15. Graham Greene served as a spy for British Intelligence
British author Graham Greene was well-known as a novelist and suspense writer before World War II. During the war, he worked for MI6. One suggestion made by Greene to his boss, the notorious Kim Philby, was a brothel on Portugal’s island of Guinea. Greene suggested staffing the brothel with trained spies in order to extract information from the Vichy French and German officers who would frequent the enterprise. Greene later wrote that he made the suggestion as a lark, and was surprised to be summoned to a meeting at which it was discussed seriously among senior intelligence officers. Ultimately, the idea was dropped.
Greene was posted in Freetown, an important port on the coast of Africa. From there he ran a network of agents which monitored the agents of Germany and Vichy France, obtained information on ship movements, and practiced counterintelligence. Greene actively recruited agents for the service, and kept notes from which he created the plots of many of the spy and espionage novels he wrote following the war. MI6 kept his activity classified for decades after the war, finally admitting that the novelist had been a spymaster in 2010. The FBI built a heavy file on Greene due to his suspected communist sympathies. Those suspicions were strengthened when it was revealed that Kim Philby had been a double agent, working for the Soviets during World War II and the Cold War which ensued.