Monthly WIN Short-Form Book Review

Stephen Talty's The American School of Spies is a valuable contribution to the literature on the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and to the history of Allied intelligence during the Second World War. It is not Talty's first study of wartime espionage. Agent Garbo: The Brilliant, Eccentric Secret Agent Who Tricked Hitler and Saved D-Day (2012) examined the Spanish double agent Juan Pujol, whose deception campaign supported the Normandy invasion, while The Secret Agent: In Search of America's Greatest World War II Spy (2013) recounted how Eric Erickson enabled the Allied bombing campaign against Germany's synthetic-oil industry.

In The American School of Spies, Talty examines OSS operations in occupied Greece by weaving together three closely connected narratives. The first recounts the extraordinary efforts of Greek archaeologists and museum officials to safeguard the nation's antiquities before the German invasion in April 1941. Entire museum collections of sculptures, inscriptions, pottery, and other irreplaceable artifacts were buried or concealed, while throughout the occupation Greek authorities sought to prevent Nazi looting of classical sites and antiquities for ideological purposes or simple souvenir hunting. Talty argues persuasively that this campaign to preserve Greece's cultural heritage constituted a form of national resistance, protecting the material symbols of Greek identity during foreign occupation.

The second narrative examines OSS Director William Donovan's recruitment of American classicists associated with the American School of Classical Studies at Athens—the premier U.S.-Canadian research institution for Greek studies since 1881—to staff the agency's "Greek desk." Rather than relying exclusively on experienced intelligence officers, Donovan chose scholars whose command of the Greek language, geography, archaeology, and society provided expertise that conventional military intelligence personnel could not quickly acquire. After training in intelligence tradecraft (hence the play on words in Talty's title), these academics proved adept at cultivating resistance contacts, inserting agents under cover, evaluating intelligence reporting, and coordinating clandestine operations in a politically fragmented and geographically demanding theater.

The third narrative follows the Greek Americans dispatched into occupied Greece to collect intelligence and support resistance organizations. Their assignments required exceptional courage, as capture frequently meant torture and execution. Talty effectively conveys both their operational successes and the persistent challenges posed by German counterintelligence, rival partisan movements, and the increasingly complex political environment. The book's most compelling episode recounts how an OSS operative in Thessaloniki learned of the imminent departure of a German military train, reported the information through OSS channels, and then witnessed the Allied airstrike that destroyed the target but also inflicted significant civilian casualties.

Talty writes with the pace of a suspense novel while maintaining a firm grounding in the historical record. He makes effective use of the secondary literature, particularly Susan Heuck Allen's Classical Spies: American Archaeologists with the OSS in World War II Greece (2013), while drawing extensively on original research in National Archives and Records Administration holdings, including OSS personnel files, operational reports, memoranda, and wartime correspondence. Interviews with the children and other relatives of many of the principal figures add a welcome human dimension without overwhelming the analysis. The result is a well-researched and engaging account that illuminates an underexamined theater of OSS operations and demonstrates how regional expertise, cultural knowledge, and language proficiency could become decisive intelligence assets.

AFIO President Paul Hollingsworth retired from CIA in 2014 as a senior executive after a 27-year career in analysis and operations, including overseas tours in Russia and Greece. He subsequently served in the private sector for ten years as the senior intelligence advisor on Europe and Eurasia for the energy company BP. In graduate schoolม before joining the US government, he studied ancient archaeology at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and earned a doctorate in medieval Greek and Slavic history at the University of California (Berkeley).