7Of the greatest examples of traitors in history and the consequences of their betrayal
According to American etymology, the term "double cross" or "double cross", which expresses a type of double behavior or dealing, originated with the English criminal (Jonathan Wild) in the eighteenth century, who kept a notebook in which he put two Xs in front of The initials of the people who were at odds with him. Wilde is also credited with giving the phrase its metaphorical meaning (represented in treason), when he pretended to be away from crime and became a good individual and was recruited by English judges to track down criminals, while he was running a vast and hidden criminal empire that extended to the whole world.
In modern times the term is commonly used to refer to a trusted ally turning against the team, such as Hitler's betrayal of Stalin after the signing of the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact in 1939.
Going back to a few centuries ago, we also find the leader of the Bengal army (Mir Jaafar), who betrayed his ruler during the Battle of Plassey in 1757, by keeping most of the Bengal army out of the battle, leaving the rest of the army to collapse to be forcibly defeated against the British army led by (Robert Clive).
Here are 7 of the greatest examples of “double cross” or “double dealing” by traitors of history and the consequences of their betrayal.
Harold Cole and the French Resistance
Harold Cole (1906-1946) was an English officer who served during World War II, in both the British Army and the French Resistance, but betrayed both by working for the Germans. During his exceptional wartime career, he lied and deceived throughout France, joined the Nazis and took over the resistance, leading to the arrest and execution of many.
As a young man, Cole was a thief, counterfeiter, and embezzler, and by 1939 he had spent several spells in prison. When the Second World War began, he forged his criminal history so that he could join the British army and be sent to France. Indeed, he managed to enter the army and was even promoted to sergeant later, but his path to glory faltered when he was arrested, accused of stealing money from a cavalry sergeant to spend on prostitutes, and became a prisoner of war in May 1940 when the Germans took over the guard. where he was imprisoned.
He then escaped from prison and headed to the city (Lille) in France, where he contacted the French resistance, claiming that he was a British intelligence agent who had been sent to organize the escape lines and obtain the means that would enable the British army personnel to return home. For a time Cole was able to do some positive work, such as escorting the fleeing British Army through Nazi-occupied lands to a relatively safe place in Vichy France, from which they set off for Spain on a repatriation ship.
Cole's business was not entirely positive, as he embezzled as much money as he could to fund these operations, and squandered it on his lavish lifestyle in nightclubs and expensive restaurants, expensive champagne, fast cars and nightgirls. When his theft came to light in 1941, the resistance arrested him and imprisoned him, but while deliberating about the punishment that should be imposed on him, (Cole) managed to escape.
After escaping from the French Resistance Army (Cole) surrendered himself to the Germans, and became an agent for them, providing them with 30 pages of names and addresses of members of the resistance. The Germans then arrested more than 150 members of the French Resistance, and executed at least 50 of them. Cole was present during the interrogation and torture of several of his former colleagues.
When the Allied armies approached Paris in 1944, Cole fled the area and disappeared completely from view. In June of 1945, he appeared in southern Germany, claiming to be a British secret agent, and offered his services to the American occupation forces. Then he turned against the Nazis in another betrayal, pursued them everywhere, exposed their hiding places and killed at least one of them.
The British discovered Cole's whereabouts and arrested him, but he escaped from prison, where he was awaiting court martial, and headed to France. There, the French police received a report revealing his whereabouts (in an apartment in central Paris), and on January 8, 1946, the French police infiltrated the building in which his apartment was located, but he revealed their case, and after an exchange of fire, Cole, the "traitor", was hit by several shots and died as a result.
(Eddie Chapman) and the Germans
Photo (Eddie Chapman).
Eddie Chapman was an AKA Agent Agent Ziczak (1914-1997), a security criminal, thief, fraudster, and the only Englishman to have been awarded the Armor of the German Iron Cross. It was ridiculous on so many levels, because he was also one of the most bewildering traitors in history, he was so serious about his work for Britain that he provided so much information to the Germans that it hampered the effectiveness of their “weapons of revenge” and saved thousands of lives. A resident of the City of London.
Chapman grew up in an unemployed family and committed several misdemeanors early in his life. He was recruited at the age of seventeen but within a few months he got bored and ran away. When the army found him, they arrested and imprisoned him. After his release, he resorted to fraud and crime to finance his gambling habit accompanied by the consumption of fine drinks.
When World War II began, Chapman was hiding on the Channel Islands in Jersey to escape numerous arrest warrants. But he made a reckless move when he tried to carry out a robbery that failed, and was arrested as a result of which he remained in the (Jersey) prison for two years, where the Germans found him when they seized the area in 1940. He offered them to work for them and released him already, and then they trained him in the use of explosives and the work of Sabotage and other secret agent skills, he is assigned the task of destroying a bomb factory in Britain.
He was sent to do the job via skydiving, but was arrested shortly after landing, and immediately accepted an offer to become a double agent - the easiest option - considering that the safer alternative for him was to be the executioner rather than the victim. Then he got the code name "Agent Zyczak" (The Zigzag Agent), where he was able to delude the Germans that the operation they assigned him to carry out had been successfully completed, which made him a source of great confidence in them. His reports (which were carefully studied by British intelligence), were very important and trusted by the Germans.
He was later called up by the Germans who gave him a warm welcome, and shortly after the Allied invasion of Normandy, he was awarded the German Iron Cross and sent back to Britain to report on the effectiveness of German V1 and V2 missile strikes on London. Acting under the supervision of the British, he sent inflated numbers of deaths caused by those German missiles, in a scheme devised to deceive them about their actual points of influence, causing the Germans' future target points to be shifted to the sparsely populated areas of London, with correspondingly smaller losses.
Chapman continued his double life after the war, working as a smuggler and setting up a farm at the same time. Eddie Chapman's true story was published in 1966 and formed the basis for the 1967 film Triple Cross.
Hitler and Stalin
A picture of Hitler and Stalin.
The world was stunned on August 23, 1939, when Nazi Germany and the communist Soviet Union signed the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, each clearly dedicated to destroying the other. The pact was a benign treaty that effectively divided Eastern Europe between Germany and the Soviet Union, and enabled Hitler to start World War II a week after invading Poland, where he was safe in the knowledge that he was not in danger of going to war against a British and French front in the West. and the Soviets in the East.
The only reason that made (Hitler) sign that agreement, was to take a temporary measure that exempted him from going to war with the Soviets, and enabled him to focus on the war against Britain and France. All of this served Hitler's great goal of building an empire in the East at the expense of the Soviet Union. But Stalin was convinced that the pact would last for a long time, and that Hitler would not turn against the Soviet Union until at least the war with Britain was settled.
(Stalin) was surrounded by agents who did not dare to violate him despite them being against the idea of signing the treaty with Germany, and by 1939 (Stalin) was considered infallible in the eyes of the Soviets, and his confidence in his decisions led him to believe that the Germans would not make any attack in it the time. Although the idea of German betrayal was clear on the tactical level, Stalin's admission that he was hasty in his decision to accept the "Non-Aggression Treaty", would represent a weakness for him in front of his supporters and people, and this was what the Soviet leader strongly rejected, even if its consequences dire.
When evidence of an imminent German attack began to mount, (Stalin) vehemently refused to believe it and treated the matter as either fake news, incompetence on the part of Soviet agents, or even as part of a plot hatched by British intelligence, to foment war with Germany in order to use the Soviets as a means to weaken their German opponent. However, Hitler declared his betrayal of Stalin when he attacked the Soviets on June 22, 1941, and his deceptive plan became apparent.
The Saxons and Napoleon at the Battle of Leipzig
Battle of Leipzig in October 1813.
With the end of the German campaign in 1813, a coalition of armies led by the Russian Tsar (Alexander I) and the army general (Karl Philip) fought a war against Napoleon's forces in the Battle of Leipzig, from 16 to 19 October of that year, and the Emperor was defeated The French were decisively betrayed, after being betrayed in the middle of the battle by his Saxon allies.
After the disastrous results of (Napoleon's) invasion of Russia in 1812, the French army of 685,000 men entered the war, leaving only 120,000 survivors who were exhausted by cold and starvation; France's hegemony over Europe was shattered, as client states and states under French control rushed to get rid of the latter's domination. After returning to France, he succeeded (Napoleon) in raising the equivalent of the size of the army to the number he had recently lost, but he was not at all efficient and experienced.
(Napoleon) then launched the war against Germany as a gesture to reassert French hegemony and strength, and was able to achieve some victories, but he was unable to crown them with a decisive victory because his enemies avoided the battle with him. By October 1813 the Allies (Austria, Belgium, Holland, Russia, Britain) were confident enough to challenge Napoleon directly, and the confrontation occurred in Leipzig between Napoleon's 225,000 troops and a powerful coalition of 380,000 of his enemies.
Since the number of armies was close, France could have won the battle, but everything changed when Napoleon's allies from Saxony betrayed him on the afternoon of the eighteenth day of the war. Having already stretched Napoleon's forces to their limit, the Saxon legion of about 10,000 men occupying an entire section of the French lines suddenly abandoned their positions, leaving Napoleon and the rest of his army to meet the Allies.
With the sudden appearance of that gap in Napoleon's lines of forces, she had to give up an entire sector, and that night began to retreat with her untenable positions. Things went smoothly at first, but the next day the bombing of a bridge crowded with retreating French soldiers led to a disaster in which thousands of them were killed, while tens of thousands more who were on the wrong side of the destroyed bridge were stranded and caught and turned the battle from a "tie". potential tactical” to a catastrophic French defeat.
(Juan Pujol Garcia) and the German Aorta
Photo (Juan Pujol Garcia).
Juan Pujol Garcia (1912-1988) was an eccentric Spanish spy who deceived the Nazis with “fantasy espionage” during World War II only because of his intense desire for adventure and excitement! His ruse grew into the greatest deception and betrayal of the time and played an important role in securing the Allies' victory on D-Day and the subsequent Normandy campaign and the liberation of France in just months.
Pujol hated dealing with fascist and incompetent people, and when World War II began he decided to help the Allies “for the good of humanity.” However, his services offered to British intelligence were rejected, so he pretended to be an officer from the Spanish government sympathetic to the Nazi government, and offered his services to the Germans, who accepted him immediately and ordered him to stay in Britain, in order to recruit a spy network there.
He went instead to Lisbon, and from there composed reports on Britain with content little of which was drawn from public sources, the rest Pujol added and composed with the help of his active imagination, and then sent to the Germans on the understanding that it was written in Britain. The trick involved the Germans becoming thirsty for more, so Pujol developed his trick further and claimed he was dealing with fictional agents, using them as sources for additional fictional reports.
The British were able to intercept and decipher those secret messages destined for Germany, realized that someone was cheating the Germans on their behalf, and upon discovering Pujol's identity, they belatedly accepted his earlier offer to work with them. Codenamed “GARBO,” he was taken to Britain, where his fictitious network solidified, turning into an elaborate treachery that duped the Germans into carefully providing them with a vast amount of often true but useless information mixed in, half with facts and half with lies.
In the eyes of the Germans, Pujol became the most successful spy stationed in Britain working for them, due to the deluge of reports from him and his ever-growing network. Then came the moment when the man proves his loyalty and sincerity and the real party that supports him. During Britain's preparation for the two important events of World War II, "Day of Victory" and the subsequent "Normandy" campaign, the main objective was to convince the Germans that the (Normandy) campaign was only the first campaign in a series of planned invasions, with a larger invasion. in the Pas-de-Calais region of France.
To reinforce Pujol's credibility with the Germans, British intelligence had him send a message alerting the Germans to the invasion a few hours before it began, knowing that by the time the message made its way from German intelligence to German military leaders, the invasion had already taken place and the warning had not worked. The Germans did anything, and only served to bolster Pujol's reputation.
Building on Pujol's great confidence in the Germans, he convinced them that the Allied landings in Normandy were just a tip-off, and that the real blow would come in the Pas-de-Clees. In addition, he told them that there was a group of American army forces (pseudo) on the English Channel along the (Ba de Klee) preparing to invade the region, and the Germans were immediately convinced of the necessity of preparing for that invasion and maintaining strong military formations there. During the crucial weeks of June 1944, this plan helped the Allies gather enough forces in Normandy to defeat the German attacks, go on the offensive, and liberate all of France within a few months.
Pujol had previously received the Iron Cross of Merit from Germany, as well as the Member of the British Empire (MBE) from Britain. After the war, the man faked his death in Angola in 1949 for fear of Nazi retaliation, then moved to Venezuela where he ran a gift shop and bookstore. He lived an unknown life until 1984, when he agreed to be interviewed for a book he wrote about him, Agent GARBO. He was then received at Buckingham Palace, and he was received in Britain, a neighborhood that received great attention. On the fortieth anniversary of “Day of Victory,” he traveled to (Normandy) and expressed his respect for the victims of the war there, and he died in Caracas after 4 years.
Jonathan Wilde and the London Judges
Photo by Jonathan Wilde.
Photo: National Portrait Gallery London
Jonathan Wilde (1682-1725) was the most famous English criminal known to the eighteenth century, as he ruled a large kingdom for thieves and bandits, and carried out extortion and forgery and owned a large store of stolen goods. After he pretended to reform, the British authorities resorted to (Wild) to help her arrest the criminals, who seek to spread terror in the streets of the city of London and gave him the nickname (Thief Taker) and he betrayed everyone in the end.
(Wild) took his new position and title with passion, and formed highly effective teams of "thief hunters" who were constantly arresting thieves, breaking up gangs and sending criminals to the gallows by the dozens. During his career, at least 120 people were executed, based on Wilde's testimony and information he provides to the authorities.
He also set up a side company as a private investigator, which enabled him to recover many stolen goods in exchange for a fee. Wilde did not tell his clients that the thieves who stole their merchandise in the first place were working for him, and that his work to “recover” was simply to go to one of his warehouses and search through the piles of stolen property there. Wilde had not given up the life of crime at all, but had deceived everyone and expanded his kingdom more and more, as he was getting rid of criminals and thieves competing with him by handing them over to the authorities.
As we mentioned at the beginning of this article, the term "double cross" has its origins in Wilde. He is finally overthrown when a criminal accuses him of owning several stolen goods and exposes his loot stores. Investigations confirmed this, and the accusation against Wilde was confirmed, then he was arrested, and at this point many of his followers turned into witnesses against him. He was quickly tried, convicted and hanged in the city of Tiburn, and became known as the biggest perpetrator of "Double Crossing" by being the fiercest crime fighter and the biggest criminal at the same time.
(Mir Jaafar) and (Siraj al-Dawla)
Photo of (Mir Jaafar) on the left and his son on the right.
Mir Jaafar (1691 - 1765), an Arab of birth, arrived in India as an adventurer and entered politics alongside his stepfather, General (Ali Vardi Khan), and helped him to carry out a plot in which they seized Bengal and liberated it from Mughal control in 1740. Then he carried out an operation "Double intersection" and betrayal of Ali Vardi's grandson and successor, Siraj al-Dawla, and he helped the British to take control of Bengal, who in turn installed him as its ruler.
The betrayal of Jaafar began when he was the commander of the Bengal Army, which was under the rule of Siraj al-Dawla, as he fought a war against the British East India Company, which wanted to seize the region, and entered into secret negotiations with the British to betray his ruler. On June 23, 1757, a force of about 3,000 men led by British General Robert Clive faced a force of 65,000 men led by Siraj al-Dawla.
Despite the odds, Clive was confident of victory, and apart from the higher standards of training and the many strengths of his army, he struck a deal with important Siraj ad-Dawla leaders. When the battle commenced, Mir Jafar and others defected with 15,000 cavalry men and 35,000 infantry, discouraging the remainder of the Bengal army, and making their ruler flee the field but was later captured and executed.
Jafar was appointed to replace Siraj-ud-Dawla as the ruler of Bengal under British auspices. However, he could not resist the desire to betray the British and entered into secret negotiations with their Dutch opponents. His failure to help the British as much as he had promised led to his dismissal and his replacement by his son-in-law in 1760. However, the latter turned out to be worse from the British perspective, as he tried to follow a line independent of them and wanted to end British rule in Bengal. So he was overthrown in 1763 and Jafar was summoned to replace him as the vice governor of Bengal, a position he held until his death in 1765.
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