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Katja Majorowa aka "Miss KGB"
Photo:
SHONE / Gamma-Rapho / Getty Images
Stars live in the spotlight, spies in the shadowy world.
One actually excludes the other.
A famous entertainer is a successful entertainer.
A famous spy is soon to be an ex-spy - or dead.
In reality, it's not that simple.
There are surprisingly many similarities between show business and everyday life in the secret service: invented identities, deceptions and the art of improvisation are essential for both professions.
Spies, like actors, have to portray someone else.
And some agents achieved world fame.
Entertainment and espionage are so similar that former ringmaster Julius Green and Cambridge professor Christopher Andrew, old master of intelligence history, wrote a book about it: Stars and Spies.
Intelligence Operations and the Entertainment Business ".
Here are six exciting examples from the two worlds that are actually mutually exclusive.
The best-known showbiz spy in history is Mata Hari, the stage name of Margaretha Geertruida cell from the Netherlands.
As an exotic dancer and noble courtesan, she spied as agent »H-21« for Germany in Parisian booths during the First World War.
But Mata Hari did not remain a beautiful stranger.
The French and British secret services quickly found out about her.
What she learned from Germans, she passed on to the French and vice versa.
In doing so, she told both sides more gossip than war information.
In return, their fee requests grew immeasurably.
Similar to her myth as an Indonesian dancer, Mata Hari's role as an agent was also not very real.
But this role soon suited her so well that it ultimately fulfilled itself: When Mata Hari was arrested in 1917, France presented the world with an alleged top spy, which the Germans did not deny either.
Until she died, the prisoner followed the self-staged caricature of the wicked top spy: dressed only in a fur coat, without a blindfold and dropping her coat at the last moment, she is said to have faced her shooters on October 15, 1917.
Another legend says that she was not shot at all - but fled with an officer in the fog.
King Alfred the Great was not only king of the West and Anglo-Saxons, he is also said to have been an entertainer and spy.
In 878 Alfred's empire was at war with the Danes who ruled parts of the British Isles.
Without further ado, so the legend has it, King Alfred slipped into the role of a minstrel, the entertainers of the Middle Ages.
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Alfred the Great, disguised as a harp player
Photo: Kean Collection / Getty Images
Disguised in this way, he aroused no suspicion, the Danish guards let him appear in front of the old man for celebrations in the camp of the Danish king Guthrum.
Alfred is said to have played the harp and sang in front of the royal tent until he was admitted.
Good entertainment made the Danish warriors reckless, this is how King Alfred found out about their war plans.
According to the medieval chronicler William of Malmesbury, this information led to Alfred's victory at the Battle of Edington in May 878.
However: Medieval chronicles are always interest-driven and full of miraculous twists and turns.
And this chronicle was written almost 400 years after the battle.
Alfred had long since become a myth.
The relatively unknown in Germany Aphra Behn was the superstar of English literature in the early modern period.
Her plays were performed at the royal court, and she was the first woman in England to earn a living as a writer.
But before her meteoric rise, Behn was a spy - even the first to officially spy on a British government.
In the middle of the Anglo-Dutch War, she was recruited in 1666 under the code name "Astrea" as "Agent 160".
Their mission: to win over their former lover William Scott, who spied against the British in Antwerp for the Netherlands, as double agents.
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Aphra Ben also took a lot of artistic freedom in her intelligence reports
Photo: Artokoloro / IMAGO
Soon after their arrival, Behn reported to London: Mission accomplished!
But the reports she sent to London raised doubts.
The alleged information was extremely thin, and Behn repeatedly explained gaps in knowledge as rather cloudy.
In reality she had invented the messages with a literary talent.
Because of this, the British crown turned the money off Behn, forcing them to live from writing from now on.
Her first play, "Die enforced marriage", from 1670 became famous for the - at the time still inexplicable - sentence: "Even the poet, it is said, has her spies abroad."
In 1909 the British government appointed Mansfield Smith-Cumming as the Secret Service Bureau's first foreign espionage chief.
Cumming was not only the midwife of modern British intelligence, he later also served as a template for intelligence chief "M" of the James Bond series.
"C", as Cumming was called, remembered his previous espionage missions during the First World War with nostalgia.
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Andrew, Christopher, Green, Julius
Stars and Spies: The story of Intelligence Operations… (English Edition)
Publisher: Vintage Digital
Number of pages: 502
Publisher: Vintage Digital
Number of pages: 502
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“That was the time when this business was really amusing,” he said to the writer and playwright Compton Mackenzie. “It's a great sport!” Mackenzie believed him and successfully applied for the position of head of the British Secret Service in Athens. His flowery intelligence reports, which he sometimes wrote in verse, entertained "C" so much that he wrote to him: "We really like your poetic reports, please send more!"
It wasn't Cumming's only link in the showbiz world.
"C" had a weakness for the theater, for writers and disguises.
In London he was a regular customer in the shop of Willy Clarkson, the king's theater set designer and wig maker.
In January 1911, Clarkson disguised "C" before he went to meet an agent who was promising information about Austrian ship production.
"C" had his costumes and disguises recorded on a photo so that he could request them again if necessary.
One such photo, which showed Cumming as a "typical German," he put up in his office.
It was also a game: would his visitors recognize him?
Moscow in January 1990: When the giant red empire of the Soviet Union imploded, popular anger also turned against the secret service.
The KGB responded with a bizarre PR offensive and organized a »beauty pageant by the security authorities«.
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The Russian agent Anna Chapman, expelled from the USA
Photo: ZUMA Press / IMAGO
The winner was Katja Majorova, the first »Miss KGB«.
The press text - dripping with sexism - said: »She wears her bulletproof vest with the outstanding ease of a Pierre Cardin model, but is always able to give her enemy a fatal karate kick on the head. «
But even "Miss KGB" failed in 1990 to convince the Russian people of the KGB. That didn't stop the Russian secret services from presenting an updated version 20 years later: the failed spy Anna Chapman, who was arrested in the United States in 2010 as part of a ten-man spy ring. On her return, the secret services presented her as "Agent 90-60-90", and Chapman posed in lingerie and a gun on the front page of the erotic magazine "Maxim".
Howard Hunt worked for the CIA for more than 20 years, involved in many dirty actions such as the failed invasion of Cuba in 1961. Under US President Richard Nixon, he was also tasked with monitoring whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg and then breaking into the Campaign headquarters of the Democratic Party that sparked the Watergate affair.
But Hunt also got involved in show business: he wrote more than 50 spy novels under his name and under a few pseudonyms, with moderate public success.
He was also one of the first agents to establish contacts in Hollywood for the CIA to promote anti-communist films.
One of them was the 1954 film adaptation of George Orwell's classic "Animal Farm".
At the same time, the FBI was monitoring half of Hollywood in the wake of Senator McCarthy's hunted down communists.
The agents recruited, for example, the chairman of the actors' association as the source "T-10": Ronald Reagan, later US president.
However, the CIA and FBI showed their greatest quality in self-promotion.
The film "Argo", produced by Ben Affleck, told the story of CIA agent Tony Mendez - officially approved by the CIA a few years earlier - and won three Academy Awards.
As a specialist in the secret smuggling of people, Mendez succeeded in smuggling six American diplomats from Iran in 1979, disguised as a film crew from Hollywood.
The secret service marketing of the CIA has remained film-ready to this day.
In 2018 she organized a public discussion with Bond actor Daniel Craig - in the middle of her legendary headquarters in Langley.
The advice for the long-running Netflix "The Americans", a spy series about a camouflaged Russian agent couple in the USA, was taken over by ex-CIA agent Joe Weisberg.
The high point of this development so far is the founding of »Spycraft Entertainment«.
The agency, based in Los Angeles and Washington, brings spies, agents and filmmakers together - and blurs the lines between the world of spies and entertainment even further.