On the brink of nuclear war, America’s bold response to the Soviet Union depended on an unknown spy agency operative.

The story of a young man from rural Ghana who bought a pair of secret camera glasses and got himself smuggled across the Sahara, to film crime and exploitation along the way.

In 2015, my friend and I went to Disney World. Three years later, she went on a solo trip to prison.

For the past 16 months, he had worked as a mole, posing as a militant jihadist in the Islamic State while passing critical information to a secret branch of Iraq’s national intelligence agency. His record was stunning: He had foiled 30 planned vehicle-bomb attacks and 18 suicide bombers, according to Abu Ali al-Basri, the agency’s director. Captain Sudani also gave the agency a direct line to some of the Islamic State’s senior commanders in Mosul.

Last week, as America’s top national security experts convened in Aspen, a strangely inquisitive Uber driver showed up, too.

There the man in the shorts—later identified as a Russian agent using the alias Richard Murphy of New Jersey—handed Michael Zottoli from Seattle two items: a flash memory card and a bag that held $150,000 in cash.

Within nine months they’d both be behind bars.

The double life of a KGB spy living in 1980s Manhattan.

In 1977, Johanna van Haarlem finally tracked down the son, Erwin, she had abandoned as a baby 33 years earlier. She immediately travelled to London to meet him. It was the perfect cover.

Ever since childhood, Brian Regan had been made to feel stupid because of his severe dyslexia. So he thought no one would suspect him of stealing secrets.

Their entire lives, Alex and Tim Foley thought their mom and dad were typical, boring American parents. Then the FBI showed up.

Jason Matthews worked at the CIA for more than 30 years. Then he started writing spy novels.

On applying to work as an undercover agent.

The death of a Russian dissident and how radioactive poison became a tool of assassins.

How a Mossad agent’s desperate bid to jumpstart his career led to the exposure of two top Hezbollah plants.

Kevin Fulton, a spy planted in the IRA, thought he was dead when he faced interrogation by a notorious IRA enforcer. But, it turned out, the enforcer was also an agent. How British intelligence undermined the IRA.