Women have often served as spies during times of war. They were often successful and unsuspected, especially if society assumed that woman’s proper role was in the domestic, not public, sphere. Alright, so now check out the impressive female spies!!!
1 ) Mata Hari (Country of allegiance: Either France or Germany)
Mata Hari (1876-1917) was the stage name of the Dutch exotic dancer and prostitute Gertrud Margarete Zelle, who was shot by the French as a spy on 15 October 1917. Born on 7 August 1876 in Leeuwarden in the Netherlands, Mata Hari’s name has since become synonymous with espionage, although it remains by no means clear that she was guilty of the spying charges for which she charged.
The daughter of a well-to-do hatter, Mata Hari attended a teachers’ college in Leiden before, in 1895, marrying Captain Campbell MacLeod (of Scottish antecedents but serving in the Dutch army). They lived together from 1897-1902 in Java and Sumatra.
2 ) Nancy Wake (Country of allegiance: New Zealand, England, America, France, Australia)
Nancy Wake , Full name Nancy Grace Augusta Wake. She was the Allies’ most decorated servicewoman of WWII, and the Gestapo’s most-wanted person. They code-named her ‘The White Mouse’ because of her ability to elude capture. When war broke out she was a young woman married to a wealthy Frenchman living a life of luxury in cosmopolitan Marseilles.
She became a saboteur, organiser and Resistance fighter who led an army of 7,000 Maquis troops in guerrilla warfare to sabotage the Nazis. Her story is one of daring, courage and optimism in the face of impossible odds.
3 ) Krystyna Skarbek (Country of allegiance: England)
Krystyna Skarbek]was a Polish Special Operations Executive (SOE) agent and Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) spy. In 1941 she began using the name Christine Granville, which she legally adopted after the war. A friend of Ian Fleming, Skarbek is said to have been the inspiration for Bond girl Vesper Lynd. Skarbek’s father was a Polish Catholic aristocrat, and her mother was a wealthy assimilated Polish Jew.
Since her death, it has been speculated by some that because author Ian Fleming used the beautiful Krystyna as the basis for the double agent, “Vesper Lynd” in his first James Bond novel, that Krystyna herself may have actually been a double agent. However, no such claim has ever been suggested by any legitimate authority and SOE’s Vera Atkins, who had access to all files and knew her well, stated that Krystyna Skarbek was “utterly loyal and dedicated to the Allies, and nothing would have made her betray her trust.”
4 ) Virginia Hall (Country of allegiance: America, England, France)
Virginia Hall was born in Baltimore, United States, on 6th April, 1906. Her father, Edwin Lee Hall, was a cinema owner in Baltimore. Hall was educated at Radcliffe College where she developed a keen interest in modern languages. She was a talented linguist and could speak French, Italian and German. Hall, now representing the Office of Strategic Services, returned to France on 21st March 1944. After landing on the Brittany coast she joined the resistance in the Haute-Loire region of the country.
The Gestapo were now aware of her activities and was known as the “lady with the limp”. Despite this she was able to inform the Allies that the German General Staff had relocated its headquarters from Lyons to Le Puy. Awarded the Distinguished Service Cross by President Harry S. Truman in 1945. She joined the CIA in 1951 where she became an intelligence analyst on French parliamentary affairs. Virginia Hall, who retired from the CIA in 1966 and died at the Shady Grove Adventist Hospital in Washington in 1982.
5 ) Violette Szabo (Country of allegiance: England, France)
Violette Bushell, the daughter of an English father and a French mother, was born in France on 26th June, 1921. After an assessment for fluency in the French language and a series of interviews, she was inducted into Special Operations Executive. She received intensive training in night and daylight navigation, escape and evasion, both Allied and German weapons, unarmed combat, demolitions, explosives, communications and cryptography.
She flew back to Limoges, France on 7 June, 1944 from RAF Tempsford. Immediately on arrival, she coordinated the activities of the local Maquis in sabotaging communication lines during German attempts to stem the Normandy landings. She was a passenger in a car that raised the suspicions of German troops at an unexpected roadblock that had been set up to find Sturmbannführer Helmut Kämpfe of the Das Reich Division, who had been captured by the local resistance. A brief gun battle ensued.
6 ) Lona Cohen (Country of allegiance: Soviet Union)
Lona Theresa Cohen, Leontine, (11 January 1913 – 23 December 1992) was born in Massachusetts. Lona Cohen was an American citizen and member of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA). She was recruited into Soviet espionage in 1939 by her husband Morris Cohen, and worked for Soviet case officers, including Anatoli Yatskov, out of the New York Rezidentura during World War II. Lona ran a network that included engineers and technicians at munitions and aviation plants in the New York area after Morris had been drafted in 1942.
In 1969 the two were exchanged with the Soviet Union for a British subject being held. Back in Moscow, they two continued training colleagues for illegal intelligence operations. Lona Cohen was awarded the Order of the Red Banner and Order of Order of Friendship of Nations. Her code name in Soviet intelligence and the Venona files is “Lesley”.
7 ) Elizabeth Bentley (Country of allegiance: Soviet Union, America)
Elizabeth Terrill Bentley (January 1, 1908 – December 3, 1963) was an American spy for the Soviet Union from 1938 until 1945. In 1945 she defected from the Communist Party and Soviet intelligence and became an informer for the U.S. She exposed two networks of spies, ultimately naming over 80 Americans who had engaged in espionage for the Soviets. When her testimony became public in 1948, it became a media sensation and had a major effect on the popular anti-communism of the McCarthy era.
In the 1990s the Venona transcripts and some Soviet intelligence archives were made available. With these revelations there was finally a definitive and public verification of the basics of Bentley’s story, and also a new appreciation of the impact her defection had on Soviet espionage in the United States.
8 ) Princess Stephanie Julianna von Hohenlohe (Country of allegiance: Germany, America)
Princess Stephanie Julianne von Hohenlohe (16 September 1891 – 13 June 1972) was a member of a German princely family by marriage and a close friend of Adolf Hitler who spied for Nazi Germany. In the post-war era, Princess Stephanie built new and influential connections in Germany, working with media executives such as Henri Nannen of Stern news magazine and Axel Springer, the owner of the Axel Springer AG publishing company.
Princess Stephanie von Hohenlohe died in Geneva, Switzerland in 1972 and is buried there. Her son Franz Josef never married, and was still living in 2005.
9 ) Brita Tott ( Country of allegiance: Denmark)
Brita Olovsdotter Tott, (fl. 3 March 1498), called the Lady of Hammersta, was a Danish and Swedish noble, landowner, royal county administrator, spy and forger. She was judged for treason and for the forgery of seals. She was one of the biggest landowners in Scandinavia, and her estates played a role in politicis in Sweden and Denmark.
Charles VIII and company found her guilty of treason and sentenced her to burn at the stake. This punishment was amended to “walling”, and later dismissed entirely, allowing her to live out the her final days in her native Denmark.
10 ) Melita Norwood (Country of allegiance: Soviet Union)
Melita Norwood, (25 March 1912 – 2 June 2005) was a British civil servant and KGB intelligence source who, for a period of about 40 years following her recruitment in 1937, supplied the KGB (and its predecessor agencies) with state secrets from her job at the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association (a cover for nuclear research), including the schematics for the British atomic bomb in 1945. Her KGB handlers gave her the codename “Hola”.
The public’s first picture of her was of a slightly stooped, great-grandma reading this statement to reporters massed outside her front door. “I did not want money. It was not that side I was interested in. I wanted Russia to be on equal footing with the west.” Melita Norwood, clerk, secretary and spy, born March 25 1912; died June 2 2005
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