Items16The creator’s order
  1. 1Igor GouzenkoIgor GouzenkoBorn Jan 26, 1919The case that told the West its wartime ally was already spying on it. Gouzenko was a cipher clerk at the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, and on the evening of September 5, 1945, he walked out with secret documents hidden under his coat. Canada's prime minister, Mackenzie King, set up a royal commission…0
  2. 2Alger HissAlger HissBorn Nov 11, 1904The case that turned spying into a domestic political fight. In August 1948 the former communist Whittaker Chambers told the House Un-American Activities Committee that Hiss, a former senior State Department official who had gone to Yalta with Roosevelt, had belonged to a Communist underground.…0
  3. 3Klaus FuchsKlaus FuchsBorn Dec 29, 1911If one spy shaped the nuclear balance, it was Fuchs. A German-born physicist, he worked in the Theoretical Division at Los Alamos under Hans Bethe and Edward Teller and passed atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. He was not caught by a slip. Decrypted Soviet cables from the Venona project exposed…0
  4. 4Julius and Ethel RosenbergJulius and Ethel RosenbergThe most argued-over case on the list. Julius Rosenberg was spying for the Soviet Union by 1942 and tried to recruit others, including his brother-in-law David Greenglass, who worked at Los Alamos. When the atomic ring unraveled in 1950 with the arrests of Fuchs and Harry Gold, Greenglass…0
  5. 5Cambridge FiveCambridge FiveA case that broke slowly, over decades. Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross were drawn to communism at Cambridge and became Soviet agents. Their damage ran across the early Cold War: Maclean passed on US nuclear secrets, and Philby helped wreck an Allied…0
  6. 6Rudolf AbelRudolf AbelKnown to the world as Rudolf Abel, he was really Vilyam Fisher, a Soviet illegal working out of a studio in Brooklyn. The case is worth knowing for how it came apart: a hollow nickel that a 14-year-old newspaper boy found in 1953 sat unexplained until Fisher's subordinate, Reino Hayhanen, called…0
  7. 7George BlakeGeorge BlakeBorn Nov 11, 1922An MI6 officer who decided to work for the Soviet Union after being captured in the Korean War, Blake did damage on two fronts. He is said to have exposed some 40 British agents in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, some of whom were executed or imprisoned, and he betrayed the CIA's Berlin tunnel,…0
  8. 8Oleg PenkovskyOleg PenkovskyA senior officer of Soviet military intelligence, the GRU, Penkovsky spied in place for MI6 and the CIA through 1961 and 1962 and photographed around 5,000 secret papers in about 14 months. The British businessman Greville Wynne carried material between him and his handlers. His value peaked in…0
  9. 9Günter GuillaumeGünter GuillaumeBorn Feb 1, 1927The rare spy case that brought down a head of government. Guillaume, a Stasi-trained East German agent, posed as a refugee, joined Brandt's Social Democrats and in 1972 became a personal assistant to West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, while Brandt was pursuing closer ties with the East. West…0
  10. 10Ryszard KuklińskiRyszard KuklińskiBorn Jun 13, 1930A colonel in the Polish army, codenamed Jack Strong, who gave the CIA around 40,000 pages of documents concerning the Polish People's Republic between 1971 and 1981. From the spring of 1981 he was head of the team planning martial law, which made him the West's window on the crackdown being…0