“Are you willing to undertake a dangerous mission behind enemy lines, knowing you may never return alive?”

“This is the question asked during the war to agents of the O.S.S., ordinary citizens who, to this question, answered, yes.”

Cloak and Dagger (May 7–October 22, 1950) aired “The Eyes of Buddha” on July 2, 1950 as the 7th of its 22 episodes. This is but the second of this realistically portrayed series of WW II dramatizations we have offered, the first coming almost a year ago in April of 2025. Like the other stories in this well produced radio series, it was one of the tales taken from the 1946 non-fiction book Cloak and Dagger: The Secret Story of the O.S.S. by Corey Ford and Alastair MacBain. The book was the first attempt to show behind-the-scenes adventures of the O. S. S. (Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of today’s CIA), and give credit to those exploits rarely mentioned in the public eye. It became so popular that a 1946 film of the same name starring Gary Cooper and Lilli Palmer was made, with Cooper as a scientist sent behind enemy lines to uncover German nuclear secrets and Lilli Palmer as his contact in the Italian resistance.

“The Eyes of Buddha” begins with a live news bulletin breaking in to announce the bombing of Seoul, the capital of South Korea, which North Korean forces first bombed on June 28th 1950, marking one of the first incursions over the 38th parallel into South Korea that began the Korean War. This news bulletin is reporting that Seoul is being defended by American and Australian fighter planes (as members of the United Nations defending S. Korea from Russian backed communist forces) shooting down attacking planes over Seoul, one of which is a Russian fighter plane. Following the news bulletin interruption, our story then begins as scheduled by setting the stage for the action, a mission to rescue one of our fighter pilots downed behind enemy lines in Siam (now Thailand since 1949) and held in a Japanese POW camp. The time: 1944. Because these stories are drawn from real life, not everything always goes as planned nor does everyone always make it home alive, making for some tense, sometimes graphic and unexpected moments packed into these half hour dramatizations. So sit back and enjoy this riveting tale of true heroism as one of America’s bravest plays the deadly but necessary game of cloak and dagger when it really counts.

(The linked CD at top includes this episode and 19 others, all digitally remastered and restored.)

Play Time: 29:30

{“The Eyes of Buddha” aired on Sunday, July 2, 1950 and caught the interest and imagination of the neighborhood gang. They found themselves at the front door of the corner newsstand bright and early the next morning, waiting anxiously for the door to open so they could be the first to hunt down some of their favorite magazines, those where the bad guys always seemed to lose to the good guys, and whether the bad guys were domestic or foreign made no difference. Black Book Detective (1933-53) began as an average detective pulp until it introduced the Black Bat detective in its July 1939 issue. The Black Bat’s adventures appeared in 60% of the rest of the pulp’s issues, accounting almost entirely for its lengthy 20-year run. It was a quarterly in 1950. 15 Mystery Stories (1932-50) began under the title of Dime Mystery as a middle of the road detective pulp, but soon reformulated its focus to a magazine of “weird menace” at which time it began to flourish. It changed its long-running title of Dime Mystery to 15 Mystery Stories at the beginning of 1950, but the name change lasted only 5 issues as the magazine would fold with its October 1950 bimonthly issue. Thrilling Detective (1931-53) was one of the few early detective pulps to last into the 1950s, attesting to its popularity due to the overall consistent quality of its fiction. It held to a monthly schedule until 1946 when it became a bimonthly through mid-1952, finishing its final year and a half with an irregular schedule of part quarterly, part bimonthly issues.}

[Left: Black Book Detective, Sum/50 – Center: 15 Mystery Stories, 6/50 – Right: Thrilling Detective, 8/50]

To view the entire list of Old Time Radio episodes at Tangent Online, click here.