The Latest Spy Scandal

Walter Kendall Myers, 72, and his wife, Gwendolyn, 71, of Washington, were charged a few days ago with having spied for Cuba for the past 30 years. Until his retirement in 2007, Walter was a high-ranking analyst for the U.S. State Department with top-secret clearance. Gwendolyn, who worked in a local bank, allegedly passed along secret documents to other Cuban agents by exchanging shopping carts in supermarkets.

Both have pleaded not guilty. The Justice Department says the information they passed along was “incredibly serious.” (more…)

The Spy Who Came In From The Cold

John le Carré (pseudonym of David John Moore Cornwell) (born 19 October 1931) is an English author of espionage novels, several of which have been adapted for film and television. He worked for MI5 and MI6 in the 1950s and 1960s, before leaving the secret service to devote himself to writing after the success of The Spy Who Came In from the Cold.

The son of Richard Thomas Archibald (Ronnie) Cornwell (1906–1975) and Olive (Gassy) Cornwell, John le Carré was born in Poole, Dorset, England on 19 October 1931. He has a brother Tony, a retired advertising executive, who is 2 years older. The actress Charlotte Cornwell is his younger sister, and the former Washington bureau chief of the Independent newspaper, Rupert Cornwell, is his younger half-brother. Le Carré states he did not know his mother, who abandoned him at the age of five, until he was reacquainted with her at the age of 21. He had a difficult relationship with his father, who had been jailed for insurance fraud and was constantly in debt. According to one biography:

His father, Ronnie, made and lost his fortune a number of times due to elaborate confidence tricks and schemes which landed him in prison on at least one occasion. This was one of the factors that led to his fascination with secrets. His father was also the inspiration for the lead character in The Honourable Schoolboy (1977). (more…)

Robert Ludlum

All About Tom Clancy

How Members Of Oxford Spy Ring Were Exposed By MI5’s Peter Wright

As a gifted Oxford university student, Jenifer Hart was determined to succeed in the male dominated world of Whitehall’s top civil servants. In 1933, just a few years before coming third from the top of the Civil Service entrance exam — the first woman to do so — she joined the Communist Party. Student friends promptly advised her to drop her official membership and go underground as a “sleeper”.

In her biography, Ask Me No More, published in 1998, she wrote: “I was unclear what, if anything, I as a civil servant would do for the British Communist Party, but I think I supposed that I would occasionally pass them useful information.”

In those days there were no security checks on those joining the Civil Service and her political allegiance was never discovered. However, she admitted having six meetings in just her first few years with shady party members who refused to reveal their true identity.

She had served as private secretary to a Permanent-Under Secretary and in the Home Office where she worked on telephone intercepts, invariably of suspected communists. But it was while at that department she was twice interviewed by Peter Wright, the MI5 agent and later author of Spycatcher, about the company she kept. In 1947, she left the Civil Service. Four years later she wrote The British Police, an account of the history and structure of the force. (more…)

China Acused Over Global Computer Spy Ring

An enormous electronic espionage programme run from servers in China has been used to spy on computers in more than 100 countries, according to two reports published at the weekend.

The reports, published by the universities of Cambridge and Toronto, detail a “murky realm” where cyber spooks infiltrate email, take over humble desktop computers and use them to spy on organisations, individuals and governments.

The reports name the system GhostNet, and claim that it has been used to attack governments in south and south-east Asia as well as the offices of the Dalai Lama. In two years, the reports suggest, the operation infiltrated 1,295 computers in 103 countries. (more…)

The Duquesne Spy Ring

The Duquesne Spy Ring is the largest espionage case in United States history that ended in convictions. On January 2, 1942, 33 members of a German spy ring headed by Frederick or Fritz Joubert Duquesne were sentenced to serve a total of over 300 years in prison. They were brought to justice after a lengthy espionage investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Of those arrested on the charge of espionage, 19 pleaded guilty. The 14 men who entered pleas of not guilty were brought to jury trial in Federal District Court, Brooklyn, New York, on September 3, 1941; and they were all found guilty on December 13, 1941.

The German spies that formed the Duquesne spy ring were placed in key jobs in the United States to get information that could be used in the event of war and to carry out acts of sabotage: one person opened a restaurant and used his position to get information from his customers; another person worked on an airline so that he could report allied ships that were crossing the Atlantic Ocean; others in the ring worked as delivery people so that they could deliver secret messages alongside normal messages. (more…)