Defection

Defector (English defector ) is an intelligence term for the full-time employee of an intelligence service, who reveals himself to another service.

The respective willingness of an intelligence service, to engage in a defector is markedly variable, it is also checked in each individual case. The Soviet KGB was, for example, be very cautious and suspicious of defectors. In contrast, U.S. intelligence agencies have even created targeted advertising programs for defectors, such as the operation of the Redcap CIA in the 1950s.

Known defectors were

• William H. Martin and Bernon F. Mitchell, two NSA cryptographer who defected to the Soviet Union in 1960
• Oleg Vladimirovich Penkowski,
• Anatoly Mikhailovich Golitsyn ( defected 1961)
• Oleg Antonovich Gordijewski, the highest-ranking public of a defector to the KGB in the West. He fled in 1985,
• Hans Joachim Tiedge,
• The atomic spy Klaus Fuchs - he betrayed the Soviet Union, the design of the Nagasaki atomic bomb
• Werner Stiller - he fled in 1979 with numerous secret documents of the East German intelligence department HVA under spectacular circumstances in the West.

In military affairs defectors are pejoratively called deserters - from the point of view of the page that is left.