Pete Sivess Worked for the CIA

Peter Sivess was born on September 23, 1913 in South River, New Jersey. He attended Dickinson College in Carlyle, Pennsylvania, where he was the only four letter athlete in the college’s history. In three years as a varsity pitcher, Sivess was 20-7 and signed with the Philadelphia Phillies following graduation in 1936.

In 1937, he was 1-1 in six appearances for the Phillies but spent most of the season with the Baltimore Orioles of the Class AA International League, where he was 15-5. Back with the Phillies in 1938, Sivess made 39 appearances, primarily in relief, for a 3-6 record and 5.51 ERA. That proved to be his last season in the major leagues. Traded to the Yankees in April 1939, Sivess spent the season with the Newark Bears. He joined the Indianapolis Indians, a Reds farm team in the Class AA American Association, for 1940.

By 1942, Sivess was playing semi-pro baseball for the Grumman Bombers before joining the Navy. He served in all three theaters, spending time in Romania, Russia, Turkey, Greece and the Aleutian Islands off Alaska.

Following World War II, Sivess spent the next 28 years with the CIA. Most of that time he was in charge of the defectors that came into the United States from Eastern European countries. As head of the Alien Branch he was personally involved in interviewing, rehabilitating and resettling these political refugees as productive American citizens at Ashford Farm, a bay front estate on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Among those who past through this temporary haven were Soviet spies, German scientists and Polish defectors. Francis Gary Powers, the U-2 spy plane pilot shot down by the Soviet Union in 1960, was hidden from reporters by Sivess at Ashford Farm after he had been traded for a captured Soviet spy.