Some of the anecdotes he's weaving are recorded in his new book, "Journey to Peking," a delightful, insightful, and playful memoir about his 18 months in China as a secret agent for the Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency.
 
"A lot of people will be pleased," he says, and then puckishly adds, "and a lot of people will say: 'Who's Dan Pinck?' "
 
A good question.
 
Pinck, now 79, was a spy to defy the stereotype, not as bold as Herb Philbrick in "I Led Three Lives" nor as altruistic as William Holden in "Counterfeit Traitor" - and never as hedonistic as James Bond in "Diamonds Are Forever," which is to say that Pinck was never dressed by a London tailor, never ordered a martini shaken, and never cavorted in exotic European capitals with wanton women.
 
Having enlisted in the Army as a freshman at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va., he was elated to receive orders to active duty on the very morning in 1942 that he was scheduled to take an exam in calculus, about which he says he didn't know beans and was certain to flunk.
 
"I much preferred to go off to war," he recalls, "than take that exam in calculus."
 
On his first day in the Army, when a sergeant woke him at 4:30, Pinck told the sergeant to go to hell, and as a result he spent his first day in the Army on KP (kitchen patrol).
 
For an image of Pinck in the Army, forget Rambo. Think of Joseph Heller's novel "Catch 22," about the madness of a military bureaucracy gone amok, and especially the character Yossarian, who was ineligible for a mental health discharge from combat because merely asking for one demonstrated that he was sane.
 
For example, having passed a test to become an air cadet, Pinck was advised that, to qualify, he'd have to have two bad teeth pulled. After the extractions, he was told the rules had changed and that he'd have to have perfect eyesight, too. He didn't, and so his career as an aviator ended before it started.
 
He was assigned to the Army Air Corps and sent to Miami Beach, where he lived in the penthouse of an Art Deco hotel, sometimes playing tennis, sometimes marching down Collins Boulevard, singing an Army song.
 
"War is hell," mutters his wife, Joan, who is sitting across the table and to whom he dedicated his book. "Lost in you I find, welcome places in my mind," the inscription reads.
 
Putting down his turkey sandwich, Pinck sings the ditty.
 
Had a girl in Baltimore,
 
Little Liza Jane.
 
She is there but I ain't no more,
 
Little Liza Jane.
 
And then: "Have you heard that one, Joan?"
 
"Yes," she says with the patience of a marble saint. "I've heard you sing it before."
 
Pinck trained in meteorology and communications and was sent to India, where one day he was assigned to the military police for a brothel-busting brigade.
 
"I didn't know what a brothel was, but the idea was that you'd go inside and if you saw Americans having sex, you were to tap them on the shoulder, get them out of there and arrest them," he says. "I made no arrests that day."
 
Meanwhile, his mother, not having heard from him in so long, wrote to General George C. Marshall to ask, "How is my son?"
 
As Pinck recalls, she received a letter from Marshall that said, in effect, "Your son is fine."
 
Bored with Army regimen, Pinck volunteered for the OSS, a unit founded by World War I hero William "Wild Bill" Donovan. The OSS needed someone to live in Hotien, a small Chinese village less than 900 miles from Japan. From Hotien, Pinck could send reports by Morse code four times a day about meteorological patterns and Japanese shipping in the South China Sea.
 
Although Pinck was only 19, had no experience in espionage, had never been to China, and did not speak the language, he won the assignment, he says, because his commanding officer lived not far from him in Bethesda, and they knew a lot of the same people.
 
Rather than send the teenager to his new assignment unprepared, the officer gave him two days indoctrination that consisted principally of teaching him how to insert a detonator into plastic to blow up something and how to use the dozen pencil-shaped, tubelike guns he was given, each with a single .22-caliber bullet, in case he was captured by the Japanese and wanted to commit suicide.
 
"They showed us how to insert the muzzle here," he says, opening his jaw and pointing to the roof of his mouth, "and then pull the trigger. I was puzzled as to why they gave me a dozen. I asked how many times I should commit suicide."
 
He was also given a .45 pistol and, to win the favor of the Chinese generals, a crate of condoms and a suitcase with $1 million in Chinese currency.
 
Handing money to the Chinese would wound their pride, warned his interpreter, Shum Hay. And so he engaged the generals in after-dinner poker games and proceeded to lose vast sums of money by, for example, drawing on inside straights.
 
"Shum was the best friend Dan ever had," says Joan, "and not because without him, Dan would have been shot or beheaded. Despite the language barrier, the chemistry was just right."
 
In Hotien, Pinck used his .45 pistol for target practice, perching a Japanese helmet on the stump of a tree.
 
"To my surprise," he says, "one day I actually hit the thing. Shot a hole right through it, and I was upset because I wanted to take that helmet home as a souvenir." He excuses himself, and from his study he retrieves the Japanese helmet with a bullet hole.
 
One of his aides, Lung Chiu Wah, had a beautiful girlfriend who seemed unusually curious about Pinck's Boy Scout manual.
 
"She very poor, almost prostitute," Lung said.
 
"You mean destitute," said Shum.
 
Suspecting the woman was a Japanese agent, Pinck pretended the Boy Scout manual was secret. When she disappeared, he tracked her to a tea shop and found pages of the manual and incriminating information meant for the Japanese.
 
"As a young man, I did a far better job than I could now or at any time later," says Pinck. "My ignorance protected me. Forrest Gump said it takes a lot of work to be stupid. I think that's pretty smart."
 
It was in China that Pinck began taking notes for the book that, in various incarnations, was rejected by more than 40 publishers until Pinck's son, Charles, a private investigator in Washington, persuaded the Naval Institute Press to publish it.
 
Now, he says, "I'm meeting a lot of new people."
 
The publisher, Naval Institute Press at Annapolis, sent copies to both George Bushes. From the president came a form letter. From his father, a personal note that praised the book.
 
Asked about the best story not in the book, Pinck recalled his going away party in Hotien.
 
"They served meatloaf. I had a bite, then another, didn't recognize the taste and asked what it was. They said it was a dog. For my party, they'd slaughtered a dog."
 
Discharged, he returned to Washington and Lee, then went to work at The New Yorker as assistant to the writer A.J. Liebling. He and Joan and four children lived in the South End for 23 years. Pinck is head of the New England Chapter of the OSS Society; his son heads the national organization.
 
Pinck also worked in administration at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in research at Harvard, and as a consultant in development in 14 African nations. He has written for such publications as "Encounter," "The American Scholar," and "The New Republic," often about Chinese-American relations.
 
"There were myths that the Chinese Communists were fighting the Japanese. They were no more fighting the Japanese than Cambridge is fighting Brookline. The communists were saving their energies for the postwar revolution. And they were killing as many Chinese and Americans as they were anyone else.
 
"There were scholars here, including till near the end of his life, John King Fairbank of Harvard, who was - I wouldn't say duped - but he'd been in the OSS in China and he thought Mao was an agrarian reformer. But anybody who kills [millions] of his own people is no agrarian and no reformer.
 
"The miracle is that when Deng Xiaoping came along and revamped the economic system and talked about property rights, this was remarkable because if China had gone into economic ruin, there'd have been another revolution."
 
Joan sets out cups with a CIA logo and lettering, and when hot coffee is added, the lettering changes to reflect the names of CIA directors. The cup was made in China.
 
In Pinck's library are hundreds of books about espionage and mementos of his time in China, including an American flag made by the people of Hotien that has red stripes where white should be and white where red should be.
 
Asked to write the first paragraph of his obituary, Pinck smiles, mischievously.
 
"Say: There are rumors Dan Pinck died, but they may not be true. You never can be sure with him."

As an adult, Charles Pinck became a private eye specializing in corporate skulduggery, but his father's war is still vivid and alive for him. Inside his bright workspace at Global Options Inc. on L Street NW, he preserves the OSS legacy with posters, stickers, lapel pins, distinguished service medals and an agency flag emblazoned with a spearhead design. 
 
On a wall hangs a large picture of his father as a young OSS man. His arms hang around his two Chinese assistants; a holster with a .45 is strapped to his waist.
 
The son stares at the black-and-white picture. "It just speaks to me. . . . I imagine myself at 19, trying to do what he did," he says, his voice trailing off. Pinck is the youngest president of the OSS Society, an organization that celebrates the achievements of its increasingly elderly membership. He gets good-natured grief from co-workers amused by the "mini-museum." (There are larger OSS collections at the CIA and the National Archives.)
 
 Go ahead and call it an obsession, he says. "Shared interest, shared obsession, shared fascination. So much of what they did was secret. My dad is still learning, 60 years after he left China, stuff he never knew that was going on there.
 
"I was the one who got him to go to the OSS reunion in 1986," he says. "It was a turning point for us both."
 
That reunion, held at Washington's Mayflower Hotel, was one of the first OSS gatherings not intended solely as a social occasion. It focused on the historical significance of the agency and included speeches by OSS veterans and CIA directors William J. Casey, William E. Colby and Richard Helms.
 
Afterward, father and son started work on a self-published, comprehensive guide to books about the OSS. Most recently Charles was his dad's literary agent, helping persuade the Naval Institute Press in Annapolis to publish his father's war memoirs last month. The book, "Journey to Peking," is filled with tales of luck and pluck.
 
There is the raw romance of it all, being sent to a foreign land and performing clandestine activities in wartime. The men and women of the OSS were considered a breed apart, "glorious amateurs" in the words of founder William J. "Wild Bill" Donovan.
 
Donovan, a World War I hero and Republican lawyer, was sent by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to observe the turmoil in Europe in the late 1930s. He persuaded the president to create a central repository of intelligence information, the OSS, in 1942. During its three-year existence, the OSS helped scout enemy troop movements, promote Allied propaganda and perform sabotage and guerrilla missions the world over.
 
Its agents were selected not for formal military expertise, but because they could use their wits and find innovative ways, in dodgy situations, to win the war.
 
In 1942, Dan Pinck was a recent graduate from Sidwell Friends School and in his first year at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va. To him, the war seemed a great excuse to get out of a college math class and he enlisted in the Army.
 
Bored with military routine in the regular Army, he volunteered for the OSS. The fledgling outfit sent him to China, although he did not know the language. His only familiarity with the country was having read an English-language children's book, "Young Fu of the Upper Yangtze," at age 12.
 
"What headquarters decided, ingeniously, is to find someone who is neither old enough or smart enough to be fearful," Dan Pinck, now 79, recounted last month at a speech at the International Spy Museum. "I suited those qualifications."
 
The OSS sent him to a small village in southeast China called Hotien to report intelligence about enemy troop movements, weather patterns and possible bombing targets along the Japanese-held coastline 19 miles away.
 
He carried with him a curious array of tools, including $ 1 million in cash to pay his Nationalist army assistants and boxes of condoms that he was told would greatly please Nationalist military officers. At a friend's suggestion, he also brought along his Boy Scout manual. As it turned out, the manual was handy for many survival needs -- including outwitting a female spy.
 
One of his top aides had a flirtatious Chinese girlfriend who expressed unusual interest in the manual's maps and codes. His suspicions raised that she might be a Japanese spy, he pretended the contents were top-secret.
 
When she disappeared later that day, Pinck and his associates chased her to a tea shop, where she was crouching in a corner. She rushed them, and they threw her to the floor. The boyfriend searched her. Sure enough, Pinck wrote in his memoir, they found a page from the Boy Scout manual and an incriminating scroll with information about Pinck and his associates. He also said he started a relief program -- using poker as a novel way of dispensing the $ 1 million. His intentional losses allowed the Nationalists to save face while winning the money they needed for arms and food.
 
He calls the war the most liberating time of his life. "I ran my own war and did what I wanted to do," he says.
 
He later finished college, was a leg man for writer A.J. Liebling at the New Yorker magazine, held administrative and research jobs at Boston-area universities and did consulting work in marketing and education. He lives now in Cambridge, Mass. He said the CIA once asked him to return to China, but he declined because he was married and had four children.
 
Charles Pinck, who lives in Georgetown, is the only one of the four to have a lasting fascination with his father's war tales.
 
The father exposed his son early on to OSS friends who had lively war careers and maintained a sense of derring-do later in life. One man went on to work for the CIA in North Africa and made his final parachute jump at age 86. 
 
Dan Pinck also said the OSS had a greater impact on his son than even the son knows. "I was always raising the question of, 'How do you know you know?' Which means, doubt everything unless you see it yourself," he said. "Even then you have to doubt it. It's not a charade, it's a real exercise on my part: What's inference, what's assumption, what's plain wrong?"The son's OSS interest accelerated when he began doing political opposition research for Democratic candidates nationwide in the 1980s. He saw the connection between his own work and his father's wartime responsibilities, even if it is less dangerous to pore over public records than foil spies.

Since becoming president of the 1,000-member OSS Society last year, he has been working on an oral history project with the Smithsonian Institution, publishing quarterly newsletters and overseeing an e-mail discussion group with requests from the descendants of OSS agents asking for information about their relatives. They are often sons and grandsons seeking tales of danger from six decades ago.
 
He said the best part of his job is when he can get OSS veterans to share those stories. It's an extension of the connection he has made with his own father.
 
"For a lot of people, including my father, if it wasn't the best part of their lives," he says, "it was certainly the most interesting part of their lives."