Til Death Do Us Part? Couples Who Spy Together

Some couples do everything together - including spying. 

Allied (2016): Pitt stars as a Canadian officer whose wife (Marion Cotillard) may be a German spy
Allied: Brad Pitt stars as a Canadian whose wife (Marion Cotillard) may be a German spy

Hollywood spy couples like The Americans and Mr. & Mrs. Smith often mixed business with pleasure but what happens when wedded, real-life operatives can’t take their eyes off of each other? The results were explosive for these five spy teams.
             

Karl Koecher and his beautiful wife Hana
Karl Koecher and his beautiful wife Hana

The CIA Swingers

Karl and Hana Koecher were an ‘it’ couple in D.C.’s social circles during the 1970s, an era marked by sexual liberation and women’s rights. Karl was a Slovakian intellectual, an undercover agent who spoke four languages. He excelled at collecting kompromat at ‘swingers’ parties where CIA and Pentagon officials traded wives. Hana was a decade younger than her husband, a beautiful, blue-eyed, blonde intelligence officer. She and her husband came as a unit and worked as a unit but what happened when they tried to leave as a unit? Read The Swinging Spies.

The Peanut Butter Spies: Diana & Jonathan Toebbe
Diana & Jonathan Toebbe

The Peanut Butter Spies: Diana & Jonathan Toebbe

The Toebbes looked like many Maryland couples - two children, a house in the burbs, and plans to retire - except the Toebbes planned to fund their sunny retirement by selling secrets about nuclear warships. They hid flash drives in a peanut butter sandwich, gum wrapper, and BandAid cover. Even from her prison cell, Diana Toebbe was relying on spy tradecraft to bamboozle her get-out-of-jail-free card. Read The Peanut Butter Spies.

Til Death Do Us Part? Couples Who Spy Together

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Some couples do everything together - including spying. 

Allied (2016): Pitt stars as a Canadian officer whose wife (Marion Cotillard) may be a German spy
Allied: Brad Pitt stars as a Canadian whose wife (Marion Cotillard) may be a German spy

Hollywood spy couples like The Americans and Mr. & Mrs. Smith often mixed business with pleasure but what happens when wedded, real-life operatives can’t take their eyes off of each other? The results were explosive for these five spy teams.
             

Karl Koecher and his beautiful wife Hana
Karl Koecher and his beautiful wife Hana

The CIA Swingers

Karl and Hana Koecher were an ‘it’ couple in D.C.’s social circles during the 1970s, an era marked by sexual liberation and women’s rights. Karl was a Slovakian intellectual, an undercover agent who spoke four languages. He excelled at collecting kompromat at ‘swingers’ parties where CIA and Pentagon officials traded wives. Hana was a decade younger than her husband, a beautiful, blue-eyed, blonde intelligence officer. She and her husband came as a unit and worked as a unit but what happened when they tried to leave as a unit? Read The Swinging Spies.

The Peanut Butter Spies: Diana & Jonathan Toebbe
Diana & Jonathan Toebbe

The Peanut Butter Spies: Diana & Jonathan Toebbe

The Toebbes looked like many Maryland couples - two children, a house in the burbs, and plans to retire - except the Toebbes planned to fund their sunny retirement by selling secrets about nuclear warships. They hid flash drives in a peanut butter sandwich, gum wrapper, and BandAid cover. Even from her prison cell, Diana Toebbe was relying on spy tradecraft to bamboozle her get-out-of-jail-free card. Read The Peanut Butter Spies.

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American CIA-KGB double agent Edward Lee Howard (far left)

The Jack-in-the-Box Spies

As the sun set over Santa Fe in September 1985, Mary and Edward Lee Howard gave their FBI surveillance team the slip. As Mary turned a corner, Howard rolled out of the car into the bushes. A dummy popped up in his place. CIA graduates of the Farm call this trick the ‘Jack-in-the-Box’. Howard and his wife were trained CIA operatives about to be deployed to Moscow as a husband-and-wife spy team when things went south. Howard was accused of being a KGB mole and fired but was he really the fall guy in a clever spy game? Read The Jack-In-The-Box Spies.

The Communist Spies Who Duped MI6: Kim Philby and Litzi
Kim Philby and Litzi

The Communist Spies Who Duped MI6

British double agent Philby was 20 when he married Litzi Friedmann, an Austrian Jewish communist whom he had met in Vienna. It was Litzi who arranged for Philby to meet one of her contacts in London’s Regent Park, a meeting that would change the course of his life. Philby had no real job prospects and no role with British intelligence when he was recruited by “Otto”, his Soviet handler, but that all changed when Philby climbed the ranks of MI6. But how did he get away with it for so long? Read The Communist Spies Who Duped MI6.

The Atomic Spies: Ethel and Julius Rosenberg
Ethel and Julius Rosenberg


The Atomic Spies

Robert and his brother Michael were aged six and 10 when their parents Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed for conspiring to pass intelligence about the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union. The 1950s case still isn’t closed. Robert, now a New York lawyer, is fighting to have his mother exonerated and there are unsettling questions about her death sentence. America was in the midst of a Communist red scare. Was Ethel Rosenberg innocent of the charges? Read The Atomic Spies.

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