Photo by Sara Cottle on Unsplash
A former CIA officer is running Washington DC’s best walking tour, and it’s got absolutely nothing to do with marble or monuments.
“Excuse me,” I say to a woman loitering by the fountain in Washington, D.C.’s Dupont Circle, making my first pass at international espionage. “Is there a good hotel bar nearby?”
“Yes,” she says, not missing a beat.
Right. A clandestine catch-up with the CIA isn’t something I make a habit of, so there is a very real chance I’ve just accidentally implied I wanted to take a total stranger for a drink. In broad daylight. Worse, she’s answered like she is keen. Which leaves me with no way of knowing whether I’ve found my contact or simply cornered a very obliging local into an accidental first date at the Tabard Inn…
I’m already imagining two women awkwardly nursing martinis while I try to explain that no, actually, I thought you were a spy, and also I’m married, and also please don’t call security
The lady in question adds, “I recommend the Tabard Inn.”
Thank heavens. Contact.
Who is my contact, and why does she know all this?
Rosanna Minchew is a former CIA operative and the founder of Spyher, a tour company staffed entirely by ex-intelligence professionals leading espionage-themed walks through the real streets where their careers played out. I, on the other hand, am, on the evidence of the last five minutes, a genuinely terrible spy. My face does a full confession the second anyone asks me a question I wasn’t expecting. I sweat under mild scrutiny. And yet here I am, standing by a fountain, having successfully made contact, having just run my first covert op and somehow not buggered it up. Sort of.
Rosanna spent fifteen years in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, running recruitment and hard target operations across South Asia, Europe, Latin America and Iraq, then three more years at the Department of Homeland Security working threat interdiction at US ports of entry. Spyher grew out of that career. It now runs five different tours across DC and beyond, staffed by a roster of ex-CIA, ex-FBI and former foreign officials, one of whom used to run the agency’s own tradecraft school. It’s a genuinely unusual business model, a company built entirely on people who spent their careers not talking about their jobs, now doing exactly that for a living.
It’s also worth noting that it is also a woman-founded, woman-led business in an industry that has spent most of its history politely suggesting women weren’t cut out for it. Rosanna doesn’t lead with that as a grievance. She leads with it as fact, delivered with the same dry efficiency she probably used to deliver an intelligence brief. Then she names a few of the women who did the real work and got none of the credit, and the reason none of us have heard of them isn’t that the work wasn’t extraordinary. It’s that being forgettable was, professionally speaking, kinda the point.
The Embassy Row case files
© Aleney de Winter
Once we’re moving, Rosanna treats every embassy along the row like it’s got a file open on it, because to her it does. The walk starts at Dupont Circle itself, where a Russian media mogul and Kremlin insider was found dead in 2015, a case that’s still unsolved. From there it’s up Massachusetts Avenue proper, past the Gilded Age mansions of Millionaires’ Row, sold off one by one to embassies once the Depression cleaned out the fortunes that built them. We pass the Cosmos Club too, the private society founded in 1878 that’s counted four presidents and dozens of Nobel laureates among its members, the kind of room where the right conversation with the right person over brandy could quietly change the course of a career.
The walk ends near Sheridan Circle, where a memorial now marks the spot where a car bomb killed exiled Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier and his American colleague Ronni Moffitt on 21 September 1976, planted, it later emerged, by agents of Pinochet’s secret police, in broad daylight, on a Washington street, in peacetime. There are plenty of stories along the way, but you’ll have to join the tour for the rest.
She’s not doing architecture for architecture’s sake, and she’s not doing true crime for the thrill of it either. Every house gets a person attached to it, a defector, a handler, a death nobody ever quite explained. And she’s not narrating any of it from a book. She did this job. So when she tells us how you actually read whether someone’s willing to break or how a recruitment really goes when the person on the other end knows exactly what you’re doing, she’s not speculating about what that felt like. She’s telling us because she’s done it.
The dead drop
Partway along, Rosanna stops talking and hands us a job. There’s a map, a location and a single task. I must retrieve the item without looking like I am retrieving anything. Easy, in theory. In practice I became something like a badly written extra from a sitcom, the one hovering badly in the background pretending to read a newspaper upside down. My hands, which have functioned normally for five decades, suddenly don’t know where to be or what to do, and I forget, briefly, how a human being is supposed to walk.
But I find my drop and I make the retrieval. I did not get arrested for loitering, which I am counting as a personal triumph on par with anything I’ve ever achieved. Turns out I have a genuine knack for lurking, a skill I would very much like to put on my CV, if only there were a section for it.
What sets Spyher tours apart
Of course, there are dozens of tours worth your time in DC, from the monument circuits to the historic house museums to wherever you’d rather be eating your way through the city. But this one does it a little different.
Spyher works because it’s a business built by people who spent their careers doing this job, not performing it. Rosanna isn’t reading from a script written for tourists, she’s telling you about her own working life on the footpath where it happened. It’s the best walking tour I’ve done in this city, and one of the few that’s left me wanting to book straight back in on a different route.
More ways to go undercover in Washington D.C
Embassy Row isn’t the only route on offer. Spyher runs several other spy tours across Washington DC, and I’d happily book straight back in for any of them.
Georgetown Spy Tour A 90-minute walk through the neighbourhood’s WWII and Soviet-era history, with a stop for lunch in the actual restaurant booth where Aldrich Ames, one of the most damaging double agents in CIA history, first met his KGB handler.
Capitol Hill Spy Tour This 90-minute tour starts at the Cannon House Office Building and rung through counterintelligence history, America’s first spy hunters, Civil War spies imprisoned in DC and the tradecraft the KGB used to steal secrets straight out of Congress. Finishes near Union Station, and yes, they’ll test whether you’re being followed.
Arlington National Cemetery, CIA Memorial Wall Tour Led by a former intelligence officer,this 2.5-hour tour traces the graves of people who lived and died in this same shadow world, alongside the Kennedy gravesite, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and the Beirut Barracks Memorial.
SpyKids Mission Training For the under-twelves. this two-hour tour includes gadget labs, a laser maze obstacle course, a disguise workshop and an escape room challenge, run by actual former intelligence officers.
Vintage Espionage Wine Tasting A blind tasting of two sparkling, two Chardonnay and two Pinot Noir, guessing Old World against New World, guided by a former CIA officer who is now a sommelier and goes only by the codename DECANTER/1. Private bookings only for ages 21 and over!
A side order of spy
© Aleney de Winter
I’d visited the International Spy Museum the previous afternoon, before my SpyHer adventure, and it’s absolutely one of the best museums in Washington, which is no small praise in a city that is stacked with Smithsonians.
There’s an Enigma machine, a KGB lipstick pistol built to deliver a single 4.5mm round at point-blank range, an entire section on women who ran networks under Nazi occupation, and a cover identity assigned to you at the door that gets tested as you go. I loved every bit of it and happily lost two hours to the glass cases.
But that’s the word for it. Glass. You look at the lipstick pistol and think, ‘Extraordinary’, then move to the next case. But stand on Embassy Row with a woman who ran assets for a living and you think about it differently, because she’s not behind glass; she’s next to you, and the story isn’t just finished, framed and museum-lit.
The museum shows you the artefact. Spyher’s spy tour in Washington DC shows you the decision behind it, which, at least from where I’m sitting, is the really interesting part.
Book it
Given how quickly a former CIA officer telling you where the bodies are buried (sometimes literally) sells out, I’d book ahead rather than turning up hopeful. (paid link) Book the Embassy Row Spy Tour with Spyher
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An award-winning travel writer and photographer, Aleney de Winter was fresh from school when she first set off to explore the far reaches of Australia with a two-man tent and a beaten-up Kingswood for company. Three decades, and two kids later, and she's still on the go, with her itchy-footed offspring in tow. 