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Spies

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Science, Wars and warfare

Edward Snowden

Edward Joseph Snowden is an American-Russian former computer intelligence consultant who leaked highly classified information from the National Security Agency (NSA) in 2013, when he was an employee and subcontractor. His illegal disclosures revealed numerous global surveillance programs, many run by the NSA and the Five Eyes Intelligence Alliance with the cooperation of telecommunication companies and European governments, and prompted a cultural discussion about national security and individual privacy.

Wars and warfare

Barry Seal

Adler Berriman "Barry" Seal was a Trans World Airlines (TWA) pilot who became a major drug smuggler for the Medellín Cartel. When Seal was convicted of smuggling charges, he became an informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration and testified in several major drug trials. He was murdered in 1986 by contract killers hired by Pablo Escobar, head of the Medellín Cartel.

Wars and warfare

QAnon

QAnon is a disproven far-right conspiracy theory alleging that a cabal of Satanic, cannibalistic pedophiles operate a global child sex trafficking ring and conspired against former President Donald Trump during his term in office. QAnon has been described as a cult.

Wars and warfare

Eli Cohen

Eliyahu Ben-Shaul Cohen, commonly known as Eli Cohen, was an Israeli spy. He is best known for his espionage work in 1961–1965 in Syria, where he developed close relationships with the Syrian political and military hierarchy and became the chief adviser to the Minister of Defense.

Movies, Art, Politics, Wars and warfare

T. E. Lawrence

Colonel Thomas Edward Lawrence, was a British archaeologist, military officer, diplomat, and writer. He was renowned for his liaison role during the Sinai and Palestine Campaign and the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. The breadth and variety of his activities and associations, and his ability to describe them vividly in writing, earned him international fame as Lawrence of Arabia—a title used for the 1962 film based on his wartime activities.

Art, Wars and warfare

Mata Hari

Margaretha Geertruida MacLeod, better known by the stage name Mata Hari, was a Dutch exotic dancer and courtesan who was convicted of being a spy for Germany during World War I. Despite her having admitted under interrogation to taking money to work as a German spy, many people still believe she was innocent because the French Army needed a scapegoat. She was executed by firing squad in France.

Wars and warfare

Robert Hanssen

Robert Philip Hanssen was an American Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent who spied for Soviet and Russian intelligence services against the United States from 1979 to 2001. His espionage was described by the Department of Justice as "possibly the worst intelligence disaster in U.S. history".

Art, Geography, Traveling, Politics, Wars and warfare

Walter Raleigh

Sir Walter Raleigh was an English landed gentleman, writer, poet, soldier, politician, courtier, spy and explorer. He was cousin to Sir Richard Grenville and younger half-brother of Sir Humphrey Gilbert. He is also well known for popularising tobacco in England.

Wars and warfare

Anthony Blunt

Anthony Frederick Blunt, styled as Sir Anthony Blunt, KCVO, from 1956 to 1979, was a leading British art historian who in 1964, after being offered immunity from prosecution, confessed to having been a Soviet spy.

Wars and warfare

Rudolf Abel

Rudolf Ivanovich Abel, real name Vilyam "Willie" Genrikhovich Fisher, was a Soviet intelligence officer. He adopted his alias when arrested on charges of conspiracy by FBI agents in 1957.

Wars and warfare

Francis Gary Powers

Francis Gary Powers —often referred to as simply Gary Powers—was an American pilot whose Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) U-2 spy plane was shot down while flying a reconnaissance mission in Soviet Union airspace, causing the 1960 U-2 incident.

Politics, Science, Wars and warfare

Klaus Fuchs

Emil Julius Klaus Fuchs was a German theoretical physicist and atomic spy who, in 1950, was convicted of supplying information from the American, British, and Canadian Manhattan Project to the Soviet Union during and shortly after the Second World War. After nine years' imprisonment in Great Britain, he re-migrated to the German Democratic Republic where he resumed his career as a physicist and scientific leader. While at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Fuchs was responsible for many significant theoretical calculations relating to the first nuclear weapons and, later, early models of the hydrogen bomb.

Movies, Art, Wars and warfare

John le Carré

David John Moore Cornwell, better known by his pen name John le Carré, was a British author of espionage novels. During the 1950s and 1960s, he worked for both the Security Service (MI5) and the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). His third novel, The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (1963), became an international best-seller and remains one of his best-known works.

Movies, Art, Politics, Business and economy, Wars and warfare

Robert Maxwell

Ian Robert Maxwell was a British media proprietor, former member of Parliament (MP), suspected spy, and fraudster. Originally from Czechoslovakia, Maxwell rose from poverty to build an extensive publishing empire. After his death, huge discrepancies in his companies' finances were revealed, including his fraudulent misappropriation of the Mirror Group pension fund.

Wars and warfare

Aldrich Ames

Aldrich Hazen Ames is a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer turned KGB mole, who was convicted of espionage in 1994. He is serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole in the Federal Correctional Institution in Terre Haute, Indiana, United States. Ames was formerly a 31-year CIA counterintelligence analyst who committed espionage against the U.S. by spying for the Soviet Union and Russia. At the time of his arrest, Ames had compromised more CIA assets than any other mole in history until Robert Hanssen's arrest seven years later.