When I was a kid in the late '50s, my dad was posted in England. Every Friday, my dad and his sergeant cronies held weekly poker games. During one of these sessions, I heard a friend of Dad's say, “George, I should have followed my instincts and shot you right between the eyes on that insertion mission in '44.” My dad shot back, “If you had, you would have never made it home. None of you dumb sons of bitches could crate a bushel of apples, much less a German jet plane.”
Of course, I was only ten years old, so I didn't recognize the significance of the exchange. But after my mom's death in 1996 I found some letters that made me remember that conversation I'd overheard so many years before.
Not long after my mom passed away, it fell to me to clean out her house. When I was going through her cedar chest, I found a packet of letters from Dad to Mom written during World War II. My mother had actually asked my uncle to burn all the letters my dad sent to her from overseas, but these had obviously been missed. My first impulse was to burn them, as my mother had requested, but the opportunity to get a glimpse into what my parents were like before I came along was too tempting, and I read them.
Most of the letters held few hints to where he was stationed (England) or what he was doing. However, in one of the letters, he wrote that he felt he might regret agreeing to be part of a “Jed” team. In another, he implied that his skill as a military airplane salvage specialist was the primary reason he had been chosen for the mission.
The last letter in the stack was written in early December 1943 and was no more than a few lines. “I won't be communicating with you for a while,” my dad wrote. “If something happens, unless we're all killed, someone will come to see you. The letter was unsigned, as if Dad had been in a hurry.
Mission Octagon actually began as a biography of my father, but after writing just a few chapters, something wasn't clicking. I couldn't stop thinking about the letters and that conversation I'd overheard in England. So I immersed myself in research and read everything I could get my hands on about World War II, the CIA, and the OSS looking for a reference to “Jeds.” I was having no luck until I began talking to Dad's surviving comrades. One, a sergeant, finally confirmed that the OSS sent three- to seven man teams known as “Jedburghs”, or “Jeds” into Nazi-occupied France to wage guerilla warfare against the Germans. He implied that the group he was a part of was a special splinter group of the OSS know only to the organization head, Bill Donavan. The missions were perilous, and the Jeds, if captured, were subject to torture and execution. Some of the team members disappeared, and it was widely assumed that they had agreed to work for the Germans and had identified their fellow team members to the enemy in other words, treason.
In my mind, the novel began take shape. What if a Jed team was inserted into Germany before D-Day? What if the mission went horribly wrong? What if there was a cover-up. And what if a ten-year-old boy was threatened into silence?