He flew a number of combat missions before injuries he suffered during a crash-landing in the North African desert ended his military flying career. The Welsh-born Dahl joined the Royal Air Force in 1939 and trained as a fighter pilot. Roald Dahl: The best-selling children’s author who spied on the United States.īefore he became famous for penning such books as “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and “James and the Giant Peach,” Dahl was part of a British spy ring in Washington, D.C. She also used her chateau in southern France to hide Jewish refugees as well as weapons for the cause.Following the war, Baker, who received multiple awards from the French for her contributions to the war effort, became active in the American civil rights movement but continued to make her home in France, where she resided with 12 children she adopted from around the globe and whom she referred to as her Rainbow Tribe. Her performing career enabled her to travel around Europe without attracting suspicion, and she attended numerous parties at embassies, gleaning whatever military and political information she could that might aid the Resistance, often smuggling intelligence secrets on invisible ink on her sheet music. Her scorn for the Nazis’ racism coupled with her gratitude toward France, where she first experienced stardom, led Baker to serve during the war as an operative for the French Resistance. Baker, whose nicknames included Black Venus and who also sang and acted in movies, became a major celebrity in Europe and a symbol of the 1920s Jazz Age. A dancer, she went on to tour the United States with vaudeville troupes and perform on Broadway before moving to Paris in 1925, where she skyrocketed to fame in the city’s music halls. Louis, Josephine Baker grew up poor and wed for the first time in her early teens. Kisch/Separate Cinema Archive/Getty Imagesīorn Freda Josephine McDonald in 1906 in St. Josephine Baker: The Jazz Age icon who smuggled secrets for the French Resistance.Ĭredit: John D. Greene published more than 25 novels during his career, including a number of espionage thrillers, such as “The Quiet American,” “Our Man in Havana” and “The Human Factor.” 3. Afterward, Greene publicly defended his friend and visited him in the USSR. (Greene’s experiences in West Africa provided material for his best-selling 1948 novel “The Heart of the Matter.”) In 1943, the author returned to London and worked for MI6 under Harold “Kim” Philby, the high-level British spymaster who in 1963 was exposed as a long-term Soviet mole when he defected to Moscow. He was stationed for more than a year in Freetown, Sierra Leone, where his responsibilities included searching ships sailing from Africa to Germany for smuggled diamonds and documents, and monitoring Vichy forces in neighboring French Guinea. The English-born Greene was already an established novelist (“Brighton Rock,” “The Power and the Glory”) with a taste for adventure when he became a spy for MI6, the British secret intelligence service, in 1941. Graham Greene: The acclaimed novelist who worked for Britain’s MI6 Following the war, Berg, an enigmatic loner, took on assignments for the CIA in the early 1950s but failed to hold down regular employment after that time and spent the rest of his life living with friends and family. However, Berg determined the Nazis weren’t close to completing a nuclear weapon and opted not to shoot Heisenberg. In December 1944, Berg was sent to Switzerland to potentially assassinate prominent German physicist Werner Heisenberg, who American officials suspected might be supervising production of a bomb for Adolf Hitler. In 1943, he became an officer with the OSS, where his work included gathering intelligence in Europe on Nazi efforts to construct an atomic bomb. It was said of the erudite Berg, who during his pro-ball days also studied at the Sorbonne and earned a law degree from Columbia University, that he knew a dozen languages but couldn’t hit in any of them.In early 1942, soon after the United States entered World War II, Berg joined the Office of Inter-American Affairs, an agency formed to combat enemy propaganda in Latin America. He signed with the Brooklyn Robins (later the Brooklyn Dodgers) and eventually played for the Chicago White Sox, Cleveland Indians, Washington Senators and Boston Red Sox, before ending his playing career in 1939 with a lifetime batting average of. ![]() He played shortstop for Princeton, graduating in 1923 with a degree in modern languages. Once dubbed “the brainiest man in baseball,” Berg was born in New York City to Ukrainian immigrants and raised in Newark, New Jersey. ![]() Credit: Mark Rucker/Transcendental Graphics, Getty Images)
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