Espionage, spying, or intelligence gathering is the act of obtaining secret or confidential information (intelligence). A person who commits espionage is called an espionage agent or spy. Any individual or spy ring, in the service of a government, company, criminal organization, or independent operation, can commit espionage. The practice is clandestine, as it is by definition unwelcome. In some circumstances, it may be a legal tool of law enforcement and in others, it may be illegal and punishable by law.
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.
Robert Philip Hanssen is an American former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) double agent who spied for Soviet and Russian intelligence services against the United States from 1979 to 2001. His espionage was described by the U.S. Department of Justice as "possibly the worst intelligence disaster in U.S. history." Hanssen is currently serving 15 consecutive life sentences without parole at ADX Florence, a federal supermax prison near Florence, Colorado.
Earl Edwin Pitts is a former FBI special agent who was convicted of espionage for selling information to Soviet and Russian intelligence services.
The Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, formerly the Main Intelligence Directorate, and still commonly known by its previous abbreviation GRU, is the foreign military intelligence agency of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation. The GRU controls the military intelligence service and maintains its own special forces units.
Ryszard Jerzy Kukliński was a Polish colonel and Cold War spy for NATO. He was posthumously promoted to the rank of brigadier general by Polish President Andrzej Duda. Kukliński passed top secret Soviet documents to the CIA between 1972 and 1981, including the Soviet plans for the invasion of Western Europe. The former United States National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzeziński described him as "the first Polish officer in NATO."
The Farewell Dossier was the collection of documents that Colonel Vladimir Vetrov, a KGB defector "en place", gathered and gave to the Direction de la surveillance du territoire (DST) in 1981–82, during the Cold War.
Józef Oleksy was a Polish left-wing politician, former chairman of the Democratic Left Alliance.
Oleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky, codenamed HERO, 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, most importantly, 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.
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.
Alfred Epaminondas Sarant, also known as Filipp Georgievich Staros and Philip Georgievich Staros, was an engineer and a member of the Communist party in New York City in 1944. He was part of the Rosenberg spy ring that reported to Soviet intelligence. Sarant worked on secret military radar at the United States Army Signal Corps laboratories at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. Alexandre Feklisov, one of the KGB case officers who handled the Rosenberg spy apparatus described Sarant and Joel Barr as among the most productive members of the group. Sarant was recruited as a Soviet espionage agent by Barr.
Aleksandr Semyonovich Feklisov was a Soviet spy, the NKVD Case Officer who handled Julius Rosenberg and Klaus Fuchs, among others.
Vladimir Ippolitovich Vetrov was a high-ranking KGB spy during the Cold War who decided to covertly release valuable information to France and NATO on the Soviet Union's clandestine program aimed at stealing technology from the West.
Adolf Georgiyevich Tolkachev was a Soviet electronics engineer who provided key documents to the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) between 1979 and 1985. Working at the Soviet radar design bureau Phazotron as one of the chief designers, Tolkachev gave the CIA complete detailed information about projects such as the R-23, R-24, R-33, R-27, and R-60, S-300 missile systems; fighter-interceptor aircraft radars used on the MiG-29, MiG-31, and Su-27; and other avionics. He was executed as a spy in 1986.
The Committee for State Security, commonly known as the KGB, was the main security agency for the Soviet Union from 13 March 1954 until 3 December 1991. As a direct successor of preceding agencies such as the Cheka, GPU, OGPU, NKGB, NKVD and MGB, it was 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, with many associated ministries, state committees and state commissions.
Farewell is a 2009 French espionage thriller film directed by Christian Carion, starring Guillaume Canet and Emir Kusturica. The film is loosely based on the actions of the high-ranking KGB official, Vladimir Vetrov. It was released in the United States in June 2010. It was adapted from the book Bonjour Farewell: La vérité sur la taupe française du KGB (1997) by Serguei Kostine.
Vladimir Petrovich Alganov is a Russian spy. He was Soviet KGB officer in Warsaw, Poland in the 1980s and Russian SVR officer in the same city in the 1990s.
Jack Strong is a 2014 Polish political thriller film directed by Władysław Pasikowski, starring Marcin Dorociński, Maja Ostaszewska, Dagmara Dominczyk and Patrick Wilson. The film is based on the true story of Ryszard Kukliński, a Polish People's Army colonel who spied for the American Central Intelligence Agency during the height of the Cold War.
In 1995 it was revealed that the Central Intelligence Agency had delivered intelligence reports to the U.S. government between 1986 and 1994 which were based on agent reporting from confirmed or suspected Soviet operatives. From 1985 to his arrest in February 1994, CIA officer and KGB mole Aldrich Ames compromised Agency sources and operations in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, leading to the arrest of many CIA agents and the execution of at least ten of them. This allowed the KGB to replace the CIA agents with its own operatives or to force them to cooperate, and the double agents then funneled a mixture of disinformation and true material to U.S. intelligence. Although the CIA's Soviet-East European (SE) and Central Eurasian divisions knew or suspected the sources to be Soviet double agents, they nevertheless disseminated this "feed" material within the government. Some of these intelligence reports even reached Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, as well as President-elect Bill Clinton.
