Since it’s as well to know what you’re getting into, here are a few examples of the sort of things spies get up to. You may find it hard to believe when you’re reading them, but every case study quoted is absolutely true.

Operation Mincemeat

This one happened in 1943 while World War Two was in full swing and shows a spy can succeed in an operation even though he is dead before it starts.

Picture the scene. After a bad start, the war was going rather well for the Allies. They’d successfully invaded North Africa and were planning to do the same to Italy. But they wanted to make sure the Germans didn’t know that. In fact, what they wanted was to convince the Germans they were going to invade Greece instead, thus diverting Nazi defences from the real target.

Enter British spymaster Ewen Montagu, who came up with a brilliant, if gruesome, scheme. He had the idea of co-opting a corpse into the British Intelligence Service and sending it on an undercover mission to fool the Germans.

Montagu eventually found a suitable body – a fit-looking 38-year-old man who had died from pneumonia. The cause of death was important because it left fluid in the lungs so it could easily seem the man had drowned at sea. After getting permission from the dead man’s relatives, Montagu put his plan in motion. Like any other good spy, the corpse was given a new identity. It was issued with (false) papers in the name of William Martin, a Major in the Royal Marines and a Staff Officer in the Command Centre for Mediterranean operations.

As well as the phony ID, a watertight briefcase chained to the body’s wrist contained a top secret coded letter written by a British general explaining how the Allies hoped to convince the Germans they were definitely not going to invade Greece when, in fact, they were. (This was a double bluff, of course: you have to remember the Allies were actually going to invade Italy.) Several other items – a photograph of ‘Major Martin’s’ girlfriend, love letters, ticket stubs for a London theatre etc. – were included to give an authentic feel.

Then the body was dumped overboard from a submarine near the beach at Huelva in Spain.

The corpse was picked up by fishermen and turned over to the Spanish authorities, who were sympathetic towards the Nazis during the war. As Montagu hoped they might, they passed copies of the documents – including the coded letter – on to the Germans before returning body and briefcase to the British.

Nazi experts cracked the code and bought the story. The Germans promptly strengthened their defences in Greece and were caught completely unawares when the Allies struck in Italy. Operation Mincemeat, as the whole affair was code-named, proved a complete success… all because of a secret agent who was stone cold dead before it even started.

Pay-offs

While some spies work for love of their country and some for the sheer excitement of their job, many more go into the business purely for the money But sometimes the pay-off isn’t what they’d hoped.

Take the case of Cicero, for example, code name for the Albanian Elyeza Bazna, one of the most successful spies in history.

Cicero had no spying experience at all when he moved with his wife and children to Ankara, the capital of Turkey. But in 1943, he landed a job as personal valet to the British Ambassador and decided it was the perfect opportunity to go into the espionage business.

First of all, Cicero made a copy of the key to the Ambassador’s personal dispatch box. Then he found the combination of the Residency safe. In just two moves, he had gained access to every secret British document in Turkey. His next move was to make some money out of it.

On the night of October 26, Cicero made contact with a German intelligence officer named L. C. Moyzisch and offered to bring him copies of Britain’s most secret documents for a payment of £20,000.

It was a tempting offer. Britain and Germany were at war at the time, so any secret documents were particularly important. But £20,000 was a vast sum of money in those days and Cicero was demanding it in cash, pounds sterling. Even though he offered to drop the price to £15,000 for future deliveries, Moyzisch told him he would have to clear things with his superiors.

The following day, Moyzisch went to the German Ambassador in Turkey who sent a coded message to the German Foreign Minister in Berlin. Rather to their surprise, the Minister replied that Cicero’s offer should be accepted and a courier was being dispatched immediately with the money.

Throughout the remainder of that year, Cicero provided Moyzisch with film after film of British documents, collecting huge pay-offs each time he did so.

Then, in spring of 1944, Cicero suddenly found his cover blown. A highly placed Allied spy in the German Foreign Ministry discovered there was secret information coming out of the British Embassy in Ankara.

At first, Embassy staff were not able to discover who the spy in their midst actually was, but then a German defector identified Bazna as the elusive Cicero. The Ambassador called him in and fired him, even though Bazna denied everything.

By this time, Cicero had £300,000 in British bank notes salted away, a sum worth many millions in today’s currency. He booked a passage for South America, banked his loot and rented a villa overlooking the ocean. It seemed as if there could not have been a happier ending to his career in spying.

But then his South American bankers arrived at his villa with the news that almost all the bank notes he had deposited were forgeries. The Germans had been paying him in duff money.

Cicero ended up in prison, but even his collection of worthless bank notes was not the meanest pay-off ever given to a spy. The reward collected by Alexander Szek was much worse.

Szek was a young radio operator working for the Germans in occupied Belgium shortly after the start of World War One. He was recruited as a spy by British spymaster Reginald Hall, who discovered Szek had actually been born in Croydon. Hall sent word that if Szek didn’t steal the German code book, his family in Britain would be arrested.

Szek agreed to do the best he could, but since he had no way to get his hands on the entire book, he decided to memorise the codes a few lines at a time, then write them down and have the copies smuggled to England.

The plan worked well enough, but Szek became more and more nervous about the possibility of discovery. So much so, in fact, that his cut-out reported he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. When Szek pleaded to be smuggled out of Belgium, Hall finally agreed, but only after Szek had delivered the last page of the codes.

Szek crossed the border into Holland and handed the final codes to the British military attaché in The Hague. He was told to return to Brussels and wait there for the agents who would shortly smuggle him out to England. Szek did so and was dead in a week. The British authorities paid a hit man £1000 to kill him in case he made a break for it and thus alerted the Germans to the possibility he had stolen their codes.

World’s Worst Spy

If Alexander Szek was one of history’s unluckiest spies (the British obtained all the German codes from another source only months after they killed him), the world’s worst seems to have been Michael Bettany. Bettany, who was born in Stoke-on-Trent, had huge problems deciding what he wanted to do with his life. He was attracted to Nazi doctrines, then changed his mind and became a Communist instead. He thought of entering the priesthood, but actually took up a teaching post in Germany. Eventually, in 1982, he became a spy for MI5, the British Counterintelligence Service.

Just what sort of secret agent he was going to be became obvious shortly afterwards when Bettany staggered drunkenly onto a train without a ticket, then ran when the conductor approached him. The conductor chased him down the corridor, but Bettany made such a fuss that the police had to be called. When they arrived, he shouted loudly, “You can’t arrest me – I’m a spy!”

Although this was not the only time Bettany got himself into trouble, MI5 promptly promoted him to the Russian Desk, one of the most important posts in the entire organization. There he learned the names of all the KGB agents operating in Britain and decided to become a double agent himself.

To this end, he made copies of secret documents and stuffed them through the letter box of a Russian diplomat with a cover note explaining he was a member of MI5 who wanted to spy for the Soviets. When this didn’t work, he called on several other Russian diplomats. None of them believed him for a minute. What real spy would act so stupidly or so openly? They decided eventually that the approaches were a bungling attempt by the British to plant Bettany in Russia as a double agent.

To put a stop to the nonsense, the KGB simply informed MI5 they had an officer who was trying to sell secrets – the Russian way of saying they were not about to be fooled. The Russians were astonished when...