When reports started emerging that Taylor Swift was a secret agent for the Biden government, the United States Department of Defence shot them down in a statement to Politico: “As for this conspiracy theory, we are going to shake it off”.
During his Fox News show Jesse Watters Primetime, Watters had argued that Swift was “a front for a covert political agenda.” He went on to tell viewers: “Around four years ago, the Pentagon’s psychological operations unit floated, turning Taylor Swift into an asset.”
Celebrity spies are a thing, used by intelligence agencies around the world.Credit: Monique Westerman
It’s not the first time a celebrity has been accused of being a government agent and that’s not surprising - various intelligence agencies have form in this area.
Actor Cary Grant, singer/dancer Josephine Baker, chef Julia Child, actor Chaim Topol and fashion designer Coco Chanel - famously for the Nazis - are a few of the big names reputed to have worked as covert agents.
Grant is alleged to have worked for the FBI and British intelligence helping identify Nazi sympathisers in Hollywood and others with possible connections to the German regime during World War II.
Living in Paris in the 1930s, African American Josephine Baker was recruited by French military intelligence. As a superstar of the day, she was privy to many conversations at parties and gatherings, attended by German, Italian, and Japanese officials.
Baker wrote notes about what she heard in invisible ink - including on sheet music which was smuggled out - and she was later awarded the Croix de guerre by the French military honouring Resistance agents who fought with the Allies against the Axis forces.
Nobel Prize-winning American author John Steinbeck, known for The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men, reportedly offered his services to the CIA, gathering information for them in Paris in the 1950s. Likewise, Ernest Hemingway was allegedly recruited by both the Soviets and, later, the CIA.
Several big-name British authors were spies, two meta examples of which are novelists John Le Carre and Ian Fleming, the mastermind behind James Bond. Graham Greene is said to have worked for MI5 when he was in Vietnam writing The Quiet American.
Before she became the queen of modern cooking, Julia Child worked for the US spy agency that became the CIA, the newly formed OSS. Soon after America joined World War II, based in Washington, DC, Child worked as a junior research assistant in the Secret Intelligence Branch, moving onto a position developing ideas to keep sailors and downed airmen safe in the water.
Israeli actor Chaim Topol was identified as a spy only a month after his death last year. Best known for playing the lead role in Fiddler on The Roof, Topol worked for Mossad, the national intelligence agency of Israel. After his death at 87, his family revealed that in between acting gigs, Topol worked on reconnaissance missions for the Israelis, using his fame to gain access to high-profile locations around the world.
Chaim Topol, who died last year aged 87, worked for London branch of the Israeli secret service.Credit: AP
During the Cold War, jazz greats Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman were sent overseas by the US government in an exercise designed to promote democratic values in different parts of Africa. The experience inspired Armstrong to collaborate with Dave and Iola Brubreck on the musical, The Real Ambassadors.
Closer to home, Australians including writer Frank Hardy - best known for his book, Power Without Glory - actor Leonard Teale and ABC foreign correspondent Peter Barnett, all now deceased, were suspected of spying by ASIO, possibly because of their left-leaning politics.
Long before them, Tasmanian-born Hollywood-bound actor Errol Flynn was accused of spying for the Nazis, an idea later widely repudiated by various biographers.
During the 1979–1981 Iran hostage crisis, the CIA rescued six US diplomats under the guise of shooting a science fiction film. A memoir of it by CIA operative Tony Mendez (The Master of Disguise) became the basis of the 2012 film Argo, in which Ben Affleck played Mendez. The director of the CIA from 1997 to 2004 George Tenet gave permission for the operation to be revealed as a good news story that would reflect well on the agency.
One of the more bizarre spy-related claims is that the CIA wrote Wind of Change by German rockers Scorpions. The 1990 song – with its whistled intro – became inextricably linked to the fall of the Berlin Wall, thanks in part to footage used in its film clip. But vocalist Klaus Meine has said it was written before that, inspired by the band’s involvement earlier that year in the Moscow Music Peace Festival and changes in the Soviet Union.
The CIA’s possible involvement in the song’s creation is explored in the podcast of the same name, by journalist Patrick Radden Keefe. “The CIA saw rock music as a cultural weapon in the Cold War. Wind of Change was released a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and became the anthem for the end of communism and the reunification of Germany. It had this soft-power message that the intelligence service wanted to promote,” Keefe said of the idea.
In 2022, Scorpions altered the song’s lyrics to support Ukraine.
Make-up artists and illusionists are also used by intelligence agencies for help with disguise and trickery.
Speaking anonymously on the Wind of Change podcast - presumably so he can continue working as a spook - an American magician who also worked for the CIA makes the point that entertainment and espionage are not that different: “You call it an operation, we call it a performance.”
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