Family of Spies

From the moment I listened to Christine Kuehn’s interview on NPR, I was captivated and knew I had to read her book. She narrated an unknown story about the Pearl Harbor attack on Dec. 7, 1941.

Kuehn explained that the journey began when she received a letter from a documentary filmmaker asking about her grandparents and their role as spies and the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Stunned, she tried to speak to her father, who claimed he had no living family members. Growing up, her father had told her that his father was a naval officer who'd had an unexceptional career and died in a traffic accident. However, the more she thought about it, she realized that her father evaded answering questions about his parents. Her unanswered questions and suspicions lead her to investigate.

Her father eventually breaks his decades of silence but only unearths that he has a sister. He puts her in touch with his older sister. She meets her aunt for the first time and asks, "What can you tell me about my grandparents;" Ruth's reply surprises her: "You have a good life. You don't want to ruin it with the past."

The author then spends the next decade uncovering the truth about her father’s parents and Aunt Ruth. As a young woman in Berlin, Aunt Ruth was Goebbels’s lover, but when he discovered that Ruth’s biological father was Jewish—making her half Jewish—she was forced to leave the country.

In 1936, the German government offered Ruth’s family an opportunity to move to Hawaii and spy on behalf of Japan. The Japanese paid them handsomely, with over a million dollars in today’s currency. The information the family provided played a crucial role in the devastating attack on December 7, 1941, which resulted in 2,403 deaths and 1,178 injuries.

They also received money from the German government: over the course of the next eight years, while in Hawaii, a total sum of four million dollars.

But Otto Kuehn, the grandfather, lived high on the hog and was careless flaunting his wealth, arousing suspicion, and the FBI was on his tail. His wife, Friedel, however, was cunning and clever; instead of buying cars and displaying affluence, she purchased a beauty shop where women would gossip, allowing her to gather information from loose tongues. Information that was used to secure their position.

There’s so much more to this story.  When they were captured and incarcerated, Otto told the authorities everything; his wife, on the other hand, kept silent. 

Christine’s father, Eberhard, who later in life gets dementia, as a teenager, instead of returning to Germany, with his mother and siblings (Otto’s incarceration is in Kansas) emancipates himself by enlisting in WWII fighting against his older brother, who is a Nazi and his blood relatives.

This was a fascinating story with greed, espionage, betrayal, loyalty, and family ties playing pivotal roles. It was the best book I read in 2025.