Zoya Rybkina-Voskresenskaya
Zoya Rybkina, having completed her career as a scout, became the famous writer Voskresenskaya.
Born in 1907, Zoya Rybkina, at the age of 22, worked as a scout in Harbin. Then Latvia, Germany, Austria … And in 1935 - she was already a deputy resident of the NKVD intelligence in Finland. She returned to the Soviet Union shortly before the outbreak of World War II. But not for long. From 1941 to 1944 Rybkina headed the residency in Sweden. Then he worked in Moscow and, before retiring with the rank of colonel, in Vorkuta.
And then, instead of the scout Rybkina, the writer Voskresenskaya appears, whose circulation of books exceeded 20 million copies. As a writer, she received the State Lenin Prize and the Lenin Komsomol Prize - in Soviet times, this is a serious indicator of recognition of merit.
It was "declassified" only in the early 90s. Zoya managed to write one book of memoirs, which included only a small part of her intelligence past, but she was not destined to live to see the publication of her memoirs in December 1992.
Maria Dobrova
Promotional video:
In the same year, 1907, another of our scouts, already a military woman, was born - Maria Dobrova. She studied vocal and piano at the Workers 'and Peasants' College, and gave concerts. Then she got married, began to learn the language. And in 1937 she left for Spain as a volunteer, where she translated and fought. And so successfully that she was awarded the Order of the Red Star.
During the Great Patriotic War, she worked as a nurse in besieged Leningrad, but already in 1944 Maria went to the USSR Embassy in Colombia - still a simple assistant. 4 years later, she returned to the Soviet Union, became a candidate of sciences and only in 1951 became a staff member of the GRU.
Two years later, Maria begins to travel to Europe and prepare for illegal work. And in 1956, she opens a trendy beauty salon in downtown New York. The American counterintelligence service did not even suspect that an illegal scout was deployed so widely under its nose. But Maria was betrayed by her own boss, Colonel Polyakov (he was exposed and shot only in 1988).
In 1963, FBI agents tried to recruit Dobrova, but she threw herself from the hotel balcony to avoid arrest.
Zoya Zarubina
Zoya Zarubina translated Roosevelt and installed "bugs" in his apartments.
Born in 1920, Zoe was almost impossible not to become a scout.
Judge for yourself: father - Vasily Zarubin - is a resident of intelligence in China, Finland, Denmark, Germany and the United States, where he obtained materials for nuclear projects. Mother is an employee of the NKVD. Stepfather - Naum Eitingon - intelligence officer, led the liquidation of Trotsky. Stepmother (father's second wife) - lieutenant colonel of intelligence.
The father, however, did not advise his daughter to become a scout, but, apparently, the genes took their toll: Zarubin was invited to serve the Motherland. She attended the Tehran, Yalta, and Potsdam conferences as an interpreter with the shoulder straps of a state security lieutenant. And the fact that the Soviet side knew, for example, about all Roosevelt's conversations, was in no small measure due to Zarubina. Her intelligence career ended in the late forties. She devoted the last 50 years of her life to teaching.
Mata Hari 1960s
Pretty Christine Keeler easily recognized the military secrets of Britain.
This is what the Englishwoman Christine Keeler, who spied on the Soviet Union, was nicknamed. The secular lioness, and in the past - a call girl, was simultaneously the mistress of the British Defense Secretary John Profumo and the Soviet naval attaché in London, intelligence officer Yevgeny Ivanov.
In 1963, the press trumpeted that Christine had learned military secrets from Profumo and sold them to the USSR. The scandal led to the resignation of the entire British government and the defeat of the Conservatives in the elections.
The disgraced Profumo then worked in charitable organizations, having got a job at first as a dishwasher (!), Then launched an active work in the alcohol rehabilitation society and, as a result, was awarded the Order of the British Empire for his work for the good of society. And Keeler herself published three volumes of memoirs about her spy novels.