Family of Spies: A World War II Story of Nazi Espionage, Betrayal, and the Secret History Behind Pearl Harbor
Finding out that your spouse or another close family member is a spy is a standard plot for an espionage novel. But what happens when you make that discovery in real life? That’s what we learn in Christine Kuehn’s Family of Spies, a combination of memoir and family research. Let’s just say it’s not pretty.
The story begins in 1994 when Kuehn, a journalist living in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC, received a letter from a screenwriter asking for information about her paternal grandfather, Otto, who he said had been a spy for the Nazis and aided the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Kuehn’s father, a German immigrant named Eberhard, had talked little about his family’s past, and she had grown up understanding that her queries would be met with evasive responses. Nor did her father’s sister, Ruth, ever talk much. “You have a good life,” she told Kuehn, “you don’t want to ruin it with the past.” But the letter spurred Kuehn’s curiosity and, after checking Gordon Prange’s authoritative At Dawn We Slept (1981), she learned that, indeed, Otto had been a spy in Hawaii
for the Japanese. From there, Kuehn began tracking down the details of her family’s secret past.