by Jeremy Hunt
Daily Lobo
An 82-year-old man trained as an assassin visited UNM on Wednesday to speak to students about his intelligence operations during World War II.
Professor Ferenc Szasz said he invited John Smith to speak to a World War II history class because of Smith's background with the Office of Strategic Services during the war.
"It brings authenticity," Szasz said.
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Smith has experience with things younger generations only read about in books, Szasz said.
The Office of Strategic Services was the predecessor to the CIA.
Although Smith was speaking to a history class, he said he wanted to impart his philosophy of life to students.
"Everything goes in circles all the time," he said.
Smith said the journey to his position at the Office of Strategic Services started when he worked on a commercial fishing boat.
While on the boat, which would be gone for months at a time, his captain taught him how to be a locksmith and open safes.
The skill of locksmithing got him involved with the Office of Strategic Services, which formed shortly after he graduated high school.
Smith received combat and other training in Canada and Scotland before he began collecting intelligence for the Allied forces in Europe.
Smith's first jump into Nazi-occupied Europe was two weeks before his 19th birthday.
Most of his missions involved sneaking into enemy headquarters, where he would crack open safes, take pictures of important documents and sneak out
undetected.
In Bulgaria, Smith and fellow operatives were mistaken for Germans and captured by an anti-German resistance group.
The operatives were taken to a village and scheduled for execution by impalement, because the resistance group did not believe the men were Americans.
While in a cell awaiting execution, the men realized they were in the village where Alexander the Great was born. The men started collectively piecing together what they remembered about Alexander the Great from high school history class.
As the men were being led to execution, they began to recount Alexander the Great's story in front of the resistance group.
The staged conversation proved to the resistance group that the men were American, because the Bulgarians figured the Germans didn't care about ancient history.
"You never know what you're doing now won't come back to help you or bite you in the rear end," Smith said.
Smith said he also spent time in Nazi-occupied Holland, where street sweeps often threatened to reveal his secret identity.
His only injury from World War II was a result of a street sweep.
A street sweep is when the Nazi army or gestapo blocked off sections of a city, gathered all the people into the street and checked their papers, Smith said. The German army would order everyone wearing pants to roll up their left pant leg so scars from a previous break could be seen.
Smith said the army was supposed to fill out paperwork for every questionable person in order to identify them at a later date, but the army often did not want to take the time to do paperwork. Instead, it would mark a suspicious person by breaking the left leg.
Smith said the German army identified him as a suspicious person and questioned him. After questioning him, they broke his left leg.
"I still have the scar," he said. "You won't read about that in any textbooks."
Smith eventually left Europe and began working for the United Nations, he said.
"The real test of a man is not when he plays the role that he wants for himself, but when he plays the role that destiny has put him in," Smith said.
