Marcelė Kubiliūtė

Marcelė Kubiliūtė (28 July 1898 – 13 June 1963) was a Lithuanian spy and activist. She is the only Lithuanian woman awarded all major Lithuanian orders. Virtually unknown until her memoirs were published in 1999, she is now recognized as a "legendary" figure in the Lithuanian intelligence services.

In 1912, Kubiliūtė moved to Vilnius where she worked at the editorial offices of the Lithuanian newspaper Viltis published by Antanas Smetona. During World War I, she evacuated to Voronezh and later Saint Petersburg where she graduated from a gymnasium. She returned to Vilnius in 1918. She edited Lithuanian periodicals, organized aid to injured and imprisoned Lithuanian soldiers, and became a spy for the Lithuanian government. She gathered information on Polish military forces and played a key role in obtaining documents of the Polish Military Organization that helped thwart the planned coup in Lithuania in September 1919. She had to flee to Kaunas as Polish counterintelligence was about to arrest her.

In interwar Lithuania, she continued to work for the Lithuanian intelligence an matters concerning Lithuanians in the disputed Vilnius Region. In 1925, she moved to work at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs where she dealt with cyphers and library of secret documents. She was an active member of the Lithuanian Riflemen's Union and the Union for the Liberation of Vilnius. During World War II, she maintained contacts with the Lithuanian Activist Front and joined the underground Union of Lithuanian Freedom Fighters. She helped many evading persecutions by the Nazis.

She was arrested by the NKVD in August 1945 and sentenced to five years of exile. Upon her return to Lithuania in 1949, she worked as a bookkeeper in Tauragė. The KGB continued to monitor her until her health deteriorated in 1958 due to bone tuberculosis and breast cancer. After extensive treatments, she died in 1963.