2026-02-20 10:00:47

MI5 once considered using gerbils to catch undercover spies by smelling their sweat.

Lord Jonathan Evans, 68, the former director general of the spy agency, read a classified dossier titled Gerbils Use in Counterintelligence, and it detailed a proposal for creating a lie detector in which a suspect would place their hand into a box containing the rodents.

And if the gerbils smelled stress-related hormones in a suspect’s sweat, the animals “push a wheel or something and a light comes on, and that tells you whether this is true or false”.

However, the idea never came to fruition due to one small issue.

Appearing on a recent episode of The Rest is Classified podcast, Lord Evans – who was head of MI5 from April 2007 until April 2013 – told hosts, 40-year-old former CIA analyst-and-novelist David McCloskey, and 52-year-old BBC security correspondent Gordon Corera: “The only problem with this technology is that it doesn’t actually work.”

Lord Evans then joked: “I thought that was really going to solve counter-espionage challenges – but there you go. You have to take risks. We normally like our pigeons, but we’ve introduced gerbils into the spy world now.”

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