Spies and the Children and Close Relatives of Spies

Son of CIA agent Miles A. Copeland Jr. (along with siblings who include Ian and Miles III), Stewart Copeland grew up partly in the Middle East where he met, through his father, infamous double agent Kim Philby and probably Ian Fleming who was a friend of friends. Copeland's father was supposedly a retired spy in Lebanon, but he was actually still active. This fact was more obvious to the locals than to other spies. Locals referred to the Copeland home as 'the CIA house'. Young Stewart considered Philby a drunken boor and once asked his father why he came over so often. His father shushed him. It later turned out that Miles was under orders to keep an eye on Philby. Copeland, père, was also an accomplished musician as well as a math whiz.

Son of Jona von Ustinov, a German-born journalist and British MI5 agent, who was nicknamed 'Klop' which is Russian for 'bed-bug'. Like father, like son, Klop was roly-poly, multi-lingual, and an engagingly funny storyteller. He could seem like a bumbler, but he was actually on top of things at all times, considered especially good at running double agents and interrogating enemy spies. He worked in London and Switzerland. Years later, Peter still recalled his father hosting clandestine meetings in the Ustinov home. After World War II, Klop continued to work for British Intelligence against the KGB.

She spied for Nazi Germany while working as an actress in Mexico and the U.S. during the 1930s and 1940s. She influenced Mexican officials to sell oil and other resources to Germany. At the end of the war, she was detained but never tried, and lived for many years in New York City.

The singer-dancer was an ex-patriot American who became a French citizen. When Germany invaded France in 1940, she joined the French Resistance and worked as a courier, storing information in invisible ink on her sheet music. She also hid Jews and weapons in her home.

During World War II, she joined the OSS (precursor of the CIA) in Washington, DC, at first as a research assistant to OSS founder William Donovan. She later worked for the Emergency Sea Rescue Equipment Section, which was actually a Q-like group (as in the Bond series), where she helped develop a shark repellent. Afterward, she was assigned to the Far East where she was classified as a ‘senior civilian intelligence officer’. In 1946, she married Paul Child, also an OSS officer.

The novelist and television writer was a military counterintelligence officer during the Korean War. He wrote a spy novel, ‘The Kremlin Letter’, on a dare after he told a publisher that the difference between a detective novel and a spy novel should be that, 'In a detective novel, the hero solves a crime; in a spy novel, the hero commits one’.

She is a former CIA case officer and author of 'Blowing My Cover'. She has both consulted on and appeared in military-themed films (sometimes with zombies). Recently she has begun working as a writer for Zulu 7, a production company run by producer-director A.K. Waters (whose own murky background involves intelligence and/or special operations).

The former Boston Red Sox baseball player joined the OSS during World War II and later worked for the CIA. He was given the authority to decide whether Nazi physicist Werner Heisenberg should be assassinated, but he nixed the idea after concluding correctly that the Nazis were not anywhere near developing an atomic bomb.

The writer joined MI6 during World War II. Later, he was among the many MI6 officers that found it difficult to believe that his friend and former boss, Kim Philby, was really a double agent.

The children’s author and television host worked as an attaché at the British embassy in Washington, DC during World War II, but this was a cover for his actual work with British Security Coordination, a branch of MI6 that coordinated with parts of the U.S. government to plant pro-British and anti-Nazi propaganda in U.S. media, among other covert activities.

A writer for such spy TV series as 'The Americans', he was a CIA officer up until 1994.

An executive producer of 'State of Affairs', he once worked in the CIA's National Resources Division. He and co-executive producer Rodney Faraon have formed Aardwolf Creative, a production company named after the CIA's code word for special cables from station chiefs back to headquarters.

An executive producer of 'State of Affairs', he was a CIA officer who used to give daily briefings within the CIA. He and co-executive producer Henry 'Hank' Crumpton co-own Aardwolf Creative, a production company named after the CIA's code word for special cables from station chiefs back to headquarters.

The writer and occasional actor ('Syriana' 2005) was a CIA officer from the 1970s to the 1990s. He asked then-CIA director George H. W. Bush for permission to look at CIA files about the Kennedy assassination, and was granted access, but when he went to look at the files, they were missing. This began a decades' long personal investigation into the assassination that culminated in a History Channel documentary series called 'Tracking Oswald' (2017) in which his knowledge of U.S. and Soviet espionage 'tradecraft' informed his production and presentation of an investigation into assassin Lee Harvey Oswald's contacts with foreign governments prior to the Kennedy assassination.

Shaw's nephew, Col. Alexander Scotland, was a member of the British Secret Intelligence Service during both world wars. During the Second World War, he served as the director of the 'London Cage' which used what would today be called 'enhanced interrogation techniques' on German POWs. Scotland created a crisis for the government when the retired intelligence officer tried to publish a frank, 350-page account of the Cage only nine years after the war.

Milne's nephew, Timothy Milne, was a member of the British Secret Service during the Second World War and the Cold War. When Tim's father died, A.A. Milne became his father figure, and unless he approved of a boy, he would not let young Tim associate with him. His uncle not only approved of Tim's schoolmate, Kim Philby, but let the boys travel around the European continent together. Later bringing Tim into the spy business, Philby was, all the while, a double agent, secretly working for the USSR. Tim wrote a book, 'Philby', which was suppressed until 2014.