Sichel died at the age of 102 at his home in Manhattan on February 24, his daughter Bettina Sichel told US papers.
The younger of two children, Peter Max Ferdinand Sichel was born in 1922 in Mainz, Germany, a commercial hub southwest of Frankfurt near the country’s wine regions.
He came from a large secular Jewish family and was raised in his grandfather’s wine company, H. Sichel Söhne, established in 1857. His mother, Franziska (Loeb) Sichel, closely followed the political developments in Germany and, alarmed by Hitler’s rise to power, urged the family to flee. “She said, ‘All the Jews are going to get killed, get out while you can, take money out,’ and they all thought she was mad,” Sichel later recalled.
The family sent their children to boarding schools in England. He attended St Cyprian's Prep School in Sussex and later Stowe School, where his headmaster advised him to grow out his hair and alter the pronunciation of his surname if he wanted to fit in.
His parents escaped Nazi Germany and resettled in Bordeaux, where the family business had offices. In 1939, Sichel and his sister were visiting their parents when Germany invaded Poland, triggering the Second World War. Trapped in France, the family was later interned. As German troops advanced, the Sichels convinced the camp administrator to let them flee, arguing that as Jews they were certain to be targeted for persecution.
They escaped on foot, crossing the Pyrenees, and hid in a château in the mountains, before making their way through Spain to Portugal. Sichel was said to have bribed a border guard with a Montblanc fountain pen and a gold pillbox before the family secured passage to America.
Arriving aged 18 to New York in 1941, the Sichels were taken in by relatives and eventually settled in Queens. Later that year, Sichel enlisted in the US Army.
With his French and German language skills, he was swiftly recruited into America’s intelligence service, then called the OSS. He was trained in lock-picking and hot-wiring cars and deployed to Algiers, where he primed guerrillas for the French Resistance. He also recruited German prisoners of war (POWs) to spy against their own country – a mission later dramatised in the 1951 film Decision Before Dawn.
After the war, Sichel returned to his home town, finding his family’s homes destroyed but their cellars miraculously still stocked with wine.
In October 1945, the US dispatched him to Berlin to gather intelligence on Soviet operations. At just 23, he became the OSS station chief in the city. Known as “the wunderkind,” he oversaw espionage operations as the OSS transitioned into the CIA, monitoring the Soviet consolidation of power in east Germany. Between 1948 and 1949, he dispatched agents into the German countryside to investigate rumours of a planned Soviet invasion of the West. His intelligence determined that such fears were unfounded.
In 1952, he returned to the US where he led the CIA’s Eastern European operations from an office in Washington.
In 1959, he was posted to Hong Kong as the agency’s station chief, monitoring Communist China.
At a gathering of CIA station chiefs that year, he learned of a planned operation to destabilise Mao Zedong’s government by airdropping American spies deep inside China. Sichel objected, calling it a death sentence for the operatives. “We’d save an awful lot of time and money if we just killed them ourselves,” he reportedly told the CIA’s clandestine operations chief. “It’s a fantasy. It’s not going to work.” Then he declared: “I’m out. I’m finished.”
Long after leaving the CIA, he remained a critic of risky covert operations, arguing instead for intelligence-gathering. “We need to get away from this idea that we are always right in the world, and that somehow when we’re invading countries or overthrowing their governments, we’re doing it to help them. We’re not helping them,” he told author Scott Anderson, who profiled Sichel in his 2020 book The Quiet Americans: Four CIA Spies at the Dawn of the Cold War — a Tragedy in Three Acts. “It is often easier to act, especially with the belief that we are always right, than to wait and let problems solve themselves. This is the disease of empires.”
In 1960, Sichel returned to his family’s wine business, focusing on marketing. He transformed Blue Nun into a global phenomenon, advertising it as a pairing suitable for almost any food. It was even named in a Beastie Boys song, The Blue Nun, which included a sample of Sichel discussing wine. By the time the drink reached its peak in 1985, 30 million bottles were sold.
The infamous Blue Nun white wine (Photo: The Little Museum of Dublin / Wikimedia)[Missing Credit]
Sichel shared ownership of the family company until 1995 when he sold it. For many years, he co-owned a vineyard in France, Château Fourcas Hosten, and was a wine consultant and judge.
His first marriage to art student Cuy Höttler ended in divorce. In 1961, he married Stella Spanoudaki, a financial analyst from Greek Macedonia. They had three daughters: Bettina Sichel, who followed her father into the wine business and now co-owns Laurel Glen Vineyard in California; Sylvia Sichel, a director and writer; and Alex Sichel, a filmmaker known for the 1997 film All Over Me.
He is survived by Bettina and Sylvia.
