When Nazi officers marched into Athens' National Archaeological Museum in spring 1941, they expected to leave with some ...

When Nazi officers marched into Athens' National Archaeological Museum in spring 1941, they expected to leave with some of the most iconic artifacts in human history. The Mask of Agamemnon, a statue of Zeus, thousands of irreplaceable pieces. They found nothing. Every treasure had already been hidden, most of it buried underground before the Germans arrived. That outcome didn't happen by accident. A new book by author Stephan Talty, "The American School of Spies," details how a small team of American archaeologists and classicists were quietly turned into OSS operatives, working under General William "Wild Bill" Donovan, the man who ran America's wartime intelligence service and would later inspire the founding of the CIA. Hitler's obsession with ancient Greece wasn't casual. He genuinely believed ancient Greek civilization had Aryan origins, and he dispatched Nazi classicists to excavate proof that never came. He was particularly fixated on the Discobolus, a crouched male athlete statue that had been celebrated in Leni Riefenstahl's 1936 Olympic propaganda film. To counter the occupation and protect the artifacts, Roosevelt gave Donovan authority to build a clandestine Greek intelligence network, drawing recruits from Harvard, Yale, and Greek immigrant communities across the United States. Donovan picked Rodney Young, a 33-year-old Princeton-educated archaeologist with no military experience, to lead what Washington called the "Greek Desk." Young, who had previously lived and dug in Greece, was described as a socialite and "Cary Grant-ish darling of New York debutante balls." His actual job was to transform scholars into spies. Young himself was wounded by shrapnel during the occupation, and an Athenian newspaper wrote at the time that "new American blood is now added to that shed in 1821 for Greek independence." Among his operatives was Dorothy Hannah Cox, a 50-year-old excavation architect and expert in ancient coins. Cox was given the code name Thrush and used her work for Greek War Relief as cover. Young's code name was Pigeon. Their training camp, called "the Farm," was a former horse estate in Virginia, 20 miles outside Washington. By July 1942, ...