Random Most Hardcore WWII Spy Stories You'll Ever Read (12 items)

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  (#9) "Cicero" Photographed and Sold Top Secret Documents Just for the Money

  Elyesa Basna was an Albanian national who managed to learn how to speak French, mostly as a result of a three-year stint in a French penal camp in Marseilles. In mid-July of 1943, without a background check, Basna was hired in Ankara, as a valet by the British Ambassador to Turkey. This after he had already been fired from the German embassy for reading official communications. The British Ambassador, Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen, had the unfortunate habit of taking classified documents home with him, and much of this information highly desirable.

  Basna (code named "Cicero") photographed and sold top secret documents to Germany throughout 1944, strictly because he needed the money; he would be paid the highest amount ever paid to a spy up until the 1940s. He would also eventually be compromised by the veracity of his information that indicated to British intelligence that a leak existed in the Ankara embassy. He narrowly avoided detection during the war; afterwards his attempts at various business ventures failed, mostly because the money he had been paid by the Nazis was counterfeit. He emigrated to West Germany, spent the rest of his days as a night watchmen, unsuccessfully suing the government for the compensation he felt that he was owed.
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  (#6) Children's Author Roald Dahl and James Bond Creator Ian Fleming Met as British Spies

  Roald Dahl enjoyed a high-profile career as a writer, screenwriter, and critic best known today for his children's books. However, less well known is that Dahl also was involved in British military and intelligence efforts during World War II. He saw action as a fighter pilot in Libya and Greece, suffering a fractured skull and other injuries after crashing in the North African desert. After officially downing at least five Axis aircraft over Greece, persistent blackout headaches forced his reassignment to Britain.

  He was eventually sent to Washington as an assistant air attaché at the British embassy. Dahl was bored by the administrative details of his job, but became involved with C. S. Forester in composing what was essentially propaganda encouraging American enthusiasm for the war in Europe. Dahl also became the eyes and ears for prominent members of the British government, including Churchill, gathering intelligence usually involving the outlook and attitudes of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

  Dahl worked with another British intelligence officer, James Bond creator Ian Fleming.  After the war, he would begin his illustrious literary career, writing Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in 1964 and subsequently the screenplay for the James Bond film You Only Live Twice.  
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  (#8) Moe Berg Was a Major League Spy Who Almost Assassinated Werner Heisenberg

  Morris "Moe" Berg was an accomplished athlete and graduate of Princeton University who played and coached professional baseball from 1923 to 1941. Because Berg was quite intelligent and multilingual, he made two trips to Japan, accompanying other players on an exhibition game tour of the country. On one of these trips in 1934, Berg brought a movie camera and filmed the city of Tokyo and its harbor from a hospital rooftop, footage that would eventually become strategically valuable.

  Berg was an average player, but he did obtain a law degree and eventually passed the bar exam. When war broke out, Berg got involved in various counter-intelligence efforts and even provided his film footage to the Army unit that planned Doolittle's Tokyo Raid of 1942.  He was eventually parachuted into enemy territory in Yugoslavia, interacting with Yugoslav partisans.

  Berg was also charged with determining German progress toward the construction of atomic weapons, focusing especially on knowledge concerning German physicist Werner Heisenberg.  In a mission to Zurich, Berg was to kill Heisenberg, who was delivering a lecture, if Berg determined that a German device was imminent. Berg concluded correctly that that was not the case and Heisenberg escaped violence.

  After the war, Berg was awarded the Medal of Freedom, which he refused, the first incident of his increasingly odd behavior.  He refused requests to return to baseball, law firms, or even teaching.  As a Jew, he requested that the CIA send him to Israel - they refused but, in 1951, they did retain him to gather intelligence in Europe. He did little work and the CIA cut him loose when his $10,000 contract expired. For the next twenty years he lived with friends and relatives, intimating that he was working on top secret missions but essentially doing nothing. He died at age 70 in 1972; his sister accepted his Medal of Freedom posthumously. His baseball card is on display at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. 
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  (#7) Two Nazi Spies Traveled to Small-Town Maine by Submarine

  Operation Magpie was an attempt by the Nazis to determine the progress of the Manhattan Project by infiltrating Erich Gimpel and William Colepaugh, two men off-loaded by submarine in November 1944, near the town of Hancock, Maine.

  As unlikely as a submarine drop-off was along the Maine coast, even more unlikely was the background of Colepaugh, an American who had defected from a Swedish ship in Lisbon in early 1944. He walked into the German embassy and declared that he wanted to help Germany win the war. By November, he was hunkered down in a North American-bound U-Boat with Gimpel, a much more accomplished spy with espionage background in South America. It was presumed that Colepaugh, with his knowledge of American mores, would be able to maneuver Gimpel through any cultural barriers.

  The two landed on the snowy Maine coast, fortuitously able to hail a cab to a train station in Bangor. Within two days, they made it to New York and actually rented an apartment in Manhattan. Money was no object: Colepaugh had somehow convinced his handlers that it would take $60,000 to finance the mission ($650,000 today).

  In the end, this money would be the mission's undoing. Colepaugh abandoned Gimpel, stole much of the cash, and went on a drunken bender that resulted in both of the spies' arrest by December 30. The saboteurs were tried and initially sentenced to death in early 1945, but Harry Truman commuted both sentences. Gimpel was paroled to West Germany and died in Brazil in 2010, aged 100. Colepaugh was paroled and died in suburban Philadelphia in 2005.       
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  (#3) Wilhelm Canaris Worked to Bring Down Nazi Germany from the Inside

  Imagine for a moment if, during wartime, it was suddenly discovered that the head of the CIA was actively working to undermine the American government and military. That is exactly what happened in Nazi Germany. Wilhelm Canaris had been appointed the head of the Abwehr, German military intelligence, in 1935. Initially a fervent supporter of Hitler, his attitude transformed after personally observing atrocities in Poland and receiving numerous reports of Nazi extermination squads operating throughout the Eastern front.

  Canaris began to assemble a group of like-minded opponents to Hitler in both the Abwehr and the military. He was involved in several plots to kill Hitler, although he was wily enough to be able to avoid direct responsibility. Canaris also undermined the Nazi government when sent to Spain in 1940 to compel Franco to join the Axis, instead hinting strongly that this would be a bad idea and Franco should remain neutral.

  Hitler abolished the Abwehr in February 1944.

  After the July 20th plot to kill Hitler failed, Canaris was quickly implicated by others who were tortured or by association with conspirators who had committed suicide. Canaris was then placed under severe detention and was repeatedly tortured, but he refused to admit guilt. Unfortunately, in early April of 1945, a copy of his diaries and notes was discovered in a locked safe in the Abwehr's former headquarters, which clearly spelled out his deliberate attempts to recruit others to oppose the regime. Personally infuriated, Hitler ordered his execution. Canaris and several other co-conspirators from the Abwehr were hanged on April 9, 1945, at Flossenburg concentration camp.   
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  (#1) The White Rabbit Couldn't Be Contained by Nazi Prisons

  Forest Frederic Edward Yeo-Thomas (who went by F. F. E. Yeo-Thomas) was not your typical cliché espionage agent, photographing documents in the early morning hours behind the embassy doors of some darkened office. After serving for two years in the RAF, Yeo-Thomas requested even more hazardous duty in occupied France serving as a liaison between the French government in exile and the Resistance.

  On his third mission in 1944, he was betrayed to the Gestapo and was badly mistreated. After numerous escape attempts, Yeo-Thomas was transported to Buchenwald. He survived eight more months of abuse, escaped from a work detail, and eventually lead other POWs to freedom in the final days of the war. Yeo-Thomas is recognized by the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography as "among the most outstanding workers behind enemy lines whom Britain produced". Yeo-Thomas is also credited as the inspiration for the character James Bond.
   

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