Hitler didn’t just want to conquer Greece. He wanted to own it — convinced the ancient Greeks were proto-Germans whose civilization gave the Third Reich its rightful heritage. When the Wehrmacht occupied Athens in 1941, the Nazis arrived believing they were home. That belief bought just enough time for a small group of scholars and spies to pull off one of the war’s most audacious cultural rescue operations. New York Times bestselling author Stephan Talty joins Big John Howell to discuss his new book The American School of Spies — the true story of how American archaeologists were recruited by Wild Bill Donovan, how a man named Rodney Young bled on the Albanian front before running Greece’s wartime spy network, and how a single conscience-stricken German helped save Athens from deliberate destruction. Plus: the spy codenamed Cicero, the D-Day deception that hinged on a fake bride and a train out of Turkey, and why both Athens and Paris came within a few weeks of being rubble.

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