Terre Haute, Indiana. Ames was known to have compromised more highly classified CIA assets than any other officer until Robert Hanssen, who was arrested seven years later in 2001.
Oleg Antonovich Gordievsky, CMG is a former colonel of the KGB who became KGB resident-designate (rezident) and bureau chief in London.
In espionage jargon, a mole is a long-term spy who is recruited before having access to secret intelligence, subsequently managing to get into the target organization. However, it is popularly used to mean any long-term clandestine spy or informant within an organization. In police work, a mole is an undercover law-enforcement agent who joins an organization in order to collect incriminating evidence about its operations and to eventually charge its members.
Rudolf Ivanovich Abel, real name William August Fisher, was a Soviet intelligence officer. He adopted his alias when arrested on charges of conspiracy by the FBI in 1957.
Oleg Danilovich Kalugin is a former KGB general. He was during a time, head of KGB political operations in the United States and later a critic of the agency. After being convicted of spying for the West in absentia during a trial in Moscow, he remained in the US and was sworn in as a citizen on 4 August 2003.
The International Spy Museum is an independent non-profit history museum which documents the tradecraft, history, and contemporary role of espionage. It holds the largest collection of international espionage artifacts on public display. The museum opened in 2002 in the Penn Quarter neighborhood of Washington, D.C., and relocated to L'Enfant Plaza in 2019.
Morris Cohen, also known by his alias Peter Kroger, was an American convicted of espionage for the Soviet Union. His wife Lona was also an agent. They became spies because of their communist beliefs.
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.
Joel Barr, also Iozef Veniaminovich Berg and Joseph Berg, was part of the Soviet Atomic Spy Ring.
Atomic spies or atom spies were people in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada who are known to have illicitly given information about nuclear weapons production or design to the Soviet Union during World War II and the early Cold War. Exactly what was given, and whether everyone on the list gave it, are still matters of some scholarly dispute. In some cases, some of the arrested suspects or government witnesses had given strong testimonies or confessions which they recanted later or said were fabricated. Their work constitutes the most publicly well-known and well-documented case of nuclear espionage in the history of nuclear weapons. At the same time, numerous nuclear scientists wanted to share the information with the world scientific community, but this proposal was firmly quashed by the United States government.
The Silvermaster File of the United States' Federal Bureau of Investigation is a 162-volume compendium totalling 26,000 pages of documents relating to the FBI's investigation of GRU and NKVD moles inside the U.S. federal government both before and during the Cold War.
The Committee for State Security, abbreviated as KGB, was the main security agency of the Soviet Union from 1954 to 1991. It was the direct successor of preceding Soviet secret police agencies including the Cheka, OGPU, and NKVD. Attached to the Council of Ministers, it was the chief government agency of "union-republican jurisdiction", carrying out internal security, foreign intelligence, counter-intelligence and secret police functions. Similar agencies operated in each of the republics of the Soviet Union aside from the Russian SFSR, where the KGB was headquartered, with many associated ministries, state committees and state commissions.
The Spy Museum is the world's first public museum of international espionage, located in Tampere, Finland. The museum was founded in 1998. The idea of the museum was invented by Teppo Turja, who founded the museum. The museum is the only one of its kind in Europe, besides Spy Museum Berlin.
Russian espionage in the United States has occurred since at least the Cold War, and likely well before. According to the United States government, by 2007 it had reached Cold War levels.
The Berlin Spy Museum is a private museum in Berlin which was created by former journalist Franz-Michael Günther. The museum opened to the public on 19 September 2015. Günther's aspirations were to create a museum devoted to the history of spies and espionage in the former spy capital of Germany. The museum is located in the central area of Potsdamer Platz, formerly known as the "death strip", as it lies on the perimeters of the wall which once divided East and West Berlin. The museum acts as an educational institution, with its permanent exhibitions bridging together centuries of espionage stories and tactics, immersing visitors in a multi-media experience. The museum particularly focuses on the World Wars and the Cold War through a range of a 1000 different exhibits and artefacts. Since its opening in 2015, 1,000,000 people have visited the museum and recently in 2020 it was nominated for the European Museum of the Year Award. The Berlin Spy Museum is partnered with the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C., and many of the artefacts and installations within the museum have captured media attention around the world.
Spyscape is a contemporary entertainment and education brand focused on secrets. Spyscape's physical HQ in New York City is a 60,000-square-foot interactive museum created by London-based private investment group Archimedia and designed by Sir David Adjaye.
