Of the relatively small number of undercover operatives parachuted into Germany territory by the Allied intelligence services, thirty two were graduates of a unique program run primarily by the American Office of Strategic Services, Project Eagle. Project Eagle trained Polish soldiers who had served in the Wehrmacht and been taken prisoner to infiltrate into Germany and gather tactical and strategic intelligence on the German military. The idea was that their language skills would allow them to pass for Polish forced laborers while simultaneously being able to navigate and observe Nazi Germany. Despite the extraordinary courage evinced by the men who went on this mission (and the fact that the Polish laborer disguises and forged papers seem to have worked), it was not a success. This was primarily due to the fact that the radios provided to the infiltration teams were unwieldy, prone to breaking, and, most importantly, required a source of electricity to run—not always easy to find for people trying to pass themselves off as forced laborers in a country whose infrastructure had been rendered non-existent.

This little-known episode in the history of Polish participation in the Second World War is related in this book by John Micgiel, erstwhile director of the Institute on East Central Europe at Columbia and former president of the Kosciuszko Foundation. Based on thorough-going archival research, especially in declassified OSS documents, the book is descriptive rather than analytical. However, there are elements of it that will be of interest to historians of clandestine operations in World War II, the Cold War, and Poland. One intriguing aspect of the story of Operation Eagle is the speed with which these Polish Wehrmacht veterans were absorbed into the army of the Polish government-in-exile. Recruited from among Polish-speaking German prisoners of war, their service as German conscripts does not seem to have unduly troubled the Polish authorities, at least according to the evidence presented here. In addition, the corrosive effects of the Yalta conference, as well as the way in which the Polish Question remained, as it had been for centuries, an international concern, is illustrated by the impact it had on the morale of Polish soldiers in the west as well as the way it created pressures that helped squelch attempts to create a Project Eagle II. The documents collected by Micgiel also cast a new and complicating light on the supposed “special relationship” between the United Kingdom and the United States. Bureaucratic and political frictions and rivalries plagued British-American-Polish joint ventures like Operation Eagle and continued into the immediate postwar era. It is striking to read an American intelligence officer’s report from after the war casting doubt on the wisdom of continuing to employ Project Eagle men as agents, partly on the ground that it would provide “an excellent opportunity for the British to penetrate us, or at least American intelligence” (171).

The book’s most important chapter is the third, “The Agents and Their Mission Reports.” In it Micgiel provides brief biographical sketches of the agents in each two-man team (one observer, one radio operator) before providing information about their missions (most of which were named after American cocktails (“Daiquiri,” “Manhattan,” “Martini”). However, this chapter is also emblematic of the book’s central flaw. Much of the archival material is simply re-printed verbatim, with brief introductions by the author. The material is not really analyzed, much less formed into a coherent narrative. In this sense, Project Eagle resembles an edited collection of documents rather than a monograph or narrative. In addition, readers of Slavic Review may note that the sources will perhaps best be used by historians of a different geographic region, for the reports reprinted in Ch. 3 give a vivid and harrowing sense of Germany in the last weeks of the war. Historians of the Third Reich’s collapse will no doubt find them very useful—perhaps unparalleled in their value—and a debt of gratitude is owed to Micgiel for unearthing them and bringing them to light.