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Today’s article is about famous spies; since today is my birthday, (real or made-up I leave it up to you) I thought I would tell you about something I love, namely the best digital escape game out there, i.e. MysterU (obviously). But don’t worry: because through this fantastic game or experience, I want to tell you something different and very interesting, namely the most famous spies in history.
But let’s start with the assumption that by now you will be perfectly familiar with the following: MysterU, and so you know that in order to solve the Cook case, you have to turn into spies to track down this phantom enemy of the agency that hired you.
So as you have to be good secret agents in the game, I will reveal who the most famous spies in history were. But be sure to pay attention because not all of them stand out as good!
The most famous spy in history, and you may even have found in a digital escape game is definitely Mata Hari. This beautiful woman, depicted in numerous films, has become the symbol of the “Femmes Fatales“. In fact, she used her extraordinary beauty and charm as a weapon of espionage. Unfortunately, however, she was executed in France in 1917.
The same fate befell Laura D’Oriano, the famous anti-fascist spy who was executed before a firing squad in 1943 at the age of 31. Laura was the only woman in Italian history to have suffered a death sentence.
Jeanne Clérisse, however, was killed in Tangier in 1948, but after living an adventurous life as a spy in the Middle East. She opened a hotel in Syria that became the den of British espionage as well as the love nest of her relationship with Lawrence of Arabia, also an agent of Her Majesty the Queen, made famous by film.
To become excellent spies in our digital escape game, you don’t have to be like Bernard Boursicot, nicknamed the gullible spy because of his naivete.
Bernand was a French diplomat who “served” the communist regime in the 1960s and 1980s after starting an ambiguous relationship with Chinese opera singer Shi Pei Pu. You must know, however, that Shi let him believe that he was a woman because in fact, he was not.
Now, I am not going to tell you in detail about this very funny “love-spy-story.” I will summarize it by telling you that the Chinese spy’s intent was to have valuable French documents delivered to him. The love affair continued in Paris, so much so that Bernard became the laughingstock of the newspapers. Tracked down by French intelligence, they were unmasked and convicted. President Mitterrand, however, decided to pardon them both.
In 1993 their love story became a film called “M.Butterfly” by David Cronenberg with Jeremy Irons as Boursicot. Really interesting, don’t you think?
Another spy whose example you must not follow if you play our MysterU cases is from the CIA, named James Angleton. He was a dark and controversial character, known to all as “Kingfisher“. He was operational from the 1950s for 20 years and was head of the CIA’s internal counterintelligence. That is, he was to ferret out moles infiltrated by the USSR into American services.
Unfortunately, however, he made a mistake and did not realize that his friend and British agent Kim Philby was actually a double agent. In fact, he had always been in the service of the Soviet Union. Kim in 1963 took refuge in Moscow, and Angleton came close to a nervous breakdown over the failure.
This led him to see the shadow of the KGB everywhere even in the U.S. Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger. In 1974, the then CIA director, William Colby, fired him after discovering from the New York Times that he had directed a program to spy on Americans involved in the civil rights war for African Americans. To Angleton’s mind, this dismissal was a protocol for conspiracy with mobs, an experiment in mind control to be used as an espionage technique, and much more. A film loosely based on his life is The Good Shepherd, released in theaters in 2006 and directed by Robert De Niro and starring Matt Damon.
Did you know these spies and their stories? Or maybe you heard about them in some escape game? Which secret agent would you be in MysterU?
Try telling us about it on our socials or here in our article! What matters is having fun with a MysterU case!
