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...