Hitler's Third Reich and World War II in the News is a daily edited review of WWII news, providing thought- provoking collection of hand-picked WW2 information.

Category: Intelligence, Espionage & WWII Spies  -- See latest WWII news here. See also 'Army Rangers', 'Nazi Spies in America', 'Special Forces - Secret Missions', 'Female Spy', 'OSS', 'MI5'.

Soviet spy Anatoly Gurevich, a member of the Red Orchestra spy ring, dies
Soviet spy Anatoly Gurevich, who was arrested in Nazi-occupied France in 1942, has died in Saint Petersburg at the age of 96. He was a member of the Red Orchestra spy ring which operated in France, Germany, Belgium and Switzerland during the Second World War. In 1945, when WWII ended, Gurevich returned to Moscow where he was seized along with other Red Orchestra agents two years later and sent to prison for 20 years. After Stalin's death in 1953 he was freed but then sent to labour camp for 25 years under Nikita Khrushchev.     [ thepeninsulaqatar.com :: 2009-01-05 :: Intelligence, Espionage & WWII Spies ]

Robert Furman, "Mysterious Major" at center of the building of the Pentagon and the a-bomb, dies
For 60 years, Robert Ralph Furman lived a quiet suburban life. Few around him knew his World War II role. He was at the center of the building of the Pentagon and the development of the atomic bomb. His roles were wrapped in such secrecy that his name did not appear in documents for decades. In 1940, as a member of the Army Reserve, he became a key figure in the construction of a new War Department office building. The Pentagon was finished in 17 months, and in mid-1943, Furman was ready for a new task. His boss' boss General Leslie Groves was in charge of the Manhattan Project, and he picked Furman as his chief of intelligence to discover what the Nazis were upto.     [ denverpost.com :: 2008-10-24 :: Intelligence, Espionage & WWII Spies ]

Bond creator Ian Fleming saved MI6 - reveal files at the National Archives at Kew
Ian Fleming, who was an officer in the British Navy's intelligence, helped to add "new blood" into MI6 by allowing it to be infiltrated by members of the Cambridge spy ring. The secret files reveal that British naval chiefs began to lobby Winston Churchill to let them start their own espionage service after an army officer was put in charge of MI6 - a post traditionally led by a navy officer. However, Fleming, the British Navy's liaison officer with MI6, directed them away from the idea. Instead, his suggestion, dated April 1940, read: "...the infusion of new blood into the existing organisation would be better than chopping off hoary but experienced heads."     [ telegraph.co.uk :: 2008-10-06 :: Intelligence, Espionage & WWII Spies ]

Winston Churchill was begged to keep SOE going to counter Russian menace
Winston Churchill was recommended, by the head of Britain's World War II secret espionage unit going in peacetime, to counter "the Russian menace", files released by the National Archives reveal. But the wartime PM unknowingly signed the death warrant of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) by holding up a decision on it until after the 1945 general election, which he lost to Clement Attlee. Lord Selborne, who as Minister of Economic Warfare headed up the service, argued against placing the unit under the control of the Foreign Office, which wanted to combine it with the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS).     [ telegraph.co.uk :: 2008-08-29 :: Intelligence, Espionage & WWII Spies ]

Carl Aschan: WWII intelligence officer who helped to hunt down Nazi leaders
Carl Aschan, who has died aged 102, worked for British intelligence in his native Sweden during World War II and in 1945 helped to track down some of the Nazi leaders. He planned operations against German garrisons in Norway and the Channel Islands. At the end of the war he was sent to Germany, where he was attached to an armoured battalion. At Flensburg Aschan and his comrades arrested the head of the German Secret Service in Stockholm. His team also confined armaments minister Albert Speer and the propagandist William Joyce ("Lord Haw-Haw"). At attempt to seize SS chief Heinrich Himmler at Glücksburg Castle was less successful.     [ telegraph.co.uk :: 2008-08-23 :: Intelligence, Espionage & WWII Spies ]

The Lost Spy: An American in Stalin's Secret Service by Andrew Meier
In "The Lost Spy" Andrew Meier reveals the tragic tale of Isaiah Oggins, one of the first Americans to spy for the Soviet Union. He was a Jewish intellectual who felt ostracized by the Ivy League's WASP world and searched solace with young Communists in New York City. With them he dreamed of a "world revolution" that would spread from the Soviet Union through Europe to the US. Oggins and his wife, a radical Soviet emigrée Nerma Berman, ran a safe house in Berlin for Soviet agents and spied on the Romanovs in Paris and the Japanese in Manchuria. "He envisioned a utopia on earth... He imagined himself an American Robin Hood among the Bolsheviks."     [ boston.com :: 2008-08-11 :: Intelligence, Espionage & WWII Spies ]

Did British double agent Kim Philby murder Polish war hero General Sikorski?
General Wladyslaw Sikorski, the leader of Poland's wartime government in exile, died in 1943 when his aircraft dived into the sea off Gibraltar. A British inquiry said that the crash was caused by the aircraft's controls jamming. But rumours of a plot to kill General Sikorski - whose defence of the Polish national cause jeopardised Britain's relationship with the Soviet Union - live on. Now Poland's president has demanded that Sikorski's body be exhumed from its tomb in Wawel Cathedral in Krakow, the burial place of Polish heroes. Moves to exhume Sikorski's body come after a long campaign by Polish historians, who claim body was not examined properly.     [ telegraph.co.uk :: 2008-07-02 :: Unsolved Mysteries of WWII ]

Operation Ruthless - Ian Fleming's plan to outwit the Nazis
The plot designed by Ian Fleming in 1940, over a decade before he created James Bond, was so preposterous that it can be seen as the prototype 007 mission. Fleming, a WW2 naval intelligence officer, was the architect of Operation Ruthless, a daring plan to seize a German codebook that may have inspired the plot to From Russia with Love. His plan, calling for a staged plane crash and disguised commandos, is revealed in full at the Imperial War Museum. It was created after codebreakers at Bletchley Park could not efficiently decode the German navy messages without copies of their conversion tables.     [ timesonline :: 2008-04-08 :: Intelligence, Espionage & WWII Spies ]

Richard Sorge - World War II spy for the Soviet Union
On the outbreak of WW1 Richard Sorge joined the German Army, earning the Iron Cross medal on the Eastern front. In March 1916 Sorge was badly wounded. In hospital he started a relationship with one of his nurses; consequently Sorge was influenced by her Marxist father. Not fit enough to return to the frontline, he studied at Berlin University. In 1925 he moved to the Soviet Union where he worked for the Comintern Intelligence Division. In 1929 Sorge returned to Germany, tasked to join the Nazi Party. In 1933 the Soviet Union decided to get Sorge to set up a spy network in Japan...     [ russia-ic :: 2008-03-05 :: Intelligence, Espionage & WWII Spies ]

George Weidinger helped uncover Nazi secrets at PO Box 1142
In 1942, a highly classified military intelligence unit was formed at Fort Hunt. Known only as PO Box 1142, for the mailing address of its 1,000-plus personnel whose work remained secret until the National Park Service revealed parts of the fort's history. The unit interrogated Nazi Germany's top officers, officials and scientists. The Allies learned about German research in rocketry, the atomic bomb, the jet engine, U-boats, microwaves and infrared technology. Among the prisoners were Wernher von Braun, Reinhard Gehlen and Heinz Schlicke. Though this unit and its intent violated the Geneva conventions, extracting information was done without torture.     [ cleveland :: 2008-01-12 ]

The Hunt for Nazi Spies: Fighting Espionage in Vichy France
During the German occupation of France, Suzanne Desseigne started contact with the Nazis. She became the mistress of a German soldier who enrolled her to conduct espionage missions against the Vichy regime. Her mother described the Nazi spy as "a young French girl who, from the age of 15... felt the danger of Bolshevism and of the Jewish conspiracy." She remained, even after her captivity, a earnest traitor, attacking other inmates who did not share her loyalty to the Nazi cause. --- Historian Simon Kitson's research of the French counterintelligence service's pursuit of German spies is precise, but maybe not aimed to appeal to a mass market.     [ nysun :: 2008-01-02 ]

Stanley Blake: A Polish resistance spy captured by Gestapo
Stanley Blake will spend Christmas pretty much the same as usual: "A candle, a cup of coffee." He thinks this is a blessing. After all, Blake well knows what a terrible Xmas is like. That's the one he spent in 1944 in Vienna at the hands of Gestapo. During World War II, when he operated as a spy for the Polish resistance in Austria, he was called Stanislaw Kasimierz Wojcik. That's the man the Gestapo caught in December 1944, after his id was leaked to them. On Dec 25 1944, he was probed by 3 Gestapo officers. The beatings went on, supplemented by torture... until he cracked under the pressure, 3 months later.     [ buffalonews :: 2007-12-26 ]

Nazi Klaus Barbie boasted of hunting down Che Guevara for CIA
Was Che Guevara's capture in Bolivia directed by the Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie, as the CIA made use of his anti-guerrilla skills? Barbie was the Gestapo chief in Lyon whose crimes included the murder of 44 children and the capture of French Resistance leader Jean Moulin. Documentary My Enemy's Enemy, by Kevin Macdonald, probes how Barbie's record was brushed off when he was enrolled by CIA as a useful tool against communism. He avoided French justice by fleeing to Bolivia where, under the alias Klaus Altmann, he was welcomed by fascist sympathisers. Alvaro de Castro, a confidant of Barbie, told that Barbie had no respect for "pitiful adventurer" Che Guevara.     [ guardian :: 2007-12-23 ]

Noel Coward recruited as pre-war undercover agent, letters reveal
Noël Coward was recruited as a British undercover agent in 1938 and was critical of fellow actors who "scuttled off" to Hollywood instead of fighting for their country, according to unpublished letters. Many date from the war years, a period only touched on in his autobiography, and reveal details about his spying activities. "I have encountered a number of people who appear sceptical of Britain's ability to ... overcome the extreme challenges we presently face. I have tried to convince them that, though we may inhabit a small island, we never have been or ever shall be a small people" - assessing the mood in Hollywood in 1940.     [ timesonline :: 2007-11-05 ]

Arno Mayer took care of captured Nazi German scientists, generals
The last thing a soldier wants to do is befriend enemy - unless it's his job. Arno Mayer, a history professor, had to do just that during the Second World War, taking care of Nazi prisoners as if they were his sick friends. He was stationed at Fort Hunt, Va., where the U.S. Army brought some Nazi generals and scientists for interrogation. "I was to keep them happy because we were trying to entice them to work for the American army. I was to provide them with newspapers, liquor and, one time, we came close to providing them with women. ... the main purpose was to get information about the order of battle of the red army."     [ dailyprincetonian :: 2007-10-26 :: Intelligence, Espionage & WWII Spies ]

Oct. 18, 1945: Red Spy Klaus Fuchs steals US Atom Bomb Secrets
1945: Klaus Fuchs passes American atomic bomb secrets to the Soviet Union for the first time. 1945-1947, working with a courier Raymond, Fuchs delivered information on the atomic bomb, later the hydrogen bomb, to Moscow. Fuchs was a refugee from Hitler's Third Reich, fleeing to England in 1933. At the outbreak of WWII, he was interned but released through professor Max Born. Fuchs was recruited for the British atomic bomb project, and became a British subject in 1942. In 1943 he was among British scientists sent to the US to collaborate on the Manhattan Project. He was present at the Trinity test in July 1945. Through it all, however, he remained a committed communist.     [ wired :: 2007-10-18 :: Intelligence, Espionage & WWII Spies ]

Spy left out in the cold: how MI6 buried heroic exploits of agent Griffin
The mystery of how one of Britain's longest-serving and best-placed spies smuggled scientific documents about Adolf Hitler's nuclear weapons programme out of Nazi Germany are concealed, it is alleged, within the secret service's archives. Cherie Booth appeared in court in an attempt to rescue the reputation of Paul Rosbaud from oblivion. Codenamed Griffin, he provided London with detailed information on Hitler's weapons programme. Rosbaud is believed to have supplied British intelligence with information about V2 rocket bombs and confirmation that Nazi efforts to build an atom bomb had been unsuccessful.     [ guardian :: 2007-09-22 :: Intelligence, Espionage & WWII Spies ]

Secret WWII files reveal rocky early years of US-UK Intelligence
British spies during World War II were frustrated by the lack of information-sharing with the FBI and feared Nazi agents could infiltrate Britain through the US. Newly declassified documents reveal that in 1941 MI5 officers were arguing for closer intelligence cooperation with the US agency. They feared German agents could hide themselves among the thousands of American diplomats, military personnel and journalists entering the country in the wake of the Lend-Lease agreement. "The 30,000 Americans who are arriving over here and the many hundreds here already, who at the moment are subject to little control, represent a grave danger to security..."     [ azstarnet :: 2007-09-04 :: Intelligence, Espionage & WWII Spies ]

Round world trip by 5 British naval officers was daring spy mission
Five British naval officers conducted a spying mission on Japanese-controlled islands in 1933 while sailing around the world claiming that they were making an amateur attempt to circumnavigate the globe, newly discovered papers have revealed. 8 years later the Japanese armed forces used the Kurile Islands to hide 6 aircraft carriers that destroyed the American fleet in Pearl Harbor. The papers have emerged from the estate of the late Commander Robert Ryder - the sailing master of the officers' yacht. Historians believe they show that the British had guessed Japan's hostile intentions and seen the military potential of the islands much earlier than previously thought.     [ timesonline :: 2007-08-25 :: Intelligence, Espionage & WWII Spies ]

Memorial unveiled to courageous Canadian spy Gustave Bieler
The exploits of a little-known Canadian spy Gustave (Guy) Bieler - a key player in the French Resistance before his capture and execution at a Nazi death camp in 1944 - are being showcased inside the Flossenburg Concentration Camp Museum. Bieler was parachuted into France in 1942 under the codename "Musician" - and he organized one of the French underground's most successful sabotage teams. The Nazi interrogators were so impressed by his unwillingness to reveal secrets that they paid tribute to him with an honour guard when he was shot to death on Sept. 6, 1944.     [ montrealgazette :: 2007-07-28 :: Intelligence, Espionage & WWII Spies ]

Laurence Olivier acted as World War 2 secret agent
On screen he portrayed military heroes such as Henry V, Lord Nelson and the Duke of Wellington. In real life Laurence Olivier, accused by some of lacking patriotism, worked secretly to help secure the hearts of US during the early stages of WW2. According to a book, he was secretly enlisted into the Special Operations Executive in 1940 by the British ambassador Lord Lothian and the producer Sir Alexander Korda. Olivier was given the task of building support in a neutral US for Britain's war with Nazi Germany. Michael Munn, the author of Lord Larry, said: "Winston Churchill recruited Alexander Korda to set up offices in America which were a front for the SOE and MI5."     [ smh :: 2007-07-17 :: Intelligence, Espionage & WWII Spies ]

The story of Peter and Helen Riedel, part III
During Peter Ernst Riedel's stint in Sweden in 1943 under the supervision of Colonel Georg Hansen, head of the Abwehr's Air Force Technical Intelligence, evidence of Nazi atrocities reached his desk. Though already disillusioned by Nazism and the failure of the German Air Ministry to recognize America's air potential, Riedel retained an allegiance to his country and his "wish for victory" evaporated. During his weekly Abwehr trips to Berlin, Peter shared his concern with a few trusted colleagues. At a cocktail party in Berlin, Riedel was approached by a Finnish Military Attaché, who asked him to consider providing intelligence to Americans about Russian aircraft.     [ tribstar :: 2007-07-15 :: Intelligence, Espionage & WWII Spies ]

The day Agent Zigzag came back from the dead - Eddie Chapman
After the publication of Agent Zigzag, I received a call from the German Ambassador Wolfgang Ischinger: "I have just finished your book. You describe how Eddie Chapman was flown across the Channel by the Luftwaffe ...the man who commanded that flight was my father. Both he and the pilot, Fritz Schlichting, are still very much alive." Schlichting had been the Iron Cross pilot at the controls of the Focke-Wulf reconnaissance plane in 1942, while Karl "Charlie" Ischinger was his navigator. The discovery led to a meeting with Fritz Schlichting. "We were the Luftwaffe Reconnaissance Squadron number 123 stationed in the Château du Buc, outside Versailles."     [ timesonline :: 2007-06-16 :: Intelligence, Espionage & WWII Spies ]

World War II spies have their cover blown by MI5 - Camp 020
A blunder by MI5 has blown the cover on some of its top WWII agents. The identities of operatives are closely guarded, even after long periods of time. However, an innocuous file released to the National Archives has allowed a number of agents who operated during World War 2 to be identified. The information is contained in a schedule from the body's secret interrogation centre, Camp 020 (run by Lt Col.Robert 'Tin Eye' Stephens) in which captured German agents were "broken". The double-agent system, in which the centre played a key role, culminated when the Germans were fooled into believing Britain would attack in the Pas de Calais rather than Normandy.     [ telegraph.co.uk :: 2007-06-13 :: Intelligence, Espionage & WWII Spies ]

Mafia Allies: America's Secret Alliance with the Mob in World War II
The U.S. Pacific fleet had been devastated in the Pearl Harbor attack, and Nazi U-boats were sinking Allied ships. The clannish Italians who made up the bulk of the fishing industry were well placed to supply critical information, but their distrust of outsiders prevented them from doing patriotic duty. An American Mafioso, Charlie "Lucky" Luciano was at a prison - to up to 50 years. Naval intelligence pulled some strings behind the scenes, and he was transferred to Albany. With his criminal mastermind Meyer Lansky acting as go-between, the Navy enlisted Luciano and the result was one of the great Allied counter-espionage successes.     [ nypost :: 2007-05-21 :: Intelligence, Espionage & WWII Spies ]

Briton killed by Nazis outside Rome was a top secret agent
An "Unknown Englishman" murdered outside Rome by Nazis was a secret agent who had been landed by submarine to organise anti-Fascist resistance on Sardinia, a historian claimed. The officer was named as Captain John Armstrong. But they cautioned that this could have been an alias. Now it was claimed that "John Armstrong" was Gabor Adler, a Special Operations Executive (SOE) agent code-named "Gabriel", who was landed in Jan 1943 in Sardinia. He was captured soon, together with Salvatore Serra, an Italian Carabinieri (paramilitary police) officer who had defected to British forces. The pair were found to be carrying a list of Sardinian antiFascist activists.     [ timesonline :: 2007-05-10 :: Intelligence, Espionage & WWII Spies ]

MI6 secrecy over superspy, who passed on A-bomb, V2 and V1 rockets
MI6, which has policy to keep all its files locked away, has been ordered to appear at a public hearing over the case of one of its superspies Paul Rosbaud, whose file is buried in the archives of the headquarters of the Secret Intelligence Service. Unlike MI5, which has been releasing its WWII records to the National Archives in Kew, MI6 has kept all its files secret. Paul Rosbaud offered his services because he was horrified by the ambitions of the Nazi regime. His offer to be a spy was accepted by Frank Foley, Britain's chief wartime spymaster in Third Reich. Rosbaud passed on secrets about nazi research into jet aircraft, radar and the V2 and V1 rockets.     [ timesonline :: 2007-05-07 :: Intelligence, Espionage & WWII Spies ]

How Nazi spycatchers tried to subvert Britain's bravest flying aces
The shadowy British organisation known as Source Columba operated from behind enemy lines from the earliest days of the 1939-1945 War bringing intelligence of German plans at top speed. The Confidential Pigeon Service was one of the most closely-guarded secrets of wartime espionage because of the value of the information it provided. Hundreds of trained birds were flown from Britain in bombers, the birds contained in small cases attached to parachutes, then dropped behind enemy lines at night. Each pigeon came with a miniature spying kit. However, as D-Day neared, the Germans became "pigeon-conscious" and came up with a fiendish plan to counter the winged spies.     [ telegraph.co.uk :: 2007-03-21 :: Intelligence, Espionage & WWII Spies ]

Lucinda Franks's father was a spy and an assassin
A few years ago Lucinda Franks stumbled upon a box: Beneath some maps, she found a military cap with the metal insignia of an eagle, a skull and crossbones and a swastika. "Was my sphinx-like father presenting one character and living another?" she writes in her memoir "My Father's Secret War." He refused to talk, but she pieced together his story. Fluent in German, he was a spy and occasionally an assassin. The Nazi cap was part of his disguise as a member of the Waffen SS, worn the night he broke into a Gestapo headquarters and killed a guard. He kept it because of the death's head insignia: "I never wanted to forget who these German soldiers really were."     [ pritzkermilitarylibrary.org :: 2007-03-05 :: Intelligence, Espionage & WWII Spies ]

CIA records reveal American hand in birth of Japan's right wing
Colonel Masanobu Tsuji was a Japanese militarist and brutal warrior, hunted after WW2 for massacres and complicity in the Bataan Death March - And then he became a U.S. spy. Newly declassified CIA records, by the U.S. National Archives, document more fully than ever how Japanese war criminals were recruited by U.S. intelligence. The documents also show how ineffective the effort was, in the CIA's view. The records fill in many of the blanks in the spotty documentation of the occupation authority's intelligence arm and its involvement with Japanese ultra-nationalists and war criminals, historians say.     [ informationliberation.com :: 2007-02-24 :: Intelligence, Espionage & WWII Spies ]

A Spy Called Sorge - the Sorge affair in Japanese film
Faint lighting, a podium, and men in dark suits provided the backdrop for a discussion about Richard Sorge - a soviet spy in Japan during World War II and member of the German Communist Party. Under the cover of reporter, he sought to collect information on Nazi Germany's war plans inside of Japan for the Soviet Union. Japanese authorities arrested Sorge and executed him. The Paul I. and Hisako Terasaki Center sponsored a lecture "Traitors and Patriots: the Sorge Affair in Postwar Japanese Culture." Professor Thomas Rimer discussed how the Sorge affair continues to resonate within Japanese culture.     [ international :: 2007-02-22 :: Intelligence, Espionage & WWII Spies ]

Eddie Chapman: The true wartime story and the incredible exploits
Secret intelligence attracts oddballs, some hugely talented. The most exotic of MI5's "doubles" was Eddie Chapman. His story would defy belief, were it not supported by a documentation in both German archives and declassified MI5 files, of which Ben Macintyre (The True Wartime Story of Eddie Chapman: Lover, Betrayer, Hero, Spy) and Nicholas Booth (The Incredible Wartime Exploits of Eddie Chapman) make splendid use. Booth's version of the story is less well written, but profits from the assistance of its subject's widow, who has provided some racy detail.     [ telegraph.co.uk :: 2007-01-28 :: Intelligence, Espionage & WWII Spies ]

Military Intelligence expert Roberta Wohlstetter dies
Roberta Wohlstetter, a military intelligence expert who said faulty analysis of intelligence signals enabled Japan to attack Pearl Harbor in 1941 and who saw the same danger in a possible Soviet nuclear strike, has died at 94. "Her seminal book on the intelligence failures that led to the attack on Pearl Harbor remains as relevant today as when she published it in 1962." In "Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision" she argued that despite having broken Japanese diplomatic and naval codes, U.S. analysts had been unable to distinguish signals - intelligence data that would reveal the enemy plan - from noise (conflicting and misleading information).     [ usatoday :: 2007-01-11 :: Intelligence, Espionage & WWII Spies ]

War with MI6: secret files of Britain's greatest spy against the Nazis
A fierce legal tussle has broken out between Cherie Booth (who is representing the family of the secret agent Paul Rosbaud) and MI6 over top-secret files that relate to "The Griffin", an Austrian who provided Britain with vital intelligence on the Nazi atom bomb programme during World War 2. Paul Rosbaud was one of the most important agents of the war. A scientist opposed to the Nazi regime, he provided Britain with intelligence on jet aircraft, radar, flying bombs and Nazi attempts to develop the atomic bomb. At the end of the war, he was spirited out of Germany in British military uniform.     [ timesonline :: 2006-12-16 :: Intelligence, Espionage & WWII Spies ]

The secret agents tortured and killed discovered after 60 years
A graveyard for secret agents recruited by British and US intelligence has been discovered in Italy. For more than 60 years, their remains have lain in an military cemetery at Bolzano. The 23 men's identities were known, but no one knew why they were there or why they had been killed together. They were Italians infiltrated into the German-occupied part of Italy after Italy's withdrawal from the world war II in 1943. "They worked either for the forerunner of the CIA, the American Office of Strategic Services OSS, or for the British Special Operations Executive SOE."     [ guardian :: 2006-10-17 :: Intelligence, Espionage & WWII Spies ]

Hidden Nazi Spy Codes -- "Heavy reinforcements for the enemy"
German spies hid messages in drawings of fashion models in an attempt to outwit Allied censors during World War II, according to British security service files. Nazi agents relayed sensitive military information using the dots and dashes of Morse code incorporated in the drawings. But British secret service officials were aware of the ruse and issued censors with a code-breaking guide to intercept them. For example, code "Heavy reinforcements for the enemy expected hourly" was hidden in a drawing of three young models. The files reveal other ingenious ways spies tried to send coded notes through the post.     [ washingtonpost :: 2006-09-04 :: Intelligence, Espionage & WWII Spies ]

WWII secret interrogators break their silence
For more than 60 years, they kept their military secrets locked deep inside. The brotherhood of P.O. Box 1142 enjoyed no parades, no reunions and no wartime stories. Almost no one knew the place in history held by the men of Fort Hunt. But the declassification of military documents and the persistence of Brandon Bies, is bringing the men of P.O. Box 1142 out of the shadows. They questioned Third Reich scientists, u-boat submariners and soldiers at one of the US's most secretive camps. As the world war II progressed, P.O. Box 1142 shifted its attention to scientists in Nazi Germany.     [ msnbc :: 2006-08-21 :: Intelligence, Espionage & WWII Spies ]

Forgotten UK spy ring in in the US to bring America into WWII
It was 1940, the Nazis were in the ascendant, the Blitz at its deadliest, and Britain's last hope was to bring a reluctant U.S. into the war. So the largest covert operation in UK history was launched. William Boyd sheds light on a forgotten spy ring. BSC, "British Security Coordination," was one of the largest covert operations in British spying history; a covert operation that was run in the US during 1940 and 1941, before Pearl Harbor. Winston Churchill realised that he had to achieve one thing in order to ensure that Britain was not defeated by Hitler's Nazi Germany: he had to enlist the US as Britain's ally.     [ guardian :: 2006-08-21 :: Allied World War II leaders ]

U.S. recruited ex-Japanese army officers to form spy ring
The U.S. enlisted former top Japanese army officers after World War II to form a spy ring against communists in Japan and other countries, declassified U.S. intelligence documents show. Headed by former Lt. General Torashiro Kawabe, who served as deputy chief of the Imperial Japanese Army's General Staff, the intelligence organization resembles the Gehlen Org, an anti-communist spy group set up by former Nazi officer Maj. Gen. Reinhard Gehlen, who was also recruited by the U.S. after the WW2. As in the German case, key members of the Japanese group did not face war crimes charges under the postwar U.S. policy.     [ Kyodo :: 2006-08-13 :: Intelligence, Espionage & WWII Spies ]

Army sent him to Aleutian Islands to spy on Japanese planes
During World War II, the Army sent Lt. Earl Acuff to a remote location in the Aleutian Islands to spy on Japanese aircrafts. He was able to warn the Army about several attacks. However, months went by, and the Army heard nothing from him. The Alaskan Scouts, a unit of commando rangers under the leadership of Col. Lawrence Castner, were sent out to recover his body. Acuff, however, was far from dead. "I was living like a king," he recalled with a chuckle. "They told me not to break radio sound unless I saw a Japanese plane, so I didn't." Alaskan Scouts, also known as Castner's Cutthroats, were a band of trappers and hunters who fought off the Japanese in WWII.     [ roanoke :: 2006-07-31 :: Intelligence, Espionage & WWII Spies ]

World War II Military Intelligence Service vets given their due
They did their World War II service in secrecy. For decades after, their work was classified, and they were forbidden to tell anyone. Veterans of the Military Intelligence Service got a bit of long overdue recognition: a plaque honoring the work done by more than 7,000 Japanese Americans who formed the unit. The MIS members were an key part of the U.S. victory in the war in the Pacific. They often ended up walking into caves and bunkers, armed with nothing more than a knowledge of Japanese culture, to convince soldiers to surrender. Gen. Charles Willoughby, intelligence chief for Gen. Douglas MacArthur, once said their work shortened WWII by two years.     [ honoluluadvertiser :: 2006-07-25 :: Intelligence, Espionage & WWII Spies ]

Guerrilla operations against the Nazi occupiers
From 1943 Francis Cammaerts was one of the star performers of the "independent French" section of Special Operations Executive (SOE), which run guerrilla operations against the Nazi occupiers and Vichy regime during the second world war. His brother Pieter's early death as an RAF pilot changed his mind about violent opposition to Nazism. Through his friend he secured an entry to SOE in 1942, where F, the independent French section, took him on and sent him on their paramilitary training courses. Training staff reported that he would make a competent sabotage instructor, but did not appear to have leadership qualities.     [ guardian :: 2006-07-07 :: Intelligence, Espionage & WWII Spies ]

Frederic A. Mayer -- U.S. Spy during World War II
Article no longer available from the original source.
Mayer penetrated Nazi military intelligence, was captured and tortured by Gestapo and arranged the bloodless surrender of Nazi-occupied Innsbruck. Once he waltzed into a Wehrmacht camp, claimed thieves stole his weapons and began his 3-month act as a first lieutenant of the Third Reich. "And I never changed my name. I just pronounced it differently." After finding 26 trains carrying tanks and supplies to German forces, he radioed in the location for a bombing raid. "They say it shortened the war by 6 months." But Germans forced his network to reveal his guise. "That was unfortunate," said Mayer, who was tortured six hours by Gestapo.     [ mlive :: 2006-06-29 :: Intelligence, Espionage & WWII Spies ]

Peter Smithers Dies; Spy worked for creator of James Bond
As a spy in World War II, Sir Peter Smithers worked for Ian Fleming, who went on to create the spy James Bond, and British obituaries did not ignore the possible connection. But neither Mr. Fleming nor his biographers ever confirmed any of the many rumored Bond originals, and Sir Peter was never prominent among them. He helped round up German spies in Britain. Sent to Washington, he worked in naval intelligence. And later he monitored U-boat communications.     [ nytimes :: 2006-06-25 :: Intelligence, Espionage & WWII Spies ]

Canadian World War II spy finally comes clean in death
A central figure in the wartime Ottawa spy network exposed by Russian cipher clerk Igor Gouzenko has reached from beyond the grave to provide for the full details. Gordon Lunan, who died last fall provides the new account in Redhanded, which is an updated version of The Making of a Spy. In it he comes clean, admitting he funnelled information to Russian agents in the Second World War. But he denies he ever intended to betray his country. But often "the scientists would simply say no, they wouldn't or couldn't pass on the information which was fine with me. There was one request for a sample of U-235 uranium. That request fell on deaf ears."     [ canada :: 2006-06-17 :: Intelligence, Espionage & WWII Spies ]

Secret Nazi Weather Station in Newfoundland
The U-537 made the only armed German landing on North American soil in WWII. U-537 left Kiel, Germany on September 18, 1943. The boat went on patrol in the western North Atlantic under Kptlt. Peter Schrewe. Its task was to set up an automatic weather station on the coast of Labrador. The station was a secret known only by a handful German seamen and scientists. The story became known in the late 1970s, when an retired engineer found photographs of one weather station and a U-boat that did not fit in with the installations he had previously been able to identify.     [ uboat-net :: 2006-04-20 :: Intelligence, Espionage & WWII Spies ]

The shady world of Western intelligence services: Organisation Gehlen
A little history may be appropriate to understand the shady world of Western intelligence services. The German intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) has an pedigree to the days of the Third Reich. Its own website admits that the 'Organisation Gehlen' was its predecessor, but gives no information about them. Reinhard Gehlen was Hitler's senior intelligence officer on the Eastern Front and he transferred his expertise to the US as WWII ended. Gehlen's network of agents - including many with Nazi backgrounds who were bailed out of POW camps by U.S. intelligence officers - received millions of dollars in funding from the US until 1956.     [ mathaba :: 2006-01-17 ]

British counter-intelligence interrogator and SS paratrooper meet
Article no longer available from the original source.
Edwards was a British counter-intelligence interrogator when World War II ended while Parchmann was a pimply-faced paratrooper of 18. Edwards interrogated captured Germans as well as the SS Troops and Gestapo after it was over to determine who should be put up for war crimes trials. When Parchmann was drafted by the Nazis at the age of 16 his friend was drafted too, but he became a member of the infamous SS. Both agreed if the Germans had been treated with respect after World War I, Adolph Hitler would never have come to power.     [ burnabynews :: 2005-12-23 ]

Writer shone light on Goering, participated in espionage efforts
Kurt Singer, an anti-Nazi activist and spy during WWII, has died. His books include works on espionage and biographies (i.e. Hitler henchman Hermann Goering). He grew up in Berlin, where he became worried about the rise of Adolf Hitler. He began publishing an anti-Nazi underground weekly in 1933. The Nazis soon put a price on his head, and he fled to Sweden. With Kurt Grossman, he wrote a biography of Von Ossietzky that helped win the Nobel Peace Prize for the humanitarian. The writer worked as a spy, providing information about Russian and Nazi activities in Scandinavia.     [ charlotte :: 2005-12-16 ]

The Perfect Spy - Fritz Kolbe
He was a civil servant in an uncivilized society, an underling assigned to incinerate the secret messages that circulated among his sinister superiors. 1943, Fritz Kolbe stuck a stack of papers into a pouch and took a train to the Swiss capital. He met Allen Dulles, a Wall Street lawyer hired to build an American espionage network. Kolbe's information was staggering: A spy who penetrated the British embassy in Turkey was feeding the Nazis details about the planned D-Day landing at Normandy.     [ independent :: 2005-11-16 ]

MIS - Secret WWII Army Intelligence Unit
It's time to revisit the exploits, knowledge, experiences and intelligence of the World War Two veterans of the U.S. Army's Military Intelligence Service (MIS). The missions of the MIS were highly classified and still are not widely known. Information about MIS activities was not made public until over 30 years after the war. The MIS consisted of Americans of Japanese ancestry who performed a very wide range of important and often dangerous activities.     [ American Chronicle :: 2005-10-29 ]

Operation Mincemeat - How a Corpse Saved Lives in WWII
In the spring of 1943, after the campaign in North Africa, the Allies began to plan the invasion of Hitler's "Fortress Europe." The best target was Sicily: It would provide a springboard for the invasion, and eliminate the Luftwaffe's presence. Allies faced three obstacles: (1) Sicily is a mountainous island which favored the defenders. (2) The Axis knew that it was logically the next move. (3) The invasion, codenamed Operation Husky, required a build up which would likely be detected. Sir Archibald Cholmondley, of the British Intelligence interservice XX Committee conceived the idea to plant false documents on a dead man and let them fall into the hands of the Germans.     [ local :: 2004-05-08 ]

See also

'Army Rangers'

'Nazi Spies in America'

'Special Forces - Secret Missions'

'Female Spy'

'OSS'

'MI5'.

Although the articles linked from Adolf Hitler's Third Reich 1933-1945 and World War II in the News are reviewed and specially selected, they do not necessarily represent the views of the editor, who is not responsible for the content of any external sites. This service is © Joni Nuutinen 2005-2009. All rights reserved.