In September 1780, at the height of the Revolutionary War, Benedict Arnold’s plot to surrender West Point was famously discovered in the capture of a British spy, John André.

But when Gen. George Washington and his staff arrived at Arnold’s home near the fort, they only found Margaret “Peggy” Shippen — Arnold’s Pennsylvania-born wife — and their infant son.

Alexander Hamilton, Washington’s aide-de-camp, wrote in a letter to his own wife that it was “the most affecting scene (he) ever was witness to.”

“We have every reason to believe she was entirely unacquainted with the plan, and that her first knowledge of it was when Arnold went to tell her he must banish himself from his Country and from her forever,” Hamilton wrote. “She instantly fell into a convulsion and he left her in that situation.”

According to Amanda Ohlke, director of adult education at the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C., Shippen’s convulsions were nothing short of masterful deception.

“Peggy wins the actress of the year award by pretending a fit of hysteria so that the people arresting her just want to comfort her, they are so sad at how upset she is about what her husband has done,” Ohlke said. “And, of course, then (she and Arnold) flee to England — she was in on it the whole time.”

Shippen’s father, Edward Shippen IV, was a member of the British Provincial Council of Pennsylvania. As such, during the British occupation of Philadelphia in 1777, the British were frequent guests in the Shippen household.

“She’s beautiful and she is quite a flirt, quite lovely company to keep,” Ohlke said. “And a young man who’s working for the British, Colonel André — who’s actually hung by us as a British spy — he’s a good friend of hers.”

While Peggy and André remained “close” even after the British withdrawal in June 1778, she met Arnold — then the Continental Army’s military commander of Philadelphia — later that summer. They were married in the spring of 1779, amid Arnold’s own misgivings with the Revolutionary cause.

“It’s a classic story: he doesn’t get promoted, his ego is not gratified, and so he turns against us,” Ohlke said. “And he has his lovely wife to help him along with it.”

While Arnold wrestled with his growing frustration, Peggy arranged a contact with her “close friend.”

“And so she connects her suitor, and then husband, Benedict Arnold with British forces,” Ohlke said. “And it’s like, ‘Let’s go over to the dark side, let’s make some money, let’s get some prestige — let’s hand over West Point.’”

Many of the secret communiqués between Arnold and André were facilitated by Peggy — letters in her handwriting containing Arnold’s coded messages in invisible ink.

“I thought that was a great jumping-off point for you,” Ohlke said. “Not all American spies are spying for the United States — we didn’t even exist yet.”

Contrary to popular belief, she said, the line between revolutionary and loyalist was far from overwhelming American patriotism.

“You tend to want to overthrow stuff when you’re not doing well, but her family was doing well,” Ohlke said. “So probably the minute Benedict Arnold ends up with her, there’s going to be that, you know, pull on him to abandon the patriotic cause.”

Still, in spite of Peggy duping Washington, Hamilton and the Continental Army, she and her husband’s lives ended in relative obscurity. Arnold died in 1801; Peggy died three years later.

“That’s one thing I’d say, often spy stories don’t end happily,” Ohlke said. “Obviously, spoiler, the American patriots won.

“They did not end up with any sort of grand life in England.”

The underestimation of women, according to Ohlke, has played an enormous part in espionage throughout history.

“That happens again and again, with anybody — people of color, women, anyone who’s kind of judged as not paying attention, maybe not as smart, not on top of things, not invested,” Ohlke said. “It continues to this day.”

On the opposite side of the revolution, she said, Agent 355 has become a legendary if unknown member of the Culper Spy Ring.

“This was the ring that was providing information to General Washington, the Culper Ring,” Ohlke said. “There was like a whaleboat man and this woman, 355, and you hear about Anna Strong being involved — whether or not she was Agent 355 or not — but they were gathering intelligence out of occupied New York City, and then they would get it to Washington wherever he was located.”

Washington, Ohlke said, was a devotee of espionage in the fledgling United States.

“Washington was heavily invested,” she said. “We always say he’s the spymaster in chief. He’s heavily invested in getting intelligence.”

Nearly a century after his death, that investment continued — using the same underestimated minorities to achieve impossible results.

“Just, if we’re doing it chronologically, we talk about Harriet Tubman because people are really surprised,” Ohlke said. “Obviously, I live my life in the spy subject matter, but I am always surprised when I say to people, ‘Well, you know, she’s in the military Hall of Fame; she’s the first woman to lead a commando raid,’ and people are surprised that she was a spy.”

During the Civil War, Ohlke said, Tubman was recruited to lead scouts through Port Royal and South Carolina.

“And then, eventually, she’s so good at it that they tasked her with leading U.S. military raid up the Combahee River in June of 1863,” she said. “She guided two steamboats and they went around Confederate mines — she had gathered intelligence, you know, from ashore that gave her information about where the mines were in the water.”

Ohlke said Tubman had gathered this intelligence, clandestinely, as a Black woman among the enslaved people of South Carolina. The raid ended up freeing 750 of those enslaved, with many of the men joining the Union Army.

“Harriet Tubman said later, because this was in the newspapers of the time, ‘I never saw such a sight,’” Ohlke quoted. “And this was people carrying still-steaming pots of rice and pigs over shoulders and babies, they were people fleeing.

“They heard the steamboat whistle, and they knew it was a chance at freedom.”

Ohlke highlighted Tubman’s celebrity in the Union at the time with a letter found in the Massachusetts Historical Society’s collection by one of General David Hunter’s aids.

“And so this aid wrote, ‘I have seen this Major General fetch a pitcher of water and stand waiting with it in his hand while a black woman drank, as if he had been one of his own servants,’” Ohlke quoted. “That woman was Harriet Tubman — that was the respect and gratitude that this woman commanded among the Union — we sit and then we forget about it and then it’s like the country moves back and then the country moves forward.”

For better or for worse, for much of history the catalyst of wartime has remained a period of social change for women and minorities, according to Ohlke.

“All of sudden you’re in wartime, people start thinking differently, being more open-minded — or more open to people’s talents, when you drop some of your blinders,” she said. “And then the war ends, it’s like, ‘Well, let’s get back to the way things were.’

But “the way things were” is rarely a closing argument for progress.

By World War I, a Dutch dancer by the name of Mata Hari came to prominence as a new kind of spy, in the stead of American heroes like Agent 355 or Tubman.

“She’s not famous because she was a spy, she’s famous because she was famous and then became a spy and then was executed,” Ohlke said.

Hari made her career in France, first as a dancer and eventually as a courtesan.

“By the time of World War I, she’s still performing, and she’s in Berlin when the war broke out and had a big booking to perform,” Ohlke said. “The Germans do recruit her and she does receive some training … but probably never gave them much — she just wanted the money.”

As war raged on, Hari fell in love with a Russian pilot serving with the French. She was soon after recruited by French intelligence for her connections with German officials.

“No doubt about it, she was a seductress — that’s what she was going to do — and she was talking about getting information out of a German diplomat,” Ohlke said. “And this was close to what she said … but it’s like, ‘I let him have his way with me, and there are going to be German sub landings.’”

According to Ohlke, Hari said the landings were planned for French Morocco. The information was useless, and her German contact had likely set her up.

“She thought she had gotten some valuable intel,” she said. “Instead she was arrested.”

Confusion over Hari’s role as a double-agent come to a head in February 1917, as French morale was failing, and she was arrested. Hari was sentenced to death five months later.

According to Ohlke, Hari was made a scapegoat for the French losses.

Henry Wales, correspondent for the International News Service, wrote that she refused a blindfold and bindings at her execution.

“At the report Mata Hari fell,” Wales wrote. “She did not die as actors and moving picture stars would have us believe that people die when they are shot. She did not throw up her hands nor did she plunge straight forward or straight back.

“Instead she seemed to collapse.”

Legend has it that Hari blew a kiss to her executioners before they opened fire.

“A lot of American women in intelligence, some people find her amusing or interesting,” Ohlke said. “Other people are so offended that we tell her story because they say, ‘We do not do that, we do not use our sexuality — we do not use our sex to get secrets.’”

Hari remains a dividing character in the intelligence community, according to Ohlke, even as her fame gave rise to a new brand of spy.

“Of course, many other of my female friends in intelligence, who are doing human intelligence work, they’re like, ‘Of course I’m going to flirt — of course I’m going to use that access,’” she said. “I mean, you use it to get a drink at a bar, you use it to get tickets — why would you suddenly become not-charming when you’re doing your job?"

She emphasized that this concern over Hari’s methods was exclusive to the United States.

“Other countries do not draw that line, they are more, ‘Go get ‘em, seduce them, men and women,’” Ohlke said. “You know, the ‘Romeo spies’ and ‘honey traps’ — so it’s not just women who are being seductive.”

While much of the invisibility of women has remained both a convenience and hindrance in espionage, Ohlke said female intelligence work has begun to break through its many stereotypes.

“Jonna Mendez, who’s very renowned now — she’s a former chief of disguise at the CIA — she’s so awesome,” Ohlke said. “Jonna came in as a secretary and there were a lot of glass ceilings to shatter.”

In an interview with her alma mater — Wichita State University — Mendez said that she was introduced to the CIA after taking a job with Chase Manhattan Bank in the 1960s.

“There were some Americans coming into that bank each week, probably with their paycheck — they were civilians, this was at the time when there was an enormous American military presence there,” Mendez said. “These were not military people, so I got to know them and went to some wine festivals with a group of them — started dating one of them.”

Three days before Mendez’s suitor proposed in Vienna, Austria, she said he admitted to working for the CIA.

“I then was a wife of a CIA officer,” Mendez said. “And overseas they will hire you on a contract basis, so I wasn’t recruited, I kind of came in a side door — there I was.”

For many years, Mendez served undercover in Europe, Southeast Asia and India before joining the Office of Technical Services in the 1970s with a specialization in clandestine photography.

By 1991, Mendez had become the agency’s chief of disguise.

Not long after, one of her disguises famously fooled then sitting President George H.W. Bush.

“That was a meeting that wasn’t supposed to happen, I had never intended to take these materials to the White House,” Mendez said. “But my boss and his boss, they all wanted to … and I was there wearing a mask — it was the end of a 10-year (research and development) program to develop that mask.”

The mask, she said in the interview, was the face of a young woman who had worked for Mendez.

“So I briefed the president, and he did not know; of course he didn’t know, we wouldn’t have done it if we didn’t think it would work,” Mendez said. “But I must say, when I took it off, it was a moment.”

In 1993, Mendez retired and was awarded the CIA’s Commendation Medal.

According to Ohlke, it is women like Mendez that have helped drive the changing roles of females in the intelligence community.

“l often hear about plum jobs going to the guys — the old boy’s network,” Ohlke said. “But there are so many top women-leaders now at many of the different intelligence agencies, or there have been, that it feels like things have really opened up.”

Experience History

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The International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C., offers a variety of exhibits, a guided tour, and even an interactive undercover mission.

For an educational summer getaway — for all ages — visit the museum at 700 L'Enfant Plaza, SW Washington, D.C. 20024.

For tickets or more information, call (202) 393-7798 or go to spymuseum.org.