Intelligence officer in the context of "Ivan Serov"

Espionage, spying, or intelligence gathering, as a subfield of the intelligence field, is the act of obtaining secret, confidential, or in some way valuable information. Such information is also referred to as intelligence. A professional trained in conducting intelligence operations by their government may be employed as an intelligence officer. Espionage may be conducted in a foreign country, domestically or remotely. The practice is clandestine, as it is by definition unwelcome. In some circumstances, it may be a legal tool of law enforcement and in others, it may be illegal and punishable by law.

Espionage is often part of an institutional effort by a government or commercial concern. The term is frequently associated with state spying on potential or actual enemies for military purposes. However, there are many types of espionage. Industrial espionage, for example, involves spying on civilians and their respective business or corporate interests.

The Intelligence field, in simplistic terms, is a collection of the people who gather or sift through intelligence. Those persons popularly called "spies" are a small but important part of the intelligence field. The intelligence field is the top-level field composed of people and organizations and their involvement the systematic espionage, analysis, and dissemination of intelligence to support policymaking and key stakeholder decision-making, primarily in matters related to national security, military affairs, law enforcement, and international relations. Collectively, that process of intelligence is usually called the intelligence cycle. The intelligence field can encompass a range of subfields including; espionage, surveillance, data analysis, and counterintelligence, all aimed at understanding threats, opportunities, and the intentions and power projection of foreign entities. While the act of espionage is illegal throughout the world, espionage is only a single subfield of the intelligence field. There are many subfields of intelligence that are not illegal everywhere, such as Open-source intelligence (OSINT).

Intelligence work can be conducted by government intelligence agencies, police forces, and military intelligence units. This work can also be engaged by private organizations, including; private intelligence agencies, multinational corporations, private investigators, drug cartels, narcotic cartels, terrorist groups, and others. Individuals employed by these organizations can either be fully employed officers of intelligence agencies called intelligence officers, or single and mission-specific solitary contracting agents who are commonly known as "secret agents." Confusingly, the term "spy" has no definition at most intelligence agencies, but is codified in many state judicial systems as an illegal operator.

Turla or Uroboros (Russian: Турла) is a trojan package that is suspected by computer security researchers and Western intelligence officers to be the product of a Russian government agency of the same name.

High infection rates of the virus were observed in Russia, Kazakhstan and Vietnam, followed by US and China, and low infection rates in Europe, South America and Asia (including India).

Harry St John Bridger Philby, CIE (3 April 1885 – 30 September 1960), also known as Jack Philby or Sheikh Abdullah (Arabic: الشيخ عبدالله), was a British Arabist, advisor, explorer, writer, and a colonial intelligence officer who served as an advisor to King Abdulaziz ibn Saud, the founder of Saudi Arabia.

As he states in his autobiography, he "became something of a fanatic" and in 1908 "the first Socialist to join the Indian Civil Service". After studying Oriental languages at the University of Cambridge, he was posted to Lahore in the Punjab in 1908, acquiring fluency in Urdu, Punjabi, Baluchi, Persian and eventually Arabic. He converted to Islam in 1930 and later became an adviser to Ibn Saud, urging him to unite the Arabian Peninsula under Saudi rule, and helping him to negotiate with the United Kingdom and the United States when petroleum was discovered in 1938. His second marriage was to a Saudi Arabian woman, Rozy al-Abdul Aziz.

Brigadier General Amir Sultan Tarar, also known by his nom de guerre Colonel Imam (4 April 1944 – 23 January 2011), was a Pakistani military officer and diplomat who served as the Consul-General of Pakistan at Herat, Afghanistan. A Pakistan Army officer and special operations specialist, he was a member of the Special Service Group (SSG), Pakistan's army special forces, and was an intelligence officer in the ISI. A veteran of the Soviet–Afghan War, he is widely believed to have played a key role in the formation of the Taliban, after having helped train the Afghan mujahideen on behalf of the United States in the 1980s.

"Colonel Imam," as Tarar was also known, was a commando-guerrilla warfare specialist, trained Mullah Omar and other Taliban factions and leaders. Colonel Imam remained active in Afghanistan's civil war until the 2001 United States led War on Terrorism, and supported the Taliban publicly through media.

Yidongyuan (Chinese: 颐东苑社区; pinyin: Yídōngyuàn shèqū; lit. 'East Summer Palace Garden') is a government compound in Beijing, China which serves as the headquarters of the Ministry of State Security (MSS). The facility consists of an office complex and residential community occupying a full city block in the Xiyuan area of Beijing's Haidian District. Closed to the public, and separated by a perimeter wall, the secretive nondescript facility is believed to be staffed by approximately 10,000 intelligence officers and support staff.

Unlike foreign counterparts such as the American CIA's George Bush Center for Intelligence, the SIS Building housing the British MI6, or the Lubyanka Building of Soviet KGB and Russian FSB, Yidongyuan is distinct in housing employees and their families in apartments on site.

Reinhard Gehlen (3 April 1902 – 8 June 1979) was a German military and intelligence officer, later dubbed "Hitler's Super Spy," who served the Weimar Republic, Nazi Germany, and West Germany, and also worked for the United States during the early years of the Cold War. He led the Gehlen Organization, which worked with the CIA from its founding, employing former SS and Wehrmacht officers, and later became the first head of West Germany's Federal Intelligence Service (BND). In years prior, he was in charge of German military intelligence on the Eastern Front during World War II and later became one of the founders of the West German armed forces, the Bundeswehr.

The son of an army officer and World War I veteran, in 1920 Gehlen joined the Reichswehr, the truncated army of the Weimar Republic, and was an operations staff officer in an infantry division during the invasion of Poland in 1939. After that he was appointed to the staff of General Franz Halder, the Chief of the Army High Command (OKH), and quickly became one of his main assistants. Gehlen had a significant role in planning the German operations in Greece, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union. When the Red Army continued to fight after the initial German success during Operation Barbarossa, in the spring of 1942 Gehlen was appointed by Halder as director of Foreign Armies East (FHO), the military intelligence service of the OKH tasked with analyzing the Soviet armed forces. He achieved the rank of major general before he was dismissed by Adolf Hitler in April 1945 because of the FHO's alleged "defeatism" and accurate but pessimistic intelligence reports about Red Army military superiority.

Roy Harris Jenkins, Baron Jenkins of Hillhead (11 November 1920 – 5 January 2003) was a British politician and writer who served as President of the European Commission from 1977 to 1981. At various times a Member of Parliament (MP) for the Labour Party and the Social Democratic Party (SDP), and a peer for the Liberal Democrats, he was Chancellor of the Exchequer and Home Secretary under the Wilson and Callaghan Governments.

The son of Arthur Jenkins, a coal-miner and Labour MP, Jenkins was educated at the University of Oxford and served as an intelligence officer during the Second World War. Initially elected as MP for Southwark Central in 1948, he moved to become MP for Birmingham Stechford in 1950. On the election of Harold Wilson after the 1964 election, Jenkins was appointed Minister of Aviation. A year later, he was promoted to the Cabinet to become Home Secretary. In this role, Jenkins embarked on a major reform programme; he sought to build what he described as "a civilised society", overseeing measures such as the effective abolition in Britain of both capital punishment and theatre censorship, the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality, relaxing of divorce law, suspension of birching and the liberalisation of abortion law.

In espionage jargon, a mole (also called a "penetration agent", "deep cover agent", "illegal" or "sleeper agent") is a long-term spy (espionage agent) who is recruited before having access to secret intelligence, subsequently managing to get into the target organization. However, it is popularly used to mean any long-term clandestine spy or informant within an organization (government or private). In police work, a mole is an undercover law-enforcement agent who joins an organization in order to collect incriminating evidence about its operations and to eventually charge its members.

The term was introduced to the public by British spy novelist John le Carré in his 1974 novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and has since entered general usage, but its origin is unclear, as well as to what extent it was used by intelligence services before it became popularized. Le Carré, a former British intelligence officer, said that the term "mole" was actually used by the Soviet intelligence agency, the KGB, and that a corresponding term used by Western intelligence services was sleeper agent. While the term mole had been applied to spies in the book Historie of the Reign of King Henry VII written in 1626 by Sir Francis Bacon, Le Carré said he did not get the term from that source.

Sir Dick Goldsmith White, KCMG, KBE (20 December 1906 – 21 February 1993) was a British intelligence officer. He was Director General (DG) of MI5 from 1953 to 1956, and Head of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) from 1956 to 1968.