The Spy Who Came In From the Cold

William G Fuchs

3/18/24 - 12/19/07

My blog has humble beginnings. I started it for my parents to give them a place to go on the Web and keep up with my writing. My Dad was delighted and printed out the whole thing.

I cannot begin to describe him to you. He was very humble and unassuming. He was an ordinary man who did extraordinary things. His life is a kaleidoscope of extraordinary images: passing through Ellis Island as an infant, sitting on Einstein's lap as a child, sneaking into the Apollo Theatre with a black classmate in the 30's. Being tapped for OSS because of his fluency in German, surviving bombings in London, lying quietly in a boat next to director ("The Admiral") John Ford as a German patrol boat cruised past. Showing up for a blind date at the GW auditorium, even though he was ill with food poisoning. (The blind date was with my mother.) The OSS stint turned into the CIA, Germany and Switzerland, DC and Hawaii. He helped raise a Soviet sub, helped invent the fax machine and saw the Roswell autopsy reports. Those were the things he could talk about.

When I last saw him in September, he told me what he was doing on the day I was born in Germany in 1962. Some of it is still classified. He took all those oaths he signed to secrecy seriously, so it was significant that he told me this. I suspected it was closure. He awakened me and saw me out the door at 3 AM the day I left. Still punctual and efficient.

This is the only digital picture I have of him...from the US Navy Memorial site. From 1945, a young sailor in front of Picadilly Circus.

Godspeed.