The Ministry for State Security, commonly known as the Stasi, an abbreviation of Staatssicherheit, was the state security service of East Germany from 1950 to 1990.
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 was an American Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent who spied for Soviet and Russian intelligence services against the United States from 1979 to 2001. His espionage was described by the Department of Justice as "possibly the worst intelligence disaster in U.S. history".
John Cairncross was a British civil servant who became an intelligence officer and spy during the Second World War. As a Soviet double agent, he passed to the Soviet Union the raw Tunny decryptions that influenced the Battle of Kursk. He was alleged to be the fifth member of the Cambridge Five. He was also notable as a translator, literary scholar and writer of non-fiction.
Oleg Antonovich Gordievsky, CMG is a former colonel of the KGB who became KGB resident-designate (rezident) and bureau chief in London. He was a double agent, providing information to the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) from 1974 to 1985. After being recalled to Moscow under suspicion, he was exfiltrated from the Soviet Union in July 1985 under a plan code-named Operation Pimlico. The Soviet Union subsequently sentenced him to death in absentia.
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.
Karl František Koecher is a Czech mole known to have penetrated the CIA during the Cold War.
Dieter Felix Gerhardt is a former commodore in the South African Navy and commander of the strategic Simon's Town naval dockyard. He was arrested by the FBI in New York City in 1983 following information obtained from a Soviet defector. He was convicted of high treason as a spy for the Soviets for a period of twenty years in South Africa together with his second wife, Ruth, who had acted as his courier. Both were released prior to the change of government following the 1994 general election.
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.
The Guillaume affair was an espionage scandal in Germany during the Cold War. The scandal revolved around the exposure of an East German spy within the West German government and had far-reaching political repercussions in Germany, the most prominent being the resignation of West German Chancellor Willy Brandt in 1974.
James W. Hall III is a former United States Army warrant officer and signals intelligence analyst in Germany who sold eavesdropping and code secrets to East Germany and the Soviet Union from 1983 to 1988.
Michał Franciszek Goleniewski a.k.a. 'SNIPER', 'LAVINIA',, was a Polish officer in the People's Republic of Poland's Ministry of Public Security, the deputy head of military counterintelligence GZI WP, later head of the technical and scientific section of the Polish intelligence, and a spy for the Soviet government during the 1950s. In 1959, he became a "triple agent" by giving Polish and Soviet secrets to the Central Intelligence Agency that directly caused the exposure of George Blake and Harry Houghton. Goleniewski defected to the United States in 1961. He later made unsubstantiated claims to be Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich of Russia.
Dmitri Aleksandrovich Bystrolyotov was a Soviet Russian intelligence officer, a polyglot, a writer and a Gulag prisoner. As a Soviet undercover operative, Bystrolyotov worked in Western Europe between World War I and II, recruiting and controlling several agents in Great Britain, France, Germany, and Italy. His greatest achievement was breaking into the British Foreign Office files years before Kim Philby, as well as procuring diplomatic ciphers of many of European countries. In the 1930s, he fell victim of Joseph Stalin's purges. Arrested by the NKVD on drummed up charges, he was tortured severely. While serving his term, he spent over 16 years in various Gulag camps. There, at great risk to himself, he wrote and smuggled his memoirs to the outside world, which were an indictment of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's crimes against humanity.
John Alexander Symonds is an English former Metropolitan Police officer and KGB agent.
Heinz Paul Johann Felfe was a German spy.
George Trofimoff was a United States military intelligence officer of Russian descent. He was convicted in a U.S. federal court of having spied for the Soviet Union during the 1970s and 1980s. He was sentenced to life imprisonment on September 27, 2001. George Trofimoff is the most senior officer in U.S. military history to have been charged with or convicted of espionage.
The Committee for State Security (CSS) 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, where the KGB was headquartered, with many associated ministries, state committees and state commissions.
Hüseyin Yıldırım is a Turkish-American auto mechanic who was sentenced to life imprisonment in the United States for his courier role in the espionage activities of U.S. serviceman James Hall III during the Cold War era. Yıldırım was later pardoned and extradited to his homeland, where he was sentenced to 17 years in prison but served only one day.
Milan Carl Miskovsky was an American who served as a member of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). He helped negotiate the release of Gary Powers in 1962 and over 1,000 prisoners captured during the 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion. After retiring from the CIA, Miskovsky worked for multiple federal agencies, including the Federal Maritime Commission and the Treasury Department.
Relations between East Germany and the United States formally began in 1974 until the former's collapse in 1990. The relationship between the two nations was among the most hostile during the Cold War as both sides were mutually suspicious of each other. Both sides conducted routine espionage against each other and conducted prisoner exchanges for their respective citizens which included spies for both the Americans and Soviets.
