Spies
The Spy Who Kept the Cold War From Boiling Over
In 1984, U.S. spies monitoring the Soviet press found an alarming piece in a Russian magazine. It wasn’t an expose on officials in the Soviet Union or a worrying account about Cold War attitudes toward the United States. Rather, it was a recipe for coot, a small water bird that’s ...read more
How an Enslaved Man-Turned-Spy Helped Secure Victory at the Battle of Yorktown
In the autumn of 1781, the American colonial army fought in the Battle of Yorktown, the final and arguably most consequential battle for American independence from British rule. By all accounts, this monumental victory, which forced the surrender of British General Lord ...read more
This Teenager Killed Nazis With Her Sister During WWII
Freddie Oversteegen was only 14 when she joined the Dutch resistance during World War II, and only a couple of years older when she became one of its armed assassins. Together with her sister—and later, a young woman named Hannie Schaft—the trio lured, ambushed and killed German ...read more
The Sex Party-Loving Soviet Spy Who Infiltrated the CIA
In the early 1980s, Karl F. Koecher and his wife Hanna lived a gold-plated life in New York City’s swish Upper East Side. They drove a new, blue BMW and lived in a luxury co-op alongside the tennis star Ivan Lendl and the comedian Mel Brooks. Hanna was a diamond dealer, blue-eyed ...read more
Edward Snowden discloses U.S. government operations
On June 6, 2013, Americans learned that their government was spying broadly on its own people. That’s when The Guardian and The Washington Post published the first of a series of reports put together from documents leaked by an anonymous source. The material exposed a ...read more
North Korea Once Captured and Detained the Crew of a U.S. Spy Ship for 11 Months
The January 1968 capture of the U.S.S. Pueblo during a spy mission in international waters cost the life of one American sailor and began a grueling 11-month imprisonment for the other 82 Americans aboard. While the Pueblo crew was remembered for their bravery and defiance, ...read more
How a Black Spy Infiltrated the Confederate White House
Confederate President Jefferson Davis occupied an anxious home in Richmond, Virginia, during the Civil War. A steady leak of information dripped from the highest ranks of the Confederacy to the Union. Davis was wary of a mole in his house, but had no idea how to stop the flow of ...read more
Undercover Ink: How Spies Use Tattoos
Tattoos are more common in the workplace than ever before, but they can still be an occupational hazard. Particularly when your profession happens to be spy. Spycraft often involves moving between legal and criminal worlds—and few things are as risky as being discovered while ...read more
Live in the Russian Spy House That Inspired ‘The Americans’
To their neighbors in Montclair, New Jersey, Richard and Cynthia Murphy appeared to be typical suburbanites, living with their two young daughters, Kate and Lisa, in the two-story beige house at 31 Marquette Road. But on June 27, 2010, a dramatic raid of the house by the FBI ...read more
When the Nazis Invaded the Hamptons
The night was especially dark as U.S. Coast Guard seaman John Cullen patrolled the sand dunes of Amagansett, New York, shortly after midnight on June 13, 1942. Regulations in effect after the United States entered World War II six months earlier had already imposed blackouts on ...read more
Robert Hanssen: American Traitor
One of the most damaging double agents in modern American history, Robert Hanssen gave the Soviets, and later the Russians, thousands of pages of classified material that revealed such sensitive national security secrets as the identities of Soviets spying for the U.S., specifics ...read more
Was Ernest Hemingway a Spy?
In his book “Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy: Ernest Hemingway’s Secret Adventures, 1935-1961,” Nicholas Reynolds chronicles Hemingway’s suspected espionage work for both Soviet and U.S. intelligence agencies, before and during the Cold War. A military historian and former U.S. ...read more
OSS: The Predecessor of the CIA
Before 1940, the U.S. State Department, FBI and the different branches of the military all had their own security and counterintelligence operations, which did not easily share information with each other. With another war raging in Europe, however, President Franklin D. ...read more
How a Spy’s Marital Troubles Nearly Derailed D-Day
After fighting briefly in the Spanish Civil War, Juan Pujol García emerged with a disdain for fascist leaders such as Germany’s Adolf Hitler and a desire to make a contribution “to the good of humanity.” So when World War II broke out, the Barcelona native tried to volunteer as a ...read more
When Roald Dahl Spied on the United States
Before he gained fame putting pen to paper, Welsh-born Roald Dahl served as a World War II fighter pilot in Britain’s Royal Air Force (RAF). During one non-combat mission in September 1940, the novice flier was forced to crash-land his Gloster Gladiator biplane in an Egyptian ...read more
The History Teacher Who Outwitted the Gestapo
A Born Rebel Lucie Bernard was born in 1912 in the small commune of Châtenay-sur-Seine in north-central France, southeast of Paris. As a teenager, she rebelled against her parents’ wishes by refusing to train as a primary school teacher, a solid position that would have helped ...read more
The Exotic Dancer Who Became WWI’s Most Notorious Spy
Mata Hari spent much of her career claiming that she was raised as an Indian temple dancer. In reality, however, she was born Margaretha Zelle on August 7, 1876, and grew up the daughter of a haberdasher in the Dutch town of Leeuwarden. Desperate for adventure, at age 18 she ...read more
In 1916, German Terrorists Launched an Attack on American Soil
Two years after the start of World War I, the greater New York region was a major hub of the American munitions industry, with “75 percent of all ammunition and armaments shipped from the United States to Europe went out within a radius of five miles of City Hall in Lower ...read more
6 Traitorous Cold War Spies
1. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg Married in 1939, New York City residents Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were devoted communists who allegedly headed a spy ring that passed military secrets to the Soviets. The scheme got underway sometime after 1940, when Julius became a civilian ...read more
What was Operation Underworld?
On the afternoon of February 9, 1942, smoke billowed over Manhattan’s west side as a fire consumed SS Normandie, a huge French luxury liner being converted into an American World War II troop transport. Although witnesses reported sparks from a worker’s acetylene torch started ...read more
5 Patriot Spies of the American Revolution
1. Nathan Hale Often dubbed “America’s first spy,” Nathan Hale was a Yale graduate who served in Knowlton’s Rangers, a short-lived Continental reconnaissance unit. When General George Washington’s forces became bottled up on Manhattan Island in September 1776, Hale volunteered ...read more
Remembering the U-2 Spy Plane Incident
Since its first flight in 1956, the U-2 had become the United States’ most effective tool for peering behind the Iron Curtain. The top-secret spy plane was capable of skating along the edge of the atmosphere at altitudes in excess of 70,000 feet—higher than any aircraft then in ...read more
Notes by Alan Turing’s Team Found in the Walls of Code-Breaking Hut
After completing his Ph.D. in mathematical logic at Princeton University in 1938, Alan Turing returned to his native Britain and a fellowship at King’s College, University of Cambridge. With the outbreak of war with Germany the following year, he joined the wartime headquarters ...read more
6 Daring Double Agents
1. Eddie Chapman: The crook turned WWII spy who double-crossed the Nazis Born in England in 1914, Chapman did a brief stint with the British army as a teen then turned to crime, becoming a professional safecracker. In 1939, he was arrested on the island of Jersey and sentenced ...read more