George Wickes had a price on his head.
It was 1946. Alarming as that was, Wickes went about his business, talking to people, asking questions. He continued to meet with his connections in the Vietnamese independence movement without pause. Wickes, a much revered and long-time University of Oregon English professor later in life, was then working for the Office of Strategic Services after World War II, stationed in Saigon as a secret intelligence operative.
George Wickes, as it happens, was a spy. It’s a charge he doesn’t deny.
“Of course I was a spy! The great thing about the OSS was how imaginative it was,” Wickes recalls. “It had no hesitation abput doing something that no one else had done. The Navy SEALS were invented by the OSS when we decided we could have swimmers who would attach limpits (a type of explosive nicknamed after a crustacean) to the bottom of enemy ships to sink them.”
Seventy-one years later, it was Wickes’ involvement in the OSS and the fact that he is possibly one of two surviving members that caught producers Ken Burns’ and Lynn Novick’s attention when they were researching for their new 10-part, 18-hour documentary, “The Vietnam War,” which will premiere on PBS stations on September 17. Wickes is featured in the first episode; his role in the OSS, which later evolved into the CIA, documents the preliminary stages of the Vietnamese independence movement, which the Unites States supported. Wickes was there initially as a cryptographer, coding and decoding messages, but eventually began to collect information and report back to Washington, D.C. about the current ground happenings in Vietnam.
"We knew when we started on the project that it was essential to capture the early American involvement in Vietnam, post the Second World War,” said the film's producer Sarah Botstein.
“When we learned that George Wickes, one of the only surviving members of his OSS team, was alive and well -- and willing to meet with us -- we knew it was urgent that we get on a plane. Not only was he one of a small number of Americans in Vietnam at the time, but the fact that he met with Ho Chi Minh, and had given a lot of thought to his experience in the country at that time, was hugely important."
Wickes didn’t discover that he was a target for assassination until he had been charged with impersonating an officer; the officer, Col. Peter Dewey, was the real target but often sent Wickes to meetings in his place. Since Wickes couldn’t meet with other officers unless he held that rank himself, Dewey bestowed the field promotion to solve the problem. It was actually Dewey that was the true assassination target; Wickes, attending clandestine meetings, was mistaken for his commanding officer. Though the bounty was never collected on Dewey or Wickes’ head, Dewey was the first American soldier to be killed in Vietnam, mistaken for a French officer at a guerilla road block on the day he was supposed to fly home. Wickes, a close friend of Dewey’s, was charged with “the rather gruesome job” of recovering his commander’s body, which was never found.
The CIA wanted Wickes to join their ranks after the OSS was defunct, but the professor emertitus didn’t particularly care about the way the new organization was planning to conduct itself.
“And we weren’t at war any longer,” he adds. “The spirit of the CIA was different from the spirit of the OSS. The OSS was like a lark. The CIA sounded more sinister.”
The one-time marked man survived his bounty, interviewed Ho Chi Minh to find out if he was indeed a communist, and went on to get his undergrad under the G.I Bill when he returned stateside. He returned to Paris to run the Fullbright program there and finish his doctorate. Back in the United States, he was a professor at Duke University, then moved to Claremont, California as one of the seven funding faculty members of Harvey Mudd College, where he edited the letters of Henry Miller, published a biography of Natalie Barney and Americans in Paris about expatriate writers in Paris during the 20s and 30s. In 1970, he visited the University of Oregon campus and took a one-year appointment. It was only in 2015, after teaching UO students for 47 years, that he retired at 92, but he continues to teach workshops for Insight Seminars, the continuing education program at the university and will be teaching a course on F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway this upcoming January.
He doesn’t think of what his life would have been like with the CIA, stealthily shooting around the globe and encountering “colorful characters with bushy mustaches,” he adds. “I just wanted to go to (university) and study English some more.”