Espionage & Secret Services

In 1935-37 America passed several Neutrality Acts, vowing never again to take sides in a European conflict. In 1938 public attitudes changed, with ...

JANE WHORWOOD (1612-84) was one of Charles I''s closest confidantes. The daughter of Scots courtiers at Whitehall and the wife of an Oxfordshire sq...

A portrait of Stephanie von Hohenlohe (1891-1972), notorious as a secret go-between and even a professional blackmailer. Despite her Jewish roots, ...

Ever since it was created in 1947, the CIA has been anxious about people wanting to tell its stories. Indeed, its effectiveness as an intelligence ...

Alan Turing was an extraordinary man who crammed into his 42 years the careers of mathematician, codebreaker, computer scientist and biologist. He ...

The actual course given to all secret agents in SOE before working behind enemy lines. It includes everything you needed to know to go undercover ...

James Klugmann appears as a shadowy figure in the legendary history of the Cambridge spies. As both mentor and friend to Donald Maclean, Guy Burges...

The history of secret intelligence, like secret intelligence itself, is fraught with difficulties surrounding both the reliability and completeness...

Dubbed an 'agent of British imperialism' by Joseph Stalin, Reginald Teague-Jones (1889- 1988) was the quintessential English spy whose exceptional ...

Every American schoolchild knows of the crimes of Alger Hiss, a man whose very name rings with villainy. Communist, spy, perjurer - all of these a...

This is the Second World War career of the longest serving double agent in the Double Cross system, Harry Williamson. Harry operated from September...

Paul Dukes was sent into Russia in 1918, shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution. His role was to keep the British spy networks in place during the ...

The United Kingdoms domestic counter-intelligence and security agency, most commonly known as MI5, was founded in 1909 by Sir Vernon Kell KBE. Kell...

State secrecy is increasingly used as the explanation for the shrinking of public discussion surrounding national security issues. The phrase that...

The shadowy world of supposedly legalized spying has an enduring fascination for us all. Spy and Counterspy reveals for the first time the web of s...

From the summer of 1940 until May 1941, nearly twenty German Abwehr agents were dropped by boat or parachute into England during what was known as ...

When Betty Farmer married double agent Eddie Chapman, Agent Zigzag, she knew her life would never be ordinary. Yet even before her marriage to Eddi...

Klop Ustinov was Britain's most ingenious spy - but he was never licensed to kill. Instead, he was authorised to bemuse and beguile his enemies int...

On 30 April 1943, the drowned corpse of Major William Martin washed up on the coast of Spain. In what appeared to be a stroke of grave misfortune f...

Garbo was the British codename of Joan Puyol Garcia, perhaps the most influential spy of the Second World War. By feeding false information to the ...

On a hot afternoon in August 1941, a 24-year-old Belgian woman walks into the British consulate in Bilbao, neutral Spain, and demands to see the co...