Which watch would you choose to wear on the day you die? It’s not a question that many of us face too often. But then our day’s work seldom involves flying in secret by Black Hawk helicopter from Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan to the Pakistani city of Abbottabad, there to locate and kill Osama bin Laden.
Will Chesney was the dog handler with SEAL Team Six, the US special-forces unit selected to carry out “Operation Neptune Spear” in 2011. His chances of being shot down by Pakistan’s air defences en route or killed by an explosion in bin Laden’s compound were, he calculated, high, for Chesney and his dog Cairo were tasked with locating IEDs on the compound perimeter. So for this operation only, Chesney put aside his workaday digital and wore his prized Rolex Submariner instead. It was a special watch, reference 14060, engraved with the SEALs’ “red man” logo. Rolexes and Tudors had been engrained in SEAL culture since Vietnam; Chesney had bought his own watch when he passed the infamously harsh selection process to join Team Six. It was, by certain measures, impractical for the mission. But what exactly, he reasoned, was he saving it for?
“I thought it would be fitting to wear the watch on that operation since it was my gift to myself for making it there,” he would say later. “I figured we wouldn’t be making it back so I might as well die with it on.”
But they got their man, Chesney didn’t die and neither did Cairo. When Chesney told this story — of how the two would later be presented to President Obama, how Cairo would help him rehabilitate after he was seriously wounded in a grenade attack in Afghanistan in 2013, how Chesney commemorated his canine partner in the book No Ordinary Dog after Cairo died of cancer in 2015 — he told it to Watches Of Espionage. (Go to the site and read the full post, it’s fascinating.)
Launched in February 2021 by a former CIA intelligence operative with an itch for timepieces, the Watches Of Espionage Instagram feed has gained some 130,000 followers and its website has a cult audience unlike anything else in the horological universe. “WoE” readers range from hardcore watch aficionados who want to know exactly why SEALS love Panerai and how Delta Force guys get their custom Breitlings; to fans of the vicarious military experience, from the knowledgeable to what you might call the Gareth-from-The-Office demographic; to another, more select, harder-to-reach group: anonymous men who do anonymous things in the service of their country.
They might not be allowed to talk about what they’ve done — many a WoE post ends with the words, “This has been reviewed by the CIA’s Prepublication Classification Review Board to prevent the disclosure of classified information” — but they want to communicate their watch lore to others in the know, and maybe leak a little to the rest of us. WoE is both their community centre and a window into their world.
This is how outsiders like your writer can learn that American pilots are into IWC or that US Special Forces increasingly favour veteran-founded brands such as Sangin or Resco. Or discover that, while CIA officers have an affection for the quiet sophistication and weight of Rolex — the ideal case officer is, as WoE often says, “a PhD who could win a bar fight” — there is not so much uniformity of styles in the halls of Langley, Virginia because, well, how would it help America’s intelligence effort if every agent in the world was wearing the same Hulk or Pepsi?
This is also where you can get a knowledgeable take on the watches of the Ukraine war and what they mean. WoE identified Volodymyr Zelensky’s watch as a Tag Heuer Carrera calibre Heuer 01 Chronograph — a well-featured, unpretentious tool watch that feels apt for a man whose genius move was to lead his country by being among his troops. Putin, on the other hand, has been seen with a Blancpain Léman Aqua Lung Grande Date, at £8,500 a relatively modest watch for a man who has looted his country of billions. The real surprise is the Russian president’s mouthpiece, press secretary Dmitry Peskov, with a stupendously expensive limited-edition Richard Mille 52-01 Skull Tourbillon, a watch worth approximately £485,000.
And it’s also where you can find out the truth behind the myth that spies are equipped with Rolexes as a fast and efficient bartering tool for those times when you have to negotiate your way out of trouble with an uncooperative local warlord. Are they really an “Escape and Evasion Tool”? In a typically thorough post, Mr WoE is unable to confirm the many stories of a Rolex buying an agent a seat on the last plane out of some doomed capital, observing only that, “At a certain point the watch may be more likely to get you in a bad situation than out of one.”
Who’s behind it? The unnamed retired spook who launched Watches Of Espionage simply wanted to question the popular notion of the spy watch and its attendant lifestyle. All those tricked-out James Bond Rolex Submariners and Omega Seamasters with their inbuilt electromagnets, Geiger counters and garrotte wires are the stuff of fantasy. So too is the accompanying world of Aston Martins, shaken-not-stirred martinis, and female nuclear physicists with improbably erotic surnames.
The true business of intelligence is patience, and the true espionage timekeeper is a tool watch designed for work and chosen for its robustness. In a world where GPS-enabled devices can make you trackable and thus vulnerable, a scrupulously accurate mechanical watch gains special value. WoE believes in function. A recurrent catchphrase on the site is “Use your tools”. But tool watches have their codes and meanings too.
As to Mr WoE’s identity, it would be wrong to say that no one knows, because the geographical spread, political depth and connections showcased in his posts suggest that quite a lot of people know exactly who he is. They’re just not the kind to talk. (Mr WoE himself politely declined the opportunity to be interviewed for this story.) On his socials he modestly introduces himself as “former CIA Officer, amateur horologist. Will do this until it stops being fun, then disappear” and there’s no doubt that if he wanted to disappear, he would really disappear. But on the Insta there is information and there are clues.
Here he is in the Beqaa Valley, Lebanon, in a photograph in the early 2000s, wearing khaki trousers, an open-necked shirt and grey trainers, face obscured, of course. The crumbling wall of bricks behind him, he notes, marks one of the reputed locations where CIA Beirut station chief William Buckley was held after his abduction by Hezbollah terrorists in March 1984 (Buckley would die in captivity from torture and neglect in June 1985). Back then, Mr WoE was learning Arabic at the American University of Beirut; in the picture he looks stocky, solid, an unremarkable man in unremarkable clothes. Except that an unremarkable man’s modest Titanium Breitling Aerospace would probably not feature the Jordanian crest nor be a gift from King Abdullah of Jordan.
This is the kind of wormhole that Watches of Espionage can pull you down. In one of his regular Dispatches, Mr WoE relates how in the years after 9/11 he travelled to Amman as a student to immerse himself in the Arab milieu. He’d already met King Abdullah in Washington (what? how? why? The reader is left to speculate) but nonetheless was surprised when “a clean-cut Jordanian, who had all the hallmarks of Mukhabarat”, the Arabian word for security service, approached him in his hotel lobby to inform him that the King “requested” his immediate presence at a military training exercise. When the King requests, you comply.
Thus ensued a strange afternoon in which His Majesty and the future Mr WoE discussed Iraq and the War on Terror, the King clocked the Jaeger-LeCoultre Master Hometime on the future WoE’s wrist, and the monarch personally piloted the yet-to-be Instagrammer to a Jordanian military base where he witnessed firefight manoeuvres and tactical simulations. In the chauffeured car back to Mr WoE’s hotel were two gifts: an inscribed Jordanian combat knife and a Breitling Aerospace engraved with a gold Royal Crown of Jordan and the King’s name. The latter gift would quicken Mr WoE’s interest in watches, act as an icebreaker when meeting Middle Eastern spooks and diplomats, and raise eyebrows when he sought top-secret clearance to join the CIA — at length the Agency determined that no, he was not beholden to a foreign power. The knife has shown up in a couple of WoE posts too, but we don’t know if he ever, you know, did stuff with it. Again, read the full story. It is remarkable.
Now, one might wonder why a Hashemite king would be so ready to show off his country’s secret military exercises to an American student. Or be so keen to show him such generosity. And then give him a watch. Maybe King Abdullah was just a very good talent-spotter. But this is part of the appeal of Watches of Espionage, to the civilian reader at least. The thought that whatever you’re reading, there’s much more going on below the waterline.
Steve Urszenyi is a former Toronto paramedic and tactical medic with the Ontario Provincial Police. “We embed with SWAT teams,” he explains. “Depending on the scenario we might go in with a special weapons team to provide immediate life-saving care when they go to get the bad guy, or we might be back at the command post to deal with what comes in… It’s a specialist job. Most jurisdictions don’t want their medics there when there are bullets about.”
He’s also an expert in responding to chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and explosives incidents (CBRNE), and became a novelist after hustling the producers of the Canadian TV police show Flashpoint to include a tactical medic in their cast, for verisimilitude. They didn’t, but their advice unblocked Urszenyi’s writing. His first thriller, Perfect Shot, telling how a former special-ops sniper uncovers a global nuclear threat, is about to be published. And he’s a huge fan of Watches of Espionage, as befits a watch guy whose collection runs from a Tag Heuer Carrera 16 Chronograph and unpretentious Timex Expeditions and Seikos to his everyday, none-more-Black Ops Breitling Blackbird Adventure 48.
“Their feed is just fascinating,” Urszenyi says. “The tool-watch images they post are incredible eye candy, but when you get into the actual stories of the intelligence community, the spy game, that takes it to a whole new level. As both a writer and a consumer of action adventure and thrillers, it’s just catnip to me. He really pulls back the curtain.
“It just speaks to the relationship that warriors and operators have with their timepieces. Perhaps it’s about the courage that says, when I go downrange, yes, I could die, but I need to consider myself infallible. So I’m bringing my most valuable possession with me and daring the fates and the gods or anyone else to take it away.”
Urszenyi particularly loves the forensic examinations of watches worn by notorious bad actors, from Putin to Xi to Russian spy Anna Chapman, whom WoE spotted wearing a suspiciously on-the-nose Ulysse Nardin “Lady In Red” diver. (“This is the same brand worn (past tense) by Wagner boss Prigozhin,” WoE noted drily.) “One of his favourite expressions is ‘sketchy dudes wear Breitling’,” says Urszenyi with a glance at his own Breitling. “I always wondered, where does that come from?” But the mystery is part of the appeal.
“It’s so intelligently written and he presents a spread of opinions from people who really know their stuff,” he says, “But the great thing is, there are no demons of social media piling in with pointless arguments. There’s a lot of respect. But it still allows us that action-movie feeling of living vicariously through the excitement of these people’s lives.”
The pandemic didn’t exactly call Watches of Espionage into being, but as with so many of the ways we profitably waste our time, a period of enforced solitude for its audience didn’t do the feed any harm. Suddenly we had all the time in the world to think about time.
“During the pandemic you saw a lot of new voices in watch media emerge online, lots of accounts that had something different to say, and Watches of Espionage was one of the best,” explains Charlie Dunne, senior watch specialist and director of content at Florida-based dealer Wind Vintage, and a Watches of Espionage fan. “The audience was just different — people who maybe don’t care so much about very small differences in dial configuration from this year to that year, but who are interested in broader topics that relate to everyday carry. And that’s really great for watch collectors, because it gets you in the door.
“When we look at vintage watches,” Dunne continues, “there’s a lot of romanticism around the stories that these things may have had. But we don’t always know the actual history, the real provenance.” On Watches of Espionage, on the other hand, the stories are right there in front of you, attested and detailed, even if the faces are cropped out and the names redacted.
Sometimes the stories live most vividly in WoE’s evocative still-life photos, where serious chunks of horology — Tudors, Submariners, IWCs — will appear in intriguing tableaus giving context or, more often, mystery. Here’s a Rolex Sea-Dweller, a vintage Lee Enfield rifle, an Afghan knife and an Osama bin Laden Wanted poster, “a few memories from the Graveyard of Empires” from a friend of the site, a terrifyingly hairy SEAL sniper called Jack Carr. Here’s a Breitling with Arabic numerals and Romanian AK-47 on top of an enormous pile of bullets (Sketchy Guy alert). From a reader, here’s a frosted white gold Audemars Piguet Royal Oak, one of 20, next to an actual Nazi Enigma Machine of which only 300 remain in the world. Who’s following this site? The Red Skull? And here’s Mr WoE’s own Tudor Black Bay 58, Pelagos FXD and Pelagos 39, draped over bottles of hot sauce for some reason (identification note: he seems to really like his Tabasco sauce). And so on. Each post is like a mini-Jack Reacher waiting to be written.
“It’s fascinating how Watches Of Espionage has been able to get these anonymous individuals to give a little bit of storytelling that they otherwise would never have shared,” says Dunne. “But then he’ll get into really interesting watch geek stuff like, say, the particular mechanical watches that are used by Italian divers right now.”
One brand which makes regular appearances in WoE is the comparatively new British manufacturer Bremont, founded in 2002. Unusually for a UK brand, Bremont’s stylish tool watches have become a favourite of US servicemen, especially for custom “unit watches” that have long been part of British military tradition and have now gained popularity in the US (and on WoE). Commissioned and often co-designed by serving or retired soldiers to commemorate their service, a unit watch will feature insignia on the face or engraved on the caseback and often a significant colour scheme and strap. Unit watches are a source of perpetual fascination on WoE; Breitling, IWC, Omega, Tudor and Rolex have long made them, but Bremont is the coming thing.
Nick English, who co-founded Bremont with his brother Giles in tribute to their father, an avid aviator who died in an air-show crash in 1995, is a big fan of Watches of Espionage. “It’s an incredible site and it’s all about the authenticity,” he says. “There’s authenticity in every photograph. None of it is staged, even when the faces are covered up, and that’s refreshing. He’s got the real credentials — and very good taste in watches.
“One of the great things about Watches of Espionage,” he continues, “is the way they zero in on the detail of a photo and explain the real meaning of a watch.” The kind of timepieces that turn up on WoE on the wrists of warlords, powerbrokers or elite forces will have small idiosyncrasies that will not be apparent to the general viewer. “That special watch on someone’s wrist, let’s say a secret-service agent? From a distance, you or I won’t be able to spot the model or the brand. The great thing is, Watches of Espionage will know, in fantastic detail.”
It has taken Bremont some 20 years to get to the point where they are trusted enough to build unit watches of the kind that get WoE excited. Now, overseen by English’s wife Catherine Villeneuve, who has the intimidating title “head of military and special projects”, custom unit watches currently make up some 20 per cent of its business. Among the first was a commission for the pilots of U-2 spy planes out of Beale Air Force Base, California. “We got to see all these insane selfies of them wearing the watch on the outside of their spacesuits at, like, 70,000ft above the earth,” says English. And yes, these pics are on WoE. “That was just a really lovely project because they got so into it. The thing is, you can’t market to these guys. They can’t be advertised to. They know the real deal and we love that.”
Above all, these clients are into a special kind of exclusivity that WoE often focuses on. There are many kinds of rare and collectable watches that we all covet — but it’s a brave person who’ll wear a watch from a unit or a theatre that they never served in. (You might just get away with it if you inherited the piece from your dad.) Here the American concept of “stolen valour” applies.
“It’s really important to confirm that you really are a member of one of these organisations,” says English. To get one of these unit watches you will have to provide confirmation that you actually are, say, an F-35 pilot. “These are not editions where people can say, ‘Hey, send me 50 of these watches,’ and 20 will end up on eBay,” English explains. “That’s what makes them so special. If you haven’t flown an F-35 or fought with Special Forces, you can’t have the watch. How cool is that?”
Perhaps this is the core of the appeal of Watches of Espionage to the hapless armchair watch fan like your correspondent. Not a fantasist thrill, but respect for people who do things you simply could never do yourself. Some things should remain out of reach. We all own vintage watches and in most cases their full stories can never really be known. They’ve passed through too many hands. But the men on Watches of Espionage know the stories of their watches. They’re living them right now. And they can never tell a soul.
This feature first appeared in the Big Watch Book 2023. Buy a copy here
