Refugee, prisoner, wine merchant, spy: Peter Sichel was many things in his long, colorful life, but he was probably most often identified as the man who made Blue Nun one of the most popular wines in the world in the 1970s and ’80s. At its peak, in 1985, 30 million bottles of this slightly sweet German white wine — its label featuring smiling nuns holding baskets of grapes in a vineyard — were sold.
By the time Mr. Sichel (pronounced sea-SHELL) took charge of his family’s wine business in 1960, he had lived a long, clandestine life. For 17 years, first in the Office of Strategic Services during World War II, and then in the Central Intelligence Agency — from its formation in 1947 until he resigned in 1959 — he played a crucial role in gathering intelligence for the United States.
He died on Feb. 24 at his home in Manhattan, his daughter Bettina Sichel said. He was 102.
As a 19-year-old German émigré to the United States who volunteered for the U.S. Army the day after Pearl Harbor, Mr. Sichel was recruited to join the O.S.S. 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 O.S.S. unit attached to Gen. George S. Patton’s Seventh 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 O.S.S. 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 O.S.S. station chief in postwar Berlin. He was 23 and known as “the wunderkind.” As the O.S.S. evolved into the C.I.A., 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.
It was Mr. Sichel who synthesized the intelligence that revealed that 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 — it was Mr. Sichel who 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 C.I.A.’s Eastern Europe operations. There he worked in rickety temporary quarters, erected alongside the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, while the C.I.A. awaited a permanent home.
In 1956, Mr. Sichel 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 C.I.A. in 1959.
A ‘Quiet American’
Mr. Sichel’s espionage exploits were recounted in a number of books, including “The Quiet Americans: Four C.I.A. 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.
In gathering intelligence, Mr. Sichel’s job was 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. Both in Hong Kong and in overseeing intelligence-gathering in Eastern Europe, he ran into a conflict that ultimately caused him to resign.
The C.I.A. had two significant parts: One included intelligence gatherers like Mr. Sichel; the other planned and executed covert operations, like 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 American interests.
Such covert efforts were repeated in 1954 in Guatemala, when the Guatemalan president Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán was deposed in a C.I.A.-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.”
Mr. Sichel spoke openly about his opinions in the film, though he was less candid in his memoir, which was subject to C.I.A. censorship. He recalled asking C.I.A. officials why he could not discuss subjects that had been well documented.
“When journalists say it, it’s speculation,” he was told. “When you say it, it’s confirmation.”
Son of a Wine Merchant
Peter Max Ferdinand Sichel was born on 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.
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. The businesses were rebuilt, but the family came together again only after World War II, Mr. Sichel said.
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, and at 14 Peter was able to enroll at Stowe, a private boarding school, on the condition, the headmaster said, that he change the pronunciation of his surname from “seashell” to “sitchel” so he would fit in better. Mr. Sichel continued to use that pronunciation until he left the C.I.A.
His parents were not initially permitted to leave Germany, as the government needed the foreign currency that their wine business brought in. But they managed to flee in 1938 and settled in Bordeaux, in southwest France, where Mr. Sichel took over that branch of the family enterprise.
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. That was the end of Peter’s formal education.
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.
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 S.S. Siboney. They arrived in New York in April 1941.
Inheriting a Business
The family eventually settled in Kew Gardens, Queens. Peter was working at shoe supply company when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.
While working for the C.I.A. 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., Mr. Sichel is survived by another daughter, Silvia Sichel, a director and screenwriter, and five grandchildren. Their daughter Alexandra Sichel 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 & Company, 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.
Mr. Sichel 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.”
Mr. Sichel tried to repeat his success with other branded wines. Wan Fu was a slightly sweet wine intended to go with Chinese food: “To eat Chinese without Wan Fu is to eat with but one chopstick,” the slogan went. It was moderately successful, Mr. Sichel said. Others, like My Cousin’s Claret, a basic Bordeaux, and Après Ski, a mulled wine, were not.
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 American company in 1995.
In 1971, he used his contacts in Bordeaux, including his cousin Peter Allan Sichel, an owner of several chateaus, to put together a group of investors to buy Château Fourcas Hosten, an underperforming Bordeaux producer in Listrac. By the 1980s, Fourcas was in financial trouble, and Mr. Sichel invested personally, taking charge of the company; soon he was improving and modernizing equipment and renovating the château. He sold the company in 2006, as his children were not interested in the wine business.
When he left the C.I.A., his colleagues there had insisted that as a wine merchant he would never find the passion for the work that he had experienced in intelligence, and that sooner or later he would be back.
In “The Last Spy,’’ his wife, Stella, recalled how high-ranking C.I.A. officials would ask her, “When is Peter coming back?”
“They didn’t think he would survive outside,” she said. “He might not have survived if he had not fallen immediately into his new passion, which was the wine business.”
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