The Roles and Weapons with the Squad

[Pete]

Back in the 1970s there was a memoir of the OSS and CIA entitled Germans by one George Bailey, probably a pseudonym. It stated that on V-E day in 1945 there was an OSS team in Prague that included Eugene Fodor, author of the 1960s Fodor's Guide handbooks for American tourists in the countries of Europe. The OSS team also included an enlisted guy who was an old crown prince of the Romanov dynasty.

The book said a group of Soviet soldiers were intrigued to be able to have a conversation with one of their princes, but a self-important U.S. Army colonel butted into the discussion and insisted that he being the ranking officer, the translators present should ignore the enlisted man and tell the Russians the things that he had to say. The translators obliged, and what ensued was one of those "When the general and I were in the whorehouse the other night" kind of discussions. The colonel couldn't understand why the Russian soldiers were laughing at the wrong times.

Those of a conspiratorial mind might want to speculate on how it was that the author of the most popular series of guidebooks for American tourists in Europe in the 1960s was a former OSS guy with CIA associations. "Bill and Susan Smith operate a very nice bed and breakfast in Oxford which I highly recommend ... " It may have been a way of keeping track of American tourists in Europe at the time.