Rogue History

Spy balloons once marked a great leap forward in the art of intelligence gathering. No longer were soldiers safe from enemy reconnaissance on the ground. They could now be watched from the air! From the French Revolution to the Civil War, balloons loomed over battlefields. Join us in a time when an oddball inventor sent President Lincoln a decisive telegraph — from 500 feet above the ground.

The details of Walter Loving’s complicated double life remained classified for over 60 years. Born to formerly enslaved parents, he became a famous band conductor and an advocate for Black Americans. When the U.S. military grew paranoid that Black Americans were colluding with German spies, they recruited Loving to infiltrate his own community and de-radicalize leaders. So whose side was he on?

Juan Pujol García was a nobody. A failed chicken farmer, he bought his way out of service during the Spanish Civil War. But when Hitler came to power, he couldn’t just sit by and watch. He devised a daring plan: to stop the Nazis, he would get close to them. As a double agent, he could feed Nazi intelligence to the Allies. This is the bizarre true story of the spy who altered the course of WWII.

Not only was Chevalier d’Eon a respected diplomat, trusted spy, and cunning secret agent, they also were a pioneer of publicly expressing gender fluidity in 18th-century France. From an undercover mission in a Russian court to gathering intelligence against Great Britain to blackmailing a King with information that could have caused a war, d’Eon was a master of their craft.

The Edo period marked the start of 250 years of peace for Japan, but it came as a death sentence for shinobi. These highly trained spies mastered the art of deception, infiltration, and some even worked as assassins. But when these talented figures started dying out, legend and mythology took their place, and eventually turned into the classic ninja characters we see in movies and tv today.

In the 1940’s, the US government had a mission: find Soviet spies that had infiltrated their nuclear program. To do that, they needed to find a way to decode Soviet messages, notorious for being “unbreakable.” So they turned to the Venona Project. This group of talented mathematicians, consisting largely of women, went on to expose spies in nearly every agency in the federal government.

Moses Dickson, a traveling barber in the years before the Civil War, had a secret– he was one of twelve members of a covert society that planned to recruit men who were “courageous, patient, temperate, and possessed of sound common sense.” Their goal? Launch a coordinated insurrection against slaveholders and claim land for black people in the South. And they almost did.

In ancient Mesoamerica, an elite class of merchants helped build the Aztec Empire. How? By mastering the arts of spycraft, disguise, and self sacrifice. These Pochteca acquired plenty of wealth and status and they traveled between cities to collect tribute, trade for valuables, and most importantly work undercover to gather information. But this wealth and power sometimes came at a deadly cost.