Loyal to Nobody in Particular
A double agent holds the least stable job in intelligence work. Two services each believe the person belongs to them, and both of those beliefs have to be fed with material real enough to be worth having. Some took the arrangement on for money. Others agreed to it in a cell with a gun on the table, which tends to end the same way. Here's 20 of them.
unknown photographer at Rijksvoorlichtingsdienst on Wikimedia
1. Alfred Redl
Redl ran counterintelligence for Austria-Hungary while selling its war plans to Russia for the better part of a decade. He handed Vienna the occasional Russian agent to protect his standing, and he sent Moscow the names of Austrians working across the border. The mail-intercept system he had helped build caught him in 1913, and his colleagues left him alone in a hotel room with a revolver.
unbekannt/not known on Wikimedia
2. Edward Bancroft
Benjamin Franklin trusted Bancroft completely and made him secretary to the American commission in Paris. He was also writing reports for London in invisible ink and leaving them in a bottle inside a hollow tree in the Tuileries. He traded on both sets of secrets in the stock market, and nobody knew for a century.
Unknown authorUnknown author on Wikimedia
3. Aleksandr Yakushev
Yakushev was a tsarist official turned Soviet agent, and he became the public face of the Trust, a monarchist underground the Soviets had invented from scratch. Exiles across Europe sent him money and men. Boris Savinkov walked back into Russia on his word in 1924, and Sidney Reilly followed a year later.
Алексей Дружинин / Alexei Druzhinin on Wikimedia
4. Nikolai Skoblin
The White Russian exiles in Paris treated Skoblin as one of their own generals, and he was on the NKVD payroll with his wife the whole time. He helped arrange the 1937 abduction of General Yevgeny Miller, who was shipped to Moscow in a crate and shot. He kept a line open to German intelligence at the same time, then vanished.
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5. Arthur Owens
Owens was a Welsh engineer who offered himself to the Abwehr in the 1930s and then offered himself to the British. He became the first agent of the Double Cross system and spent three years telling each service whatever it wanted. MI5 decided he had confessed the whole arrangement to his German handler and interned him.
6. Mathilde Carré
Carré helped run the Interallié network in occupied Paris until the Abwehr picked her up in 1941. Within days she was sleeping with the officer who caught her and giving up the addresses of her own agents. She talked her way to London as a British double agent, and MI5 worked out what she was and put her in a cell.
7. Eddie Chapman
Chapman was a safecracker in a Jersey prison when the Germans took the island, and he volunteered his services to them. They trained him and dropped him into England with a bag of cash. He walked into MI5 the same week, then faked a bombing at an aircraft factory convincing enough to earn him an Iron Cross.
Unknown British photographer. on Wikimedia
8. Nathalie Sergueiew
Sergueiew came to MI5 by way of the Abwehr and fed the Germans false material through the buildup to D-Day. Her handlers never learned she had held back a signal she could leave out of a transmission to warn Berlin she was under British control. She admitted it after a row over her dog, and MI5 dropped her.
British Security Service on Wikimedia
9. Christiaan Lindemans
Lindemans was a large, loud Dutch resistance courier who went over to the Germans in 1944 to save his brother from a firing squad. He kept working alongside the Allies until his arrest that October. Postwar rumor blamed him for the failure at Arnhem, though the Dutch inquiry that examined the case found no evidence he had access to the plan.
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10. Henri Déricourt
Déricourt organized SOE's clandestine landings in France while meeting a senior officer of the German security service in Paris. Agents he received went into Gestapo hands with unusual regularity, and the mail he handled appears to have been photographed first. A French court acquitted him in 1948 after his former SOE superior, Nicholas Bodington, testified that the contacts had been authorized.
11. Bhagat Ram Talwar
Talwar guided Subhas Chandra Bose out of India in 1941 and then took German and Japanese money for years of reporting. The British turned him not long afterward, and the Soviets ran him for a stretch as well. Every service that paid him got a version of the truth.
12. Boris Morros
Morros was a music director at Paramount who spent the 1930s moving Soviet agents and cover stories through the film business. In 1947 he went to the FBI and worked the other direction for a decade, drawing his old colleagues into recorded meetings. The Soble network went to prison largely on his word.
Paramount Pictures & George Maillard Kesslere on Wikimedia
13. Morris Childs
Childs rose to the top of the American Communist Party and flew to Moscow as its representative, carrying Soviet cash home by the millions. The FBI had recruited him years earlier. He sat in meetings with Soviet leaders for nearly thirty years and wrote up every one of them for Washington.
Federal Bureau of Investigation file photo on Wikimedia
14. Vitaly Yurchenko
Yurchenko was a senior KGB officer who defected in Rome in 1985 and gave the Americans two of their own traitors. Three months later he left his CIA escort at a Georgetown restaurant table and turned up at the Soviet embassy, claiming he had been drugged and held all along. Whether he ever defected at all is still argued over.
15. Freddie Scappaticci
Scappaticci ran the IRA's internal security unit, the men who interrogated and shot suspected informers. The Irish News and the Sunday Herald named him in 2003 as the British agent codenamed Stakeknife, which he denied until his death in 2023. Operation Kenova, the police investigation that followed, concluded his intelligence probably cost more lives than it saved.
16. Denis Donaldson
Donaldson spent decades as a trusted Sinn Féin official and republican prisoner, then admitted in 2005 that he had been working for British intelligence for twenty years and taking money for it. He was shot dead in a cottage in Donegal four months later.
17. Katrina Leung
For two decades the FBI paid Leung more than a million dollars to report on Chinese affairs, and Chinese intelligence was receiving her reporting too. She was also sleeping with two of her FBI handlers, which is how classified files ended up in her house. The espionage case fell apart in 2005.
18. Ashraf Marwan
Marwan sat close to the center of Egyptian power as Nasser's son-in-law, and he warned Tel Aviv ahead of the 1973 attack. Egypt buried him as a patriot who had misled the Israelis on purpose, and Israeli officers are still arguing about which country he was working for.
19. Ali Mohamed
Mohamed was an Egyptian army officer who ended up teaching at Fort Bragg as a US Army sergeant while informing for the FBI. He was training al-Qaeda operatives the whole time, and he took the surveillance photographs used to plan the 1998 embassy bombing in Nairobi. He pleaded guilty in 2000.
20. Humam al-Balawi
Jordanian intelligence recruited Balawi, a doctor who had made a name for himself writing on jihadist forums, and handed him to the CIA as a source inside al-Qaeda. He had gone back to the other side before he ever produced anything. At a base in Khost in December 2009 he was waved through the checkpoints unsearched, and he killed seven CIA employees and his Jordanian handler.
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