Maria Butina: How to be a Woman and a Spy

Male and female spies are presented very differently. Male spies are represented as active investigators, professionals collating information in files, and handing coded secrets to each other. Male spies are intelligence agents.

Female spies are represented as domestic. They talk to people, gathering gossip and innuendo, and focus on making themselves attractive to men. Female spies are informers, maybe unaware of the importance of what information they pass on.

While writing my novel, The Wolves of Leninsky Prospekt, I was very conscious of the ways these gender lines are drawn within espionage. Set in 1973, it is the story of a young British embassy wife, Martha, who moves to Moscow with her new husband, Kit. Struggling to make sense of this restricted world, Martha is relieved to meet Eva, an ex-British citizen who has renounced her nationality to live in Soviet Russia. While Kit must disguise his homosexuality to be able to work in the masculine world of intelligence, Martha accesses a more marginal world - the world of women.

The old distinction between male spies as active and female spies as passive has long been challenged in literature, yet it still runs through the way real world spies are represented, just as strongly as when it was applied to Mata Hari or Kim Philby. Mata Hari is presented as making use of her body and men’s weaknesses to collect information, while Philby actively sought out intelligence which would undermine the British State to benefit the USSR. But is this an accurate explanation of a gender difference in spying, or it is lazy gender stereotyping? And could it explain the headline of an article about Butina in the New Republic (11/2/19), ‘The Spy Who Wasn’t’?

Maria Butina, in the vast majority of images found online (when not alone), is presented in the company of a man or men: Paul Erickson, Alexandr Torshin, Governor Bobby Jindal, Governor Scott Walker and former Senator Rick Santorum. There are photos of her with David Keene, President of the NRA 2011-13, Jim Porter, President 2013-15, and but not Sandra Froman who was the second female President from 2005-7. Despite Froman’s invitation to Butina to attend the NRA Women's Leadership Luncheon in 2014, there is no visual evidence of them together. The Women’s Leadership Forum has the tagline ‘Armed & Fabulous’, which would seem to suit many of the photos taken of Butina posing with guns, but where are the photos of her with women?

The overwhelming association of Butina with men in positions of power certainly suggests the popular Mata Hari image of female spies, the objectified beauty who exchanges favours for information. This was also seen in the case of the ‘sleeper agent’, Anna Chapman where, again, ‘sleeper’ suggests cosy, passive domesticity. Lacking the bureaucratic authority of the official office, the file and the safe, the actions of these women are seen as hidden and devious. Yet it’s so close to how women are often presented that, for some, it raises the question of femininity - could a woman this beautiful really understand the consequences of her actions? Isn’t this all a terrible error?

Representing female spies as sexually motivated, gossip gathering, and directed by men

undermines the active role of women, and not just in the world of spying. Eroding the agency of women, and disregarding any guilty pleas in the case of Butina, appears to make some men more comfortable. Yet, as my character, Martha, shows, sometimes it’s women who have to make the big decisions when it comes to deciding who is a spy.

Sarah Armstrong is the author of The Wolves of Leninsky Prospekt (Sandstone Press) – out now.

Escaping failure as an undergraduate and a daughter, not to mention bleak 1970s England, Martha marries Kit - who is gay. Having a wife could keep him safe in Moscow in his diplomatic post. As Martha tries to understand her new life and makes the wrong friends, she walks straight into an underground world of counter-espionage. Out of her depth, Martha no longer know who can be trusted.

New Book Series on Espionage and Culture

For anyone interesting in various aspects of espionage, surveillance we have launched a new series with Routledge and are looking for proposals for monographs and edited collections.

‘Routledge Studies in Espionage and Culture’ is a major new books series, which seeks to investigate representations of the intelligence world and how we interact with it. The scope of the series is international and it seeks to blend several disciplines including cultural studies, history, literature and film studies. 

The new book series seeks to generate new insights into the connections between espionage and culture. During the second half of the twentieth century the public became aware of the importance of the role of espionage and security services. Television, radio and print news reported shocking events including the defection of Soviet moles like Kim Philby, Guy Burgess and Donald McLean; the Profumo scandal of 1963 that exploded when the British Secretary of State for War, John Profumo, had an affair with a woman who was in contact with the Soviet security services; and the state censorship of Peter Wright’s memoir Spycatcher (1987). Whilst the news sparked the public interest popular culture soon followed and the 1950s and 60s saw the resurgence of spy books, films and television series.

The James Bond franchise of books and films began in 1953 with the publication of the book Casino Royal. Bond achieved mass popularity in 1962 with the cinematic release of Dr No. Over the coming decades twelve authors have written James Bond novels or shorts stories and he has been played by seven actors with the books and films enjoyed by millions. Other authors such as John Le Carré and Len Deighton released bestsellers which were adapted for film and television and brought an often more realistic version of spying to an international public.

More information about the series can be found here.

For details on how to propose a book for Routledge Studies in Espionage and Culture please contact one of the series editors, Nick Barnett nicholas.barnett@plymouth.ac.uk or Laura Crossley lcrossley@bournemouth.ac.uk