Resumo de Book Of Facts - Reader's Digest

SPIES AND SPYING-I

SAVAGE PENALTY

Jail is one of the risks a spy a runs. In the late 1950s Colonel Peter Popov, an officer in Russia?s military intelligence service the GRU, was discovered to be a double agent working for the West. His penalty- later leaked and officially recorded as a dreadful warning to Western intelligence agencies- was savage. He was tossed live into a furnace in front of an audience of his GRU colleagues in 1959.

FROM RUSSIA WITH DEATH
SMRESH, the Soviet spy organization made familiar by James Bond?s creator, Ian Fleming, is a real KGB department. Named after its motto, Smert Shiponen (?Death to Spies?), SMERSH has the job of eliminating enemies of the Soviet Union who live aboard. Its most important victim was Leon Trotsky, the former Bolshevik leader in the 1917 revolution, who was murdered in Mexico in 1940.

THE SQUAD THAT FOXED A SATELLITE

During the battle for the Falklands in 1982, Britain?s Royal Air Force claimed that pinpoint bombing of Port Stanley?s only runway had effectively closed the airport to Argentina?s air force. This view was supported by sophisticated aerial photographs taken by US satellites which showed what appeared to be several deep bomb craters. After the fighting ended, however, it was discovered that a handful of Argentine soldiers, equipped only with buckets and spades, had fooled the most advanced military equipment simply by constructing convincing- looking crater walls of loose earth under cover of darkness. The bogus craters were left in view during the day for the satellites to photograph, and then cleared away after dark. By this simple and cheap expedient the Argentine forces were able to fly in supplies and reinforcements every night, right up the final surrender.

A SPY NAMED CICERO

A British ambassador?s early morning bath to one of the most notorious episodes for the Second World War. For it was while Sir Hughe Knatchbull- Hugessen- His Majesty?s ambassador in Ankara, the capital of neutral Turkey- was soaking in his tub that his Turkish valet, Elyesa Banza, made a wax impression for the key to the top-secret documents box which stood on the desk in Sir Hughe?s study. It was October 1943- a time when Turkey was debating whether to join in the fight against Hitler- and by the end of the month Banza had copied 52 documents, which he sold to Nazi officials in Ankara.
The German gave Banza the code name of Cicero, after the Roman orator and statesman (106-43BC) noted for his great eloquence. Banza continued his work as a spy until April 1944, by which time Turkey had decided not to enter the war. He had amassed some 300,000 pounds from his activities- and hid the money under the floorboards of his bedroom in the British embassy. He then handed in his notice to Sir Hughe and dropped out of sight, taking his fortune with him. At the end of the Second World War Banza resurfaced in Istanbul with the idea of building a luxury hotel for tourists. It was then he discovered that he, too, had been betrayed. The money the Germans had given him turned out to be worthless forgeries. The man who had sold so many secrets had finally been ?sold? himself.

OF MOLES AND MEN

The word ?mole? for a long- term agent who burrows into a rival intelligence agency was devised by an author. British thriller writer and former M16 officer John Le Carre (real name David Cornwell ) coined the term in 1974 in his spy novel Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy- and the word was later adopted by real spices

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