Has there ever been a documented incident, any time or place, of a mole secretly working for a rival nation being elected to a position of power within a government? Or being turned once they were elected?
Not government, but the Mafia was about to make the FBI agent “Donnie Brasco” a made man which means you are a full member of the mob. It did not happen because they asked him to kill somebody which of course he could not do.
Not elected, to my knowledge, but several Soviet spies reached very high positions in the British government during and just after World War II: Cambridge Five - Wikipedia
Richard Hoyt’s Trotsky’s Run is a quick, fun read about a mentally-disturbed Soviet mole running for President.
There is some evidence that Benjamin Franklin was playing on both sides during the American Revolution. He apparently kept some clandestine communications going with the British government that his American colleagues didn’t know about.
Henry Wallace, FDR’s second Vice-President, had communist leanings and some, one was a historian at Oxford whose name escapes me, have accused him of being a KGB agent.
I’d love to learn more about this. Do you have a cite handy?
So far as I know, Franklin didn’t hold elected office during the Revolution. He was a member or the Continental Congress, but that was an appointment by the Pennsylvania legislature.
Although Franklin was a canny diplomat, and may well have had some back-channel contacts in London about which he didn’t inform his fellow Congressmen, I’ve never read anything at all to suggest that he could in any way be considered a British mole. Far from it. Although he did all he could to avert war, once it started he was a stalwart Patriot; he even turned his back on his own son, the Tory governor of New Jersey.
Kim Philby rose pretty high up in MI6 while he was secretly working for the Solviet Union - http://www.nytimes.com/1988/05/12/obituaries/kim-philby-double-agent-dies.html
Willi Brandt had to resign as West German Chancellor in 1974 after it emerged that a senior aide, Gunter Guillaume, was an East German mole. But Brandt himself was not a mole.
Moles generall try to insert themselves into the civil or military service, rather than into political life, since this offers a better prospect of long-term continuous access to confidential information which can be relayed back to the relevant paymasters.
Yes. He was part of the Cambridge Five, which I mentioned in post 4.
Author: Currey, Cecil B.
Title: Code number 72/Ben Franklin; patriot or spy? By Cecil B. Currey.
Publisher: Englewood Cliffs, N.J., Prentice-Hall [1972]
Description: Book
viii, 331 p. 22 cm.
LC Subject(s): Franklin, Benjamin, 1706-1790.
Notes: Bibliography: p. [323]-331.
ISBN: 0131394932
It isn’t an Oxonian, it’s a Tab: Christopher Andrew.
Looks like this book is out of print, and there are only two reader reviews on Amazon. Walter Isaacson cited it in his prize-winning recent Franklin bio, but found Currey’s analysis “unconvincing” and “overdrawn.”
Robert Harris has an interesting if controversial take on this in his roman a clef The Ghost.
Regarding Franklin, I seem to remember Hugh Bicheno, in his Rebels and Redcoats, mentioning having seen Franklin’s secret reports to the British from Paris detailing French shipping.
I read the Curry book about 10 years ago from a library. I was not convinced but thought it interesting. I was more impressed that Curry wrote “Self Destruction,” a good book about the U.S. defeat in Vietnam, under the pseudonym ‘Cincinatus.’