Espionage

Chevaliere d’Eon or Chevalier d’Eon? An 18th-century legal dispute between two French spies unravelled into a public battle about identity.

National security during the Second World War was threatened by the ‘enemy within’ – working-class women, suspected of betraying their country by taking in deserters and escapees.

All His Spies: The Secret World of Robert Cecil and Spycraft: Tricks and Tools of the Dangerous Trade from Elizabeth I to the Restoration bring Tudor and Stuart espionage in from the cold.

In the era of the early modern ‘secret state’, two notorious brothers set up an elaborate intelligence network, managing a vast array of spies and informers watchful for Jacobite plots against Britain.

Mystery surrounds George McMahon who, having tried to assassinate Edward VIII, outed himself as an agent of a ‘foreign power’. Does the discovery of new Italian documents solve the puzzle or obscure it further?

Switzerland was a hub for China’s spy networks in the Cold War. 

During the Franco-Prussian War a British wine merchant was imprisoned in Cologne, accused of being a spy. The public clamoured for the government to secure his release, but wartime diplomacy was not so straightforward. 

A history of the dirty business of wiretapping.

The 1930s spy ring who informed on technological advances in the defence industries.