Numbers

Double Agent

A "double agent" is a spy who works for two opposing groups at the same time.

How It's Used

“In Betrayal, a book about Aldrich Ames, the double agent who for years ferried C.I.A. secrets to the Soviets, the agency is characterized as ‘a cross between Yale’s secret Skull and Bones society and the post office.’”

“The early poetry is full of what was to him the uniquely 'authoritative' landscape of Pennine limestone, isolated communities, cold skies and deep-rooted, revengeful violence. This serves not as a backcloth for regional mythmaking, but as a set of framing metaphors for the social and political tragedy of the era. And, perhaps more importantly, for the sense of doubleness and loneliness, being suspicious and creating suspicion, that was bound up at this point in his life with Auden's homosexuality. The convoluted political context, with its rhetoric of covert operations, espionage and treachery, is inextricably connected with a muted but intensely felt sexual politics—of a very different kind from what we associate with the phrase in more recent decades. The poetic voice is often that of someone working as a kind of double agent or negotiating difficult border country. In what for some might seem a paradoxical development, the recovery of Christian belief and imagery allows for the poetry of hard but accepting self-awareness and a sense of absolution mysteriously granted in advance, and of an elusive but overwhelming order of joy to which the poem compulsively moves ('Whitsunday in Kirchstetten').”

"Moura is not a spy novel, I confess, but it was written by the Russian novelist and short-story writer Nina Berberova, and the book—subtitled 'The Dangerous Life of the Baroness Budberg'—affords all the pleasures of first-rate fiction. The mysterious baroness, known as Moura, was likely a Soviet spy and possibly a double agent, as Berberova shows in this intricate biography, one that is also a meditation on Bolsheviks, penniless Baltic nobility and the attractions of the femme fatale. (Moura's lovers included Maxim Gorky, H.G. Wells and the British spy Robert Lockhart.) Berberova (1901-93), who knew Moura when they both lived in Gorky's chaotic household in the 1920s, was an émigré in occupied Paris during World War II, then moved to the U.S., where she taught at Princeton. Though 'Moura' was published in Russian in 1981, it didn't appear in English until four years ago, with Marian Schwartz and Richard D. Sylvester's translation. As many readers discovered then, Berberova is a splendid writer who deserves to be better known.”

“They retell great MI5 successes, such as the Double Cross operations of the second world war, in which double agents were used to deceive Germany, culminating in successful decoys before the 1944 Normandy landings. They trace British weaknesses in the cold war intelligence battle with the Soviet Union to a fumbled raid on Moscow's UK espionage cover organisation in 1927 which revealed to the Russians that their codes had been broken. MI5 never broke them again. It also points up the establishment's fatal failure to realise that Communism had a pan-class appeal that extended to Cambridge students such as Kim Philby and Guy Burgess, Soviet double agents who penetrated British intelligence services to crippling effect after the second world war.”

“[Ben] Rhodes, who wears hats as a foreign policy speechwriter, deputy national security adviser and sometime administration spokesman, is not new to the Obama team. He wrote Obama's statesman-in-training address in Berlin, the nuanced speech to the Muslim world in Cairo, the call for nuclear disarmament in Prague , the Nowruz message signaling engagement with Iran, and the modest, moving eulogy to the slain soldiers of Fort Hood. More recently, he wrote the president's Afghanistan address, acceptance speech of the Nobel Prize in Oslo, and letter to CIA employees following a suicide bombing attack on agents in Khost by a double agent. On Tuesday, Rhodes will be blogging for the White House on national security and foreign policy.”

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