Counterintelligence

VENONA began in 1943 when analysts detected reused key material in Soviet diplomatic cables encrypted with one time pads that had ...

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were convicted in 1951 of conspiracy to commit espionage for the Soviet Union and executed in June 1953...

Aldrich Ames spied for the USSR and then Russia from 1985 to 1994, selling the identities of CIA assets in exchange for millions o...

Robert Hanssen spied for Moscow in spells from 1979 and then continuously from 1985 until his arrest in February 2001, selling som...

The ring led by Navy warrant officer John Walker Jr passed cryptographic keys and manuals that let Soviet intelligence read Americ...

The Cambridge Five, Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, and John Cairncross, were recruited at Cambridge in th...

Kim Philby worked for Soviet intelligence from the 1930s while rising inside the Secret Intelligence Service to head its anti-Sovi...

George Blake was recruited by the KGB while a prisoner in North Korea and betrayed Western operations for years, most famously rev...

The Double-Cross System, run by the wartime Twenty Committee, caught every German agent sent to Britain and turned them into chann...

Vasili Mitrokhin, a KGB archivist, spent years secretly copying foreign intelligence files before defecting to Britain in 1992, wh...

Oleg Penkovsky volunteered to the United States and Britain in 1960 and passed thousands of pages on Soviet rockets and missiles t...

Oleg Gordievsky worked secretly for British intelligence from 1974 and rose to head the KGB residency in London. His reporting exp...

Adolf Tolkachev spied for the CIA in Moscow from 1979 to 1985, passing research on radar and missile guidance worth billions in in...

Richard Sorge ran a celebrated Soviet ring in Tokyo from the 1930s under cover of a German journalist, working inside the German e...

Eli Cohen, an Egyptian-born Israeli, operated in Damascus from 1961 to 1965 under the identity of a Syrian businessman, rising so ...

The network built around Abdul Qadeer Khan, the metallurgist behind the Pakistani gas centrifuge program, sold nuclear weapons des...

Margaretha Zelle, a Dutch exotic dancer who performed in Paris as Mata Hari, moved among senior officers of several nations during...

Klaus Fuchs, a German born physicist and communist who fled the Nazis to Britain, worked on the British atomic project and then at...

A Spaniard who volunteered to spy for Britain, Juan Pujol Garcia first talked the Germans into recruiting him and then fed them in...

Vladimir Vetrov, a KGB officer in the directorate responsible for scientific and technical intelligence, offered his services to F...