This role is played by spies in war

class=”sc-97fd9fa8-0 jNFKxv”>

This news caused a sensation in Ukraine: the half-naked model Ksyusha Maneken (30) was awarded a military medal. Both the Beauty Service and the Secret Service tried to explain it all – with moderate success. Because: in war there is the highest level of secrecy. Speculation continues: Maneken is said to have worked as an escort for the Ukrainian military intelligence service (GUR) to obtain important information from Russian circles.

Spies like Maneken play an important role in wars. History shows that. Secret services were “historically more of a male domain, in which female personnel were not trusted”, scientist Christoph Ewering (37) of the German Espionage Museum in Berlin explains to Blick. “And yet women have repeatedly become top agents, double agents and informants,” he explains.

Female Agents and the “Honey Trap”

Exactly what duties Secret Service agents perform depends “on their actual position, whether they worked as command officers with informants, were on the road as double agents, or evaluated knowledge gained,” Ewering added. Women would also like to be used in surgeries called the “honey trap.” The goal is to “obtain information through intimate relationships”.

This image, which is often used in movies and books, is viewed critically by some experts. Secret agents are still “constantly sexualized,” write Ann-Katrin Müller and Maik Baumgärtner in their book “The Invisibles – How Secret Agents Shaped German History.”

Agents can do much more than just fight with the “proverbial weapon of a woman,” she emphasizes. Some of their stories could have come straight out of a spy thriller. “Spiegel” editor Müller said of “Deutschlandfunk”: “Women have done amazingly egregious things.”

What motivates women to expose themselves to the dangers of Secret Service activities? “Essentially, the female agents were driven by the same things as their male colleagues, ie hunger for adventure, interest, political attitudes or lack of money, depending on the situation,” Müller told the Tamedia newspapers. It is not enough for them “just to fill the smaller role that society had given them”.

Many of them led exciting lives – sometimes ending prematurely. Blick introduces the most famous women in the secret services.

Margaretha Geertruida Zelle, alias «Mata Hari», was a Dutch nude dancer who worked for the German secret service. Her Malay stage name means “eye of the day”. The Germans operated them under the code name “H 21”.

After her marriage to colonial officer Campbell Rudolph MacLeod, who was 20 years her senior, failed, she made a living in Paris as a model for painters. She only became famous when she posed as an exotic nude dancer from India. In 1907 she first came to Berlin as part of a performance abroad. Here she even gave a performance for the German Emperor Wilhelm II and his family.

She started working for the German secret service in the late autumn of 1915. A year later she is said to have been recruited by the French secret service. Your task: spy on German activities. However, she continued to spy mainly for Germany. Mata Hari knew personalities from politics and society through her performances, but to this day it is unclear whether and how much information she passed on. With her salary she paid off the debt she had incurred during the First World War.

Despite little evidence, she was convicted of double espionage and high treason by the French military court in 1917. On October 15, 1917, she was shot by firing squad.

German political scientist Dr. Elisabeth Schragmüller, known as Elsbeth, met German Governor General Colmar von der Goltz while traveling in 1914 after completing her doctorate. He initially used them to evaluate seized letters from Belgian soldiers. Schragmüller was so talented at this that she soon rose to the intelligence ranks after the war.

In 1915 she was already head of the espionage service in Antwerp – an absolute novelty for a woman. Schragmüller is said to have been Mata Hari’s controlling officer during her time in the Secret Service. There are numerous myths surrounding the woman nicknamed “Miss Doctor”: in 1916 she is said to have traveled to the Belgian front with forged papers to obtain information about the Allies. On the way back, the spy disguised himself as a farmer to go unnoticed.

According to her own statements, the agent almost never left her desk. Rather, she gathered intelligence, intercepted messages, and recruited agents. She spoke fluent English and French. She signed some of her reports with Lieutenant Schragmüller. The German army command later found out that she was a woman.

After World War I, she returned to her academic career. On February 24, 1940, she died of bone tuberculosis at the age of 52.

Lydia Oswald, born in St. Gallen, is said to have been recruited by Elsbeth Schragmüller. She was trained as a spy in Lindau on Lake Constance. The “Swiss Mata Hari” spied for the Germans, first in Paris and Marseille, and from 1935 in the military ports of Toulon and Brest. In Brest, “the emerald-eyed spy” entered into a relationship with a naval lieutenant. This way she could easily get as much information as possible. When the lieutenant was sent to the Caribbean, she joined his friend, a lieutenant captain.

On March 2, 1935, Oswald was arrested at Brest railway station. She then spent nine months in prison. Later she became a journalist, made documentaries and traveled the world. In 1982 she died in Zurich.

Nathalie Sergueiev was born in St. Petersburg in 1912. She grew up in a family of exiles in Paris and was recruited by the Germans in 1940 as a spy. From then on she devoted herself to secret writing and the use of numbers and Morse codes.

She was later smuggled into England. There she immediately turned to the British secret service MI5 and works as a double agent under the code name “Treasure”. She gave the Germans false information and was instrumental in the success of D-Day. The day heralded the turning point in the Second World War and was decisive for the liberation of Europe from the National Socialists.

Anna Chapman (41) was born in 1982 in Volgograd as the daughter of a former KGB officer. In 2002, she married Briton Alex Chapman. The Russian made headlines at the end of June 2010 because she was arrested in the United States along with nine other members of a Russian spy gang. At the time of the arrest, the red-haired beauty, dubbed “Agent 00Sex” in the tabloids, was working as a real estate agent in New York.

She allegedly passed classified information from the US to the Russians. In addition, she is said to have transferred millions to Zimbabwe during her four-year marriage to financially support the Russian secret service there. She later returned to Russia as part of an agent exchange. Today she works as a TV presenter, model and fashion designer.

Katharina von Wattenwyl worked as an agent for the French crown in the late 17th century. The resident of Bern provided the French ambassador Jean-Michel Amelot with information that came directly from the pro-French mayor of Bern (the current mayor) Sigismund von Erlach. In Switzerland she later became known as the “spy of the Sun King” Louis XVI. known.

In December 1689 she was blown up. The Bernese authorities arrested her in the middle of the night and charged her with high treason. She was sentenced to death, later commuted to life imprisonment.

Ethel Rosenberg was electrocuted in 1953 for being a spy, even though she wasn’t a spy. Ethel and her husband Julius were staunch communists. The case caused quite a stir. Pope Pius XII and other well-known personalities such as the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre or the artist Frida Kahlo spoke out against the death penalty.

The couple is accused of giving the Russians important information about the atomic bomb. Ethel’s brother had made the accusations – it was he who had supplied the Soviet Union with the important information. In court, he heavily charged his sister and brother-in-law to get himself out of the case.

Source: Blick