Spy Agencies
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50 free Spy Agencies trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This spy trivia quiz covers both the agencies and the agents. One half deals with the world's intelligence services: where the CIA, MI6, Mossad and France's DGSE are headquartered, how the KGB became the FSB, what the NSA does and which state the Stasi served. The other half is about the spies themselves and the great espionage stories: Mata Hari's firing squad, Kim Philby and the Cambridge Five, the CIA and FBI moles Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen, the Rosenbergs at Sing Sing, Bletchley Park and Enigma, Virginia Hall's wooden leg named Cuthbert, Ian Fleming's real wartime job, Operation Mincemeat, Gary Powers and the U-2, double agent Garbo and the 2010 Illegals Program. Questions range from easy to expert, and every answer has been checked against a reliable source.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Where is the CIA headquartered?
Langley, Virginia
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.
Q 02Since 1994, which building at Albert Embankment in London has housed the UK's foreign spy service?
Vauxhall Cross
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.
Q 03Israeli agents spent years hunting the militants behind the massacre of Israel's athletes at which Olympic Games?
Munich
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.
Q 04Inter-Services Intelligence, the military spy agency better known as the ISI, belongs to which country?
Pakistan
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.
Q 05Which longtime KGB chairman went on to lead the Soviet Union in 1982?
Yuri Andropov
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.
Q 06Which US agency, formally created by President Truman in 1952, focuses on signals intelligence?
NSA
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.
Q 07Which agency became Russia's main domestic security and counterintelligence service after the KGB?
FSB
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.
Q 08Which prime minister founded Israel's foreign intelligence agency?
David Ben-Gurion
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.
Q 09French secret agents sank which Greenpeace ship in Auckland harbour in 1985?
Rainbow Warrior
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.
Q 10Which UK agency is commonly known by the acronym MI6?
Secret Intelligence Service
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.
Q 11The KGB was formed in March 1954 after the fall of which Soviet security chief?
Beria
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.
Q 12Which Israeli agency handles foreign intelligence collection and covert operations?
Mossad
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.
Q 13The Stasi, formally the Ministry for State Security, was the secret police of which state from 1950 to 1990?
East Germany
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.
Q 21Before creating James Bond, Ian Fleming served in which British wartime organization?
The Naval Intelligence Division
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.
Q 22Which Revolutionary spy is quoted as saying 'I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country'?
Nathan Hale
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.
Q 23Soviet spy Richard Sorge, posing as a German journalist in Tokyo, warned Moscow in 1941 of which coming military operation?
Q 14Which Dutch-born exotic dancer was executed by a French firing squad in October 1917 as a German spy?
Mata Hari
Mata Hari was born Margaretha Zelle, and her stage name means 'sun' in Indonesian; historians still debate how much spying she actually did.
Q 15Kim Philby was revealed in 1963 to belong to which Soviet spy ring of British university men?
The Cambridge Five
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.
Q 16Which CIA counterintelligence officer was convicted in 1994 of spying for the Soviet Union and Russia?
Aldrich Ames
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.
Q 17Robert Hanssen, arrested in 2001, spied for Moscow while working for which U.S. agency?
The FBI
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.
Q 18Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed in 1953 at which New York prison?
Sing Sing
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.
Q 19At which English estate did the Government Code and Cypher School break Enigma and Lorenz?
Bletchley Park
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.
Q 20Which spy, the Gestapo's 'limping lady', named her wooden leg Cuthbert?
Virginia Hall
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.
Operation Barbarossa
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.
Q 24Which Russian-born British agent was later fictionalized as the 'Ace of Spies'?
Sidney Reilly
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.
Q 25CIA pilot Francis Gary Powers was shot down over the Soviet Union in 1960 flying what kind of aircraft?
A U-2 spy plane
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.
Q 26Which spy novelist, born David Cornwell, was still an MI6 officer when The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was published?
John le Carré
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.
Q 27Operation Mincemeat planted fake invasion plans on a corpse in 1943 to disguise the landing on which island?
Sicily
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.
Q 28Double agent Juan Pujol García, codenamed Garbo, received wartime decorations from which countries?
Both Nazi Germany and Britain
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.
Q 29Anna Chapman was arrested in the United States in 2010 as part of which Russian spy operation?
The Illegals Program
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.
Q 30ASIS is the foreign spy service of which country?
Australia
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.