Conspiracy Theorists Think Taylor Swift Is a Government Spy. These Celebs Actually Were.

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This story is a collaboration with Biography.com.

Is Taylor Swift a secret government agent? The conspiracy theory sounds ludicrous, but in some right-wing circles, the world’s biggest pop star is being called a “Pentagon asset” who is part of a “psyop” to “rig the Super Bowl” in order to sway the 2024 Presidential Election for incumbent Joe Biden.

According to The Guardian, the right-wing influencer Jack Posobiec first spread the conspiracy theory. Posobiec, who “a Southern Poverty Law Center investigation found had ‘collaborated with white supremacists, neo-fascists, and antisemites for years,’” per The Guardian, claims that “they” are “using” Taylor Swift, who is in a high-profile relationship with the Super Bowl LVIII-bound Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce. Who “they” are is unspecified.

Meanwhile, Vivek Ramaswamy, whose own defeat in the Republican presidential primary did not require any rigged sporting events, declared that Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are “an artificially culturally propped-up couple,” and Jack Lombardi, who lost the U.S. House Illinois District 14 Republican primary in 2022 by more than 6,000 votes, tweeted out, “I have never been more convinced that the Super Bowl is rigged” after the Baltimore Ravens lost to the Kansas City Chiefs by a mere 7 points in the 2024 AFC Championship.

These conspiracy theorists have yet to provide concrete proof to support their claims. Additionally, they struggle to justify why an undefined collective of “liberals” would orchestrate a vast scheme to propagate “wokeness,” particularly targeting a team steeped in contentious, racially insensitive customs that are prime fodder for critical essays.

Here’s the truth: There’s no substantiated proof the Super Bowl is rigged, certainly not as a ploy to influence the election in favor of President Joe Biden with support from Taylor Swift, who previously backed him without any suggestion of some grand sports conspiracy.

Except, of course, that this wouldn’t be the first time an arm of the U.S. government has been accused of using musicians to influence a political outcome. Nor is it true that celebrities have never, knowingly or unwittingly, committed covert acts on behalf of a global superpower.

Indeed, the baseless conspiracy theory accusing Taylor Swift of rigging the Super Bowl brings to mind the rumored—or, in some cases, confirmed—examples of celebrities who were also government spies.

A History of Celebrities as Government Assets

In the spring of 2020, Crooked Media dropped an engrossing eight-part podcast series delving into the sensational accusation that it was actually the Central Intelligence Agency who wrote the iconic 1990 power ballad “Wind of Change,” by the German heavy metal band Scorpions, in an effort to end communism.

Although the podcast didn’t unearth definitive proof of the CIA’s hand in composing “Wind of Change” (a claim that Scorpions lead singer Klaus Meine emphatically rejected), it did unearth some shady undertakings surrounding the Moscow Music Peace Festival’s origins. These questionable activities on the outskirts of the main story are, more often than not, characteristic of the ways in which the CIA has been known to operate in similar contexts.

After all, was Jerry Garcia singing “I’m Uncle Sam, how do you do?” in “U.S. Blues” a confession that he was secretly a Fed this whole time? No. But does Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter appear in some CIA documents relating to MK-ULTRA? He sure does.

Just because Deadheads embracing the “turn on, tune in, drop out” mantra at concerts in Haight-Ashbury may have unwittingly experienced LSD circulated by government agents, it doesn’t imply they were aware of this sinister backdrop. For musicians, the CIA may not be writing their songs, but the agency could be playing an unseen role behind the scenes. Such was the case in the tragic tale of Nina Simone.

Nina Simone and the CIA

Nina Simone was a defiant and outspoken musician and activist, whose willingness to sacrifice her career to promote causes she believed in never wavered. Considered “...the voice of the Civil Rights Movement,” as Biography notes, Simone composed powerful protest songs like “Mississippi Goddam” that took America to task.

In 1961, Nina Simone joined a roster of artists commissioned to visit Nigeria to perform on behalf of the American Society of African Culture (AMSAC). Simone and her peers believed that AMSAC was an independent organization dedicated to fostering ties between Africans and African-Americans. Only years later did it come to light that AMSAC served as a cover for another agency: the CIA.

During a period when the CIA aimed to win the ideological and cultural war against the USSR, the agency used American artistic expression to subtly showcase the advantages of capitalist democracy over communist rule. Consequently, Nina Simone, an artist actively campaigning against many of her own government’s policies, unknowingly became a mouthpiece for that same establishment.

By the late 1960s, a beleaguered Simone, grappling with financial strain and mental health challenges, left the country that had exploited her, bitterly referring to it as “the United Snakes of America.”

Gloria Steinem, John Steinbeck, and Ronald Reagan

Of course, there are plenty of celebrities who worked with the CIA, in one way or another, of their own volition. For example, the U.S. wasn’t the only player in the Cold War to orchestrate concerts as a form of undercover propaganda. Parallel to the Soviet Union’s support for the World Youth Festivals, the CIA founded the Independent Research Service, which was ostensibly used to deploy American students to undermine these events.

The leader of that front organization? Famed writer and feminist activist Gloria Steinem, who The New Yorker reports “...knew perfectly well where the money was coming from and never regretted taking it.”

Nor was Steinem the only activist author who was willing to stick it to the USSR on behalf of Uncle Sam.

It’s easy to read John Steinbeck’s heartrending works of the families abandoned by cold capitalism during the Great Depression and assume he had leftist leanings. After all, in The Grapes of Wrath, he equates Marx and Lenin to Paine and Jefferson, and states, “For the quality of owning freezes you forever into ‘I’, and cuts you off forever from the ‘we.’”

But Steinbeck had a noted distaste for Soviet-style communism. The Christian Science Monitor reports that, according to CIA documents released in 2012, Steinbeck’s distaste for the USSR was so strong that he volunteered his services to the agency during his European sojourn in 1952. “If during this [trip to Europe] I can be of any service whatever to yourself or to the Agency you direct, I shall be only too glad,” Steinbeck wrote to Gen. Walker Smith, the director of the CIA at the time.

Steinbeck saw communism as a threat to Europe, but he wasn’t terribly worried about it taking hold domestically. Not because, as he’s often misquoted as saying, the poor saw themselves as “temporarily embarrassed millionaires,” but rather, as he said in America and Americans:

Of course, just because Steinbeck didn’t see would-be communists as a domestic threat, that didn’t mean everyone saw it that way. In a twist worthy of a Hollywood script, one well-known American actor—and future President—even stepped into the real-life role of a government informant.

If you only remember the Ronald Reagan who sat in the White House, then you remember a man who hated communists just as much as he hated government regulations and listening to Congress about sending funds to the Contras. But the Ronald Reagan who appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947 as President of the Screen Actors Guild struck a very different tone.

A HUAC memo from the time states that Reagan was “reticent to testify” before the famously anti-communist-crusading committee because “he is a New Deal Liberal.” When Reagan finally sat down before the microphone, he said of the Communist Party USA that, “we must recognize them at present as a political party,” and as a private citizen, he hesitated “to see any political party outlawed on the basis of its political ideology.”

Instead of naming names, Reagan declared, “I would say in opposing those people that the best thing to do is to make democracy work.” Fighting for his fellow actors is even how he met his second wife, Nancy, who “sought his help after she was mistakenly listed as a possible communist sympathizer.”

But contrary to his public image, Reagan, along with his wife and Brother Rat co-star Jane Wyman, privately named individuals he suspected of being communists to the FBI. The San Jose Mercury News revealed FBI records indicating that Reagan, under the cryptonym “T-10,” was, as the Chicago Tribune wrote, “one of at least 18 informants the FBI used to gauge communist infiltration of the film industry.”

The Celebrity Spies of World War II

The historical record regarding the involvement of celebrities as spies during the Cold War period is complex and often ambiguous. In contrast, the narratives concerning those who ventured into espionage during World War II are much more clear-cut. But not all of our beloved stars from that era fell on the right side of the conflict.

As the Washington Post recently revisited, many celebrities spied for the Allies during World War II. Celebrated singer and dancer Josephine Baker, for example, collaborated with the French Resistance. She leveraged her star status to gain access to Occupied France and gathered intelligence, which she smuggled back as notes in her underwear or messages inscribed in invisible ink on her sheet music. “Baker was awarded both the Croix de Guerre and the Legion of Honour with the rosette of the Resistance, two of France’s highest military honors,” Biography writes.

You may not think of Julia Child, meanwhile, as a globe-trotting secret agent. But prior to her fame as a chef, Julia Child served as a volunteer “research assistant” for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the organization that eventually evolved into the CIA. According to Biography, Child and her team embarked on missions across the world, to places such as Kunming, China, and Colombo, Sri Lanka. It was in Sri Lanka where she crossed paths with Paul Child, her future husband and a fellow OSS operative.

And then there’s Cary Grant, who starred in Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious, where he plays an American agent hunting down Nazis. As it turns out, that film was something of a sequel to his real life escapades.

“There can be little doubt that Cary Grant was a special agent or contact for the FBI,” Marc Eliot wrote in Cary Grant: A Biography. Working for J. Edgar Hoover as a volunteer, Grant was assigned to keep tabs on the then-husband of heiress Barbara Hutton, Count Kurt von Haugwitz-Hardenberg-Reventlow. Like a proto-James Bond, Grant ultimately won the heiress away from his target and married her in 1942.

And if you believe the 1980 book Errol Flynn: The Untold Story, Grant found out the awful truth about America’s favorite action star of the day, Errol Flynn. As the Washington Post notes, the author of that book “claimed to find government records implicating the film legend, though no one else has ever substantiated the claim.” However, the story has been whispered by those in the know for decades, with Flynn serving as the basis for the traitorous actor Neville Sinclair in 1991’s The Rocketeer.

While it’s unclear if Errol Flynn actually spied for the Nazis, there’s no such speculation about the fashion legend Coco Chanel’s Nazi ties. The exact reasons behind Chanel’s choice to work with the Nazis remain a topic of debate: Was it a matter of survival, a calculated business move, or shared ideology? What is irrefutable is that she was officially enlisted as an agent for the Abwehr, Germany’s military intelligence agency during World War II.

“After the Nazis took over Paris in 1940,” Biography notes, “Chanel cozied up to Baron Hans Günther von Dincklage, an officer in Abwehr.” Chanel’s connection to a German officer offered two notable advantages: her pursuit of “the release of her nephew André Palasse, who was imprisoned in a German stalag in 1940” and the opportunity to seize money from her financial backers, the Jewish Wertheimer family, under the Nazi Aryanization laws.

“Sometime in 1941,” Biography continues, “Chanel was registered as Agent F-7124.” Chanel embarked on a secret mission to Madrid under Nazi orders, which proved successful enough to ensure the release of her associate, Palasse. However, her involvement in a second mission, codenamed Operation Modellhut, led to her exposure as a German agent. Despite this revelation, Chanel faced no consequences for her dealings during the war, shielded by her wealth and the influence of political maneuvering, which allowed her to escape any form of retribution.

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