Dr. Seuss & Co. Go to War: The World War II Editorial Cartoons of America’s Leading Comic Artists
By Andre Schiffrin
The New Press
272 Pages, $29.95
Reviewed by Dan Pinck

This book was published as a sequel and companion to Richard Minnear’s Dr. Seuss Goes to War, which introduced contemporary readers to Theodor Geisel’s forgotten career as a political cartoonist. Most people know Geisel as the author of children’s books. However, Geisel had a previous career as a cartoonist for the politically progressive New York tabloid PM from 1940 to 1943. He published about four hundred cartoons in PM before joining the army 1943.

Andre Schiffrin is an editor, publisher, and a historian. He has written a garland of serious books. His book, Embracing Defeat, received a Pulitzer Prize. His new book, a first rate history, illuminates the role of leading editorial cartoonists in American newspapers and magazines – including Geisel, Saul Steinberg, and Al Hirschfeld, among others - in overriding the junk that dominated the pages of a large number of monstrously prejudiced newspaper empires in our nation before and during the Second World War. One of these empires was on the verge of being indicted for treason for revealing stolen secret information during our war against Japan. For Americans not old enough to have memories of how awfully stupid many American newspaper were and what a large number of Congressman were opposed to all efforts to strengthen our nation before Pearl Harbor – the Lend-Lease Act of 1941 barely passed – Mr. Schiffrin’s book is a needed revelation.

Growing up in Washington, DC, I had more than a schoolboy’s familiarity with some of the duds in Congress as well as some of the outstanding patriots who worked day and night to prepare us for war. The bads in Congress then were far worse than the bads in Congress now. The sharp and fair-minded editorial cartoonists before and during the Second World War helped to mitigate the foul, syndicated hatred of many columnists, such as the despicable Westbrook Pegler and rightist editorial cartoonists.

Approximately three hundred and seventy editorial cartoons are reproduced in this book. Many of the PM cartoonists achieved acclaim as national treasures before, during, and after the war, including James Thurber, Saul Steinberg, Leo Hershfeld, Carl Rose, John Groth, Mischa Richter, Arthur Scyk, Eric Godal, and Reginald Marsh. The founder and editor of PM, Ralph Ingersoll, had been a writer and editor at The New Yorker during its early years. He left when he could no longer stand its founder and editor, Harold Ross.

Permit me to offer a few corrections to the text of this fine book. Concerning Saul Steinberg’s political cartoons in PM, Schiffrin writes:  “Steinberg had been drafted into the Office of Strategic Services, the CIA's predecessor…and he was asked to draw cartoons for the newspaper that the OSS sent into Germany.”

The OSS played no part in Steinberg’s PM career. The Romanian-born artist had fled Italy in June 1941 for Santo Domingo.  His first PM cartoon appeared on January 11, 1942, six months before he arrived in the US and before OSS was created.  It was Steinberg’s agent in New York, Cesar Civita, who arranged the PM assignments, which continued until May 1943.  Then, newly commissioned as an ensign in the US Naval Reserve, Steinberg shipped out to China under the auspices of Naval Intelligence and the budding OSS.  (Joel Smith discusses these events and Steinberg’s later work for the OSS Morale Operations division in Saul Steinberg: Illuminations.)

Schriffrin writes that “the adoption of the Italian Fascist government’s anti-Jewish law in 1941 led him [Steinberg] to flee…”  The famous racial laws instituted by Mussolini began in 1938.  It took Steinberg nearly three years, including a six-week imprisonment, to succeed in getting the visas and permits that enabled him to leave the country.

“On the day that he became an American citizen, according to his obituary in the New York Times, he was sent to China…”  The New York Times obituary was incorrect.  As documented in Steinberg’s military records, he became a naturalized citizen on February 19, 1943; on the 23rd, he was ordered to report to the Chief of Naval Operations, Washington, for “temporary active duty, under instruction.”  On March 9, he was “assigned for duty to the Navy Department, Chungking, China.”  He left on a troop ship from San Francisco in May.

Finally, “Steinberg’s sketches of his time in the military in China, India, and elsewere were published in the New Yorker and later, in 1945, in a collection called All in Line.  Some of the anti-Nazi cartoons may well have echoed his work in PM (or may indeed be identical to his OSS work; not having access to the OSS newspaper [Das Neue Deutschland], we can only guess.”

The handful of anti-Nazi cartoons published in The New Yorker were not echoes of his PM work but contemporaneous with it—as were his similar anti-Nazi cartoons in American Mercury and Liberty.  The selection in All in Line comprises reprints of cartoons published in all these journals.

It’s a tribute to General Donovan that his OSS had the intelligence and imagination to employ artists who served around the world and produced outstanding art. Saul Steinberg, who served in China, Italy, and North Africa, drew 1200 cartoons and ninety covers for The New Yorker. Henry Koerner created propaganda posters for the OWI, was the OSS illustrator at the Nuremberg War Crime Tribunals, photographed post-World War II Austria and Germany, and created many covers for Time. Dong Kingman served in the OSS graphics divison along with other notable artists and designers such as Will Burtin, Georg Olden (who designed the CBS logo), and Donal McLaughlin (who designed the United Nations logo). Taro Yashima, a political refugee from Japan rather than a political prisoner like so many Japanese Americans who were interred during the war, served as an OSS translator and became a noted painter in peacetime.

Both Carl Rose and Chon Day contributed to PM; after the war, they became noted cartoonists at The New Yorker. Gardner Rea was a PM contributor and afterwards became a permanent and distinguished of The New Yorker, contributing its first cover, of Eustace Tilley, which appeared on February 21, 1925, and hundreds of drawings over the years. His first cover was repeated yearly on its anniversary for more than sixty-five years. (When I worked for The New Yorker, I attended weekly art meetings with Gardner Rea, Harold Ross, and Jim Geraghty, the art editor. I treasure a drawing given to me by Chon Day in China.)

I might add a toast to another form of art commissioned by OSS. We all know that Marlene Dietrich sang “Lilli Marlene” to German troops. This was recorded by an American orchestra selected by OSS. But do we know that she also sang “Miss Otis Regrets” and “Taking a Chance on Love” to the Germans? Peggy Lee and Josephine Baker also sang popular songs translated into German. And do we recall that General Donovan commissioned an underground German newspaper that printed our disinformation?

Hunting Evil: The Nazi War Criminals Who Escaped and the Quest to Bring Them to Justice

Broadway
By Guy Walters

Already acclaimed in England as "first-rate" (The Sunday Times); “a model of meticulous, courageous and path-breaking scholarship"(Literary Review); and "absorbing and thoroughly gripping… deserves a lasting place among histories of the war.” (The Sunday Telegraph), Hunting Evil is the first complete and definitive account of how the Nazis escaped and were pursued and captured  -- or managed to live long lives as fugitives.
 
At the end of the Second World War, an estimated 30,000 Nazi war criminals fled from justice, including some of the highest ranking members of the Nazi Party.  Many of them have names that resonate deeply in twentieth-century history -- Eichmann, Mengele, Martin Bormann, and Klaus Barbie -- not just for the monstrosity of their crimes, but also because of the shadowy nature of their post-war existence, holed up in the depths of Latin America, always one step ahead of their pursuers.  Aided and abetted by prominent people throughout Europe, they hid in foreboding castles high in the Austrian alps, and were taken in by shady Argentine secret agents. The attempts to bring them to justice are no less dramatic, featuring vengeful Holocaust survivors, inept politicians, and daring plots to kidnap or assassinate the fugitives.
 
In this exhaustively researched and compellingly written work of World War II history and investigative reporting, journalist and novelist Guy Walters gives a comprehensive account of one of the most shocking and important aspects of the war: how the most notorious Nazi war criminals escaped justice, how they were pursued, captured or able to remain free until their natural deaths and how the Nazis were assisted while they were on the run by "helpers" ranging from a Vatican bishop to a British camel doctor, and even members of Western intelligence services.  Based on all new interviews with Nazi hunters and former Nazis and intelligence agents, travels along the actual escape routes, and archival research in Germany, Britain, the United States, Austria, and Italy, Hunting Evil  authoritatively debunks much of what has previously been understood about Nazis and Nazi hunters in the post war era, including myths about the alleged “Spider” and “Odessa” escape networks and the surprising truth about the world's most legendary Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal. 
 
From its haunting chronicle of the monstrous mass murders the Nazis perpetrated and the murky details of their postwar existence to the challenges of hunting them down, Hunting Evil is a monumental work of nonfiction written with the pacing and intrigue of a thriller.

Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory

Harmony
By Ben Macintyre

Ben Macintyre’s Agent Zigzag was hailed as “rollicking, spellbinding” (New York Times), “wildly improbable but entirely true” (Entertainment Weekly), and, quite simply, “the best book ever written” (Boston Globe). In his new book, Operation Mincemeat, he tells an extraordinary story that will delight his legions of fans.

In 1943, from a windowless basement office in London, two brilliant intelligence officers conceived a plan that was both simple and complicated— Operation Mincemeat. The purpose? To deceive the Nazis into thinking that Allied forces were planning to attack southern Europe by way of Greece or Sardinia, rather than Sicily, as the Nazis had assumed, and the Allies ultimately chose.
 
Charles Cholmondeley of MI5 and the British naval intelligence officer Ewen Montagu could not have been more different. Cholmondeley was a dreamer seeking adventure. Montagu was an aristocratic, detail-oriented barrister. But together they were the perfect team and created an ingenious plan: Get a corpse, equip it with secret (but false and misleading) papers concerning the invasion, then drop it off the coast of Spain where German spies would, they hoped, take the bait. The idea was approved by British intelligence officials, including Ian Fleming (creator of James Bond). Winston Churchill believed it might ring true to the Axis and help bring victory to the Allies.

Filled with spies, double agents, rogues, fearless heroes, and one very important corpse, the story of Operation Mincemeat reads like an international thriller.

Unveiling never-before-released material, Ben Macintyre brings the reader right into the minds of intelligence officers, their moles and spies, and the German Abwehr agents who suffered the “twin frailties of wishfulness and yesmanship.” He weaves together the eccentric personalities of Cholmondeley and Montagu and their near-impossible feats into a riveting adventure that not only saved thousands of lives but paved the way for a pivotal battle in Sicily and, ultimately, Allied success in the war.

Beyond Repair: The Decline and Fall of the CIA

Lyons Press
By Charles S. Faddis
Reviewed by Dan Pinck

Before we choose sides about the decline and fall of the Central Intelligence Agency, it makes sense to discard and to sweep away our biases. This is a thoughtful book by a distinguished and experienced counterterrorist operative. To a great extent, he bases his thesis on his experiences as an operations officer in the Middle East, South Asia, Europe, as a branch chief at CIA Headquarters, and on his pursuit and understanding of OSS history. Although the title of Faddis’s book may invite occasional beads of controversy and skepticism - as it should - we must acknowledge that his argument, for certain, is not spiced with bias. He served the CIA for twenty years and risked his life in the process. His loyalty to the CIA cannot be questioned. I know of few men and women whose background invites our undivided attention and respect as his does. Mr. Faddis owns TS/SCI and Q Clearances and he’s not telling tales out of school.
 
I own no clearances but I am licensed to carry a copy of The New York Times.  I am an intelligence observer who has been collecting information from the center field bleachers and bundling my observations into amateur assessments since the Office of Strategic Services was killed by President Truman on October 1, 1945. Truman probably knew less about intelligence at that time than anyone sitting in the bleachers at Griffith Stadium and even less than that about the wartime exploits of the OSS and its founder, Major General William J. Donovan. It took Truman two years to discover that the United States had to have a Central Intelligence Agency (which had been originally proposed by General Donovan in 1944) as a postwar necessity required to confront the Soviet Union during the Cold War. By executive order, Truman created the CIA on July 26, 1947 as part of the National Security Act.
                                                
One page before Mr. Faddis’s contents page is this paragraph: “All statements of  fact, opinion, or analysis expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position or views of the CIA or any other U. S. Government agency. Nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying U. S. Government authentication of information or Agency endorsement of the author’s views. This material has been reviewed by the CIA to prevent the disclosure of classified information.”    
                                       
To me, this statement suggests that discussions about the ruptures in the CIA’s overall operations and the numerous fractures in management practices occur on a continuing basis, involving many top officials since the CIA was founded.  Consultants who were experts in organization behavior and administrative practice were hired in the early years to do something about the alarming lack of communication in the higher ranks between men who were veterans of the OSS and those with little or any experience in intelligence. Disasters occurred frequently, such as the Bay of Pigs invasion, when men without a pinch of knowledge about intelligence operations refused to share any knowledge - or lack of knowledge - with experienced men who had a background in planning wartime invasions. When failures happened, consultants were hired, including a professor of organizational behavior at the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration.
 
As time progressed the CIA became more of a bureaucracy, compounding the environment for continuing mistakes. No doubt, mistakes are inescapable in any organization. Good people make mistakes. Bad people make mistakes.  When you’re trying to uncover the history behind a severe mistake, you may learn that people in responsible positions created a situation that led to tragic consequences. The inevitable question is to ask what changes can be made to remove some of the factors that produce lamentable consequences.
 
Why did President Roosevelt organize, with Donovan’s encouragement, first, the Office of the Coordinator of Information and a year later, the wartime Office of Strategic Services?  Simple. He had no advance warning of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.  He immediately recognized the ineptitude of the managers of the United States  government’s intelligence services, such as they were. He responded by founding the OSS, hoping that it would provide him with coordinated, effective and timely intelligence that would give the U.S. a warning of what our enemies and potential enemies were plotting; in short, a wartime intelligence organization that had the potentiality to make a difference in the outcome of the war.   
 
Can you believe that we had no advance warning of the Japanese attack? That we had fired our best code breaker in 1929? How did this happen? How could it happen? From my amateur perspective, my feeling is that the seeds of our incompetence and failure were sewn when Herbert Hoover became President in 1928 and when he appointed Henry Stimson his Secretary of State. (Stimson was Secretary of War in the Second World War.) Imagine: Jonathan O. Yardley was probably our foremost cryptographer, beginning as a 23-year-old code clerk in the State Department in 1912 and continuing until he was fired by Stimson. Yardley was the head of a small group of code breakers known as The Black Chamber. By 1929, the code breakers had broken coded messages of Argentina, China, the Soviet Union, England, France, Germany, Japan, Mexico, the Vatican, and the codes of other nations. When Stimson discovered that he had a Black Chamber, he disbanded it immediately.  He said, “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.” Believe it. Imagine: Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek hired Yardley in 1938 to break Japanese codes.  (This reference comes from David Kahn’s illuminating book, The Codebreakers.)

One year after the founding of the CIA marked the creation of special committees by our Presidents and our Congress to investigate perceived faults in the CIA, some of them in reaction to errors in judgment by the White House and Congress. (The public was usually unaware of this.) The Hoover Task Force in 1948 recommended that “vigorous effects to made to improve the internal structure of the CIA and the quality of its product.” It  was followed by a resolution of a Congressional task force led by a freshman senator from Montana, Mike Mansfield, to adopt changes endorsed by the Hoover Task Force that an “urgent need exists for regular and responsible Congressional scrutiny of the Central Intelligence Agency. Such scrutiny is essential to the success of our foreign policy, to the preservation of our democratic processes and to the intelligence agency itself.”  
 
In the resolution, Mansfield added: “I agree that an intelligence agency must maintain complete secrecy.” Further, he stated: “If we accept this idea of secrecy for secrecy’s sake, we will have no way of knowing whether we have a fine intelligence service or a very poor one.  Secrecy now beclouds everything about the CIA – its cost, its efficiency, its successes and its failures.”

In 1954, General James H. Doolittle headed a special presidential study group that uncovered, so he said, “important areas in which the CIA organization, administration   and operations can and should be improved.” He also said the CIA was doing a “credible job.” Hardly an endorsement of the management.  Allen Dulles, who was Director of Central Intelligence, doodled away Congressional attempts to provide keener oversight of the CIA. For good or ill, oversight of the CIA is largely a one-way street. It appears that it always has been. And probably always will be. Walter Norblad, an Oregon Republican and a former member of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on the CIA, reported that the subcommittee members “met annually one time a year for a period of two hours in which we accomplished virtually nothing.”
 
How does this relate to mistakes in general? And, in particular, to mistakes at Pearl Harbor, Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, the USSR, Korea, Somalia, Afghanistan, and Iraq?
 
Should we blame the CIA for any and all errors and mistakes? Certainly not. But as long the CIA exists, one of its major functions is to serve as our nation’s straw man, one that officialdom and the public can blame for almost anything that goes wrong. We ought to know by now that one of the CIA’s paramount services is to protect and hide our Presidents from intelligence failures they may have caused, instigated or prolonged.
 
By the same token the President of the United States is the chief executive officer of the CIA. The Directors of CIA, men whom the President appoints, are chief operating officers. They fall on their shields when they disappoint their President. Some Presidents are as poorly qualified to make intelligent assessments as the men they appoint to lead the CIA.
   
At this point, I’ve reached half-time in my review of Mr. Faddis’s book. It’s appropriate now to allow him to run the plays in the second half. Here goes.
 
“It is not an attack on the men and women of the Clandestine Service of the Central Intelligence Agency, the overwhelming majority of who are dedicated, patriotic Americans working hard every day on behalf of their fellow citizens.  It is also not an argument against the existence of a central human intelligence collection organization within the United States government.  This book is an argument that the existing Central Intelligence Agency is no longer capable of performing the task for which it was designed and must rapidly be replaced.”
 
Mr. Faddis says that in the summer of 2002 he took the first CIA team into into northern Iraq for the pending invasion. He served in command of the CIA team for roughly the next year. Before that, he had spent months looking for evidence that Iraq had any semblance of weapons of mass destruction. He and his team discovered zilch. He reports, “The WMD programs did not exist. Our assessments were wrong.”                                                                                                                  
                                                      
“Donovan would not make it in the CIA today. He would be branded as too aggressive, a ‘cowboy,’ and someone lacking the requisite ‘corporate’ attitude. He would in due course, if he decided to stick it out, find himself riding a desk somewhere in a corner at headquarters, shelved, put someplace where he couldn’t do any harm.”
 
“He (a staff officer of Charles Faddis’s in his early years in Afghanistan) had no doubt that if the Bush administration had made military forces available as requested, Bin Laden would have been killed or captured right there and then at Tora Bora. The man responsible for this success is not the kind of man we want in a senior leadership position at CIA. Why not? Because he has a tendency to speak truth to power and to put mission accomplishment ahead of bureaucratic interests. Who then do we want to run the CIA and what attributes should they have? Donovan craved independency and initiative. He said, ‘I’d rather have a young lieutenant with guts enough to disobey an order than a colonel too regimented to think and act for himself.’ What happened to that spirit?”
 
“But for the unwillingness of the Bush administration to commit military troops on the ground when repeatedly requested to do so at Tora Bora, Osama bin Laden would also
have been killed or captured.”
                                                   
Faddis discusses more than fifteen OSS operations in his book.  He refers to them because they help to define his thesis that the CIA ought to be operated with the same kind of administrative support and vigor that Donovan imbued in his leadership. I mention only two OSS heroes here.  There were hundreds more.
 
About William Colby:
 
Colby refused to quit. Members of his team located a frozen waterfall proceeding down the face of a cliff in stages through a gorge. The team, sliding and slipping, improvised a method to descend. At the rail line they emplaced their charges and destroyed the target bridge. Then, evading German troops the entire distance, they proceeded overland to a base camp on the Swedish border and safety.”
 
With only twenty colleagues, this was one of the outstanding OSS combat operations. Roughly 150,000 German troops were greatly delayed in their evacuation from Sweden.                                     
 
About Virginia Hall:
 
“I have taken the time to acknowledge Virginia Hall’s service at some length for a variety of reasons. First, certainly, because she did her nation a great service and deserves to be remembered. .... I think Hall’s story is important also, however, because of what it tells us about the way the OSS approached its mission and the simple, elegant, even brutal methodology it employed. It is, I think, critical that we think about it if we are serious in wanting to improve the functioning of our current intelligence apparatus.”
 
“Inside France, Hall organized resistance activities and collected intelligence on German troop dispositions and plans. She was hunted continuously by the Gestapo and was forced to change residences and hide sites almost daily almost daily. She refused to be deterred, going out frequently into the street herself, dressed as a peasant woman, to collect key intelligence directly. Teams under her direction attacked trains, downed telephone lines, blew up bridges, and, as the Germans retreated following the Normandy invasion, captured over five hundred enemy troops themselves. As the result of her actions, the Gestapo assessed her to be the most dangerous Allied agent in all of Europe.”
 
When Germany conquered France in 1940, Virginia Hall went to London and joined the Special Operations Executive (SOE) which was created by Churchill to undertake sabotage and covert action inside German-occupied Europe. She returned to France after training. When the United States entered the war, she again returned to London and transferred to the OSS. She received additional training as a radio operator and then volunteered to return to France. (In a hunting accident, she lost her left leg. Her wooden leg did not inhibit her heroism.) Virginia Hall was awarded a Distinguished Service Cross.  She deserved a Medal of Honor.
 
She made me remember the hundreds of heroes who’ve served in the OSS and the CIA and the SOE. Thirty-nine women served in the SOE in occupied France.  Thirteen women were captured by the Germans and shot or gassed or dragged alive into the crematorium at Ravensbruck Concentration Camp.
 
Is the OSS a bedrock model for the reform of the CIA, as Faddis believes it to be? I’m not wholeheartedly convinced that it is, even though an OSS prescription has often been been invoked as a model for reform. The prescription has been drowned among critics who claim that reform is all right as long as it doesn’t change anything. Faddis projects worthy foundations for a study of a new structure and governance of the CIA. How would our government have to change to support the CIA and to respect its need for secrecy? And how can a reformed organization guarantee continuing competencies at home and abroad?
 
Spying is generally as anathema to Americans, especially since some distasteful events have been exposed or revealed during the past sixty-three years. For many reasons, we seemingly have an inbred aversion to clandestine activities. When a secret service’s work is not secret, we no longer have a secret service. Or at least a service that has the potentiality of accomplishing much over a period of time. Our national obsession to heap contumely on the CIA emanates from Congress, the Defense Department, the State Department, the media, and the public. The blame game starts at the White House.
 
An example of this is the bipartisan 9/11 commission. It recommended a thorough overhaul of our intelligence, including placing all intelligence agencies and functions under a new centralized intelligence bureaucracy that would report to the President.  (The Office of the Director of National Intelligence is now composed of approximately 3,000 personnel.) It turned out that the Joint Chiefs had severe reservations about some major changes. Changes that, in Mr. Faddis’s experience in the Middle East, greatly decreased our chances of success and increased the chances of further American and Allied casualties. Before you could engage an enemy in your sights, you had to get permission.  In short, real-time technical intelligence cannot be used is real time.  President Bush supported the 9/11 commission’s recommendations.
 
In vital ways, we seem to be continuing to fight Bush’s war. Does anyone consider the CIA the guilty party in this war? We know the answer.
                                                        
How did the OSS succeed? How would we begin to construct a new OSS today?
 
I admit that I’m at home in James Thurber’s camp of historians. Thurber, whom I knew slightly, believed that it was better to know a few of the questions than all of the answers.
 
At this point, in sight of the goal line, I’ll turn the offense over to Charles Faddis.
  
“... it is critical that we succeed in finding a way to run the kinds of operations that are required for victory. We cannot afford not to. The ongoing war on terror will be fought far more by intelligence operatives and special operations forces than it will be by armored divisions and strategic bombers. All the massed conventional troops on the planet are not going to help us root out al-Qaeda cells in the Middle East or interdict radiological material on its way from the former Soviet Union to the tribal areas of Pakistan.  To do this we are going to have to work together. The CIA, or its successor, has to be treated as a national asset and supported as such. Clearly, its actions need to be in accordance with national policy and pursuant to the direction and control of the president and the Congress. The CIA is not some sort of private club. It is a tool, owned and paid for by the taxpayers of the United States. That said, when the CIA takes action as directed, Congress needs to stand behind it and support it. Without that support and the confidence it will inspire, no human intelligence organization has a prayer of accomplishing the things we must require of it.”
 
There’s the rub. How do we do this? How do we change Congress? How do we change the White House? If we aim to change the CIA, don’t we first have to find another Roosevelt and another Donovan?
 
As much as I subscribe to Mr. Faddis’s arguments, my feeling is that his next book ought to deal with how the CIA might be repaired.  And that probably means repairing a considerable chunk of our entire intelligence apparatus.

Behind the Lines in Greece (Click On Title To Order A Copy)

Behind the Lines in Greece: The Story of Operational Group II
By Robert E. Perdue Jr., Ph.D.
Available for purchase from robertperdue.com
Reviewed by Jonathan D. Clemente, MD

I met Bob Perdue at the National Archives while researching a book on the OSS Medical Services.  I overheard him mention Robert Moyers, a young U.S. Army Dental Officer who had served with the OSS in Greece in 1943-45. Since I was also researching Moyers’ service with OSS, I enquired as to Perdue’s interest. He was writing a book about OSS Operational Group (OG) II, which fought in German-occupied Greece for several months in 1944. Since he appeared to be about the right age to be a World War II veteran, I asked, "Did you serve in the OSS?" "No,” he replied humbly, "I was with the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division." Company E of this famous unit was the subject of the HBO miniseries "Band of Brothers," and the book of the same name.  "And…you're not writing about that?” I responded, somewhat incredulously.

Fortunately, Dr. Perdue has chosen a subject that has received far less attention than the Screaming Eagles.  The literature on special operations in wartime Greece is dominated by memoirs of British special forces veterans — notably Chris Woodhouse's The Struggle for Greece, 1941-1949.  I know of only four first-hand accounts by American OSS veterans who served in Greece: one by Major Jerry Wines, first Deputy Commander of the Allied Military Mission to Greece; the "war diary" of Dr. Robert E. Moyers, the Mission's medical officer; and memoirs of OG veterans Andrew Mousalimas and John Giannaris, the first commanding officer of OG II.

Perdue has adeptly woven together a concise yet comprehensive history of Greek OG II based largely on declassified OSS operational records, Moyers’ diary, OSS personnel files, unpublished letters and photos, and interviews with participants, including Mousalimas and Giannaris.

In late 1942, General William Donovan conceived of the OSS Operational Groups as small commando groups trained to enter occupied territory to harass the enemy and organize local resistance.  The OGs were comprised of volunteers from various U.S. ethnic groups including the Norwegian, Italian, French, and Greek immigrant communities. These men would undergo rigorous physical conditioning and parachute training to prepare for their entry into their ancestral homelands where they could exploit their knowledge of the local language and customs to help foment resistance to German occupation. Perdue's "Behind the Lines" tells the story of OG II, one of seven Greek OGs. Group II operated in the Roumeli area of south-central Greece from 18 June until early October 1944, initially under the command of 1st Lt. John "Yannis" Giannaris.

"Behind The Lines in Greece" begins with Dr. Perdue's account of how, by chance, he became interested in the OSS. He was researching the circumstances of his own wartime service as a 1st Lt. Platoon Leader with the 506th PIR in The Netherlands when he was given a photograph thought to show two of his old unit members.  It turned out the photo was of OSS Greek OG II taken in Athens in October 1944. Perdue’s curiosity got the better of him. There was very little written about the OGs and, by coincidence, his wife’s parents had emigrated from Greek villages near Group II’s operational area.   Thus began a “voyage of discovery to learn more and satisfy my curiosity.”

The book describes the political and military situation in Greece after the October 1940 Italian invasion.   The Greek Army repelled the Italian invaders back into Albania.  In April 1941, the Germans came to the aid of the Italians and seven divisions invaded Greece through Bulgaria and Yugoslav Macedonia. Germany, Italy, and Bulgaria divided Greece into three zones of occupation. King George II fled the country and formed a government-in-exile. To quell any resistance, the Germans confiscated food stores and thousands of Greek civilians subsequently starved. Many villagers died from harsh reprisals and other unspeakable acts.  But the Greek resistance thrived because the central mountainous core of Greece had few paved roads — just trails, suitable only for movement by foot or mule — and was relatively impenetrable by German armor and infantry. The invaders were forced to occupy cities, large towns, and main lines of communication leaving the interior open for resistance groups. Two main guerilla forces — the communist inspired ELAS and the Royalist EDES, collectively known as the Andartes — formed during the occupation. Much to the dismay of the allies, ELAS and EDES spent more time fighting each other than fighting the occupiers.

Perdue outlines some of the early efforts by the British to unify the warring Greek factions so as to conduct sabotage operations. The successful destruction of the Gorgopotamus viaduct along the critical north-south rail line south of the Sperchios Valley in late November 1942 was the highlight of these operations. In 1943, the allies began to plan for more coordinated guerilla operations inside Greece. The first OSS officers were recruited to join the Allied Military Mission. Jerry Wines and Bob Moyers, assigned to OSS Special Operations Branch, were among the first of the American contingent. They parachuted into Greece in December 1943.

In January 1943, at the request of the Greek government-in-exile, President Roosevelt authorized the establishment of the 122nd Infantry Battalion formed of Greek-speaking Americans and recent immigrants from Greece. This “Greek Battalion” would be used in the event of an allied invasion of Greece - the “soft underbelly of Europe.” The Army began recruiting to fill the ranks.  Eventually there would be 30 officers. All but eight of the men were of Greek descent.  The ranks of the Greek Battalion would form the nucleus of the OSS Greek Operational Groups.

Perdue highlights several of the men who joined in 1943, but devotes considerable space to the military service of John Giannaris, the original Group II Commander.  The Greek Battalion trained at Camp Carson, Colorado. In August 1943, OSS solicited recruits for “hazardous duty in Greece.” A month later, the 122nd Battalion was designated the “Third Contingent, Unit B, Operational Group” and was assigned to the OSS. In October 1943, the 160 volunteers began OSS training at Area F (the Congressional Country Club in Potomac, Maryland) and at Area B (present day Camp David, Maryland).  The men underwent intensive physical conditioning and training in map reading, night reconnaissance, demolitions and sabotage, and hand-to-hand combat. OG II became a cohesive well-trained unit of 22 enlisted men commanded by a single officer, Lt. John Giannaris.

In November 1943, the OGs, — now known as Company C, 2671st Special Reconnaissance Battalion were sent to Camp Russell B. Huckstep at Heliopolis near Cairo in preparation for dispatch into occupied Greece.  They were to participate with the British Raiding Support Regiment (RSR) in Operation “Noah’s Ark,” guerilla warfare against the retreating German army.  The operation was planned to begin in March 1944, but was not initiated until October 1944.

Perdue traces the activities of Group II upon their infiltration into Greece, near Parga in June 1944, through 14 operations out of their base near Lamia. This forms the heart of his story. According to Perdue "OG II, alone or with small British forces and Andartes, participated in 14 operations against the Germans. They destroyed three locomotives and 31 railroad cars, six trucks, mined roads and blew up almost 7500 yards of rail."

Operation #5 was a combined BritishAmerican-Andartes attack on the German-held Dereli rail station near the town of Kaitsa during the night of 20/21 August. The station was a “vital junction of the main Athens-Thessaloniki rail line with a branch line that extended to the east to a chrome mine near Domokos.” Chrome ore was a strategic material for the Germans for production of stainless steel. A train was attacked and seven cars derailed. In the ensuing melee, 80 German soldiers were reported killed. Through a critical examination of the historical record, Perdue determined that some of the “official” accounts of the participants could not have happened as described.

Operation #10 was an attack on a heavily defended rail line, two miles south of Dereli, on 8/9 September 1944.  The team came under intense enemy fire and suffered its only fatality — Technical Sergeant Michalis Tsirmulas struck by a burst of small arms fire.  Lt. Giannaris attempted to aid Tsimurlas, but accidentally detonated a landmine and was severely wounded.  Capt. Moyers — a dentist with limited medical or surgical training — and his corpsman Bob DeWeese, struggled to keep Giannaris alive for the nearly two weeks required to evacuate him from a clandestine airstrip near Neraida to Brindisi, Italy. Bad weather over the Adriatic thwarted several evacuation attempts by air. Perdue recounts Giannaris’ remarkable 1989 reunion with Flight Officer Norman Attenborrow, the RAF pilot who volunteered to fly a single-engine Lysander on the hazardous — and successful — rescue mission into Greece.

Perdue picks up the story with Lt. Nicholas Pappas taking over command of Group II after Giannaris' exfiltration. He concludes the book with an account of the final four Group II operations. He provides details of the men’s post-war lives and Giannaris’ successful lobbying effort to have the bronze star bestowed belatedly on all 22 men of OG Group II.

Perdue supplements his narrative with dozens of previously unpublished photographs and several maps of the operational areas. Although, the book would have been better served by the inclusion of a regional map of Greece showing topography, since many of the locations will probably be unfamiliar to the average reader. The books appendices include a unit roster, award narratives, and examples of propaganda leaflets dropped over Greece.

"Behind the Lines In Greece" represents the fruit of Dr. Perdue's prodigious research into the wartime activities of the Greek Operational Groups, and is an important contribution to the OSS historiography. It is highly recommended for anyone with an interest in the OSS or U.S. Army special operations during World War II.

Japanese Intelligence in World War II

Osprey Publishing
By Ken Kotani
Translated by Chirharu Kotani
Reviewed by Bob Bergin

This is the story of Japanese intelligence operations before and during World War II, and the ways policy makers and war planners used and misused the information that was collected. In his forward, Williamson Murray (Ohio State) describes the work as "a detailed examination of the bureaucratic, organizational, and cultural aspects" that rendered the "Japanese military ... in most respects dysfunctional in the field of intelligence" (vii).

Ken Kotani is a fellow of Japan's National Institute for Defense Studies (NIDS), specializing in the intelligence history of Japan and the United Kingdom, with emphasis on World War II. To write this history he faced a formidable task: the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) and Navy (IJN) "destroyed most intelligence documents at the end of the war. In addition, intelligence officers of the IJA and IJN were unwilling to talk about their roles, as they were afraid of being punished by the victorious Allies" (1). Kitani "dug up and struggled with the fragmented primary sources" (ix), as well as examining existing literature and available British and other intelligence documents.

Japanese intelligence has its roots in Sun Tzu's The Art of War, which Japan's early military thinkers studied. From the establishment of the IJA and the IJN in 1868, each service had its own intelligence apparatus. Their focus was tactical, "influenced by the Prussian style of limited war" (8). That served Japan well in wars with China in 1894-95 and Russia in 1904-5, but, not having participated in World War I, it failed to understand "the concept of total war" that required "total intelligence," including factors well beyond the scope of military collection and analysis (8).

In the run-up to World War II, both services collected information through methods ranging from exploitation of open source material and military attachés abroad to signals intelligence (SIGINT) and code breaking. The use of foreign agents was apparently limited and, in some cases, not greatly successful. One IJN officer wrote: "We succeeded infiltrating the U.S. government, but after the outbreak of the war the agents were obliged to move to Mexico, Argentina, and Chile.… We hired native Chinese and Australian in New Guinea, but they eventually double-crossed" (10).

By contrast, the success of the Japanese in code-breaking is most impressive. The IJA's main target was the Soviet Union, while the IJN focused on the United States and Britain. The IJN broke low-level U.S. diplomatic codes early in the 1920s, and also "part of the British diplomatic code," discovering "that the British defense of Malaya was highly vulnerable" (15). Kotani asserts that "the IJA had significant success in breaking Allied [military] codes" during the war (18), although a postwar U.S. report suggests these were "low grade…, principally weather and aircraft codes," and that the Japanese "apparently had not succeeded in reading any high-grade American or British cryptographic systems" (5).

The real threat to the Allies came from Chinese codes. The IJA broke Chinese military codes in Manchuria as early as 1928, the KMT diplomatic code in 1936, and subsequently "Chinese systems of all types" (5). A senior IJA General Staff officer wrote: "The IJA could divine the intentions of the United States and Britain through the Chinese coded cables" (20). The Allies knew this from reading the Japanese cables, and had to be very selective about information they passed to the Chinese.

IJA code-breakers who targeted the Soviet Union had trained in Poland in the 1920s. SIGINT sections in Manchuria broke the Red Army's code in 1935. During the war, IJA code-breaking operations were established in Hungary, Finland, and Poland in cooperation with the host services, while "British and US codes decrypted by the IJA were exchanged for Soviet codes decrypted by Germany" (24). The IJA's SIGINT was very extensive: "the IJA had eight SIGINT sites in Manchuria … acquiring 50,000 cables a year," but suffered severe shortages of staff and funds. Kotani observes that "Japanese SIGINT competence could have been equal to that of the United States or Britain if they had urgently increased the staff to cope with the enormous volume of traffic" (25).

The unfortunate term HUMINT, designating IJA attachés working abroad, encompasses their exchanges with local counterparts, open-source collection, and the "hiring" of agents. From 1919, the primary target of IJA HUMINT operations was again the Soviet Union, while "Soviet security centered on battling Japanese intelligence" (28). The full range of operations against the Soviets included massive watch operations along the Manchurian-Soviet border, exploitation of Russian defectors, and attempts to run Russian agents back across the border. "Manchurians, Koreans, and Mongols were also chosen as spies, but most of them tended to be Soviet agents" (36). "Operations against the Soviets were extremely laborious, 'like searching for very fine gold dust in the mud'" (32).

In the late 1930s, an attempt to improve Japanese intelligence, particularly against the Soviets, included the establishment of the Nakano school for the "rapid training" of officers who "would fight in the covert war … of espionage, propaganda, security, and plots" (31). The first class of eighteen graduated in 1939, but "HUMINT" successes against the Soviets did not increase significantly. The most reliable information came from censored open source material: the attaché in Moscow predicted the Soviet invasion of Poland by reading Soviet newspapers (40).

HUMINT collection in China was more effective. IJA attachés had been posted in major Chinese cities since the late nineteenth century and a cadre of "China hands" developed. Some, like General Kenji Doihara, "Lawrence of Manchuria," became famous. But they were "specialists," and that meant a "shortage of expertise on Chinese affairs as a whole" (43). IJA also ran counterinsurgency operations against both the KMT and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). At the outset, the IJA had no CCP specialists, held the Eighth Route Army "in low esteem," and was "deeply shocked" when 20,000 Japanese soldiers were lost to CCP attacks in 1940 (44).

The Navy collected intelligence on the United States from 1909 on, although the section responsible had "fewer than ten staff until the attack on Pearl Harbor" (69). IJN code breakers had early successes, particularly in China, but "from the interwar period through the Pacific War the IJN made a generally poor effort in code-breaking while their own codes were cracked by the Allies" (76). The Navy had long considered the possibility of a war against Britain or the United States, and in 1937 "decided to focus SIGINT on the Hawaii area," the base of the U.S. Pacific Fleet (72). During the war, even though codes could not be broken, traffic analysis gave useful indications of the targets and timing of U.S. attacks.

Few records of Navy HUMINT operations exist, but Britain's MI5 had good files on Britons who served as IJN agents, including several Royal Navy officers who were compromised to MI5 early on. Herbert Greene, brother of novelist Graham Greene, became an IJN spy in 1933, and then told the Daily Worker. Great IJN hopes rode on ex-RAF officer, F.J Rutland, a hero of the Great War and an expert on carrier aircraft, who became an "adviser" to the IJN in 1923. He moved to California in 1934, set up front companies, and "behaved like a billionaire" (82). The FBI quickly pegged him "as in charge of Japanese intelligence works in America" (84). He was repatriated to Britain in 1941 and interned as a collaborator. Though he must have cost the IJN a great deal of money, "he seems not to have reported much genuinely useful information" (86).

Kotani believes that "in the first phase of the Pacific War, Japan was good at using tactical intelligence" (159). Pearl Harbor was the outstanding example. Once it was decided to draft a plan for an attack, an IJN officer was posted to Hawaii as a junior diplomat. He made sight-seeing trips around Oahu and reported to Tokyo details of installations, airfields, and the strength and location of the U.S. fleet. Other IJN officers booked passage on liners to explore the seaways, and collected information "from human sources in Hawaii" (137). Security was flawless. Neither the IJA nor the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was informed of the target, and few in the IJN knew the specific plan. Once the ships deployed, radio silence was total. The Americans never had a clue: "this was not American failure, but the success of Japanese security" (137). That would soon change.

"IJA and IJN information gathering was not poor, but structural flaws meant that the efforts were often wasted." The flaws comprised "the vulnerable position of the military Intelligence Departments, the lack of a central intelligence machinery, and the war planners' indifference to intelligence" (159). Causing further vulnerability were IJN operations staff--the best and brightest--who looked down on the intelligence staff and tailored their own assessments to support IJN strategic goals (160). Evidence contrary to operational staff assessments was ignored. This was not analysis, but wishful thinking.

The lack of a coordinating body--a central intelligence organization--caused many problems as the war went on. The IJN took heavy losses at the Battle of Leyte Gulf, but announced it had sunk eleven U.S. carriers, two battleships, and three cruisers. Crediting this report, IJA planners shifted their main force from Luzon to Leyte--only to have much of it annihilated in transit by U.S. aircraft that should not have been there.

The most striking example of Japanese intelligence failure--on many levels--was the compromising of IJN operational codes prior to the battles of the Coral Sea and Midway. Though the IJA knew secrets were being leaked, its "conceit [was] that 'our codes cannot be broken'" (90):

The chief staff officer of the 1st Air fleet noted: "The major factor of the failure in the operation was the leaking of the Japanese Combined Fleet's plan on the battle of Midway to the US Navy." In the operational diary of the General Staff it was recorded that "the enemy had grasped our intentions beforehand." However, in the minds of the Navy General Staff, the major factors behind the defeat were technical issues, such as a problem in liaison between the fleets and replenishment vessels and the lack of reconnaissance…. The lack of thorough examination regarding code failures resulted in the shooting down of the plane of Admiral Yamomoto on April 18, 1943 (87-88).

And there was no help from the Army: "Although the Army SIS could break some of the US military ciphers … the Navy SIS failed to break them. The Army was superior to the Navy in code-breaking and the code-breakers of the IJA knew the vulnerability of the Navy's code. However, they did not share their knowledge of code-breaking, and the Navy was not informed of their vulnerability" (162).

"But the fundamental problem was the Japanese decision-making process itself, which could not handle intelligence for war planning or for strategic policy" (150). Official decisions, once made, became impervious to change by "rational ideas" or by intelligence. In the prewar period, three power centers--the IJA, the IJN, and the government--each pulled in its own direction, with no one entity formulating national strategy. Before that, the Genro (the Emperor's advisers) had set Japan's grand strategy, but they had been pushed aside by the IJA. Intelligence became useful when it supported a position being negotiated within the power structure. "The war planners usually chose reports in an arbitrary and impromptu manner for their own strategic goals" (163). The IJA Chief of Staff is quoted on one such occasion: "The report is perfect and there is no room to argue. But the report is against our national policy" (151). The report was ordered burned.

Kotani convincingly describes what Professor Murray calls "not so much a failure of the intelligence organizations themselves as a massive failure of the culture and bureaucratic organization of the Japanese military from top to bottom" (viii). The book is indeed a significant contribution to the literature of intelligence and World War II, particularly for English-language readers with no access to works in Japanese. The translation, by Kotani's wife, is competent, despite a few odd word choices (for example, Japanese agents are "hired," not recruited), too many unfamiliar acronyms, and occasional imprecise phraseology.

The bibliography attests to extensive use of Japanese and British documents, but U.S. documents are limited to Office of Naval Intelligence "Records of the Oriental Desk" and a brief history of communications intelligence in the United States. There is but a single reference to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and none to Chinese documents. This does not diminish Kotani's accomplishment, but suggests that future explorations of U.S. and Chinese sources may add further insights into Japanese intelligence operations, perhaps like those Kotani gained from MI5 files. Nonetheless, this important work will benefit specialists and general readers and indeed anyone wanting a more complete picture of Japanese intelligence during World War II than previously available.

CITIZENS OF LONDON: The Americans Who Stood With Britain In Its Darkest and Finest Hour

Random House
By Lynne Olson
Reviewed by Fisher Howe

For anyone interested in World War II as it was fought out in heroic, war-torn London, this is the book for them. Detailed, well-researched, it is a splendidly written historical narrative by former Baltimore Sun correspondent Lynne Olson and an absorbing tale.

The story is told principally through three central characters who, it can be reliably claimed, were largely responsible for getting America into the War: the CBS correspondent, Edward R. Murrow, famous for his nightly dramatic broadcasts from London during the Blitz; Averill Harriman, the wealthy, ambitious Presidential Lend-Lease representative to Britain; and Gilbert Winant, the well-loved U.S. Ambassador. But Winston Churchill and his family, and FDR also come very much alive in the story – their historic friendship and unhappy rivalry. In addition, a multitude of hardly subordinate characters are part of this wide-ranging, authoritative chronicle: most especially, Harry Hopkins, FDR’s eminence grise; the little known but apparently critically important aviation expert, the polo-playing socialite, Tommy Hitchcock; and the star-studded, sometime fractious American and British military leaders. Only the War in Europe is involved in this fine tale; there is hardly a reference to Japan and the Pacific. MacArthur doesn’t come into it.

One important insight emerges in this chronicle: the critical historical significance of the years 1940 and 1941. The War itself was a colossal event but those two years saw a major turning point in world affairs: the survival of the desperately stricken, courageous British nation, and the massive shift in the American posture from its isolationism to overwhelming world involvement. The winning US - British partnership that emerged saved Britain in its dire need, re-made the American world outlook, and won the War.

The book however is not limited to those two crucial years; the narrative covers the whole of the European war in great detail – the terrifying London Blitz in the “Battle of Britain; the “Torch” invasion of North Africa; the massive “Overlord” cross-channel operation; the difficult dealings with the irrepressible, controversial and generally disliked deGaulle; the friendly cooperation with the other European exile governments and people; the dramatic and disputatious dealings with Stalin in the several Summit conferences; the fluctuating leadership of Eisenhower; the back-biting struggles of the American and British military. And withal, the human stories, including the love affairs of the three protagonists with members of the Churchill family.

It is a long, detailed, heroic tale. One of its attractive features is the many quotations from contemporary letters and diaries of the actors in the drama.

OSSers, however, should not look for significant recognition in this book. For instance, the name William Donovan gets only one meager mention. That may be understandable in the light of so many other prominent personalities, but it is unfortunate. Donovan, through his pre-war trips to Europe, especially his visits to England, and his opening of the COI office in London – before Pearl Harbor - under the close guidance of British Intelligence leaders, especially William Stephenson – who gets no mention at all - should probably count as a not-unimportant part of the 1940 – 1941 beginnings of the close US – UK relationship that led to the wartime partnership. Donovan and Stephenson were important figures in the British - American wartime establishment.

The OSS London office is mentioned only a few times - not altogether accurately. One reference toward the middle of the book: “When the OSS set up operations in London in 1942 . . . . .” No, we set up the Coordinator of Information Office (COI) in October of 1941 and it became OSS in June, 1942. Those were critical months in the story the book seeks to tell.

At another point the narrative reports: “Among the new agencies whose work Winant oversaw were . . . . [the] Office of Strategic Services, America’s first official intelligence agency.” Winant did not oversee London’s OSS; he once tried to, half heartedly, but, beloved and wise as he was, he did not get into the intelligence business.

But never mind. It is a fascinating and revealing story of those dramatic and critical years at the epicenter of World War II.

Fisher Howe served as a special assistant to General William Donovan with COI and OSS, opened the OSS office in London, and served in the Maritime Unit.

China and the Vocation of History in the Twentieth Century: A Personal Memoir

Princeton University Press
By Frederick W. Mote

Frederick Mote, one of the twentieth century's most prominent Sinologists, has written a historian's memoir that uses observation and personal experiences to understand the intellectual and social transformation of China. Mote's thought-provoking narrative distills his reflections on modern China and details change in Chinese historical studies in the twentieth century. Mote assesses the work of historians prior to 1950 and the domination of China by the Communist Chinese, hints at the direction of Chinese historical studies in the post-1950s era, and explores the continuous change in the ways Chinese history has been understood among the Chinese themselves and within the field.

Language training in the Army Specialized Training Program and subsequent wartime service with the Office of Strategic Services serendipitously drew Mote into the study of China, the immense discipline to which he devoted his life. Previously unpublished material in the text, appendices, and addenda document such diverse encounters as the destruction of a Catholic mission by the Communists, Sino-Japanese relations in China in the aftermath of World War II, the growth of East Asian Studies at Princeton University, and a 1974 delegation visit to China. Evaluating Chinese ideas and attitudes toward revolution, modernization, and war, Mote measures the weight and meaning of Chinese historical study.

Abundance of Valor: Resistance, Survival, and Liberation: 1944-45

Presidio Press
by  Col. Will Irwin, USA (Ret.)

The operation known as “Market Garden”—made famous in the book and film A Bridge Too Far—was the largest airborne assault in history up to that time, a high-risk Allied invasion of enemy territory that has become a legend of World War II, even as it still invites criticism from historians. Now a thrilling and revelatory new book re-creates the operation as never before, revealing for the first time the full adventures of the bold “Jedburgh” paratroopers whose exploits were almost unimaginably risky and heroic.

Kicked off on September 17, 1944, Market Garden was intended to secure crucial bridges in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands by a parachute assault conducted by three Allied airborne divisions. Capture of the bridges would allow a swift advance and crossing of the Rhine by British ground forces. Jedburgh teams—Allied Special Forces—were dropped into the Netherlands to train and use the Dutch resistance in support of the larger operation. Based on new firsthand testimony of survivors and declassified documents, Abundance of Valor concentrates on the three teams that operated farthest behind enemy lines, the nine men whose treacherous missions resulted in deaths, captures, and hair-breadth escapes.

Here in unprecedented detail are the heat and stench of fuel, oil, and sweat in the troop carriers going over, the remarkable (and misleading) initial success of the daylight parachute landings, and the deadly, brutally effective German response, particularly by crack SS armored units in the blood-soaked town of Arnhem. Abundance of Valor portrays with stunning verisimilitude the experiences of Lt. Harvey Allan Todd, who fought from a surrounded position against overwhelming numbers of the enemy before surviving capture, near-starvation, interrogation, and solitary confinement in German POW camps, and Maj. John “Pappy” Olmsted, who made a hazardous journey, in disguise, from safe house to safe house through enemy territory until finally reaching friendly lines.

With piercing criticism of the mission’s ultimate failure from faulty use of intelligence—and Field Marshall Montgomery’s distrust of the Dutch underground—Abundance of Valor is a brutally honest and truly inspiring account of fighting men in a noble cause who did their jobs with extraordinary honor and courage.

Shadows on the Mountain: The Allies, the Resistance, and the Rivalries that Doomed WWII Yugoslavia

By Marcia Kurapovna

An in-depth look at a crucial, little-known World War II episode the failed Allied policy in Yugoslavia and its ramifications in the Balkans and beyond.

Winston Churchill called it one of his biggest wartime failures the shift of British and U.S. support from Yugoslavia's Dra a Mihailović and his royalist resistance movement to Tito and his communist Partisans. This book illuminates the complex reasons behind that failure through the incredible story of what has been called the greatest rescue of Allied airmen from behind enemy lines in World War II history, a rescue executed, incredibly, with minimal official support from the United States and none such support from Great Britain.

• Recounts an unknown chapter of World War II history and the single largest rescue operation of the war
• Starting with Serbia's tragedy and triumph in World War II through civil war in Yugoslavia during World War I, focuses on the history of the Balkans, a tragically misunderstood part of the world
• Sheds new light on the OSS-SOE relationship and manipulations of intelligence that profoundly altered policy decision making
• Reveals how failed Allied policy set the stage for Yugoslavia's breakup in the 1990s
• Details the wartime camaraderie of unlikely warriors who became fast friends, outcasts, and heroes in executing the rescue

Written with the drama of a novel and the insight of serious history, Shadows on the Mountain is essential reading for anyone interested in World War II, European history, and the Balkans.

Yalta: The Price of Peace

Viking
By S. M. Plokhy
Reviewed by Joseph C. Goulden

For several generations of foreign policy students, the term “Yalta” was a codeword for an ailing President Roosevelt bartering into communist slavery Poland and other Eastern European nations. The undeniable evidence was that the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin treated many of the “agreements” painstakingly reached by FDR, Stalin, and Winston Churchill in the Crimean city in February 1945 as worthless “promises” to be crumpled and tossed in the trash bin.

The Harvard Russian scholar S. M. Plokhy sums up the key lesson from the Yalta Conference in a telling phrase: “Democratic leaders and societies should be prepared to pay a price for close involvement with those who do not share their values.” And indeed a heavy price was paid for what happened at Yalta.

In hindsight – always a good vantage point from which to examine history –the scenario for Yalta was preordained. The Red Army already held sway over a wide swath of Eastern Europe, and Stalin’s appetite for more territory appeared unsated. He was in no mood to bargain over the spoils he had in hand, declaring, “This war is not as in the past; whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system.” Such is what he proceeded to do, without a glance at the peoples he subjugated under communism.

Thus we have Stalin blithely agreeing to negotiations over the post-war Polish state that would include both his hand-picked communists and a non-communist delegation who favored free elections leading towards democracy. When the latter group arrived in Warsaw, under a safe conduct pass, the Soviet secret police promptly hauled them off to jail; several were shot. So much for Stalin’s “word of honor.”

Plokhy’s major contribution to the Yalta story was his acquisition of Soviet documents pertaining to the conference. Do be on notice that although his book is a fascinating read, sprinkled with “I-was-there” reminisces from all sides, we are dealing with intricate diplomatic history. So do not expect to breeze this work in a single evening.
Plokhy insists that the record shows no sign that Roosevelt’s physical condition hampered his performance. Perhaps. But several factors should be considered. His blood pressure soared from 186/108 to 260/150 between March and November 1944. Physicians tried to restrict him to a four-hour “work day” (he refused). A hacking cough and abdominal pains made sleep difficult.

So why did Roosevelt risk his life by traveling half-way around the world? His chief goals were two-fold: to persuade Stalin to enter the Pacific war, which he hoped would avert the bloodshed of an invasion of the Japanese home islands; and to persuade Stalin to join the United Nations.

To achieve the first goal, Roosevelt blithely granted Stalin control wide swathes of territory that by rights should have gone to his “ally,” Chiang Kai-Shek of China. As for Poland, FDR agreed to huge slices being taken off its eastern borders. In the west, Poland was granted large chunks of Germany, resulting in a massive shuffling of populations. Although Plokhy has much to praise about the proceedings at Yalta, he faults both FDR and Churchill for agreeing “to redraw international borders and forcibly resettle millions of people without consulting the governments and nations involved.”

One of the more cynical – and bloody – concessions to Stalin was the forcible return to the USSR of Red Army soldiers taken captive by the Germans, and hordes of displaced civilians. To Stalin, capture was akin to treason, and soldiers knew they faced imprisonment or death when returned; hundreds chose suicide.

Given that State Department officer Alger Hiss was with the US delegation, in a relatively minor role, suspicions have long lingered as to whether he had a hand in the concessions FDR made to Stalin. Based on the Soviet documents Plokhy obtained, the answer is “no.” Stalin et al seemed not even aware of Hiss. One explanation is that Hiss spied for the GRU, the intelligence service of the Red Army, whereas Yalta was under the purview of its rival NKVD. (Plokhy refers to Hiss’s “persecution” – an odd choice of words – in post-war years, although acknowledging that he was probably a Soviet agent.)

But intelligence gave the Soviets a clear advantage at Yalta. The infamous Cambridge Five spy ring – think Kim Philby – sent to Moscow papers concerning the British-American positions on Poland. The British traitor-diplomat Donald Maclean, stationed in Washington, kept Moscow apprised of US bargaining strategies. As Plokhy writes, “His documents were often considered so important and time-sensitive that instead of being sent to Moscow by diplomatic mail they were coded and dispatched by cable.”

The Soviet documents revealed a good deal of “rewriting of history,” always to Stalin’s advantage. For instance, although at Yalta Stalin was a staunch advocate of “dismemberment” of Germany after the war, he later assigned blame to the West, not wishing to rile his East German subjects.

To be sure, Churchill does not emerge with totally clean hands. He wanted Germany stripped bare, saying, “By removing factories and equipment from Germany, Russia would be doing us a service, for it would put an end to German exports which could then be replaced by British exports.” (Viewed up close, diplomacy can bear a strong resemblance to sausage-making.)

Most of the American delegation left Yalta in exuberant moods. FDR confidant Harry Hopkins spoke of the “dawn of a new age we had all been praying for and talking about for so many years.” Secretary of State Edward Stettinius claimed that the Soviets “made greater concessions” than did the US or Britain.

But a few months later, Averell Harriman, who had served as ambassador to Moscow, bluntly warned the new president, Harry Truman, that “Stalin is breaking his agreements,” and that there was a new “barbarian invasion of Europe.” Plokhy makes a strong case that the Yalta talks were essential to bring the war to a successful conclusion. But, in the end, I opt for Harriman’s assessment.

Historical Dictionary of Ian Fleming's World of Intelligence

Scarecrow Press
By Nigel West

Twelve novels and nine short stories define one of the most extraordinary fictional characters of all time, creating the basis for the most successful movie series in cinematographic history, watched by more than half the world's population. The single person probably more responsible than any other for glamorizing the murky world of espionage is Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, who himself lived a remarkable double life of spy and writer. Everyone has an opinion on why 007 became so successful, but one possible explanation is the ingenious formula of fact, fiction, and sheer fantasy. Certainly the author drew on friends and places he knew well to provide the backdrop for his drama, but what proportion of his output is authentic, and what comes directly from the author's imagination?

These questions and more are examined in the Historical Dictionary of Ian Fleming's World of Intelligence: Fact and Fiction. This is done through a chronology, an introduction, a bibliography, and hundreds of cross-referenced dictionary entries on actual cases of espionage, real-life spies, MI5, SIS, CIA, KGB, and others. It also contains entries on Ian Fleming's novels and short stories, family and friends, his employers and colleagues, and other notable characters.

Jungle of Snakes: A Century of Counterinsurgency Warfare from the Philippines to Iraq

By James R. Arnold
Bloomsbury Press
Reviewed by Bob Bergin

The title is apt, taken from former CIA Director James Woolsey's description of the post-Cold War world as "a jungle full of poisonous snakes," for all the insurgents, guerrillas, and terrorists that seem to have overrun it. In this first decade of our new century there are active counterinsurgency operations "on every populated continent except North America and Australia" (6).

Arnold is a military historian and author of more than twenty books. He examines four insurgencies and the campaigns waged against them: the United States in the Philippines, the British in Malaya, the French in Algeria, and the United States in Vietnam. In an epilogue, he reflects on the occupation of Iraq. At the start, he notes: "One inescapable conclusion is that a counterinsurgency is a long fight. Jungle of Snakes provides readers with a historical foundation so that informed citizens can assess how the fight is going" (7).

In 1898, the head of the Philippine Commission, William Howard Taft, guessed it would take fifty or a hundred years for the Filipinos to develop the Anglo-Saxon political principles needed for good government. After the war was won, the U.S. Senate was still troubled by "an apparent open-ended commitment of American soldiers and gold to the Philippines" (250).

The Philippine insurrection--which the United States defeated--grew out of the Spanish American war: when President McKinley decided to keep the islands after evicting the Spanish, the U.S. Army found a ragtag group of Filipino revolutionaries opposing American occupation. It did not seem very problematic: the insurgents were poorly armed, their leadership weak, and--after an early and disastrous attempt to fight as a regular army--they scattered into the interior's mountains and jungles.

The Americans tried to win the population with a "policy of attraction." Medical programs and the building of schools and roads would show American benevolence. The insurgents used terror to compel support for their cause and to discourage collaboration. Lacking collaborators, the Americans had no intelligence, and consequently little knowledge of how the insurgency was growing, or that all their good works were not winning over the population.

In the run-up to the U.S. presidential election in 1900, "the Philippines exploded into violence as the insurgents began a general offensive timed to influence the American election" (40). William Jennings Bryan ran on a platform opposing McKinley's Philippine policy. The insurgents recognized the value of trying to influence perceptions, but the year was 1900, not 1968. In Manila, war correspondents trying to tell the story were thwarted by strict military censorship, while the U.S military "exaggerated its accomplishments … to make it appear that the war was progressing smoothly" (33). Arthur McArthur, the American commander in the Philippines, had concluded--four months before the election--that America's "looming strategic defeat" demanded a "more stringent policy" and "relied on his censors to keep this information from the American public" (42, 40).

After McKinley's victory in the polls, the crueler war began. Carrying it out on the remote island of Samar was Brigadier General Jacob Smith:

He ordered his brigade to wage hard war, telling subordinates the more killing and burning the better.... He then set to work by ordering the concentration of Samar's inhabitants into protected zones on the coast. He treated the rest of the island as enemy territory. Smith sent his forces … inland, where they killed opponents, real and imagined, burned houses and crops, and slaughtered livestock. Many of his subordinates kidnapped civilians and routinely applied physical abuse to extract intelligence. Eventually a comprehensive starvation policy forced the insurgents to spend most of their time searching for food. Meanwhile, uncounted numbers of civilians also perished (54).

Hard measures brought the war to an end. "Before the conflict was over, two thirds of the entire U.S. Army was in the Philippines" (21). On 4 July 1902, Theodore Roosevelt--president after McKinley's assassination--declared the war ended. Five years later, "20 percent of the entire U.S. Army still remained in the Philippines" (70). Reports of brutality prompted a Senate inquiry into army misconduct. The American people were disillusioned when they learned what it took to win the war, "and most were happy to forget about the distant islands as soon as possible" (66). Also soon forgotten were the lessons of a long and nasty fight.

In Algeria the outcome was different: the French Army won all the battles; the insurgents won the war. "Algeria was a notable example of the perils of fixating on the military defeat of an armed insurgency" (128). Insurgencies are essentially political conflicts, something the leaders of the Algerian Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) understood well. In their war against French colonialism, the FLN relied on an international political climate that favored self-determination, and the French surrender at Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam galvanized them.

On 1 November 1954, All Saints' Day, the FLN launched seventy simultaneous attacks around the country, killing seven people and wounding four. It was "hardly a devastating blow." But in France, the Prime Minister pledged "massive military reinforcements to restore order" (81). For two years the French Army conducted large, clumsy operations that found few guerrillas, but drove many Algerians into the maquis. Civilians on both sides were slaughtered indiscriminately as the FLN goaded Algerians into violence and "awaited the predictable French overreaction." (90).

The nature of the war changed as the French buildup brought in veterans from Indochina, who understood guerrilla warfare and produced results. The FLN recognized they could not defeat the French army and moved the fight to the capital, Algiers, where they believed they could paralyze French rule through terrorism. To that point the war had been brutal; in the Battle of Algiers, French units "set out to prove that they were more extreme than the terrorists" (105). In the end, the FLN was defeated in Algiers, but the fight in the countryside went on, with more French victories, until the French commander was finally able to proclaim: "The military phase of the rebellion is terminated in the interior" (118).

The French won the shooting war, but press revelations of the army's brutality and use of torture shocked the French public. Clergy, politicians, and veterans groups questioned their military's methods. Political pressure grew inside France and abroad, and "de Gaulle concluded that the war was being lost because of waning domestic support and international opposition to colonialism" (122). This broad opposition was a victory for the FLN's use of the media, aimed at the United Nations as well as France's allies, to publicize French repression and brutality. The FLN leaders were not great military strategists, but they understood how modern insurgencies are won.

The Malayan Emergency was a communist insurgency, an "Emergency" because London insurance companies would not cover damages caused by civil war. The British were slow to get under way, but in time got everything right. It took twelve years, but Malaya became the textbook example of the way to defeat an insurgency.

Circumstances in Malaya gave the British many advantages. The enemy was the Malaya Communist Party (MCP), composed almost exclusively of ethnic Chinese, who made up thirty-eight percent of the country's population and had long been at odds with the majority Malays; the insurgency could never become a nationalist movement. Even though the MCP was a Maoist party, its leaders ignored Maoist principles, particularly that "indiscriminate terror against the masses was counterproductive" (175). Even among the Chinese in Malaya, the MCP insurgency won "only halfhearted" support (178).

Unlike the French, the British stressed operating within the law and winning the loyalty of the population. They provided security and "convinced the people of Malaya that they intended to remain until they won" (176). They rejected the indiscriminate use of heavy weapons, thereby limiting harm done to civilians. "Lastly, British leaders understood that winning the war in Malaya would take time and they fully committed to what one general called 'the long, long war'" (177). At home, most Britons supported the effort.

The successful Malaya campaign influenced America's early strategy in Vietnam, but the lessons of Malaya were not easily transferred. The British in Malaya had had complete control of the police, the civil service, and the military. In Vietnam, the Americans acted in support of the host government, "a weak reed dominated by an elite minority that was corrupt, inefficient, and badly frightened" (186). The Government of South Vietnam had little popular support and no real control in the countryside. It was called the "Saigon Government" for good reason.

There were promising early efforts by Malaya expert Sir Robert Thompson and by U.S. Special Forces and Marines working directly with the people, but the "American political leadership had come to the realization that the Communists were winning the war" (194). Their answer was to commit regular American ground forces to the fight. With the vast deployment of troops and firepower came large and aggressive search and destroy missions, where success was reflected in body counts.

"The [communist] National Liberation Front viewed their armed forces as tools to gain political goals. American generals saw their armed forces as tools to destroy the enemy military forces" (231). This became most apparent early in 1968. Skepticism about the war's outcome was growing in the United States, and "far better than anyone in the Johnson administration, the Vietnamese Communists understood the link among international opinion, American public opinion, and battlefield outcomes" (212). At the end of January 1968, the Communists launched the surprise, nationwide Tet Offensive.

The outcome of Tet may have been an enormous success for the U.S. military, but the confidence of the American public was shattered. What Americans witnessed on their TV screens gave the lie to what their political and military leaders were telling them. The Communists were obviously much stronger than they had been led to believe. Polls showed most Americans now believed the war a mistake. Though American involvement in the war continued another sanguinary four years, waning support led to "the political decision to transfer the burden to the unsteady hands of the Vietnamese" (225).

In the book's final section, "Reflections on a War Without End," Arnold briefly ponders the challenges ahead, particularly the increase in destructive power available to combatants and the effect of modern communications, a "force multiplier," to spread terror and control perceptions. "Modern insurgents understand the importance of the media and manipulate it [sic] with great skill" (240).

Turning to Iraq, Arnold asserts that, "by any measure" (241), the Surge, assisted by the Sunni Awakening, has accomplished its goals, but acknowledges it is uncertain what will happen as the U.S. presence diminishes. Similarly, Afghanistan's future as the fight there intensifies is "unknowable." We hear an echo from Vietnam when he notes that Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, "is derisively known as the 'mayor of Kabul' because his rule does not extend beyond the gun range of his foreign benefactors who provide security in his capital" (242).

Arnold quotes analyst Col. John Nagel on defeating an insurgency: "The way you win a counterinsurgency campaign is that you don't--you help the host nation defeat the insurgency." Because the one absolute certainty about insurgencies is that victory requires "a long-term commitment of blood and treasure," the litmus test for American involvement should be whether "an insurgency truly poses a mortal threat to the nation" (252).

Jungle of Snakes gives a good foundation to better understand insurgencies, although it does not enable readers to assess "how the fight is going." The battle is fought on many fronts, and progress in counterinsurgency programs is notoriously difficult to measure. Arnold's four case studies are necessarily abbreviated histories of complex situations. But, in clear and precise prose, he provides a fairly complete picture of each conflict. The book is essentially a primer for the general reader, but it will not disappoint specialists seeking to revisit the basics of the four insurgencies examined. The bibliography points interested readers to some of the classic works on insurgency. If the book has a weakness, it is in the final section, where Arnold reflects too briefly on future challenges and on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In fairness, however, it must be noted that Jungle of Snakes appeared in 2009, when those conflicts and American policy concerning them were in flux.

They Dared Return: The True Story of Jewish Spies Behind the Lines in Nazi Germany

Da Capo Press
By Patrick O'Donnell
Reviewed by Joseph Goulden

Of the countless books I;ve read about bravery in espionage and war, few moved me as much did Patrick K. O’Donnell’s They Dared Return. Not even a B-grade Hollywood writer could contrive such a story: five Jewish refugees from Hitler’s Germany join the Office of Strategic Services and voluntarily return to the beastly land from which they had been expelled.

Their mission is to scout the heavily-fortified area of Austria’s “Alpine Redoubt,” where Hitler reputedly intended to make his last stand as the war wound down. The mission – Operation Greenup – was led by a streetwise sergeant named Fred Mayer, born in Freiburg in 1921, whose father had won an Iron Cross for bravery. The father clung to the notion that his service would exempt the family from the persecution being waged against other Jews. The mother demurred, “We are Jews, and we are leaving.”

Mayer volunteered for the army the day after Pearl Harbor, at age 20, and then for OSS, his background slotting him for assignment to the German Operational Group, assigned to “penetrate enemy lines and strike at the heart of Nazi Germany.” No one had to be told of the consequences of capture. Hitler had ordered that any commandos or spies captured, whether in uniform or not, were to be summarily executed.

O’Donnell painstakingly details the OSS tradecraft to prepare the men for their mission. To test whether Mayer could pass as a German officer, they fitted him with a uniform and put him into a POW camp. For three tense days, he passed muster – and importantly, he discovered that one of the prisoners, Lt. Franz Weber, detested the Hitler regime. Webb accepted an OSS offer to join the infiltration team.

Then the adventure began in earnest. The five parachuted into the snow-covered Austrian mountains, Mayer posing as an Alpine Corp lieutenant, the others as Dutch collaborators. Mayer found himself drinking at an officers-only table in a tavern, in a group that included an engineer who had returned from Berlin, where he directed improvements in Hitler’s bunker. “In his drunken tirade, the Austrian engineer incredulously spouted out technical details regarding the thickness of the bunker’s wall, its depth, and its exact location in the heart of Berlin.” This tidbit, and much other intelligence, was radioed to OSS handlers.

O’Donnell tells much of the story through the words of Mayer and surviving members of the group. As an added treat, he reproduces the team’s original mission reports and prisoner of war debriefings, all housed in National Archives II in College Park. (O’Donnell has proved himself a wizard at finding untold stories in the archives. Another earlier book, The Brenner Assignment, told of OSS missions into Italy.)

Mayer, remarkably, is still spry at age 89; he chops wood daily and helps in a Meals on Wheels program in his community on the Virginia-West Virginia border. An incredibly brave man and a first-rate read.

Operation Jedburgh: D-day And America's First Shadow War

Viking Penguin
by Colin Beavan

In 1943, less than a year before D-Day, nearly three hundred American, British, and French soldiers—shadow warriors—parachuted deep behind enemy lines in France as part of the covert Operation Jedburgh. Working with the beleaguered French Resistance, the “Jeds” launched a stunningly effective guerrilla campaign against the Germans in preparation for the Normandy invasion. Colin Beavan, whose grandfather helped direct Operation Jedburgh for the Office of Strategic Services, draws on scores of interviews with the surviving Jeds and their families to tell the thrilling story of the rowdy daredevils who carried out America’s first special forces missions— forever changing the way Americans wage war.

Dispatches from Camp-X
By Lynn Philip Hodgson
Published by Lynn Philip Hodgson (info@camp-x.com)
Reviewed by John Whiteclay Chambers II

Celebrating Camp-X, British Special Operations Executive’s (SOE) clandestine training facility in Canada in World War II has been a task that Lynn Philip Hodgson has pursued with gusto for three decades. This latest work, Dispatches from Camp-X (2009), is a sequel to his popular first volume, Inside Camp X, which has gone through four editions and thirteen printings since it was first published by Blake Books in 1999.

Hodgson’s work as an amateur historian began in 1976, when William Stevenson’s A Man Called Intrepid, a biography of Canadian-born British spymaster William Stephenson, disclosed that the top secret spy-training and communications facility known as Special Training School 103 and “Camp X” had been located on the edge of Lake Ontario near the villages of Whitby and Oshawa, 30 miles east of Toronto.

There between 1941 and 1944, the British, with Canadian support, trained more than 500 covert operators. They were primarily Britons, Canadians, and Latin Americans of various ethnic backgrounds recruited for SOE, but they also included Americans for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the Office of War Information and the FBI. In addition, the sealed-off compound included a high-powered, trans-Atlantic wireless radio station and code center (referred to as Hydra) which received and distributed top-secret ULTRA decodes from London.

Stevenson’s revelation fired the imagination of two young Whitby couples, Lynn and Marlene Hodgson and Alan and Judi Longfield, who, despite government secrecy, located some old-time residents who had earlier worked at what were by 1976 some old ruins. They failed to prevent the bulldozing of the site and the ruins’ replacement with a modern warehouse. However,  they ultimately succeeded in creating a monument at Intrepid Park, a small museum at the local airfield, a journal, 25-1-1, and a website: www.camp-x.com. They also contacted individuals who had worked or trained at the site, and interviewed and obtained tape recordings, photos and written documents from them.

A friendly, generous individual, Lynn Hodgson has spent thirty-three years assembling data on Camp X. He has responded to requests for information from around the world. In 1999, he put together a useful and coherent compilation in the first volume.

The present volume is less path-breaking than the first. It is less original, less well organized, digressive, and somewhat repetitive. Several of the new segments deal with Hodgson’s own experiences, from giving a talk at Bletchley Park Manor to posing with the Ashton Martin DB5 used in the “James Bond films.

Yet there is valuable new material about the camp in Dispatches from Camp-X. Scottish-born Captain Hamish Pelham Burn’s first person account of how he and two other instructors from Camp X staged a daring raid and destroyed a German radar installation in Brittany just before D-Day is the most dramatic. Also included is an account of Oxford-educated, British Major Paul E. Dehn, a Camp-X instructor in psychological warfare, who after the war became a highly successful screenwriter of spy and other mystery films such as Goldfinger (1964), The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1965), and Murder on the Orient Express (1974).

On a visit to the Public Records Office in England in 2002, Hodgson obtained several documents which he reprints in this volume (albeit without full citations). Some provide valuable insights. However, Hodgson is prone to overstatement. His assertion (p. 114), for example, that a British Major’s report after a visit to the camp on 8-9 March 1943 shows that British MI6/SOE from the U.K. were “actually spying on Canada, William Stephenson, and the British Security Co-Ordination” (BSC) is speculative at best. Furthermore, the report was not hostile to Stephenson, as Hodgson implies but recommended that the SOE school report to British Security Co-ordination (BSC), Stephenson’s officer in New York, rather its previous policy of operating independently or via London.

Hodgson’s interest is primarily in the Canadian and British aspects of the Camp X story. He reprints (p. 149) Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 31 May 1945 letter of congratulations to British SOE for their work with the French Resistance but neglects to note that Eisenhower sent an identical letter the same day to the OSS. William J. Donovan’s organization utilized Camp X and its staff in numerous ways early in the U.S. participation in the war, a few of which Hodgson briefly mentions. However, the British subsequently tended to overemphasize their role in the creation and training of the American agency (as for example in the January 1945 SOE document, “Notes on Co-Operation between SOE and OSS,” that Hodgson reprints on pages 93-104, and whose biased and sometimes inaccurate account he accepts without qualification). It is surely also an overstatement to assert, as Hodgson does, that “The OSS…had its roots at Camp-X in Canada” (p. 181).

Even more surprising is Hodgson’s uncritical acceptance of a statement by an unidentified Englishman in 2002 that the OSS “despised” close-combat specialist William E. (“Dan”) Fairbairn “and considered him boorish, a braggart, and a show off.” (p. 182). This hardly seems creditable since the OSS utilized the taciturn Scot and veteran of the Shanghai police force and SOE schools in Britain and Canada, as a regular instructor at its U.S. camps from 1942 to 1945, featured him in several training films, and helped get him  a series of promotions from captain to lieutenant colonel. Schools and Training Branch repeatedly praised Fairbairn as irreplaceable, and in a letter to the British War Office, 29 February 1944, Donovan lauded him as “our most effective and valued instructor” [OSS Records, RG 226, Director’s Office Microfilm 1642, Roll 46, Frame 13, National Archives II]. OSS veterans of U.S. training camps whom I interviewed during the past four years indicated that Fairbairn was highly respected by American students and instructors.

Going beyond the first volume, Dispatches from Camp-X provides some excellent new descriptions and photographs of the top-secret facility. The illustrations include aerial and ground level pictures of the wartime site and various buildings, including Whitby’s Blue Swallow Inn which housed visiting dignitaries such as Donovan and J. Edgar Hoover, pictures of the “hydra” decoding machines, formal photographs of the staff, and in contrast, lively candid pictures of trainees. In one, a jeep overflows with gun-toting Yugoslavs in fur hats. In another, a bevy of Hungarian Canadians in berets perch jauntily atop a stack of boxes. Local dignitaries receive due respect, yet Hodgson also provides entertaining written accounts of pranks played by Canadian paramilitary trainees on their instructors and of difficulties faced by the civilian employees, men and women, who worked at the communication and decoding center.

The relationship between Camp X and Ian Fleming, the British naval intelligence officer who wrote a dozen “James Bond” novels in the postwar era, is updated in this volume. Responding to skeptics of his earlier claim that Fleming trained at Camp X, Hodgson (p. 160) reprints a Toronto wire story carried in the Oshawa Times, 5 November 1966, quoting the wartime chief of the British Security Co-Ordination in Canada, Thomas G. Drew-Brook, that Fleming had failed an assigned spy test while “taking intelligence training near Oshawa, Ont[ario].” Hodgson (p. 2) contends that although Fleming may not have taken the full 10-12 week paramilitary training course, he was there at least for a short time to observe and participate in some aspects of it, including a test to determine if he was ruthless enough to assassinate an enemy. Armed with a pistol, Fleming was told there was a dangerous enemy agent in an upstairs room in the old Sinclair farmhouse on the site (a picture of the house is on p. 163) and that he was to break open the door and kill him. (The “agent” was actually an instructor skilled at evasion and disarming assailants). Fleming went upstairs, waited at the door, but decided he could not kill a man that way.

Near the end of subsequent editions of Inside Camp-X (p. 202), in a statement that could also apply to Dispatches from Camp X, Hodgson emphasized that he never intended it to be an “exhaustive, scholarly treatise.” As he correctly suggested, for scholarly studies, readers should turn to works such as David Stafford’s Camp-X (1986). Still undeniably, credit is due to Hodgson and his teammates for the information they uncovered, for the two engaging books they compiled, and for their worthy efforts to honor the men and women of Camp X who secretly played a part in helping to defeat the Axis Powers in World War II.

Papa Spy: Love, Faith and Betrayal in Wartime Spain
By Jimmy Burns
Walker & Company
Reviewed by Joseph C. Goulden

One of the many worries facing Great Britain’s leadership in the opening months of World War Two was whether Hitler-friendly Francisco Franco, the strong-man leader of Spain, would eschew his declared neutrality and enter the war on Germany’s side, or, as a lesser evil, open his borders to the German military. In either event, the British could lose their naval facility at Gibraltar, vital to protecting access to the western Mediterranean. It is no exaggeration that the outcome of the war depended on keeping Franco neutral.

One of the silent players in this struggle was a one-time British publisher named Tom Burns, who went to Madrid ostensibly as a “press attache” in the embassy, working for the Ministry of Information, the propaganda arm of the Secret Intelligence Service, of MI6. In any event, such was the story that he consistently told his family, including son Jimmy, the author of the book at hand.

But the younger Burns was a suspicious sort, a natural by-product of his years as an award-winning journalist for The Financial Times. Why, he asked himself, did his father’s best friends tend to be old spooks who had retired from MI6 and other intelligence agencies? And what was a “press attache” doing with the miniature Minox camera found in his effects, a gadget long favored by British spies?

After Tom Burns’ death in 1995, Jimmy set about addressing the mystery. And one must applaud not only his reportorial diligence, but his keen understanding of the overlap of espionage, diplomacy and propaganda, each of which the Brits employed skillfully during the war. He found persons who worked with his father in Madrid – from embassy secretaries to now-aged street urchins who acted as couriers – as well as others who told him, politely but firmly, that their wartime work was still covered by the Official Secrets Act.

Given those latter strictures, his story is necessarily incomplete. But he does detail how British diplomats – often holding their noses – managed to keep Franco from flipping to the German side at a time when Hitler’s military was sweeping through Europe. One weapon employed was euphemistically called the “Knights of St. George,” derived from the image of St. George on the face of the British gold sovereign – in actuality, a slush fund of $10 million used to bribe senior Spanish military officers from siding with the Axis.

Burns’ opinion, in his very first intelligence report, was that Franco’s patriotism was of a nature that would resist any attempt by Hitler “to absorb Spain into his empire.” Ambassador Sir Samuel Hoare was dubious, scrawling “I wonder” on a draft of the message before it went to the code room for dispatch to London. But as the son writes, “Burns’s judgment has ultimately stood the test of time.”

The Germans, with their own diplomatic (and intelligence) presence in Madrid, were distrustful of Burns’s role from the outset. A Spanish police file, using information from the Gestapo, went so far as to identify him (incorrectly) as the head of the MI6 station.

Ironically, Burns had equally vicious enemies within his own embassy. A strong Catholic, during the pre-war years he publicly decried the persecution of his churchmen by the communists fighting Franco for control of Spain. H. R. “Kim” Philby, who worked on Spanish affairs for MI6 – later unmasked as a Soviet spy – used these writings to attempt to discredit Burns as a “Franco toady.” He failed.

In the end, Franco decided that his best interests dictated continued neutrality, so Gibraltar remained in Allied hands. Jimmy Burns documents how his decision was heavily influenced by British intelligence, making his book a five-cloak/five-dagger read.

FDR's Deadly Secret
By Eric Fettmann and Steven Lomazow

The death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1945 sent shock waves around the world. His lifelong physician swore that the president had always been a picture of health. Later, in 1970, Roosevelt’s cardiologist admitted he had been suffering from uncontrolled hypertension and that his death—from a cerebral hemorrhage—was “a cataclysmic event waiting to happen.” But even this was a carefully constructed deceit, one that began in the 1930s and became acutely necessary as America approached war.

In this great medical detective story and narrative of a presidential cover-up, an exhaustive study of all available reports of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s health, and a comprehensive review of thousands of photographs, an intrepid physician-journalist team reveals that Roosevelt at his death suffered from melanoma, a skin cancer that had spread to his brain and abdomen. Roosevelt’s condition was not only physically disabling, but also could have affected substantially his mental function and his ability to make decisions in the days when the nation was imperiled by World War II.

Spymaster: Dai Li and the Chinese Secret Service
University of California Press
By Frederic Wakeman, Jr.
Reviewed by Bob Bergin

Spymaster is a rich, but very complex book, difficult to read in places, but rewarding for the reader willing to struggle through the difficult parts. It tells the story of Dai Li, “an extraordinary secret policeman,” and of the immense espionage apparatus he built. More importantly, in detailing American involvement with Dai Li, the story offers a lesson, relevant today, in the nature of intelligence relationships between allies, how wrong they can go, and how the OSS deftly handled a relationship gone bad.

Dai Li was Chiang Kai-shek’s spymaster during World War II, “the claws and teeth” of the Chinese Nationalist leader and the “Chinese Himmler” to the British. As chief of the Bureau of Investigation and Statistics of the Military Affairs Commission or Juntong, he controlled tens of thousands of spies in China and in every country that had a Chinese community. Official sources claim that Dai Li had 100,000 agents in the field by 1945. “There were 50,000 regular agents run ning assets, amounting to about 500,000 spies and informers, making the Juntong the world’s largest espionage organization at the time.” Aimed primarily at Chiang’s political enemies and the communists, the Juntong carried out “all kinds of espionage and intelligence work.”

Dai Li was a natural for the job: his was the classic rise from obscurity to great power through cunning, intelligence, and deviousness. He was born in 1897 in the hills of Zhejiang Province, where even as a teenager he was seen as a natural leader, but also as “a trouble maker addicted to sex and gambling.” Caught cheating at cards, he ran off to join the army, and then deserted—but not before he connected with the Green Gang, the notorious gangsters who controlled the Shanghai underworld. It was a link that would serve him well in times to come.

In 1921, while “living off the land” in Shanghai, he met Chiang Kai-shek and ran errands for him. In 1926, possibly with Green Gang help, he managed to get admitted to the Whampoa Military Academy, where Chiang was the chancellor. To ingratiate himself with Chiang, who wanted to use him as a batman, he reported on the ideological purity of his fellow cadets. The ones he identified as communists were eliminated in a purge at Whampoa in 1927.

Whampoa and its alumni were the base on which Chiang’s power was built. His loyalists moved in a swirl of associations, secret societies, and front organizations. At the core was the most secret Lixingshe (the Society for Vigorous Practice) and the front organization it controlled, the Fuxingshe, or Renaissance Society. Permeating the mix was Chiang’s personal espionage apparatus of secret intelligence organizations that he let fight among themselves for funds and authority.

In 1928, Chiang established a 10-man intelligence unit called the Liaison Group and put Dai Li in charge. Later called the “embryo of all subsequent party and state military intelligence organizations,” the group had to compete with many others. To strengthen his hand, Dai Li formed the “League of Ten,” Wampoa graduates he put on his private payroll who became the core of his personal “secret service.”

In 1932, when Chiang needed intelligence that others were unable to provide, he directed Dai Li to turn his League of Ten into a formal Special Services Department. The Ten became more than a hundred, and Dai Li’s rise began. Dai Li became Chiang’s primary source for political intelligence, and, in 1938, Chiang established the new independent security agency that was the Juntong. Dai Li was made its chief.

Before the outbreak of war with Japan, Dai’s activities centered on Shanghai, where he suborned the police and drew on the skills of his associates in the Green Gang. Kidnapping and torture became tools to gather intelligence and root out Chiang’s enemies and the communists. Trafficking in narcotics and other contraband was the means to supplement budgets as Dai Li’s activities and power grew. Dai Li was the only man allowed armed into Chiang’s presence. He became the most feared man in China; mothers invoked his name to make their children behave.

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Americans started streaming into China, some with big ideas for winning the war and access to the funds to do it. Dai had never taken well to foreigners and avoided dealing with them. Then he met a US Navy officer open to his ideas. Commander Milton E. Miles, known to history as “Mary” Miles, was the nearest thing the US Navy had to a China expert. A graduate of the Naval Academy, he had spent five years with the Asiatic fleet. In early 1942, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral King sent him to China to establish weather stations and “to heckle the Japanese.”

Dai Li took Miles on a trip into occupied China and impressed him with how easily the Juntong could operate behind Japanese lines. Before the trip was over, Dai proposed the creation of a 50,000 strong Chinese guerrilla army under Sino-American control. Without consulting Washington, Miles agreed, and the two started working on the creation of what became the Sino-American Cooperative Organization (SACO) to carry out espionage, special operations, and signals intelligence. The Chinese would provide the manpower; the United States the rest. Dai Li would be the SACO director, Miles his deputy.

Washington’s approval of the SACO agreement required that Miles be appointed chief of OSS activities in China. OSS chief “Wild Bill” Donovan resisted the idea, but because OSS needed a Chinese base for its Asia operations, he agreed to “an unhappy alliance with Miles and Dai Li.” The OSS was admitted to China “as subordinate partners of General Dai Li’s intelligence service.” Personnel from OSS and the US Navy started arriving at Dai Li’s base, “Happy Valley,” outside Chunking to instruct Dai’s people in everything from guerrilla warfare to criminal investigation, even an “FBI school” to train Dai Li’s secret police.

There were problems from the start. Dai’s secret police were directed against Chiang’s internal enemies rather than the Japanese. There was the matter of torture: Happy Valley, which had a sanitized mess hall and western toilets for the Americans, also had “a grim prison about which unpleasant stories were told.” There was Miles, who insisted that nothing be kept secret from the Chinese; they would work directly with the Americans and everything would be shared. There was Dai Li, whose hand was seen in thwarted OSS operations. Free Thai agents being infiltrated into Thailand were delayed and several killed. Dai Li had his own plans. He would invade Thailand with a force of 10,000 Chinese guerrillas disguised as Thai—on 10,000 Tibetan ponies.

The situation was further complicated by Allied suspicions that Dai was trading secrets with Japanese intelligence. In October 1943, Donovan was ordered to gather intelligence in China’s communist-controlled areas. Donovan told Roosevelt, “We cannot do our job as an American intelligence service unless we operate as an entirely independent one, independent of the Chinese and our other allies.” The president agreed.

Donovan visited China in late 1943. Over a dinner in Dai Li’s residence, Donovan told the spymaster that OSS would work unilaterally inside China. Dai responded that he would execute any OSS agent found operating outside the SACO agreement. Donovan slammed his fist on the table and shouted, “For every one of our agents you kill, we will kill one of your generals!” The next day Donovan met with Chiang Kai-shek, who spoke of Chinese sovereignty, and asked that OSS act accordingly.

Leaving Miles to work with Dai Li’s operations, Donovan circumvented them both and secretly set up a separate clandestine OSS intelligence collection mechanism. The senior US officer in the China-Burma-India Theater, General Joseph Stilwell, was no help, but in the 14th Air Force commander, General Claire Chennault, Donovan found an ally. Chennault had served as Chiang’s aviation adviser since 1937. He had no use for Dai Li and had turned down an early offer to work together. But as the war expanded, Chennault’s bombers needed more intelligence than the Chinese could provide. He created his own network of American operatives who worked behind Japanese lines.

Chennault agreed to work with Donovan. The result was the 5329th Air and Ground Forces Resources and Technical Staff (AGFRTS), or “Ag-farts,” as it was popularly called. OSS would run operations inside Japanese territory using the 14th Air Force as cover from the Chinese. Donovan later wrote: “AGFRTS succeeded where SACO had failed, and its results were almost immediately apparent.” OSS agents behind the lines gathered intelligence on Japanese shipping and rail traffic and other targets, interrogated prisoners, trained guerrillas, sometimes engaged in guerrilla warfare, and did a host of other things important to the war effort.

By contrast, “no intelligence or operations of any consequence have come out of SACO,” Donovan reported to Roosevelt in November 1944. The judgment is shared by Wakeman and other historians. It was Dai Li and his “clandestine empire” that benefited. Dai Li emerged from the war at the pinnacle of his power. But as the postwar repositioning began, he became convinced that Chiang intended to abolish the Juntong. In the spring of 1946, rumors of Dai Li’s retirement were rife. On 17 March 1946, an aircraft carrying Dai Li crashed into the hills outside Nanjing. Dai Li was dead, but many refused to believe it. Some blamed the crash on communist sabotage, others on a bomb planted by OSS. The most common rumor was that Dai Li had faked his own death.

But Dai Li was dead, and it was bad weather that did it, not the OSS. He was buried on a hillside outside Nanjing, not far from Sun Yat-sen’s mausoleum. In 1949, his remains were destroyed by the communists. A hero to some, a demon to others, Dai Li with his genius for organization had created the largest spying machine of its time, but reviews of its effectiveness are mixed. Its success was greatest against Chiang’s internal enemies and dissidents of his regime, less so against the Japanese and their collaborators, where intelligence collection was subordinated to the lucrative trade between the Chinese and Japanese under the guise of infiltrating each other. With the Juntong’s main target, the Chinese Communist Party, there appears to have been only limited success, but here Wakeman and other historians necessarily depend on information that comes mainly from former Dai Li agents re-educated by the communists.

While the current utility of the lessons of intelligence cooperation are relatively clear—intelligence partners almost always give precedence to self-interest; sovereignty is likely to trump better sense; and mismatches in cultural norms strain, if not make impossible, good relationships—other elements of Wakeman’s meticulous scholarship are worth noting for what they might say about China’s present intelligence apparatus and about the way in which such organizations might form in periods of national stress.

First, Wakeman’s research reveals the bewildering array of organizations and personal connections that eventually grew into an internal security apparatus. Organizational sprouts—societies, unions, clubs, cliques, etc.—large and small, came and went in the chaotic environment of newly republican China. Many thought themselves destined for big things but were gone or aimless soon after they were created. Amazingly, Wakeman seemed to have found them all in the minutest detail—it is the feature of this book that makes it such difficult reading at times. His effort, however, speaks to the energy, dynamism, and potential for manipulation of Chinese intellectuals in the 1930s and 1940s who were looking in almost every conceivable direction for ways to combat the Japanese (or other enemies) and to bring the nation into modern times. This chaotic scene eventually coalesced in 1949, but Wakeman’s effort is a powerful reminder of the complexity of the underlying coalition and the challenges that complexity presents in understanding China and the responses of its people in difficult times, and in knowing with whom to deal in such eras of change in China or anywhere.

Covert Action in the Cold War: US Policy, Intelligence and CIA Operations
I.B. Taurus Publishers
By James Callanan

Born out of the ashes of World War II, the covert action arm of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was created to counter the challenge posed by the Soviet Union and its allies and bolster American interests worldwide. It evolved rapidly into an eclectic, well-resourced organization whose activities provided a substitute for overt military action and afforded essential backup when the Cold War turned hot in Korea and Vietnam. This comprehensive examination of a still controversial subject sheds valuable new light on the undercover operations mounted by the CIA during the Cold War. Using a wide range of unpublished government records and documents, James Callanan traces the growth of the agency chronologically as it forged a covert action mission that sought to advance US foreign and defense policy in all corners of the globe. Offering a powerful perspective on a pivotal period in American history, "Covert Action in the Cold War" makes a crucial contribution to our understanding of global politics during the Cold War.

Honorable Survivor: Mao's China, McCarthy's America and The Persecution of John S. Service
By Lynne Joined
Reviewed by Joseph C. Goulden

In the matter of John Stewart Service, a diplomat of the China experts generation, even critics of Joseph McCarthy must admit that this is one case where the blustery senator had things half-right, at least.

By Service's own admission, he supplied secret State Department documents to a publication run by a man with strong communist ties. Further, the legendary Democrat political fixer Thomas "Tommy the Cork" Corcoran persuaded the Truman Justice Department to drop charges against Service without a trial under circumstances that can only be described as very smelly.

But where McCarthy overstepped was to accuse Service of being a member of a State Department coterie of communists who were bent on turning China over to Mao Zedong. To be sure, Service was guilty of extraordinary misjudgment in passing around secret documents, some of them pertaining to military matters. Nonetheless zealotry - and stupidity - do not equate with treason.

Lynne Joiner, a West Coast journalist, was a friend of Service for 30 years, and unsurprisingly, her book gives him the benefit of the doubt at every turn. Service, she asserts, was the "designated leaker" for State Department officials who wished to end U.S. support for the Nationalist Chinese government of Chiang Kai-shek. These officers felt the Nationalist regime had failed by 1945 and that the United States should recognize that the communists would prevail in the civil war raging in the country. Whatever materials he gave to journalists was at the behest of superiors. Or so he argued, and Ms. Joiner buys his story.

(Professors Harvey Klehr and Ronald Radosh are far more skeptical of Service in their 1996 book "The Amerasia Spy Case." They also provide far more detail on the background of persons arrested with him.)

Service seemed bound for a distinguished diplomatic career. Born of missionary parents in China in 1904, Service spent much of World War II there and immersed himself in the fierce political battle over the nation's future. Then came a fatal stumble.

In early 1945, the Office of Strategic Services was startled to see a near-verbatim version of a secret report, "British Imperial Policy in Asia," printed in Amerasia, a small publication edited by Phillip Jaffee. Part of the report - not published in Amerasia - dealt with a top secret anti-Japanese operation in Thailand. OSS recognized that the leak was serious. Investigators crept into the Amerasia office and found a treasure trove of documents from throughout government, some marked top secret.
The FBI put Jaffee under FBI surveillance, and one of the people seen in frequent contact with him turned out to be Service, who often handed Jaffee bulging envelopes of documents. Agents established that Jaffee, who had made a small fortune in the stationery business, had long lent his name (and pocketbook) to communist causes.

Other contacts also had pro-communist backgrounds. One was Andrew Roth, a young lieutenant in the Office of Naval Intelligence. Oddly, ONI did a background check and concluded that Roth was a communist but gave him a commission anyway. Emmanuel S. "Jimmy" Larsen worked for the Navy and then the State Department, compiling biographical material on Chinese warlords and politicians; he, too, had a "fellow traveler" background. Another was Mark Gayn, a journalist who wrote for such magazines as the Saturday Evening Post and Collier's.

FBI bugging experts picked up a hotel conversation in which Service told Jaffe, "Well, what I said about the military plans is, of course, very secret." As Ms. Joiner writes, "This comment apparently referred to something Service had said during breakfast, out of earshot of FBI agents sitting nearby. This incriminating comment would be cited many times over the next three decades as evidence that Service was a security risk."

The FBI also caught a chat between Roth and Jaffee, in which the latter said, "I shouldn't tell you this. I shouldn't tell it to anybody." He related that Joseph Bernstein, a former Amerasia employee, complained that an acquaintance - "an agent for the Soviet Union for many years" - was having "a problem" getting information from Washington. Jaffee said Bernstein asked him "whether you are willing to give me the dope" about China that he was receiving from State Department sources. Jaffee said he recognized that he would be giving information to Soviet intelligence agents. Roth counseled caution.

With President Truman's approval, arrests were made in June, with headlines blaring "spies in the State Department." In an interview with FBI agents, Service expressed a willingness to testify against the other people. Such was not to be: Enter now Corcoran, who had come to Washington as a New Deal legal wunderkind, and now was in private practice. Although he was never Service's attorney-of-record, he burned the telephone wire to the Justice Department - including the attorney general - to get Service out of the legal mess.

Transcripts of these calls were first revealed by Mr. Klehr and Mr. Radosh in their 1966 book. Neither they nor Ms. Joiner could fix a motive for Corcoran's intervention - although it is plain that the Truman administration did not want to be caught in a "spy scandal." Corcoran said he did not want a "Dreyfus case," with all the publicity. And he succeeded. Service was not indicted; Jaffee, Roth and Larsen pleaded guilty to misuse of government documents.

Service lost his clearance and his job. He had painful appearances before the McCarthy committee (marked by more fury than facts) and other panels. He appealed to the courts. He was reinstated to State Department, but assigned to do-nothing jobs, none of which required a high clearance. The media rehabilitated him. And much of his 1940s reporting on the balance of power proved to be prescient.

Service gave perhaps the best explanation for his conduct during questioning by State Department security officer Otto Otepka. He admitted he had been used by the communists and their sympathizers. "It is not a pleasant thing to say but, yes, I was certainly being used. I don't like the impression that I am a complete dope. ... Inevitably I am afraid it's the conclusion that is to be drawn."

Anthropological Intelligence: The Deployment and Neglect of American
Anthropology in the Second World War
Duke University Press
By David Price

By the time the United States officially entered World War II, more than half of American anthropologists were using their professional knowledge and skills to advance the war effort. The range of their war-related work was extraordinary. They helped gather military intelligence, pinpointed possible social weaknesses in enemy nations, and contributed to the army’s regional Pocket Guide booklets. They worked for dozens of government agencies, including the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and the Office of War Information. At a moment when social scientists are once again being asked to assist in military and intelligence work, David H. Price examines anthropologists’ little-known contributions to the Second World War.

Anthropological Intelligence is based on interviews with anthropologists as well as extensive archival research involving many Freedom of Information Act requests. Price looks at the role played by the two primary U.S. anthropological organizations, the American Anthropological Association and the Society for Applied Anthropology (which was formed in 1941), in facilitating the application of anthropological methods to the problems of war. He chronicles specific projects undertaken on behalf of government agencies, including an analysis of the social effects of postwar migration, the design and implementation of OSS counterinsurgency campaigns, and the study of Japanese social structures to help tailor American propaganda efforts. Price discusses anthropologists’ work in internment camps, their collection of intelligence in Central and South America for the FBI’s Special Intelligence Service, and their help forming foreign language programs to assist soldiers and intelligence agents. Evaluating the ethical implications of anthropological contributions to World War II, Price suggests that by the time the Cold War began, the profession had set a dangerous precedent regarding what it would be willing to do on behalf of the U.S. government.

Ian Fleming's Secret War
Pen and Sword Books
By Craig Cabell

While his extravagant and glamorous lifestyle is well known, little has been published concerning Ian Fleming's contribution during the Second World War. In the very early days of the War, Fleming was earmarked by the Director of Naval Intelligence as his 'right hand man'. From the outset he was in the centre of events, meeting with key political and military figures as well as those of exceptional intelligence, experience and courage. All this was to give him invaluable background when he came to write the Bond novels. The author has uncovered through official documentation, private papers and contacts the depth of Fleming's work in Naval Intelligence. Fascinating insights of those he worked with and details of covert trips to Europe and North Africa emerge. Fleming was closely associated with 30 Assault Unit, a crack team of Commandos who took the fight to the enemy. The book reveals both the history of 30 AU and Fleming's role.

James Jesus Angleton, The CIA, & The Craft Of Counterintelligence
By Michael Holzman
University of Massachusetts Press, 2008
Reviewed by Dan Pinck

Mr. Holzman’s biography is a literary and historical adventure about the career of James Jesus Angleton, the difficult head of the CIA’s counterintelligence staff from 1954 to 1974. His book encompasses Mr. Angleton’s entire professional life that began with World War II service in the Office of Strategic Services followed by his contentious and prominent role in the cold war against Russia in which some of his activities were of undoubted value and some were not. His career ended when he was fired by a director of the CIA.

A blanket of contumely covered much of his work. Yet his work was supported most of the time by six successive Directors of the CIA, none of whom was ever blamed (or accepted the blame) for Angleton’s alleged misdeeds A full accounting of what Angleton did, good and bad, remains a secret to the public and, oddly enough, to the CIA’s top management and staff over the years.

What kind of a person was Mr. Angleton? What was his background? What were some of the important influences that fed his psyche and caused him to suspect that so many of his fellow workers at the CIA, including high officials, could be fellow travelers and/or traitors? One of the key questions is why so many CIA directors supported him and his work. It is unlikely that without the declassification of a mountain of many privileged documents, especially a lengthy, internal study by a staff member who worked for Angleton before Angleton was dismissed by CIA Director William Colby. I can think of no other high CIA officer whose reputation was so extreme – good and bad – and who was involved in wrecking the careers of patriotic and effective CIA staff members.
Peter Karlow, who was no farther left than a soup spoon, to paraphrase James Thurber, was among them. Karlow, whom I knew, lost a leg on an OSS mission off the coast of Italy when his PT boat triggered a mine.

Karlow was fired in 1962. (Twenty-five years later, the CIA apologized and Karlow received a medal and slightly less than $500,000.00.) In the intervening years, he was a vice president of Monsanto. David Wise, who has written and co-written many books on intelligence and espionage, including Molehunt: The Secret Search for Traitors that Shattered the CIA, which Holzman cites in his index, notes that Angleton did not act alone in pursuing Peter Karlow. Rather, two other counterespionage groups in the CIA as well as the FBI helped to shatter Karlow’s career and reputation. Likewise, Holzman extends his tapestry in trying to present a fair and accurate picture of Angleton while simultaneously noting his assaults on civil liberties in general and on the CIA’s conduct in particular. A former counterintelligence case officer told Wise that “much of the trouble we get into is due to stupidity rather than evil design, sabotage, or treason. Normally it’s stupidity.”

It’s not off the mark to suggest that Angleton was warped throughout his professional career, beginning in the OSS. I know four persons who had close contact with Angleton in the OSS and the CIA. They thought he was off-the-wall, a cipher. Simply, they never understood what he was saying – and often what he was doing as well as his mismanagement of his operations. This relates to Thomas Powers’ decoding of Angleton. In a recent conversation with me, he said that Angleton created a “thicket of implications but never an accounting of connected, alleged facts. You seldom knew what his facts were. He had an impenetrable intellectual style.” (Mr. Powers, in his books and reviews, illuminates an impressive sweep of our intelligence history. His Intelligence Wars: American Secret History from Hitler to Al-Qaeda (New York Review Books) is a must-read book.)

Before the table of postmortems on Angleton is set in stone, so much of the evidence is classified that we may never know the complete story. Internal CIA records will probably remain internal for many decades, and some operational files will be lost forever. Even so, many CIA historians have written publicly-available articles about Angleton.

For me, it’s easy to say that his problems had problems. But I’ll dilute that by observing that Mr. Angleton was a strange guy, and it’s difficult to crack his code. He is both praised with enthusiasm and damned with venom. He covers all bases.

You have to go back to Nathan Hale to find such a strong difference of opinion. Hale, often hailed as the first American spy, was a member of the Yale class of 1773. Angleton was a member of the Yale class of 1941.

Some of the pro and con books about James Jesus Angleton that have been written over the years begin and end with undocumented pronouncements and assumptions. In some of them, the research and analysis are mostly static and repetitive and sometimes shrill. There’s little that you’d call intellectual and deep veined. They often contain diluted, fast-food journalism or research and small portions of what may be verifiable facts. Of course, it would greatly help us in our how-do-know-we- know facts. You can read my soft assumptions in many different ways: (1) the evidence, if revealed, would be political dynamite, internally and externally, even at this late date you can read in several books, for example, that there are two statues to honor Mr. Angleton in Israel; no other non-native, intelligence officer is recognized in this manner in the State Israel; (2) the evidence would reveal overwhelming malfeasance or ineptitude by one or more Directors of the Central Intelligence; (3) it’s conceivable that hard evidence leads to one or more Presidents, overriding all traces of deniability; (4) as a producer and keeper of secrets, the CIA is performing its duty to reveal nothing; (5) the facts and reading of them defy logic in the mind of anyone who reads Angleton; he seems to have played the role of Angleton in Wonderland; and you’d have to put Walter Mitty on his tail to uncover what he covered up, if anything; (6) all of the vital data, including the stuff that Angleton wrote and hid in a safe from even his staff, few, if any of them, knew the combination to it, was either lost or the safe was blown up and the remains of it were rendered to a low level in Mt. Etna’s volcano.

It’s my feeling that Mr. Holzman’s book can be a valuable touchstone in future attempts to unravel Mr. Angleton, the culture of the CIA’s counterintelligence operations, and to answer these questions: was Mr. Angleton an American asset or an American liability? Did Mr. Angleton help to strengthen American efforts during the Cold War, as his partisans claim, or did he make us weaker? Precisely, what did Mr. Angleton do? And, for gosh sakes, what’s the evidence? I’m convinced we can only know the answers when we have the facts. We should not rely on the guild of Old School, Angleton partisans. (But, for all we truly know, they may be right.)

It’s pertinent to observe now that nobody is supposed to know what goes on in an intelligence agency. Isn’t that the point of an intelligence service? If we’re talking about the inside workings of the CIA, it’s a separate conversation. We don’t really know what the CIA knows. We can only wonder if Angleton is the CIA’s last secret.

Holzman brings a rare critical inventiveness and a welcome literary skill to his task. Recognize: Mr. Holzman projects no careless animus against Mr. Angleton. Mr. Holzman’s book is not one-sided. He is fair-minded; he has strong opinions; and the scope and plan of his research methodology is worthy of an accomplished historian trying to uncover the mysteries embedded in any group conducting risky, hidden activities.

Mr. Holzman’s book begins with a study of Mr. Angleton’s undergraduate education in Yale’s English Department, his immersion in New Criticism and poetry; his study with Norman Holmes Pearson, a leading spook and one of more than fifty Yale faculty and alumni who served in the OSS. He was the head of X-2, the OSS counterintelligence branch in London. Angleton served under him in London. Pearson was Angleton’s principal mentor at Yale and in the OSS. You read about their relationship in Robin Wink’s history, Cloak and Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939-1961.

Since Mr. Holzman’s book begins its journey as a literary and scholarly exploration of Mr. Angleton’s beginnings as a literary apprentice of intelligence at Yale, I feel compelled to begin this review with my own relationship to some of the men and women scholars, poets and artists who affected Angleton and whom I knew and spent so much of my early years studying. So here’s a brief explanation of my special interest in Mr. Holzman’s fine book. Let me begin on this tack:

During my youth, which lasted forty years or so, I devoured books; I had them for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Later, in meandering middle age, I began dissecting books, reading again and again books that I’d read when younger, looking for all sorts of casual and irrelevant clues to explain their uniqueness and my enjoyment of them. Still later, I skirted the environs of knowledge in reading books about books with the bibliomainiac rigor that allows a desultory scholar to read with a degree of penetrative sympathy, as the English critic Holbrook Jackson might have said (and, indeed, did say), and thereby discover byways leading to further research.

How do I read a new book? First, I read the first two or three paragraphs; next, if I like the cut of the writer’s jib, I open the book in ts middle and read a few pages, more if I’m impressed with what’s happening. Then I play pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey with different sections of the book. If I like what I’ve read, I look at the index and the acknowledgement section; and I skim the bibliography. I set out on this route when I first opened Mr. Holzman’s book on Mr. Angleton. As I scoured the index, his book took a tack that more than piqued my interest.

What do the following poets, scholars, writers and others, including a famous economist, an artist and a sculptor have in common with Mr. Angleton? Hugh Winston Auden, Vanessa Bell, Julian Bell, Rupert Brooke, Ezra Pound, Edward Albee, Bryher, Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, E. E. Cummings, Isak Dinesen, T. S. Eliot, Richard Eberhart, Ford Madox Ford, Graham Greene, H. D. (Hilda Doolittle Aldington), Christopher Isherwood, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Koestler, Lincoln Kirstein, Fernand Leger, John Lehmann, Rosamond Lehmann, Wyndham Lewis, Archibald MacLeish, John Maynard Keynes, Mary McCarthy, Thomas Merton, Henry Moore, Malcolm Muggeridge, Howard Nemerov, Harold Nicolson, F. S. C. Northrop, George Orwell, Norman Holmes Pearson, I. A. Richards, Bertrand Russell, Sappho, John Paul Sartre, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Georg Simmel, Stephen Spender, Gertrude Stein, John Steinbeck, Lytton Strachey, Jonathan Swift, Rebecca West, E. Reed Whittemore, William Carlos Williams, Yvor Winters, William Wimsatt, and William Butler Yeats.

If you have more than a cursory exposure to Twentieth Century British and American literature, you may assume that some of them influenced the cultural and professional life of James Angleton, and you may be right. If you are prepared to follow Mr. Holzman’s intelligent interpretation of much of Angleton’s intelligence career, you will have an exciting and provocative adventure, no mistake. Occasionally you’ll talk back to this book. Angleton’s connection to some of poets and scholars comes from the fact that co-founded, as an undergraduate, a literary magazine at Yale, Furioso. His mentor, Norman Holmes Pearson, guided him to poets and scholars who submitted their work for publication. Angleton retained a friendly relationship with some of them for many years.

A book critic is honor-bound to know his or her own limitations. I have many and I believe I’m smart enough to know that. In fact, when I finished reading Mr. Holzman’s book, I acknowledged, to myself, that a little learning can be a dangerous handicap. My little learning consists of having known or met a number of these poets and writers, including Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams; of having read the majority of them, including Ludwig Wittgenstein; and I spent six or seven years writing a critical biography of Ezra Pound, of which only a few parts were published. (Full Disclosure: I uncovered in the British Museum more than thirty nom de plumes of Pound. No matter.)

I’m more than slightly familiar with a few faculty members at Yale, including Norman Holmes Pearson, who guided Angleton to many of these poets and who was his first mentor in the study and practice of counterintelligence in London. Pearson was the head of the Office of Strategic Service’s counterintelligence branch in London during the Second World War. Their offices were in a British intelligence building on Ryder Street.

The notorious British traitor, Kim Philby, had an office in the same building. Philby was recruited by the Russians when he was a student at Cambridge University. A squad of Cambridge undergraduates was recruited to spy on their mother country and its allies, including the United States.

As far as open history allows, Mr. Angleton’s brain was penetrated by a KGB defector, Major Anatoliy Golitsyn. Even J. Edgar Hoover thought Golitsyn was a fraud; but Angleton thought the Russian was the real deal. And when Philby was sent to Washington, he succeeded in relaying a lot of secret, information to the KGB, some of which he may have learned from Angleton who, from most accounts, considered Philby an upstanding friend. Or did he? Did Angleton play him?

If you can deceive your friends, you can deceive anybody. By many accounts, Angleton camouflaged his personality and his actions with many persons and in many endeavors, as did Philby. From many accounts, Angleton was distraught after Philby was exposed while on a traitor’s assignment in Washington.

Angleton accepted Philby as a good buddy and a loyal confederate during the Cold War. You might say that he placed more trust in Philby than he did in many colleagues and superiors at the CIA. Holzman reports that Philby became “Angleton’s nightmare.”

I’ll continue my ramble for a bit. As I said, I think I know my limitations as a book critic. Sometimes, I set my compass by reading what a few learned critics have written about this craft. “A book reviews the reviewer as much as the reviewer reviews the book,” says Bruce Mazlish, an emeritus professor of history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and he adds, “A really original contribution, almost by definition, promises to go beyond the reviewer’s initial competence and constitutes a learning experience for him or her.” So be it. This is where I sit. I’m on an excursion to write a review-essay of a book that I like a lot. But I ask myself: whose review of Mr. Holzman’s book could best capture the mystery of his quest and serve him with the kind of literary perceptions that he deserves? Surely not a middling intelligence groupie with a carapace of biases. (Full disclosure: that may be me.)

Mr. Holzman begins his biography of Mr. Angleton with an analysis of what is known as the New Criticism and its development at Yale in the 1930s and 1940s. A potent band of literature specialists became immersed in the “close reading” of the text whether it be poetry, history, novels or literary criticism. Some specialists overdosed on footnotes that tended to be more important and more interesting than the poem or narrative on which they concentrated. Their analyses, some claimed, revealed a new way of being a critic – separating the writer’s background almost totally from his written work With a focus solely on textual criticism and the structure of a writer’s work, they uncovered a roadmap of a writer’s psyche and also revealed a few hints at what the writer didn’t say and perhaps more importantly what he’s hiding.

Add to this potion the study of William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity; I. A. Richard’s works, T. S. Eliot’s criticism, and Cleanth Brooks literary acumen, and you might accept their conviction that an immersion in New Criticism in an undergraduate classroom at Yale could serve budding counterintelligence officers.

I confess my inability to relate with precision the full relationship between the New Criticism as it was fed to undergraduates at Yale and the facility to adapt this knowledge to a counterintelligence career. To be certain, you can’t avoid becoming more intelligent under the guidance of exceptional teachers who have the ability to play the keys of textual criticism. Close reading is a skill and an art. If you have had a great teacher -- say, like Albert Guerard, who may have had an OSS affiliation – your intellectual quotient can increase in any field, including intelligence and counterintelligence. And it can increase remarkably if you are born smart.

Two roads diverge here; one leads to Angleton’s relationships with two Russian defectors, Anatoliy Golitsyn and Yuri Ivanovich Nosenko. Golitsyn was a KGB agent whose goal was to dissemble erroneous information about Russian agents in the CIA – all of which was a grand lie. Nosenko was an honest defector who was considered a bogus defector and who was treated like a prisoner at Abu Ghraib. I choose to follow a different road, a road that emphasizes Mr. Holzman’s literary explications. According to Holzman:

“Robin Winks first called attention to Angleton as a figure at the junction or intersection of the New Criticism and counterintelligence and was followed in this by William H. Epstein, who argued that the New Criticism was the source of “those modes of analysis that came to associated with anti-communist counter-intelligence.” Specifically, Epstein claimed, Angleton’s approach to counter-intelligence can be characterized, almost in his own language, as the ‘the practical criticism of ambiguity’ a phrase derived from the titles of two of the most influential texts of formalist criticism, Richards’ “Practical Criticism” and Empson’s “Seven Types of Ambiguity.” This study follows the lead of Winks and Epstein and seekss to establish the study of secret intelligence as a realm of thehistory of ideas, crossing what Pierre Bourdieu called the ”most disputed frontier of all,” that which “separates the field of cultural production and the field of power.”

When picking up a new book about the CIA, one finds oneself asking: Who is the ventriloquist? Which of the interviewees has used the opportunity to “play” the interviewer? Thus it has been with some ambivalence that I have imposed upon the generosity of former CIA officers who have been willing to talk, write or communicate via e-mail about James Angleton. None have spoken on condition of anonymity.”

If you consider yourself an amateur, as I am, you might consider new criticism as basically a matter of semantics. No matter where you start, you end on first base. If you swing at close reading, you reach the same conclusion at first base. I read a number of books from the sections of new criticism, some them keenly intelligent, and I end with semantics. What all of this means to me is that if you’re fortunate enough to have a first rate education and good teachers, you may be able to dissect any novel and a lot of poetry.

There’s more to it than having a label assigned to your study of literary criticism. You can read John Crowe Ransom’s The New Criticism, I. A. Richards Principles of Literary Criticism, William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity, and T. S. Eliot’s critical essays – and you might learn something from each of them. No labels are necessary. (Come to think of it, if I were James Jesus Angleton, I would make a note of the fact that Richards, Empson, and Michael Holzman all studied and taught in China at points in their careers. I would hide my note and deduce that each writer had something mysterious and shady in their careers. And that this warranted a close counterintelligence reading and investigation.)

There’s got to be more to its connection to a career in intelligence than a course or two in Yale’s English Department.

Mr. Holzman writes:

“For example, there was the school of the New Criticism at Yale, beginning in the 1930s. Its catch phrases – moral center, unity, close reading, ambiguity—are part of the intellectual life in this country, and through a certain cousinship of ideas (ideology) that of Britain. Given the “moral” of the New Criticism, we might be able to test the theory that education can be intellectually formative, in a strong sense, by looking at the career of someone who was educated in the ways of New Criticism – and who did not pursue a career in English departments, but undertook some other line of work, one that had direct effects on the world.”

“Having moved from the Jesuits (Angleton graduated from a Catholic high school) to the New Critics as the generators of our critical influences, where, then, should we look for public effects? The secret world of the Central Intelligence Agency seems an appropriate choice. The world was strongly tied to a relatively small number of educational institutions, Yale being one of the most important.”

This reminds me of the head of the recruiting officer at the CIA in the early years who recruited only Phi Beta Kappa graduates of Yale, Harvard and Princeton. I attended several parties for him at Harvard on his scouting tours. Angleton was not a Phi Beta Kappa, but he was favorite of Norman Holmes Pearson and James Murphy, the head of OSS’s X-2 (counterintelligence). Pearson recommended Angleton to Murphy. With Angleton’s OSS record behind him, Allen Dulles accepted his request to join the CIA several years after the end of World War II. (I recall that Pearson did not teach Angleton in a any course; and that, when Angleton’s first application to Harvard’s Law School was rejected, Angleton asked Pearson to write him a letter of recommendation. Pearson did this and, naturally, he was accepted. Angleton left before graduating.)

Under the influence of close reading, I searched the internet for the few examples of Mr. Angleton’s writings in the so-called public domain. In June 1976, he and Charles J. V. Murphy co-authored an article On the Separation of Church and State in a special report in American Cause, published by the American Security Council, in Washington, D.C. After reading 25 pages on the Internet, I gave up. It’s probably just as well, since it’s unlikely I could not identify what he wrote and what Mr. Murphy wrote.

I’ve read some of his poetry in Furioso, the magazine he co-founded at Yale. Close reading of his poetry informed me it was bilge and not worth reading. And I’ve seen a line of his at the CIA. Case closed for my applying seven or more types of ambiguity to him. I did find photographs of him fly-fishing, and I learned he had been an infrequent golfing partner of James McLaughlin, the founder of New Directions, the publisher of some of the poets whom he knew. Had Angleton not hidden in intelligence, he might have become a publisher of poetry or a deputy editor at New Directions.

Angleton’s record, as we know it, is jumbled, confusing, complex and contradictory. I believe that Mr. Holzman could not have chosen a person in the intelligence game in our generation whose career and reputation are more unfathomable than Mr. Angleton’s. Angleton is not in Mr. Holzman’s pantheon of noble Americans. Mr. Angleton’s partisans will complain. That’s to be expected; and it’s all right. Maybe they will write their own books, based on information that’s new to us. I hope they do. Even a jackdaw could be enlightening.

Mr. Holzman weaves a tapestry of Angleton’s career that invites a continuing skein of guesses about his entire academic career at Yale and Harvard and its effect on his intelligence career. It’s possible that Angleton was born in left field and that he found a perfect environment in counterintelligence. I certainly don’t know the answer.

You may often want to talk back to his book. And I believe that’s a good thing. The historian Walter Schorske wrote in one of his books that every person ought to become his own historian.

In my opinion, few persons have more than grains of precise knowledge about what he did and what made him tick. My guess is that it would take a team of ingenious and learned investigators with unlimited access to classified and declassified information and with unlimited funds to write a casebook history of Angleton. Maybe it’s best to include philologists and lexicographers and to build a Scriptorum, not dissimilar from the structure in which James Murray and his colleagues produced over many decades The Oxford English Dictionary. Today, we have it in twenty volumes and in a small-type, two-volume Shorter Oxford English Dictionary which comes with a magnifying glass. If you want to have some fun, read K. M. Elisabeth Murray’s Caught in the Web of Words: James Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary and Simon Winchester’s The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary.

“American counterintelligence officers in World War II were drafted into that war from positions as critics of English to examine the assumptions hidden in words and phrases, and to grasp the whole structure of a poem or play, not just the the superficial plot or statement. So the multiple meanings, the hidden assumptions and the larger pattern of a CIA case were grist for their mill. I do not require my young CIA officers to be able to discuss the complexities of a Shakespeare play, but if I catch them studying Brook’s and Warren’s “Understanding Poetry”, I do not instantly send them off to the firing range. I tell them to go and read Cleanth Brooks on “the Language of Paradox,” because counterintelligence is the act of paradox.”

At the end of this paragraph from Holzman’s book, there’s a reference to a citation in the Index: William R. Johnson, Thwarting Enemies at Home and Abroad. The paragraph is not in quotes. My guess is that the entire paragraph relates to Johnson’s observation. (Johnson was a staff member in Angleton’s counterintelligence branch.)

My feeling is that a course in Shakespeare ought to be required in the CIA’s curriculum for new and veteran officers and staff members in many branches. It’s easy to discount the conversational gambit of close reading and ambiguity; but it’s not easy to deflate the contention that a well-educated person – with a liberal education that includes the study of William Shakespeare – is a highly desirable candidate for an important intelligence position, especially in counterintelligence. This is not a pseudo-educational exercise. Far from it.

A person, whose name I choose not to reveal and who is the head of an important division at the CIA, is a Shakespeare scholar. Not a Kittredge, this person ran spies in the Soviet Union, Poland, Japan and Latin America. He states that literature was an important starting point in his conversations with potential recruits among foreign nationals.

This is Mr. Holzman’s final observation in the final paragraph of his book:

Angleton was educated by men paid to educate men of his class to believe – and to behave as if by second nature – that protecting men of that class was identical with patriotism, that those ends justified any means, until the unlimited nature of those means became the end for which they worked. Those beliefs and that behavior came close to destroying the republic. They may yet.”

Michael Holzman may be right. We manage to escape calamities by the skin of our teeth, and I hope we always will. At any rate, neither Angleton nor any of the Directors of the Central Intelligence Agency – or any of the leaders of the sixteen or so other Federal intelligence organizations – can be wholly blamed for hapless activities.

It’s time we all realized that the President is the CEO of all of the intelligence services that are financed by our Government. More than a few of our Presidents use the CIA is a device to skirt Congress and American citizens and to hide, as best they can and for as long as they can, some of their foreign and domestic initiatives that imperil our nation.

For good or bad, James Jesus Angleton did not set policy. Or did he?

Dan Pinck served in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) behind enemy lines in China.  His memoir, Journey to Peking: A Secret Agent in Wartime China (Naval Institute Press) was nominated as a book of the year in the memoir category by the Independent Publishers Association in 2004.  

Many of his articles, essays, profiles and reviews have appeared in such leading magazines and newspapers as The New York Times, Financial Times, The New Republic, Preservation, Foreign Intelligence Literary Scene, The Intelligencer, The Reporter, The Saturday Review, and The Boston Globe.

Dan Pinck was a longtime contributor to Encounter and The American Scholar. In the late 1940s, he worked as a legman for A. J. Liebling at The New Yorker.

The Hornet's Sting: The untold story of Britain's Second World War Spy Thomas Sneum
Little Brown
By Mark Ryan

The exploits of Tommy Sneum, the Danish-born spy who died in 2007, made him a legend in espionage circles. But until now, the full extraordinary story of Sneum’s action-packed career as a British-run spy has never been told.

Based on hundreds of hours of interviews with Sneum, Mark Ryan describes how Tommy made an incredible escape from Denmark in a battered old Hornet Moth aircraft - which he had to refuel in mid-air by climbing out on the wing. Later, he escaped from Denmark again - by walking across a treacherous frozen sea on which two of his companions died.

Tommy brought over precious intelligence about the Nazi radar installations in Denmark and their atom bomb - his reward was to be imprisoned in Brixton as a suspected double agent and threatened with execution.

He cheated the hangman - but it is only with the publication of this enthralling book that Sneum can be celebrated as, in the words of Professor R.V. Jones, Churchill’s chief of scientific intelligence, ‘one of the true heroes of World War II.

The Cloak and Dagger Cook: A CIA Memoir
By Kay Shaw Nelson
Pelican Publishing
368 pages, $24.95

Upon graduating from college in 1948, Kay Shaw Nelson, a bright young woman with a yen for international travel, joined the newly founded Central Intelligence Agency. Within months, she received her security clearance, learned the difficulties associated with the life of a spy, fell in love, and set about traveling the world on assignment with her husband. At times under the cover of a cookbook writer, Nelson sailed from one exotic locale to another, each more incredible than the last. From Washington to Turkey and Cyprus, to Syria, Libya, France, Greece, and the Netherlands, among many other ports, the Nelsons traversed the globe as Kay discovered her passion for food, developed her journalistic abilities, and honed her exceptional palate.

With humor and panache, Nelson tells of her exploits gleaning intelligence while gathering recipes and sampling the local cuisine. Kebabs in Turkey, kimchi in Korea, spargel in Germany, eels in Spain, and Rumbledethumps in Scotland were among the delightful gastronomic surprises she encountered. Dozens of unusual recipes with memorable histories pepper this irresistible memoir of fascinating events, extraordinary corners of the globe, and clandestine culinary pursuits.

Defend the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5
By Christopher Andrew
1068 pages, $40

An unprecedented publishing event: to mark the centenary of its foundation, the British Security Service, MI5, has for the first time opened its archives to an independent historian. The book reveals the precise role of the Security Service in twentieth-century British history, from its foundation by Captain Kell of the British Army in October 1909, through two world wars, up to and including its present roles in counterespionage and counterterrorism. The book describes how MI5 has been managed, what its relationship has been with government, where it has triumphed, and where it has failed. In all of this no restriction has been placed on the judgments made by the author.

Defend the Realm also reveals the identities of previously unknown enemies of the United Kingdom whose activities have been uncovered by the Service, adds significantly to our knowledge of many celebrated events and notorious individuals, and definitively lays to rest a number of persistent myths. Above all, it shows the place of this previously extremely secretive organization within the United Kingdom. Few books could make such an immediate and extraordinary increase to our understanding of British history over the past century.

Beyond Repair: The Decline and Fall of the CIA
By Charles Faddis

“Faddis, a career CIA operations officer, pulls no punches in this provocative critique of the iconic and dysfunctional spy agency. . . . In a world where threats are multiplying and becoming more complex, [his] bleak assessment of the CIA should be required reading.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“If you want to know what’s wrong with today’s CIA—and how to fix it— this book is the place to start. Sam Faddis . . . describes the timidity of station chiefs terrified of getting blamed for mistakes, the obduracy of ambassadors who don’t want flaps, the ‘we’re all winners here’ training rules better suited for a kindergarten playground than intelligence work, the reluctance to hire and promote people who understand leadership. You read Beyond Repair and you realize: No wonder the CIA is screwed up! Faddis proposes a bold cure: Remake the CIA in the image of the Wor ld War II spy service, the OSS—smaller, flatter, tougher, smarter, meaner. If people would read this book and understand its message, it could save lives.”
—David Ignatius, Washington Post columnist and author of Body of Lies

“Drawing on his unique experience as a CIA operations officer, Charles Faddis makes a compelling case in Beyond Repair that the CIA must return to its Office of Strategic Services (OSS) roots to provide the United States with the intelligence it needs. Faddis has a deep appreciation for the OSS and great admiration for its legendary leader, General William J. Donovan, who frequently told OSS personnel that they could not succeed without taking chances. Faddis has taken such chances himself. General Donovan could have written this book. I know he would have read it and agreed wholeheartedly with its conclusion.”
—Charles Pinck, President of The OSS Society

Charles Faddis, co-author of Operation Hotel California, offers gritty, hair-raising stories about the CIA, which has devolved into a giant bureaucracy of ass-coverers and careerists – not the kind of people you want in charge of preventing another 9/11. He discusses the birth of the CIA (then called the OSS) after an earlier Day of Infamy (12/7) under “Wild Bill” Donovan, the 20th-century American father of spy-craft, and how it works from the inside out, and why things have gone awry. In the face of threats that are multiplying and becoming increasingly complex, he tells why we need an effective CIA and how to go about building one.

World War II: Saving the Reality (A Collector's Vault)
By Kenneth Rendell
Whitman Publishing
144 pages, $49.95
Reviewed by Dan Pinck

Ken Rendell’s Museum of World War II is a wondrous place.

An official at the Imperial War Museum described it as “a fully staffed private collection containing the most comprehensive display of original World War II artifacts on exhibit anywhere in the world.”

Mr. Rendell’s private museum in Natick, Massachusett has been open for the past forty-one years This exclusivity stemmed from Mr. Rendell’s determination to provide every guest with an exemplary and unique environment in the museum. For example, when have you been in an important museum or art gallery when you’ve not been tailed by uniform guards? Where you’re commanded by signs and guards not to touch anything large or small? In short, in an environment in which each visitor is not judged as a potential thief.

To extend this, when did you last visit a zoo in which guards were not tracking you and you wondered whether they were protecting you from once-wild animals or the animals from you?  When you walk through the Museum of World War II, you might feel as though you’re walking through a friend’s house – a friend who trusts you absolutely and who encourages you to touch anything you want to, with the exception of original documents, manuscripts, handwritten notes by world leaders and very small espionage equipment, including an OSS stinger, a camera in a matchbox, and a Dunhill pipe that contains a bullet.
 
Mr. Rendell writes in his book: “The goal [of the museum] is to surround the visitor with all the elements a person in World War II in that particular area would have seen, read, touched, smelled, experienced.”  Further, he writes: “The visitor’s mind is the key to the interactive experience in visiting the museum.”  There are seventeen areas in the museum, some of which are War in the Pacific, Rise of Nazism, Occupied Europe, Resistance, the Battle of Britain, the Holocaust, and the Invasion of Europe.
 
I can’t imagine anyone visiting the museum, from those with a profound, personal experience in World War II  to young students who are beginning to study history who would not leave the museum without either a newfound sense of that war or the many roles and contributions that the United States and its Allies played in achieving victory as well as the unspeakable savageries of the Japanese and the Germans.
 
“What no museum can convey,” writes Mr. Rendell, “is the anxiety of danger people faced – the knowledge that a certain percentage of the people around you wouldn’t be alive the next day. And the reality that you might be gone as well.”
 
How does the museum affect its visitors? “The most common comment we receive from visitors is that they are overwhelmed, emotionally exhausted,” Mr. Rendell writes. “When I hear that I know I have succeeded – World War was overwhelming and exhausting.”                                                                                                              
 
In a national broadcast with a group of World War II historians about his museum, Mr. Rendell said, “What the museum is all about is trying to give as much a sense as possible of what it was like to be there. What life was like, the everyday objects of life. It’s not about guns; it’s not a museum about armor. It’s a museum about the totality of the World War II experience and living through it.”
 
I suspect that you are curious, as I surely am, about the genesis of the museum and the career of its founder and director, and why the museum succeeds in creating a stature that’s in a league of its own.
 
Mr. Rendell has become one of the rarest rare book dealers, and autograph and manuscript dealers in the United States. He is a scholar and has written and co-written more than fifteen books.  Some experts among rare book dealers and collectors consider him one of the professional descendants of  Dr. A. S. W. Rosenbach, the great autograph and rare book dealer in the early twentieth century. A book Rendell wrote more than forty years focusing on Churchill and other British World War II leaders deepened his interest in starting a museum devoted to World War II.
 
Each time I visit his museum, I’m excited by looking at Hitler’s eyeglasses and a section of the sofa that he and Eva Braun committed suicide on; the complete plans for the invasion of Normandy; a draft of the 1938 Munich Agreement, with Hitler’s handwritten changes; Japanese war posters; silicon likenesses of the period’s “Straighten your necktie, son.” And the letters and battle orders of well-known generals. More than 6, 000 different items are displayed. No wonder that a former curator at Britain’s Imperial War Museum, Phil Reed, said that the museum “simply has no equal.”
 
What is most exciting to me about World War II: Saving the Reality are the jackdaws that bring a heightened degree of authentic history.  (Jackdaws are facsimiles of primary source documents.)
 
World War II: Saving the Reality is a notable book in every way. It ought to be in the library of every person who wants a prime fix on that war. It consists of a magnificent scope and plan of 144 pages of well-written text and more than a hundred photographs in color of items on display, from a Sherman tank to the instrument panel of a B-17, from a British Type A, Mark III suitcase radio to a Japanese postcard celebrating the attack on Pearl Harbor.
 
Ken Rendell has produced a book as magnificent and important as his museum.

The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History
By Robert Edsel
Center Street, 496 Pages

WWII was the most destructive war in history and caused the greatest dislocation of cultural artifacts. Hundreds of thousands of items remain missing. The main burden fell to a few hundred men and women, curators and archivists, artists and art historians from 13 nations. Their task was to save and preserve what they could of Europe's great art, and they were called the Monuments Men. Edsel has presented their achievements in documentaries and photographs. He and Witter (coauthor of the bestselling Dewey) are no less successful here. Focusing on the organization's role in northwest Europe, they describe the Monuments Men from their initial mission to limit combat damage to structures and artifacts to their changed focus of locating missing items. Most had been stolen by the Nazis. In southern Germany alone, over a thousand caches emerged, containing everything from church bells to insect collections. The story is both engaging and inspiring. In the midst of a total war, armies systematically sought to mitigate cultural loss.

A Spy's Diary of World War II: Inside the OSS With an American Agent in Europe
By Wayne Nelson
McFarland and Company
204 pages, $35

Here are the wartime diaries of Wayne Nelson, an OSS officer who served in North Africa and Europe during World War II. A prewar colleague of Allan Dulles, Nelson joined an infant OSS after failing to join the Navy because of a vision disability, and he went on to serve in North Africa, Sicily, Sardinia, Italy, Corsica, and mainland France. Erudite and a skilled writer, Nelson captured intriguing observations about some of the most important spy operations of the war, and his diaries offer a thrilling, readable and informative glimpse into the life of a spy during World War II.

The late Wayne Nelson, a former actor and playwright, earned a Bronze Star and France's La Croix de Guerre for his service with the OSS during World War II. He also served the CIA in Washington, Turkey, Greece, South Korea and West Germany.

TREACHERY

By Chapman Pincher
Random House
679 pages. $36, illus.
Reviewed by Joseph C. Goulden

Given that Chapman Pincher was born in 1914, longevity alone makes him the dean of British non-fiction spy writers. But as those of us of a certain age realize, senior status by itself does not equate with infallibility. As I plowed through Mr. Pincher’s massive work, the thought came through my mind time and again, “This man is flogging a well-beaten horse” – the contention that Sir Roger Hollis, the head of MI5, the British domestic security service from 1956 to1965, was a Soviet agent.

Mr. Pincher told essentially the same story in Their Trade Is Treachery, published in 1981. His primary source, then unnamed, was former MI5 officer Peter Wright, who in 1987 published his own controversial book on Hollis , Spycatcher, Hollis was hauled out of retirement to testify at one of several inquires about MI5 security. The conclusions were that the Soviets indeed had penetrated MI5, but that the charges against Hollis were not supported by the evidence.

Dissenters remain unconvinced, of course, both in Britain and the US. And indeed, Mr. Pincher lists no fewer than 52 “anomalies” in Hollis’ care er that point to his guilt. (“Anomalies” is spookspeak for suspicious inconsistencies or events.) Some are thin gruel – of the “ Hollis should have known” variety. Others are more disturbing : for instance, the fact that throughout Hollis’ career, MI5 “secured no Russian defectors of consequence, and there is evidence that some of those who wished to defect were afraid to do so because they believed the British service services to be penetrated.”

The great “British mole hunt” began in 1945, when Lt. Igor Gouzenko, a defected Red Army code clerk in Canada, said that MI5, the British internal security agency, had been penetrated by a Soviet agent who had unfettered access to sensitive files. Gouzenko’s leads on other Soviet agents, including two members of the Canadian parliament, proved on-target. But his lead about the MI5 mole was tantalizingly sketchy. A series of intelligence mishaps in succeeding years heightened concern about a Soviet penetration.

My problems with Mr. Pincher’s work are many. He does not burden readers with chapter notes, so one is expected to accept his text at face value. Adding notes, he writes, “would unnecessarily bulk” an already large book. Perhaps, but serious readers would like to see them. More glaring, he is most selective in the evidence he chooses to present. If you bother to read this book, seek out also Nigel West’s 1997 book Mole Hunt, which is by far the more balanced book. (Mr. West’s nominee for the Soviet mole was Graham Mitchell, Hollis’ deputy.)

To be sure, a series of governments obfuscated security failures in MI5, foremost being the failure to detect the Philby spy ring and prevent its principals from fleeing behind the Iron Curtain. In Britain – and elsewhere, to be sure – governments reflexively lie to protect themselves. In this instance, misguided secrecy soured the relationship between American and British intelligence for decades.

One can read Mr. Pincher’s evidence and conclude that Hollis was unqualified to be an intelligence officer, much less the head of a sensitive service. Indeed, Pincher describes him as “...a university dropout with no foreign languages, little field experience, an appalling counter-espionage record, a negative personality, mediocre qualities of leadership, doubtful health, and a mistress installed in his office...[nonetheless the man] in charge of the nation’s first line of defense against spies and saboteurs.” But a Soviet agent? An ineffectual spymaster, by many accounts, but treason remains unproven.

THE SECRET SENTRY

The Untold History of the National Security Agency
By Matthew M. Aid
Bloomsbury Press
Reviewed by Joseph C. Goulden

Unlike Mr. Chapman. Matthew Aid presents an impressive array of chapter notes in his “history” of the National Security Agency, some 97 pages, which are chiefly references to documents he obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. In his instances, my qualms concern (a) the historical value of the documents and (b) the interpretation  he chose to make of  them. 

The documents, in essence, are what NSA chose to reveal about itself, and from decades of writing about the intelligence community, I can attest that the alphabet-agencies are chary when it comes to the release of information.  On examination, much of what Mr. Aid cites are bureaucratic histories and thumbnail profiles of the persons who have run NSA over the years.

And even these canned histories have their flaws. Mr. Aid cites an internal history of the Gulf of Tonkin incident as “intelligence disaster of epic proportions.”  These murky encounters between two US destroyers and North Vietnamese patrol boats in August 1964 resulted in Congress giving President Johnson a blank check to use to wage war.

But  was this an  “intelligence failure?”  Such indeed was the conclusion of an NSA “historian.” Unfortunately, his study was so one-dimensional as to be worthless. To be sure, NSA listening stations scattered over the Pacific lagged in capturing and interpreting North Vietnamese radio transmissions. No matter. LBJ and his advisers had been itching for a pretext to gain Congressional support for an expanded war, and especially with the 1964 presidential election only weeks away. 

Years ago, in researching a book on Tonkin, I interviewed Capt. John Herrick, the  commander of a task force comprised of the Maddox and Turner Joy. In the hours following a chaotic night-time encounter, Herrick told me of his feverish efforts to compile a credible after-action report from confused accounts by crew members and sonar operators.  He repeatedly told superiors that he was uncertain as to whether destroyers had been attacked  and he suggested that they hold off any action until he could report. As the last of several such messages went off, Herrick looked into the sky and saw American planes bound for a bombing mission against Haiphong. 

But to blame NSA for Tonkin fits the story line of a book whose chapter titles include “The Inventory of Ignorance,” “Errors of Fact and Judgment,” and “The Wilderness of Pain.” A credible “inside story” of NSA remains to be written.

In his acknowledgment and source notes, Mr. Aid chose not to mention an episode in his  background that conceivably  influenced his attitude towards NSA.  In 1985, as an air force staff sergeant serving at an NSA listening post in Chicksands, England, Mr. Aid was found to have concealed top-secret/codeword documents in his  locker. He was court martialed for unauthorized possession of classified materials and impersonating an officer. He was jailed for more than a year.

Did this transgression sour his view of NSA? In an e-mail, he told me that the episode was “water under the bridge and did not in any way ‘color’ what I wrote about NSA.”  The documents related to his work as a Russian linguist that he had taken home for study. He said he claimed to be an officer to “impress” a girl.

A retired NSA officer who brought the court martial to my attention questioned whether Aid was in a position to be a credible critic of “intelligence failures.”  Mr. Aid would have been wise to cover his flanks by mentioning the incident in his book.

RED ORCHESTRA

By Anne Anderson
Random House, $27, 388 pages
Reviewed by Joseph C. Goulden

What could surpass the courage of individuals who resist a tyrannical regime, knowing that any miscue could lead to death by cruel torture? A handful of brave Germans receive their deserved credit in Anne Anderson's study of the resistance to the Nazi regime in wartime Germany. She focuses on the intellectuals, artists and bureaucrats — half of them women — who comprised the German offshoot of the Rote Kapelle, or Red Orchestra, the name German security gave a broad European network aligned with Soviet intelligence.

These persons faced a cruel dilemma: Should they suffer Hitler's barbarities in silence, as did the mass of the German populace, or oppose him by telling the outside world of his plans and abuses, and risk being branded as traitors to their country? Among the p rincipal figures in her ensemble were Germans who met while studying at the University of Wisconsin, Greta Kuckhoff and Arvid Harnack. With spouses and friends, they were at the core of a network that worked within the Nazi bureaucracy, gathering information to smuggle out of Germany and running an underground network to publicize atrocities.

Harnack's wife, Mildred, who had immigrated to Germany, became the only American woman to be executed by Hitler. Other dashing figures included Harro Schultze-Boysen, a communist from the early 1930s who relied on family connections to become a Luftwaffe intelligence officer. (His vivacious socialite wife, Libertas, was a favorite of Hermann Goering.) Schultze-Boysen was one of many sources who warned Moscow of the imminent German invasion in 1940, only to be ignored as circulating "British disinformation." He, too, was eventually executed.

One dislikes faulting such a pioneering study, and especially one featuring brave persons, most of whom indeed were not communists. But Ms. Anderson goes a bit far in divorcing the entire effort from Soviet intelligence. She apparently chose to ignore the most authoritative overview of the Red Orchestra, a post- war CIA study based on interviews with veterans of the organization. She does not refer to the study in her text nor cite it in her extensive bibliography, even though a commercial reprint is readily obtainable via online used book dealers.

As the CIA history notes, "The Rote Kapelle was not, in fact, a wartime creation, but derived directly from the Soviet prewar networks in Europe." It operated throughout Europe, not just in Germany. Rote Kapelle veterans interviewed by officers from the Army Counterintelligence Corps said the Soviets set up the organization as early as 1935 or 1936, drawing upon "specially trained and first-rate Red Army intelligence officers." Not until 1940 did Nazi Germany become its main target. All the while, it was "the principal component of the Soviet Military IS [Intelligence Service]."

Alas, much of the Red Orchestra's work went for naught because of Stalin's paranoia. As the CIA study noted, "the Soviets deeply distrusted any information not supplied by their own agents through their own channels." Horrible Soviet tradecraft — including the names of Orchestra agents in radio messages, for instance — had disastrous results. As Ms. Anderson writes of the German group, "it was hard to argue that they did any real damage to the Nazi war machine."

But, in the end, the Soviet connection was irrelevant. The Red Orchestra resisted Hitler at a time when the rest of the world turned a blind eye [to Hitler]. Consider, for instance, the New York Times reviewer who in 1934 praised a Nazi propaganda film screened in New York as "genuinely entertaining." Or Joseph Kennedy Jr., sent to Berlin by his London ambassador father, who reported that "the dislike of the Jews … was well-founded" because they "were at the head of big business, in law, etc."

Greta Kuckhoff, one of the few survivors, lived on until 1981, and she wrote an autobiography. As Ms. Anderson aptly summarizes, "Greta had no time for the idle moralizing of those who waited out the regime in silence, safety, or exile. She didn't distinguish between Communist or Socialist, Catholic or Jew. For her, the world was divided into two categories: those who took action, and those who did not." A first-rate read.

Balkan Caesar: A Novel Of World War II

Aberdeen Bay
by Peter Lucas

Balkan Caesar is the compelling, previously untold story about the American soldiers of the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) who fought the Nazis behind enemy lines in World War II Albania. The story is based on fact.

At the outbreak of the war, the OSS, the forerunner of the CIA, scoured the country searching for young men willing to secretly return to the countries of their European ancestors to help resistance fighters sabotage the Nazi war machine.

In Boston they find a group of first generation Americans of Albanian descent who volunteer to join the OSS and help liberate Albania from the Nazi Occupation.

The story centers around one of the men, Tom Stevens, a rugged young high school football star who is fluent in Albanian. Stevens tends bar at the Arch Street Tavern, a Boston newspaperman’s hangout, while he attends college at night.

Stevens recruits fellow Bostonians—some of Albanian descent, others not--to join the OSS with him. One unlikely volunteer is handsome actor Sam Harding, who works as a seaman on the Boston water front before he is discovered by Hollywood.

Their assignment: gather intelligence useful to the OSS for its wartime—and post-war—needs, and to bond with Enver Hoxha, the handsome, charismatic, ruthless, Paris-educated Albanian Communist Partisan leader. This they do.

Together Stevens, Harding and their men make the dangerous nighttime crossing of the Adriatic Sear from Allied-occupied Italy to join Hoxha’s Partisans and help them fight the Nazis in the rugged mountains and seaside caves of southern Albania.

Once on Albanian soil, Stevens learns that the Nazis are only part of the problem: Albania is in the midst of a complicated civil war in which the Communists are fighting with Albanian nationalists and royalists to determine who will control postwar Albania. Albanian alliances are murky and shifting: sometimes it is difficult to divine who is on whose side, and whom to trust. Hoxha and his lover, Tueta? Mehmet Shehu, Hoxha’s brilliant military chief and potential rival? Lucy, the beautiful Albanian woman with whom Stevens falls in love?

On top of all of this, Stevens and his men find themselves thrust by their OSS masters into an even greater struggle that is emerging out of the rubble and chaos of the war that is soon to become the Cold War. Stevens is trained to follow orders, even orders to kill. But is he equipped to carry out an assignment that requires him to betray the trust of his new Albanian friends?

The outcome of this extraordinary saga is to influence American, Albanian and Balkan history, and the protagonists, for decades to come.

OSS Training in the National Parks and Service Overseas in World War II

By John Whiteclay Chambers II
U.S. National Park Service, 2008
Reviewed by Dan Pinck

What a rare occasion it is to read a book about the Office of Strategic Services that deserves a host of encomiums. Mr. Chamber’s book is not one of those 20-watt intelligence books mugged by writers who can’t write. Far from it, his book is a startling and unexpected illumination by an outstanding historian. His book is actually a report commissioned by the National Park Service. It is likely to be published in hardcover in the near future by Rutgers University Press.

The title is a camouflage for a 719-page book about how OSS personnel were taught to shoot pistols and submachineguns; to throw hand grenades on a golf course; to detonate plastic to dismember trees; to read maps; to kill an enemy with a rolled-up newspaper or a small knife; and to encode and decode one-time pad messages. It is a superbly-researched history of the Office of Strategic Services, from its pre-war birth as the Office of the Coordinator of Information to the OSS’s activities around the world during the war, and to the adoption of many OSS branches by the CIA and the U. S. military after the war.

It’s not a stretch to claim that his book is one of the better histories of the OSS, ranking a place on a shelf with Thomas Troy’s book, Donovan and the CIA: A History of the Establishment of the Central Intelligence Agency. Mr. Chambers’ book puts a closure on the need for more knowledge about the National Park Service locations during the Second World War utilized by OSS.

If Mr. Chambers had limited or confined his book to the work of OSS’s Schools and Training Branch in the United States and to National Park Service sites in Maryland and Virginia, it’s possible, though unlikely, that the interest of many readers, including OSS veterans, would wander off.

However, you will discover that he travels to the OSS theaters around the world; he also traces the irregular, ambitious and successful exploits of a number of OSS representatives who gained distinctive reputations in risky circumstances, some of whom we first meet in his book while they attempt to survive classroom lectures, many dangerous field exercises (four men were killed), and goofy psychological assessments at Park Service locations in Virginia and Maryland. (A minor note: William Casey, who became the 13th Director of the CIA, broke his jaw in a training accident. Many men were injured. OSS training was not a piece of cake.)

I’ve no doubt that a majority of the OSS veterans who entered service in the United States has more than a ragtag knowledge about a few of the training sites in Maryland and Virginia, especially at the Congressional Country Club in Bethesda, Maryland. For these veterans, the sites were their kindergartens and graduate schools.

In peacetime, Congressional had been a swanky private club on four hundred acres, with an 18-hole golf course and other amenities, including a swimming pool, tennis courts, and lakes. The Club’s existence was threatened by the continuing depression and the beginning of the war. It had severe difficulty in making its mortgage payments. When General Donovan, the founder and sole head of the OSS, heard that the Club was seeking a tenant with deep pockets, he visited Congressional and made an offer on his first visit. Its board of directors accepted his offer. The lease required monthly payments by the OSS and the promise to restore whatever damage had been done to the buildings and grounds to be restored immediately following the war to its prewar grandeur.

The latter provision was a wise one since the entire golf course was destroyed during OSS training exercises by grenades, explosives, and demolition weapons of all kinds. They took the place of putters and drivers. The OSS succeeded in wrecking most of the Club. Despite its temporary designation as Area F by the National Park Service, Congressional was still privately owned.

Roughly 5,300 veterans in the major OSS branches received some or all of their training at National Park Service locations in Virginia, Washington, D.C., and Maryland.

OSS veterans whose memories are in good working order are familiar with these wartime designated areas:

• Area A at Prince William Forest Park in Virginia;
• Area B at Catoctin Mountain Park in Maryland;
• Area C also at Prince William Forest Park;
• Area D also at Prince William Forest Park;
• Area E at Towson, Maryland;
• Area F at Congressional Country Club;
• Area RTU-11 at Lothian Farm in Clinton, Maryland;
• Area S at a country estate in Fairfax, Virginia;
• Area W at a townhouse in Washington, D. C.

Other training locations included the banks of the Potomac River where the Maritime Unit had its start. (The OSS initiated training in the armed forces of “frogmen.” OSS Limpets sunk several German transport ships, including the Donat in Norway.) When the OSS discovered that the ice and cold hindered training, this operation was moved to Florida and Nassau in the Bahamas and later to Catalina Island and then to Puget Sound, Newport Beach and San Clemente. Worth noting is a nightime landing in assault boats – a mini-invasion, no less – at Gay Head on the western edge of Martha’s Vineyard. This training exercise was led Serge Obolensky, born a Russian Prince and the oldest combat parachutist in the OSS and in the American armed forces. Camp Edwards on Cape Cod (it exists today) was his group’s training base. He, too, had prior training at Congressional Country Club.

Mr. Chambers devotes more than one-third of his book to an examination of OSS training, its merits and its defects. The rest of the book is all value added. By leading us on expeditions to every part of world in which the OSS engaged our enemies, we learn how the OSS accomplished its missions. In this fashion, the book becomes a comprehensive history of the OSS at home and abroad.

Mr. Chambers’ book is a complete package. On this tack, his book achieves landmark status as an OSS history, in much the same way that Dr. John W. Brunner’s outstanding books, especially his OSS Weapons (Second Edition) closes the history on this topic. Dr. Brunner, an OSS veteran who served in China, is acknowledged as the premier historical researcher of the weapons used by the OSS. He received his early training at Congressional Country
Club.

General John Singlaub, one of our few generals to serve in the frontlines and to be always ahead of his men in combat, in Europe as a Jedburgh; in China and French Indochina, and as commander of all U. S. troops South Korea, gives this assessment of what he learned in his training at the Congressional Country Club and at other Park Service locations: “These were individual skills that are perhaps useful but are most important for training the state of mind or attitude, developing an aggressiveness and confidence in one’s ability to use weapons. One of the most important aspects of the training was that it gave you complete confidence. It gave you an ability to concentrate on your mission, and not to worry about your personal safety. That’s really a great psychological advantage. I used that later in training my units when I was a battalion commander and later, a battle group commander.”

General Singlaub very likely received the most complete training and education for his responsibilities in warfare of any general. He received a Combat Infantryman’s Badge, Pilot Wings, a Parachute Badge. He received twenty-four awards and decorations. Top that. You ought to read his book, Hazardous Duty: An American Soldier in the Twentieth Century.

Erasmus Kloman had many risky assignments overseas and he received high grades in his domestic training. He had a different tack about the value of some of his experiences in Virginia and Maryland. In his wartime memoir, Assignment Algiers: With the OSS in the Mediterranean Theater, he wrote: “Another camp I attended was Area B in the Catoctin Mountains of Maryland. Some time was spent learning how to steam open sealed envelopes leaving no trace of tampering. At area B we had a couple of days of Morse code (nowhere near enough to function as radio operators). Considerable emphasis was placed on explosives, how to place fuses in various devices, where to place demolitons under bridges or on train tracks, and even how to attach limpets to the bottoms of ships. None of these abilities proved very useful in my later years. The official history of the OSS explains the difficulty of training operatives in the skills they would need.”

Emmett McNamara, a distinguished Operational Group fighter in Europe and China, recalls his training at Congressional Country Club: “There wasn’t much training. What I most remember is running five miles or more every morning. In China, near the Indochina border, my colleagues and I ran for three days through rice paddies to escape Japanese forces. They appeared late one night. I didn’t have time to put on my boots. So I ran barefoot for three days. Maybe that’s why I only remember running at Congressional.”

You’d probably have to make the assumption that the overall OSS training was generally successful. If this were the case, you’d have to infer it was due more to the innate abilities of the men and women who underwent the training than it was to the often disconnected instruction they received. Mr. Chambers thoroughly examines the results of the OSS Schools and Training Branch’s decisions; and he notes the efforts by more than a few of its leaders to overcome the limited vision of other leaders. Few leaders as well as instructors appear to have known precisely how their training at home would help their students overseas. (Weapons instruction was an exception. No one ever suffered from knowing how to use a weapon.)

General Donovan was the perfect leader of the OSS, commanding a rare imagination that fostered success even when his concept may have been misguided. An example was his belief that a single training program would work for all recruits in all of the OSS branches. What would work best for Special Operations and Occupational Groups would be just as appropriate for the training of Secret Intelligence and Morale Operations representatives. Noting the attributes that can lead to effective performance in each activity in sometimes desperate situations, it doesn’t seem logical that a common scheme of training and education could be a proper way to inculcate in each group of trainees the types of expertise that are essential. Should we expect that one size fits all? For longer than a year, there was scant differentiation in the training programs. It took almost two years, until the end of 1943, that each branch’s training programs were more closely focused on their own separate requirements.

Mr. Chambers observes that “Donovan wanted a unified OSS basic course to be attended by all new male OSS personnel, but changes had to be made to bring training into line with the field experience and demands of the operational branches.” Further, he notes that “during the big OSS buildup between the summer of 1943 and the fall of 1944, the training camps had operated at breakneck pace as field activities of Donovan’s organization expanded along with the U. S. military effort, first in Europe and then in Asia.” In OSS fashion, it’s not so surprising that the training branches operated as well as they did. The total number of instructors at more than twelve branches in the United States numbered nearly five hundred men and women. The Schools and Training Branch Headquarters was staffed by about fifty persons. Oh, yes: the deputy head of OSS personnel had been the general manager of Macy’s department stores in civilian life, for what it’s worth.

General Donovan said many times that he had more enemies in Washington than he had overseas. Many of us are aware of some of the officials who attempted throughout the war to throttle him and the OSS. J. Edgar Hoover, generals, and admirals had their knives out to wreck the OSS. Without President Roosevelt’s constant support, they would have succeeded. A new wartime opponent has been uncovered in Mr. Chambers’ research. We know the man’s name, Harold D. Smith. To OSS veterans, his name will live in infamy: as head of the Bureau of the Budget, he carried out President Truman’s order to fire Donovan and to put the OSS out of business two weeks after the end of the war. In fact, Smith wrote Truman’s order and Truman’s letter firing Donovan.

What Mr. Chambers uncovered is this: In the early fall of 1944, Smith ordered Donovan to reduce the size of the OSS by roughly six hundred persons. Donovan responded in his typical fashion by hiring about three hundred additional recruits. This occurred, of course, while the training programs were in operation.

Yes, beyond a doubt, the training operation was successful. At the end of the war, and before the OSS was liquidated, Mr. Chambers wrote: “Operating like the OSS itself which was created in haste and without American precedent and which was impelled with a tremendous drive for speed, production and results, the Schools and Training Branch sometimes appeared confused and indecisive, as S&T acknowledged. Yet, training areas and programs were indeed developed almost overnight to fit the evolving needs of Donovan’s organization and other wartime developments. To meet suddenly increased quotas, the capacity of training areas was from time to time doubled in size, sometimes by putting new sub-camps into operation, sometimes with the creation of “tent cities” to accommodate additional students. Yet, Schools and Training also admitted that “only toward the end of World War II was OSS beginning to approach the kind of training that was really adequate for the complex and hazardous operations carried out by OSS personnel.”

To see the world of the OSS by focusing on the training that the majority of veterans received at National Park Service sites in the United States as well as at some overseas locations is a novel and highly effective approach.

I was skeptical when I began Mr. Chambers’ book. After the first ten pages, I was excited by the quality of his thinking; by the scope and detail of his research; and by the pleasure of reading a book by an first rate historian. I felt the same way when I finished the last page.

He has written a kind of a “Who’s Who of the OSS,” buttressed by an imposing collection original and archival sources: books, records, maps, photographs, and interviews.

DAN PINCK’S INTERVIEW OF PROFESSOR JOHN CHAMBERS

DP: What surprised you the most in your research on your new book?

JC: Just how active, lively, and engaged physically and mentally so many OSS veterans remain even in their 80s. In retrospect, it should not be surprising, because this was a group selected on the whole for being above average in intelligence physical ability, individual initiative, and desire to master challenges. But it surprised me at first until I saw the pattern in it and the causes for it.

DP: Were there noticeable differences in the way recruits from the military and from civilian life performed?

JC: I have not seen any breakdown of statistics in this way. All members of the Operational Groups and most, but not all, of the Special Operations teams came from the military. But few were career soldiers at that point at least. I think the key point is that the OSS operational personnel in OG and SO were basically civilians turned into wartime soldiers or paramilitary operators. They were more often citizen-soldiers who volunteered or had been drafted into the military for the war effort. But because of OSS’s priority status in recruiting, OSS sometimes acquired military volunteers who had not had basic training, so were little different from civilians. I can think of several instances where civilian operational personnel in SO, Americans such as Virginia Hall in France or, of course, civilian foreign nationals who were recruited in France or Italy from the Resistance, operated as bravely and possibly as effectively as military-trained personnel. Of course, many of the Secret Intelligence personnel were civilians, although others were citizen-soldiers as indicated before. The short answer is that the OSS had its own training and on the whole it effectively prepared personnel physically and mentally for their roles and also in particular skills that proved useful to them.

DP: Who are a few of your favorite writers?

JC: William E. Leuchtenburg, James McPherson, David Kennedy, Arthur Schlesinger, David McCullough, Stephen Ambrose.

DP: What’s the subject of your next book?

JC: The short answer is: it will be “the forgotten Civil War,” the coastal engagements along the seacoast regions of the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida

DP: Before I read your OSS book, I had merely a cocktail knowledge about what went on at Congressional and the other sites. Now I know more than I ever thought I’d know. I thank you

JC: Thank you. What did you know?

DP: I knew the golf course. Before the war, I played golf there. I broke 100. I learned from you, among other things, that the OSS literally saved Congressional by blowing up and wrecking its golf course. I’ll note that the present fee to join Congressional is at least $150,000 and that you have to wait about twelve years to become a member and an additional three years to receive golf course privileges.

JC: I don’t expect to play golf there.

DP: How long did it take you to write your book?

JC: From start to finish, I spent four years, three on research and a year to write it. I had a year free of classroom responsibilities.

I have a question to ask you: what did you learn that was especially pertinent to your interests?

DP: I learned not to listen to anyone who believes that stalking the history of the OSS is a task for amateurs. I’m reminded of a frieze on a government building on Pennsylvania Avenue. I’ll paraphrase it: “To seek the wealth of the Indies, you must take the wealth of the Indies with you.”

I’ll add that your book enforces or invigorates the memoirs and splendid careers of OSS veterans who received some or all of their training at the sites noted in your book, including especially training at Congressional Country Club. I’ll mention Erasmus Kloman, John Singlaub, Albert Materazzi, William Colby, Elizabeth McIntosh, William Casey, Arthur Reinhardt, Bernard Knox, Roger, Hall, William Pietsch, John Brunner, and Emmett McNamara.

Read the National Park Service Report on OSS Training Facilities

The Spy Who Loved Us: The Vietnam War and Pham Xuan An's Dangerous Games

Public Affairs, $26.50
by Thomas Bass

Pham Xuan An was a brilliant journalist and an even better spy. A long-time correspondent for Time and friend to many American reporters covering Vietnam, he was an invaluable source of news and font of wisdom on all things Vietnamese. At the same time, he was a masterful double agent, a North Vietnamese operative whose secret reports were so admired by Ho Chi Minh that he clapped his hands with glee on receiving them and exclaimed, “We are now in the United States’ war room!” An inspired shape-shifter who kept his cover in place until the day he died, Pham Xuan An ranks as one of the preeminent spies of the twentieth century. Thomas Bass began his conversations with An in 1992. And when he set out to write the story of An’s remarkable career for The New Yorker, he uncovered fresh revelations almost daily during their freewheeling conversations. But a good spy is always at work, and it was not until An’s death in 2006 that Bass was able to lift the veil from his carefully guarded story and provide this fascinating portrait of a hidden life.  A masterful biography, The Spy Who Loved Us reveals the true motivations of a man who, caught between dueling loyalties in a time of war, “lived a lie and always told the truth.”
_____

"I enjoyed this book enormously and learned a lot. The Spy Who Loved Us is a fine read and a gripping story; but, most of all, it is an object lesson in why human intelligence and a great spy will always trump the most sophisticated espionage and surveillance technology. It's not the simple accumulation of information that counts. It's the recognition of what's important and then knowing what to do with it." 
- Ted Koppel

“This is a chilling account of betrayal of an American army—and an American press corps—involved in a guerrilla war in a society about which little was known or understood.   The spy here was in South Vietnam, and his ultimate motives, as Thomas Bass makes clear, were far more complex than those of traditional espionage.  This book, coming now, has another message, too, for me—have we put ourselves in the same position, once again, in Iraq?”
- Seymour Hersh, author of Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib

“Thomas Bass has rendered a sensitive, revealing portrait of the strangely ambivalent personality I knew during the Vietnam War.  In doing so he provided us with unique insights into the nature,  conflicting sentiments and heartbreak of many Vietnamese who worked with Americans, made friends with them, but in the end  loved their land more and sought , as their ancestors had a for a thousand years, to free it from all trespassers.”
- Seymour Topping, former Southeast Asia Bureau Chief and Managing Editor of The New York Times

“The story of Pham Xuan An is the revelation of a remarkable life and a remarkable man. Fictional accounts of practitioners of the Great Game—the craft of spying—come nowhere near the real thing that was practiced by An. In The Spy Who Loved Us, An is revealed as a man of split loyalties, who managed to maintain his humanity. Cast prejudices aside and you will discover a true hero, scholar, patriot, humanist and masterful spy.”
- Morley Safer, Correspondent, CBS 60 Minutes and author of Flashbacks: On Returning to Vietnam

Arabian Knight: Colonel Bill Eddy USMC and the Rise of American Power in the Middle East

By Thomas Lippman
Selwa Press
Reviewed by Joseph Goulden

Middle East veterans of a certain era - the World War II era into the 1950s - speak with respectful awe of William A. Eddy. Soldier, scholar, statesman, spy, Arabist - of him a colleague said, "Bill Eddy was probably the nearest thing that the United States has had to a Lawrence of Arabia."

His rich career is detailed by Thomas Lippman in "Arabian Knight: Colonel Bill Eddy USMC and the Rise of American Power in the Middle East." Mr. Lippman reported from the Middle East for decades, chiefly with The Washington Post. He documents how Mr. Eddy initially exerted much influence on U.S. policy in the Middle East and how much of his advice went unheeded.

Born of missionary parents in 1896 in Sidon, in what is now Lebanon, Mr. Eddy learned Arabic as a child. After graduation from Princeton, he went into the U.S. Marine Corps and was awarded the Navy Cross and Silver Star for bravery; severely wounded, he was near death from pneumonia when he came home. He received a doctorate in literature from Princeton and became president of Hobart College.

Mr. Eddy returned to the Marines as war neared, quickly switched to the Office of Strategic Services and was sent to North Africa to do political spadework for the Allied invasion. He thrived on espionage. Germans bribed a telephone operator in his hotel to monitor his calls. The operator took the money, then told Eddy, who wrote his daughter, "We are taking the francs and composing fake conversations for him to report to them, conversations which should give the Germans plenty of phony information."

Next came the seminal assignment of Eddy's career: establishing relations with Ibn Saud, the king of Saudi Arabia, an impoverished backwater considered to be insignificant. But President Roosevelt sensed Saudi Arabia's future importance as a source of oil, and as a U.S. toehold in the Middle East. FDR dispatched Mr. Eddy there as "Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary." Mr. Eddy wore Arab garb for his first meeting with the king and charmed him with his knowledge of and sympathy for the nation's culture.

FDR's fear was that insolvency would drive the kingdom back into the British sphere, with the United States excluded from oil concessions. So Mr. Eddy negotiated loans for agricultural and other development, to be repaid with oil. King Saud was favorably disposed to the United States because he was determined that "his country will not become a ward or a mere instrument for profit for some foreign government." As Mr. Eddy (and a few others) felt, "the Arabic people, as they gained independence, would face a choice of external loyalties and that it would be far preferable for them to align themselves with the United States than with the looming great rival, the Soviet Union."

But friendship had limits. Ibn Saud refused American military advisers. He accepted U.S. technology, but laid down a rule: "We will use your iron, but leave our faith alone." Traditions such as the veiling of women were none of the Americans' business. He agreed to accept an air field - but the Saudi flag flew over it, not the Stars and Stripes.

At war's end, Mr. Eddy left the Marines (as a colonel) and plunged into the fierce war over creation of the U.S. intelligence establishment. He spoke for the State Department in negotiations over creation of the CIA and eventually ran the department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. He served briefly as ambassador to Yemen, but resigned in 1947 over President Truman's decision to support creation of a new Jewish state in Palestine.

Mr. Eddy felt strongly that the United States should form a "moral alliance" with Islam. As Mr. Lippman writes, "To support instead what Arabs saw as the expansionist, usurper state created by the Zionists in Palestine would bring down upon America the relentless rage of militant Islam. In this, he was the Cassandra of the Middle East." Mr. Eddy correctly forecast that the U.S. alliance with Israel would inflame the Muslim world.

Mr. Eddy returned to the Middle East as a "consultant" to ARAMCO, which U.S. oil companies owned in conjunction with the Saudis. As Mr. Lippman writes, although Mr. Eddy was not on the U.S. government payroll, "throughout his years with ARAMCO he reported regularly to the CIA, where he had been present at the creation, and was a trusted informant, about Arab politics and personalities." Eddy's nephew, Ray Close, a longtime CIA officer, told Mr. Lippman, "He never spent five minutes in Washington as a member of the staff of the agency. He was a friend of [Allen] Dulles's on a personal basis."

Generally I dismiss "what if?" scenarios as a waste of time. But reading Eddy's dire predictions on U.S. policy inescapably brought those two words to mind.

The Lost Spy: An American In Stalin’s Secret Service

By Andrew Meier
W. W. Norton
Reviewed by Joseph C. Goulden

In the parlance of espionage history, the term “The Great Illegals” has especial resonance. The reference is to the small band of agent-handlers who worked for Stalin’s Soviet intelligence apparatus during the 1920s and beyond, not necessarily spying on their own, but servicing and directing those who did. The record shows that they performed well, enabling the USSR to build a between-wars intelligence machine that infiltrated the highest levels of Western governments, including the US and Great Britain (remember the infamous Philby ring?), stealing military and diplomatic secrets hither and yon.

Their collapse came with stunning rapidity in the late1930s, when these previously-trusted handlers were recalled to Moscow during the Great Purge. Those who obeyed the call vanished. Those who resisted were tracked down and killed – for instance, Alexander Orlov, who managed to reach the US before falling victim to a staged “suicide” in a Washington hotel, and Ignace Reiss, brutally murdered in the French countryside..

Among those who dutifully trotted off to their fates, true believers to the end, was Isiah “Cy” Oggins. A former Moscow correspondent for Time, Meier gained access to Soviet files on Oggins, as well as dossiers in other countries; he also tracked down a long-lost son in upstate New York who retained a few fading memories of his father’s odyssey.

Born in 1898, to Jewish-Russian immigrants, Oggins was among the uncountable idealists who in the 1920s eschewed capitalism. After graduation from Columbia University, he met and wed a communist firebrand named Nerma Berman, She wrote for The Daily Worker, agitated for the release of “political prisoners,” and apparently wooed Oggins across the line separating idealism from radicalism. He joined the Workers Party of America, as the Communist Party, USA, was then disguised, and off they went to Europe, vanishing into the misty shadows of the espionage underworld.

Oggins slipped in and out of cover roles. In Paris, “a ghostwriter,” he was the “rich American abroad.” (His true mission, Meier believes, was to keep tabs on the refugee Romanovs and other anti-Red Russians.) In Berlin, as a faux student, he perhaps played a role in a Soviet scheme to counterfeit Western currencies. In China, he was an “antiques dealer” who worked to bring the Chinese Communists under Soviet control.

It was in the latter role that Oggins came a cropper. His immediate superior fell under suspicion of being a double-agent. Ergo! Oggins, too, must be a traitor. So he willingly obeyed a summons to Moscow, sending his wife and small boy to the US. He was arrested in 1939 and sentenced to give years in prison.

Here commences the sickening part of Meier’s’ account. Word leaked from the gulag about the presence of an American prisoner. That he was being held should have been reported to the US Embassy. Demands and refusals sailed back and forth.

Washington had no illusions as to why Oggins was abroad in the first place. Sumner Wells, the under secretary of state, cabled the Moscow embassy, “It is possible that he has been acting for years as an agent of a foreign power or an international revolutionary movement.” Nonetheless, “the failure to report his detention should not be ignored.” Sending him home would cost $1,200. The wife (who earned $25 a week in New York) came up with $450. Sympathetic embassy officers, including Charles Bohlen and Llewellyn Thomas, agreed to pay the balance. But then the Soviets said Oggins had died. Embassy officers reported at the time that the Soviets were not about to free someone who knew the horrors of the gulag. Given the wartime need not to offend Stalin, the US did not make an issue of Oggins’s case.

Meier’s son seemingly did not know the full story, complaining to Meier, “The government just let Dad sit in a Soviet jail and rot.” He blamed “red-baiting Congressmen.” The record shows otherwise. Not until 1992 did the truth emerge from Soviet files. Oggins’s dossier contained a photo of a cadaverous man, the product of years of brutality. Documents showed that he had been used as a guinea pig for testing of curare, a poison long used in South America, to determine whether the substance could be detected in a corpse after death.

The administering “physician” – I use the quotation marks deliberately – reported “cyanosis and death with symptoms of suffocation while retaining complete conscious. Death was excruciating, but the man was deprived of his ability to shout or move while retaining complete consciousness....death...ensued with ten to fifteen minutes....”

One dislikes criticizing another writer’s organization. But Meier’s decision to present his narrative in non-chronological fashion, skipping back and forth, resulted in a jumble of a book that I frankly found highly confusing. Nonetheless, The Last Spy deserves one’s attention because it points up once again how well-meaning “revolutionaries” can end up with burned fingers – or worse – if they insist on sticking their fingers into the fire.

The Brenner Assignment: The Untold Story of the Most Daring Spy Mission of World War II

By Patrick K. O'Donnell
Da Capo Press
Reviewed by Joseph Goulden

In 1943, a young army lieutenant who had just graduated from Officers Candidate School wrote an audacious letter to the newly formed Office of Strategic Services. He began, "It seems to me, who knows nothing about our organization, that finding an agent with the necessary personal accoutrements to go to Cortina [on the southwest approaches of the Brenner Pass between Italy and Austria] and carry out acts of sabotage, political organization, reconnaissance, or whatever is desired would be difficult." He went on to list his qualifications for just such a mission, noting that his training as an army combat engineer included demolitions.

The writer was Roderick Stephen Goodspeed Hall, a 28-year-old who had dropped out of Harvard to seek adventure wherever he found it: The Texas oil fields, a steamer off the West Coast, climbing rocks in the Grand Tetons and, most importantly, spending a winter skiing in the Alps in the area around the Brenner Pass.

Once he learned of the Allied invasion of Italy, the young Hall realized that in due course, the German army would be forced to retreat to the north — and that one key route went through the Brenner Pass. In due course, Hall was snatched up by the OSS, and, after training, parachuted into the mountains of northern Italy to prepare for destruction of the Brenner rail bridges.

The story of his odyssey is told by Patrick K. O'Donnell in The Brenner Assignment (Da Capo Press, $25, 286 pages). Mr. O'Donnell, who lives in Arlington, is a military historian of talent, and this work reflects a tremendous amount of work, both in OSS records in the National Archives and on-site explorations in Italy.

Alas, Hall drops out of the story rather quickly. He is captured by the Germans, tortured and executed. Meanwhile, another OSS team, headed by a dashing character named Howard Chapell, picks up the mission. He blows up enough bridges to cause massive traffic jams of fleeing German vehicles that are smashed by Allied air strikes. In due course, Mr. Chapell becomes the central figure, and Mr. O'Donnell is the first writer who persuaded him to talk about the mission.

The account of how notes that Hall scrawled on cigarette papers were concealed and later found is a made-for-the-movies story, and I warrant that is exactly where this book is headed.

www.brennerassignment.com

The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington

By Jennet Conant
Simon and Schuster
Reviewed by Joseph C. Goulden

What more could one wish from a book? Here we have a discussion of propaganda and covert actions written with text-book clarity. Add salacious gossip about the upper circles of Washington’s political and media community. And a writing style that has one racing from page to page, eager to soak in more details.

I thump my desk with glee over Jennet Conant’s The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington. The book’s connective thread is the story of the somewhat caddish English writer Dahl, obscure in the 1940s, but later to achieve fame and wealth with children’s books such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. But Ms. Conant’s scope is far wider.

Severely injured in a crash early in his service in the Royal Air Force, Dahl was assigned to the Washington embassy as a deputy attache. He hated the thought of being a desk-bound warrior. Fortunately, he quickly fell into a hush-hush group called British Security Coordination (BSC). As Ms. Conant observes, BSC was “one of he most controversial, and probably one of he most successful, covert action campaigns in the annals of espionage.” At one level it was a massive “propaganda machine,” tasked with gaining American public support for Britain, and countering isolationists who wanted no part of the European war. Another brief was collecting intelligence on the inner-workings of the Roosevelt Administration.

Ms. Conant’s truly fascinating book can be read on several levels. It is, first of all, a highly readable primer on propaganda operations, and a strong statement as to why intelligence organizations mount operations on the turf of “friendly nations.” Britain literally was fighting for its life in the months before Pearl Harbor, and a strong isolationist segment of the American population wanted no part of the European War. What struck me was the ease with which an unknown 20ish airman and aspiring writer insinuated himself into the upper ranks of Washington’s political and journalistic society. For instance, Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt was impressed with a children’s story authored by Dahl. A brief exchange of correspondence later, Dahl was at FDR’s Hyde Park retreat, chatting up the President and advisers and enjoying a bucolic weekend.

But Dahl’s most valuable on-going contact was the millionaire newspaper publisher Charles Marsh, who despite awesomely uncouth manners and speech managed to befriend persons such as Henry Wallace, the vice-president, and a number of Roosevelt cabinet officers. Wallace was of especial interest to the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) because of his leftist politics (“that menace!” SIS chief Stewart Menzies called him) and fears that he could actually become president should the visibly frail FDR die.

To put it bluntly, Wallace was a blabber-mouth, both to Marsh and to Dahl. His indiscretions meant that British intelligence had staggering access to the inner workings of the Roosevelt Administration. In his latter years, Wallace became a figure of public ridicule, so leftist that he was driven out of politics. But in the early 1940s, James Reston of the New York Times would call him the “Assistant President,” writing, “Henry Wallace is now the administration’s head man on Capital Hill, its defense chief, economic boss, and No. 1 post-war planner.”

Dahl shared his superiors’ view of Wallace as a political nitwit, but made nice with him nonetheless because of the quality of information obtained he provided British intelligence. Because of his contracts, Dahl was able to alert London that FDR would dump Wallace from the 1944 presidential tickets six months before he actually did so.

In writing about Marsh, Ms. Conant scored a major research coup. She obtained, from the publisher’s son, access to his personal papers, and the draft of an unpublished Marsh biography by Ralph Ingersoll, a prominent journalist of the era. Among the fascinating characters who waft through her book is the lithesome Alice Glass, a sleep-around beauty who was Marsh’s mistress, then his wife. (He first s potted her as a teen skinny dipping in a friend’s pool in Austin, Texas, where he owned the local paper. He had her in bed that very night.) Marsh set her up in a mansion in Culpepper County, Virginia, where she entertained a seemingly endless string of bed partners. Included was a strapping young Congressman Lyndon B. Johnson, who did not hesitate to cuckold the older Marsh, a friend and campaign contributor. The much-wiser Dahl, not wishing to offend a man who was feeding him high-level political information, wisely resisted Glass’s amorous overtures.

Dahl’s allies were legion. He cultivated the columnist Drew Pearson, who went so far as to permit BSC to write an occasional piece under his byline. Pearson’s sources were good enough to give him who-said-what accounts of cabinet meetings – information that passed quickly to Marsh, thence to Dahl and on to London.

Other BSC officers during the period – “The Irregulars,” they were called – including Ian Flem Fleming, creator of James Bond (Dahl later would write the movie script for You Only Live Twice) and the advertising genius David Ogilvy.

One especially unorthodox assignment given the dashing Dahl was to bed Republican Representative Clare Booth Luce of Connecticut, the gorgeous playwright wife of Time-Life publisher Henry Luce, in hopes she – and her husband – would “warm” to the British position on post-war issues such as colonialism and aviation rights.20Mrs. Luce was 13 years Dahl’s senior, and she proved more than a physical match for him. His comments about her sexual stamina cannot be repeated here; suffice to quote him as telling Ambassador Lord Halifax after three nights, “You know, it’s a great assignment, but I just can’t go on.” Whereupon Halifax threw back a Shakespearean quote, “the things I’ve done for England...” and told Dahl to keep at it. He sighed and did his duty a few more nights.

American Intelligence in War-time London: The Story of the OSS

Routledge, 304 p.
By Nelson MacPherson
Reviewed by Fisher Howe

This scholarly treatise – which its Canadian author for some reason calls historiography rather than history – presents a detailed, indeed exhaustive analysis of the London OSS office. He explains why: “The London mission was at the heart of OSS relations with British intelligence, and as such it personified the essence of that connection in the Allied war effort. The Allied invasion of Europe ensured that OSS/London, more than any other OSS outpost, would have the greatest opportunity to perform a decisive role in the intelligence war.”

The author states a threefold purpose: “to examine more closely the trend in western intelligence communities toward slow and uneven professionalism”; to judge “the relevance and professionalization [sic] of the OSS intelligence effort within the Anglo-American alliance”;  and “to illuminate this alliance intelligence relationship within the larger framework of Anglo-American ‘competitive cooperation.’”  With full justification he sees it as a case study both “to illuminate the process by which America was introduced to the various components of intelligence and clandestine work” and to show “how US intelligence matured and became institutionalized within the contex t of the larger Anglo-American political-military alliance.”

These purposes the treatise largely achieves. However, while its scholarly dimension may be measured by the number of footnotes (46 for the 12 pages of Introduction text; 73 for the 19 pages of Chapter 4: 167 for 30 pages of Chapter 8), or the 30 pages of Bibliography, its scholarly merit should not be measured by the judgmental pronouncements that fill every chapter.  Certainly people can disagree on the contribution of OSS and each of its branches to the war effort - to performing “a decisive role in the intelligence war.” That is controversial and open to all kinds of assessment. This treatise, be it understood, goes to considerable length to document an almost universally negative evaluation, sometimes using what would seem to be unscholarly judgmental language.

The chapter titles demonstrate not simply the range of subject matter covered but the tilt of evaluation that pervades the presentation:
1. The British Intelligence Community: Setting the Tone for OSS
2. The Genesis of OSS/London, and the British Dimension
3. Servants of OVERLORD: SO, SI, and the Invasion of Europe
4. Reductio Ad Absurdum: R&A/London’s Quest for Relevance
5. Falling Short of the Target: EOU [Enemy Objectives Unit of R&A], SIRA [SI and R&A intelligence processing arrangement], and the Pitfalls of R&A
6. Inspired Improvisation: William Casey and the Penetration of Germa ny
7. Following the British Example: X-2 and Morale Operations
8. Full Circle: Anglo-American Intelligence and the Transition to Cold War.
 
These chapters present an enormously detailed account of the operations of the London office against the background of start-up turmoil within the neophyte intelligence agency, particularly with the centralization demands of Washington headquarters, the inter-branch rivalries both in Washington and the London outpost; and the ambivalence in the “competitive cooperation” with British organizations

The wartime evolution of the British Intelligence organizations and the comparable development of the OSS, largely in the British image, are well and interestingly presented. The assessments of the several OSS/London branches, however, while extensive and detailed, are quite uneven, in most cases critical. The author gives unstinting praise to Bill Casey’s SI efforts in the penetration of Germany, modest commendation for the JEDBURGH (SO and British SOE) and SUSSEX (SI and British SIS) operations in the OVERLORD invasion, but other OSS efforts are derided as naïve, confused, or just ineffective in the war effort.

R&A generally and R&A/London specifically suffer most in the analysis. According to the treatise, R&A, “in contradiction to its postwar reputation as a unique collection of scholarly operatives mobilized by an ingenious William Donovan”. . . “spent its existence in a desperate, if largely futile, struggle to secure a me aningful role.”  Elsewhere, “R&A developed into a highly skilled irrelevancy”; throughout the war it kept trying to establish its basic mission – what customers it was to serve and with what kind of materials. At one point it goes to this extreme: The R&A/EOU [Enemy Objectives Unit] “illustrates the perversion of the intelligence cycle. . .  [its] subordination of disinterested analysis and dissemination to the biased needs of its bloated collective ego.”   

Our hero 109 does not come off at all well in this treatise. Donovan is depicted as a brilliant courageous leader but “often erratic and less than deft in dealing with the ferocious intricacies of the Washington and London power centers.” Later: “He never really directed his organization in any meaningful way.” And this: “Donovan’s reputation for erratic behavior, arrogant stubbornness, and blatant ambition determined OSS's fate by alienating the military.” Also: his ‘authoritarian attitude’ and ‘zealous inability to consider any other point of view than his own’.” Finally: “Donovan’s shortcomings were compounded by his erratic behavior and all of these factors contributed by 1945 to a widespread antipathy for Donovan personally which gravely undermined his attempts at securing OSS as the postwar intelligence bureaucracy.”

The treatise contains one unforgivable blooper: in several key places it totally confuses two peop le named William Phillips. One Phillips was a rather shady intelligence operative who showed up in the early days of the London office with vague connections to Washington intelligence agencies. He was mistrusted and disliked by the British. An unflattering description of him and his role by London’s director, David Bruce is fully reported. This Phillips was never, as the treatise wrongly reports, given a responsible role in OSS/London. The other William Phillips was no less than the very distinguished U.S. Ambassador whom Donovan sent to be the second director of OSS/London, succeeding W. D. Whitney and preceeding David K.E. Bruce. Ambassador Phillips gets no mention whatsoever in the treatise

Surprisingly, the conclusions drawn in the final chapter of the treatise present a much more balanced picture, quite unlike the chapter evaluations, and give a constructive and interesting overall assessment, part of which is worth repeating:

The British connection’s significance to American intelligence is clear. US intelligence was not shaped by one Machiavellian manipulation by SIS and SOE, or by the prophetic genius of William Donovan. It was instead moulded through the forging of an Anglo-American intelligence partnership that paved the way for realizing a concrete capacity for professional American intelligence. The British intelligence establishment did not tutor OSS/London per se. The various OSS branches were instead accepted by their British counterparts as partners in joint endeavo rs, in the course of which OSS/London achieved an accelerated capability which matched, and in some cases surpassed, that of the British services. X-2 and SO certainly produced efforts equivalent to those of MI6(V) and SOE in northern Europe. SI not only kept pace with Broadway’s operational record in France, but it went on to out-perform MI6 in penetrating Germany. . . .MO’s efforts were limited by the problematic nature of its work, whereas R&A served mainly as an underachieving disappointment that hinted at the possibilities of applying scholarly methods to intelligence analysis without matching those already attained by Britain.  The potential would remain unrealized in America until CIA’s formation.

The Missing Thai Silk King: A Niece’s Search for Jim Thompson

By Martha Galleher
Ivy Book Store, 6080 Falls Road, Baltimore, Maryland 21210, $35 
Reviewed by Dan Pinck

Pardon the patois: this is a swell book, a combination of history and mystery focused on an investigation of the disappearance in 1967 of Mrs. Galleher’s step-uncle, James H. W. Thompson, in the Cameron Highlands in Malaysia. As famous as he was mysterious, Jim Thompson served in the OSS and in the CIA and he lived in Bangkok since 1945. He founded the well-known Thai Silk Company which still exists; and he did not severe his ties with the CIA. He disappeared on Easter Sunday; only rumors survive about what might have happened to him.

His disappearance was reported in American newspapers. The FBI investigated his disappearance; there’s no assurance that the CIA ever undertook an investigation and this fact is probably the most curious aspect of the case. The Cameron Highlands is a hill-station north of Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia. Small rewards were posted for information leading to answers about what had happened to him.

What happened to Jim Thompson? Was he eaten by a tiger? Was he kidnapped? Was he killed by Cambodians? Was he killed in a robbery by natives? Was he killed by Thai royalty? Was he on a secret mission for Thai royalty? Was he on a CIA mission? Was he killed by employees of his Thai Silk Company? Did he simply get lost in the jungle while out for a late-afternoon walk? Did the Viet Cong do him in? Was he killed by Pathet Lao? Was he killed by the Chinese in Vietnam? Was he a double agent? Was he on a secret mission to persuade Chinese Communists to stop supporting the Viet Cong?

Mrs. Galleher and her husband Earl made two visits to the Far East to try to unravel the mystery of her step-uncle’s disappearance. Their first trip was in 1966, the second in 1977. Their Touch-all-bases investigation was exemplary. Miss Marple, Agatha Christie, Sherlock Holmes and Charlie Chan could not have done a better job. During their search, they interviewed an international line-up of sources of information, from ambassadors, generals, intelligence operatives, high government officials in many countries, and U. S. congressman to inconspicuous natives in Asian nations. Result: zilch.

I suspect Mrs. Galleher might have been on a promising track when, two pages from the end of her book, she states: “Whatever his reasons, I believe Jim headed for China after he disappeared.” How did she reach this assumption and from whose office did it originate?

The answer is: I won’t tell you. Reviewers of mystery books properly do not tell readers cogent clues or answers to the mystery. The Main Man is surprising, I’ll tell you that. Could this be an unfounded rumor, too? Who knows?

Mrs. Galleher’s book is absorbing, with stretches of fine writing. The disappearance of James Harrison Williams Thompson is