Welcome to Spycast, the official podcast of the International Spy Museum.

I'm your host, Sasha Inber, and each week I take you into the shadows of espionage, intelligence, and covert operations across the globe.

How do you catch an enemy's submarine and then make it vanish?

That's what the U.S. Navy's elusive 10th fleet planned as it tracked down Germany's U-505 sub.

The mission came right before the Allies ran ashore on the beaches of Normandy in World

War II. An historian Alex Rose draws on long classified documents and intercepted transmissions

to reveal the bold, salt-soaked heist. Alex, take us back to what happened on June 4, 1944, off the west coast of Africa.

On that day, an American task group with the aircraft carrier, USS Guadalcanal, and three

or four of its escort destroyers intercepted a German U-boat called U-505, as you say, just off the coast of West Africa.

And they, after a short and brief fight, they managed to capture it.

They managed to take a German U-boat alive and into captivity, you could put it that way.

What was essentially a miraculous feat, taking a U-boat?

Because 99.9% of the other times, if the U.S. Navy intercepted a U-boat, they sank it,

and with most of the German sailors dying on it.

But this time they got pretty much everyone alive and they captured this U-boat

and they had to keep it a big secret and they had to make the U-boat disappear as well as the crew.

So it was a big day, June 4th, 1944, in this otherwise minor incident, but was actually

a great importance, especially compared to what was happening in Europe on June 6th,

two days later, which was, of course, D-Day.

And before we get into the details of what happened with that operation, why was the U.S. Navy

so laser-focused on this German sub?

Oh, that's a great question.

...