PIERCING THE REICH: The Penetration of Nazi Germany by American Secret Agents during World War II

by Joseph E. Persico ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 15, 1979

The Allied advance was stopped, rumor had it that die-hard Nazis would take a stand in the Alps if the front collapsed: it was time, the OSS command decided, to start infiltrating agents into Germany for eye-witness information that Ultra, intercepting messages, couldn't provide. Thanks to the declassification of OSS documents and extensive interviews with survivors, Persico (My Enemy, My Brother, 1977) has been able to reconstruct this operation in stunning detail from the first purchase of refugee clothes in New York three years before--clothes that would eventually pass Gestapo scrutiny as German-made. In London, under the unprepossessing, magnetic Wild Bill Donovan, two irregular Army privates manufactured cover stories (the color of local streetcars, for instance, was a stock Gestapo query to trap suspects) while the Labor Division recruited refugee workers with Socialist trade-union connections. In Berne, the unflappable Allen Dulles--a late arrival in Switzerland before it was sealed off--gathered intelligence from anti-Nazi German officials Hans Bernd Gisevius, a conspirator in the plot to assassinate Hitler, and ""bureaucratic drone"" Fritz Kolbe, who deposited Foreign Office cables in the Americans' lap. Whether the secret penetration of Germany actually shortened the war by a single day is, as Persico notes, unknowable; but it emerges--in this narrative--as a considerable accomplishment and one of the brighter episodes in U.S. espionage history.

Pub Date: Feb. 15, 1979

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1979

Categories: NONFICTION