50 Fun Facts About Spy Agencies

Where is the CIA headquartered?

Langley, Virginia: the CIA has worked from the wooded campus since 1961, and in 1999 it was renamed the George Bush Center for Intelligence after the former CIA director who became president.

Since 1994, which building at Albert Embankment in London has housed the UK's foreign spy service?

Vauxhall Cross: in September 2000 a rocket blamed on dissident Irish republicans struck the riverside building, but the foreign secretary said it had done no damage inside.

Israeli agents spent years hunting the militants behind the massacre of Israel's athletes at which Olympic Games?

Munich: Black September gunmen killed eleven members of Israel's team at the 1972 Games, and the hunt for the plotters was suspended in 1973 after the agents killed an innocent man in Norway by mistake.

Inter-Services Intelligence, the military spy agency better known as the ISI, belongs to which country?

Pakistan: after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 the ISI teamed up with the CIA to arm and train the mujahideen, and in the 1990s it backed the Taliban.

Which longtime KGB chairman went on to lead the Soviet Union in 1982?

Yuri Andropov: he ran the KGB for fifteen years from 1967, a tenure known for its crackdown on dissidents, then succeeded Leonid Brezhnev as Soviet leader in November 1982.

Which US agency, formally created by President Truman in 1952, focuses on signals intelligence?

NSA: Truman created it by a classified presidential directive rather than an act of Congress, so for years the public did not know the agency existed.

Which agency became Russia's main domestic security and counterintelligence service after the KGB?

FSB: Boris Yeltsin gave the Federal Security Service its name and wider powers in 1995, and in 1998 he appointed as its director Vladimir Putin, who succeeded him as president.

Which prime minister founded Israel's foreign intelligence agency?

David Ben-Gurion: in December 1949 he ordered a central institute set up to make the army, foreign-ministry and internal security intelligence services work together.

French secret agents sank which Greenpeace ship in Auckland harbour in 1985?

Rainbow Warrior: two bombs planted by France's foreign intelligence service sank the ship before it could sail to protest nuclear tests at Moruroa, and the scandal forced the defence minister to resign.

Which UK agency is commonly known by the acronym MI6?

Secret Intelligence Service: 'MI6' began as a Second World War label, when the service was treated as section six of military intelligence, and the nickname outlived the war.

The KGB was formed in March 1954 after the fall of which Soviet security chief?

Beria was toppled by Khrushchev and his other Kremlin rivals within months of Stalin's death and executed in December 1953; the following March state security was reorganised as the KGB.

Which Israeli agency handles foreign intelligence collection and covert operations?

Mossad: besides spying and covert action, it has run rescue missions, helping to bring Ethiopian Jews out of famine-hit Sudan to Israel in 1984.

The Stasi, formally the Ministry for State Security, was the secret police of which state from 1950 to 1990?

East Germany's Stasi kept files on millions of citizens; fearing they were being destroyed, crowds occupied its Berlin headquarters in January 1990, and a 1991 law let people read their own files.

Which Dutch-born exotic dancer was executed by a French firing squad in October 1917 as a German spy?

Mata Hari was born Margaretha Zelle, and her stage name means 'sun' in Indonesian; historians still debate how much spying she actually did.

Kim Philby was revealed in 1963 to belong to which Soviet spy ring of British university men?

The Cambridge Five: Philby, Burgess, Maclean, Blunt and Cairncross all studied at Cambridge and were recruited in the 1930s; Philby fled to Moscow in January 1963 after being confronted in Beirut.

Which CIA counterintelligence officer was convicted in 1994 of spying for the Soviet Union and Russia?

Aldrich Ames sold the KGB the names of American agents inside the Soviet Union, at least ten of whom were executed, and was paid millions of dollars before his arrest in 1994.

Robert Hanssen, arrested in 2001, spied for Moscow while working for which U.S. agency?

The FBI: Hanssen, a counterintelligence agent, sold secrets to Moscow on and off from 1979 and was arrested in February 2001 as he left a package of classified papers at a dead drop.

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed in 1953 at which New York prison?

Sing Sing: the Rosenbergs died in the prison's electric chair in June 1953; Ethel's brother David Greenglass later took back the trial testimony that helped convict her, which had kept his own wife out of the dock.

At which English estate did the Government Code and Cypher School break Enigma and Lorenz?

Bletchley Park: thousands worked at the Buckinghamshire estate on Enigma and Lorenz, yet the secret held for three decades, until a former officer was allowed to publish a memoir in 1974.

Which spy, the Gestapo's 'limping lady', named her wooden leg Cuthbert?

Virginia Hall: she lost her lower left leg in a hunting accident before the war, yet escaped France by hiking over the Pyrenees into Spain on the wooden one.

Before creating James Bond, Ian Fleming served in which British wartime organization?

The Naval Intelligence Division: Fleming was recruited in 1939 as personal assistant to its director, John Godfrey, and helped plan Operation Goldeneye, a name he later gave his house in Jamaica.

Which Revolutionary spy is quoted as saying 'I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country'?

Nathan Hale: the 21-year-old Continental Army captain was hanged by the British in New York on 22 September 1776 after being caught gathering intelligence behind their lines.

Soviet spy Richard Sorge, posing as a German journalist in Tokyo, warned Moscow in 1941 of which coming military operation?

Operation Barbarossa: in May 1941 Sorge told Moscow that Germany would attack in late June, missing the date by two days; Japan executed him in 1944 and the USSR made him a Hero of the Soviet Union in 1964.

Which Russian-born British agent was later fictionalized as the 'Ace of Spies'?

Sidney Reilly: in 1925 he slipped across the Finnish border to meet a supposed anti-Bolshevik underground that was really a secret-police front, and was arrested and executed that November.

CIA pilot Francis Gary Powers was shot down over the Soviet Union in 1960 flying what kind of aircraft?

A U-2 spy plane: a Soviet surface-to-air missile brought it down near Sverdlovsk, the row wrecked a superpower summit days later, and Powers was swapped for Soviet spy Rudolf Abel in February 1962.

Which spy novelist, born David Cornwell, was still an MI6 officer when The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was published?

John le Carré: he wrote his first three novels under the pen name while still in government service, and left it in 1964, after the third became a worldwide bestseller, to write full time.

Operation Mincemeat planted fake invasion plans on a corpse in 1943 to disguise the landing on which island?

Sicily: papers planted on the corpse of 'Major William Martin' pointed to Greece and Sardinia, so Hitler sent reinforcements there and the Allies caught the defenders of Sicily off guard in July 1943.

Double agent Juan Pujol García, codenamed Garbo, received wartime decorations from which countries?

Both Nazi Germany and Britain honoured him: Hitler's regime awarded an Iron Cross for a spy network he had made up, and Britain made him an MBE for helping to sell the D-Day deception.

Anna Chapman was arrested in the United States in 2010 as part of which Russian spy operation?

The Illegals Program: Chapman was one of ten deep-cover Russian 'illegals' arrested in June 2010; within two weeks all ten were flown to Vienna and swapped on the tarmac for four men held in Russia as alleged Western agents.

ASIS is the foreign spy service of which country?

Australia: ASIS was formed in 1952, but its existence was not officially acknowledged for 25 years, until Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser confirmed it in 1977.

Since 1994, MI5 has been headquartered in which building on Millbank in London?

Thames House: MI5 moved into the Millbank building in 1994 after decades at Leconfield House and Curzon Street House in Mayfair; the Security Service's wartime PO Box 500 gave it the nickname 'Box 500'.

GCHQ's circular headquarters in Cheltenham, in use since 2003, is known by what nickname?

The Doughnut: the £337 million circular building around an open courtyard replaced more than fifty buildings on GCHQ's two older Cheltenham sites, gathering its staff under one roof.

Which 1947 US law established the Central Intelligence Agency?

National Security Act: the wartime OSS had been wound up in 1945, and this law, signed by Truman in July 1947, created the CIA as its peacetime successor along with the National Security Council.

Which 'Wild Bill' led the OSS, America's wartime intelligence service?

Donovan: a lawyer who won the Medal of Honor in the First World War, he was asked by Roosevelt to draw up plans for a central intelligence service and led the OSS from its creation in June 1942.

The Five Eyes alliance comprises the US, UK, Canada, Australia and which other country?

New Zealand: the alliance grew out of American and British code-breakers pooling their work in the Second World War, a partnership sealed by a 1946 pact that the Commonwealth members later joined.

West Germany's BND, founded in 1956, grew out of an 'Organization' named after which general?

Reinhard Gehlen: the German army's intelligence chief on the Eastern Front surrendered to the Americans in 1945 and was soon running a US-backed spy network against the Soviets, which became the BND in 1956.

Who led the Cheka, the first Soviet secret police, from its founding in December 1917?

Felix Dzerzhinsky: 'Iron Felix' led the Cheka through waves of summary executions of real and suspected enemies, and stayed in charge of Soviet state security under its later names until his death in 1926.

In May 1960 Israeli agents abducted Adolf Eichmann in which country?

Argentina: Eichmann was living there as 'Ricardo Klement' when Israeli agents seized him and took him to Israel, where his trial, covered by Hannah Arendt, drew the world's attention to the Holocaust.

The Research and Analysis Wing is which country's foreign spy agency?

India: until 1968 its Intelligence Bureau handled spying abroad as well as at home, but its failures in the 1962 border war with China helped persuade the government to create a separate foreign service.

Canada's CSIS was created in 1984 to take over security intelligence from which organisation?

The RCMP: its Security Service was caught opening mail and staging break-ins in the 1970s, so the McDonald Commission urged a separate civilian agency and Parliament created CSIS in 1984.

Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov was killed in London in 1978 by a poison pellet reportedly fired from what?

An umbrella: Markov felt a jab in the leg from a stranger's umbrella on a London street in September 1978 and died within days; doctors found a tiny platinum pellet thought to have carried ricin.

Russian defector Alexander Litvinenko was fatally poisoned in London in 2006 with which substance?

Polonium-210: Litvinenko drank green tea laced with the radioactive isotope at a London hotel bar on 1 November 2006 and died three weeks later; a British inquiry found two Russian agents had poisoned him.

Ex-GRU double agent Sergei Skripal was poisoned with Novichok in 2018 in which English city?

Salisbury: Skripal and his daughter survived, but four months later a Wiltshire woman, Dawn Sturgess, died after spraying her wrists from a perfume bottle her partner had found, which held the nerve agent.

MI6 smuggled KGB double agent Oleg Gordievsky out of the USSR in 1985 hidden in what?

A car boot: British diplomats drove him across the Finnish border in July 1985, and a baby's dirty nappy helped throw the Soviet sniffer dogs off his scent.

German-born physicist Klaus Fuchs passed the Soviets secrets from which wartime programme?

Manhattan Project: at Los Alamos Fuchs worked on the implosion design of the plutonium bomb while passing its secrets to the Soviets; he confessed in January 1950 and served nine years of a fourteen-year sentence.

Which secret US programme decrypted Soviet cables and helped expose Julius Rosenberg as a spy?

Venona: begun by US Army code-breakers in 1943, it identified Klaus Fuchs and Julius Rosenberg, but the decrypts were thought too secret to use in court and were only made public in the mid-1990s.

Israeli spy Eli Cohen, who infiltrated the Syrian elite, was publicly hanged in 1965 in which city?

Damascus: posing as businessman Kamal Amin Thaabet, Cohen won the trust of Syria's leaders until security men with Soviet tracking gear caught him mid-transmission in January 1965; he was hanged in Marjeh Square that May.

Churchill told Hugh Dalton to 'set Europe ablaze' on creating which wartime organisation?

Special Operations Executive: Dalton wanted it to stir up revolt in occupied Europe in the manner of the Irish rebels who had fought Britain, and it worked from offices at 64 Baker Street in London.

Room 40, the Admiralty's First World War codebreakers, famously decoded which 1917 message?

The Zimmermann Telegram: Room 40 decoded Foreign Secretary Arthur Zimmermann's January 1917 offer of an alliance to Mexico against the United States; its publication in March helped push the neutral US into the war in April 1917.

Which future TV chef spent the Second World War with the OSS, in a section that developed a shark repellent?

Julia Child: at 6 feet 2 she was too tall to enlist, so she joined the OSS instead, starting out typing index cards and ending the war in charge of secret files in Ceylon and China.