My Favorite Spy Stories Are Set in Europe, so I Planned an Espionage-themed Trip Across the Continent

I love spy stories. Their characters seem to be privy to great secrets about the world. They are incredible travelers, who know how to navigate a Peugeot through Paris at high speed, or disappear down a back alley in Budapest. They always patronize the best coffee shops and dive bars, stay in the most picturesque safe houses, and enact key plot points at a city’s most iconic landmark.

With this in mind, I planned a trip through Continental Europe, the setting of my favorite Cold War–era espionage films and novels. I would also take photographs along the way. Not tourist snaps so much as stills from a spy movie that would never be made: my own personal version of John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

My trip began in Paris, as Smiley’s People does. The last week in September was cool, and the light was like mercury on the sandstone buildings. The cobblestoned streets and neon signage of Montmartre made everything feel cinematic, the Dopplering police sirens like the soundtrack from a Jason Bourne movie. A drink at a sidewalk café in the Marais felt portentous, casting every passerby as a potential contact, every attaché case filled with confidences. Which is kind of like real life, I suppose. 

From Paris I flew to Berlin, where I found a pension not unlike the one where Bernie stays in Len Deighton’s Berlin Game. My safe house, Hotel-Pension Funk, felt like it hadn’t been updated since the Weimar Era days of Cabaret — knotted with crystal chandeliers, eccentric plasterwork, and curling damask paper — so it was a perfect perch from which to step back in time.

I spent my days in this storied spy capital treading between East and West — both metaphorically and literally — imagining where the Wall once stood. Then I spent my nights at Paris Bar, the unironically-cool-again haunt of the city’s Cold War–era demimonde, where I could pretend to be anybody I wished over martinis and steak frites while casually eavesdropping on my glamorous fellow diners. 

On the train to Prague, the East-West fault lines felt even more dramatic. Central Europe has long been a kind of liminal space, a fringe between empires. Propagandists on both sides of the Cold War framed the conflict as a black-and-white war of ideas. But maybe the point of the best spy fiction is that the real drama takes place in the gray areas. 

By night, Prague is lit up like the back lot of a noir thriller — which, of course, it has been, countless times, during the past 30 years. Standing outside Liechtenstein Palace, I thought about the scenes filmed there in Mission: Impossible, and then listened as a man described the on-screen goings-on between Tom Cruise and Kristin Scott Thomas. I walked farther, to where The Gray Man was shot, and thought about how strange it is that pockets of these capitals have been turned into Epcot Center kiosks on a global tourist circuit.

Not that I exempt myself from being a tourist; in fact, I am the worst offender, I thought, as I embarked on a coffeehouse — and Third Man — tour of Vienna. What sort of demented reasoning led me to sneak into a Bauhaus apartment building in Budapest, for example, or to hang off the rooftop marquee where Brad Pitt and Robert Redford shot their famous confrontation in Spy Game, or to have dinner at the Párisi Udvar Hotel, where a double-cross scene in the 2011 movie of Tinker Tailor was filmed? If this was a pilgrimage, what spiritual purpose did it serve? And what in the world was I supposed to be photographing again?

Toward the end of the journey, my second-guessing snowballed into a crisis of conscience. On one hand, I was living the life of an artist; on the other, well, trying to pay rent. Partly in escapist mode, partly on LinkedIn. And perhaps this trip was an attempt to consolidate the two. If I made it to the other side, where might I find myself?

Well, in Budapest, as it happens: the backdrop for so many spy movies. Its 19th-century architecture doubled for East Berlin in Spy Game and Moscow in Red Sparrow, and played itself in Tinker Tailor and the fourth Mission: Impossible. I checked in to the Anantara New York Palace Budapest Hotel — where Redford trained Pitt on tradecraft in Spy Game — and loved it all so much that I extended my stay, twice. 

The Palace’s famous New York Café is a kind of Disneyfied version of Belle Époque Budapest, where tourists can imagine themselves entering café society. And for days I watched them as they wearily found their footing after cruises up the Danube, ordered goulash, and took endless selfies, delighted in the escapism of it all. How wonderful, I thought, that for a few moments, we can all run away to join a circus of our imagination. To travel as if on a mission. To be the main character in our own adventure. 

A version of this story first appeared in the November 2024 issue of Travel + Leisure under the headline “Spy Chronicles.”