List of Famous Spys

James Jesus Angleton was chief of counterintelligence for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from 1954 to 1974. His official position within the organization was Associate Deputy Director of Operations for Counterintelligence (ADDOCI). Angleton was significantly involved in the US response to the purported KGB defectors Anatoliy Golitsyn and Yuri Nosenko. Angleton later became convinced the CIA harbored a high-ranking mole, and engaged in an intensive search. Whether this was a highly destructive witch hunt or appropriate caution vindicated by later moles remains a subject of intense historical debate.

Oleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky, codenamed HERO, was a Soviet military intelligence (GRU) colonel during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Penkovsky is known for informing the United Kingdom about the Soviet emplacement of missiles in Cuba, thus providing both the UK and the United States with the precise knowledge necessary to address rapidly developing military tensions with the Soviet Union.

José Silverio Olaya Balandra was a Peruvian hero in the Peruvian War of Independence.

Roger Henri Auque was a French journalist, war correspondent, and diplomat, and Israeli spy. He served as France's Ambassador to Eritrea from 2009 to 2012.

Dmitri Aleksandrovich Bystrolyotov was a Russian/Soviet intelligence officer, a sailor and painter, a doctor and lawyer, a traveler and polyglot, a writer and a Gulag prisoner. One of the most outstanding Soviet undercover operatives, Bystrolyotov acted in Western Europe in the period between the great wars, recruiting and controlling several important agents in Great Britain, France, Germany, and Italy. His greatest achievement was breaking into the British Foreign Office files years before Kim Philby, as well as procuring diplomatic ciphers of scores of European countries. Despite his personal courage and heroism, he fell victim of Joseph Stalin's purges of the 1930s. Arrested by the NKVD on drummed up charges, he was severely tortured and turned into an invalid. Serving his term, he spent over 16 years in various Gulag camps. There, at great risk to himself, he wrote and smuggled to the outside world his voluminous memoirs, an indictment of Communist Party of the Soviet Union's crimes against humanity.

Jaime Ramón Mercader del Río, more commonly known as Ramón Mercader, was a Spanish communist and NKVD agent who assassinated Russian Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky in Mexico City in August 1940 with an ice axe. He served 20 years in a Mexican prison for the murder. Joseph Stalin presented him with an Order of Lenin in absentia. His mother participated in the preparation of the assassination, waited for Ramon near the house of Trotsky but escaped to Moscow. With the exception of Ramon Mercader all other persons who participated in the preparation of assassination obtained Soviet awards as well. Ramon was not awarded because nobody could learn how he behaved during the trial and how he would behave in prison.

William Curtis Colepaugh was an American who, following his 1943 discharge from the U.S. Naval Reserve, defected to Nazi Germany in 1944. While a crewman on a repatriation ship that stopped off in Lisbon, Colepaugh defected at the German consulate. Colepaugh had attended Admiral Farragut Academy in Pine Beach, New Jersey.

Greville Maynard Wynne was a British engineer and businessman who was recruited by MI6 because of his frequent travel to Eastern Europe. He became known for acting as a courier to transport top-secret information to London from Soviet agent Oleg Penkovsky.

Sidney George Reilly —known as "Ace of Spies"—was a Russian-born adventurer and secret agent employed by Scotland Yard's Special Branch and later by the Foreign Section of the British Secret Service Bureau, the precursor to the modern British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6/SIS). He is alleged to have spied for at least four different great powers, and documentary evidence indicates that he was involved in espionage activities in 1890s London among Russian émigré circles, in Manchuria on the eve of the Russo-Japanese War (1904–05), and in an abortive 1918 coup d'état against Vladimir Lenin's Bolshevik government in Moscow.

Veli Küçük is a retired Turkish brigadier-general. He is thought to be the founder of the JİTEM intelligence arm of the Turkish Gendarmerie, and is accused by the Turkish government of being the head of the Ergenekon organization, based on testimony by Tuncay Güney. He was arrested in January 2008, and on 5 August 2013, sentenced to two consecutive life sentences.