FAMILY OF SPIES

A spy’s granddaughter tells her story.

The is the first book by journalist Kuehn, born and raised in the U.S., who only learned the story in 1994 when a screenwriter, researching a World War II script, wrote to ask help in locating her father, Eberhard Kuehn. Shocked, she hurried to a local bookstore, where several histories revealed that Eberhard’s father, Otto, was a Nazi intelligence agent sent with his family to Honolulu to spy in 1935. Paid generously by the Japanese, he rented a house overlooking Pearl Harbor and gathered information on the ships and defenses. The author’s father, born in 1926, was a boy during this time. No professional, Otto spent money wildly despite having no obvious source of income, visiting Japan and the local Japanese consulate regularly (often when his money failed to arrive). His wife and daughter spied with more good sense. All this quickly caught the attention of neighbors as well as the FBI, who, aided by a small army of informers, kept a close watch on them. Otto was arrested and sentenced to death after the attack of Dec. 7, 1941; the sentence was commuted, and he was deported after the war. His wife and daughter were never tried but interned and then deported. Eberhard, now of college age, refused to join them and concealed his family history until pressed by his daughter. Japanese from the local consulate also spied, and scholars still debate the value of all this intelligence, although fringe writers happily describe light signals from the Kuehns’ dormer window directing Japanese planes to their Pearl Harbor targets. Despite the impression given by Hollywood, Nazi spies were largely ineffective, and their efforts in Hawaii do not contravene this.

Absorbing niche history about a grandfather’s secret Nazi identity.