50 Fun Facts About Spy Agencies

Where is the CIA headquartered?

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is headquartered in the George Bush Center for Intelligence in Langley, Virginia, a location often used metonymously to refer to the agency itself.

Since 1994, what building on the Thames at Albert Embankment has housed the UK's foreign spy service?

Vauxhall Cross: the SIS Building at 85 Albert Embankment, opened by Queen Elizabeth II in July 1994, houses MI6 and appears as its home in several James Bond films.

Israel's foreign intelligence agency trains its recruits at an academy near which city?

Herzliya: Mossad's training academy, the Midrasha, sits at the Glilot junction just south of Herzliya on Tel Aviv's northern edge, alongside the agency's headquarters.

In which city is France's foreign intelligence agency, whose HQ is nicknamed 'La piscine' after a nearby pool?

Paris: the DGSE headquarters sits on boulevard Mortier in the 20th arrondissement, beside the Piscine des Tourelles swimming pool that gave it the nickname 'La piscine'.

The KGB was headquartered in which city's Lubyanka Square?

Moscow's Lubyanka, a Neo-Baroque building from 1897, also housed a prison, part of which is now a museum.

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

It is headquartered at Fort Meade, Maryland, and has roughly 32,000 employees.

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

FSB, the Federal Security Service, was reorganised in 1995 out of the Federal Counterintelligence Service and is the KGB's main successor inside Russia.

In what year was Israel's foreign intelligence agency formally established?

1949: it began on 13 December as the Central Institute for Coordination, on Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion's recommendation to Reuven Shiloah.

Which French intelligence agency is primarily responsible for external intelligence gathering?

The Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure (DGSE) is France's main foreign intelligence service, tasked with collecting information outside national borders.

Which UK agency is commonly known by the acronym MI6?

MI6 is the common name for the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), the foreign intelligence agency of the United Kingdom, responsible for covert overseas intelligence collection.

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

Beria's fall in June 1953 triggered a restructuring of the MVD that produced the KGB, with Ivan Serov as its first chairman.

Which Israeli agency handles foreign intelligence collection and covert operations?

Mossad is Israel's national intelligence agency, primarily responsible for intelligence collection, covert operations, and counter-terrorism beyond Israel's borders.

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

East Germany's Stasi infiltrated almost every aspect of daily life through a vast network of informants.

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 recruited at a British university?

The Cambridge Five: Philby, Burgess, Maclean, Blunt and Cairncross were recruited at Cambridge 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?

His betrayals led to the execution of several CIA sources in Moscow. He bought a Jaguar and a house in cash while on a government salary.

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

The FBI: Hanssen, an FBI counterintelligence agent, spied for Moscow on and off from 1979 to 2001 and was arrested in February 2001 making a dead drop in Foxstone Park, Virginia.

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

Sing Sing: the Rosenbergs died in the electric chair at Sing Sing prison in Ossining, New York, on 19 June 1953, the only American civilians executed for espionage in the Cold War.

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

Bletchley Park: the Buckinghamshire estate housed the Government Code and Cypher School from 1939, where Turing's bombes broke Enigma and the Colossus computers attacked the Lorenz cipher.

What did American agent Virginia Hall, 'the limping lady,' name her prosthetic leg?

Cuthbert: Hall lost her leg in a 1933 hunting accident in Turkey, crossed the Pyrenees on the wooden leg in 1942, and in 1945 became the only civilian woman awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for the war.

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

The Naval Intelligence Division: Rear Admiral John Godfrey, Director of Naval Intelligence, recruited Fleming as his personal assistant in 1939; Fleming helped plan Operation Goldeneye, later the name of his Jamaican house.

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 about what?

Operation Barbarossa: Sorge's warnings of the June 1941 German invasion were ignored by Stalin; the Japanese hanged him in Tokyo in November 1944, and Moscow named him a Hero of the Soviet Union in 1964.

Which Russian-born British agent, fictionalized as the 'Ace of Spies,' served as a model for James Bond?

Sidney Reilly: the 'Ace of Spies' worked for Scotland Yard's Special Branch and the early Secret Intelligence Service; the Soviet OGPU lured him into Russia and executed him in November 1925.

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

A U-2 spy plane out of Peshawar, Pakistan, was hit by a surface-to-air missile near Sverdlovsk; Powers was traded two years later for Soviet officer Rudolf Abel on Berlin's Glienicke Bridge.

Spy novelist John le Carré, a former MI5 and MI6 officer, wrote under a pen name; what was his real name?

David Cornwell worked for both MI5 and MI6 before The Spy Who Came in from the Cold made him famous in 1963; in full he was David John Moore Cornwell.

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

Sicily: the July 1943 Allied invasion was the real target; 'Major Martin's' planted papers pointed to Greece and Sardinia, and the idea was item 28 on a deception list Ian Fleming helped compile.

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

The Germans gave him the Iron Cross for a spy network that never existed; Britain made him an MBE for helping 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 SVR 'illegals' arrested in June 2010 and swapped in Vienna for four Russians held by Moscow, the biggest exchange since 1986.

In which year did an Australian prime minister first publicly confirm that ASIS existed?

1977: a 1972 Sydney Daily Telegraph exposé blew ASIS's cover, but Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser only formally acknowledged the agency in October 1977, after the Hope Royal Commission on intelligence.

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, opened in 2003, is known by what nickname?

The Doughnut: GCHQ's ring-shaped Cheltenham headquarters, built around a central courtyard at an estimated £337 million, was one of Europe's largest public-sector building projects when completed in 2003.

Which 1947 US law established the Central Intelligence Agency?

The National Security Act: Truman had abolished the wartime OSS in 1945 and set up a Central Intelligence Group in 1946; the Act of July 1947 created the CIA, the National Security Council and the National Military Establishment.

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

Donovan: Roosevelt asked William 'Wild Bill' Donovan to design a service modelled on Britain's MI6 and SOE; he became Coordinator of Information in July 1941 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 name is shorthand for the 'AUS/CAN/NZ/UK/US Eyes Only' marking on shared documents; the signals-intelligence pact grew from the 1946 UKUSA Agreement, which New Zealand formally joined in 1956.

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

Reinhard Gehlen: as head of Foreign Armies East he ran Wehrmacht intelligence on the Eastern Front, then built the US-backed 'Gehlen Organization' in 1946, which became the BND in April 1956 with him as its first president.

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

Felix Dzerzhinsky: 'Iron Felix' ran the Cheka from its founding in December 1917 until his death in 1926, through its renamings as GPU and OGPU; it began with a handful of staff at Petrograd's Smolny Institute.

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

Argentina: Eichmann had lived near Buenos Aires as 'Ricardo Klement' since 1950; Mossad agents seized him on 11 May 1960 and flew him to Israel, where his trial inspired Hannah Arendt's phrase 'the banality of evil'.

In what year was R&AW, India's external intelligence agency, founded?

1968: R&AW was carved out of the Intelligence Bureau on 21 September 1968 after intelligence failures in the 1962 and 1965 wars; R. N. Kao led it from the start until 1977.

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

The RCMP: the McDonald Commission recommended separating security intelligence from policing after the Mounties' Security Service was caught in illegal activities in the 1970s, so the CSIS Act of 1984 created a civilian agency.

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

An umbrella: on Waterloo Bridge in September 1978 Markov felt a jab from an umbrella tip; a 1.7 mm platinum-iridium pellet later examined at Porton Down had carried ricin, and he died four days later.

Former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko was fatally poisoned in London in 2006 with which substance?

Polonium-210: Litvinenko drank tea laced with the radioactive isotope at London's Millennium Hotel on 1 November 2006 and died three weeks later; a British inquiry named Andrey Lugovoy as a prime suspect, but Russia's constitution bars extraditing citizens.

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

Months later a local woman died after spraying herself with a discarded perfume bottle of the agent. The OPCW added Novichok to its banned list in 2019.

MI6 smuggled KGB double agent Oleg Gordievsky out of the USSR in 1985 under which codename?

Operation Pimlico: recalled to Moscow, drugged and interrogated in May 1985, Gordievsky gave his prearranged escape signal and MI6 drove him across the Finnish border in a car boot in July 1985; the USSR sentenced him to death in absentia.

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 and passed details to Soviet couriers; he confessed in January 1950, served nine years of a fourteen-year sentence and moved to East Germany.

Which US programme (1943-80) decrypted Soviet cables and helped expose the Cambridge Five?

Venona: the Army Signal Intelligence Service began the Soviet-cable programme in 1943 and it ran until 1980, decrypting roughly 3,000 messages that exposed Fuchs, the Rosenbergs and Maclean; it was declassified only in 1995.

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

Damascus: Cohen, born in Alexandria to a Syrian-Jewish family, posed as businessman Kamel Amin Thaabet in Damascus until his capture in January 1965; he was hanged in the city's Marjeh Square on 18 May 1965.

Churchill told Hugh Dalton to 'set Europe ablaze' on creating which organisation in July 1940?

Special Operations Executive: formed on 22 July 1940 under Minister of Economic Warfare Hugh Dalton to run sabotage and resistance in occupied Europe, SOE employed about 13,000 people, some 3,200 of them women.

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.

Russia's SVR, successor to the KGB's First Chief Directorate, is based in which Moscow district?

Yasenevo: the SVR's headquarters sits in a wooded compound in the Yasenevo district on Moscow's southern edge, inherited from the KGB's First Chief Directorate; the service dates itself to the Cheka's Foreign Department of December 1920.