The Quiet Americans: Four CIA Spies at the Dawn of the Cold War—A Tragedy in Three Acts

by Scott Anderson

There was one crucial feature of the POW infiltration missions that predicated all others: this was the decision that the German soldiers would go across in their own uniforms and under their own names. This negated any need for that most perilous accoutrement to a spy’s life—the creation of a false identity—and lessened any dangers from a missing documents standpoint. The typical German soldier in World War II carried a formidable array of official papers with him, but any that had gone missing since a recruit’s capture could be easily replicated in one of the OSS forgery labs. There was also little concern that a German sentry or Abwehr agent might question why a soldier whose unit had been stationed hundreds of miles away suddenly found himself on the Moselle River. The German retreat from France had been so swift and chaotic that different units were jumbled together all along the line, making a soldier’s presence in any one spot nearly as plausible as anywhere else. Of course, that still left the question of precisely how to get the spies across no-man’s-land, and how to get them back. Initially, Hyde opted for the same tactics that had been used in Italy and western France: after frontline troops had probed for a weak or unguarded spot along the enemy line, the agent would be brought up and, under the cover of darkness, slip his or her way across. Along the more tightly controlled Moselle front, however, this approach proved unworkable, with several agents paying wit...