Project Eagle

John S. Micgiel has served as director of the Institute on East Central Europe, associate director of the Harriman Institute, and adjunct professor of international and public affairs-all at Columbia University. He is past president of the Kosciuszko Foundation, which promotes cultural exchange between the United States and Poland. In 2011 he received the Commander's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland, an award honoring service to the Polish-American community. Now retired from Columbia, Micgiel teaches at the University of Warsaw. He lives in Greenwich, Connecticut.

John Micgiel's fascinating work reconstructs the quite-unknown adventure of the Poles who had been forced to serve in German ranks during World War II but, eventually, were able to join the Western Allies for intelligence work behind German lines, "Operation Eagle." Obviously, this is an adventure that recounts Polish patriotism and the Allies' frequent negligence. Complex, detailed, and only made comprehensible by extraordinary efforts, Micgiel has accomplished this unprecedented analysis by consulting a great array of primary materials: archives in four countries, a vast collection of multi-lingual materials, and exhaustive mining of the internet. We knew virtually nothing of this complex act of Polish Romanticism; now we have it in detail. --Mieczyslaw B. Biskupski Ph.D., Central Connecticut State University, Endowed Chair in Polish History Project Eagle tells the previously unknown history of a group of forty brave and dedicated Polish agents who were parachuted into Nazi Germany during the last weeks of World War II to gather information to aid the Allied advance. The book advances our understanding of wartime intelligence goals and methods and of the history of the American OSS in particular. It demonstrates again the crucial role that Polish military formations played in the ultimate victory in Europe. And it tells the stories of the individual Polish participants made possible only by Micgiel's skillful and thoroughgoing archival research. --Norman M. Naimark, Robert & Florence McDonnell Professor of Eastern European Studies, Stanford University