Many archaeologists are first drawn to the field by its promise of adventure: Perhaps more than any other discipline, it can take you around the world. For George H. McFadden, archaeology took him around the world in a sailboat—and along the way, he became a spy during World War II.
Richard Carreño, a former reporter for The Boston Globe and university lecturer, tells this unlikely story in his new book The Inventive Life of George H. McFadden: Archaeologist, Poet, Scholar, Spy (Camino Books, 2024).
Penn Museum Voices spoke by phone with Carreño, who lives in Philadelphia.
How did you arrive at the subject of George McFadden?
I’m friends with John H. McFadden, who’s related to George. John is a supporter of the Museum’s Digital Kourion project. He wanted to expand people’s knowledge of his uncle George, and also to archaeology as a whole and to Penn Museum. He suggested I look at George as a topic to write about.
With John’s help, I spent a month in Cyprus investigating George’s activities there. I also did a lot of research at the Penn Museum. The fruit of all that labor is this book. It’s a tale of adventure and spy craft.
The subtitle is Archaeologist, Poet, Scholar, Spy. That’s an unusual group of words. Tell us about the first one: archaeologist.
George fell into these different roles over time. He was never a formal, professional archeologist, but that was his life’s work. He graduated from Princeton and moved on to the University of Pennsylvania to study archaeology.
He happened to meet two people here who were very influential in his life. The first was an amazing woman named Edith Dohan, a curator in the Mediterranean Section. And the second was Horace Jayne, the director of the Museum at the time. Both of these people, brilliant individuals, knew George socially.
Unlike the very successful archaeologists at the time, like John Franklin “Pete” Daniel and Rodney Stuart Young, George did not complete graduate school or do internships. He was his own worst enemy, in many respects.
In his own facile manner, George became a self-funded archaeologist in Cyprus. But as time moved on, the idea of an amateur archaeologist in post-war America didn’t sit well with many people in the field. Instead off publishing, he was sailing on his yacht and enjoying the good life in the Mediterranean.
He eventually realized that to save his own bacon, he needed a graduate degree. But by the time he would be able to resolve that problem, he died at sea. It was suspect, the manner in which he died at sea. I don’t want to give anything away, because there is some suspense in how I write about George’s untoward death.
Let’s go back for a second. What do you mean “he was his own worst enemy”?
He was a bit of a dilettante. His great wealth came from his family of cotton merchants. He had a great cushion of wealth that allowed him to speculate in any field that he chose.
Most of all he chose archaeology, and he basically said to Horace Jayne, “Maybe I can make a financial contribution to the Museum’s efforts in the Middle East, and in Cyprus.” This was in the early 1930s, and the Great Depression was in full swing. George was dispatched to Cyprus as a tenderfoot.
He was able to develop his skill there, and became quite good at what he did. He was never a great archeologist, but he was an accomplished archaeologist.
How about the “poet” part of the title?
He went to St. Paul’s, a college prep school in New Hampshire, and at that time the curriculum was very Classical, so he was exposed to Greek. When he went on to Princeton, he continued his studies in Greek. He eventually completed a major translation of The Iliad.
He was not a professional translator, and his translation has never been published. Believe it or not, translating The Iliad was a relaxing form of entertainment for him. He finished it slightly before his death in 1953.
Now to the most intriguing word in the title: “spy.”
That happens during World War II. Temperamentally, he was not a spy. There was no James Bond in him. There was nothing in him that you’d want to recruit to be a spy.
But he happened to be in the right place at the right time, and he also happened to own a yacht. The American military wanted to be able to use his vehicle to transport matériel and manpower.
George was recruited, and he became a full-fledged spy. He never went to the so-called “spy farm” in Maryland, but he was a spy for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) which became the CIA. They gave him cyanide pills. He brought his yacht to Alexandria, which was a real hotbed of spies and intrigue. I don’t know how much the OSS paid him, but it was the only paycheck he ever received in his life.
What do we know about George’s sexual orientation, and how that affected his life and career?
This was the time of Proper Philadelphia. George felt compatible with this group, but he had one black mark against him: He was gay. He knew he would not be able to live within the confines of Proper Philadelphia because of his sexual orientation.
He would come under the legend of being “fay”—rather than gay. “Fay” was sort of a demeanor that he had where he suggested he was gay, but he never came out of the closet. Everybody knew he was gay. He had open relationships when he summered in Germany. It was said that he entertained “friends” when he was there, and that it was his retreat from Cyprus.
There was an awkwardness with his family. His father did not like the fact that his favorite sport was croquet and not polo, and his mother was upset because she wanted an heir. Their family life was not a happy one.
It’s a window into what Philadelphia was like in the era before World War II, and it was not a great place to be if you had an alternative lifestyle, or, say, if you were Black or Italian.
Tell us a little more about Cyprus at the time.
George worked with a guy named Pete Megaw, the head of the Cyprus Museum. Cyprus was a British protectorate at the time. The people were Greek and Turkish, and they often clashed at the time. In the latter years they divided the place between Greeks and Turks, and now it’s an independent country.
George made some enemies in Cyprus. He did not play by the rules that the British wanted everybody to abide by. They had a tight society and George was somebody who didn’t conform to that. The British were unhappy with his performance in the war. They thought he compromised the missions he was on.
The Museum’s point man in the Middle East, Bert H. Hill, was based in Athens. George was very lucky to meet up with Burt and be taken under his wing. He was a great mentor to George. Bert worked with a group of archaeologists in Athens who were gay.
George’s story is full of fascinating individuals who speak to a time of scholarship and study. His story is peopled by larger-than-life people—and to George they were sometimes villains, and sometimes good people. The reader will have to decide for himself or herself what really happened to George in the end.
Quinn Russell Brown is the editor of Expedition Magazine and the Penn Museum Voices blog.
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