Classical Spies: American Archaeologists with the OSS in World War II Greece by Susan Heuck Allen (review)

Classical Spies is the first full-length study of the heroic contributions made by classical archaeologists and classicists alike to the design and operation of the United States's intelligence service during World War II in Greece and in the surrounding regions. The roster of those involved reads like an academic Who's Who, and ranges from Carl Blegen, Jack Caskey, Margaret Crosby, Dorothy Cox, John Daniel III, William Dinsmoor, Sterling Dow, Charles Edson, Gerald Else, Alison Frantz, Virginia Grace, Moses Hadas, Benjamin Merritt, James H. Oliver, Arthur Parsons, Jerome Sperling, Lucy Talcott, and Rodney Young to power couples like Eugene and Joan Vanderpool, Josephine and T. Leslie Shear, Homer S. Thompson and Dorothy Burr (Thompson). With Allen as guide, the reader crisscrosses the entire Mediterranean area and experiences a series of thrilling and sometimes chilling episodes.

Allen's keen eye for detail and local color makes the text come alive. We ride a "slow train to Ankara that jerked and snorted along" (108), enter a newly liberated Athens in October 1944 with the first American to return, Rodney Young (223), watch a trench-coat-clad Jerome Sperling use "the flash of a ruby ring" to signal Special Operations agent, Captain James Kellis at Istanbul's Haydar Pasha station (173), and suffer indigestion with the twenty-six-year-old Earl George Jellicoe, who, after breaking his leg in a parachute drop to Rhodes in December, 1944, decided to eat a five-page letter to the island's governor Admiral Campioni from General Maitland Wilson, lest it fall into German hands. And it wasn't as easy as the fictive accounts of James Bond and George Smiley seem to those of us experiencing espionage from our armchairs. According to Earl Jellicoe's obituary in The Daily Telegraph (February 26, 2007) the letter had been written "on thick paper, [and] was neither succulent nor digestible, took an hour to consume [and] left him with a raging thirst." And if that is not enough to pique a reader's interest, there is the fascinating story of Jack Caskey's rescue of the beautiful blonde fraulein Nele Kapp who had uncovered a spy, code-named Cicero (Elyesa Bazna), selling secrets from the British embassy in Ankara to the Germans. Caskey, who "was used to hiding 'bodies,' but none as hot as this," engineered Kapp's daring escape to Cairo in April, 1944 (188).

The reader would like to have had a unified list of illustrations, seen the birth and death dates of each person placed in parentheses when first mentioned, rather than in the Epilogue (271-289), and had the maps used as end papers. For a book so bristling with names, a better index could have been expected. Major Michael Woodbine Parish, for example, is first mentioned on page 110, not on page 114 as listed in the index (426). Gladys Baker who is pictured in Figure 2 (16) is not in the index at all. "Nairobia" should be corrected to read Nairobi (105) and "companyp" to company (125). Five of the six people in Figure 18 (174) are listed by name; for accuracy's sake the sixth should be listed as unidentified. Caskey's "professor" who "had excavated on the banks of the Euphrates" (107) was Michael Rostovzeff, and his name should have been supplied. The reader wonders what "antiaircraft crowbar showers" are (103), wants to know more about "Q" pills (136, 185) and thinks that the musmulla tree that Clio Adossides Sperling and a friend planted in Haifa "for the refugees" (90) should be identified as an indigenous fruit-bearing tree cultivated in southwest Asia and southwestern Europe for millennia.

But these are small points which certainly do no harm to the whole. Without much trouble, each can be remedied in a subsequent edition. This intriguing book with its multinational narrative of brave...