True Life Spy Stories

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On 19 April 1956, Royal Navy frogman Buster Crabb slipped into Portsmouth Harbour to examine the hull of a Soviet warship carrying Khrushchev and Bulganin on a state visit. He surfaced once, dived again, and was never seen alive again. What followed was a cover-up that reached the Prime Minister, a hotel register stripped of evidence, a Commons debate, and a headless body pulled from Chichester Harbour fourteen months later. The full government files on his disappearance stay sealed until 2057.

📚 Sources & Further Reading (affiliate link):

📕 ⁠The Final Dive: The Life And Death of 'Buster' Crabb by Don Hale

📕Undersea Warrior: Commander Crabbs' Story by Marshall Pugh

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In November 1952, a Soviet army officer in Vienna slipped an envelope through the window of a parked American diplomat's car. Inside was an offer to sell military secrets. Within weeks, the CIA had their first ever source inside Soviet military intelligence.

For seven years, Pyotr Popov gave the CIA a picture of the Soviet military it had never had: weapons systems, nuclear doctrine, and the identities of hundreds of GRU officers operating across the West. Then the KGB closed in. What followed was one of the most contested exposure cases in Cold War history. Decades later, a document found in a Lithuanian KGB archive suggested Popov had been identified as a CIA source before he ever returned to Moscow.

📚 Sources & Further Reading (affiliate link):

📕 Mole: True Story of the First Russian Spy to Become an American Counterspy by William Hood

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In August 2010, MI6 codebreaker Gareth Williams was found dead in his London flat, locked inside a padlocked holdall with no sign of how he got there. A coroner ruled it unlawful killing. The police ruled it an accident. This episode traces the case from discovery to the 2024 forensic review, and the questions that still haven't been answered.

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From A to Z, the secret world has a story for every letter.

The spy chief who ran Nazi intelligence while sabotaging it from within. The corpse that fooled Hitler. The tunnel the KGB already knew about before the first shovel hit dirt. The family that sold America's naval codes for eighteen years. The criminal who became Britain's most celebrated double agent.

This is volume 1 in the Encyclopaedia of Espionage. Twenty-six letters, twenty-six entries from the history of intelligence.

Some of these names you'll know. Most you won't. All of them are real.

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On 6 September 1976, Soviet Air Force Lieutenant Viktor Belenko defected to the West in a MiG-25 interceptor, landing at a civilian airport in Japan and handing American intelligence the most secret aircraft in the Soviet arsenal.

The MiG-25 was studied for 67 days before being returned to the Soviet Union in pieces. What the West found overturned a decade of assumptions about Soviet air power.

This is the story of how Belenko did it, what the analysis revealed, and what became of the man who pulled it off.

📚 Sources & Further Reading (affiliate link):

📕 MiG Pilot by John Barron

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In 1982, an American signals intelligence sergeant walked past the Soviet consulate in West Berlin and dropped a letter through its mail slot, offering his services to the KGB. Within weeks he had opened a second channel to the East German Stasi, selling the same secrets to both.

For six years, James W. Hall III operated out of Field Station Berlin — one of the most sensitive NSA listening posts in Cold War Europe — passing material an NSA official later estimated cost three billion dollars in damage. He was paid roughly three hundred thousand dollars for it.

This episode tells the story of how he did it, what he sold, and how an unrelated shoplifting arrest in West Berlin set the chain of events in motion that would end his career in a motel room outside Savannah, Georgia.

📚 Sources & Further Reading (affiliate link):

📕 Traitors Among Us: Inside the Spy Catchers World by Stuart A. Herrington - https://amzn.to/4uVZXac

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Welcome to Dead Drop.

In this week's dossier:

1. FSB operative Zarubina jailed 14 months in New York;
2. the Pentagon raises Israel's espionage threat rating to critical;
3. Tulsi Gabbard resigns as US Director of National Intelligence; and 
4. China arrests US Myanmar scholar on suspicion of espionage.

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John Anthony Walker Jnr. ran the largest and most damaging espionage ring in Cold War history. For nearly 18 years he and his co-conspirators sold US Navy secrets to the Soviets.

Yet things inevitably got too big and too messy. John Walker’s contempt for his wife and those around him meant that it was only a matter of time before his house of cards went tumbling down.

In the year of the spy, John Anthony Walker Jnr. was the spy of the decade.

#philipthompson #truelifespystories #johnwalker

Primary sources and further reading (afiiliate links):

📕 Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Spy Ring, Pete Earley - Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Spy Ring - https://amzn.to/4v0Sgjw

📘 Spy Hunter: Inside the FBI Investigation of the Walker Espionage Case, Robert W. Hunter - https://amzn.to/4ekCCYq

📕 Breaking the Ring, John Baron - https://amzn.to/3VgiKgo

Media shown in this video (affiliate links):

🎞️ On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969) - https://amzn.to/4b4L9vQ

🎞️ The Vietnam War (2017) - https://amzn.to/3VqClux

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Welcome to Dead Drop.

In this week's dossier:

1. A former CIA officer steals gold bars worth more than 40 million dollars; 
2. Former MI6 chief, Sir Alex Younger, dies at the age of 62; 
3. IRA spy asks a judge if she can take off her ankle tag to go wedding dress shopping; and 
4. Former MI6 chief reveals how his cover was blown by a Christmas card.

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On 28 August 2013, a woman named Monica Witt sent an email from Dubai. She was about to board a flight to Tehran. The message went to a contact in Iran who had been managing her movement for months. "I'm signing off and heading out!" she wrote. "Coming home." She included a smiley-face emoji.

Witt was a former U.S. Air Force cryptologic language analyst who had held a Top Secret clearance and access to some of America’s most sensitive counterintelligence programmes.

In February 2019, a federal grand jury indicted Monica Witt on charges of conspiracy to deliver national defence information to a foreign government and two substantive counts of delivering that information. Each count carries a potential life sentence. An arrest warrant was issued, but only on 14 May 2026 was a $200,000 bounty placed on her head.

But who is she, and why does the FBI now, 13 years later, want her back so badly?