OZY Classics: On Spies and Spying

Odette Sansom, a French mother living in London with her three daughters, didn’t think much of it when the British War Office issued a call for photographs of the French coastline. She mailed in some photos, and the next thing she knew she was learning hand-to-hand combat and Morse code so she could transmit vital information between spy networks in occupied territory. She survived brutal torture with her wit intact and helped convict Nazi war criminals. The wildest James Bond film isn’t a patch on her true story.

In December 1944, Werner Heisenberg, Nazi Germany’s greatest physicist, gave a lecture at the University of Zurich. In attendance was an American secret agent, with orders to assassinate Heisenberg should he encounter evidence that the Nazis were close to completing an atomic bomb. The identity of the spy entrusted with such a sensitive mission? Morris “Moe” Berg, a 42-year-old journeyman baseball player with only a passing knowledge of German and an even worse grasp of physics. Berg was an odd choice for the job, but he had made a career of being mysterious long before he became a spy.

From her post in New York City, she wrote a letter in invisible ink filled with intelligence, folded it and prepared it for its journey to the Washington office. The American Revolution was in full swing, and this correspondence would relay vital information to Gen. George Washington. The sender? The faceless but pivotal spy known as Agent 355. To this day, the mysterious spy is credited as one of America’s first female undercover operatives and was integral to America’s wartime efforts. Yet despite her bravery, her true identity remains unknown more than 200 years later.

Forget the Stasi, if you can. When we profiled him in 2014, Gerhard Schindler was trying to ramp up the German spy agency responsible for foreign intelligence in a world where Germany had become Europe’s dominant economic and political player. But he faced a skeptical public that remembered too well the abuses of the Nazi Gestapo and East German Stasi, which used intelligence against Germans.

The most powerful man in Algeria has no public face, according to OZY’s 2013 profile of him. His name is Mohamed Lamine Mediène. Everyone calls him “Toufik.” Another nickname is the “God of Algiers,” supposedly because he’s more powerful than the president. No official photograph of Mediène has ever been made public. The pictures of him that do exist are few and blurry, and may be decades old. Rumor has it that Mediène receives visitors with his back turned — and that if you see his face, it’ll be the last one you ever see.

During the 2019 tensions between Iran and the U.S. over a downed U.S. drone, there was one key figure caught in the middle: Hojatoleslam Seyyed Mahmoud Alavi, a conservative cleric and Iran’s minister of intelligence. An unlikely spy chief, Alavi was emblematic of the multiple power centers vying for control within Iran. He was widely seen as close to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader. Yet at the same time, as a minister, he was the sword arm of reformist President Hassan Rouhani’s turf war with Tehran’s hardliners.

My Mother's Inspiration on The Carlos Watson Show

Former CIA deputy director John McLaughlin has shared his espionage insights with OZY as a regular contributor, and he recently sat down with OZY’s CEO and co-founder on The Carlos Watson Show, where he ranked the various intelligence agencies. McLaughlin observed that while no one really has the “raw capability” of U.S. intelligence, “the Russians and Chinese have very good intelligence services, better at some things than others.” What things exactly? Read more to find out…

President Joe Biden’s choice for director of national intelligence (DNI), Avril Haines, presents a stark contrast with her predecessors, says McLaughlin. Haines has made clear her determination to keep the intelligence community professional and objective, but the challenges ahead for her agency are substantial, from dealing with the usual “hot spots” such as Iran, North Korea, Afghanistan and Syria to major rivals such as Russia and China. Haines, a former CIA deputy director with degrees in law and physics, is held in high regard throughout the intelligence community, and should be willing to talk truth to power, including President Biden, when needed.

When the NSA surveillance debate took center stage in 2013 after the Edward Snowden affair, McLaughlin argued that, based on his personal dealings with NSA over many years, the agency is truly not interested in our personal lives — that kind of data is the province of Google, Amazon, Facebook and other organizations that want to understand our habits in order to sell us something. Instead, there are bigger national security and intelligence issues to be concerned about, including terrorism, cyberattacks, and unsecured nuclear material.

Who is your favorite spy in history? Share your thoughts with us at OzyCommunity@Ozy.com.