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4 Fantastic & Absolutely True Spy Stories We Bet You Haven't Heard Before


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“There's nothing good that comes out of war. It's simply hell on earth, and people survive, and people don't.” is a quote by Michael Cimino as true as any. However, the wars have definitely given us some unbelievable and astounding stories of spies and special agents. Here are four of the most fantastical spy stories you'll ever come across on the internet.

1. Noor Inayat Khan

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An Indian born spy with a story worth celebrating. Noor was a child of an interracial marriage between an Indian man (descendant of Tipu Sultan) and an American woman. She lost her father at a young age and had to flee with her family to London during World War II. She wasn't a woman mentally or physically fit to be a secret agent but her hatred towards the Nazis was enough motivation to overpower her incapability. 

She was sent to Paris in June 1943, Noor, aged 29 at the time, was SOE's first female undercover radio operator in France. Roughly in a week's time, all of SOE's operators in the city were caught by German intelligence. She refused to be extradited and continued the mission alone for three months. She changed locations and identities every day, collected information and also managed to send messages back to London. 

She was eventually caught after being betrayed by a German double agent. She collected all her strength and fought the captors, it took six men to arrest her. Noor tried to escape the prison twice. She was kept in solitary confinement and was continuously subjected to violent interrogations but the woman did not break. After one whole year in captivity, she was transferred to Dachau concentration where she was brutally tortured and shot to death in 1944. “Liberte” is believed to be her last word. She was awarded Croix se Guerre, France's best known military decoration and a George Cross, Britain's highest civilian decoration

2. Takeo Yoshikawa

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History doesn't change because of people's opinion. It is an accumulation of “facts”. Here is how fact is defined; a thing that is known or proved to be true. Very rarely do people challenge history. We are about to introduce you to one of those rarities.   

Takeo Yoshikawa, a man disguised as Tadashi Morimura, was on a one-man mission to Pearl Harbour but was abandoned by his own men. In August 1940, Yoshikawa reached Pearl Harbor with the mission of collecting intel on the American military installations. Not only was he sent without a proper training but he was informed that he wasn't going to receive help of any sort from Japan's Hawaiian spy network. 

He spied on the Navy base and the nearby Army Air Corps through a private dining room owned by a woman. He was living a life straight out of spy movies; changing costumes, jobs, and adapting different identities better than a chameleon. He manipulated his long-distance swimming skills by spying on the base from underwater and breathing through reeds. During the evenings, he picked up hitchhiking U.S. soldiers and servicemen and persuaded them for information without seeming suspicious. 

He raided the military dumpsters pretending to be a drunk vagrant. It was the information provided by him that shaped the entire attack. He reported that North of Oahu was the direction with the lowest security, the location of shallowest waters, the robustness of ships, and the entire schedule. The Japanese military accomplished its objective with brutal effectiveness with the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941. Yoshikawa returned to Japan and worked in Naval intelligence until Japan surrendered in 1945. He immediately went into hiding and returned to his family in 1952 and opened a candy shop in 1955. 

People became aware of his role in the war. “They even blamed me for the atomic bomb,” Yoshikawa told Australia's Daily Mail in 1991, in an interview with the Western press. The candy business failed and he couldn't find another job. He never received any official recognition for his contribution to the war effort. In fact, his petition for the pension to the Government was denied.    

3. Juan Pujol García

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Juan Pujol joined German spy agency to serve as a double agent to Britishers. His success can be calculated by the fact that he is the only confirmed person to receive high decorations from both the British (MBE) and the Germans (Iron Cross). He was sent to England to collect information about British spies but instead went to Lisbon and using a UK tourist guide he made up the reports. He maintained a fictional network of 27 agents (for which he got paid US$340,000) in efforts to waste German resources. 

The reports seemed so pristine that Germans plotted various missions to capture spies based on data provided by him. This caught the attention of British intelligence and they recruited him. He passed an MI5 security check conducted by two MI5 officers and an MI6 officer after which he was assigned the code name; Garbo. He never made the Germans suspicious enough to appoint another spy to verify his reports and still managed to not leak any sensitive information about British strategies. For a while, he blamed the delay in the delivery of reports on the courier. 

Noticing the growing frustration of Germans, in 1943 Pujol and Tomás Harris (a Spanish-speaking officer) created a fictional radio mechanic to facilitate faster communication. To justify the inability in reporting an easily available information, he faked the death of Tomás Harris.

In January 1944, he provided false locations for Normandy landings. They believed Garbo's reports to such an extent that they kept two armoured divisions and 19 infantry divisions in the Pas de Calais waiting for an invasion through July and August 1944. He even professed his own “arrest” to justify his failure of providing information on the falling of V1 flying bombs.

4. Fritz Joubert Duquesne 

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Fritz Duquesne was a man believed by many to be the most notorious spy ever. Even though he was one of the most influential people at the time, his story is barely covered in the history books since he had a reputation for fabricating stories about himself including his origin, education, and even the fact that he murdered Britain's Lord Kitchener. 

He headed the biggest spy ring in the history of the United States, was a globe-trotting journalist, was known for his connections with President John F. Kennedy. At age 12, he killed his first man, a Zulu who attacked his mother. His hatred for Britishers (for massacring his family) motivated him to be a German spy. He escaped several internments (three times by the British and once by the Portuguese) with his manipulative skills and sheer shrewdness. He faked paralysis for two years to avoid imprisonment, allegedly used a metal spoon to tunnel his way out of a prison and also, pretended to be a woman for his breakout. 

He is held responsible for the sinking of 22 ships and embezzling money from insurance on merchandise he transported on those ships. He was finally seized and faced imprisonment of 13 years followed by two years in welfare hospital where he died as a 78-year-old lonely poverty-stricken man.

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