Remarkable documentary about ‘the Jewish James Bond’ tells story of a spy

“I’ve wanted to write about my life for some time now”, says Peter Sichel, a scarcely believable 100 years old. When he consulted his former employer, America’s Central Intelligence Agency, he was told: “If a journalist writes about it, it’s speculation. If you write about it, it’s confirmation.”

But Sichel, who died in February 2025 aged 102, was well past the stage of caring by the time he spoke to the director and writer Katharina Otto-Bernstein. In her remarkable documentary, The Last Spy, Sichel reviews his extraordinary career with the CIA, gleefully settling old scores, and even surprising his two daughters with some stories they had never heard before.

Towards the end of the film we see Sichel, billed as “the Jewish James Bond”, relaying some of his wartime and Cold War experiences to a Jewish friendship club in the Hamptons, in upstate New York. Despite the fact that he parted company with the CIA in the 1960s, there is the sense that Sichel has not forgotten any of his tradecraft. Once a spy, perhaps, always a spy.

Sichel ended his career with the CIA as head of station in Hong Kong; previously he had run the Agency’s operation in Berlin, steering it skilfully between the two powerful Dulles brothers: Allen Dulles, the CIA’s director, and his brother John Foster Dulles, Secretary of State under President Eisenhower from 1953 to 1959.

But Sichel’s story begins in 1922 in Mainz, Germany, where his family was three things: Jewish, not very observant, and prominent in the city. (They did go to synagogue on Yom Kippur but once his father offered him a choice between school and shul, Peter chose school.)

His great-grandfather had established a highly profitable wine business and there were branches in Bordeaux, in New York and in London. The family home, pictured in the film, is plainly a building owned by wealthy people.

His parents were Franziska and Eugen and Sichel is clear-eyed about the difference between them: his whip-smart mother closely followed political discourse and wanted to leave Germany as soon as Hitler came to power. His father did not agree until 1935 when the Nuremberg laws were imposed, restricting the lives of Jews whether they were religiously observant or not.

The Sichels left Germany illegally and made for their property in Bordeaux, only to be interned as enemy aliens. Sylvia Sichel, one of Peter’s daughters, is astonished in the film to hear her father talk about a cousin who was with him in the internment camp, and whom he urged to leave with him. But the relative did not join Sichel, and perished in a concentration camp after the Nazis over-ran France.

In 1941, still only 19, Peter and his sister and parents succeeded in making it from Europe to New York, where they were “very well received by our relations”.

Once America entered the war in December 1941, everything changed. “I volunteered for the US army the day after Pearl Harbor [when the Japanese attacked the American military base] — and my parents were proud that I did so.”

It seems extraordinary now to learn that the CIA, as an intelligence body, did not exist during the war. Instead there was the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS, and it was this organisation which began to recruit “foreign-born experts” like Peter Sichel, who spoke not only English but fluent French and his native German.

By the time he was 22 Sichel was in charge of recruiting German prisoners of war to see if they would reject Nazism and work for the Allies. The only person who was not in favour of the OSS’s operations was the legendary General George S Patton, lauded post-war as a hero, but derisively described by Peter Sichel as “a very stupid man”.

When the war ended in 1945 Sichel was still in Germany and the OSS was formally abolished. It did not become the CIA properly until 1947, but Sichel was in pole position to run America’s emergent spy network in post-war Germany, particularly keeping an eye on Russian ambitions in the divided country — West and East Germany.

It was the time of rabid “Red-hunting” in America, spearheaded by the Republican senator Joe McCarthy, with his notorious repeated question of “Are you now, or have you ever been, a Communist?”

Though he became increasingly disillusioned with CIA tactics — not least as a result of John Foster Dulles’ obsessive anti-Communist stance — Sichel was a highly admired head of station in both Berlin and Hong Kong. Allen Dulles, his CIA mentor, remained convinced that despite Sichel’s unhappiness with some CIA policies, his resignation was not permanent and that he would one day return.

But that was not the case. Despite describing spying as “a fascinating game”, Sichel had had enough and in 1960 turned in his CIA badge. But he was still only 48 and had to find something to do to earn a living and support his family.

The answer was sitting waiting for him: the family wine business, which he revived and turned into a hugely successful company, because Sichel Wines produced the later derided – but massively commercial – wine Blue Nun. A sweet white wine, thanks to Peter Sichel’s aggressive marketing which told consumers that Blue Nun would go well with any food, it became an almost world-wide ubiquitous brand in the 1960s and 70s.

There is something cheerfully ironic about about a nice Jewish boy becoming synonymous with nuns, and by Sichel’s gleam of a grin in the film, he was well aware of the irony. One of his daughters, Bettina, is now a partner in a California vineyard, while his other daughter Sylvia is a screenwriter and film-maker.

Sichel wrote several books on German wine and produced a wine guide. He loses no opportunity in the film to describe the vast quantities of alcohol which kept the CIA afloat in the 1950s and early 60s. I like to think that since they didn’t really care what they were drinking as long as it got them drunk, that was part of the inspiration behind Blue Nun. Bland, inoffensive, and working behind the scenes. Or was that Peter Sichel, the spymasters’ spy?

The Last Spy, a film by Katharina Otto-Bernstein, is showing at the Curzon Bloomsbury at 4.50 pm on November 16 as part of the UKJFF’s Documentary Day