May 10 2010 07:38 AM
This remarkable life --- from the AP to POW to the OSS to the CIA to the HOF --- belonged to the father of a friend of mine.
A LOCAL LIFE: Angus Thuermer, 92
Angus Thuermer dies at 92; former journalist, CIA official
By T. Rees Shapiro
Sunday, May 9, 2010
As a top CIA public affairs official, Angus Thuermer described himself as the agency's "spooksman" who officially gave "no comment" to inquiring reporters.
But that didn't mean Mr. Thuermer, 92, who died of pneumonia April 14 at Inova Loudoun Hospital, lacked for stories to tell. Just out of college in the late 1930s, he reported on the eve of World War II from Berlin before being interned by the Germans.
In the mid-1940s, Mr. Thuermer served in the U.S. Navy interrogating German U-boat engineers. He then joined the CIA for a 26-year career that included postings as station chief in New Delhi and Berlin during the Cold War.
Part of his expertise as a clandestine agent, his family said, was helping sources get out of tight spaces, or occasionally into them. 
In one instance, Mr. Thuermer smuggled a source out of India by putting him and a bottle of oxygen in a box, which was boarded onto the cargo bay of a Pan Am flight out of New Delhi.
For another mission, he arranged to have Chinese dissidents carried over the mountains of Nepal into India on the back of an elephant.
Then, there was Soviet leader Joseph Stalin's daughter, Svetlana, whom he helped spirit out of New Delhi to the United States, in part by hiding her in a luggage cart at an airport.
Before retiring in 1978, Mr. Thuermer served as the CIA station chief in Berlin for two years. Because of his high position, the East German Stasi secret police covertly recorded many of Mr. Thuermer's moves around the city.
After the end of the Cold War, Mr. Thuermer requested his Stasi file and noted, in a 1998 essay for the Christian Science Monitor, that he felt somewhat let down about how much of the material was mundane. It stated, for example, the time he drove his Volkswagen bus the wrong direction on a one-way street.
Angus MacLean Thuermer was born in Quincy, Ill., on July 17, 1917. After graduating from the University of Illinois in 1938, he moved to Berlin to study German.
Through a family friend, Mr. Thuermer secured a job with the Associated Press as a reporter to make extra spending money during his time abroad. He quickly made a name for himself as a witness to some of the most traumatic events leading up to the war that engulfed Europe and later the world.
He filed firsthand reports on the anti-Semitic riots of Kristallnacht, when he watched a synagogue burn to the ground and saw a piano crash through a second-story window. He was one of the first to cover Germany's invasion of Poland in September 1939.
For one widely played story, Mr. Thuermer negotiated with German officials to interview British author P.G. Wodehouse, "the imperturbable creator of the unexampled Jeeves," who in a series of beloved stories is personal valet to the foppish Bertie Wooster.
Wodehouse was arrested at his villa in Le Touquet, France, and taken by German soldiers to a prison camp in eastern Germany that had once been an insane asylum. There, as Mr. Thuermer wrote in his dispatch on Dec. 26, 1940, Wodehouse was "cheerfully writing a book" in an old padded cell. "Well, my, my," Wodehouse told Mr. Thuermer. "It certainly is grand of you to come down to see me."
A year later, Mr. Thuermer himself was interned shortly after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and the United States declared war. He and 135 journalists, diplomats and American officials still in Germany were detained for five months in Bad Nauheim, a resort town in the lush countryside north of Frankfurt.
To bide time, Mr. Thuermer, wire service reporter Glen Stadler and George Kennan, a U.S. embassy official who later became a chief architect of U.S. foreign policy toward the Soviet Union, formed the "Bad Nauheim Wurlitzer Cup Series," a four-team baseball league.
They used a whittled-down tree branch for a bat and made a baseball out of a champagne cork wrapped in old pajamas and socks and bound by U.S. Public Health Service adhesive tape. Bases were fashioned from diplomatic pouches, and home plate was crafted from the end of a commissary box.
They went to such lengths, he later told The Washington Post, because "it's unconstitutional not to play baseball."
When they were released in 1942 through an exchange for prisoners, Mr. Thuermer took the baseball bat home and later kept it in his garage in Middleburg, where he had lived since the 1950s with his wife of 62 years, the former Alice Alexander.
She survives, along with three children, Tina Thuermer of Arlington County, Kitty Thuermer of Washington and Angus M. Thuermer Jr. of Jackson, Wyo.; and one granddaughter.
Nearly 50 years after his release from Bad Nauheim, Mr. Thuermer decided to wrap his old bat in newspaper and mail it to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., where it is now part of the museum's World War II collection.