List of Famous Spys

David Greenglass was an atomic spy for the Soviet Union who worked on the Manhattan Project. He was briefly stationed at the Clinton Engineer Works uranium enrichment facility at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and then worked at the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico from August 1944 until February 1946.

Lt. Col. Elizaveta Ivanovna Mukasei was a Soviet spy codenamed Elza. Along with her husband Mikhail Mukasei, she took part in a number of undercover operations in Western Europe and the United States from the 1940s through to the 1970s. She died on September 19, 2009 in Moscow at age 97. Her husband died on August 19, 2008, aged 101.

Mary Jane Richards, also known as Mary Jane Richards Denman, Mary Jane Richards Garvin and possibly Mary Bowser, was a Union spy during the Civil War. She was enslaved from birth in Richmond, Virginia, but was effectively freed as a young child in 1843 when her owner, John Van Lew, died and his daughter, the abolitionist Elizabeth "Bet" Van Lew, took ownership of all his slaves and subsequently freed them all. But Van Lew then had Richards sent to school. When the Civil War broke out, Van Lew recruited her to serve as a spy and helper for the Union cause. She relayed information she heard to Van Lew, who in turn communicated it to Union leadership. Richards was only one of a spy ring run by Van Lew, although Van Lew considered Richards her most important source.

Lise Marie Jeanette de Baissac MBE CdeG, code names Odile and Marguerite, was born in Mauritius of French descent and British nationality. She was an agent of the United Kingdom's clandestine Special Operations Executive (SOE) organization in France during World War II. The purpose of SOE was to conduct espionage, sabotage, and reconnaissance in countries occupied by the Axis powers, especially Nazi Germany. SOE agents allied themselves with resistance groups and supplied them with weapons and equipment parachuted in from England.

Domènec Francesc Jordi Badia i Leblich, better known by his pseudonym and nom de plume Ali Bey el Abbassi, was a Spanish explorer, soldier, and spy in the early 19th century. He supported the French occupation of Spain and worked for the Bonapartist administration, but he is principally known for his travels in North Africa and the Middle East. He witnessed the Saudi conquest of Mecca in 1807.

Ilse Stöbe was a German journalist and anti-Nazi resistance fighter.

Konon Trofimovich Molody was a Soviet intelligence officer, known in the West as Gordon Arnold Lonsdale. Posing as a Canadian businessman during the Cold War he was a non-official (illegal) KGB intelligence agent and the mastermind of the Portland Spy Ring, which operated in England from the late 1950s until 1961.

Benita Ursula von Falkenhayn, maiden name von Zollikofer-Altenklingen was a German baroness who served as a spy for the Second Polish Republic.

Ahmet Esat Tomruk was a Turkish spy better known as "İngiliz Kemal" [Kemal, the Englishman] in Turkey.

Edith Tudor-Hart was an Austrian-British photographer and spy for the Soviet Union. Brought up in a family of socialists, she trained in photography at Walter Gropius's Bauhaus in Dessau, and carried her political ideals through her art. Through her connections with Arnold Deutsch, Tudor-Hart was instrumental in the recruiting of the Cambridge Spy ring which damaged British intelligence from World War II until the security services discovered all their identities by the mid-1960s. She recommended Litzi Friedmann and Kim Philby for recruitment by the KGB and acted as an intermediary for Anthony Blunt and Bob Stewart when the rezidentura at the Soviet Embassy in London suspended its operations in February 1940.