IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO PURCHASE ANY OF THE BOOKS, PLEASE USE THE AMAZON LINKS BELOW.
Arabian Knight
The Lost Spy
The Brenner Assignment
The Irregulars
American Intelligence in War-time London
The Missing Thai Silk King
The Mighty Wurlitzer
In The Ruins of Empire
The Hunt For Nazi Spies
My Father’s Secret War
Endgame, 1945
Dragon’s War
A North Africa Story
Journey to Peking
The OSS in World War II Albania
FDR’s 12 Apostles
Legacy of Ashes
Twilight Warriors
Cloak and Dagger
Angling and War
Duffy’s War
Alliance of Enemies
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.
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.
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
The never-before-told true story of a small team of American saboteurs with orders to sever the Third Reich’s main supply artery—the Brenner Pass. Like a scene from Where Eagles Dare, a small team of American special operatives parachutes into Italy under the noses of thousands of German troops. Their orders: link up with local partisans in the mountains and sabotage the well-guarded Brenner Pass, the crucial route through the Alps for the Nazi war machine. Without the supplies that travel this route, the German war effort in Italy will grind to a halt.
Using thousands of recently declassified files, personal interviews, and private documents, including a behind-the-lines diary buried in a bottle, military historian Patrick K. O’Donnell has written a cinematic World War II adventure story.
The unforgettable cast of characters includes the dashing and daring team leader; the romantic idealist who plans the operation; the seductive Italian countess who is also a double-agent; and the maniacal SS officer who will stop at nothing to kill the team and their partisan collaborators.
The Brenner Assignment is also a World War II story that resonates today, revealing lessons for the war on terror and illustrating the complex nature of insurgency.
Packed with action, suspense, intrigue, and even romance, this exciting true tale of survival and sabotage behind enemy l ines is one of the greatest untold adventure stories of World War II.
www.brennerassignment.com
By Patrick K. O'Donnell
Da Capo Press
The never-before-told true story of a small team of American saboteurs with orders to sever the Third Reich’s main supply artery—the Brenner Pass. Like a scene from Where Eagles Dare, a small team of American special operatives parachutes into Italy under the noses of thousands of German troops. Their orders: link up with local partisans in the mountains and sabotage the well-guarded Brenner Pass, the crucial route through the Alps for the Nazi war machine. Without the supplies that travel this route, the German war effort in Italy will grind to a halt.
Using thousands of recently declassified files, personal interviews, and private documents, including a behind-the-lines diary buried in a bottle, military historian Patrick K. O’Donnell has written a cinematic World War II adventure story.
The unforgettable cast of characters includes the dashing and daring team leader; the romantic idealist who plans the operation; the seductive Italian countess who is also a double-agent; and the maniacal SS officer who will stop at nothing to kill the team and their partisan collaborators.
The Brenner Assignment is also a World War II story that resonates today, revealing lessons for the war on terror and illustrating the complex nature of insurgency.
Packed with action, suspense, intrigue, and even romance, this exciting true tale of survival and sabotage behind enemy l ines is one of the greatest untold adventure stories of World War II.
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.
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:
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.”
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 compensated – if this is the right word – by the appearance of his niece’s book. An adroit scriptwriter and other highly competent professionals in Hollywood could produce a good movie about Mrs. Galleher’s adventures in the Far East.
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 compensated – if this is the right word – by the appearance of his niece’s book. An adroit scriptwriter and other highly competent professionals in Hollywood could produce a good movie about Mrs. Galleher’s adventures in the Far East.
The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played
America
By Hugh Wilford
Harvard University Press, 342 pages
Reviewed by Dan Pinck
Mr. Wilford’s book is a surgical incision into the intelligence life of Frank Gardner Wisner, a preeminent cold warrior who served in the operational cockpit of our international attempts to rollback the spread of communism. That we achieved our goal is due in part to many of the schemes and strategies developed and set in motion by Mr. Wisner and his colleagues at the CIA. He took risks and made mistakes that come with the territory. If we intend to praise him, we should praise ourselves. If we care to heap calumny on him for his mistakes, we should blame ourselves. If a person is involved in operations and doesn’t take risks and doesn’t make mistakes, that person is not doing his or her job. (Inevitably, some mistakes are inexcusable.)
As there are no easy answers, there are no easy questions. In framing my review or observations, I would like to ask Frank Wisner what he thinks of this book. My feeling is that he would give it a High Pass; in fact, he would commend it for limning the major points in his career and especially the influence of his mentor, George F. Kennan, the principal architect of our earliest Cold War strategies and tactics. And I’d like to contemplate whether Mr. Wisner, had he lived a life almost as long as Mr. Kennan, who died in 2005 at age 101 and who retained his mental sharpness and severe skepticism until the end and repudiated some of his earliest assumptions, -- whether Mr. Wisner would have changed his bedrock outlook on containing communism. I’d like to think he would have changed some of the tunes that he played on his Mighty Wurlitzer. Mr. Wisner called his covert operation a Mighty Wurlitzer on which he could play any propaganda or operational tune.
Imagine that Mr. Wisner at age thirty-eight being charged by George Kennan “with the task of breaking up the Soviet Empire.” Mr. Wisner was gung-ho. In 1949, his Office of Policy Coordination made its first attempt to overthrow a foreign government, the communist regime of Albanian dictator Never Hoxha. It was a total failure. The British traitor Kim Philby was the Washington liaison between the Office of Policy Coordination and MI6; he gave the information to the Soviets and all of our agents were killed by Hoxha’s men. Further infiltrations were made in the Baltic States and the Ukraine, with the same results. Covert action continued. Mr. Wilford notes that “... Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles believed clandestine foreign interventions to be a relatively inexpensive, and conveniently deniable, means of waging the Cold War.” You can’t blame Frank Wisner for that; part of his job description was to take the blame. Then and now, the President is actually the CEO of the CIA. The Director of Central Intelligence is, in reality, the Chief Operating Officer.
Do we know beyond a doubt that he was responsible for the overthrow of Mohammad Mossedagh in Iran; that he was responsible for the recruitment of former members of the Nazi Party to help us in covert operations against the Soviet Union? Do we know for certain that he and Allen Dulles tried to upend American democracy by creating an imposing number of fronts and by persuading influential American newspaper publishers, editors and journalists to feed information to the CIA and to prevent damaging information from being printed in their publications? Do we know that the CIA supported or infiltrated a number of magazines in our country and in Germany and Great Britain? Do we know that his office was responsible for recruiting a variety of academic departments to support the training of foreign nationals and, through varied fronts, to entice students, labor unions and religious organizations, including the International Catholic Youth Federation and the Young Women’s Christian Association (for heaven’s sake), museum directors, including the New York Museum of Modern Art, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Boston Symphony Orchestra (for gosh sakes), the American Society of African Culture, and a host of other organizations? Do we know that he supported the Harvard University International Affairs Committee and Center for International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology? Relying on primary sources and some recently declassified material, Mr. Wilford assures us that this information is not a fable. Maybe the President of the United States was the instigator. Who knows or will ever know? Maybe it was George Kennan. I’m reluctant to put the finger on Frank Wisner.
Maybe this is not as outlandish as it sounds. Willi Munzenberg, a German citizen born in Prussia and a Marxist intellectual, was one of the most imaginative communist agents ever. Beginning in 1917, he composed score and the play book for what became the CIA’s Mighty Wurlitzer. He knew how to reach the minds and hearts of people through a myriad of fronts that concealed the fact that they were unknowingly supporting the Russian State. He used psychology before there was psychology to capture the minds of the enemy; he did it brilliantly. Mr. Wilford quotes from a biography of Munzenberg titled The Red Millionaire: “Out of these early efforts grew the so-called Munzenberg trust, a vast media of newspapers, publishing houses, movie houses, and theaters which, ‘on paper at least,’ stretched from Berlin ‘to Paris to London to New York to Hollywood to Shanghai to Delhi.” Devices such as this were used by Munzenberg who called them front committees. His operations were picked up by Kennan, a student of Russian history. The Mighty Wurlitzer had its genesis in the Soviet Union. Wisner, partly with Kennan’s guidance, adapted the scheme for his own purposes.
Mr. Wilford’s index is tantalizing. It invites our interest and suggests that if spend the time to decode it, we might deduce the substance and flair undertaken in his research and the breadth of his own investigative skill. We can follow it for fun as well as our asking the question: Was everyone in the CIA or used, without their knowledge, by the CIA? And how many were pawns or dupes of Soviet fronts, again without their knowledge? Some persons mentioned are: Vladimir Nabokov, Jerry Lewis, Dean Martin, F. O. Matthiessen, John Crowe Ransom, Georgia O’Keefe, George Orwell, Jackson Pollack, Elmore Schwartz, Stephen Spender, Gertrude Stein, John Wayne, Arthur Hayes Sulzberger, De Witt Wallace, Ernest Hemingway, Clement Greenberg, Lionel Hampton, James Cagney, Aaron Copeland, Isaiah Berlin, and many others. In a sense, some of these persons reflect the propaganda and scope of the front games of the CIA and the Soviet Union. Of course, the implications of the domestic Wurlitzer were anything but fun and games.
In addition to innumerable front groups, including student associations and labor unions, some of which reached around the world, from Harvard to Europe and Africa. Mr. Wisner recruited more than 450 journalists and writers on our leading newspapers, magazines, and left-leaning periodicals to provide the CIA with information – you can call it spying in many instances – about people and organizations in the United States and in other nations; and, in addition, co-opting them to go easy on writing and publishing incriminating articles about the CIA’s operations. The publisher of The New York Times, Arthur Hayes Sulzberger, a friend of Allen Dulles, played ball with the CIA. A few journalists were repelled by the invitation to become secret agents and they rejected the CIA’s invitation. In effect, Mr. Wisner waged a total Cold War at home and abroad. When many of his operations were exposed, the CIA was almost wrecked.
Strangely, we know more about the personal lives of others than we do about Frank Wisner. Allen Dulles’s photograph is on the cover of the book, not Frank Wisner’s. We learn this about Dulles: “The eve of World War II found Dulles as genial and raffish as ever (qualities that apparently made him irresistible to women – his sexual conquests, in addition to his long-suffering wife Clover, included the queen (sic) of Greece, a daughter of Toscanini, and Clare Booth Luce) but drifting professionally.” Aw shucks.
Frank Gardner Winsor: Born in Mississippi in 1910, died in Maryland in 1965. The bare bones of his existence barely serve as an introduction to posterity. His intelligence career – at least those parts of it that set off firecrackers – is mentioned in many books about the CIA. But none, so far as I know, reveal what kind of a person he was. It seems that the good that he did was interred at his death. Yes, in my opinion, he must have had many commendable, personal qualities; and in his professional life, I feel that he must have made distinguished contributions. All I do know is that he had a few outstanding persons who worked closely with him and achieved well-deserved prominence in our society after they left the CIA. That book has yet to be written. In the meanwhile, we accept Mr. Wilford’s insightful, well-written and modestly-told accounting of an important segment of Wisner’s professional career. Mr. Wilford writes clearly and without the inbred pomposity of so many popular historians and journalists. Frank Wisner played a major role in the Cold War and he’s worthy of Mr. Wilford’s attention and of ours.
Mr. Wilford is a leading historian of the Cold War. Among his other books are The C. I. A., the British Left, and the Cold War (2003); and is the editor, with Helen Laville, of The U. S. Government, Citizen Groups, and the Cold War: The State-Private Network (2006). He is a member of the Total Cold War Roundtable. If he degrades Major General William J. Donovan’s contribution in his new book – well, that’s to be expected; in three books by British historians that I’ve read in the past few months, the writers slam General Donovan and his career in intelligence. I’ve a suspicion of the genesis of this condemnation, but I won’t mention it here.
The interest and outcry against our own intelligence system that began with the expose in Ramparts magazine in 1966 of the CIA and its Mighty Wurlitzer surpasses our interest in, and our outcry against, foreign intelligence operation. This continues today. With Slam Dunk, we moved from skepticism to cynicism.
P. S. We won the Cold War.
By Hugh Wilford
Harvard University Press, 342 pages
Reviewed by Dan Pinck
Mr. Wilford’s book is a surgical incision into the intelligence life of Frank Gardner Wisner, a preeminent cold warrior who served in the operational cockpit of our international attempts to rollback the spread of communism. That we achieved our goal is due in part to many of the schemes and strategies developed and set in motion by Mr. Wisner and his colleagues at the CIA. He took risks and made mistakes that come with the territory. If we intend to praise him, we should praise ourselves. If we care to heap calumny on him for his mistakes, we should blame ourselves. If a person is involved in operations and doesn’t take risks and doesn’t make mistakes, that person is not doing his or her job. (Inevitably, some mistakes are inexcusable.)
As there are no easy answers, there are no easy questions. In framing my review or observations, I would like to ask Frank Wisner what he thinks of this book. My feeling is that he would give it a High Pass; in fact, he would commend it for limning the major points in his career and especially the influence of his mentor, George F. Kennan, the principal architect of our earliest Cold War strategies and tactics. And I’d like to contemplate whether Mr. Wisner, had he lived a life almost as long as Mr. Kennan, who died in 2005 at age 101 and who retained his mental sharpness and severe skepticism until the end and repudiated some of his earliest assumptions, -- whether Mr. Wisner would have changed his bedrock outlook on containing communism. I’d like to think he would have changed some of the tunes that he played on his Mighty Wurlitzer. Mr. Wisner called his covert operation a Mighty Wurlitzer on which he could play any propaganda or operational tune.
Imagine that Mr. Wisner at age thirty-eight being charged by George Kennan “with the task of breaking up the Soviet Empire.” Mr. Wisner was gung-ho. In 1949, his Office of Policy Coordination made its first attempt to overthrow a foreign government, the communist regime of Albanian dictator Never Hoxha. It was a total failure. The British traitor Kim Philby was the Washington liaison between the Office of Policy Coordination and MI6; he gave the information to the Soviets and all of our agents were killed by Hoxha’s men. Further infiltrations were made in the Baltic States and the Ukraine, with the same results. Covert action continued. Mr. Wilford notes that “... Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles believed clandestine foreign interventions to be a relatively inexpensive, and conveniently deniable, means of waging the Cold War.” You can’t blame Frank Wisner for that; part of his job description was to take the blame. Then and now, the President is actually the CEO of the CIA. The Director of Central Intelligence is, in reality, the Chief Operating Officer.
Do we know beyond a doubt that he was responsible for the overthrow of Mohammad Mossedagh in Iran; that he was responsible for the recruitment of former members of the Nazi Party to help us in covert operations against the Soviet Union? Do we know for certain that he and Allen Dulles tried to upend American democracy by creating an imposing number of fronts and by persuading influential American newspaper publishers, editors and journalists to feed information to the CIA and to prevent damaging information from being printed in their publications? Do we know that the CIA supported or infiltrated a number of magazines in our country and in Germany and Great Britain? Do we know that his office was responsible for recruiting a variety of academic departments to support the training of foreign nationals and, through varied fronts, to entice students, labor unions and religious organizations, including the International Catholic Youth Federation and the Young Women’s Christian Association (for heaven’s sake), museum directors, including the New York Museum of Modern Art, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Boston Symphony Orchestra (for gosh sakes), the American Society of African Culture, and a host of other organizations? Do we know that he supported the Harvard University International Affairs Committee and Center for International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology? Relying on primary sources and some recently declassified material, Mr. Wilford assures us that this information is not a fable. Maybe the President of the United States was the instigator. Who knows or will ever know? Maybe it was George Kennan. I’m reluctant to put the finger on Frank Wisner.
Maybe this is not as outlandish as it sounds. Willi Munzenberg, a German citizen born in Prussia and a Marxist intellectual, was one of the most imaginative communist agents ever. Beginning in 1917, he composed score and the play book for what became the CIA’s Mighty Wurlitzer. He knew how to reach the minds and hearts of people through a myriad of fronts that concealed the fact that they were unknowingly supporting the Russian State. He used psychology before there was psychology to capture the minds of the enemy; he did it brilliantly. Mr. Wilford quotes from a biography of Munzenberg titled The Red Millionaire: “Out of these early efforts grew the so-called Munzenberg trust, a vast media of newspapers, publishing houses, movie houses, and theaters which, ‘on paper at least,’ stretched from Berlin ‘to Paris to London to New York to Hollywood to Shanghai to Delhi.” Devices such as this were used by Munzenberg who called them front committees. His operations were picked up by Kennan, a student of Russian history. The Mighty Wurlitzer had its genesis in the Soviet Union. Wisner, partly with Kennan’s guidance, adapted the scheme for his own purposes.
Mr. Wilford’s index is tantalizing. It invites our interest and suggests that if spend the time to decode it, we might deduce the substance and flair undertaken in his research and the breadth of his own investigative skill. We can follow it for fun as well as our asking the question: Was everyone in the CIA or used, without their knowledge, by the CIA? And how many were pawns or dupes of Soviet fronts, again without their knowledge? Some persons mentioned are: Vladimir Nabokov, Jerry Lewis, Dean Martin, F. O. Matthiessen, John Crowe Ransom, Georgia O’Keefe, George Orwell, Jackson Pollack, Elmore Schwartz, Stephen Spender, Gertrude Stein, John Wayne, Arthur Hayes Sulzberger, De Witt Wallace, Ernest Hemingway, Clement Greenberg, Lionel Hampton, James Cagney, Aaron Copeland, Isaiah Berlin, and many others. In a sense, some of these persons reflect the propaganda and scope of the front games of the CIA and the Soviet Union. Of course, the implications of the domestic Wurlitzer were anything but fun and games.
In addition to innumerable front groups, including student associations and labor unions, some of which reached around the world, from Harvard to Europe and Africa. Mr. Wisner recruited more than 450 journalists and writers on our leading newspapers, magazines, and left-leaning periodicals to provide the CIA with information – you can call it spying in many instances – about people and organizations in the United States and in other nations; and, in addition, co-opting them to go easy on writing and publishing incriminating articles about the CIA’s operations. The publisher of The New York Times, Arthur Hayes Sulzberger, a friend of Allen Dulles, played ball with the CIA. A few journalists were repelled by the invitation to become secret agents and they rejected the CIA’s invitation. In effect, Mr. Wisner waged a total Cold War at home and abroad. When many of his operations were exposed, the CIA was almost wrecked.
Strangely, we know more about the personal lives of others than we do about Frank Wisner. Allen Dulles’s photograph is on the cover of the book, not Frank Wisner’s. We learn this about Dulles: “The eve of World War II found Dulles as genial and raffish as ever (qualities that apparently made him irresistible to women – his sexual conquests, in addition to his long-suffering wife Clover, included the queen (sic) of Greece, a daughter of Toscanini, and Clare Booth Luce) but drifting professionally.” Aw shucks.
Frank Gardner Winsor: Born in Mississippi in 1910, died in Maryland in 1965. The bare bones of his existence barely serve as an introduction to posterity. His intelligence career – at least those parts of it that set off firecrackers – is mentioned in many books about the CIA. But none, so far as I know, reveal what kind of a person he was. It seems that the good that he did was interred at his death. Yes, in my opinion, he must have had many commendable, personal qualities; and in his professional life, I feel that he must have made distinguished contributions. All I do know is that he had a few outstanding persons who worked closely with him and achieved well-deserved prominence in our society after they left the CIA. That book has yet to be written. In the meanwhile, we accept Mr. Wilford’s insightful, well-written and modestly-told accounting of an important segment of Wisner’s professional career. Mr. Wilford writes clearly and without the inbred pomposity of so many popular historians and journalists. Frank Wisner played a major role in the Cold War and he’s worthy of Mr. Wilford’s attention and of ours.
Mr. Wilford is a leading historian of the Cold War. Among his other books are The C. I. A., the British Left, and the Cold War (2003); and is the editor, with Helen Laville, of The U. S. Government, Citizen Groups, and the Cold War: The State-Private Network (2006). He is a member of the Total Cold War Roundtable. If he degrades Major General William J. Donovan’s contribution in his new book – well, that’s to be expected; in three books by British historians that I’ve read in the past few months, the writers slam General Donovan and his career in intelligence. I’ve a suspicion of the genesis of this condemnation, but I won’t mention it here.
The interest and outcry against our own intelligence system that began with the expose in Ramparts magazine in 1966 of the CIA and its Mighty Wurlitzer surpasses our interest in, and our outcry against, foreign intelligence operation. This continues today. With Slam Dunk, we moved from skepticism to cynicism.
P. S. We won the Cold War.
In The Ruins of Empire: The Japanese
Surrender And The Battle for Postwar Asia
By Ronald H. Spector
Random House, 2007
Reviewed by Dan Pinck
This book is difficult for me to assess and I don’t mind saying this. Mr. Spector is a historian with a commendable reputation. He has written six or seven books that skillfully illuminate past wars, including World War II and Vietnam. Given the wide-angle scope and boldness of the thesis in his new book, I’m puzzled by its execution and the style or manner in which picks at some important facts. In some respects, his history is excitingly sound and in other respects, it’s somewhat scattered. I add that it’s possible that his book demolishes some of my thoughts about war and peace in Asia, and it dumps some of assumptions in a waste paper basket. But never mind. This goes with the territory of anyone who tries to capture China during the Second World War, as well as before and after it. When you add French Indochina, Great Britain, and the Netherlands to the mix, and Japan after their surrender, you’ve got an imposing swath of history. How to pick and choose? In this review, I propose to suggest what the context is, not to cover the entire, postwar geopolitical and military history of Asia. That’s a complex task for me. I expect I will concentrate on mainland China, with a few excursions to other nations. Along the way, I will undoubtedly reveal some of my eccentricities and biases.
I choose to allow Mr. Spector to set the compass of where he’s heading in his own words. I’ve added my observations. The following excerpts are from his introduction:
“Americans are accustomed to thinking of World War II as having ended on August 14, 1945, when Japan surrendered unconditionally.”
MY COMMENT: I confess that I’m one of those roughly 200 million Americans who believes that World War II ended with Japan’s surrender. I have a copy of the surrender document. When I occasionally read it, I have no doubt that’s when the war officially ended. I’m also accustomed to thinking that World War I ended on November 11, 1918. And I recognize that the Versaille Treaty all but guaranteed Germany’s initiating World War II. The interim years might be seen as a Cold War.
“ That was the end of the war so far as most Americans were concerned. Yet on the mainland of Asia, in the vast arc of countries and territories stretching from Manchuria to Burma, peace was at best a brief interlude. In some parts of Asia, such as Java and southern Indochina, peace lasted less than two months. In China, a fragile and incomplete peace lasted less than a year. In northern Indochina, peace lasted about fifteen months, and in Korea, about three years. Indeed, 1945-46 in Asia may have appeared to many not as a time when war ended, but as a time when various protagonists switched sides.”
MY COMMENT: In fairness to Mr. Spectator, some wars were undoubtedly a continuation of what had been taking place, before and after World War II, especially in China. Japan invaded China’s province of Manchuria, with 200,000 troops, on September 18, 1931. They took control of Mukden in a four-hour battle. Japan began its invasion of China proper at the Marco Polo Bridge, near Peking, on July 7, 1937. After the Japanese surrender, the Nationalist Chinese fought the Communist Chinese until October 1, 1949. On that date, the Communists officially declared victory, in Peking, and the People’s Republic of China was born.
For the record, I believe that “a fragile and incomplete peace” after Japan’s surrender, lasted far less than a year. In fact, in parts of South China the Communists were sending teenagers, a few months after Japan’s surrender, into villages to inhabitants who lived on the main commercial paths. Later in this review, I will discuss China.
“Why did peace in Asia prove so elusive? What were the elements that contributed to the long postwar years of grim struggle during which many suffered far more than they had during World War II itself. With one exception, they were places in which things went disastrously wrong and gave birth to long-term problems that sometimes outlived the Cold War. This is largely a story about military occupations and their consequences. After the American experiences in Iraq it is unnecessary to explain that military occupations that follow on the areas of mainland Asia that had formed part of Japan’s empire.”
MY COMMENT: Our first responsibility in World War II in Asia, as it was in all theaters, was to win the war, to defeat our enemies, to save as many lives as possible, and to get home as soon as we could. To equate postwar problems in Asia to the absence of postwar military occupations is Mr. Spector’s primary thesis, I believe. Fighting didn’t stop in Asia after Japan’s surrender. It stopped in Japan because we occupied Japan. It did not stop in Asia because we went home as soon as we could. Peace brought war. Wars to end wars have long gone out of fashion. Lamentably, wars are a constant. No nation is so wise that it can forecast all of the consequences of its actions. Among President’s Eisenhower’s first actions was to end the war in Korea, and among his last was to make the unfortunate first steps that led to the Vietnam War. Were these wars generated by our failure in not providing a large army to sustain the Nationalist Chinese in their continuing war against the Chinese Communists, following the Japanese surrender and by our not building and sustaining an omnipotent military occupation in China, Indochina and Korea after Japan surrendered? Of course, I don’t know the answer to that. If I understand Mr. Spector correctly, and maybe I don’t, I wonder about his statement: “After the American experiences in Iraq it is unnecessary to explain that military occupations that follow on the areas of mainland Asia that had formed part of Japan’s empire.”
MY COMMENT: This puzzles me. I don’t know the answer; and I don’t know the question. But his challenge to conventional thinking is provocative. That’s for sure. Mr. Spector considers, I believe, that the nations which the Japanese conquered in Asia as components of their wartime empire. My problem with this is one of definition. Should a nation or territory that you’ve conquered by slaughtering tens of thousands of civilians and military personnel, throughout your occupation, be rightly defined as part of an empire? “The Shorter Oxford Dictionary” defines Empire in a number of different ways. “Supreme and extensive political dominion.” “An extensive territory (exp. an aggregate of many states) ruled over by an emporer or by a sovereign state.” “Great Britain with its colonies and dependencies; the British Empire.” In short, while you spend a few years killing a nation’s people, is the definition of “Empire” correct? I doubt it. Maybe, it’s a technicality. Is it correct to consider the nations that you conquer while the fighting occurs as part of your empire?
Mr. Spector is on target when he focuses on the pervasive problems of colonialism in Asia which were especially in the domains of the French, Dutch, and Great Britain. European imperialism was at the heart of the matter in Asia during and after the war. In 1942, President Roosevelt wrote to his son, Elliott, “Don’t think for a moment that Americans would be dying in the Pacific tonight if it hadn’t been for the short-sighted greed of the French and the British and the Dutch.” You may permit me for adding that if it weren’t for the Japanese, none of our Allies would have died in the Pacific and Asia. But Mr. Spector is precisely correct in identifying one of the major stumbling blocks to our efforts to reclaiming peace after the war. You ought to know that the Dutch was the most malevolent of the imperialists; the natives in Dutch-ruled territories, in general, at first welcomed the Japanese and would do almost anything to get out of the clutches of the Dutch. The same held true for the French and the British. And, in fact, we assisted them in recovering their Asian empires. An example is our helping Great Britain to return to Hong Kong before the Nationalist Chinese. The British presence in Hong Kong was analogous to a foreign nation owning New York. But we didn’t see it that way. The Nationalists wanted our help in flying their troops to Hong Kong as soon as Japan surrended. We did not do that, as you know. A day or two after the surrender, with our connivance, British ships landed in Hong Kong. And, as you may also know, we helped the French maintain their empire in Indochina. President Truman sent them military equipment to fight the Vietnamese.
Let me go back in history. When Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931, our Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson protested and Japan acceded to a temporary peace accord. He persuaded the League of Nations to send an investigative team to Manchuria headed by Viscount Lytton of Great Britain with members representing the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany and Italy. The team’s report that called for Japan to leave was passed by the League of Nations by a vote of 42 to 1. Result: Japan remained in Manchuria, the industrial heartland of China. No nation intervened. It’s interesting to note that a United States Congressman from Illinois published an article in H.L. Mencken’s magazine a year or two later in which he predicted that if we didn’t force the Japanese out of China, there would soon be a major war in China. Beginning in Manchuria, the Japanese record in killing prisoners and civilians never abated, without change or remission for the following thirteen years.
Japan’s Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere began its work without remorse or pity. Murder is murder: an inclusive policy was followed subsequently in Burma, Thailand, Malaya, Indochina, Singapore, Formosa, Hong Kong, New Guinea, Korea, Borneo, Sumatra, the Philippines, the Netherland East Indies, in Japan itself, and throughout the Pacific. When Japan began its invasion of China proper at the Marco Polo Bridge, in 1937, the Chinese again appealed for help. Our Secretary of State Cordell Hull delivered a speech on July 14, 1937, advocating international justics and avoidance of the use of force as an instrument in promoting national policy. Result: nothing happened. China then appealed to Great Britain for help. The British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlin adoped an appeasement policy toward Japan; his priority was to maintain British interests in the Far East. Result: nothing happened. Four years later, our entry into the Second World War began at Pearl Harbor, and China became our ally in the all-out war against Japan. History does keep a dear school.
“All of the soldiers who brought their various versions of liberations to the countries of Greater East Asia were members of famous military units, veterans of the most difficult campaigns of World War II. They were unprepared for their new role as occupiers and had at best
By Ronald H. Spector
Random House, 2007
Reviewed by Dan Pinck
This book is difficult for me to assess and I don’t mind saying this. Mr. Spector is a historian with a commendable reputation. He has written six or seven books that skillfully illuminate past wars, including World War II and Vietnam. Given the wide-angle scope and boldness of the thesis in his new book, I’m puzzled by its execution and the style or manner in which picks at some important facts. In some respects, his history is excitingly sound and in other respects, it’s somewhat scattered. I add that it’s possible that his book demolishes some of my thoughts about war and peace in Asia, and it dumps some of assumptions in a waste paper basket. But never mind. This goes with the territory of anyone who tries to capture China during the Second World War, as well as before and after it. When you add French Indochina, Great Britain, and the Netherlands to the mix, and Japan after their surrender, you’ve got an imposing swath of history. How to pick and choose? In this review, I propose to suggest what the context is, not to cover the entire, postwar geopolitical and military history of Asia. That’s a complex task for me. I expect I will concentrate on mainland China, with a few excursions to other nations. Along the way, I will undoubtedly reveal some of my eccentricities and biases.
I choose to allow Mr. Spector to set the compass of where he’s heading in his own words. I’ve added my observations. The following excerpts are from his introduction:
“Americans are accustomed to thinking of World War II as having ended on August 14, 1945, when Japan surrendered unconditionally.”
MY COMMENT: I confess that I’m one of those roughly 200 million Americans who believes that World War II ended with Japan’s surrender. I have a copy of the surrender document. When I occasionally read it, I have no doubt that’s when the war officially ended. I’m also accustomed to thinking that World War I ended on November 11, 1918. And I recognize that the Versaille Treaty all but guaranteed Germany’s initiating World War II. The interim years might be seen as a Cold War.
“ That was the end of the war so far as most Americans were concerned. Yet on the mainland of Asia, in the vast arc of countries and territories stretching from Manchuria to Burma, peace was at best a brief interlude. In some parts of Asia, such as Java and southern Indochina, peace lasted less than two months. In China, a fragile and incomplete peace lasted less than a year. In northern Indochina, peace lasted about fifteen months, and in Korea, about three years. Indeed, 1945-46 in Asia may have appeared to many not as a time when war ended, but as a time when various protagonists switched sides.”
MY COMMENT: In fairness to Mr. Spectator, some wars were undoubtedly a continuation of what had been taking place, before and after World War II, especially in China. Japan invaded China’s province of Manchuria, with 200,000 troops, on September 18, 1931. They took control of Mukden in a four-hour battle. Japan began its invasion of China proper at the Marco Polo Bridge, near Peking, on July 7, 1937. After the Japanese surrender, the Nationalist Chinese fought the Communist Chinese until October 1, 1949. On that date, the Communists officially declared victory, in Peking, and the People’s Republic of China was born.
For the record, I believe that “a fragile and incomplete peace” after Japan’s surrender, lasted far less than a year. In fact, in parts of South China the Communists were sending teenagers, a few months after Japan’s surrender, into villages to inhabitants who lived on the main commercial paths. Later in this review, I will discuss China.
“Why did peace in Asia prove so elusive? What were the elements that contributed to the long postwar years of grim struggle during which many suffered far more than they had during World War II itself. With one exception, they were places in which things went disastrously wrong and gave birth to long-term problems that sometimes outlived the Cold War. This is largely a story about military occupations and their consequences. After the American experiences in Iraq it is unnecessary to explain that military occupations that follow on the areas of mainland Asia that had formed part of Japan’s empire.”
MY COMMENT: Our first responsibility in World War II in Asia, as it was in all theaters, was to win the war, to defeat our enemies, to save as many lives as possible, and to get home as soon as we could. To equate postwar problems in Asia to the absence of postwar military occupations is Mr. Spector’s primary thesis, I believe. Fighting didn’t stop in Asia after Japan’s surrender. It stopped in Japan because we occupied Japan. It did not stop in Asia because we went home as soon as we could. Peace brought war. Wars to end wars have long gone out of fashion. Lamentably, wars are a constant. No nation is so wise that it can forecast all of the consequences of its actions. Among President’s Eisenhower’s first actions was to end the war in Korea, and among his last was to make the unfortunate first steps that led to the Vietnam War. Were these wars generated by our failure in not providing a large army to sustain the Nationalist Chinese in their continuing war against the Chinese Communists, following the Japanese surrender and by our not building and sustaining an omnipotent military occupation in China, Indochina and Korea after Japan surrendered? Of course, I don’t know the answer to that. If I understand Mr. Spector correctly, and maybe I don’t, I wonder about his statement: “After the American experiences in Iraq it is unnecessary to explain that military occupations that follow on the areas of mainland Asia that had formed part of Japan’s empire.”
MY COMMENT: This puzzles me. I don’t know the answer; and I don’t know the question. But his challenge to conventional thinking is provocative. That’s for sure. Mr. Spector considers, I believe, that the nations which the Japanese conquered in Asia as components of their wartime empire. My problem with this is one of definition. Should a nation or territory that you’ve conquered by slaughtering tens of thousands of civilians and military personnel, throughout your occupation, be rightly defined as part of an empire? “The Shorter Oxford Dictionary” defines Empire in a number of different ways. “Supreme and extensive political dominion.” “An extensive territory (exp. an aggregate of many states) ruled over by an emporer or by a sovereign state.” “Great Britain with its colonies and dependencies; the British Empire.” In short, while you spend a few years killing a nation’s people, is the definition of “Empire” correct? I doubt it. Maybe, it’s a technicality. Is it correct to consider the nations that you conquer while the fighting occurs as part of your empire?
Mr. Spector is on target when he focuses on the pervasive problems of colonialism in Asia which were especially in the domains of the French, Dutch, and Great Britain. European imperialism was at the heart of the matter in Asia during and after the war. In 1942, President Roosevelt wrote to his son, Elliott, “Don’t think for a moment that Americans would be dying in the Pacific tonight if it hadn’t been for the short-sighted greed of the French and the British and the Dutch.” You may permit me for adding that if it weren’t for the Japanese, none of our Allies would have died in the Pacific and Asia. But Mr. Spector is precisely correct in identifying one of the major stumbling blocks to our efforts to reclaiming peace after the war. You ought to know that the Dutch was the most malevolent of the imperialists; the natives in Dutch-ruled territories, in general, at first welcomed the Japanese and would do almost anything to get out of the clutches of the Dutch. The same held true for the French and the British. And, in fact, we assisted them in recovering their Asian empires. An example is our helping Great Britain to return to Hong Kong before the Nationalist Chinese. The British presence in Hong Kong was analogous to a foreign nation owning New York. But we didn’t see it that way. The Nationalists wanted our help in flying their troops to Hong Kong as soon as Japan surrended. We did not do that, as you know. A day or two after the surrender, with our connivance, British ships landed in Hong Kong. And, as you may also know, we helped the French maintain their empire in Indochina. President Truman sent them military equipment to fight the Vietnamese.
Let me go back in history. When Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931, our Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson protested and Japan acceded to a temporary peace accord. He persuaded the League of Nations to send an investigative team to Manchuria headed by Viscount Lytton of Great Britain with members representing the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany and Italy. The team’s report that called for Japan to leave was passed by the League of Nations by a vote of 42 to 1. Result: Japan remained in Manchuria, the industrial heartland of China. No nation intervened. It’s interesting to note that a United States Congressman from Illinois published an article in H.L. Mencken’s magazine a year or two later in which he predicted that if we didn’t force the Japanese out of China, there would soon be a major war in China. Beginning in Manchuria, the Japanese record in killing prisoners and civilians never abated, without change or remission for the following thirteen years.
Japan’s Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere began its work without remorse or pity. Murder is murder: an inclusive policy was followed subsequently in Burma, Thailand, Malaya, Indochina, Singapore, Formosa, Hong Kong, New Guinea, Korea, Borneo, Sumatra, the Philippines, the Netherland East Indies, in Japan itself, and throughout the Pacific. When Japan began its invasion of China proper at the Marco Polo Bridge, in 1937, the Chinese again appealed for help. Our Secretary of State Cordell Hull delivered a speech on July 14, 1937, advocating international justics and avoidance of the use of force as an instrument in promoting national policy. Result: nothing happened. China then appealed to Great Britain for help. The British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlin adoped an appeasement policy toward Japan; his priority was to maintain British interests in the Far East. Result: nothing happened. Four years later, our entry into the Second World War began at Pearl Harbor, and China became our ally in the all-out war against Japan. History does keep a dear school.
“All of the soldiers who brought their various versions of liberations to the countries of Greater East Asia were members of famous military units, veterans of the most difficult campaigns of World War II. They were unprepared for their new role as occupiers and had at best