Dead Celebrity Alert

October 30, 1927 - August 23, 2008

The controversial defection of the Soviet agent Yuri Nosenko to the United States contributed to deep and demoralising divisions within the CIA and the ultimate dismissal of James Jesus Angleton, the agency’s chief of counter-intelligence.

Nosenko joined the KGB’s Second Chief Directorate in 1953 and was responsible for the surveillance and recruitment of foreigners in Moscow. In the 1960s he offered to provide the West with details of Soviet penetration agents and, later, information about the KGB connection with Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin of President Kennedy.

His defection was initially viewed as a CIA coup, but it came at a time when the agency was gripped with spy fever, stoked by Angleton, and fears that the CIA had been penetrated by a Soviet mole in its highest ranks. … Read full obituary

Former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko, who had been fighting for his life in recent days after an apparent poisoning, has died, the London hospital where he was being treated said today.

“We are sorry to announce that Alexander Litvinenko died at University College Hospital (UCH) at 9.21pm GMT (0821 AEDT) on the 23rd of November 2006,” the spokesman for the hospital said.

“He was seriously ill when he was admitted to UCH on Friday November 17, and the medical team at the hospital did everything possible to save his life.”

Litvinenko was a former lieutenant-colonel in Russia’s Federal Security Services (FSB) — the successor to the Soviet KGB. His friends have in recent days blamed Russia for his apparent poisoning.

Oleg Gordievsky, a former colonel in the KGB who defected to Britain in the mid-1980s, said before Litvinenko died that there was “no mystery” for him, pointing the finger directly at the Russian secret service. … Read full story

Helene Deschamps Adams, a hero of the French Resistance who saved American fliers from capture and Jews from execution by the Nazis, and played a role in secret preparations for Allied invasions of France, died in Manhattan Saturday of heart failure.

When asked why she took on the dangerous role of secret agent, “she was fond of saying, ‘I didn’t like the idea of Nazis taking over my country,’” according to her daughter, Karyn Anick Monget.

Helene Deschamps was born into a French military family at Tientsin, China, in 1921, and grew up in colonial outposts. Studying at a convent when Germany invaded France in 1940, she joined the Resistance. Her duties ranged from being a courier to gathering information on German troop strength, airfields and coastal installations in preparation for the Allied invasion of southern France in 1944. She rescued downed U.S.fliers before the Nazis could find them and guided groups of Jews to safety across the Spanish border in the Pyrenees mountains. … Read full obituary

Hugh Trevor-Roper, a British historian who wrote a best-selling account of Hitler’s final days in the Berlin bunker but damaged his reputation 35 years later by authenticating forged Hitler diaries, died yesterday in Oxford, England. He was 89.

“The Last Days of Hitler,” published in 1947, was based on the official investigation into Hitler’s fate conducted by Professor Trevor-Roper as a wartime officer in Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service.

Relying mainly on interviews with captured Nazi leaders and others close to Hitler, Professor Trevor-Roper established that Hitler’s new wife, Eva Braun, took poison and that he shot himself at about 3:30 p.m. on May 1, 1945, as Soviet forces advanced on the Reich Chancellery’s bunker, and that their bodies were burned in the yard. … Read full obituary