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Free Spy quiz: 72 trivia questions and answers — famous spies & secret codes. Easy to hard, with explained answers. No sign-up.
Start this quiz →🖨️ Printable version (20 questions + answers)
Double agents, coded messages, improbable gadgets and deception operations: this quiz takes you into the real history of intelligence, from the Spartans' scytale to Edward Snowden's revelations. Could you unmask a spy or crack a secret message?
This quiz currently has 72 questions, ranging from easy to hard, available in French, English and Spanish when the Spanish translation is available.
Warm up before the quiz with these 14 trivia questions and their explained answers: click a question to reveal the answer.
Answer: Mata Hari. Born Margaretha Zelle, she fascinated officers all over Europe. Historians now doubt she passed on any truly useful information: she may mostly have served as a scapegoat.
Answer: The FSB. The KGB was dissolved in 1991. Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer, himself headed the FSB in 1998 before coming to power.
Answer: Samuel Morse. The SOS distress signal (· · · — — — · · ·) was chosen for its simplicity, not because it stands for 'Save Our Souls': that reading came afterwards.
Answer: Written in invisible ink on her sheet music. Thanks to her fame, she crossed borders without being searched. Awarded the Legion of Honour and the Croix de Guerre, she was laid to rest in the Panthéon in 2021.
Answer: Military Intelligence. MI5 handles domestic security, MI6 espionage abroad. Both acronyms date from the time when they came under military intelligence.
Answer: An arranged seduction to compromise a target or make them talk. During the Cold War, the KGB and the Stasi often used seductive agents, nicknamed "swallows" and "Romeos".
Answer: Enigma. Polish mathematicians had paved the way as early as 1932; at Bletchley Park, Alan Turing and his colleagues then turned codebreaking into an industry. Colossus was a British computer and Ultra the codename for the intelligence obtained.
Answer: The Cambridge Five. Diplomats, MI6 officers or advisers, they passed secrets to Moscow for decades. The shock in Britain was huge: the enemy was at the heart of the elite.
Answer: Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Their trial, at the height of the Cold War, divided the world. Soviet archives opened later confirmed Julius's role, while Ethel's guilt remains hotly debated.
Answer: The one-time pad. The Washington-Moscow hotline reportedly used it. Its weakness is practical: keys as long as all the messages must be carried in secret.
Answer: The black cabinet. Developed under Richelieu and Louis XIV, it unsealed letters, copied them and closed them again without a trace. Courtiers knew… and sometimes wrote deliberately to be read.
Answer: British Naval Intelligence. As assistant to the Director of Naval Intelligence, he devised bold deception operations. Many elements of 007 come from that experience.
Answer: The initials of its three inventors. Ronald Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman published it in 1977. A British intelligence mathematician had found the idea a few years earlier… but it was classified.
Answer: Virginia. The CIA headquarters is named after George H. W. Bush, a former director of the agency who became president. The NSA is based in Maryland.
58 more questions are waiting for you in the quiz!