ESPIONAGE

The First Spies (Part of the “ESPIONAGE” series).
The oldest weapon in the human arsenal is not the spear or the sword — it is information.

Thousands of years before the first modern intelligence agency opened its doors, the pharaohs were sending scouts into the Sinai, Assyrian kings were reading intercepted letters from vassal states, and Chinese...

Every civilisation discovered the same secret. None learned to defend against it.

In 1488, a woman named Josine Hellebout received a professional salary from the city of Ypres — for military intelligence work. Her existence remained unknown until a single researcher found the evidence in municipal archives in 2022. She is not an exception....

Simon Wiesenthal, who spent decades working with and against every major intelligence service on earth, once described the Vatican’s intelligence apparatus as the best he had ever encountered. That remark tends to surprise people. It shouldn’t. The Holy Alliance has been running continuously since 1566 — which makes it older than the CIA, the...

Aldrich Ames destroyed the CIA’s Soviet spy network for $4.6 million and a Jaguar. Robert Hanssen passed nuclear war plans to Moscow for 22 years. Neither was ever polygraphed. Both sat in the same buildings as the people hunting them.

Double Agents is a global history of betrayal in espionage — why it happens, how it goes undetected for years or...

Three thousand years ago, the penalty for revealing China’s silk secret was death — not just for the individual, but for their entire family. The secret held for two millennia. Then a princess hid silkworm eggs in her bridal crown, and the monopoly began to crack.

It would not be the last time.

A Dutch clerk spent nine years copying secret...

The deadliest weapon in the history of espionage was never a gun, a cipher, or a satellite. It was a lie.

In 1274 BCE, two “deserters” stumbled into the camp of Pharaoh Ramesses II and told him exactly what he wanted to hear: the enemy was still far away. They were Hittite plants, and their lie nearly destroyed the Egyptian army. More than three...

The services that mastered new technology first won the intelligence war. Those that fell behind lost it.

The Spy’s Arsenal tells the full story of how intelligence services equipped themselves across twenty-five centuries — from the first hidden messages of the ancient world to the artificial intelligence systems that now identify military...

They didn’t recruit him. They didn’t turn him. They killed him.

Assassination is the oldest tool in the intelligence trade — and the least understood. For as long as states have gathered secrets, they have also decided, coldly and deliberately, when a human being was too dangerous to leave alive. Spies Who Kill, Spies Who Die is the first truly...

The spy and the storyteller have never been as separate as either side pretends.

For centuries, espionage and culture have been locked in a hidden feedback loop. Real spies became famous writers. Celebrated writers became real spies. Performers smuggled secrets past the enemy, intelligence agencies quietly bankrolled the art the public believed...