Spies

The top spies in World War 2

19 minutes read.

Before listing the top spies during World War 2, let's briefly clarify some terms:

• Intelligence - the activity of information collection, processing, analysis, and distribution to "consumers". In addition to collecting information from humans or documents, in World War 2 there was a dramatic growth in the use of electronics, and of aerial photography, to collect information.
• Espionage - the activity of obtaining the secrets of an enemy without its permission, and typically without its awareness, or they would act to stop it.
• Agent - a person who either does the actual spying, or one who assists a spy. Both have to act secretly.
• Handler - a person who controls secret agents. The handler, also called a case officer, directs agents about tasks, priorities, methods, and provides money, equipment, documents.
• Spy - the person who obtains the enemy's information while operating within the enemy territory. Spies often "recruit" sub-agents and handle them, creating an espionage network. That usually brings more information, but also increase the risk of exposure.

There are 3 types of spies, depdending on how they become spies:

• Walk-in - someone who voluntarily offers to spy. Intelligence officials are obviously suspicious of the unexpected good fortune, but sometimes they fail to seriously investigate the possibility that it is. Some of the best spies offer to help was rejected more than once, before they finally met an official who was willing to investigate the possibility that a genuine treasure of information just walked into their office.
• Recruit - intelligence organizations actively seek individuals with access to desired information who might be persuaded to become spies, for ideolological, financial, or personal reasons, or by coercion.
• Undercover - while commando soldiers operate in enemy territory by stealth to avoid being seen, an undercover spy is a soldier who operates in enemy territory by disguise, by playing a false identity, to avoid being identified. This is the most difficult type, because while a walk-in or recruited spy continue to live their normal life, do their normal work, in their real identity, and only a small part of their time is devoted to secret spy work, an undercover spy has to play a role, a fake identity, almost all the time. For such a person, especially during war time, any wrong word, a wrong dialect of the language, a discrepancy in their cover story, any error at all, might cause suspicion, arrest, interrogation, exposure, and death.

And now, the top spies in World War 2:

Spies for the Soviet Union:

In an era when the United States did not even have an espionage agency, the Soviet Union was the espionage superpower.

• Richard Sorge - a soldier in the German Army in World War 1, he was injured in battle. While convalescing from the injury that left him limping forever, Sorge became a Communist. Medically discharged from the army, he studied economy, and in 1919 received a doctorate in political science. After losing two jobs due to his political views, he immigrated to the Soviet Union and found a job in Moscow, Russia. There he was recruited by Soviet intelligence, becoming a spy, with the cover of a journalist. From 1920 to 1929 he covered, both journalistically and as a Soviet spy, countries all over Europe. In 1929, Sorge was re-assigned to Soviet military intelligence. He returned to Germany, severed all his ties with communists, joined the Nazi party, found a job in a German newspaper, and then spent 3 years spying in China in the cover of a foreign journalist. In 1933 he was sent to Japan.

  In Japan, Sorge spied against both Germany and Japan. He became a close friend, confidant, and unofficial advisor, of the German military attache, later promoted to be the German ambassador in Japan. The two met daily for years, and the ambassador shared practically all of Germany's secrets known to him with his best friend, not suspecting that Sorge was a spy. At the same time, Sorge used his journalistic ties and cover to recruit Japanese agents, including an advisor of the Japanese Prime Minister.

  The most crucial reports that Sorge sent to Moscow were: (a) Sorge warned Moscow, three weeks in advance, of the coming German invasion of the Soviet Union, Operation Barbarossa. Stalin ignored that report, refusing to accept that war was coming. (b) Days after the invasion started, Sorge reported, based on his Japanese agents, that Japan was not going to also invade the Soviet Union, despite being allied with Germany. That report was not ignored, and it enabled the Soviet Union to shift large military forces from the far East to the West, which helped to stop the German invasion and save the Soviet Union from defeat.

  The increasing wartime activity and suspiciousness led to German suspicions against Sorge, but he was able to outsmart the GESTAPO (Nazi secret police) investigator and convince him of his loyalty. But the Japanese secret police, the Kempeitai, suspected and arrested Sorge's main Japanese agent, Hotsumi Ozaki, and followed by arresting Sorge on 18 October 1941, ending his 21 years long exceptionally long and exceptionally productive espionage career.

  The Kempeitai initially thought that Sorge spied for Germany, but after Germany denied that, Sorge confessed under torture that he spied for the Soviet Union. Japan tried 3 times to offer the Soviet Union to exchange Sorge for a captured Japanese spy, but despite his exceptional service, which saved them from destruction, the Soviet Union insisted that Sorge was not known to them, so after 3 years in a Japanese prison, Sorge was hanged on 7 November 1944. Only 20 years after his death, Sorge was officially acknowledged by the Soviet Union, posthumously awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union and the rank of a Colonel.

  General Douglas Macarthur said about Sorge that he was "a devastating example of a brilliant success of espionage", and top spy novelist Tom Clancy said, half a century later, "Richard Sorge was the best spy of all time".

• Leopold Trepper - Born in Poland, Trepper had to emigrate from 3 countries due to authorities response to his Communist activities, so in 1932 he settled at Moscow, in the Soviet Union. In 1937 he was recruited by Soviet military intelligence to be a spy in Western Europe, and in December 1938 he arrived at Brussels, Belgium in the cover identity of a Canadian entrepreneur. He used the money provided to him to start a company which exported raincoats all over Europe, employed or had business relations with hundreds, and provided excellent "business" cover for what actually was a spy network that included, at its peak, 290 agents. The target of the network was collecting information about Germany's military forces. In May 1940, when Germany invaded Belgium and France, Trepper moved to Paris, France, presented himself as a French businessman, and a year later created a new company, with the same team that helped him manage the raincoat export company.

  Trepper's wide spy network obtained highly valuable information about the German military from multiple sources. Its most crucial information were two warnings about the coming German invasion of the Soviet Union, Operation Barbarossa, one delivered in advance, and one delivered in person by Trepper just before the invasion. These warnings, like those of Sorge, were dismissed by Stalin. During the war, it was essential to deliver information with minimum delay, so the spy network was forced to use radio transmitters. The Abwehr, the German military intelligence, intercepted the coded transmissions and, knowing that they assisted the Soviet Red Army, nicknamed them "Die Rote Kapelle", The Red Orchestra. This started a protracted chase by German intelligence to capture the transmitters and the spies who used them, but Trepper carefully built his large spy network to be resilient. Although several transmitters and network members were captured, the network continued to spy. It took the Germans until the end of 1942 to capture Trepper himself. He then bought time by outwardly accepting the offer by his German captors to become a double agent, but actually helped the Germans as little as possible and was able to deliver a warning that he's captured. Six months later he exploited an opportunity to escape and was not captured again. Five months after the liberation of Paris, Trepper was flown to Moscow, where he was arrested due to internal power struggles. He was interrogated and then imprisoned until 1955, when he was released and rehabilitated. He became a publisher, and in 1975 published his own autobiography, named "The Great Game: Memoirs of the Spy Hitler Couldn't Silence".

• Harro Schulze-Boysen was 24 years old when the Nazis came to power in Germany. He was one of the few Germans who resisted them on moral grounds, and one of fewer Germans who actively resisted them. He came from a privileged and well connected military family. His grand uncle was the founder of the modern German Navy. His wife was the granddaughter of a prince. Their wedding was at her parents' magnificent manor, and the bride was walked down the aisle by Hermann Goering, one of the top Nazi leaders, who was also the minister of aviation. Schulze-Boysen had journalistic experience, spoke several languages, and was a certified pilot. With these skills and ties, he was hired, first as a civilian employee and later as an Air Force officer, to work in the analysis and evaluation department of the intelligence branch of the German aviation ministry. At that capacity, Schulze-Boysen knew in detail of the operational war plans and preparations by the German Air Force for the invasion of the Soviet Union, and of the intelligence collection efforts for that purpose, including German aerial reconnaissance flights over the Soviet Union. As part of Soviet military intelligence preparations for the coming war, they sent to Berlin a senior spy handler, Alexander Korotkow, in diplomatic cover, to personally re-evaluate Soviet agents in Germany, to guide the agents, and to improve their security and means of communications. Three months before the German invasion, Korotkow secretly met with Schulze-Boysen for a long meeting. Since that meeting, Korotkow invested significant effort and means to improve Schulze-Boysen's operational security and communications, and Schulze-Boysen's reports directly reached Stalin. Schulze-Boysen was the most important agent within the German military HQ which directly spied for the Soviet Union. Two and a half months before the invasion, Schulze-Boysen reported that the detailed and updated operational warplan for the invasion was completed, and also provided a list of the priority targets to be bombarded by the first wave of German bombers. Nine days before the invasion, Schulze-Boysen delivered the final operational plan for the invasion, and reported the main locations where the German Air Force already concentrated its aircraft for the invasion. But as with the invasion warnings from Sorge, Trepper, and other sources, Schulze-Boysen's pre-invasion reports changed nothing, and just five days before the invasion, Stalin rejected with contempt Schulze-Boysen's last pre-invasion report of the coming invasion. Schulze-Boysen continued to deliver highly valuable wartime information for 14 more months after the invasion, until he was arrested by the GESTAPO in August 1942, at age 33, and he, his wife, and their entire network of idealistic anti-Nazi dissidents which secretly operated for a decade under the Nazi regime, were all executed. Schulze-Boysen was exposed due to a severe error by a Soviet secret agent sent to re-establish contact with him after the radio transmitter provided by Korotkow was broken. The agent collected all the intelligence material accumulated by Schulze-Boysen since the radio transmitter broke down, and due to the importance and urgency of delivering the information, the agent went to Brussels, where he used the secret radio transmitter of Trepper's network there to encipher and transmit the entire material over radio, and also a report of his meeting with, and status of, the Schulze-Boysen network, in which he included the real names and addresses of Schulze-Boysen and a few others. The volume of transmitted information was sufficient for German intelligence to decode the cipher, and that gave them the name of Harro Schulze-Boysen as the source, the spy.

• Willi Lehmann - a Berlin police, counter-espionage, and GESTAPO officer. Since 1929 he spied for the Soviet Union for money. In 1933 he joined the GESTAPO as the head of the division in charge of countering Soviet espionage. In 1939 he was made head of the department of the Main Security Office (RSHA) in charge of countering Soviet espionage in the German military industry, which enabled him to deliver information on that too. In 1941 he too delivered an early warning about the coming German invasion of the Soviet Union, and even provided the exact date, but Stalin dismissed Lehmann's report, and all other warnings, until the invasion itself proved them correct. Near the end of 1942 he was exposed, arrested, and executed.

• Nikolai Kuznetsov - with an exceptional talent for foreign languages and dialects, Kuznetsov was recruited at age 19 by the Soviet Secret police. He initially monitored German engineers working in the Soviet Union, allegedly as a translator, which further improved his command of German language and dialects. He later followed and monitored German diplomats in Moscow. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union, and after months of special preparations and training, he was sent to German-occupied Ukraine, where he acted as a spy with the cover identity of Oberleutnant Paul Siebert, a German army officer. His base of operations and point of contact was a "partisan" group commanded by another Soviet secret police officer, Dmitry Medvedev, which parachuted into the forests near the city of Rivne, the capital of the German occupation, and conducted guerrilla attacks on German forces. Moving about disguised as Oberleutnant Paul Siebert, Kuznetsov collected highly valuable military information. He delivered an early warning for Operation Citadel, the Battle Of Kursk, which was the last major German offensive in the German-Soviet front. He discovered the location of Adolf Hitler's forward command center, code named "Werwolf", and more. Kuznetsov also assasinated or kidnapped several high rank Nazi officials and officers, including a deputy governor and an army General. In March 1944, as the Soviet army was advancing westwards across the Ukraine, Kuznetsov was ordered to advance too, ahead of the Soviet forces. He attempted to contact the underground in the city of Lviv, but was exposed. He was chased for two days, and killed himself to avoid capture. He has been posthumously awarded the "Hero of the Soviet Union", the highest medal, and in the 1970s a city and a celestial body were named after him.

• Arnold Deutsch and the Cambridge Five - with a doctorate in chemistry with distinction from the university of Vienna, Arnold Deutsch and his wife Josefine were recruited by Soviet intelligence and trained to act together as spies and spy recruiters. In 1933 they settled in London, with their real names so that his university credentials would be valid and serve as his cover, and Deutsch devised a brilliant spy recruitment strategy: (a) find and recruit young and highly capable Communist students in the most prestigious British universities, (b) tell them to sever their Communist contacts and behave and appear as conventionally British as possible (c) personally train them for espionage, (d) send them after graduation to join the British civil service, particularly the intelligence services, as career officers, secretly spying for the Soviet Union. Deutsch recruited spies that way between 1933 and 1937, when he was recalled to Moscow. His first recruit, in July 1934, was Kim Philby, the first of the "Cambridge Five". The full scope of their espionage is well beyond the scope of this essay. Here I'll focus only on their wartime contribution to the Soviet Union's war effort against Nazi Germany by secretly passing intelligence information on Nazi Germany from within British intelligence to Soviet intelligence: Guy Burgess was recruited by British secret intelligence service (MI6) in 1940, and Kim Philby was then recruited by MI6 on his recommendation. Philby later moved to Special Operations Executive, where in 1941 he delivered, like Richard Sorge, a crucial early warning of the coming German invasion of the Soviet Union, and of Japan's intention to invade Southeast Asia and not the Soviet Union. Anthony Blunt joined the counter-espionage service (MI5), where he had access to the processed intelligence from decoded top secret German communications. John Cairncross worked in 1942-1943 in Bletchley Park, where he had access to the raw transcripts of thousands of decoded top secret German communications, which he passed to his Soviet handler and were extremely helpful. Donald Maclean worked during World War 2 as the Foreign Office's expert on economic warfare.

• Atomic espionage - although it did not help the Soviet Union during World War 2, the Soviet effort to spy within the Manhattan Project successfully obtained practically all the secrets of the atomic bomb, and was probably both the largest, and most successful, scientific-technological espionage effort ever. It enabled the Soviet Union to become a nuclear superpower much sooner than anyone expected, saving it the enormous cost of development.

Spies for the United States:

The United States had to start a wartime espionage effort entirely from scratch:

• Eric Erickson - a Swedish-American Cornell University graduate, Erickson worked in the oil industry, immigrated to Sweden, and cancelled his US citizenship in favor of a Swedish citizenship. As a Swedish oil businessman, he developed work relations with the German oil industry. In World War 2 he was recruited by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) to spy in Germany. Erickson outwardly became an active Nazi sympathizer, misleading all who knew him. He received training in espionage techniques, and between 1941 and 1944 he made frequent business trips from Sweden to Germany in which he collected strategically important information about the German economy and energy situation, and particularly about the German synthetic oil industry.

• Fritz Kolbe - a career diplomat in the German foreign office since 1925, his repeated refusal to join the Nazi party resulted in his reassignment in 1939 to a clerical job in the foreign office in Berlin. He secretly became an anti-Nazi. In 1943 he convinced a higher ranking anti-Nazi foreign office official to add his name to the list of officials allowed to act as diplomatic couriers. On his first diplomatic trip, to Switzerland, he entered the British embassy and offered all the documents he carried, both in the diplomatic bag and hidden on his body, but was rejected. The American embassy was also suspicious, but did not rejected him. Until the end of the war Kolbe secretly delivered lots of German documents to the US intelligence in Switzerland, containing top quality strategic military information, advanced weapons technology information, and also high quality verbal reports.

Spies for the United Kingdom:

After years of appeasement, British intelligence services were not ready for World War 2 with spies within Germany. When the war started, the main intelligence efforts were: (a) codebreaking German radio communications, (b) supporting resistance all over Nazi-occupied Europe, (c) capturing German spies and turning some of them to double agents. But there were two very unique walk-in spies:

• Hans Ferdinand Mayer - a German scientist, and secretly an anti-Nazi. As the director of the Berlin research lab of Siemens, one of the largest German electronics companies, Mayer had insider knowledge of the most technologically advanced weapons being developed in Germany at the start of World War 2. Some of these developments were entirely revolutionary at the time, and totally unknown outside Germany. In late October 1939, two months after the war started, Mayer arranged a business trip to then neutral Norway, and once there, he delivered an anonymous letter to the British embassy. The letter, just seven pages, contained a summary of the state of the art of Germany's advanced weapons development. When the letter was evaluated by British intelligence, it was rejected by almost all who read it as being "too good to be true". But Dr. Reginald Victor Jones, the scientist of Royal Air Force intelligence, decided to focus on the scientifically verifiable details in the letter, nicknamed the "Oslo Report", and thus proved the authenticity of the information.

  The "Oslo Report" was perhaps the most continuously useful single document from a spy in the history of espionage. It provided critically important information that gave Britain months, in some cases years, of early warning. Critical time needed to prepare for and to disrupt these revolutionary new and secret German weapons. These included: radio navigation for bombers, RADAR, proximity fuzes for shells and bombs, remotely guided missiles, cruise missiles, acoustic homing torpedoes, magnetically fused torpedoes, and the V-2 ballistic missiles. The document also revealed the exact locations of Germany's advanced weapons test site and its new aircraft test site. In 1943 Mayer was imprisoned for expressing criticism of the Nazi regime and remained imprisoned until the end of the war, but the Nazis never knew that he was a spy.

• Juan Pujol Garcia - during World War 2, British intelligence made a fully successful effort to capture ALL German spies in Britain. Some of the captured spies were turned into "double agents", who sent back to Germany the disinformation that British intelligence ordered them to send. An ongoing operation meticulously coordinated between all branches of British armed forces and intelligence services, by what was called the XX comittee (XX for double-cross), to maximize the result of feeding disinformation to the German intelligence via the double agents, and to minimize the risk that the Germans will understand that they're being fed disinformation. In 1941, decoded German communications indicated that German intelligence have a highly appreciated spy in London, being handled via the German intelligence station at Madrid, Spain, who is not known to them. To their amazement, British intelligence also realized that the highly appreciated spy was in fact misinforming the Germans. That was Juan Pujol Garcia.

  When British intelligence finally found out who he was, they discovered that Garcia, who offered to spy for Britain several times and was rejected, independently convinced German intelligence that he was running a network of agents for them in Britain, a network which did not exist, while he was actually in Lisbon, Portugal. He fed the Germans disinformation that damaged them, and was well paid for it by them. Juan Pujol Garcia was a genius of deception and disinformation. In April 1942 he was moved to London and became one of the XX comittee's double agents, the best of them. Working with British intelligence instead of all by himself, his fictitious network gradually grew to 27 nonexistent agents, allegedly reporting from all over Britain. Until the end of the war Garcia delivered to the German intelligence nearly 2000 reports, disinformation that caused Germany tremendous damage, and also carefully timed true information that could not help them but convinced them that Garcia's network was real. For his unique service, both fake and real, Nazi Germany paid Garcia over $300,000, and awarded him on July 29, 1944 the Iron Cross medal, and four months later King George VI made him a member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (MBE).

Spies for Nazi Germany :

In addition to being decisively defeated by the intelligence services of the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom, the deadly rivalry between the German military intelligence service and the Nazi party's intelligence service, negated the usefulness of Germany's one well-placed spy.

• Elyesa Bazna - in 1943, Bazna offered himself for the job of valet for the British ambassador in Turkey, to serve in the ambassador's private residence outside the embassy. When interviewed for the job, he did not reveal that he spent 3 years in prison for stealing, or that later, as a valet, his was fired for reading his employer's private mail. His background was not investigated, and he was hired. He quickly found out that the ambassador neglected security protocols, routinely bringing top secret documents to the private residence and not guarding the key to the safe. Bazna copied the key to the ambassador's private safe, then systematically photographed the top secret documents while the ambassador was busy out of the room, and since October 1943 delivered the documents to the German embassy in Turkey, for money. His German code name was "Cicero", and in return for the high quality strategic information he provided them, the Germans paid him over 300,000 pounds. They did not tell him that much of the money was counterfeit. Just two months after Bazna started spying for Germany, Fritz Kolbe informed OSS of the spy in the British embassy in Turkey, and the British were warned. Bazna noticed the increased security and the other efforts to find a spy, and resigned in job in February 1944. British intelligence found only after the war that he was the spy.

Spies for Japan:

Japan's intelligence collection focused on tactical and technical military information. That left them dangerously unaware of the economic-industrial strength of their enemies:

• William Forbes-Sempill - Lord Sempill joined the Royal Flying Corps at the start of World War 1, and ended the war as a Colonel. After the war he became a civilian test pilot, and in 1920 the Air Ministry sent him to Japan with other aviators in hope of selling British military aviation technology to Japan. When he returned to Britain in 1922, he secretly continued working with the Japanese, by becoming a spy who sold them British military aviation technology secrets, when he had access to such secrets. Amazingly, although his espionage was discovered in the 1920s and he even admitted that he passed secrets to Japan, nothing was done, and on the outbreak of World War 2 he was given a job in the department of Air Materiel at the Admiralty, which gave him again access to secret information about the latest British military aircraft. In June 1941, decoded Japanese communications proved that Lord Sempill was again spying for Japan for money, but still nothing was done beyond discussions about his case. Only after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor action was taken and Lord Sempill was captured while delivering information to Japan and also holding secret documents. But even then, instead of being arrested and accused of wartime espionage, he just agreed to resign.

• Takeo Yoshikawa - Japan's spy at Pearl Harbor was not a secret agent. A young Japanese naval officer who served on a cruiser and in submarines, and trained to become a naval aviator, his maritime career was stopped due to a health problem, and he moved to naval intelligence. He specialized in US Navy information and proved his initiative and resourcefulness, so in 1940 he was trained for diplomatic duty as a cover, and on March 27, 1941 arrived at Honolulu, allegedly as a new vice-consul. In the next eight months, until the attack on Pearl Harbor, he meticulously observed and reported US military presence and military activity at and around Pearl Harbor from every direction, including flying over with rented aircraft, visiting the Harbor by boat, and even by diving underwater. Only the complacency of US security at Hawaii allowed the intense and very undiplomatic activities of the Japanese vice-consul to go unnoticed. Furthermore, although the Japanese PURPLE code was broken by US signals intelligence, the communications of the Japanese consulate at Hawaii, which was mostly on commercial issues, was given low priority and too little attention, and so Yoshikawa's intelligence reports and other clearly military communications, were not noticed. Yoshikawa's intelligence reports significantly helped the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. When he received by radio the code word indicating the start of war with the United States, he destroyed all evidence of his intelligence activity, and was thus not suspected of espionage when the FBI raided the day after the attack. In August 1942, when imprisoned US and Japanese diplomats were exchanged, he returned to naval intelligence HQ in Tokyo, and remained there until the end of the war.

Related essays:
German Secret Weapons (7 minutes read)
The Battle Of Kursk (8 minutes read)
World War 2 Leaders (17 minutes read)
World War 2 RADAR (6 minutes read)
Russia In World War 2 (22 minutes read)
World War 2 Submarines (6 minutes read)
The Manhattan Project (7 minutes read)

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