A World of Spies One thing we can be sure of is there are far too many missiles on this planet. The race is on for creating the fastest hypersonic missiles right now and the United States turned the leading hypersonic missile scientist in China and now he is working for us. Turnabout is fair play. They have been stealing our secrets for years and even our scientists such as the Chinese scientist that worked for us for over 30 years but left after stealing valuable secrets. I believe those secrets were for secret aircraft. Every country has spies and they spy on everyone even on countries which are allies. The problem for us is being the leading technological country we have much more to lose than gain, so many of the spies are keyed in on us. We don’t talk much about spies who steal our data who might be from friendly countries, but as I said, it does happen. When it was asked how many spies are in the United States, the response was no one knows. The estimate was in the low thousands, but now that the southern border is open and millions of people are pouring in, there is no way to estimate the number of spies or terrorists for that matter. When this question was said to have been asked to the FBI, CIA and NSA, it is said they all declined to answer. We know that there are representatives of 177 countries living in the United States. I am not saying they are all spies, but surely some on the staffs are. Sometimes people ask the question what spies did the most damage to us? Even though there is an answer, it could be there were even worse cases which are being kept secret because they would either expose the incompetency of an agency, or there was still some part of the data which remains untouched and we want to protect it. When the Soviet Union managed to steal the plans for the atomic bomb from us it was through spies. It was a husband and wife team. The plans they stole were of the bomb we dropped on Nagasaki. The spies were the infamous Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Years later it was thought even though both were executed, Ethel may not have been involved. Her brother was caught before them and gave both up but admitted later that she may not have been part of the ring. I bet not many people know the Cubans had at least one successful spy in the U.S.? Her name was Ana Montes. For 17 years she plied her trade. She belonged to a spy ring which was cracked by her own sister. One of the amazing things was her operation was like a movie plot because she would go back and forth to Cuba wearing different disguises. Her job entailed briefing the Joint Chiefs of Staff and she would receive all sorts of sensitive documents. She was about to be promoted to the CIA Security Council when she was arrested. What could be worse than having a spy or turncoat who has access to the list of American spies, turn it over to an enemy country? Not much could be worse than that. Such was Robert Hanssen who proved to be one of the most dangerous double agents we ever had. Of course, we didn’t know this for years and he continued to spy on us from 1979 to 2001, putting every agent in danger. He stopped for a while when the Soviet Union fell, I guess he was afraid of being caught, but started up again later. He even turned over documents to the KGB which outlined our nuclear strategies if a nuclear war broke out. He got caught when the United States paid the KGB to tell us who the mole was in our organization. We forked over 7 million dollars, but it was worth it. Amazingly he escaped the death penalty in exchange for cooperating. This is hard to believe, but after all that damage and probably getting many of our spies killed, he apologized. One has to wonder why any deal made with him would be honored. He received 15 life sentences. When we talk about our allies spying on us, one of the most famous spies was Jonathan Pollard an Israeli spy. Pollard was considered a traitor and yet in Israel he is considered a hero. He joined the U.S. Navy as a civilian intelligence officer. As time went by, he began to think selling secret documents about Arab and Soviet surveillance was a good idea. Before he was caught, he had sent a tremendous number of documents to Israel. When he was finally caught, he received 30 years in jail and was released in 2015. He had been called emotionally unstable. It has often been said we are spying on every other country and they are spying on us. This is probably true. We have had spies ever since George Washington was the president. When we think of traitors who had become spies, the first name which many of us think of is Benedict Arnold. He was probably the most brilliant general in Washington’s army, but felt he never got the credit he deserved and went to the British side. One of the most famous Confederate spies during the Civil War was a woman named Rose O’Neal Greenhow. She was a socialite who lived in Washington D.C. She cultivated relationships with all the important people on the Northern side which included politicians, generals and others. She was even in with James Buchanan who was president from 1857 to 1861. She would be told important information by the people she met with and pass it along to the south. She was found guilty along with her daughter and served 5 months in jail and then deported to the Confederacy where she continued to support the south. The spy who became the most famous in World War One and who is still famous today was Mata Hari. She was a famous dancer who was found to be a German spy. She had made believe she was an Indian temple dancer most of her life when in reality she was really Margaretha Zelle the daughter of a Dutch haberdasher. The French captured her and she was shot. Some say even today she was really not a spy and mistakenly convicted and executed. I guess there will always be spies since every country feels they need to not only know what is going on in other countries, but also their intentions and new military inventions so they can keep up.
|
