Hottest Female Spies in World History

According to the Iranians, former Miss North Dakota Roxana Saberi stepped off the pageant stage and into the murky world of espionage. Ms. Saberi would have you believe she is a journalist and human rights activist, but that did not prevent her from spending nearly half a year in the notorious Evin prison, accused of spying on behalf of the United States. She went on to pen a book about her ordeal and then got right back to the business of being a generally good person and not in fact a spy at all.

Unless you are a champion boxer or a Navy SEAL, chances are that Ms. Violette Szabo was tougher than you are. She died in a WWII German concentration camp at just 23 years old after serving as an agent with the French Resistance. At a time when most young people are pounding cheap cocktails and shirking the job search, Szabo was parachuting into occupied France to help run a spying and sabotage network, taking part in gun battles and generally being a badass.

Christine Keeler was at worst an unwitting spy, at best a woman with very loose morals who knew where her bread was buttered. Her involvement with British Secretary of State for War (the equivalent of the Secretary of Defense) John Profumo led to an incident known aptly enough as the Profumo Affair. See, Keeler was not only sleeping around with this married man who happened to be a higher up in the UK government; she was also sleeping with (among others) a man named Yevgeni Ivanov, who was later revealed to be a Russian spy. The affair alone would likely have sunk Profumo””the espionage love triangle was more than enough to end his government career.

She was a singer, a dancer, a seductress and a spy. Or so go the stories about Mata Hari, AKA Margaretha McLeod. Mata Hari was a Dutchwoman born in 1876 and executed in 1917 under suspicion of spying for the Germans during WWI. During her four decades alive, she was born into luxury, saw her family fall into poverty and married back into wealth, only to have that union crumble. She made a name for herself as a courtesan and exotic dancer, and eventually began to assist the German army by passing them information.

Redheaded vixen Anna Chapman is about as close as you can get to a Hollywood femme fatale spy. She was beautiful, classy and coy. And she was also likely sneaking sensitive information out of the US and back to her native Russia as part of a spy ring run by the the Russian Federation’s secret intelligence agency, the SVR. She rubbed shoulders with the elites in London and Manhattan, where she had a brief and strangely successful business career, now clearly a result of Russian cash infusions. In 2010, Chapman was caught along with nine other Russian nationals and would likely have been facing life in prison for her espionage had not she been deported back to Russia in a prisoner exchange program.