Charles Hostler dead; U.S. intelligence officer who worked with French resistance during WWII was 94

 For his World War II service as an intelligence officer in Nazi-occupied France, Charles Hostler received a Legion of Merit award from the United States and a French Legion of Honor.

He also got something else: a scar on his forehead from the butt of a meat ax wielded by a French collaborator who was resisting Hostler's entreaties to switch sides and aid the Allies.

Hostler's attacker later relented and helped funnel disinformation to convince Hitler that the D-Day invasion had only been a feint and a greater invasion was coming elsewhere on the coast. This helped pin down battalions of German troops as the Allies fought toward Paris and Berlin.

In the decades after the war Hostler's scar faded but his appreciation of how his life had been shaped by his work with the Office of Strategic Services -- forerunner to the Central Intelligence Agency -- grew larger.

"Looking back, there were two major influences on my life: the Great Depression and OSS," Hostler once said. "The Depression gave me perspective and humility. The OSS taught me how to survive and helped me excel."

Hostler, who lived in the San Diego-area city of Coronado, died Sept. 28 of cardiac arrest at a Navy hospital in San Diego, his family said. He was 94.

Hostler excelled in several fields: as a colonel in the Air Force, a top executive with McDonnell Douglas Corp., ambassador to the island nation of Bahrain in the Persian Gulf, private-sector investor and adjunct professor of political science at San Diego State University.

"Charles Hostler was a visionary and a true American hero," said San Diego State president Elliot Hirshman.

Charles Warren Hostler was born in Chicago in 1919. Like many Americans, the family was financially devastated by the 1929 stock market crash. They moved to California and Charles helped the family by selling newspapers on the streets of San Francisco.

In college, he joined the Reserve Officer Training Corps to help pay expenses. After graduation in 1942, Hostler went on active duty.

His fluency in French made him a natural for the OSS, which assigned him to help the French resistance and root out collaborators. He landed on Utah Beach on D-Day, armed with a pistol, a spy camera, a list of suspected collaborators, and, in hopes of persuading French women to provide information, several pairs of stockings and tubes of lipstick.

For decades the work of Hostler and other OSS operatives was classified. But once the veil of secrecy was lifted, one of Hostler's proudest moments was recalling a comment by President Dwight D. Eisenhower that the OSS had saved thousands of lives by hastening the end of the war.

After the liberation of Paris, Hostler was assigned to Romania, where the government switched sides and joined the Allies. He smuggled pro-democracy leaders out of Romania to protect them from the communists.

After World War II, as the Cold War ratcheted up tensions between the United States and Soviet Union and both sides jockeyed for influence, Hostler helped train the air intelligence unit of the Turkish military and also served as U.S. military attache in Lebanon, Jordan and Cyprus.