20 Awesome Spy Facts

1. British spies used to pretend to be stupid, absentminded, tourists, hiding sketches of military installations in the drawings of butterflies and rock striations.

2. There was a German spy sent into Canada during WW2, but he decided to use his funds to move to Ottawa and then surrendered to Canadian authorities. They let him go because he didnt do any damage or even spying

3. In the 1960s, the CIA spent 20 million on a cat equipped to spy on Soviets, but it got hit by a taxi almost immediately after it was released for its first mission.

4. Chevalier dEon was French spy, diplomat, lady-in-waiting, swordsman and a soldier it was only discovered after her death, in 1810, that she was a fully-formed man, not a woman.

5. In 2009, it was found that Earnest Hemingway was a failed KGB spy.

6. In 1917, Germans built a 25-foot-tall armor-plated fake tree with a soldier sitting in it to spy on Allied forces. The Germans waited until nightfall and cut down one of the real trees to replace it with the fake one with artillery firing the whole time, so the Brits wouldnt hear the axes.

7. George Koval was Soviet master spy that infiltrated the Manhattan project, stole nearly all of Americas nuclear secrets, single-handedly provided the key technology for Russias nuclear arsenal, and was only discovered as a spy in 2002.

8. At the age of 19, Gevork Vartanian, a Soviet Armenian spy operating in Iran, led a team in 1943 that helped foil a Nazi plot to assassinate Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin who were meeting in Tehran.

9. When a ship ran aground in the early 1800s at Hartlepool UK, the only survivor was a small monkey. The monkey was interrogated, subjected to a lengthy court trial on the beach, and then Hanged as a French spy.

10. There is a method spies can use to log keystrokes acoustically from a computers keyboard. No software installation necessary

11. North Korea has abducted in addition to around 485 South Koreans, Japanese, Chinese, Malaysians, French, Italians, and other citizens mainly for them to teach languages at spy schools.

12. Kim Philby, who serves as the head of the anti-Soviet division of MI-6, was in fact found to be a soviet spy in 1963.

13. The word lollapalooza was a shibboleth used by American soldiers in the Pacific to identify Japanese spies, who used to mispronounce it as rorrarooza

14. The writer Roald Dahls mission, as a spy for the British government, was to seduce powerful US women in order to gather useful intelligence. For this reason he had to sleep with countless high society women.

15. Saddams reason for refusing nuclear inspectors was that he thought they spied for the US, which in fact was true.

16. Sarah Edmonds, a white woman from Canada starting working as a spy for the Union Army at the age of 21, infiltrated Confederate territory in Virginia in the disguise of a black man. She stole blue prints to a fort, and burned some spies before escaping back north

17. Sergeant Stubby was the only American war dog to be promoted to sergeant through combat in WWI. He saved his regiment from surprise mustard gas attacks, found and comforted the wounded, and even once caught a German spy by the seat of his pants, holding him there until American soldiers found him

18. Before digital cameras, film from spy satellites had to be ejected from the satellite, and retrieved mid-air by specially designed aircraft lest it fell into enemy hands.

19. Just after WWII, multiple short wave radio stations located around the world appeared. These stations transmit letters and numbers, presumably to spies and are still being operated today.

20. James Bond was modeled after a real spy named Wilfred Biffy Dunderdale, MI6s agent in Paris, he was also friends with Ian Fleming and it appears that several of Dunderdales stories ended up in Flemings books.