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Peter Sichel, Wine Merchant With a Cloak-and-Dagger Past, Dies at 102

Wine, Beer & Cocktails|Peter Sichel, Wine Merchant With a Cloak-and-Dagger Past, Dies at 102

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/04/dining/drinks/peter-sichel-dead.html

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He played a crucial role in the early days of the C.I.A., as a station chief in Berlin and Hong Kong, before shifting gears to popularize Blue Nun wine.

A black-and-white photo of Peter Sichel, wearing glasses, a striped shirt, polka-dot tie and striped pants, holding a wine glass in one hand and gesturing with the other.

March 4, 2025, 3:12 p.m. ET

Refugee, prisoner, wine merchant, spy: Peter Sichel was many things in his long, colorful life, but he was probably most often identified as the man who made Blue Nun one of the most popular wines in the world in the 1970s and ’80s. At its peak, in 1985, 30 million bottles of this slightly sweet German white wine — its label featuring smiling nuns holding baskets of grapes in a vineyard — were sold.

By the time Mr. Sichel (pronounced sea-SHELL) took charge of his family’s wine business in 1960, he had lived a long, clandestine life. For 17 years, first in the Office of Strategic Services during World War II, and then in the Central Intelligence Agency — from its formation in 1947 until he resigned in 1959 — he played a crucial role in gathering intelligence for the United States.

He died on Feb. 24 at his home in Manhattan, his daughter Bettina Sichel said. He was 102.

As a 19-year-old German émigré to the United States who volunteered for the U.S. Army the day after Pearl Harbor, Mr. Sichel was recruited to join the O.S.S. as part of an effort to build an American intelligence-gathering force where none existed.

He served in Algiers in 1942 and ’43, and then as head of the O.S.S. unit attached to Gen. George S. Patton’s Seventh Army as it drove from Southern France toward Alsace in late 1944. Among his jobs were interrogating German prisoners of war and recruiting volunteers to infiltrate the German lines and report back to him.

One of Mr. Sichel’s O.S.S. colleagues, George L. Howe, wrote a novel about one such case, made into the highly regarded 1951 film “Decision Before Dawn,” directed by Anatole Litvak, with a screenplay by another of Mr. Sichel’s colleagues, Peter Viertel.

After Germany surrendered, Mr. Sichel became the O.S.S. station chief in postwar Berlin. He was 23 and known as “the wunderkind.” As the O.S.S. evolved into the C.I.A., and the Allies’ wartime united front deteriorated into the international standoff that became the Cold War, he oversaw espionage operations.