I Was Trained To Be A Spy by Helias Doundoulakis

I Was Trained To Be A Spy follows the story of an American-born boy who grew up in a small village on the Greek island of Crete. During his final year in high school, he witnesses the German invasion of the island as WWII began. At the age of eighteen, he joined a resistance group and supplied crucial information to the SOE, the arm of the English Intelligence Service. This group however is uncovered, resulting in their evacuation by the SOE, to Cairo.

There, Helias Doundoulakis was asked to join English Intelligence, only to pursue the American OSS (Office of Strategic Services), the fledgling American spy organization. He enlisted in the U.S. Army and was attached to the OSS’s SI or Secret Intelligence sector, where the author was trained for intelligence as well as defensive combat skills. After being oriented into a skilled “spy”, Doundoulakis was sent back to Salonica, Greece along with a Greek naval intelligence officer, and later set up a communications cell with a wireless radio he smuggled in, hidden inside a can of olive oil!

I Was Trained To Be A Spy is a heart-rendering account told in simple prose, of one young man’s spy training. He was the only American soldier in Salonica for a period of nine months, sending daily messages to OSS headquarters in Cairo on German troop movements. With these cryptic messages, many Axis ships were sunk, trains bombed, and thousand of Germans were killed. The author was decorated by the United States Army and the Greek government after the war, became a successful civil engineer, and holds the patent for the world’s largest radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico.

Xlibris , $22.99, ISBN#: 978-1-4257-5395-5