5 Spies Who Went Out in the Cold

SIDNEY REILLY

Spied for: Britain

Thought to be Ian Fleming’s main inspiration for the character of James Bond, Sidney Reilly is often referred to as the original “gentleman spy,” though given that he was once married to three women at the same time, that’s a rather loose definition of the term. It’s a little difficult to separate the facts of Reilly’s life from the legend and self-aggrandizement, but we know that he was born Shlomo Rosenblum, in Ukraine, in 1873. He began working for the War Office Intelligence Division in China during the Russo-Japanese War and later worked for the British in Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution.

His tactics were often over the top and crude — he once showed up at the Kremlin without authorization, pretending to be a British diplomat and demanding to meet with Vladimir Lenin. He also participated in several failed plots to capture or kill the Soviet leader and depose the Bolsheviks.

In the 1920s, he allegedly participated in a plot by high-ranking MI5 officers to discredit and oust the newly elected Labour government. He disappeared on an undercover mission in Russia in 1925. It’s believed that he was making contact with a shadowy anti-Bolshevik group called the Trust, which was in fact a sting operation set up by the OGPU, the forerunner of the KGB, and is thought to have been tortured and executed. Reilly remains the most famous figure in British spy-lore, despite persistent rumors that he was a double agent.

RICHARD SORGE

Spied for: Soviet Union

There are few individuals who did more by themselves to impact the outcome of World War II than Richard Sorge, a German communist who operated for years as the Russian military intelligence agency’s man in Tokyo. Arriving in Japan in 1933, Sorge posed as a pro-Nazi journalist, quickly becoming a popular figure in the city’s social scene and collecting a string of paramours, including the wife of the German ambassador.

Sorge could be reckless at times — he once crashed his motorcycle while driving drunk with valuable intelligence documents on his person — but he got results, providing Moscow with advance warning of the German-Japanese Pact and the Pearl Harbor attack.

In 1941, he cabled Moscow to inform his handlers that the Japanese did not plan to invade Russia from the east, but would instead focus on controlling Southeast Asia. Acting on the information, Stalin moved his troops to the Western Front where they would make a decisive stand against invading Nazi forces. Sorge was captured later that year by the Japanese authorities and executed three years later, becoming a posthumous hero in the Soviet Union.

ELI COHEN

Spied for: Israel

In a nation with a rich tradition of espionage, Eli Cohen’s legacy looms large. Born in Egypt to Syrian-Jewish parents and a former Arab nationalist, Cohen joined Israeli intelligence in 1960 after two rejections from the agency. The dark-skinned, Arabic-speaking Cohen was given the cover name Kamel Amin Thabet and sent to Argentina where he established an identity as an émigré Syrian businessman.

Upon his “return” to Damascus in 1962, he quickly became a hit among prominent Syrian businessmen and government officials, hosting lavish parties at his apartment and providing a discreet spot for his powerful friends to arrange rendezvous with their mistresses.

Over time, he became a close confidant of prominent officials in the Syrian defense ministry. He was so trusted that he was briefly considered for the position of deputy defense minister. All the while, Cohen was feeding information back to Tel Aviv, including detailed descriptions of military fortifications in the Golan Heights, which would later prove invaluable during the Six Day War.

Cohen was eventually found out, detained by Syrian intelligence in 1965, and executed in public.

JAMES JESUS ANGLETON

Spied for: United States

The urbane and intellectual James Jesus Angleton might have been a great literary critic or editor had things turned out differently. Indeed, he was close friends with T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. But Angleton’s overwhelming obsession, working with the Office of Strategic Services in London during World War II and later as a founding member of the CIA, was detecting Soviet infiltration of the U.S. intelligence community. To this end, he led an agency-wide “mole hunt” from 1963 to 1974 exposing dozens of alleged Soviet agents — but in the process almost certainly falsely accusing several innocent ones and turning away some genuine Soviet defectors.

Known for his forbidding personality and dark clothing, Angleton was known as the “Delphic Oracle” throughout the agency, and passion for counterintelligence work was matched only by his obsessive cultivation of orchids. Despite his eccentricities and arguably disastrous effect on the agency’s work, he was a confidant of multiple CIA directors over this 20-year career and enjoyed unprecedented “no-knock” access to the director’s office. It’s quite possible that some of these directors were more than a little intimidated by the power wielded by Angleton, who once boasted, “If you control counterintelligence, you control the intelligence service.”

Angleton was eventually forced to resign after being called before the Senate to testify about allegedly illegal surveillance activities in 1975. He maintained that the hearings were part of a “diabolical plot” being controlled from Moscow.

PHILIP AGEE

Spied for: United States

After 12 years of loyal service to the CIA in Latin America, Philip Agee became one of its most outspoken enemies, to the point that he was described by former president and CIA director George H.W. Bush as a “traitor to our country.”

Agee left the agency in 1969, disillusioned by what he saw as the CIA’s complicity in aiding military regimes who were repressing dissent and torturing dissidents. His change of heart was influenced by Brazilian leftist activist Angela Camargo Seixas, who had been arrested and tortured by the military regime — and eventually became Agee’s lover. In 1975, he published a book, Inside the Company: CIA Diary, which, in addition to denouncing CIA actions in Latin America, identified about 250 officers, front companies, and foreign agents that he claimed were working for the United States.

Agee was deported from Britain, where he had been living, in 1978 and eventually settled in Cuba, where he continued to write on the CIA and operate a travel service until his death in 2008. To his death, Agee denied claims that he had provided information to the KGB or Cuban intelligence, despite veterans of both agencies saying that he had been a “valuable source.”