Norman J. Rees

Norman John Rees, ( – February 29, 1976) was an Italian-American oil engineer who was an agent for Soviet intelligence, then became a double agent for the FBI. Rees committed suicide when a newspaper revealed his spying activities.

Early life and career Rees was born Nuncio Ruisi in Sicily . He worked as an engineer for the M.W. Kellogg Company and then the Socony Mobil Oil Company where he specialized in metallurgy, piping and pressurized tanks for oil.

Spying According to Rees, he became a "communist sympathizer" during World War II and began supplying oil industry trade secrets to the USSR in 1942. In 1950, he gave the Soviets a newly developed design for a catalytic cracking converter for which he earned a Soviet medal. Ten hours after the story was published, Rees died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. In the aftermath, newspapers debated whether the threat of suicide should supersede the right of the journalist to publish the story.