5 Real-Life Spies and How They Blew It
Being a spy is a unique job in that half the people you work with are going to be really, really upset if they find out you’re doing it. You just really have to hope you’re at the right office when the news gets out. If not, you can kiss any hope of severance pay goodbye.
What you’re more likely in for is, unfortunately, the part of espionage that’s probably closer to what happens in the movies. Day-to-day spying might be a lot more boring paperwork and less snowmobile racing, but when you’re found out? Like the undercover icons of the silver screen, you’re likely headed to jail or the afterlife, posthaste.
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Some spies have managed to make it a successful career, but the more famous ones tend to be the agents who find themselves in a real pickle by the end of their assignment. Here are how five real-life spies got caught…
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg
The Rosenbergs were a married couple who are some of the most notorious spies in American history. Partly because the information they were selling was pretty important, being that it was about the atomic bomb. You know, there’s military secrets and then there’s all-caps, bright red “MILITARY SECRETS.”
Julius was already selling secrets to the Soviets in the 1940s, but it was his link to the Manhattan Project that, in retrospect, might have been a little too direct: his brother-in-law, David Greenglass. I like to imagine they were sharing a Scotch after Thanksgiving dinner, and Julius mumbled, “Hey, hypothetically, have you ever thought about selling state secrets to the Soviet Union?”
When another spy, Klaus Fuchs, was arrested, he didn’t know the Rosenbergs, but he did give up the courier they shared, Harry Gold. Gold then pointed the finger at Greenglass, and shared the less-than-covert phrase they used when first meeting: “I come from Julius.” Come on, man. Code names exist for a reason.
Robert Hanssen
Hanssen wasn’t only one of the most infamous spies to ever betray the U.S., but generally a giant weirdo. Things like secretly filming him and his wife having sex and trying to convert strippers to Catholicism aren’t part of why he got caught, but it’s a good indicator that the guy wasn’t exactly flying under the radar.
His name was given by another arrested spy as well, one included in this article, but inexplicably, that also didn't lead to his arrest. The FBI only started looking into him when other arrests failed to stop the flow of secret information, and they finally thought, “Hey, that Robert guy keeps doing some pretty suspicious stuff.”
They gave him a fake job and stuck him in an office full of cameras, and pretty quickly he arranged an information hand-off with the Russians as his spy alter-ego, Ramon Garcia. The FBI, not the Russians, showed up at the location, and as they arrested him, he had one question for them: “What took you so long?”
Aldrich Ames
If Hanssen is a stain on the CIA’s reputation, Ames is a full-on cup of spaghetti sauce right down the front of their shirt.
Ames wasn’t only not a particularly good spy, he wasn’t even a good CIA employee. The fact that he was able to operate for almost a decade is less because he was a fastidious man and more because the CIA thought he was an idiot. He didn’t even bother to hide his ill-gotten gains, suddenly showing up to work with new suits, new cars and a whole set of new teeth.
You’d think “FBI employee with a lot of unexplained money” would raise red flags, but apparently not. He said the money came from his wife’s rich family, and the Central Intelligence Agency apparently thought, “Fair enough.” Eventually, when he came under suspicion, they went through his trash and found a torn-up note with spelling errors planning a spy meet.
If you’re a spy, here’s my advice: Buy a good shredder. Ames was arrested, and when he was, he gave up another spy: Robert Hanssen. To which the FBI apparently responded by going, “Eh, maybe later. One’s good.”
John Anthony Walker
Marriage is built on trust, but I’d say that “running a massive espionage ring” is still something you might want to keep to yourself. After all, there’s always the chance that you eventually get divorced, and your beloved wife becomes an alcoholic who really, really hates you.
That was a chief mistake made by Walker, a Navy officer who sold secrets to the Soviets. No matter how you divvy up the joint bank account, there’s no way to get sole custody of your biggest secret. Unfortunately for Walker, his ex-wife eventually had enough and called up the F.B.I. one night and told them what he'd been doing.
Shi Pei Pu
The Chinese spy and opera singer Shi Pei Pu was destined to get caught from pretty much day one thanks to an incredibly unwieldy cover. The source of Shi’s information was an almost two-decade love affair with a French diplomat, Bernard Boursicot. Two decades in which the French diplomat failed to realize that the Chinese woman he was in love with was a man in disguise.
You’d think 20 years would be enough to pick up on some key information, but Shi’s grand plan apparently included only having sex in the dark, and at one point, telling Boursicot he was pregnant. He was not, but he did show up with an adopted child that he claimed to have birthed. It should be said that while he was bisexual, Shi used male pronouns, except with Boursicot, for his entire life. However, he didn’t seem particularly attached to them, saying in an interview, “I used to fascinate both men and women. What I was and what they were didn’t matter.”
If any of this sounds familiar, it’s likely because this story inspired the Broadway play M. Butterfly.
