Espionage

[JohnM]

The recent hysterical wailing, faux indignation and indeed deliberate lies and misrepresentation about issues surrounding Ed's dad reminded me that unlike Ed's dad, people who really do "hate their country" do not generally make that fact known.They seem to become spies instead.

 

Of course, there were people like Edith Tudor Hart  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edith_Tudor-Hart

An anti-fascist activist and Communist, she saw photography as a tool for disseminating her political ideas. She married medical doctor Alex Tudor-Hart, who belonged to a well-known radical and artistic family. The couple fled to London in 1933, so that she could avoid prosecution and persecution in Austria for her Communist activities and Jewish background.

 

but equally there are people like those in The Cambridge Spy Ring who were I think, heavliy protected by the establishment.  see http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/coldwar/cambridge_spies_01.shtml

 

Philby, Burgess, Maclean and Blunt.... believed that the democracies would prove too weak to stand up to Hitler and Mussolini, and they knew that many people in Britain did indeed admire these leaders. They also thought that only the Soviet Union would be powerful enough to defeat Fascism. So, when they were approached by a recruiter from Moscow, the four young men agreed to serve the KGB. The KGB believed that recruiting clever people from a respected university was a good game plan, because the chances were that sometime in the future these young men would be among Britain's rulers and well placed to betray their country's secrets.

All seem to have come from wealthy and privileged backgrounds..apart from John Cairncross, whose father was the manager of an ironmonger's and his mother a primary school teacher. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cairncross

 

Then there was Bob Stewart see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Stewart_(spy)

 

Oh, and then there was Goronwy Rees http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goronwy_Rees

 

Oh, and yes, Gordon Lonsdale: TROFIM MOLODIY, son of the Soviet spy Konon Molodiy who passed himself off in Britain as Gordon Lonsdale and stole submarine secrets in the 1950s, was sick and tired of reading "rubbish" by Russian authors about his father. see http://www.independent.co.uk/news/at-last-the-truth-emerges-about-gordon-lonsdales-shadowy-life-1171736.html

 

None of this is relevant anymore, though. If you want to know a secret, you can  use Wikipedia and of course http://wikileaks.org/