There are accounts of spies and espionage dating back thousands of years. The so-called Amarna Letters, a collection of diplomatic correspondence from Egypt from the mid-14th century B.C., discusses matters of intelligence-gathering, and according to the Old Testament, Moses sent 12 spies into the land of Canaan to assess it for possible invasion.
People become spies to serve their country or to betray it. In the latter case, they may be motivated by greed or financial need, by ideology, by the pressures of blackmail, or simply by boredom. They may end up garlanded with honors or executed for their activities, or sometimes simply walk away from clandestine activities and live long lives in peace.
While most of history’s most famous spies have been men — Nathan Hale, Sidney Reilly (known as “the Ace of Spies”), Richard Sorge, Rudolf Abel, Kim Philby — there have also been a large number of women involved in spying over the centuries.
Legend attributes espionage activities to an Ancient Greek woman named Agnodice — but historians believe she was a mythical character. England’s first female spy may have been the 17th-century playwright Aphra Behn. The earliest example in America is a mysterious figure known only as Agent 355, said to have been a member of George Washington’s spy network.
In order to assemble a list of some of the most famous female spies in history, 24/7 Tempo consulted sources including The International Spy Museum, The History Press, Britannica, Intell.gov (a website of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center), and various articles on the subject published by the CIA.
The list is far from complete, but singles out spies who have become particularly well-known in the news and/or popular culture — the prime example being the woman who called herself Mata Hari, a name that became a generic term for dangerous females — or who have had particularly dramatic effect on the course of history.
It should be noted that a half-dozen of the 16 figures appearing here were recruited by the UK’s Special Operations Executive to ply their tradecraft against the Nazis in German-occupied France during World War II. Hundreds if not thousands of other women bravely fought the same fight, on behalf of the Allies, the Free French, or the various groups that constituted the French Resistance. (Here are 35 horrifying images of World War II.)
Scroll down for the most famous female spies in history:
Rose O’Neal Greenhow (1813-1864)
- Who she spied for: Confederacy
- Conflict: Civil War
Greenhow was a Washington D.C. socialite, friendly with a wide range of top politicians and army officers, before the Civil War. After hostilities began, she began leaking military plans to the Confederates, and Jefferson Davis later credited her with helping the Rebels win the First Battle of Bull Run. She was found out and she and one of her daughters, “Little Rose,” spent five months in jail, and were then deported to Richmond, VA, the Confederate capital. She died in 1864 when her rowboat overturned off the coast of North Carolina while she was fleeing a Union gunboat.
Elizabeth Van Lew (1818-1900)
- Who she spied for: Union Army
- Conflict: Civil War
Born in Richmond, VA, which became the Confederate capital, Van Lew was educated at a Quaker school in Philadelphia, and became an ardent abolitionist. When the Civil War broke out, she and her mother went to work helping Union prisoners in a Richmond hospital, passing information from them to the Union Army. She later developed a spy network that continued to feed intelligence to the North throughout the hostilities. After Richmond fell, Ulysses S. Grant named her the city’s postmaster, though local residents widely shunned her, considering her a traitor.
Harriet Tubman (1822-1913)
- Who she spied for: Union Army
- Conflict: Civil War
The revered anti-slavery activist, herself born into slavery, is perhaps best-known for her tireless and remarkably successful work with the Underground Railroad, shepherding escapees northwards after passage of the Fugitive Slave Act — but she also served as a nurse and then an armed combatant and spy for the Union Army during the Civil War. Intelligence she gathered enabled Union forces to free countless African-Americans and destroy Confederate strongholds.
Maria Isabella (Belle) Boyd (1844-1900)
- Who she spied for: Confederacy
- Conflict: Civil War
The so-called “Cleopatra of the Secession,” born in Virginia, became a Confederate spy after she grew close to Union officers who had been assigned to monitor her activities (she had killed a soldier who insulted her mother, but was acquitted of murder charges). Boyd gathered information and passed it along to Stonewall Jackson’s forces, among other Confederates. Arrested on numerous occasions, she somehow avoided being jailed. Surprisingly, she later married a Union navy officer in England, and stayed on to become an actress there after his death, before returning to the U.S., where she died of a heart attack in Wisconsin.
Margaretha Geertruida MacLeod (Mata Hari) (1876-1917)
- Who she spied for: France, Germany (?)
- Conflict: World War I
MacLeod (née Zelle) was a Dutch exotic dancer and courtesan who performed under the name Mata Hari, a Malay word for the sun (literally “eye of the day”). Inveigled into spying for the French against the Germans during World War I, she was later accused of collaborating with them and passing on information about France’s war plans. She was arrested in France and accused of having been responsible for the deaths of 50,000 French soldiers. Although some believed her innocent of the charges (as she maintained that she was), she was executed by firing squad. The term “Mata Hari” subsequently became a synonym for a femme fatale.
Lise de Baissac (1905-2004)
- Who she spied for: UK
- Conflict: World War II
Born in Mauritius, de Baissac later moved to Paris with her family. When the Germans took the city, she and her brother Claude moved to London, where he was recruited by the UK’s Special Operations Executive, a secret government espionage and sabotage group. Lise was later accepted into the SOE herself, and was considered competent enough to lead her own spy network. She participated in two missions in occupied France, working closely with the French Resistance. Among other accomplishments, she conveyed messages about the location of German forces to the Allies before the D-Day invasion. De Baissac survived the war and worked as an interior decorator in Marseille, dying there at the age of 98.
Josephine Baker (1906-1975)
- Who she spied for: France
- Conflict: World War II
Born in St. Louis but adopted by the French as a national treasure, Baker was a singer, dancer, and actress, said to have been the first African-American woman to play the starring role in a feature film — a 1927 silent called “Siren of the Tropics.” At the onset of World War II, however, she took on a different part: Recruited by France’s military intelligence unit, the Deuxième Bureau, she befriended German, Italian, and Japanese dignitaries in occupied Paris, gleaning information from them that she passed along to the French. After the war, she was awarded the Médaille de la Résistance and other honors in recognition of her service. She later became active in the U.S. Civil Rights Movement and spoke at the March on Washington in 1963 alongside Martin Luther King.
Virginia Hall (1906-1982)
- Who she spied for: UK, USA
- Conflict: World War II
A contemporary of Lise de Baissac in Britain’s Special Operations Executive, Hall founded a network of spies in France, one of whom owned a brothel frequented by German officers — which turned out to be a font of information taken from Nazi pillow talk. She also helped engineer the successful escape of a dozen fellow agents from a French prison. She later continued her activities as a member of America’s Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner to the CIA — and subsequently joined that organization. She felt underused and disrespected by the agency’s mostly white male establishment, however, and was forcibly retired at the age of 60.
Mathilde Carré (1908-2007)
- Who she spied for: France, Germany
- Conflict: World War II
Nicknamed “La Chatte,” “The She-Cat,” for her stealthiness, Carré joined a French-Polish espionage group in Paris, Interallié, after her country fell to the Germans. The network was betrayed by a captured member and Carré and other members of Interallié were arrested. She reportedly immediately switched sides, giving her captors the names of other members and even accompanying them on their arrest raids. After the war, she was charged with treason by the French and sentenced to death, but the sentence was commuted and she ended up spending only five years in prison. She died in Paris at the age of 98.
Nancy Wake (1912-2011)
- Who she spied for: France, UK
- Conflict: World War II
Born in New Zealand, Wake was married to a Frenchman and living in Marseille when the Germans invaded France. She became a courier for an escape network, helping downed Allied pilots cross into Spain. When the Nazis discovered her activities, she fled to Spain herself and then the UK — where she joined the Special Operations Executive. She parachuted back into France to serve as a liaison between the SOE and the French Resistance. Post-war, after a stay in Australia, she returned to the UK, living for years at the Stafford Hotel in London before moving to an assisted living home, where she died — at the age of 98, like two other spies on this list.
Odette Hallowes (1912-1995)
- Who she spied for: UK
- Conflict: World War II
Born Odette Marie Léonie Céline Brailly in France, Hallowes was recruited by the Special Operations Executive in England in 1942 and sent back to France, where she made contact with members of the French Resistance, acted as a courier, and helped establish a safe house in Burgundy. She was captured by the Gestapo, imprisoned, and tortured, then sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp in northern Germany. Remarkably, she survived, and later testified against her captors at a war crimes trial. She received numerous medals from the UK, as well as France’s Legion d’Honneur, and lived to be 82.
Noor Inayat Khan (1914-1944)
- Who she spied for: UK
- Conflict: World War II
Born in Moscow to Indian Muslims, Khan was recruited by the Special Operations Executive, trained as a clandestine radio operator, and sent into occupied France. When the Germans started to arrest members of her network, her handler in London wanted to fly her home, but she was the only person broadcasting from Paris and wanted to stay. She was taken into custody on several occasions herself, and was eventually imprisoned, spending nine months in shackles before being transferred to the Dachau concentration camp in Bavaria, where she was executed.
Violette Szabo (1921-1944)
Violette Szabo.
- Who she spied for: UK, France
- Conflict: World War II
Szabo was born Violette Bushell to a British father and French mother in Paris. As a young woman working in an armaments factory in England, she met and married Étienne Szabo, an officer in the French Foreign Legion. In the early days of World War II, she served as a switchboard operator for the Post Office in London during the Blitz, then enlisted in the Auxiliary Territorial Service, receiving anti-aircraft training. It is unknown who recruited her into the Special Operations Executive, but as she was fluent in French, she was sent into occupied France on two occasions. On her first mission, she gathered information of the arrests of members of an important Allied spy network. Her second sortie, when she was sent to aid Resistance fighters in acts of sabotage, ended in tragedy when she was arrested and sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp, from which she never returned.
Ethel Rosenberg (1915-1953)
Ethel and Julius Rosenberg became the first Americans executed by the federal government for espionage.
- Who she spied for: Soviet Union
- Conflicts: World War II, Cold War
Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were the most notorious American spies of the 20th century. Ethel Greenglass met Julius at a Young Communist League meeting, and they married in 1939. Both remained dedicated communists, and believed that the Soviet Union — a U.S. ally during World War II, but an adversary afterwards — should keep up with America’s military technology. To that end, Julius, having recruited an engineer who had worked on the Manhattan Project, which developed the first nuclear weapons, passed copious secret nuclear and other military secrets to Moscow. Ethel was his assistant throughout his treachery. The couple was found out in 1950, arrested, and after a contentious trial, executed in 1953. Their sons and other interested parties long maintained that they were innocent, and victims of Cold War hysteria, but documents revealed after the fall of the Soviet Union removed all doubt as to their guilt.
Ana Montes (1957- )
- Who she spied for: Cuba
- Conflict: Post-Cold War
Montes was a senior analyst at the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, specializing in Cuban military capabilities. But she had left-wing proclivities, and had apparently been recruited by a Cuban intelligence agent while she was pursuing a master’s degree at Johns Hopkins University in the 1980s. It is believed that she spied for Cuba, passing along classified information, including the names of American spies on the island, for some 17 years. Her actions may also have resulted in the deaths of others in Latin America, as well. Arrested by the FBI in 2001, she was sentenced to 25 years in prison on a plea bargain, but released early, in 2023. She now lives in Puerto Rico.
Anna Vasilyevna Chapman (1982- )
- Who she spied for: Russian Federation
- Conflict: None
A glamorous redhead whose father was a KGB official, Chapman was recruited as a so-called sleeper agent by the SVR, the Russian Federation’s overseas intelligence group, probably around 2000. Her brief was to identify and recruit possible American collaborators. CBS News reported that she “allegedly used fake identities, coded radio transmissions and encrypted data to avoid detection.” She was arrested in 2010, and pleaded guilty to a charge of conspiracy to act as an unlawful agent of a foreign government. Almost immediately, she was returned to Russia as part of a spy exchange. Since then, she has become a celebrity in her homeland, hosting a TV show, appearing as a runway fashion model, and working for a major bank, among other things. She also reportedly proposed to Edward Snowden, who apparently turned her down. (These are the worst cases of espionage in U.S. history.)