Faces Of January Trivia Quiz

Answer: American

On 21 September 1780, Benedict Arnold attended a meeting that changed the way history remembers him - from hero to traitor. Arnold was one of George Washington's most skilled field generals in the American Revolutionary War against the British. His feats on the battlefield, including his role in the capture of Fort Ticonderoga in 1775 and his leadership at the Battle of Saratoga in 1777, which resulted in him being severely injured in the same leg on two occasions, had garnered him plaudits and admiration. However, by 1780, Arnold had become disenchanted and resentful with his situation and felt that he was both underappreciated and unfairly recompensed. This bitterness, together with the financial debt he had accumulated, led to the fateful meeting where Arnold met a British officer named Captain John Andre to discuss his switching his allegiance to the British cause. At this point, Arnold was in command of the Continental Army's defenses at West Point, a key stronghold for the colonists. Arnold offered to deliver West Point to the British in return for a large payment and a British military role.

Unfortunately for Arnold, before this plan could come to fruition, a series of misfortunes occurred that resulted in Captain Andre being captured while trying to make his way back to British controlled territory after a meeting with Arnold. The documentation he carried was evidence of Arnold's betrayal. Arnold escaped to a British warship, HMS Vulture. Despite the colonists' best efforts at capturing him, he remained at large, even leading British troops against his former comrades in Richmond, Virginia. Arnold survived the war and moved to England with his wife where he died in relative obscurity in London on 14 June 1801. However, his name has become synonymous with both treason and betrayal.

Answer: British

George Blake is considered by many to be Britain's most damaging traitor. The MI6 officer turned KGB agent not only severely compromised Britain's position during the Cold War, his actions also resulted in the death of numerous field agents whose identities he revealed to the Soviets. However, until his death in Moscow on 26 December 2020 at the age of 98, Blake never recanted his beliefs or showed any regret for his actions. He once said that "to betray, you first have to belong. I never belonged." George Blake was born George Behar in Rotterdam, to Albert Behar, a Turkish-born Jew, and his wife, Catherine, on 11 November 1922. He moved to Britain during World War II and became a British citizen. After joining the British army, he was recruited by the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), where he was trained as a spy. He was captured in Korea during the Korean War and it is thought that his experiences there convinced him that communism was the only system that could put an end to war and ordinary people's suffering. He offered his services to the KGB and began passing on classified information he gained through his postings with MI6.

George Blake was unmasked as a double agent in 1961 through information supplied by a Polish defector, Michael Goleniewski. Blake was tried and convicted of treason and sentenced to 42 years in prison, one of the longest sentences ever handed down for espionage in Britain. He was held at Wormwood Scrubs prison where he served five years of his sentence before escaping in 1966 with the help of two anti-nuclear campaigners, Michael Randle and Pat Pottle, and an Irish petty criminal named Sean Bourke. He was smuggled out of the UK and his arrival in Moscow saw him greeted as a national hero and was awarded honours by the Soviet government. He lived out the rest of his life in Moscow.

Answer: Other

Vidkun Quisling is the traitor whose name has become an accepted term for betrayal. Quisling is used to describe a traitor, especially one who collaborates with an enemy occupying force for personal gain. Quisling was a Norwegian military officer and diplomat who gained infamy for his collaboration with Nazi Germany during World War II. He was born Vidkun Abraham Lauritz Jonssøn Quisling on 18 July 1887, in Fyresdal, Norway. In 1905, he enrolled at the Norwegian Military Academy and began his military career with the Norwegian General Staff. After his career in the Norwegian army, he was posted as the Norwegian diplomat to the Soviet Union before returning to Norway in 1929 and entering politics. In 1933, he founded the national-socialist Nasjonal Samling (National Union) party in Norway, which promoted a nationalist and anti-communist agenda. Despite his political efforts, Quisling's party never gained significant support in Norway. Quisling was a firm believer in the "superior quality of certain races and types of people" and, from1935 onward, his party's policies became more more pro-German and hardline anti-Semitic.

On 9 April 1940, Nazi Germany invaded Norway. Quisling declared himself the head of the Norwegian government in a radio broadcast, effectively staging a coup d'état. He collaborated closely with the Nazis, facilitating their occupation of Norway. He held the office of Minister President of Norway from 1 February 1942, to the end of World War I. However, the Nazis never fully trusted Quisling and he wielded little real power. He was despised by the vast majority of Norwegians. After the war, Quisling stayed in power until he was arrested on 9 May 1945 at his mansion on Bygdøy in Oslo. He was tried for high treason, and executed by firing squad on 24 October 1945.

Answer: American

On 12 January 1976, Robert Hanssen by taking an oath to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic" and to "bear true faith and allegiance to the same," becoae a FBI special agent. On 6 July, 2001, he pleaded guilty to 15 counts of espionage by betraying his country's secrets to the Soviet Union and later Russia, becoming the most damaging traitor in Bureau history. Robert Philip Hanssen was born on 18 April 1944, in Chicago, Illinois. After completing his studies, he served in the Chicago Police Department before joining the FBI in 1976. In 1979 he approached the GRU , the Soviet Intelligence Directorate, to offer his services as an agent. He would later tell the FBI that his motivation for doing so was purely financial.

Employing the skills and training he had acquired as a counterintelligence agent, Hanssen remained undetected for years. He used the alias "Ramon Garcia" in his transactions and provided highly classified national security information to the Russians in exchange for more than $1.4 million in cash, bank funds, and diamonds. In 2000, after years of investigation into the presence of a mole, the FBI and CIA came across original Russian documentation of an American spy. All evidence pointed towards Hanssen. A sting operation designed to catch him red-handed was implemented and Hanssen was arrested on 18 February 2001, at Foxstone Park near his home in Virginia, after leaving a package of classified materials at a dead drop site. Following his guilty plea, he was sentenced to life in prison without parole on 10 May 2002. Hanssen died on 5 June 2023, at a maximum security prison in Colorado at the age of 79.

Answer: British

The case of Dorothy O' Grady is probably one of the most intriguing stories of treason to come out of Britain in World War II. This seemingly ordinary housewife who ran a boarding house on the Isle of Wight during World War II, was the first woman to be convicted of treason and the first person to be condemned to death under the Treachery Act of 1940. What makes things even more curious is that her beef with Britain which led her to pass information to the enemy, was not the usual reason of money or politics, but rather her anger at the authorities for the death from neglect of her puppy while she was on remand for soliciting. Dorothy Pamela "Sweet Rosie" O' Grady was born in London on 25 October 1897 and her life from the outset was less than charmed. By the age of 20, she had been convicted of forging bank notes and then followed convictions for theft and prostitution. In 1926 she married a London firefighter named Vincent O' Grady and they moved to the Isle of Wight to run a boarding house called Osborne Villa. The outbreak of World War II put the island was on full alert for a possible German invasion as its position facing the channel was of strategic importance. The beaches and shores were heavily fortified to repel such an eventuality.

Despite a ban on the public walking on the beaches for security reasons, O' Grady and her dog continued to do just that and suspicions were aroused. She was caught after police found maps and other materials in her possession that indicated she was preparing to send information to the Germans which involved mapping and marking military installations on the Isle of Wight. She went on trial for espionage on 16 December 1940, convicted of treason and initially sentenced to death. However, her sentence was later commuted to 14 years in prison after it was argued by a prison psychologist that her actions may have been motivated by personal grievances rather than outright loyalty to the Nazis. She was released in 1950 after serving 9 years and and spent the rest of her life mainly alone at Osborne Villa until her death on 11 October 1985.

Answer: Other

Depending on personal viewpoints, Mordechai Vanunu is considered to be either a traitor of the highest order or a prisoner of conscience and a hero. The facts are that he is a former Israeli nuclear technician who worked at the secret Dimona nuclear research center in the Negev Desert. On 10 September 1986, citing his opposition to weapons of mass destruction, he revealed details of Israel's nuclear capabilities to a British newspaper, an issue that the Israeli government had never publicly acknowledged or confirmed. Mordechai Vanunu was born on 13 October 1954, in Marrakesh, Morocco and immigrated to Israel with his family in 1963. After completing his compulsory military duty, he drifted between jobs and studies. In 1976 he began work as a technician at the Negev Nuclear Research Center in Dimona. It was during his employment here that he became disillusioned with Israel's secretive nuclear program. In 1986 his services were terminated, partly because of political statements he had made against Israeli policies. Vanunu traveled to London, contacted the Sunday Times and gave interviews detailing what he knew about the weapons program which included 60 photos that he had secretly taken inside the Dimona facility.

The Israeli authorities reacted strongly to these revelations and Vanunu was lured to Rome, Italy by an Israeli Mossad agent, where he was kidnapped, brought back to Israel, and secretly tried for treason and espionage. He was sentenced to 18 years in prison, 11 of which were spent in solitary confinement. Vanunu was released in 2004 subject to numerous restrictions, including bans on speaking with foreign media, traveling abroad, and discussing his work at the Dimona facility.

Answer: British

Kim Philby is most known as one of the most significant and damaging spies in British history. A member of the notorious Cambridge Five, a group of spies who secretly worked for the Soviet Union while being part of the British intelligence establishment, his actions had a profound impact on international relations and intelligence operations during the Cold War. He was born Harold Adrian Russell Philby on 1 January 1912 in Ambala, India, the son of a British diplomat. Nicknamed "Kim" after a spy character in a Rudyard Kipling story, he was as educated at Eton College and later at the University of Cambridge, where he became involved in left-wing politics and joined the Communist Party. He was recruited by the NKVD, the Soviet Intelligence Service, during a stint working as a journalist in Vienna. By 1940, Philby had been recruited by MI6 and he began began working for the British intelligence services. He rose rapidly through the ranks and by the end of the war, he was the head of counter-Soviet intelligence, responsible for combating Soviet subversion in western Europe, a position that gave him access to highly classified information.

After the escape of Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess to the Soviet Union in 1951 after they had been warned of their imminent exposure by Philby, suspicions about his loyalty grew and he resigned from his intelligence duties in 1951. Despite a major investigation after the exposure of the Cambridge spy ring, Philby avoided detection for many years. In 1962 a Soviet defector named Anatoliy Golitsyn provided information which strongly implicated him. By this time, Philby was in Beirut, Lebanon as the Middle East correspondent for The Observer and The Economist. On the evening of 23 January 1963, facing imminent exposure and arrest, Kim Philby simply vanished from Beirut. On 30 July 1963, Soviet officials announced that they had granted him political asylum and Soviet Citizenship. He lived the rest of his life in Moscow until his death on 11 May 1988.

If you are interested in the story of Philby and would like to know more, I can recommend "A Spy Among Friends" written by British historian Ben MacIntyre.

Answer: American

"This is Berlin calling the American mothers, wives and sweethearts." So would begin the anti-American broadcasts of Mildred Gillars, the American radio presenter who worked as a propagandist for Nazi Germany during World War II. She was born Mildred Elizabeth Sisk (Gillars being the name of her step-father) on 29 November 1900 in Portland, Maine, USA. Gillars studied at Ohio State University and initially worked as an actress and singer before moving to Germany in the late 1930s. When Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, Gillars chose to remain in Germany and in 1940, began working for the German state radio network. She became the personification of Nazi propaganda to American soldiers with her cruel, taunt-filled broadcasts aimed at American soldiers and their families. She was variously known as the Berlin Babe, Berlin Bitch, Olga, and most lastingly, Axis Sally.

When the war ended, Axis Sally disappeared, with Gillars pretending be a refugee. She used the alias Barbara Mome, but was eventually captured in Berlin by American authorities on 15 March 1946. In August 1948 she was returned to the USA and indicted by the US Justice Department on charges of treason. She went on trial and, despite her assertion that she had done nothing wrong and was only a paid performer, she was convicted by a jury on 10 March 1949 and sentenced to 10 to 30 years in prison. In January of 1961, Gillars, who had converted to Catholicism while in prison, was paroled. She went to live at a convent in Columbus, Ohio, and taught music to novice nuns there. Gillars died in hospital in Columbus on June 25, 1988 at the age of 87.

Answer: Other

He has been dubbed "the spy who saved the world." Oleg Penkovsky was a high-ranking Soviet military intelligence officer who was also an agent for both MI6 and the CIA. The intelligence he supplied, containing detailed information about Soviet missile capabilities and the deployment of nuclear weapons in Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, was critical to the peaceful resolution of the crisis. Oleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky was born on 23 April 1919, in Vladikavkaz, Russia. After school, he joined the military and saw active service during World War II. In 1953 he joined the GRU, the Soviet military intelligence service. In 1960, Penkovsky approached a group of American tourists in Moscow asking them to pass a letter to the U.S. Embassy in which he offered to collect classified information for the CIA. He stated that his motivation for betraying his country was reportedly disillusionment with the Soviet regime and a desire to prevent a nuclear war. The CIA passed the baton to MI6 who assigned him a handler named Greville Wynne and he began providing vast amounts of secret information about Soviet military capabilities and strategies. It is estimated that he handed over films containing 5000 documents of classified information. He is also believed to have betrayed nearly 600 Soviet intelligence officers.

However, the Soviet Union had two double agents, William Whalen and Jack Dunlap, working in Washington, who advised the KGB that Penkovsky was spying for the West. On 20 October 1962, the KGB raided Penkovsky's apartment and discovered a camera that had been used to photograph secret documents . Penkovsky was arrested by the KGB and put on trial at which he was convicted of treason and espionage. He was sentenced to death. Penkovsky was executed by firing squad on 16 May 1963 at the Butyrk Prison in Moscow.

Answer: British

The identity of the mysterious "Fourth Man" in the infamous Cambridge Spy Ring was revealed on 15 November 1979 when then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, revealed in the House of Commons that Sir Anthony Blunt, director of the Courtauld Institute of Art and Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures, a highly respected art historian, was in fact a long time Soviet agent. It caused shock waves. It is hard to ascertain what caused more outrage. The fact that this highly respected member of the establishment was a spy or the the subsequent revelation that Blunt had confessed in 1964 that he has passed information to the Russians while he served as a high-ranking British intelligence officer during World War II and the matter was hushed up.

Anthony Frederick Blunt was born on 26 September 1907 in Bournemouth, England. He was educated at Marlborough College followed by studies at Trinity College, Cambridge. It was here that he became involved in a circle of intellectuals and left wing radicals which included Guy Burgess. Blunt later stated that it was Burgess who persuaded him to join the Soviet cause. In 1939 he was recruited by MI5, the British Security Service, and began passing intelligence to the Soviet Union. Following the war, his prominence as a art historian rose and he was appointed Surveyor of the King Pictures in 1945 and in 1947 Director of the prestigious Courtauld Institute. He was knighted in 1956 in recognition of his work with the Royal Collection. Although his friendship with Burgess placed him under suspicion after Burgess defected, it was only in 1963 that Blunt was unmasked by an American agent named Michael Straight. .On 23 April 1964, Blunt made a full confession to MI5 in return for immunity from prosecution. He was only publicly exposed in 1979. He was stripped of his knighthood and lived the remainder of his life in relative obscurity. He died on 26 March 1983, in London, England of a heart attack at his London home aged 75.

Answer: American

Ana Montes was the US Defense Intelligence Agency's "Queen of Cuba"; their top analyst and their go-to person on Cuban affairs. She was also a Cuban agent who fed information and secrets to the Cuban authorities for 17 years before her arrest on 21 September 2001. She is considered by officials to be one of the most damaging spies in American history. Besides revealing the existence of a stealth satellite that the US used to spy on Russia, China and Iran, she also provided the true identities of American operatives working in Cuba placing those lives in jeopardy. Montes was motivated by ideology. She passionately disagreed with American foreign policy towards Cuba. She received no payment for the information she passed on and stated after her arrest that "I feel that what I did was morally right. That I was faithful to principles that were right,"

Ana Belén Montes was born on 28 February 1957 in Nuremberg, Germany while her parents were stationed there with the U.S. Army. After first studying at the University of Virginia, she began a master's degree at Johns Hopkins University. Her often and openly spoken views against the U.S. government's policies towards Central America brought her to the attention of the Cuban authorities. They approached her and she agreed to help Cuba. In order to achieve this, she applied to the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and started work there in 1985 analyzing military intelligence related to Cuba.She soon became one of the DIA's rising stars. By the late 1990s, suspicions about a possible Cuban spy within the U.S. government surfaced and in 1996, the FBI received a tip from a U.S. intelligence officer who had noted unusual activities that pointed to Montes. She was placed under surveillance and her downfall came when the FBI was able to intercept and decode some of the communications between Montes and her Cuban handlers that provided evidence of her espionage activities.She was arrested on 21 September 2001 at her office. In 2002, Montes pleaded guilty to charges of espionage and was sentenced to 25 years in prison. She was released in 6 January 2023 after 20 years and went to live in Puerto Rico.

Answer: Other

Admiral Wilhelm Canaris was one of the most powerful men in the Third Reich as the head of the Abwehr, the Wehrmacht Intelligence Agency. He was also the organiser of an anti-Nazi-Hitler spy ring and a key participant in the resistance of military officers to them. Canaris was initially a supporter of Hitler and the plan to re-arm Germany, but became disillusioned with the Nazi regime when they started their terror campaign which included the systematic murder of thousands of Jews and other "undesirables. He came to believe that the Nazi regime would "ultimately destroy traditional conservative values and that its foreign ambitions were dangerous to Germany". Wilhelm Franz Canaris was born 1 January 1887, in Aplerbeck, Germany. He joined the Imperial German Navy in 1905 and served during World War I. He gained a reputation as a war hero during the First World War for his exploits as a submarine captain and worked as a military intelligence agent. Canaris was appointed head the Abwehr Military Intelligence in 1935.He used this powerful position to protect those who were working against the Nazi regime. He maintained secret contacts with opposition figures and was involved, albeit indirectly, in several assassination plots against Hitler. He supplied the Allied forces with information on German plans including the details of Operation Barbarossa. He was also instrumental in saving the lives of numerous Jews, getting them to safety by disguising them as Abwehr infiltration agents.

However, as the war turned against Germany, suspicions that Canaris was playing a double game grew and, in 1944, he was removed from his position and the Abwehr was disbanded. His involvement in anti-Hitler conspiracies was eventually uncovered and on 23 July 1944, Canaris was arrested by the Gestapo. He was placed on trial by an SS court and charged with treason, H convicted and sentenced to death. He was executed by hanging on 9 April 1945, at the Flossenbürg concentration camp. He stated that "I die for my fatherland. I have a clear conscience. I only did my duty to my country when I tried to oppose the criminal folly of Hitler."