The documentary, The Last Spy, by Katharina Otto-Bernstein, is a fascinating look at the life of CIA spymaster Peter Sichel, a German Jewish refugee to the US who ran the CIA’s operations in Berlin and Hong Kong at the height of the Cold War.
The film had its Israeli premiere at the 41st Haifa International Film Festival, which runs until October 14.
Born to a wealthy family in Germany, Sichel and his parents fled the country in the 1930s and eventually moved to America. He volunteered for the US military just after the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, and worked for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the CIA.
He distinguished himself by using German POWs – who were returned to their units with the story they had gotten lost during the chaos of battle – to spy on the Nazis.
As a rising star in the OSS, he then became a top official in the CIA, serving as station master for the CIA in Berlin. But he left in 1960, disillusioned by how the US government was using this agency to fight the Cold War.
Otto-Bernstein’s film makes clear that Sichel felt the agency was cavalier in its disregard for the lives of its agents, and wrong-headed in its attempts to try and change regimes in many countries, fearing that they would come under Soviet domination.
Sichel, who was around 100 years old during the interviews for this documentary, passed away earlier this year at the age of 102. In the film, Sichel makes a compelling case that the CIA botched its operations in a number of places, including in Albania in the early 1950s.
He also criticized the CIA’s involvement in the 1953 coup that unseated Iran’s elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, in favor of the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, saying it was a mistake that has had repercussions till today. He also faulted the agency’s approach in Southeast Asia after his transfer to Hong Kong.
After leaving the CIA, he became a vintner and a wine merchant, which had been his father’s profession in Germany, popularizing the Blue Nun brand of wine.
Otto-Bernstein attends as festival guest
OTTO-BERNSTEIN, a guest of the festival, spoke about making The Last Spy with this unique, retired agent. The German-born New Yorker has had a distinguished career directing and producing both documentaries and dramas, including The Need for Speed: Bicycle Messengers in New York, Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures, and Absolute Wilson. Based in New York, she is married to art gallery owner Nathan A. Bernstein.
Asked how she learned about Sichel, she said, “I wasn’t looking for a ‘spy subject,’ oddly enough. In the early ’90s, I was in Berlin working with a British company. Through friends – I’d grown up with the daughter of West Germany’s ambassador to East Germany – I started doing biographical interviews with fascinating figures who appeared in Who’s Who in the East. That led me into the Cold War underworld: double agents, legendary Stasi cases, people who rolled up entire networks.
“A few years later, through my husband’s family, someone said, ‘My cousin was the head of the CIA in Berlin.’ That cousin was Peter Sichel. Initially, I only wanted to corroborate another spy’s story. Then I met Peter, and everything shifted.”
When they met, she said, “He was 90-plus, sharp as a tack, typing on a laptop, and effortlessly multilingual – German, French, English. We clicked immediately. He was working on his memoir then and asked if I could read it.”
When she did, she found that while his early life and his years in the wine business were covered extensively, his CIA years “felt skeletal and heavily censored. Even what remained had been trimmed by the agency.”
Her instinct as a documentarian told her that his intelligence career could be a great subject for a documentary, but it wasn’t so easy to win his trust. She interviewed some of his former colleagues, and John Hadden, whose father had worked with Sichel.
“Then I’d return to Peter with new specifics. He wasn’t an open book; it could be like pulling teeth. But persistence and respect paid off. He would never gossip, but he would engage with policy, strategy, and the choices he believed were right or wrong.”
One of the film’s central threads is Sichel’s clash, both temperamentally and ideologically, with the Dulles brothers – secretary of state John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles, who was head of the CIA for much of the time Sichel worked there.
“Peter was a pragmatic German-Jewish survivor who’d learned that ideology must bend to reality. The Dulleses were brilliant, patrician, and intensely ideological,” said Otto-Bernstein. “Peter respected Truman-era realism and believed intervention could sometimes be justified; he cites the Italian elections as an example where preventing a Communist victory stabilized Europe.
“But he distrusted reflexive ‘interfere everywhere’ thinking. He’d raise alarms about operations that were romantic on paper, suicidal in practice.”
The Last Spy suggests that Sichel was ahead of the curve, warning Washington about the Soviets, before US diplomat George Kennan’s so-called “Long Telegram,” a warning to Washington about the threat from Moscow in 1946.
“That claim came up in our conversations and in other interviews; it didn’t all fit in the final cut, but Peter described providing early assessments from Berlin that anticipated the hardening of Soviet policy. He was 20-something and already station chief – an extraordinary responsibility. He could be adamant, even with superiors, when he felt the facts demanded it.”
ULTIMATELY, SICHEL became frustrated with the CIA’s treatment of its assets. “He saw operations – first in Europe, then patterns reappearing in Asia – where assets were being sent to near-certain death based on wishful thinking…
“When he recognized that the machinery could rationalize sacrificing agents while repeating the same mistakes elsewhere, he walked. He wasn’t a whistleblower; in that era, there wasn’t really a path for that. He just refused to be complicit.”
He saw the CIA’s approach to Iran as “a case study in missed opportunities and great-power myopia. The British and oil shaped so much of the early maneuvering; the Dulles worldview hardened the line.
“Peter’s view was nuanced: Intervention can sometimes avert catastrophe, but you have to understand the country you’re acting in and have an exit strategy; America rarely does. He thought glamour and clubbiness – these WASPy networks –could cloud judgment.”
He also sometimes felt excluded socially, although he didn’t label this treatment as antisemitism. But his early experience fleeing Nazi Germany was a formative one. The director said that when he reflected on his early life, he did so “deeply, without hate.”
“He credited his mother as the family oracle; she read the danger early. She died during the war, and he carried that loss.”
But he managed to focus on moving forward. “‘Hate is no state of being,’ he told me. That ethos informs the film: he judges actions, not people; he distinguishes between true believers, opportunists, and those trying to undo harm from within.”
As she worked on the film, she was astounded by the elderly Sichel’s energy. “At 95-100, he’d show up prepared, with typed notes in impeccable English, having ‘truncated’ documents for me because he assumed my time was valuable.”
She also came to appreciate his honesty. “If he hadn’t ‘made a study’ of something, he wouldn’t bluff. He held big views –on Berlin, on Kennan, on policy – but he wouldn’t speculate beyond his lane. That intellectual honesty is rare in public life.”
Asked whether Sichel lived to see the film, Otto-Bernstein replied, “Tragically, no. He always said he wouldn’t live to see it – and but for the two ‘lost’ COVID years, he might have…
“Shortly before he died, he sent a long goodbye letter: ‘I am endlessly tired; it is time for me to go.’ It was dignified, lucid; exactly him.”
Musing on what he would have said about the film had he seen it, Otto-Bernstein conjectured: “He’d critique the private bits, smile at the policy arguments, and – quietly – approve. Then he’d ask what I’d cut and why, and he’d suggest three better trims.
“Afterward, he’d invite us to open a bottle and talk about exit strategies, because in his world, you needed an exit before you dared make an entrance.”