Spy Agencies
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
50 free Spy Agencies trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This spy trivia quiz covers both the agencies and the agents. One half deals with the world's intelligence services: where the CIA, MI6, Mossad and France's DGSE are headquartered, how the KGB became the FSB, what the NSA does and which state the Stasi served. The other half is about the spies themselves and the great espionage stories: Mata Hari's firing squad, Kim Philby and the Cambridge Five, the CIA and FBI moles Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen, the Rosenbergs at Sing Sing, Bletchley Park and Enigma, Virginia Hall's wooden leg named Cuthbert, Ian Fleming's real wartime job, Operation Mincemeat, Gary Powers and the U-2, double agent Garbo and the 2010 Illegals Program. Questions range from easy to expert, and every answer has been checked against a reliable source.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Where is the CIA headquartered?
Langley, Virginia
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is headquartered in the George Bush Center for Intelligence in Langley, Virginia, a location often used metonymously to refer to the agency itself.
Q 02Since 1994, what building on the Thames at Albert Embankment has housed the UK's foreign spy service?
Vauxhall Cross
Vauxhall Cross: the SIS Building at 85 Albert Embankment, opened by Queen Elizabeth II in July 1994, houses MI6 and appears as its home in several James Bond films.
Q 03Israel's foreign intelligence agency trains its recruits at an academy near which city?
Herzliya
Herzliya: Mossad's training academy, the Midrasha, sits at the Glilot junction just south of Herzliya on Tel Aviv's northern edge, alongside the agency's headquarters.
Q 04In which city is France's foreign intelligence agency, whose HQ is nicknamed 'La piscine' after a nearby pool?
Paris
Paris: the DGSE headquarters sits on boulevard Mortier in the 20th arrondissement, beside the Piscine des Tourelles swimming pool that gave it the nickname 'La piscine'.
Q 05The KGB was headquartered in which city's Lubyanka Square?
Moscow
Moscow's Lubyanka, a Neo-Baroque building from 1897, also housed a prison, part of which is now a museum.
Q 06Which US agency, formally created by President Truman in 1952, specialises in signals intelligence?
NSA
It is headquartered at Fort Meade, Maryland, and has roughly 32,000 employees.
Q 07Which agency became Russia's main domestic security and counterintelligence service after the KGB?
FSB
FSB, the Federal Security Service, was reorganised in 1995 out of the Federal Counterintelligence Service and is the KGB's main successor inside Russia.
Q 08In what year was Israel's foreign intelligence agency formally established?
1949
1949: it began on 13 December as the Central Institute for Coordination, on Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion's recommendation to Reuven Shiloah.
Q 09Which French intelligence agency is primarily responsible for external intelligence gathering?
DGSE
The Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure (DGSE) is France's main foreign intelligence service, tasked with collecting information outside national borders.
Q 10Which UK agency is commonly known by the acronym MI6?
Secret Intelligence Service
MI6 is the common name for the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), the foreign intelligence agency of the United Kingdom, responsible for covert overseas intelligence collection.
Q 11The KGB was formed in March 1954 after the fall of which Soviet security chief?
Beria
Beria's fall in June 1953 triggered a restructuring of the MVD that produced the KGB, with Ivan Serov as its first chairman.
Q 12Which Israeli agency handles foreign intelligence collection and covert operations?
Mossad
Mossad is Israel's national intelligence agency, primarily responsible for intelligence collection, covert operations, and counter-terrorism beyond Israel's borders.
Q 13The Stasi, formally the Ministry for State Security, was the secret police of which state from 1950 to 1990?
East Germany
East Germany's Stasi infiltrated almost every aspect of daily life through a vast network of informants.
Q 21Before creating James Bond, Ian Fleming served in which British wartime organization?
The Naval Intelligence Division
The Naval Intelligence Division: Rear Admiral John Godfrey, Director of Naval Intelligence, recruited Fleming as his personal assistant in 1939; Fleming helped plan Operation Goldeneye, later the name of his Jamaican house.
Q 22Which Revolutionary spy is quoted as saying 'I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country'?
Nathan Hale
Nathan Hale: the 21-year-old Continental Army captain was hanged by the British in New York on 22 September 1776 after being caught gathering intelligence behind their lines.
Q 23Soviet spy Richard Sorge, posing as a German journalist in Tokyo, warned Moscow in 1941 about what?
Q 14Which Dutch-born exotic dancer was executed by a French firing squad in October 1917 as a German spy?
Mata Hari
Mata Hari was born Margaretha Zelle, and her stage name means 'sun' in Indonesian; historians still debate how much spying she actually did.
Q 15Kim Philby was revealed in 1963 to belong to which Soviet spy ring recruited at a British university?
The Cambridge Five
The Cambridge Five: Philby, Burgess, Maclean, Blunt and Cairncross were recruited at Cambridge in the 1930s; Philby fled to Moscow in January 1963 after being confronted in Beirut.
Q 16Which CIA counterintelligence officer was convicted in 1994 of spying for the Soviet Union and Russia?
Aldrich Ames
His betrayals led to the execution of several CIA sources in Moscow. He bought a Jaguar and a house in cash while on a government salary.
Q 17Robert Hanssen, arrested in 2001, spied for Moscow while working for which U.S. agency?
The FBI
The FBI: Hanssen, an FBI counterintelligence agent, spied for Moscow on and off from 1979 to 2001 and was arrested in February 2001 making a dead drop in Foxstone Park, Virginia.
Q 18Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed in 1953 at which New York prison?
Sing Sing
Sing Sing: the Rosenbergs died in the electric chair at Sing Sing prison in Ossining, New York, on 19 June 1953, the only American civilians executed for espionage in the Cold War.
Q 19At which English estate did the Government Code and Cypher School break Enigma and Lorenz?
Bletchley Park
Bletchley Park: the Buckinghamshire estate housed the Government Code and Cypher School from 1939, where Turing's bombes broke Enigma and the Colossus computers attacked the Lorenz cipher.
Q 20What did American agent Virginia Hall, 'the limping lady,' name her prosthetic leg?
Cuthbert
Cuthbert: Hall lost her leg in a 1933 hunting accident in Turkey, crossed the Pyrenees on the wooden leg in 1942, and in 1945 became the only civilian woman awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for the war.
Operation Barbarossa
Operation Barbarossa: Sorge's warnings of the June 1941 German invasion were ignored by Stalin; the Japanese hanged him in Tokyo in November 1944, and Moscow named him a Hero of the Soviet Union in 1964.
Q 24Which Russian-born British agent, fictionalized as the 'Ace of Spies,' served as a model for James Bond?
Sidney Reilly
Sidney Reilly: the 'Ace of Spies' worked for Scotland Yard's Special Branch and the early Secret Intelligence Service; the Soviet OGPU lured him into Russia and executed him in November 1925.
Q 25CIA pilot Francis Gary Powers was shot down over the Soviet Union in 1960 flying what kind of aircraft?
A U-2 spy plane
A U-2 spy plane out of Peshawar, Pakistan, was hit by a surface-to-air missile near Sverdlovsk; Powers was traded two years later for Soviet officer Rudolf Abel on Berlin's Glienicke Bridge.
Q 26Spy novelist John le Carré, a former MI5 and MI6 officer, wrote under a pen name; what was his real name?
David Cornwell
David Cornwell worked for both MI5 and MI6 before The Spy Who Came in from the Cold made him famous in 1963; in full he was David John Moore Cornwell.
Q 27Operation Mincemeat planted fake invasion plans on a corpse in 1943 to disguise the landing on which island?
Sicily
Sicily: the July 1943 Allied invasion was the real target; 'Major Martin's' planted papers pointed to Greece and Sardinia, and the idea was item 28 on a deception list Ian Fleming helped compile.
Q 28Double agent Juan Pujol García, codenamed Garbo, received military decorations from which countries?
Both Nazi Germany and Britain
The Germans gave him the Iron Cross for a spy network that never existed; Britain made him an MBE for helping sell the D-Day deception.
Q 29Anna Chapman was arrested in the United States in 2010 as part of which Russian spy operation?
The Illegals Program
The Illegals Program: Chapman was one of ten deep-cover SVR 'illegals' arrested in June 2010 and swapped in Vienna for four Russians held by Moscow, the biggest exchange since 1986.
Q 30In which year did an Australian prime minister first publicly confirm that ASIS existed?
1977
1977: a 1972 Sydney Daily Telegraph exposé blew ASIS's cover, but Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser only formally acknowledged the agency in October 1977, after the Hope Royal Commission on intelligence.