5 Badass Celebrities Who Were Also Secretly Spies
by Karen Jones
We all know that being a star has its appeal -- mostly the money part of it. But with that life comes the inevitable, constant spotlight, always in the public eye and being recognized. That’s why it’s so cool to learn about people whose fame not only didn't stop them from badass espionage missions, but was sometimes specifically used to facilitate their covert operations. We’re talking about people like ...
Josephine Baker Passed German Military Secrets To The Resistance
If you know anything about entertainers in the early part of the twentieth century, you probably know Josephine Baker. Born in Missouri in 1906, she worked a succession of menial jobs until she got into vaudeville, where one of her most famous acts was a dance while costumed only in bananas and beads. If you’re even tacitly familiar with the concept of a skirt made from bananas, it’s because of Baker, and the real-life version is just as badass as you’d imagine:
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“This day is bananas, B-A-N-A-N-A-S …”
This took her to Paris where she became a huge success, and after her third marriage, to a Frenchman, she became a French citizen. And when France declared war on Germany in 1939, Baker was recruited by the Deuxième Bureau (French Intelligence). As one of the most famous entertainers in the world, she was ideally suited to hop around to other countries and mingle with high society, as well as German brass pretending to be such. And accordingly, like many, many men have done since the history of forever when in the presence of a beautiful woman, the German officers would show off how important they were by blabbing about who had the biggest “gun,” where to find their encampments should she be in the mood for a little tête à tête, and pretty much anything else she could innocently find a reason to ask, up to and including the day’s passwords. She passed all of this along to her superiors in La Resistance, some of it hidden in her sheet music and some pinned to her undies like the world’s most incriminating mad money.
She continued to stage shows to entertain Allied troops throughout this part of her career, too, despite suffering a miscarriage and developing several serious illnesses. After the war was over, she was awarded the Croix de Guerre, the Rosette de la Résistance, and Charles de Gaulle made her a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur. And after that, she became a prominent proponent of civil rights in the U.S., despite still being a French citizen and the controversy that surrounded some people taking issue with that.
Baker didn’t care, though. She spoke loudly against discrimination, turned down gigs from venues that supported segregated audiences, was recognized by the NAACP with her own day, spoke at the March on Washington, and was even approached by Coretta Scott King to take over as head of the Civil Rights Movement following her husband’s death.
Read that last part again and let it sink in.
Harpo Marx Smuggled Letters Out Of The Soviet Union
Arthur “Harpo” Marx might just be the second most famous Marx that ever lived, behind his brother Groucho but ahead of his other brother Chico and definitely more than Karl. A performer with his brothers since the age of 22, Harpo was hugely successful in vaudeville and made over a dozen films. Nicknamed for his musical instrument of choice, Groucho claimed that Harpo was so bad at learning his lines that they finally stopped giving him any.
That didn’t stop Harpo from touring and entertaining on his own, though, and in 1933 he spent some weeks in the Soviet Union, performing in various spots around Moscow. In Cyrillic his name was spelled ХАРПО МАРКС, so of course, he went around calling himself “Exapno Mapcase” during his stay. He was there primarily to assist in the U.S. sprinkling a little friendliness over the Soviets, since they were, you know, rumored to be cozying up to the Nazis and all.
During the course of this Soviet tour he became friends with Ambassador William Bullitt Jr., and on his last day in the country, Harpo was invited to share a cup of coffee before departure. That’s when Bullitt handed Harpo a stack of letters and begged him to smuggle them home. The ambassador didn’t tell him why they couldn’t go by diplomatic pouch, and the entertainer never asked, but reassured that his fame was such that nobody would interfere with him, Harpo agreed, hid them on his person, and got on the train to go home. When he reached the border and his fellow travelers began queuing for inspection, Harpo figured he was screwed when he was taken off the train and sent to the local headquarters where his passport and belongings disappeared. And then … he was treated to a lavish meal by the officers, and his luggage given the VIP treatment, because he was Harpo Freaking Marx.
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And because he demanded it.
This did nothing to assuage his fears, however, and for the remainder of his journey he automatically assumed every single person he met was a double agent. He kept to his stateroom during the voyage home, until he figured that might seem even more suspicious, so he ventured out until a few days in the open led to such paranoia that he panicked and fled back to his room.
He basically had constant fear sweats until he was finally met by two officials from the Secret Service after docking in New York, and even they scared the piss out of him before identifying themselves. But considering that only three years later, the Soviets enacted the Great Purge when hundreds of thousands of people were executed as suspected spies and other enemies of the state, we’ll go ahead and say that Harpo's fear during that little smuggling operation was totally justified.
Sterling Hayden Was A Paratrooper Who Fought With Yugoslavia’s Partisans
Sterling Hayden was a movie star so handsome that in only his second film appearance he was cast as the leading man. But after World War II started, he decided he’d rather lead men into battle instead, and enlisted in the Army, where he joined the Office of Strategic Services as a commando. During parachute training, he was injured badly enough to be discharged, but determined to do his duty, Hayden used a fake name to sign up again, this time with the Marines. During Officer Training his superiors figured out who he was soon enough and just gave him his old spot in the O.S.S. back.
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“And who’s Mr. Handsome new recruit over h- dammit, Hayden!”
During his service he parachuted into Croatia, earning a Bronze Arrowhead, and spent a year with Yugoslavian partisans fighting in Eastern Europe, smuggling supplies from Italy. He also helped capture a German patrol boat and organized the extraction of Americans held in enemy territory. Hayden was so good at his job that by 1945 he’d been promoted to captain and Josip Broz Tito awarded him the Order of Merit.
When the war was over, he just ... went right back to acting, even if some of his best-known characters weren’t quite as badass as he was in real life.
Alice Marble Went Looking For The Nazis’ Money
Alice Marble was a celebrated tennis player, had 18 Grand Slam championships under her belt, and was named the Associated Press’ Athlete of the Year in 1939 and 1940. She was so influential that when she was invited to endorse DC’s new comic book hero Wonder Woman, she turned that opportunity into a job as an editor, and established a regular feature that highlighted notable women throughout history.
Tragedy struck in 1944 when Marble had a miscarriage after an automobile accident, and again only a few days later when her husband, an Air Force pilot, was killed in action over Germany. She was in such grief that she attempted suicide, and when the U.S. government came knocking with a job offer she immediately accepted because she figured, “What the hell?” at that point anyway.
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“Yeah, I got it. Super top secret, life-threatening danger, blah blah blah.”
Remember that part in Mission Impossible II where Ethan Hunt tells his boss that the woman he has just recruited doesn’t have the skills to go on the inside and play a double game against the bad guy, who just so happens to be her former lover? If not, because you’ve done all you can to erase all memory of that terrible movie from your brain, forgive us for forcing you to revisit it with this awful and misogynistic dialogue made worse, somehow, by Anthony Hopkins: “...to go to bed with a man and lie to him? She’s a woman; she’s got all the training she needs.“
But it was that very idea behind Marble’s recruitment, and she was tasked with hooking back up with one of her previous lovers, a Swiss banker suspected of having intimate knowledge of Nazi finances. Unfortunately, her mission ended with her being double-crossed and shot in the back by a Nazi agent, but fortunately she escaped and was able to recover. Unfortunately, that’s pretty much the extent of what we know about her mission, given she was so tight-lipped about it that this part of her life wasn't even public knowledge until 1991 when it showed up in her posthumously published memoirs.
She kept on being a badass after the war, too, and was instrumental in breaking down the color barrier in women’s professional tennis by supporting Althea Gibson’s bid to compete in the US National Championship.
Moe Berg Spied On The Germans For The O.S.S.
Morris “Moe” Berg was a Major League Baseball catcher in the ‘20s and ‘30s with more brains than batting ability. He always seemed to be more of a scholar than an athlete, and his skills in the batter’s box were mocked even by his own teammates. Purportedly, they’d joke that even though he could speak 10 different languages, “... he can't hit in any of them."
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“Hey, Berg. How do you say, ‘Your baseball card sucks, too,’ in German?”
Still, he finished with an almost (?) respectable .243 batting average, which maybe isn’t too bad given Yogi Berra’s was .285? Look, this isn’t SportsCenter, and we’re not really up on baseball statistics. Regardless, near the end of his professional career, he was perhaps better known for making successful appearances on a radio quiz show called Information, Please, anyway.
When Pearl Harbor was bombed, however, Berg signed up for an Intelligence branch of the U.S. government, despite being nearly 40 years old. Originally sent to South America to keep tabs on U.S. troops there, he considered this to be a waste of his talents and took a job with the O.S.S. as a paramilitary operations officer, training field agents on how to infiltrate Yugoslavia by air. He was also sent to discover if there were any remaining rocket scientists or physicists worth recruiting (read: kidnapping) in Europe.
And perhaps craziest of all was his assignment to determine if the Germans had figured out how to build The Bomb, and if so, to personally see to it that they never actually did build it, by any means necessary. But Berg reported that they couldn’t, so his bosses -- now calling themselves the Central Intelligence Agency -- sent him to learn about the Soviets’ nuclear capabilities.
By now, Berg was becoming known for being a bit of a flake, and after sending back nothing pertinent to his Soviet investigation whatsoever, he resigned — or was forced to retire, depending on who you ask. But he never gave up the appearance of still secretly being a badass spy, and after his death, his sister accepted the Medal of Freedom in his honor, which he’d refused to take from President Harry S. Truman years earlier.
Oh yeah, and Paul Rudd played him in a movie. And his baseball card is enshrined at the headquarters of the CIA. Let’s see his old teammates make fun of that.
