Operation Sparrow: The Three-Man Mission That Fooled Hitler

On March 15, 1944, Colonel Florimond Duke boarded an unlit runway at a captured Italian airfield near Brindisi, bound for a night parachute jump into Nazi-aligned Hungary with a mission that defied every rule of warfare: get captured on purpose.

Duke led a three-man Office of Strategic Services commando team—Major Alfred Suarez, a radioman and explosives expert, and Captain Guy Nunn, a multilingual propagandist—tasked with convincing German intelligence that the main Allied invasion of Europe would strike the Balkans, not France. The plan, according to the excerpt, called for the team to parachute near the village of Podturen in Hungary, surrender immediately, and claim they had been trying to reach Josip Tito's Yugoslav Partisans but jumped in the wrong place.

The excerpt, from Operation Sparrow: The Incredible True Story of the Spies Who Tricked Hitler and Won the War by Jason Bell (Hanover Square Press, 2026), reconstructs the operation from its opening moments: a grounded Halifax bomber, a storm over the Adriatic, and a full moon that would not return for a month—by which time it would be too late.

Operation Sparrow was the opening play of Operation Bodyguard, the Allies' most ambitious deception of the Second World War. Churchill named its logic in a line the operation borrowed: "In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies." By June 6, 1944, Bodyguard would deploy George Patton's imitation army near Calais. But in March, the burden fell on three living commandos whose staged capture had to look like proof of a southeastern invasion.

The arithmetic made the deception urgent. Only 150,000 Allied soldiers would land on D-Day, while Germany kept 826,000 troops in the southeast alone—five times the invasion force. A failed landing, the Sparrows understood, would prolong the war for years and give Hitler time to perfect jet fighters, ballistic missiles and perhaps a nuclear bomb.

Bell's account traces the operation's improbable origins in secret diplomacy. In January 1943, anti-Hitler Romanian and German emissaries approached Allen Dulles, the OSS spy chief in neutral Switzerland, seeking a way out of the war. Hungarian agents followed. Regent Miklós Horthy and Prime Minister Miklós Kállay hoped Britain and America would arrive before the Soviets—and Hungary's million Jews, the last large Jewish community in Nazi-aligned Europe, remained alive largely because Horthy resisted German pressure to deport them.

The mission nearly died in December 1943, when American intelligence concluded that Colonel Otto von Hatz, a Hungarian officer involved in the talks, was "giving the Germans very full particulars of his connections." The OSS had misread him. Von Hatz, an Olympic fencer, was feeding the Germans a cover story—telling them the contacts were a counterintelligence operation to catch American spies. But the Americans were accidentally right that Sparrow was compromised: Nazi spies in Hungary knew a military mission was coming.

Dulles chose to exploit the leak rather than cancel. He accelerated the timeline, reasoning that Hitler had seen only part of the plan. As Bell puts it: "The Führer thought he had uncovered a conspiracy to invade southeastern Europe, and he planned to crush it. He had no idea he was falling for an American ruse."

General William Donovan, the OSS founder, picked Duke to lead. At forty-eight, Duke was a former Madison Avenue advertising executive who had left a Connecticut mansion and a New York career for the new agency, and by December 1943 he ran its southeast European intelligence section, overseeing spy networks from Prague to Tirana. Dulles needed an officer able "to confer on an equal footing with individuals of rank and to influence them in matters of the gravest importance." Bell writes that sending a man who knew as much as Duke into capture was "insane, or maybe so crazy that it might just work"—for the former advertising maestro, it was one more sales pitch, with Hitler as the target audience.

Twelve days before launch, American intelligence officers tried to cancel the mission. Dulles cabled Washington: "This is the culmination of months of work. We have now obtained agreement from 684"—the code name for the Hungarian envoy in Switzerland—warning that delay would "lose quite a unique opportunity." President Franklin Roosevelt authorized the mission personally, one of the few covert operations he approved directly, and entrusted Duke with a verbal message for Horthy: if Hungary switched sides, it could join the victors.

The operation carried a hidden second purpose. If Sparrow worked, the Allies would not merely fake an anti-Nazi rising in southeastern Europe but trigger a real one—led by the Hungarians, coordinated through General István Ujszászy, head of Hungarian military intelligence, in Budapest. The staged "mistake" and "capture" gave the Hungarians plausible deniability against an immediate German invasion.

The stakes were personal as well as strategic. Since late 1942, captured Allied commandos had stopped appearing in POW camps; the OSS presumed them dead. The army could not order anyone on a suicide mission, only ask for volunteers. Duke, Suarez and Nunn stepped forward. On the flight out, wedged among supply crates earmarked for Tito's offensive, the three men sat in silence; the operation's real order, too secret for paper, had been given by word of mouth by General Jacob Devers, commander of US forces in North Africa.

The Halifax lifted off the rain-soaked strip, clearing the Adriatic waves by inches. The mission was on. Bell's closing assessment frames what rides on it: three men, millions of lives, and the fate of D-Day—the riskiest deception of the Second World War, and until now, a story almost no one knew.