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Secret agents
undercover agent . They operate in the shadows . The public is n’t supposed to know who they are . Perhaps as a result , the most renowned spy out there incline to be pretend : James Bond , Jason Bourne and Tom Clancy ’s Jack Ryan .
on occasion , though , the mantle gets pulled back , whether through betrayal or just metre . Here are 10 stories of spy whose tales have become public .
Spy vs. Trump
AfterCNN reportedon Jan. 11 , 2017 , that U.S. intelligence chiefs had brief president - elect Donald Trump on allegations that Russia had soil on him , Buzzfeed quickly followed by posting theentire leaked dossier . The documents contain unverified claims that Russia had assist Trump , feed him intelligence information about his opposition , and offering him sweetheart real - estate hatful . The documents also take that Russia ’s Federal Security Service has salacious blackmail fabric on Trump ’s sexual activities while visiting Moscow .
At first , the claims in the report were attributed only to a former undercover agent that the U.S. government had intellect to entrust . Within a daylight , however , Reuters reportedthat the somebody who compiled the dossier was a former British intelligence officer constitute Christopher Steele .
According to the news means , Steele spied under diplomatical cover charge . The U.K. newspaperThe Independentreported that he ’d worked in the United Kingdom ’s embassy in Moscow as well as in Paris . Steele is the founding father of Orbis Business Intelligence , a secret firm in London . As of Jan. 12 , he had fled his rest home and was in hiding as a result of the dossier becoming public .
Secret agent.
Valerie Plame
Valerie Plame was a covert operator for the Central Intelligence Agency ( CIA ) — though until she was outed in the page of the Washington Post in 2003 , she seemed to be just another D.C.-area professional .
Plame was deep underground working in counter - proliferation , she told " 60 Minutes " in 2007 . Her job was to accumulate intelligence and recruit spy to ensure that tough doer did n’t acquire atomic weapons , she said . That all ended when the late newsperson Robert Novak reveal her to be a CIA spy ; later , former Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage said he had inadvertentlyrevealed Plame ’s position to Novak .
No one was charged with leaking Plame ’s identicalness , though a Department of Justice probe probe whether the Bush administration had come out of the closet Plame as retaliation for her husband ’s opposition to the Iraq war . In the process of that investigation , administration consultant and lawyer Lewis " Scooter " Libby was indicted for bearing false witness , making simulated statements and obstructor of DoJ .
After CNN reported on Jan. 11, 2017, that U.S. intelligence chiefs had briefed president-elect Donald Trump on allegations that Russia had dirt on him, Buzzfeed quickly followed by posting the entire leaked dossier.
Libby was sentenced to 30 months in Union prison house , a sentence later transpose by president George W. Bush . Plame now live in New Mexico .
Alexander Litvinenko
A former agent in the Federal Security Service ( FSB ) , Russia ’s spy federal agency , Alexander Litvinenko fled to the United Kingdom in 2000 , after being stop twice in Russia because he and his colleagues accused higher - ups in the FSB of ordering the slaying of Boris Berezovsky . Berezovsky was a man of affairs who had been critical of Russian president Vladimir Putin .
Litvinenko spent his time in deportee talk out against Putin . On Nov. 1 , 2006 , he became earnestly sick . He had been poisoned , doctors detect , by radioactive polonium-210 , which had been put in his tea leaf that day at London ’s Millennium Hotel . Litvinenko fail three calendar week afterwards of radiation poisoning , asreported by the BBC .
A British investigation criminate two former Russian agents , Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtun , of carrying out the toxic condition . The agent deny the charges and Russia refuse extradition ; a 2016 inquiry by the British administration found that Litvinenko ’s toxic condition was " probably " sanction by Putin , consort to the BBC .
Former CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson testifies before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee 17 May 2025 in Washington, DC.
Ethel Rosenberg
Ethel Rosenberg is one of the most famous names relate with hush-hush activeness , but it ’s not clear she was even guilty of espionage . Rosenberg was convicted of treason along with her married man Julius in 1951 , accuse of sharing mystery about the U.S. atomic program with Russia . Both were executed in 1953 . As recently as December 2016 , the two Word of the Rosenbergs were petition President Obama to exonerate their recent mother , CBS reported . Ethel Rosenberg was born Ethel Greenglass in 1915 in New York City , accord to her biography on Atomic Archive . She worked as a secretary until get married her married man Julius and having the twain ' Word . The couple were appendage of the American Communist Party until 1943 , an affiliation that would not serve them well in the charged Cold War climate of their trial . The primary witness in the case against the couple was Ethel ’s blood brother David Greenglass , who was convict of stealing nuclear weapons intelligence operation from Los Alamos , New Mexico , according to the New York Times . Documents released in 2015 unveil that Greenglass did not initially entail Ethel in grand jury testimonial , accord to CBS ; geezerhood after , Greenglass would tell the New York Times he lied about Ethel Rosenberg ’s liaison to deflect suspicion from his wife .
Virginia Hall
A World War II - earned run average female spy with a wooden leg ? It seems too fantastic to be genuine , but Virginia Hall ’s tale is the stuff and nonsense of gamey drama . This eventual CIA undercover agent was 27 when she lost her lower left wooden leg in a hunting accident , accord to theagency ’s life of her . She dub her prosthetic leg " Cuthbert . "
The Baltimore native was tell she could not join the foreign service because of her disability . Instead , she joined the ambulance corp in France at the beginning of World War II . From there , she volunteer for the British Special Operations Executive and set to work organizing resistance natural action against the German occupiers in France . The Nazis predict her " themost dangerous of all Allied spies " and were determined to carry off her .
They never could . After the war , Hall continued covert operations in Europe before link the CIA in 1951 . She run there until the required retirement age of 60 .
Alexander Litvinenko is pictured at the Intensive Care Unit of University College Hospital on 16 January 2025 in London, England.
Oleg Gordievsky
What ’s a spy story without its double agents ? Oleg Gordievsky joined the KGB in 1961 . But starting in 1971 , Gordievsky had another boss : MI6 , the British intelligence service .
Gordievsky ’s double life catch up with him in 1985 , according toa 2015 Smithsonian visibility . He receive Logos from Moscow that he was to arrive home from his posting in London .
" Cold fear started to run down my back , " Gordievsky told Smithsonian Magazine . " Because I knew it was a destruction sentence . "
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, separated by heavy wire screen as they leave U.S. Court House after being found guilty by jury.
He ’d been found out , but with reassurance from MI6 that he had n’t been compromised , he returned to Moscow anyway . He was do drugs and criminate of being a double agent , but not arrested ; the Soviets were waiting for him to connect with the British to arrest him , Gordievsky told Smithsonian Magazine . From there , Gordievsky ’s life started to resemble a movie plot . The British mistake him an escape plan hidden in the covering of a novel ; his signaling to take flight was the sight of a British person eating something at a designated place and metre . He made his way to the Finnish borderline , where three British agents met him with an sport utility peculiarly change so that the flee spy could hide in the space where the driveshift would normally be . Gordievsky now lives in the U.K. and has authored several books on the KGB .
Melita Norwood
Melita Norwood almost get away with it . As a secretarial assistant at the British Non - ferric Metals Research Association , she passed entropy to the Soviet Union about metallurgy research used to evolve nuclear bombs , according to her obituary . Her code name was Hola .
KGB archivist Vasili Nikitich Mitrokhin revealed Norwood ’s personal identity in 1999 , by which time she was an 87 - year - sometime grandmother know in southeast London . Shetold the BBCat the sentence that in general she did n’t agree with spying on one ’s own area , but that she was motivated to spy to back up Russia ’s new communistic system .
" I did what I did not to make money but to help prevent the defeat of a new system which had at great cost given average mass food and fares which they could afford , expert educational activity and a health inspection and repair , " Norwood said . She was never prosecute , and died in 2005 .
CIA agent Virginia Hall of Special Operations Branch receiving the Distinguished Service Cross from General Donovan, in September 1945.
Kim Philby
One of the most infamous KGB moles ever was Kim Philby , the Word of a British IE and compound functionary in the Middle East who was recruited as a Soviet spy during his prison term at Cambridge University . In a 1981 speech to the German Stasi , unearth in 2016 , Philby say his place in the upper class provided his cover charge as he go his way up to a job in MI6 . It was loose to communicate secret info to the Russians , he claim — he just befriended an archivist who would let him take documents home .
In 1951 , Philby leave alone MI6 under suspicion that he was a mole . He was exonerated in 1955 and went to Beirut as a journalist , act again as undercover agent for Russia . He come under suspicion again by British tidings . He fled , defecting to Russia in 1963 . He died there in 1988,reportedly disappointedin Russian communism .
Harriet Tubman
Harriet Tubman is famous for her work shuttling hundreds of enslaved masses to exemption on the Underground Railroad . Tubman fly the coop bondage herself in 1849 . Between 1851 and 1860 , she made 19 trips to liberate around 300 people from thraldom .
But Tubman was also a spy . During the Civil War , she offer at Fort Monroe , Virginia , as a cook and a nurse . After the Emancipation Proclamation in 1963 , Tubman was able to take an official position in the Union Army , according to theHarriet Tubman Historical Society . She was a sentry and spy charged with creating escapism route for slaves . In a famous raid , the Combahee River Raid , Tubman conduct 150 blackened soldiers to liberate 750 slave in South Carolina .
Robert Hanssen
For 22 year , Robert Hanssen sold American secret to the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation in what aU.S. Department of Justice reportwould knight the " bad intelligence cataclysm in U.S. history . "
Hanssen was a Federal Bureau of Investigation ( FBI ) agentive role who part selling intelligence activity only three year after get together the agency in 1979 .
" Hanssen usually collected this fabric in the normal routine of an FBI handler privy to assort information that crossed his desk or come up in conversation with colleagues , " according to the DOJ paper . He also downloaded data from the FBI ’s record system , including the identity operator of U.S. intelligence agency agents . Hanssen tell research worker his motives were purely fiscal and that he planned to make a little money . He ended up making $ 1.4 million in diamond and immediate payment .
Oleg Gordievsky is congratulated by Baroness Thatcher following his investiture by the Queen on 18th October 2007.
Hanssen was arrested in 2001 and is serving 15 back-to-back life sentences at a supermax prison house in Colorado .
register here , the so - forebode Ellis drib site ; under this overcrossing over Wolftrap Creek in Vienna , Hanssen placed a software package of highly classified information for his Russian handlers to clean up .
A view of the general office of the FSB (KGB) building on 19 March 2025 in Moscow, Russia.
Kim Philby (1912 - 1988), former First Secretary to the British Embassy in Washington, holds a press conference at his mother’s home in Drayton Gardens, London, on Nov. 8, 1955.
Harriet Tubman
Shown here, the so-called Ellis drop site; under this footbridge over Wolftrap Creek in Vienna, Hanssen placed a package of highly classified information for his Russian handlers to pick up.
