This is true spies. The podcast that takes you deep inside the greatest secret missions of all time.

Week by week, you'll hear the true stories behind the operations that have shaped the world we live in.

You'll meet the people who live life undercover. What do they know?

What are their skills?

And what would you do in their position?

I'm Rihanna Needs, and this is True Spies from Spyscape Studios.

The stories told on true spies often begin in the heat of the action, with the echo, perhaps, of hurried footsteps down some ill-lit alley, or the cold weight of a weapon pressed against skin. But this story begins with nothing more potential than an envelope passing through a letterbox. I came home from work

and received the letter from California. We're in Kensington, Maryland, the year 1994.

Christine Keown is a mother of two, looking forward to a Friday evening with her family,

when she finds this envelope, with its unfamiliar scrawl, waiting for her.

She brings it with her to the couch, reads it once, then twice, and then sits in silence.

After some time, her husband Mark enters the room and asks her what's wrong.

Wordlessly, she hands him the sheet of paper.

It was from a screenwriter who was asking me about my grandfather's involvement with the Nazi party and his time in Hawaii, and I was just totally confused.

Specifically, the writer is researching the attack on Pearl Harbor and the role of German spies in the event.

Clearly, he's made a mistake.

Christine has never met her grandfather, but she has a wonderful relationship with her dad, Eberhard,

and she knows the family's story through him.

He said that he was born in Berlin, but they left Germany before the war, because, you know, I would ask him,

well, were you there during the war? He was like, no, we left before the war started.

We moved to Hawaii with my little brother and my sister and my parents.

And I had an ideal at childhood.

...