Camden Public Library is set to host a hybrid talk by a son of spies in the 55 Main St. Picker Room at 2 p.m. Sunday, March 24.

Before there was the CIA there was the Office of Strategic Services, and before the OSS there was the COI — the Coordinator of Information, established under President Franklin Roosevelt as the first American spy agency in WWII — and Les Fossel Sr. was present at the creation.

He was one of the first 10 members of the new agency that would morph into the OSS in 1942. Fossel ran the Scandinavian operations of the OSS and was awarded the King Haakon Freedom Cross by the king of Norway after the war. Meanwhile his wife-to-be, Virginia Van Brunt, smuggled the first photos of Nazi concentration camps out of Germany, according to a news release from the library’s Julia Sagaser.

“My parents ran towards trouble,” said Les Fossel Jr., who will tell his parents’ stories. This will be a hybrid program, in person at the Camden Public Library and on Zoom. For the Zoom registration link, visit  librarycamden.org or register at bit.ly/lesfosselCPL.

“I cannot prove everything in Dad’s resumé,” said Fossel, whose home restoration business is located in Alna. “But it is quite likely the truth.”

Some of the items in that resumé: Fossel, Sr. lived with Trigve Lie in London during the war; Lie would become the first Secretary General of the United Nations. Fossel served in the fledgling OSS under General William “Wild Bill” Donovan; may have conducted secret negotiations with high-ranking Nazi officials over an early peace deal; and apparently knew how close the Nazi regime came to developing the first atom bomb.

Fossel hopes his talk will attract people who might be able to flesh out his father’s story through discussion, questions, and curiosities that may further connect the dots. Camden has been a favorite retirement community for former State Department and CIA employees, some of whom organized the first Camden Conference in 1987.

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