Peter Sichel, wine merchant with a cloak-and-dagger past, dies at 102

Boston Globe

05-03-2025

He died Feb. 24 at his home in New York City, his daughter Bettina Sichel said. He was 102.
Get Starting Point
A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday.
Enter Email
Sign Up
As a 19-year-old German émigré to the United States who volunteered for the US Army the day after Pearl Harbor, Peter Sichel was recruited to join the OSS as part of an effort to build an American intelligence-gathering force where none existed.
He served in Algiers in 1942 and '43 and then as head of the OSS unit attached to General George S. Patton's Third Army as it drove from Southern France toward Alsace in late 1944. Among his jobs were interrogating German prisoners of war and recruiting volunteers to infiltrate the German lines and report back to him.
One of Mr. Sichel's OSS colleagues, George L. Howe, wrote a novel about one such case, made into the highly regarded 1951 film 'Decision Before Dawn,' directed by Anatole Litvak, with a screenplay by another of Mr. Sichel's colleagues, Peter Viertel.
After Germany surrendered, Mr. Sichel became the OSS station chief in postwar Berlin. He was 23 and known as 'the wunderkind.' As the OSS evolved into the CIA and the Allies' wartime united front deteriorated into the international standoff that became the Cold War, he oversaw espionage operations.
The Allies had divided Germany into four zones, each administered by one of the four occupying powers: the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, and France. Berlin, the German capital, which was in the middle of the Soviet Zone, was likewise divided among the four powers.
Advertisement
It was Mr. Sichel who synthesized the intelligence that revealed the Soviet Union had no intention of permitting the residents of their zones to determine their own political future, as the Allies had agreed to do. As tensions rose, culminating in 1948 with the Soviet Union's blockade of all rail, road, and water access to Allied-controlled areas in Berlin — a crisis that was relieved only by what became known as the Berlin Airlift — Mr. Sichel determined that the Soviets were not planning to invade western Germany as many in the West had feared.
He returned to the United States in 1952, posted to Washington to take charge of the CIA's Eastern Europe operations. There he worked in rickety temporary quarters, erected alongside the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, while the CIA awaited a permanent home.
In 1956, he was sent to Hong Kong to be the agency's station chief there, monitoring what was then called Red China as well as other Asian countries. Hong Kong, then administered by Britain, was the Asian counterpart to Berlin, a sliver of democracy on the vast communist mainland. He remained in Hong Kong until he resigned from the CIA in 1959.
Mr. Sichel's espionage exploits were recounted in a number of books, including 'The Quiet Americans: Four CIA Spies at the Dawn of the Cold War — a Tragedy in Three Acts' (2020), by Scott Anderson, and Mr. Sichel's 2016 memoir, 'The Secrets of My Life: Vintner, Prisoner, Soldier, Spy.' He is the subject of a documentary film, 'The Last Spy,' directed by Katharina Otto-Bernstein, which is to be released this year.
Advertisement
In gathering intelligence, Mr.Sichel sought to detect any shifts in the leanings of nonaligned countries and to figure out whether perceived disagreements between the Soviets and the Chinese were real or fictitious. In Hong Kong and in overseeing intelligence-gathering in Eastern Europe, he ran into a conflict that ultimately caused him to resign.
The CIA had two significant parts: one included intelligence gatherers like Mr. Sichel; the other planned and executed covert operations, including the coup in Iran in 1953 that overthrew the elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, and reinstalled the Shah of Iran, who had abdicated during World War II.
Mr. Sichel encountered these covert operators directly as efforts to parachute so-called freedom fighters into Albania and later China, aimed at fomenting resistance to the communist regimes, failed dismally. He was especially dismayed, he said, because the intelligence he had collected showed that these operations had no chance of success.
'If the intelligence doesn't fit, they don't believe the intelligence,' he said in 'The Last Spy.' Covert actions like the Iran coup, he added, were 'not only illegal, but ill-advised,' with long-term consequences, including the rise of the Islamic theocracy in Iran, that ran counter to US interests.
Such covert efforts were repeated in 1954 in Guatemala, when Guatemalan president Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán was deposed in a CIA-backed coup, and again in 1961 with the Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba.
'There's no attempt to learn from the past,' he said. 'It's an institutional mistake of this country.'
Peter Max Ferdinand Sichel was born Sept. 12, 1922, in Mainz, Germany, a commercial hub southwest of Frankfurt, near the leading German wine regions. His father, Eugen Sichel, was a third-generation wine merchant. His mother, Franziska (Loeb) Sichel, oversaw the home.
Advertisement
The Sichels were members of a large and prosperous secular Jewish family. They owned vineyards and made wine, but the bulk of their business was as négociants, merchants who bought wine from farmers, blended it to meet their specifications, and then bottled and sold it.
The family company, H. Sichel Söhne, sold wine throughout Germany and exported it, as well as importing wine from France. Outposts of the Sichel company were established by members of the extended family in the late 19th century in London, New York, and Bordeaux, France.
World War I destroyed those businesses, and it separated the extended family.
Soon after the Nazis came to power, Franziska Sichel saw what was to come and urged her husband to prepare to leave Germany while they could. He was not alarmed until the Nuremberg Laws were passed in 1935, depriving Jews of their civil rights. At that point, 12-year-old Peter and his older sister, Ruth, were sent to England. They didn't speak English but learned the language quickly.
His parents managed to flee in 1938 and settled in Bordeaux, in southwest France.
Peter and his sister were visiting their parents in Bordeaux during the summer of 1939 when Germany invaded Poland and war was declared. Considered enemy aliens by the French, they were not allowed to leave France, and when Germany invaded the country in May 1940, the Sichels were sent to French internment camps. Peter would not return to school.
With the Germans meeting little resistance, his father was able to talk a camp administrator into releasing the family, pointing out that as Jews, they were not disposed to aid the Nazis and were most likely to be sent back to Germany, given that the parents had fled illegally.
Advertisement
The Sichels, along with refugees from Nazi-occupied areas of northern France, found shelter at a château in the Pyrenees. A relative in New York managed to get visas for the family, as well as transit visas through Spain and Portugal, and in March 1941, they left for Lisbon, where they boarded the steamer SS Siboney. They arrived in New York in April 1941.
The family eventually settled in Queens. Peter was working at a shoe supply company when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.
While working for the CIA in Berlin, Mr. Sichel met and married a German art student, Cuy Höttler; they later divorced. In 1961, he married Stella Spanoudaki, a financial analyst and real estate broker; she died in 2022. In addition to their daughter Bettina, an owner of Laurel Glen Vineyard in Glen Ellen, Calif., he leaves another daughter, Sylvia Sichel, a director and screenwriter, and five grandchildren. Their daughter Alexandra died in 2014.
When Mr. Sichel took over his family wine business in New York in 1960, he found it antiquated and disorganized. He streamlined it, partly by merging with Schieffelin & Co., an alcohol and pharmaceutical company that could handle importing and distribution, allowing him to concentrate on promoting the company's brands.
The focus, he decided, would be Blue Nun, a wine that blended riesling and other white grapes, including Müller-Thurgau, silvaner, and gewürztraminer. It was called liebfraumilch, meaning the milk of the Holy Mother, a generic term for Rhine wine.
He traveled around the world promoting the wine and arranged print, radio and TV advertising. A particularly memorable series of radio ads in the 1970s employed a young comedy team, Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, touting Blue Nun as 'the wine that's correct with any dish.'
By the late 1980s, as the world's appetite for wine increased, interest in branded wines like Blue Nun waned. To an aspirational audience, varietal wines like chardonnay and cabernet sauvignon seemed more sophisticated. Mr. Sichel sold off the US company in 1995.
This article originally appeared in