Page 28 - Alumni Horae: Vol. 94, No. 3 Spring 2014

But for all that Young revealed through his fieldwork,
he kept a big secret: a career as an American spy dur-
ing World War II. In her book (and in remarks delivered
in the Rodney S. Young Memorial Lecture at the Museum
in September 2012), Allen paints a captivating hidden
history. Young was recruited – and then recruited other
archaeologists – to work for Special Intelligence (SI),
a predecessor of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS),
which, in turn, was a precursor of the Central Intelli-
gence Agency. As the ringleader of a cohort of archae-
ologist spies, Young masterminded 57 missions inside
Axis-held Greece. He created missions to foment armed
and passive resistance through sabotage and demoli-
tion, and by supplying Greek guerillas with arms, food,
and medicine.
Then he apparently put those secrets in a vault and
flung away the key.
“Sabotage? Guerillas?” says George Bass, pioneer of
nautical archaeology and founder of the Institute of
Nautical Archaeology. “I’d never have guessed, and he
never mentioned it.”
Bass earned his Ph.D. at Penn as a student of Young’s,
whom he met at the American School of Classical Studies
in 1956. The two spent decades digging together in
Turkey and working at Penn, where Bass became an
archaeology professor and associate curator of the
Mediterranean section. “Never once did Dr. Young
mention even being in World War II,” Bass says, “let
alone being part of the OSS.”
Yet it’s not hard for Bass to imagine Young oversee-
ing missions and leading his colleagues into dangerous
situations.
“He was absolutely gregarious and an incredibly
dominant person,” Bass recalls. “He was a physically
large man with a deep voice that rumbled in his belly.
He commanded respect, and people – including me –
seemed to do what he asked, even if it seemed impos-
sible. His sense of adventure was matched by a confi-
dence that he would succeed in those adventures. And he
was very, very private.”
If Young evolved into what his OSS evaluator called
a “grade A” operative, who “ranks with the best we
have had,” he didn’t start life that way. He was born
into wealth in 1907. Allen describes him as a “coddled
child of the Golden Age,” a “Cary Grantish darling of New
York debutante balls,” who was educated at St. Paul’s,
Princeton, and Columbia.
In a June 10, 1929, letter to SPS Rector Samuel Drury,
who was trying to recruit Young to the SPS faculty via a
two-year Cochran Scholarship to study in Greece, Young
declined the Rector’s offer, telling him he instead intended
to spend a year working abroad.
“A year at Athens may lead to almost anything – the
excavations at Athens are to start in the winter and it
is possible I might get a job working on them,” Young
explained, also telling Drury that he was not interested
in secondary school teaching, but would consider a
career in teaching at the college level.
Not yet having to earn a living, Young spent six years
digging at the Agora in Greece, while World War II
coalesced around him. In 1940, after war arrived in
Greece with the Italian invasion, Young served the
Greek resistance by driving an ambulance that he
paid for himself. While in that role, Young sustained a
wound sufficiently serious that it later earned him
4F status from the U.S. Army.
In the spring of 1941, Alumni Horae reported that
“Rodney S. Young was the first American to take an
active part in the war in Greece and has fully recovered
from wounds received while driving an ambulance on
the Albanian front. The War Cross was awarded to him
recently at the King’s instance.”
Sidelined, Young was working at Princeton when Ben-
jamin Merritt, consulting for the Foreign Nationalities
Branch of SI, and his boss, William “Wild Bill” Donovan,
the wartime head of the OSS known as the “Father of
American Intelligence,” recruited him to do intelligence
work on behalf of the Greeks. Two weeks after Pearl
Harbor, the Foreign Nationalities Branch of SI went
operational. Young volunteered for active duty.
Why would Young risk his life for the Greeks – and
spend the next five years going to greater and greater
extremes in that effort? Noblesse oblige, a bit of hubris,
an acquired philhellenic spirit, and the desire to alleviate
the Greeks’ suffering, Allen says. Alessandro Pezzati,
senior archivist at the Penn Museum, agrees.
“Archaeologists speak the language, walk the country,
know the people, and are literally covered in centuries of
its dirt,” he says. “They develop strong attachments to the
countries they work in, and that particular country at that
particular time was facing a real and dangerous threat.”
The Penn Museum Archives are not where Allen found
the revelatory material for her book, which details the
exploits of a number of scholar-cum-spies. Records
housed in the National Archives, declassified in 2004
and 2008, gave her the facts of the missions. To those
records, Allen added oral histories to create what she
calls a “mosaic” of Young’s wartime activities.
By 1942, Young was leading the OSS’s Greek Desk from
Cairo, which Allen describes as “an exotic paradise . . .
like a movie set, teeming with rich refugees, war corres-
pondents in khaki chic, and officers from occupied
France, Greece, Yugoslavia, and Poland.”
Young also orchestrated espionage from Alexandria,
Cyprus, Istanbul, and Izmir. Assisting him were four
male captains and a sorority of female spies, all Amer-
icans and leaders in the field of archaeology: Dorothy
Cox, Virginia Grace, Margaret Crosby, Lucy Talcott,
James Oliver, Jerome Sperling, John Caskey, and John
Franklin Daniel III.
Daniel became Young’s link to Penn. From 1940 until
he left for Cyprus, Daniel served as associate curator of
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