Shoes in Espionage

In the film ‘There’s Something about Mary’ one of Mary’s ex-boyfriends with a shoe fetish used to steal her shoes. The landlord character Joe Fusco Jr., in the film “While you were Sleeping” has a shoe fetish.

Spies have used shoes very effectively. In the 1960's and 1970's the Soviet KGB used shoe transmitters to hear the conversations they wanted to. By using a maid or other confidant to replace a target's shoes with these bugged ones, they changed the wearers into radio transmitters. Then their clandestine stations would pick up the conversations. However, these could not be used to make phone calls like the secret agent Maxwell Smart did in Get Smart! Even CIA's official site reports Maxwell Smart's shoe phone.