Good luck visiting the Wall of Spies Experience in Bethesda, Md. The museum is housed inside the National Counterintelligence and Security Center headquarters, one of the most secure buildings in the country, and to get in, you kind of have to be a spy.
Far from an honor roll, the Wall of Spies names and shames more than 130 Americans who have betrayed the country. Their stories are right up the NCSC’s alley, since it guards against insider espionage.
“It’s a wall you don’t want to end up on,” Dean Boyd, chief spokesman for the agency, said in a recent phone interview.
Because it is closed to the public, the NCSC has slowly been bringing the museum online for all to see. Its newest exhibit, which went live last week, focuses on spies during the American Civil War.
There was Thomas Nelson Conrad, a Methodist preacher from Virginia who used his chaplain garb to cross into Washington, D.C., and collect information on Union troop movements. His reports helped Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee trounce the Union in the Battle of Fredericksburg in 1862. Conrad was arrested three times during the war; twice he was let go, and once he escaped.
Many Confederate spies were women. One of the most famous was Rose Greenhow, a wealthy widow and socialite who lived across from the White House. She organized a spy ring that relayed information via ciphers, Morse code and messages sewn into secret pockets and tapestries.
Even after she was caught and placed under house arrest, Greenhow continued to spy, even using her 8-year-old daughter to transmit messages on candy wrappers. In 1862, both of them were held for several months in the Old Capitol Prison before being deported to the Confederate capital of Richmond. She toured Europe to gin up support for the Confederacy, and while returning by ship, she drowned off the coast of North Carolina. The weight of the gold sewn into her dress dragged her underwater.
Younger women also became Confederate spies, like Belle Boyd, who at 17 began flirting with Union soldiers staying at her family’s hotel in Front Royal, Va. When she got useful information from these soldiers, she passed it on to Confederate Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson. Boyd was repeatedly arrested and let go until she was deported to Richmond. When she attempted to escape to England in 1864, her ship was captured by the Navy. While trying to charm one of her captors, naval officer Samuel Wylde Hardinge, she instead fell in love; they married a few months later.