A documentary about Peter Sichel, the former CIA officer and wine merchant who died in 2025 aged 102, includes striking criticisms of US foreign policy, particularly the 1953 coup in Iran. Known in New York social circles as the 'Jewish James Bond', Sichel was a refugee from Nazi Germany who became the CIA's first station chief in Berlin in his twenties.
In the film The Last Spy, directed by Katharina Otto-Bernstein, Sichel says the overthrow of Iran's democratically elected prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh was a mistake. 'If we had not got rid of Mossadegh, Iran today would be a good member of the family of nations, a socialist democratic country,' he states. He argues the coup boosted the authoritarian rule of the Shah, which 'caused a revolution' and 'indirectly caused the arrival of the mullahs'.
The documentary shows Sichel reflecting on the cost of US interventions. 'We don't think it through until the end, that an action we take today might in the long run be against our interest,' he says. US historian Stephen Kinzer, who appears in the film, notes it is rare for a former CIA officer to be so clear-sighted in tracing the consequences of his own actions. 'He's arguing that actually we wasted a lot of lives and we intensified conflicts in the world rather than trying to resolve them,' Kinzer says.
Sichel was born in 1922 in Mainz into a family of wine merchants. After the Nuremberg race laws, the family fled to Bordeaux and then New York. He joined the US army after Pearl Harbor and was recruited by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) for his language skills. After the war, he ran CIA activities in Berlin, laying a spy network across the eastern zone. He later left the agency and turned Blue Nun wine into a global success.
The film is released in UK cinemas and on streaming platforms from 24 April.
