In Family Declassified social scientist Katherine Fennelly delves into the rationale and consequences of family secrets by studying her grandfather, Francis Kalnay, a high-level spy for the Allied Forces in Europe. In 1954 Francis abandoned his family and fled to Mexico for two decades where he reinvented himself as a children’s book author, an architect, and a gourmand. Until his death at age 93, he never spoke of his Jewish ancestry, his work as a spy, or of the murder of his sister and nephew at the hands of Hungarian Fascists.

A Google search for ‘Francis Kalnay’ yields more than 54,000 results—the vast majority related to the children’s book, Chucaro: Wild Pony of the Pampa, for which he won a Newbery Honor in 1959. Buried deep within the search results are a few references to his years at the Office of Strategic Services (OSS)—the precursor to the CIA. However, none describe how a foreign-born sailor overcame a childhood marked by tragedy and rose to become the head of an elite espionage unit for the Allied Forces during World War II. At the OSS Kalnay was one of the few foreign-born Americans informed and ‘indoctrinated’ in what we now know as the ULTRA decrypts, the German Enigma messages that were used to capture or thwart almost all German offensive intelligence activity during the Second World War.

It took several years of examination of declassified government records, personal interviews, and genealogical searches to piece together the life of a man who kept secrets about his Jewish identity, the nature of his work as a spy, and the murder of his sister by Hungarian Nazis. The result is a manuscript that examines the nature of family myths and presents the gripping story of a man whose life was shaped by some of the most extraordinary events of the 20th century.