Women among some most notorious spies in history of global espionage

LAHORE: The long history of espionage is ripe with the exploits of notorious spies, including women, who had met different fates, a research conducted by the "Jang Group and Geo Television Network" shows.

Prestigious international media houses like the AFP, CBS News, Associated Press, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the CNN and the Guardian etc have shed a lot of light on the adventures of these spies. A spy’s life is one of tedious endurance. He or she is required to carry out covert, clandestine and potentially dangerous operations for his country.

Some of these spies get executed, a few are freed after serving long sentences and others die in jails. And among these spies are the ones who are awarded medals of honour from states in recognition of their meritorious services. And then there are the more lucky ones who find themselves as parts of the spy-swap deals between nations.

Here follows a list of some of the most well-known global spies in history:

Margaretha Geertruida Zelle or Mata Hari (1876-1917), an exotic Dutch dancer and high class prostitute in Paris, had spied for Germany during World War 1.

Possibly one of the most famous spies of all time, she began her spying career after working as a courtesan to top-ranking military men and politicians.

She was hired by an Army Captain, Georges Ladoux, to bring military information from her German government and military clients to the French.

Mata Hari’s gig came to a halt in January 1917, when French intelligence had intercepted a German Military Attaché-encoded radio signal to Berlin which declared that they were receiving amazing information from a German spy code-named H-21.

Mata Hari was identified and arrested in a Paris hotel room on February 13, 1917. She was executed by Firing Squad on September 15, 1917 for espionage.

Convicted American spy Jonathen Pollard (born 1954) was released from a North Carolina jail on November 20, 2015, some 30 years after he was caught selling classified US information to Israel.

His release had capped one of the most high-profile spy sagas in modern American history, an extraordinary espionage case that complicated US-Israeli relations.

Pollard, a Jewish American, was a civilian naval intelligence analyst. He was jailed in 1987 and sentenced to life in prison.

Pollard was granted Israeli citizenship while in prison. Despite a request by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to allow Pollard to join his wife in Israel, he was barred from travel for five years.

Cecile Witherington (1914-2008) had played her part to help France escape German control during World War I.

Born in Paris to British parents, she began her career as a covert courier smuggling weapons into France in 1943.

When her superior was arrested, she took over his troops and led a 14-hour battle against the Germans. Her fighters were responsible for the deaths of more than 1,000 German soldiers and the surrender of 18,000 more.

Although the Nazis had offered a million Francs reward for her death, she was never caught and had lived to the age of 93.

Robert Hanssen (born April 18, 1944) is a former US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent who had spied for Soviet and Russian intelligence services.

Hanssen, who began his life of espionage in 1979, was arrested in 2001. He plead guilty, in order to avoid the death penalty, and was sentenced to 15 life terms in prison.

The Rosenbergs, an American married couple (Julius and Ethel Rosenberg) were American Communists who were executed in 1953 for passing nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union.

The couple became embroiled in espionage in 1942, when Julius was recruited by the KGB. He was responsible for passing classified reports and designs to the KGB.

He was assisted by his brother-in-law, Sergeant David Greenglass, who had later admitted to passing on classified information through Julius and Ethel (who typed nuclear secrets).

In 1950, David Greenglass was arrested on suspicion of espionage and gave Julius's name during his confession.

The couple was found guilty of conspiracy to commit espionage and executed by electric chair in 1953. They were the only two American civilians to be executed for espionage during the entire Cold War.

A New Zealand-born journalist Nancy Wake (1912-2011) had joined the French Resistance Movement to help British soldiers escape France in the early 1940s.

The Gestapo (the secret police of Hitler's Nazi Germany) had caught wind of her actions, and sought her capture.

The organization had nicknamed her "the White Mouse" because of her elusive nature.

Wake had left France for the safety of Spain, expecting her husband to follow. News that her husband had been shot by the Gestapo had sparked the feeling of revenge in her. She thus returned to France in 1944 to lead a raid against Gestapo headquarters and German gun factories.

Following the liberation of France, Wake was awarded several medals of honour from France and America.

Former CIA agent Aldrich Ames (born 1941) is an American traitor who was convicted of espionage against his country in 1994.

He had turned a Soviet Union spy in 1985 after being stationed in Ankara, Turkey.

He is currently serving a life sentence in a federal prison without the possibility of parole.

It is believed that Ames had compromised the second-largest number of CIA agents—second only to those betrayed by Robert Hanssen (discussed above).

German-born physicist Klaus Fuchs (1911-1988) had turned a Soviet spy after fleeing his country during the Nazi regime to settle in England.

Fuchs continued to provide confidential information to the KGB for two years on key products including theoretical plans for building a Hydrogen bomb and American capabilities in this context.

He was interrogated in 1946 by the British government and was sentenced to 14 years imprisonment, but only served nine.

British Spy Major John Andre (1750-1780) was caught after traveling through New York in civilian clothes with a fake passport.

He was alleged during the American War of Independence of being a spy for the enemy and was hanged on October 2, 1780.

James Lafayette (1760-1830) was the first African-American double agent who rose to prominence in 1781 during the American Revolution. His missions included spying on the British Brigadier General Benedict Arnold, and his reports were vital in helping defeat the British forces during the war.

To aid the US colonies, he had approached the British pretending to be a runaway slave, and subsequently spied on General Benedict Arnold and the British forces.

By 1818, he had applied to the state legislature for financial aid. He was granted $60 for present relief and a $40 annual pension for his services in the Revolutionary War.

German spy Frederick Duquesne (1877-1956), nicknamed "Black Panther," had spied for his country during both world wars. He went by many aliases, fictionalized his identity and background on multiple occasions, and operated as a conman

During the Second Boer War, from 1899 to 1902, Duquesne was captured and imprisoned three times by the British and once by the Portuguese, and each time he escaped.

In June 1941, following a two-year investigation, the FBI arrested Duquesne and 32 Nazi spies on charges of relaying secret information on US weaponry and shipping movements to Germany. The spy and his aides were sentenced to serve a total of more than 300 years in prison.

American secret agent Virginia Hall (1906-1982) had worked with the British Special Operations Executive during World War II in the 1940s and later for a division of the CIA.

She only had one leg as the other was amputated from the knee down.

"The Limping Lady," as she was called, Hall had also passed highly classified German information to the United States.

She was labeled by the Gestapo as "most dangerous of all spies."

She was never caught and was awarded the "Distinguished Service Cross" in 1945 by the US Army.

Chinese spy Shi Pei Pu (1938-2009) was an opera singer from Beijing.

She had made a French embassy clerk, Bernard Boursicot, hand over as many as 150 French embassy documents to the Chinese secret service before returning to France in the early 1980s. Bernard had fallen for her.

She was arrested and charged with espionage, serving six years in prison.

Anna Chapman (born 1982), a Russian national, was arrested in June 2010 from New York.

She was part of a spy ring operating under the Russian Federation's external intelligence agency. After being formally charged, Chapman and nine other detainees became part of a spy swap deal between the United States and Russia, the biggest of its kind since 1986.

The 10 Russian agents had returned to Russia via a chartered jet that landed at Vienna Airport where the swap occurred on July 8, 2010.

Back in Russia, the photogenic Chapman enjoyed celebrity status. She modeled lingerie and joined a board associated with President Vladimir Putin's party.

An FBI agent Earl Pitts (born 1953) was found guilty of selling information to the Soviet KGB and continued to do so even after the Soviet Union had disintegrated. The US intelligence agencies had arrested him in 1996. A federal judge had sentenced him to 27 years in prison, a considerable increase to the prosecution's request.

John Anthony Walker (1937-2014) and his son, Michael, had both betrayed the US Navy. They were found guilty of delivering key information to the Soviet Union from 1967 until 1985.

Chief Warrant Officer and communications specialist John Walker's covert dealings had made it possible for the Soviets to unscramble military communications and find US submarines at any time.

He was given three life sentences and had died in prison in 2014.

First-ever American spy Nathan Hale (1755-1776) had spied during the Revolutionary War in the country. He had volunteered for an intelligence -gathering mission in New York, but was captured by the British and executed.