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Manfred Ramminger (15 December 1930 [1] - November 1997 [2] ) was a German architect, playboy, and KGB agent. He is noted for his theft of an American AIM-9 Sidewinder Infrared homing air-to-air missile which he then brought to the Soviet Union.
Manfred Ramminger was born in Groß-Scharellen in East Prussia on 15 December 1930 to a bricklayer and his wife. His family fled the area in 1945 after the Soviet invasion of East Prussia, and settled in the town of Krefeld. After graduating high school, Ramminger studied engineering with minor success, being involved in a small construction company in the 1950s before his partner left the business. [1]
Ramminger also had a reputation for being a playboy. He was known for driving a blue Maserati race car, winning a dozen trophies in various races, and having a possible affair with a married woman. [1]
In 1951, Polish locksmith and concentration camp survivor Josef Linowski (or Linowsky [3] ) was living in West Germany. While visiting family in Poland, he was recruited by the Polish Ministry of Public Security. [3] He then recruited Ramminger as well as Wolf-Diethardt Knoppe, who had been a West German military pilot since 1956. [4]
Linowski was given a number of tasks by his superiors. He was first ordered to steal a Litton LM-II navigation box from the Neuburg Air Base,[ clarify ] and later to steal a Phantom aircraft. [3] Realizing the difficulty of such a task, Linowski decided instead to steal a Sidewinder missile.
On 22 October 1967, the trio entered the Neuburg base with Knoppe's base security pass, taking advantage of the thick fog that evening. They identified the missile in an ammunition depot and put it in a wheelbarrow, driving down the entire runway before placing it in Ramminger's Mercedes Sedan outside the base. It was too big to lay flat, so Ramminger broke the rear window to poke it through. To avoid police attention, he covered the missile with a carpet and noted the protrusion with a piece of red cloth, which was required by law. [5]
Returning to Krefeld, some 200 miles away, Ramminger dismantled and packed the missile for Moscow through airmail. Due to the extra weight, the shipping costs came out to $79.25. [5] The crate was to be flown directly to Moscow, [5] with Ramminger boarding the same plane. However, due to an error, the crates were returned to Düsseldorf. Ramminger had to fly back to Germany and redeem the packages[ contradictory ] before boarding the next flight to the Soviet Union. [3]
Ramminger and his aides were arrested by West German authorities in 1968 after Knoppe boasted about the heist while drunk in a bar. [5] Ramminger and Linowski were sentenced to four years in prison, and Knoppe was sentenced to three years and three months on 7 October 1970. [6] However, Ramminger was released in August 1971 in a prisoner swap for Western spies. [3]
The Cardinal of the Kremlin is an espionage thriller novel, written by Tom Clancy and released on May 20, 1988. A direct sequel to The Hunt for Red October (1984), it features CIA analyst Jack Ryan as he extracts CARDINAL, the agency's highest placed agent in the Soviet government who is being pursued by the KGB, as well as the Soviet intelligence agency's director. The novel also features the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), a real-life missile-defense system developed by the United States during that time, and its Russian counterpart. The book debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list.
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.
Earl Edwin Pitts is a former FBI special agent who was convicted of espionage for selling information to Soviet and Russian intelligence services.
Oleg Antonovich Gordievsky, CMG is a former colonel of the KGB who became KGB resident-designate (rezident) and bureau chief in London.
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.
The First Main Directorateof the Committee for State Security under the USSR council of ministers was the organization responsible for foreign operations and intelligence activities by providing for the training and management of covert agents, intelligence collection administration, and the acquisition of foreign and domestic political, scientific and technical intelligence for the Soviet Union.
Oleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky, codenamed Hero and Yoga was a Soviet military intelligence (GRU) colonel during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Penkovsky informed the United States and the United Kingdom about Soviet military secrets, including the appearance and footprint of Soviet intermediate-range ballistic missile installations and the weakness of the Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile program. This information was decisive in allowing the US to recognize that the Soviets were placing missiles in Cuba before most of them were operational. It also gave US President John F. Kennedy, during the Cuban Missile Crisis that followed, valuable information about Soviet weakness that allowed him to face down Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and resolve the crisis without a nuclear war.
Firefox is a thriller novel written by Craig Thomas and published in 1977. The Cold War plot involves an attempt by the CIA and MI6 to steal a highly advanced experimental Soviet fighter aircraft. The chief protagonist is fighter pilot turned spy Mitchell Gant. The book was subject to a 1982 film adaptation produced and directed by Clint Eastwood who also played the role of Gant in the film.
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.
Lona Cohen, born Leontine Theresa Petka, also known as Helen Kroger, was an American who spied for the Soviet Union. She is known for her role in smuggling atomic bomb diagrams out of Los Alamos. She was a communist activist before marrying Morris Cohen. The couple became spies because of their communist beliefs.
Mitchell Gant is a fictional character in a series of books written by Craig Thomas. His first appearance occurs in the 1977 novel Firefox as a US Air Force major that steals a Russian MiG-31 Firefox fighter aircraft prototype. In 1982, Clint Eastwood portrayed the character in the film adaptation of the 1977 novel.
Clayton J. Lonetree is a former U.S. Marine who was court-martialed and convicted of espionage for the Soviet KGB; he served nine years in prison for espionage. During the early 1980s, Lonetree was a Marine Corps Security Guard stationed at the Embassy of the United States in Moscow.
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.
Dmitri Fyodorovich Polyakov was a Major General in the Soviet GRU during the Cold War. According to former high-level KGB officer Sergey Kondrashev, Polyakov acted as a KGB disinformation agent at the FBI's New York City field office when he was posted at United Nations headquarters in 1962. Kondrashev's post-Cold War friend, former high-level CIA counterintelligence officer Tennent H. Bagley, says Polyakov "flipped" and started spying for the CIA when he was reposted to Rangoon, Moscow, and New Delhi. Polyakov was suddenly recalled to Moscow in 1980, arrested, tried, and finally executed in 1988.
There existed an evolved system of military education in the Soviet Union that covered a wide range of ages. The Soviet Armed Forces had many tri-service educational opportunities as well as educational institutions for the Soviet Ground Forces, the Air Forces, and the Navy. The Soviet Border Troops, the KGB and the Internal Troops also maintained service academies.
Heinz Paul Johann Felfe was a German spy.
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.
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.
The KGB and Soviet Disinformation: An Insider's View is a 1983 non-fiction book by Lawrence Martin-Bittman, a former intelligence officer specializing in disinformation for the Czech Intelligence Service and retired professor of disinformation at Boston University. The book is about the KGB's use of disinformation and information warfare during the Soviet Union period.