List of Famous Spys

Mahmut Yıldırım, better known as Yeşil, is a Turkish rogue agent. He is wanted for the murders of eight people in Turkey. Among the murders he is accused of is that of Cem Ersever in 1993. Yıldırım, who also used the alias Ahmet Demir, disappeared in 1998 and was the subject of an Interpol Red Notice in 1999. In 2013, security officer Korkut Eken told prosecutors that Yıldırım was still alive.

Hercules Mulligan was an Irish-American tailor and spy during the American Revolutionary War. He was a member of the Sons of Liberty.

Juan Pujol García, also known as Joan Pujol Garcia, was a Spanish spy who acted as a double agent loyal to Great Britain against Nazi Germany during World War II, when he relocated to Britain to carry out fictitious spying activities for the Germans. He was given the codename Garbo by the British; their German counterparts codenamed him Alaric and referred to his non-existent spy network as "Arabal".

Ma Ying-jeou is a Hong Kong-born Taiwanese politician who served as the sixth president of the Republic of China (Taiwan) from 2008 to 2016. His previous political roles include Justice Minister (1993–96) and Mayor of Taipei (1998–2006). He was also the Chairman of the Kuomintang (KMT) between 2005–2007 and 2009–2014.

Mariia Valeryevna Butina is a Russian who was convicted in 2018 of acting as an unregistered foreign agent of Russia within the United States.

Ashraf Marwan was an Egyptian billionaire. Marwan worked as a spy for the Israeli Mossad, though some contend that he was a double agent.

Charles Marie Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy was an officer in the French Army from 1870 to 1898. He gained notoriety as a spy for the German Empire and the actual perpetrator of the act of treason of which Captain Alfred Dreyfus was wrongfully accused and convicted in 1894.

George Blake was a spy with Britain's Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) and worked as a double agent for the Soviet Union. He became a communist and decided to work for the MGB while a prisoner during the Korean War. Discovered in 1961 and sentenced to 42 years in prison, he escaped from Wormwood Scrubs prison in west London in 1966 and fled to the Soviet Union. He was not one of the Cambridge Five spies, although he associated with Donald Maclean and Kim Philby after reaching the Soviet Union.

Valerie Elise Plame Wilson, is an American writer, spy novelist, and former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer. As the subject of the 2003 Plame affair, also known as the CIA leak scandal, Plame's identity as a CIA officer was leaked to and subsequently published by Robert Novak of The Washington Post.

Melita Stedman Norwood was a British civil servant and KGB intelligence source who, for a period after her formal recruitment in 1937, supplied the KGB with state secrets from her job at the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association.