20 Celebrities Who Secretly Worked As Real Spies

Even years before she was teaching Americans how to cook, Julia Child was rejected by the military for being too tall. But in 1942 she was accepted into the Office of Strategic Services, a World War Two version of the CIA, where she worked on a project to develop a chemical shark repellent for the Navy. Eventually she ran the OSS registry in Ceylon and China. It was a careful, meticulous job, cataloging and protecting classified files, earning her a U.S. medal for civilian service.

In 1939, Ian Fleming, the future author of the James Bond novels, joined the Royal Navy’s Naval Intelligence Division, serving under Rear Admiral John Godfrey, the inspiration for Bond’s superior officer, “M.” Fleming authored a memo suggesting ways to deceive the Germans, among them the plan to plant a corpse with fabricated documents on a beach along the enemy’s coast. That particular scheme eventually materialized as Operation Mincemeat. He also created a commando force designed to capture German codebooks and cipher machines. Fleming devised the plans, though other men executed them.

A catcher in Major League baseball with a degree from Princeton University, Moe Berg knew several languages. The OSS, the U.S. wartime intelligence agency, tasked Berg with determining how close Germany was to building an atomic bomb. In December 1944, disguised as a student, he showed up at a lecture in Zurich given by Werner Heisenberg, Nazi Germany’s premier nuclear physicist, armed with a pistol and orders to shoot him if his speech implied that Germany was on the verge of an atomic bomb. Berg concluded that Germany was not close and spared Heisenberg’s life, reporting back to Washington.

In 1939, Josephine Baker, an American-born cabaret singer who had made a sensation of herself in Paris, joined French military intelligence, thankful for the liberty France had given her. She toured Portugal, Spain and North Africa, compiling information about Axis troop movements. She wrote her reports in invisible ink on her musical scores and tucked other papers into her clothing. Dazzled by her celebrity, customs officials never searched her, and she handed over what she carried to Charles de Gaulle’s Free French headquarters.

The notorious Mata Hari (Margaretha Zelle) was a Dutch dancer of some renown in pre-war Europe. Recruited by a German officer in Madrid in 1915 as the agent known as H21, she was sent to Paris to collect intelligence for Germany, earning 20,000 francs for the assignment. The French intercepted messages from the Germans identifying her as H21. She was arrested, put on trial, and shot by a French firing squad in 1917. Today historians agree that her contributions to the German cause were quite limited, and that the French wartime prosecutors overplayed her role in order to excuse their own failure to detect German espionage.

In 1933, Harpo Marx, the silent comedian of the Marx Brothers, was visiting Moscow just after the United States recognized the Soviet Union for the first time, when there were still no official mail routes to the new U.S. ambassador there. Ambassador William Bullitt asked Marx to carry sealed embassy dispatches to Western Europe. Marx stuck the letters on his leg under his trousers and managed to get them past Soviet border controls. He successfully delivered the letters and returned to Hollywood.

German-born Hollywood superstar Marlene Dietrich refused lucrative offers by the Nazis to return home, and in 1939 became a U.S. citizen. She was recruited by the OSS, the U.S. wartime intelligence agency, psychological warfare branch, and contributed to the Musak Project. This saw her record German-language songs containing homesick, anti-Nazi lyrics which were then broadcast over the radio to reach enemy soldiers and persuade them to desert. It was distinct from her more high-profile tours entertaining American troops. For this more private effort, she later received the U.S. Medal of Freedom.

Roald Dahl, who went on to write many well-known children’s books such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, was posted to Washington, D.C., in 1942 as an air attache after a plane crash during his Royal Air Force service left him unable to take part in combat. He was recruited by Sir William Stephenson, who led a clandestine British intelligence agency that operated out of the United States. Dahl leveraged his smooth manners and upper-crust contacts to provide intelligence about U.S. foreign policy and to counteract American isolationism, relaying information to Churchill’s administration.

Cary Grant, the actor born in Britain, was an informant in a secret British intelligence program operating in North America during World War Two. In his role as a spy, he attended parties with wealthy celebrities and listened in on conversations at Hollywood studios. Whenever he heard anyone who might be sympathetic to the Nazis or secretly funding pro-Nazi causes, he reported back to his bosses. He donated his own salary from movies like The Philadelphia Story to the British war effort. His service as an informant remained unknown until long after the war.

The Nobel Prize-winning author Ernest Hemingway obtained authorization from the U.S. ambassador to Cuba in 1942 to set up a small, clandestine counterespionage outfit in Havana dubbed the Crook Factory to monitor potential Nazi collaborators. He also outfitted his fishing vessel, the Pilar, with communications equipment and cruised along Cuba’s coastline into 1943, looking out for U-Boats and reporting any sightings back to the Naval Intelligence Command. Despite FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s suspicion of the entire scheme, no actual fighting took place, as Hemingway merely observed and reported.

Among the earliest British film stars to return to England after the outbreak of World War Two in 1939 was David Niven, who was an Oscar-winning actor. He joined “Phantom,” a mobile signal intelligence group that collected real-time information on enemy troop movements and transmitted it directly to Allied headquarters. Niven remained with Phantom during the 1944 Normandy campaign, serving as a liaison between British and American commanders. He survived the war and received a U.S. decoration for his wartime efforts.

Hollywood leading man Sterling Hayden broke his contract with the studio to enlist in the Marines following the attack on Pearl Harbor, and was recruited by the OSS, the U.S. wartime intelligence agency, using the name John Hamilton. While stationed in Italy, the highly skilled sailor smuggled weapons into Yugoslavia aboard small wooden fishing vessels which he maneuvered around German blockade ships in the Adriatic Sea to supply the Yugoslav Partisans. He was also air-dropped behind enemy lines to establish contacts and retrieve downed Allied pilots. Hayden survived the war and received the Silver Star.

A four-time Oscar winner, John Ford directed a film unit for the OSS, the U.S. wartime intelligence agency, during World War Two. He was commissioned as a Navy captain. His film crews filmed reconnaissance images of enemy positions and troop movements. In 1942 he was hit with shrapnel while filming under fire from a Japanese attack on Midway Island. The footage he created won an Oscar and provided military intelligence. Ford coordinated filming at the Normandy landings and survived the war.

The British playwright Noel Coward was the head of Britain’s propaganda bureau in Paris when war broke out in 1939. Winston Churchill is said to have dismissed Coward’s aspirations for genuine intelligence work, saying “Go and sing to them when the guns are firing, that’s your job!” But Britain’s intelligence services did employ Coward: his concert tours through South America and the United States provided opportunities to assess the political views of the leaders there and to fight Nazi propaganda, information which was fed back officially to London.

In 1941, the English novelist Graham Greene was recruited into Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service by his sister, who was already an employee. In 1942 he was sent to Freetown, in Sierra Leone, where he kept watch on nearby Vichy French military activities and looked into diamond smuggling, which might have been financing the Axis cause. In 1943 Greene returned to London to work in counterintelligence, taking orders from Kim Philby, who was at the time not yet exposed as a Soviet double agent. Greene used his assignment in West Africa as the basis for one of his novels.

Years before starting the Boy Scouts, Robert Baden-Powell was a British intelligence officer who mapped enemy fortifications in foreign lands including Dalmatia and South Africa. To avoid detection, he pretended to be a butterfly enthusiast, and hid the plans for enemy fortifications in the drawings of butterflies. He drew them in such a way that they contained the floor plans, measurements of walls, locations of gun positions and other details. This is clearly visible in his preserved sketchbooks. He published a book about the technique in 1915, years after founding the Scouting movement in 1907.

W. Somerset Maugham, among the highest paid writers of his day, was also a secret agent for British intelligence during World War One. Following a stint in Switzerland, he was dispatched to Petrograd in August 1917 with 21,000 pounds in secret British funds to support Aleksandr Kerensky’s provisional government and keep Russia in the war against Germany. Nevertheless, the Bolsheviks took power that October, swept along by political currents far beyond the ability of a lone agent to influence. Maugham fictionalized the episode in his novel Ashenden.

Leslie Howard, the actor who played Ashley Wilkes in the movie Gone with the Wind, spent much of the war engaged in British anti-Nazi propaganda. In early 1943, British intelligence recruited him for a lecture tour of Spain and Portugal to undermine Nazi propaganda and discourage Spain from joining the war. In June 1943, his civilian aircraft was shot down by German fighters over the Bay of Biscay, and all aboard were killed. Even today, there is controversy as to whether Germany actually intended to kill him, or mistakenly thought Churchill was aboard.

In the UK, Anthony Blunt, an established British art historian in charge of the royal family’s art collection, was recruited as a Soviet agent while a student at Cambridge University in the 1930s. He subsequently worked for Britain’s counterintelligence service during World War Two, and, as part of the Cambridge spy ring along with fellow Soviet double agent Kim Philby, passed thousands of documents to Moscow. He was outed by a defector in 1964, but British authorities kept this quiet, and Blunt only confessed in secret in exchange for immunity. He remained free until Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher announced his espionage in 1979 and stripped him of his knighthood.

In the Civil War, Harriet Tubman, already well known for her work on the Underground Railroad in helping slaves escape, became an official Union Army scout and spy coordinator in South Carolina. Tubman assembled a team of Black scouts in South Carolina who scouted Confederate army movements and located hidden mines in the rivers. Based on the information they provided, she assisted in piloting Union gunboats past Confederate fortifications on the Combahee River in June 1863, freeing more than 700 slaves. She is recognized as the first woman to lead an armed assault in American history.

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