Eleven people were arrested this week, accused of being spies in a long-term Russian operation to blend into American culture and befriend U.S. officials and defense scientists. Documents from the FBI’s 10-year
investigation reveal the Russians acting just like the movie version of Russian spies: writing in invisible ink, burying money in a field, and doing “brush pasts”—when agents swap identical luggage as the pass each other, spy-movie style. They reportedly spoke in
awkward coded language, such as this conversation bugged by the FBI: “You will meet this guy… Tell him Uncle Paul loves him… he will know… It is wonderful to be Santa Claus in May.” Efforts to act American may have gone too far in the eyes of their bosses, however. HQ back in Moscow was worried the alleged spies would go native and refused a request to let a couple in New Jersey buy a house; they protested they were just trying to “do as the Romans do.”
There is no better phrase to describe Mata Hari (né Margaretha Geertruida Zelle) than “The Spy Who Loved Me”: the Dutch daughter of a hat store owner-cum-oil investor rose to prominence as one of Paris' most famous exotic dancers at the turn of the 20th century and later became a high-class prostitute. As a courtesan who traveled across European borders during World War I, developing relationships with influential, high-ranking German military and political officials, she was well-positioned to gather intelligence and funnel it to the French, who had tapped her as a spy. She eventually, however, was suspected of being a double agent and was arrested by French police in 1917. She was subsequently put on trial, convicted of spying for Germany and causing the deaths of thousands of French soldiers, and was executed by firing squad later that year. According to a biography released in 2007, 30 years after Mata Hari's death a prosecutor
admitted "there wasn't enough evidence to flog a cat."
Everyone's favorite exuberant television chef disseminated more than just recipes. During World War II, Child worked for the Office of Strategic Services, FDR's massive spy network and a forerunner agency to the CIA. In 2008 the National Archives released her classified OSS personnel files. The records detail that Child had tried to join up with the Navy but was rejected because of her height. Her 6'2” stature made no difference to the OSS, where she started out as a typist but was soon
promoted because of her "education and her previous experience outside the government.” Child worked as a secret researcher for the agency's director and helped mitigate the threat of Nazi U-boats. Upon completion of her service she was honored with an award and praised for her "drive and inherent cheerfulness."
Legendary actress, dancer and 20th-century muse Josephine Baker utilized invisible ink to transfer intel on behalf of the French Resistance. Her fame eclipsed her clandestine activities and ironically allowed her to slip under the radar as a spy. Linda McCarthy, curator of an exhibition on female spies at The National Women's History Museum
told NPR that Baker had so much star power that she was allowed to traverse European borders with other members of French Resistance in tow. Passport checkers were so in awe of her celebrity that it never crossed their minds that she could be a spy. "One thing about espionage, at its peak it's an equal opportunity employer," she said, "And there are times, quite frankly, where women can get into situations where men can't."
As the leader of CIA's Operation Ajax, Theodore Roosevelt's grandson Kermit Roosevelt, Jr. coordinated America's first coup of a democratically elected leader—one that has had tremendous consequences for the state of Iran, and the aftershocks of which are still straining U.S.-Iranian relations. In 1951, Britain was angered when Iran's Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh nationalized its oil industry, which had been almost exclusively controlled by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company—now known as BP. In lieu of a military response, Britain chose to topple the Mossadegh government and hoped for U.S. involvement. While the idea of a coup was rejected by the Truman administration, it ultimately gained traction by the time Dwight Eisenhower was in office. Ike ordered the CIA to begin covert operations. Using bribery, libel, and orchestrated riots, Roosevelt undermined Mossadegh's government. Mossadegh was overthrown and jailed in 1953 and the Shah was restored to the throne. In 2000, the U.S. government finally admitted to the coup. Then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright
said, "The coup was clearly a setback for Iran’s political development. And it is easy to see now why many Iranians continue to resent this intervention by America in their internal affairs.”
Last year, Walter Kendall Myers and his wife, Gwendolyn, both in their early 70s, were accused of wire fraud and acting as agents for the Cuban government for three decades. Unlike many cases of espionage, the Myers were motivated by politics instead of money—“
true believers” in the words of one law enforcement official. Former colleagues and friends were stunned by the allegations against Kendall, an Army veteran who served at the State Department for more than two decades as a European political expert before retiring in 2007, though perhaps they should have had an inkling when Kendall publicly said in 2006 that he was “
ashamed” of George W. Bush’s treatment of Tony Blair. And privately, he made his love of Cuba very clear: In his diary, Kendall
enthused, “Everything I hear about Fidel suggests that he is a brilliant and charismatic leader.” He also lamented Americans’ “complacency about the poor,” and the health-care system. The couple was allegedly recruited after a visit to Cuba in 1978 and passed along sensitive information over a shortwave radio, later switching to encrypted emails from Internet cafés. The State Department first became suspicious in 2006, and the couple was eventually arrested last summer. They say they’re innocent; Fidel Castro, for his part, said that if the allegations are true, “I can’t help but admire their disinterested and courageous conduct on behalf of Cuba.”
The spies that get caught are always described as buffoons. Jonathan Pollard, a Texan rejected by the CIA, worked in naval intelligence beginning in 1979. Early in his career, he set off internal alarms when his superiors learned of his past drug use, as well as his reputation as “a kook” prone to wild ideas and inappropriate conversations. Nevertheless, he kept climbing the intelligence hierarchy, and in 1984 began
passing along information to Israel in return for cash. A year later, Pollard was approached by FBI agents, and he knew the jig was up. He called his wife, Anne, and used the codeword “Cactus,” meaning she should try to dispose of all incriminating evidence. Pollard was sentenced to life in prison; his wife served a five-year sentence. Israel initially denied that Pollard was its spy, but in 1995 the country 'fessed up and awarded Pollard Israeli citizenship. Since then, Israeli officials have occasionally
lobbied for Pollard’s release. The extent of the damage he caused remains shrouded in mystery.
The trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, communists convicted of treason and sentenced to death in 1953, stands as one of the biggest
media circuses of the 20th century. It was the dawn of the McCarthy era, and many said the Rosenbergs were convicted long before they were tried. Nevertheless, little doubt remains that Julius acted as a recruiter and courier in Soviet espionage. And it is generally accepted that he passed along the most coveted intelligence of that era to the U.S.S.R.: information on how to make an atomic bomb. Yet to this day, questions remain about the
involvement of Ethel, who is often portrayed more as a devoted wife than as a collaborator. She certainly was aware of her husband’s activities, but whether she herself played a large role remains a point of contention. When the judge sentenced the pair to the electric chair, he said they had “committed a crime worse than murder.”
Aldrich Ames loved vodka, and began having monthly drinking fests with a reporter for Pravda in the '70s. Ames found Cold War spy games a farce, with the Americans having so deeply infiltrated the U.S.S.R. that they had “cleaned its clock.” Disgruntled in Mexico City and Langley, Virginia, and derided as a drunk, Ames decided to “level the playing field.” His
first act of espionage was offering the KGB the names of Soviet citizens cooperating with the CIA for the price of $50,000 in 1984. The next year, to prove he was holding nothing back, he offered the names of every double agent betraying the Soviets, and was rewarded with $2 million over the next decade. Many were executed. Ames admitted that he—and his wife, Maria del Rosario Casas Ames, also an agent—was motivated almost entirely by greed. Once discovered in 1994, the case highlighted the CIA’s
inability to police itself, as numerous strongly worded internal reports had criticized Ames’ political sympathies, his sloppy work, and his drinking problem. Despite the Ameses’ purchase of a half-million dollar house near CIA headquarters and a Jaguar, it took the CIA eight years to bust Ames, who stands as the most damaging traitor in American history.
The entire Plame scandal began with one sentence in George W. Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address, as the country began its march to war in Iraq: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” Joe Wilson, a diplomat who had been sent to Africa to investigate this very issue, took exception to the claim and
made it public. Vice President Dick Cheney and his right-hand man, Scooter Libby, didn’t appreciate what they perceived as disloyalty, and decided to out Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, as an
operative for the CIA in retribution. It’s a crime to reveal the identity of a covert agent, and Libby ended up taking the fall.
Fair Game, the
movie version of the Plame story starring Sean Penn and Naomi Watts, premiered at Cannes this spring.
Klaus Fuchs, a German-born British scientist, tried to pass along secrets from the Manhattan Project during World War II. The physicist was eventually unsuccessful in his mission to instruct the Soviets on how to prepare a hydrogen bomb. In 1950, American officials caught onto his game and arrested him. Fuchs, who spent nine years in an English prison for trading state secrets,
described his dastardliness this way: “I used my Marxist philosophy to establish in my mind two separate compartments. One compartment in which I allowed myself to make friendships, to have personal relations, to help people and to be in all personal ways the kind of man I wanted to be and the kind of man which, in a personal way, I had been before with my friends in or near the Communist Party. I could be free and easy and happy with other people without fear of disclosing myself because I knew the other compartment would step in if I approached the danger point. “
The French had a flashy nickname for Belle Boyd—“La Belle Rebelle”—for her role as a Confederate spy during the American Civil War. She had other titles too, including the Cleopatra of Secession. From her father’s Virginia hotel, Boyd served as a loyal aide to leading Confederate generals like Stonewall Jackson. In one notable attempt at subterfuge, Boyd hid in the closet of that hotel, eavesdropping on Union plans. She bluffed her way through their lines to deliver the army’s scheme to her Confederate brethren. For her bravery, Jackson bestowed upon her the Southern Cross of Honor. Boyd traveled the country after the war as a lecturer. She died in 1900.
In the middle of the Second World War, five Cambridge University grads (Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, Donald Maclean, and an unknown fifth) began passing secrets along from England to the Soviet Union. The group had ties to a secret debating society at the elite school, where they all became entwined in the Communist cause. It wasn’t until the 1960s that one of the members of the notorious spy ring was unmasked. Harold Evans tells the story about how his newspaper, The Sunday Times of London, uncovered Kim Philby’s treachery. In his memoir Evans
writes about how the investigation was a collision with “those overlapping ‘charmed circles’ of influence and power whose strands of DNA were the elite public schools, Oxbridge, the aristocracy, the City and the blue-chip boardrooms, the civil service, the legal profession, and the conservative press.”
Sometimes spies are hiding in very public places. From 1923 to 1939, Moe Berg was a so-so professional baseball player. He started with the Brooklyn Robins and spent most of his playing days as a back-up catcher. When war broke out, Berg hung up his cleats began a stint working for the OSS (the precursor to the CIA), swooping in to Yugoslavia to find information on resistance groups for the U.S. government. A graduate of Princeton, Berg impressed his teammates more with his brains than his bat. According Nicholas Dawidoff’s
The Catcher Was a Spy, one teammate, when told of Berg’s ability to speak seven languages replied, “Yeah, I know, he can’t hit in any of them.”
Widely considered America’s first spy, Nathan Hale volunteered to go behind enemy lines during the Battle of Long Island, a fight that the Continental Army lost, handing New York City over to the British. Hale, 21, was caught at a tavern in Queens and handed over to British General William Howe. Hale was hanged on September 22, 1776, becoming a hero for the Revolutionary War generation. His purported last words became famous: “I only regret that I have but one life to give for my country.”
