I have no idea. He was a scientist at a university. I assume he had to vetted by the KGB in order to visit the US, and he was probably told to report on anything he saw but I doubt there was anything he saw or heard that wasn’t public information. Maybe like our own agents in the field he was supposed to try to form contacts, but I have no idea. I would think any visitors from the Soviet Union and their client countries would have been in the same position prior to détente.
When I was very young, my family knew a US military member who defected to the Soviet Union with some classified information. He took his family with him. He died after some sort of brain surgery (my mom said it was a frontal lobotomy) and his family was repatriated to the US.
Several years ago, I met a woman who had retired from the Army and claimed to have been a spy. To my mind, that pretty much said she could not possibly have been a spy.
My mother’s first cousin used to work “for the State department.” Since his brother really was a Foreign Services Officer and career diplomat, we all knew what he really did. We also knew better than to ask.
An older church friend of my mother was an officer in the WAAF during WW2. She only finally mentioned to my mum that she had worked at Blechley Park on Enigma during the War when books started to be published about it in the 1970’s. Whilst she had signed the Official Secrets Act I don’t think that really makes her a spy though - but clearly she took the secrecy very seriously. Even her family didn’t know.
The guy who was our Best Man lives in Rhu, near Helensburgh, a couple of miles from the Faslane nuclear sub base. One of the guests at his birthday party barbecue a few years ago was probably a spy of some sort - he wasn’t in the US military but not clear what he did for a living.
Apparently he went off his head one night later on, firing off a pistol into the night and shouting. He was quickly detained and shipped back to the States. Some Military Police apparently went around in the next day asking people would they mind not speaking about it to any Press that were interested. He was never seen again in the village. Again, who knows if he was really a spy - but civilians having hand guns in the UK is illegal nowadays.
When I was working in Angola a few years ago, I was different from most ex-pats in that I lived with a couple of Portuguese speaking colleagues downtown rather than in the expat compound for the rest of the oil workers. I was working for the insurance arm of SONAGOL, the National Oil Company. I used to drink in a bar opposite a petrol station on the sea front regularly and an American lady who claimed she worked for a US Charity started turning up. This was a place for Portuguese speakers really and she showed no signs of speaking much of the language but did show a great interest in what my colleagues and I were doing out there. We basically told her, but she kept asking really odd questions - I did not feel at ease with her anyway. Kept showing up for a few weeks then shopped coming. Yet again, her business card did not say Spy on it - but she didn’t come over as as open and plain speaking as I would expect a charity worker to do.
As others have said, anyone who tells you they are a spy probably aren’t.
I thought that they were entitled assholes. Worse than Eve, even.
Did you know them personally?
I was a cryptologic linguist in the USAF. Everyone I worked with was a spy.
Not any more personally than I might have met 1000 people in Essex County… from Newark to the high and mighty of Highland Ave.
My father. He debriefed the pilots doing the bombings in Laos and Vietnam. ( and other things)
Very possibly.
In 1970, I was 22 at the time, I met the boy who lived next door to my parents. He was 15/16 at the time and was scary smart. But he was a nice kid who worked hard not to make us feel bad that we weren’t as clever as he was. I really liked him as did most of the adults in the neighborhood.
He took a lot of Chinese in college and went to work for NSA after getting a masters.
The last I heard of him he was in China.
Think I’ll google him and see if anything turns up.
Wife’s distant family member was an intel guy for the Army during the '60s and '70s, who started out in Viet Nam as an advisor (early '60s) and later, because of his proficiency in a certain languages, he was moved to Eastern Europe. He spent a ton of time out there, and once told a story of trying to get someone to turn (he didn’t tell me if the guy eventually did), and using a book code for communication. The book that they used was “The Lord of the Rings”.
When I first met him, he was teaching at The Farm, and I went on board the installation to visit him. Not sure what he is doing now.
When I was a Computer Science prof I’d come across NSA people form time to time. E.g., one pair came in to do a recruiting pitch to the students and they brought in an actual Enigma machine. (Which the students were clueless about, of course.)
One of my fellow faculty members got a small grant from them. (Nothing remotely secret, though.)
You could have really great, interesting conversations with them … until you say the wrong phrase and then it’s time to change the topic.
Presumably some people you’d meet from other branches of government would be NSA/CIA in a covert position. But you basically couldn’t know for sure in most cases.
(One case where it was clear was the spouse of a high school friend of Mrs. FtG. He had been posted all over to places like Chile as an Ag. advisor or some such. Which raised red flags. And then his name appeared on a list of outed CIA agents. But I never met him.)
Sometimes you’d wonder about certain grad students from certain countries. A little too old, a little too much keeping to themselves, etc.