14 Underrated Spy Movies Based On Real Spies

The Courier shines a light on what it's like to be a normal person thrust into an extraordinary position in times of war. The film focuses on Greville Wynne (played by Benedict Cumberbatch), a real British salesman who regularly went to Moscow for work in 1960. Wynne was approached by the British intelligence agency MI6 to meet up with Oleg Penkovsky (Merab Ninidze), a high-ranking Soviet official who decided to give secrets to British intelligence. While hesitant, Wynne agreed, and continued to pass intelligence between the two for almost two years. However, the Soviets eventually caught on and detained both Wynne and Penkovsky. Wynne remained in Soviet prison until 1964, when he was released back into British hands. Penkovsky was reportedly executed.

In the 2015 film Bridge of Spies, Tom Hanks is an insurance lawyer trying to negotiate an exchange between an American pilot and a Russian spy, played by Mark Rylance, who won a best supporting actor Oscar for the role. The Russian spy, Abel, was born in Britain, where his Russian father tried to indoctrinate employees in the factory where he worked. Before long, Abel and his father returned to Russia, where Abel became a spy for the Soviet Union. He worked in espionage in Europe for 20 years before obtaining a fake identity and moving to the United States in 1948. For nine years he transmitted messages to the Russians before being detained in 1957.

Tony Mendez was a CIA officer who spearheaded the “Canadian Caper” mission. In 1979, Iranian students took control of the US Embassy in Tehran in protest of an American-held Iranian. During the takeover, a few US diplomats managed to escape - but were still stuck in Iran. Mendez helped orchestrate a plan to get them back. Essentially, the Americans would pose as a Canadian film crew who were in town to scout film locations for a sci-fi movie. The 2012 film Argo details the ridiculous yet stunning success of the mission, with Ben Affleck playing Mendez, and also starring Bryan Cranston, Alan Arkin, and John Goodman. Argo won the Oscar for best picture in 2013.

As shown in the 2007 film Charlie Wilson's War, Charlie Wilson, a US congressman from Texas, became passionate about helping the Afghans fight back against the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Wilson, a Democrat, partnered with the CIA to develop one of the largest covert operations ever to aid the Afghans with weapons and supplies. The comedy-drama film, directed by Mike Nichols and with a screenplay by Aaron Sorkin, based on George Crile's biography of the same name, features Tom Hanks as Wilson, and also stars Julia Roberts, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Amy Adams. Hoffman played CIA officer Gust Avrakotos, earning a best supporting actor Oscar nomination.

In the 2007 film Breach, Robert Hanssen (Chris Cooper) is an American who turns against his country as a double agent. Born and raised in Illinois, Hanssen studied chemistry and Russian in college. He later studied accounting and began working for the Chicago Police Department when the FBI recruited him. In 1979, Hanssen, then working in counterintelligence, started selling secrets to the Soviets. When his wife found out, she demanded he stop, confess his sins to their priest, and donate money to their church. Hanssen stopped for a while, but in 1985 ramped up his spying efforts, even delivering the names of American double agents in the KGB. At least three of these spies were executed after the Soviets learned about them. Breach follows Eric O'Neill (Ryan Phillippe), Hanssen's mentee, who eventually took down Hanssen.

In 2003, Valerie Plame had been a CIA spy for more than a a decade. She was also married to former US Ambassador Joe Wilson, who wrote a scathing opinion piece about how the US government provided misleading information to make it look like Saddam Hussein had access to nuclear weapons. In response, several members of the CIA leaked to a journalist that Wilson was married to a spy who specialized in atomic warfare. The story ran in The Washington Post, blowing the cover Plame had worked years to build. The 2010 film Fair Game, based in part on Plame's 2007 memoir of the same name, details the monumental repercussions that cascaded upon Plame (Naomi Watts) as soon as the article was released.

Money is often the driver behind espionage. But sometimes, a spy is disillusioned with their country. That was the case for Christopher Boyce (AKA the Falcon, as he was very involved in falconry), portrayed by Timothy Hutton in 1985's The Falcon and the Snowman. While working as a file clerk at a federal agency in the mid-1970s, Boyce became upset at how the US was running its operations, so he decided to start selling national secrets to the Soviets. He roped in the help of “The Snowman," Andrew Daulton Lee (Sean Penn), a minor cocaine dealer who ran the secrets to Soviet agents in Mexico. However, Lee became careless and was eventually spotted throwing a note over the fence of the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City. This led to the end of their espionage, with Boyce soon detained in the US. He escaped from a federal prison, however, and was on the run for almost two years before the FBI finally tracked him down.

Before the start of WWII, many people were skeptical of and disgusted by SS doctrines. This anger reached Hollywood, whose creators decided to make an anti-Nazi film. So in 1939, Confessions of a Nazi Spy was released, based on a book by real-life secret agent Leon G. Turrou, who headed up the case finding German operatives in America. Directed by Anatole Litvak for Warner Bros., the film stars Edward G. Robinson, Francis Lederer, George Sanders, Paul Lukas, and many German actors. The movie shows how the Germans had infiltrated America, and follows a brave FBI agent who worked to track them all down.

Barry Seal made a lot of poor choices. Once just an ordinary commercial pilot, Seal was recruited by Pablo Escobar's cronies to smuggle large amounts of drugs into the United States on his planes. He was eventually caught by American authorities, and to avoid a long jail sentence, agreed to spy on the cartel for the DEA. The 2017 action-comedy film American Made stars Tom Cruise as Seal, and also features Domhnall Gleeson, Sarah Wright, Jesse Plemons, and Caleb Landry Jones. Seal's decisions ultimately caught up to him, when a hit was put out for him. He was eventually gunned down and killed by assassins.

The 2006 film The Good Shepherd, directed by Robert De Niro, follows Edward Wilson (played by Matt Damon) as he works his way up the American government channel, eventually becoming a founding member of the CIA. Wilson's career affects his personal wife, however. He and his wife both have affairs, and his relationship with his son becomes more and more strained. The character of Wilson was loosely based on James Jesus Angleton, who created and spearheaded the counterintelligence unit within the CIA. Angleton was a complicated man. On the one hand, his technique in finding patterns was essential in the war of intelligence against the Soviet Union. But his dogmatic and suspicious ways also meant he could go too far in accusing and spying on people, including Americans.

Vladimir Vetrov, whose story is told in the 2009 film Farewell, was a top Soviet KGB secret agent in the late '70s. However, he decided that he no longer supported the Soviet leadership and chose to give top KGB secrets to the French. Vetrov was given the code name “Farewell,” partly because if the Soviets caught on to his espionage, they would think he was working with the Brits or Americans, not the French. Vetrov used a French engineer who worked in Moscow as his courier. During his time working with the French, Vetrov gave over double agents, plans of Soviet missions, and more. He was eventually caught by the Soviets and executed for treason. In the film, Emir Kusturica plays Sergei Grigoriev, a character based on Vetrov.

Few things are worse than being lied to by the love of your life. This was the real-life case for Bernard Boursicot, a high-ranking French diplomat. Sent to China in the 1960s, Boursicot fell for an opera singer, Shi Pei Pu, he thought was a woman. But Shi was a man who hid his identity from Boursicot to gather secret intelligence for the Chinese government about the French. Shi even convinced Boursicot they had a child together, which led Boursicot to propose. The lies came out in a trial in 1986 where Boursicot was blindsided with the truth. The story was portrayed in the 1993 film M. Butterfly, starring Jeremy Irons as the fooled French man and John Lone as the opera singer (they have different names in the movie).

During WWI, because women were often undervalued and overlooked, they could sometimes get top secret information from men without raising suspicion. A particularly successful female spy was renowned Dutch exotic dancer Mata Hari, who picked up her Asian style of dancing while abroad with her husband. Hari's reputation led her to be able to sleep with many highly influential men, including military leaders. As WWI loomed, she reportedly began to work for the Germans, and for the French as a double agent. She was apprehended by the French in 1917 and killed by firing squad. Hari's life is portrayed in the 1931 film Mata Hari, which stars the legendary Greta Garbo as the dancer turned spy. The film was a commercial hit, though the version available today is more censored than the original (due to the 1934 Hays Code that dictated what could be shown in movies).

Spies usually work hard to keep their identities a secret, so a celebrity isn't an ideal candidate for a spy. But Chuck Barris, known for creating and hosting The Dating Game and The Gong Show in the ‘60s and ’70s, revealed in his 1984 autobiography, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, that he had worked for the CIA as an assassin during the same time period. Many people refuted his claim, and the CIA even said he had never worked for them, but Barris was tight-lipped about whether he had made the whole thing up. George Clooney saw the book as an opportunity for a great film, so he chose to make his directorial debut on a film of the same name based on the book, with a script by Charlie Kaufman. The 2002 film is full of famous faces, with Sam Rockwell portraying Barris, while Clooney, Julia Roberts, Drew Barrymore, and Maggie Gyllenhaal play supporting characters. Brad Pitt and Matt Damon make an appearance, too.