Examples of notable sex espionages

Examples of notable sex espionages

AGIRAKI, ANNA. The Greek mistress of the chief of the Italian Servicio di Informazione Militar (SIM) in Athens, Anna Agiraki was sent on an espionage mission in August 1942 by boat to Syria because her lover felt she was attracting too much attention from the Italian secret police.

She was accompanied by George Liossis and a radio operator but was arrested by the Royal Navy off the Syrian coast. Liossis, a Greek Air Force officer and son of General Liossis, revealed that he had been in contact with the British Secret Intelligence Service before the war and volunteered to work for the British as a double agent.

His offer was accepted and he was codenamed QUICKSILVER. Agiraki also agreed to become a double agent and, codenamed GALA, she notionally became a prostitute plying her trade to indiscreet Allied officers who supposedly confided secret plans to her.

Agiraki claimed to receive information from five regular clients: DENZIL, a Royal Air Force technician engaged in preparing plans for Allied airfields to be constructed in Turkey after the country had been occupied in early 1944; PAPADOPOULOS, a dockyard superintendent in Beirut; STEVEN, a liaison officer from the Royal Navy’s base at Alexandria; TAKIS, a Greek submariner; and TOLLUS, who really was Brigadier George Tolhurst.

The other four sources were entirely notional, and Agiraki remained an active source until October 1944, even though she spent the entire time in prison in Palestine. Of her two companions, only Liossis retained his freedom and would return to Greece with a promotion.

ALBIN, GABRIELE. A German employed as a clerk by the U.S. embassy in Bonn, in 1977 Gabriele Albin was seduced by a Hauptver-waltung Aufkrarung (HVA) Romeo, Rudolf Beck alias Frank Dietze, after her marriage to an American solder had failed. Codenamed GERHARD, she was run by the HVA’s Colonel Heinz Keller until she entered a psychiatric hospital for treatment in 1980, but she re-turned to work two years later and was transferred to the Office of Defense Cooperation, where she had access to large quantities of classified information, for which she was paid more than $105,000.

Albin and Beck were arrested in March 1991 but he was killed in his car in a railway-crossing accident soon afterward, leaving his supposed fiancée to be tried alone. In August 1996, she was sentenced to two years’ probation.

ALSOP, KENNETH. In 1957, while on a visit to Moscow, the well known journalist Kenneth Alsop was photographed in bed with a young man and then approached by the KGB. Alsop declared the incident to the American ambassador, who advised him to tell the Central Intelligence Agency, and the matter was reported to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Apparently aware that Alsop had reported the matter, the KGB made no further attempt to contact him.

Alsop later pursued a successful career as a BBC television journalist, hosting the early evening news show Tonigh.

He died in Indiana in December 1997, aged 83.

ALVAREZ, CARLOS. In January 2006, 61-year-old Dr. Carlos M. Al-varez and his wife, 55-year-old Elsa Alvarez, were arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) after a lengthy surveillance operation and charged with espionage on behalf of the Cuban Dirección General de Inteligencia (DGI) at Florida International University

(FIU).

The Cuban-born couple, codenamed DAVID and DEBORAH, had been recruited by the DGI in 1977 and had visited Cuba several times on educational trips sponsored by FIU’s Cuban Research Institute and Cuban Bridges. In reality, Alvarez, an associate professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies since 1974, and his wife, an FIU administrator and counselor since 1999, passed information about the émigré community in south Florida to the DGI in Mexico, South America, and to post office boxes in New York, and confessed to the FBI in June and July 2005. Carlos Alvarez was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment in a plea agreement, while his wife received a three-year prison sentence.