The Celebrities Who Were Spies

this video is made possible by mouth science get a 25% discount on the first month through the link in the description below using the code brain food more on them in a bit Ian Fleming's the author who created the most famous spy novel in the English language James Bond himself actually worked for a British intelligence service during World War two recruited by the director of intelligence for the ROM Navy in 1939 Fleming codenamed 17f was adept at creating special operation schemes one of his most famous ploys involved placing misleading documents on a British corpse and then leaving it where axis soldiers could find it another called Operation Gold and I had Fleming establishing an intelligence framework in Spain by 1942 Fleming led a special operations unit that works near and behind enemy lines to acquire sensitive documents it's easy to see the creative minds behind Casino Royale on a Majesty's Secret Service and the Spy Who Loved Me in Fleming's dashing wartime efforts moving on the literary genius behind Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and James and the Giant Peach also worked as a spy during World War two although many of rolla Dahl spying effort seems to have involved in the bedroom rather than in the Situation Room as newspaper powerhouse Charles Marcia's daughter said girls just fell at Roald's feet I think he slept with everybody on the east and west coasts that was worth more than fifty thousand dollars a year Dahl had been a flying ace level fighter pilot who rose to the rank of Wing Commander for the British a severe crash eventually resulted in him taking a diplomatic position with the British Embassy in Washington DC in 1942 Dahl quickly became popular with the wealthy wives of powerful men who ran Washington he was soon recruited to help a secret British effort that was geared surreptitiously bringing the United States further into the war in addition to helping to secure American popular support Dahl also engaged in a bit of espionage that included transferring stolen documents and passing on secret information next up we have null cowards the famous playwright who penned cavalcade and private lives he once said of his spying days celebrity was a wonderful cover trained at a secret base in Bletchley Park with Ian Fleming and others coward's cleverness wit Fame and style enabled him to successfully collect and convey in elegance across three continents during World War two describing himself as the perfect silly ass coward used his persona as a happy playboy to convince those he was spying on that he was a vacuous twit and he did this to great effect throughout the war he kept in close contact with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor the former being Edward the eighth who abdicated in 1936 while they stayed in Paris both were known to be Nazi sympathizers although much of cowards clandestine work during World War two remains a mystery it appears that it abruptly came to an end in 1941 according to a rumor he was found out and placed on a Nazi blacklist of people that would be killed once Germany defeated Britain now let's move on to Julia Child's before she pens the transformative cookbook mastering the Art of French Cooking she worked as a top-secret researcher on various projects for the chief of the Office of Strategic Services the precursor to the CIA when the u.s. entered World War two child tried to volunteer for the Navy's women accepted for volunteer emergency service waves that was rejected due to a height six feet two inches which was two inches above the maximum for waves this turns out to be a good thing as had she been accepted to waves she never would have met her husbands who got her interested in cooking and was her first teacher in the culinary arts she states before this she didn't really know how to cook at all as it was cheap to hire a maid and a cook at a time rather than waves she eventually found her way to the Office of Strategic Services OSs under General William J Donovan she began there as a low-level clerk ins within a year had risen to senior clerk before volunteering with the emergency rescue equipment Department of the OSS as a research assistant where she worked on such projects as research into whether soldiers lost at sea could survive on drinking liquids from a fish's body which child referred to as the fish squeezing unit in a similar vein the Navy was having trouble with sharks eating soldiers from down ships before rescue operations could be carried out so child was put on a team who were coming up with a shark repellent this was later put in use by the military and also Batman who would famously use it to save himself while underwater on an alien planet using it against an angry alien reasoning that if it works on the killers of the deep on earth might just scare away a similar creature on an alien planet we luncheon this because it gives the infamous scene in the 1966 Batman film where Adam West Femmes off a shark in midair with some handy shark repellents a bit more context goriest 1950s era context with pure West back to reality though after finding out they were recruiting people in the OSS to travel to India and China child volunteered and was selected to go in 1944 while in the Far East she became the head of the registry of the OSS Secretariat and was granted high security clearance with her primary job being to organize a relay and track various top-secret documents and information funneled to and from the OSS as Air Force intelligence officer Byron Martin stated about child she was privy to every top-secret a person of unquestioned loyalty of rock-solid integrity of unblemished lifestyle and of keen intelligence near the end of the war child was targeted to actually become a fully fledged field spy herself instead of just working behind the scenes as she had a particularly adventurous spirit and had proven herself exceptionally trustworthy but before she could be used in the field Thor ended abruptly shortly after the dropping of those nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki so moving on to someone who had extensive field spy experience we have Major League Baseball player Morris Moe Berg who was originally recruited to the OSS in August of 1943 when he was 41 years old and had been retired from baseball for about four years at the time of his retirement he had been working for the Office of Internal American Affairs stationed primarily in South America with his job being to monitor the physical fitness levels of US troops there the OSS recruited him primarily for his ability to fluently speak multiple languages with little to no accent among the languages he spoke were German Italian French Spanish Japanese Greek Russian Hebrew Sanskrit and Latin among others athirst Berg primarily served as an Operations Officer but was soon recruited into the Secret Intelligence Division of the OSS in this position was often parachuted behind enemy lines to fulfill his various missions such as evaluating which resistance groups were most effective and providing them aid through the OSS for instance he was once dropped into occupied Norway where he established contact with the Norwegian guerilla fighters while there he helps them destroy a German facility that was attempting to build an atomic bomb it was also sent to the Soviet Union on a few intelligence-gathering missions another interesting mission which was his last with the OSS was project Larsen which was one where he was trained in nuclear physics so that he could pose as a Swiss physicist during this mission he was tasked with trying to convince various top European physicists and engineers to move to the United States as well as try to buddy up to them in order to gather information principle among his information-gathering goals was to learn everything he could about certain key German physicists such as karl friedrich von weizsäcker and Verner Heisenberg the head of Germany's atomic bomb project the u.s. particularly wanted information on how far along Germany was in the development of a nuclear weapon nearing the ends of this mission in 1944 he was sent to a lecture given by Heisenberg in Switzerland at this lecture he was to determine from it whether Germany was close to being able to create a nuclear bomb if after Heisenberg's lecture Berg felt the Germans were close he had instructions to murder Heisenberg and if he wasn't able to escape after the assassination to take a cyanide pill to avoid being interrogated luckily for Heisenberg and possibly for Berg he didn't think the Germans were close and so didn't attempt to kill him although one would think most would come up with that assessment if the price of concluding they were close was then to murder someone and then possibly have to commit suicide afterwards but continued traveling around Europe gathering information for another four months before returning to the US and resigning from the OSS six years later after turning down two offers to coach for the White Sox and Red Sox the latter team which she had already once helped coach for two years they attempted to join the CIA particularly wanting to be sent to Israel as he was Jewish but his request was denied however a year later the CIA did hire him wanting to re-establish contact with various acquaintances of his in Europe in order to gather information for the u.s. on the Soviet Union particularly on their nuclear program Berg accepted this mission but supposedly ultimately did nothing but take the ten thousand dollars over to him about a hundred thousand dollars today providing no information to the CIA and he was subsequently let go after two years previous to becoming an agent for the US it is thought by some of his biographers that Berg may have already been involved in spying for the u.s. though his always denied this for instance while still a baseball player he was invited to join with Major League Baseball all-stars such as Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig to travel to Japan this was actually the second such trip to Japan the first of which she stayed behind after the other players left and spent a couple of months traveling around China Japan Siam India Egypt and Berlin among other places what makes his selection for the second trip to Japan even more curious is that Berg was a pretty mediocre player and all the others invited were all-stars further while in Japan the second time Berg bluffed his way into the tallest building in Tokyo a hospital and managed to sneak onto the roof he had a motion picture camera hit him with him and he managed to get shots of all of Tokyo which were later given to the US government particularly these shots were later used by the US when planning bombing raids on Tokyo during World War two once again after the other players left to return to the US he stayed behind and this time traveled to the Philippines Korea and Moscow he also conspicuously traveled a lot to other countries in the offseason such as spending one offseason in Paris as an academic students instead of working on his hitting as he was supposed to be doing all this has given rise to rumors that he had been actively spying for the US long before he retired though again he always denied this claim and there is very little direct evidence other than the taking of the film of Tokyo and indeed he might have just been filming this for fun further Berg later stated he only offered the footage he had taken of Tokyo to the US after he was hired on with the OSS and they had never previously known about it whatever the case next up we have Charles Lucky Luciano the famous Maffeo sir and head of the Genovese family who answered the call when Uncle Sam needed help during World War two fearing axis agents would surreptitiously enter the country on ships and even potentially sabotage US efforts the Navy knew it had to have excellent intelligence about the comings and goings on the New York waterfront unfortunately neither these civil authorities nor the police fully controlled the Port of New York the Cosa Nostra did never ones but principle before practice the Navy negotiated a deal with Luciano who was in prison at the time in 1941 Luciano reportedly ensured that the Navy had the best intelligence from the docks and by some accounts that there would be no strikes until the war ended in fact there is rumor that Luciano helps American military personnel establish contacts with the mafioso in Sicily prior to the invasion of course no leopard can't change his spots and Luciano kept with his criminal enterprise until his death in Italy in 1962 moving on from mobsters a Hollywood beauty best known as a movie actress having starred in such classic movies as Sabrina funny-face Breakfast at Tiffany's my fair lady and Roman Holiday for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress Audrey Hepburn had a fascinating if tumultuous upbringing her mother was a Dutch Baroness and her father was a British businessman as a result she spent her childhood bouncing between Belgium England and the Netherlands in 1939 shortly after the start of World War two Hepburn's mother moved the family back to the Netherlands in the mistaken belief that the country which had remained neutral and free from the devastation of World War one would not be drawn into the conflict obviously she was mistaken the country was occupied by the Germans in 1940 by 1944 they had executed Hepburn's uncle one of her brothers was in a labour camp and the other had gone into hiding Hepburn was still a young teenager when she began to help the Dutch Resistance an accomplished ballerina by age 14 she started out helping the resistance not by any spying activities but rather by dancing and how is this helpful well she danced in secret productions to raise money for the resistance as she famously said the best audience I've ever had made not a single sound at the end of my performances not limited to dancing the young Hepburn also ran intelligence messages for the resistance on the site had she been discovered doing either of these things a swift execution would have followed finally we have the man who was perhaps the most inept of all celebrity spies and who stint as a clandestine information gatherer lasted almost no time at all and that's the creator of Dennis the Menace Hank Ketcham in 1959 Ketchum was invited to visit the Soviet Union as part of the cartoon exchange trip never one to miss an opportunity the CIA asked catch him if he wouldn't mind using his artistic skills to sketch anything significance he saw while in the Soviet Union and to pass those drawings back to them said Ketchum we were flying from Moscow to Kiev and it was during the day and I looked out of the window and some shapes I had my sketchbook and I would put them down and the flight attendant would walk by and I would put a big nose and some eyes and make the whole thing into a funny face so I had a whole book of funny face cartoons at the ends that I didn't know how to read needless to say the CIA didn't exactly appreciate his work and his spying days more or less ended before they had begun just for we get into the bonus facts today I do want to tell you a bit about mell science mell science is an amazing subscription for safe and fun experiments for kids to do at home it also comes as a subscription so you don't have to think about organizing it or going to the store anything like that mell science comes in two flavors chemistry and kids chemistry comes with a starter kit and is for ages 10 plus they sent me a kit for me to play around with it had three experiments I've got one of them in front of me right now so that you have your kids those gloves so you get this little instruction booklet right there what we're gonna do pour the solution until it starts dripping from the bottom so this is what we're doing is an iron sulfate solution feso4 when I do is we're gonna just pour that until this starts dripping from the bottom okay this has definitely started to drip from the bottom so what we're gonna do is we put it in this marker like so now what I want to do is put 20 drops into my beaker yeah that's about 20 drops for two to three minutes through the magic of television it's two to three minutes later now okay and then what we want to do is we want to take our paper over here I'm gonna write a message on it okay I hope my penmanship was good enough because I cannot see that at all take this tannin solution let's give this a go show only five to seven drops and then you just apply it to the whole paper apparently hey okay that's actually pretty exciting oh that's cool and now boom just like that mell science check them out through the link in the description below you use the code brain food for a 25% discount and let's get into those bonus facts speaking of celebrities contributing to the war effort James Doohan was shot six times on d-day but not by enemy soldiers after leading some of his fellow Canadian soldiers through a minefield on Juno Beach and personally taking out two German snipers in the process his unit secured their position for the night Dewan was crossing between command posts when a Canadian gunman spotted him and opened fire and so it was that Doolin took four rounds in one of his legs one in his hands which ultimately resulted in him losing his middle finger and one in the chest the shots of the chest likely would have been fatal except he had a silver cigarette-case they're given to him by his brother which deflected the bullet he would later give up smoking but at least he could say that being a smoker had actually saved his life as for actor Jimmy Stewart in 1940 Stewart was drafted into the United States Army that ended up being rejected due to being five pounds under the required weights give him his height at the time he weighed 143 pounds not to be dissuaded to do it then sort out the help of Donna Loomis who was known to be able to help people add or subtract pounds once he gains little weight he enlisted with the Army Air Corps in March of 1941 and was eventually accepted once he convinced the enlisting officer to rerun the tests initially Stewart was given the rank of privates but by the time he had completed training he advanced to the rank of second lieutenant that was in January of 1942 much to his chagrin due to his celebrity status and extensive flight experience having tallied over 400 flight hours before even joining the military Stewart was initially assigned to various behind the lines type duties such as training pilots and making promotional videos in the States eventually when he realized they were never gonna put him on the front line he appealed to his commanding officer and managed to get himself assigned to a unit overseas in August of 1943 he founds himself with the 700 and third embodiment squadron initially as a first officer and shortly thereafter as a captain during combat operations over Germany Stewart found himself promoted to the rank of Major during this time Stewart participated in several uncounted missions on his orders into Nazi occupied Europe flying his b-24 in the lead position of his group in order to inspires troops for his bravery during these missions he twice received the Distinguished Flying cross three times received the Air Medal and once received the quarter ger from the French the slat medal was an award given by France and Belgium to individuals allied with themselves who distinguished themselves with acts of heroism by July of 1944 Stewart was promoted to chief of staff of the second combat bombardment wing of the 8th Air Force shortly thereafter he was promoted to the rank of colonel becoming one of only a handful of American soldiers to ever rise from private to colonel within a four year span after the war Stewart was an active part of the United States Air Force Reserve serving as the reserve commander of Dobbins Air Reserve Base on July the 24th 1959 he attains the rank of Brigadier General as a one-star general during the Vietnam War he flew in a b-52 on a bombing mission and otherwise continued to fulfill his duty within the Air Force Reserve he finally retired from the Air Force on may 31st 1968 after 27 years of service and was subsequently promoted to Major General that's a two-star general so I really hope you found that video interesting if you did please do hit that thumbs up button below and do not forget to subscribe brand new videos just like this every day of the week and also please do check on our fantastic sponsor Mel science 25% off use the code brain food there is a link below and as always thank you for watching

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Keywords: today i found out, tifovidz12, tifo, awesome, facts, didn't know, spy, celebrity, entertainment, celebrity spies, history, hollywood history, celebrity facts, entertainment facts

Id: peElrjxyOs0

Length: 19min 7sec (1147 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 22 2019