The National Park Service has posted on its website an extensive report entitled, “OSS Training in the National Parks and Service Abroad in World War II,” prepared for the Park Service by John Whiteclay Chambers II, professor of history at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. The typescript report runs more than 600 pages of text, footnotes and bibliography, plus nearly 90 pages of illustrations.

For a book for a wider audience, Professor Chambers is now preparing an shorter, revised, and updated study for possible publication by Rutgers University Press in 2009.

The National Park Service report is located on the NPS website.

By Hans Bernd Gisevius
Da Capo Press

When on July 20, 1944, a bomb—boldly place inside Hitler’s headquarters by Colonel Claus Count von Stauffenberg—exploded without killing the Führer, the subsequent coup d’état against the Third Reich, codenamed Valkyrie, collapsed. The conspirators were summarily shot or condemned in show trials and sadistically hanged.
 
One of the few survivors of the conspiracy was Hans Bernd Gisevius , who had used his positions in the Gestapo and the Abwehr (military intelligence) to further the anti-Nazi plot. He knew well or had met the major figures involved in planning Valkyrie, including General August Beck, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, Colonel Hans Oster, and von Stauffenberg. The conspiracy was widespread, involving a wide circle of former politicians, diplomats, and government officials as well as senior military men. The anti-Hitler movement, largely motivated by moral outrage than by political expediency, had started as early as 1933 and involved several putsches and assassination attempts.
 
Valkyrie, an abridgment of Gisevius’s classic insider’s account To the Bitter End, is an intimate memoir as riveting as it is exceptional.

OSS: Greek & Norwegian OGs, training in Scotland, 1945 with Lt. Roger Hall. 
Greeks on one side, Norwegians on the other.


See More OSS Photos In Our Photo Section...

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.

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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..

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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 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.

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The New York Times
By Scott Shane

John E. Taylor, a specialist in military history at the National Archives for 63 years and a trusted guide to authors mining the dusty records of past wars, died Saturday  at his home in Chevy Chase, Md. He was 87.

The cause was congestive heart failure, said his niece, Claudia Taylor Walsworth.

Mr. Taylor joined the archives staff in September 1945 at the close of World War II, whose intelligence records would become his particular interest. Despite declining health, he was still at work last week in the archives' facility in College Park, Md.

For decades, historians and journalists who visited the archives in search of obscure military or intelligence records were invariably referred to Mr. Taylor, who could often direct them to just the documents they needed. Few Americans have been thanked in the acknowledgments of so many books.

''With me as with everyone, Mr. Taylor was generous with his time and with his ideas,'' Allen Weinstein, archivist of the United States, said Tuesday in a statement. ''His distinguished career brought honor to the dogged research enterprise which the archives embodies.''

Iris Chang, author of the 1997 bestseller ''The Rape of Nanking,'' told The Baltimore Sun in 2003 of Mr. Taylor's assiduous attention to researchers' requests.

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Routledge
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.

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By Charles Pinck
The Martha's Vineyard Times
August 28, 2008

Earlier this month the National Archives released personnel files from World War II's Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency and U.S. Special Forces, which was founded and led by the legendary Major General William "Wild Bill" Donovan, the only American to receive our nation's four highest military honors. OSS luminaries included famed chef Julia Child, Kennedy aide Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Nobel Prize winner Ralph Bunche, movie director John Ford, Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, actor Sterling Hayden, writer John O'Hara, the artist Saul Steinberg, baseball player Moe Berg, among many others. General Donovan called them his "glorious amateurs."

OSS was a perfect reflection of General Donovan's character: a potent combination of brains, brawn, and bravado. General Donovan encouraged OSS personnel to take risks, frequently telling OSS personnel that, "you can't succeed without taking chances." Leading by example, General Donovan took the same risks himself. Members of OSS volunteered for the most dangerous missions of World War II behind enemy lines to conduct sabotage and guerilla warfare and work with local resistance groups. Their capture by the enemy meant certain death.

Intelligence provided by OSS was critical to the success of Operation Torch, the invasion of North Africa. Allen Dulles, chief of OSS operations in Switzerland, secretly negotiated the early surrender of German troops in Northern Italy. Fritz Kolbe, a German diplomat and an OSS asset, provided the U.S. with some of the most valuable intelligence of the war. Some of the most significant contributions came from leading academics in its Research and Analysis division. The Science and Technology branch devised imaginative new weapons and other espionage tools.

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By BRETT J. BLACKLEDGE and RANDY HERSCHAFT
Associated Press
August 13, 2008

WASHINGTON (AP) — Famed chef Julia Child shared a secret with Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg and Chicago White Sox catcher Moe Berg at a time when the Nazis threatened the world.

They served in an international spy ring managed by the Office of Strategic Services, an early version of the CIA created in World War II by President Franklin Roosevelt.

The secret comes out Thursday, all of the names and previously classified files identifying nearly 24,000 spies who formed the first centralized intelligence effort by the United States. The National Archives, which this week released a list of the names found in the records, will make available for the first time all 750,000 pages identifying the vast spy network of military and civilian operatives.

They were soldiers, actors, historians, lawyers, athletes, professors, reporters. But for several years during World War II, they were known simply as the OSS. They studied military plans, created propaganda, infiltrated enemy ranks and stirred resistance among foreign troops.

Among the more than 35,000 OSS personnel files are applications, commendations and handwritten notes identifying young recruits who, like Child, Goldberg and Berg, earned greater acclaim in other fields — Arthur Schlesinger Jr., a historian and special assistant to President Kennedy; Sterling Hayden, a film and television actor whose work included a role in "The Godfather"; Thomas Braden, an author who's "Eight Is Enough" book inspired the 1970s television series.

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The National Archives will open more than 35,000 official personnel files of men and women who served in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) which was the U.S. wartime intelligence agency during World War II. The files cover civilian and military personnel who served and were later transferred, discharged, reassigned, or died while in service prior to 1947. These records are available for research in the textual research room at the National Archives facility in College Park.

On the day of the opening, the press office will distribute CDs that include selected files of some of the notable people who served in the OSS, including former CIA directors Allen Dulles and William Casey, famed chef Julia Child, Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, Arab/Israeli peace negotiator and civil rights advocate Ralph Bunche, and Hollywood actor Sterling Hayden.

The 750,000 pages include initial applications to join the OSS; preliminary training and subsequent work assignments; pay, leave and travel documents; evaluations, basic medical information; and awards, decorations and discharge papers. Occasionally, photographs are included in the application file. Senior officials, officers and men engaged in special combat actions, such as Detachment 101, Jedburghs, X-2, espionage, and major intelligence missions may have citations summarizing those efforts in the files.

Name searches for individuals who served in the OSS can be found online in the Archival Research Catalogue listing for the OSS Personnel Files posted as ARC # 1593270 at http://arcweb.archives.gov/arc.

by Bob Bergin

Special operations conducted by the OSS during World War II were the foundation on which the U.S. Special Forces were built, and the basis for the special operations conducted by U.S. forces today.  The Special Operations (SO) Branch was one of two major divisions created by William Donovan when he organized the OSS.  Donovan’s thinking on the role and the nature of special operations is as relevant today as it was in the early days of World War II.

A July 30, 2008 Washington Post article “Strategy against Al-Qaeda Faulted” cites a major new Rand Corporation study critical of the course the U.S. is following in what has become known as the “war on terrorism”.  The study advocates that terrorists should be described as criminals, not warriors, and argues that the fight against terrorists is better waged by law enforcement agencies than armies.  According to the Post, the authors of the study say that “when military forces are needed, the emphasis should be on local troops, which understand the terrain and culture and tend to have greater legitimacy.  In Muslim countries in particular, there should be a ‘light military footprint or none at all.’”

Donovan’s thinking was most recently expressed by Major General John K. Singlaub in an interview published in the November issue of WWII History.  Singlaub was a young OSS officer when he parachuted into German-occupied France in 1944 to organize, train and lead a French Resistance unit.  Later he was sent to China to train Vietnamese guerrillas to operate in Japanese-occupied Indochina.

Singlaub commented on William Donovan’s thinking about special operations even before the U.S. became directly involved in World War II:  “President Roosevelt had authorized William “Wild Bill” Donovan, who later conceived and organized the OSS, to go to Great Britain in 1940 to look into things like espionage that we didn’t know very much about.  Donovan came back and tried to introduce the American leadership to what he called ‘the fourth dimension of warfare’. The first and second dimensions were land and naval warfare; the third, air warfare, was introduced in World War I.  The Fourth dimension, Donovan said, was to organize the enemy’s rear areas to our advantage.  The idea was to help people under German occupation and use them to achieve our objectives.  It’s what my group was heading for.”

Later in the same interview, when asked what most struck him as he looked back over a long and eventful career, Singlaub said:  “It’s clear that Donovan really understood that Special Operations were to be conducted as unconventional warfare.  We were given a mission and sent off to it with resources we had, whether we were in occupied France, China, or Vietnam.  We went in with very small teams.  The concept was that we would train the indigenous people and let them conduct the operations.  Today we’re losing that.  The emphasis now seems to be on direct action – to launch an attack with our own highly trained people to kill the enemy or kick down doors. There seems to be too much emphasis on the direct action part of special operations – rather than keeping our own participation low, and training the indigenous people to do the job.”

by Catherine Lyons
United Nations Association of the US

Donal McLaughlin, like any architect, said his wish was to see his designs come to life in brick and stone. Instead, the hallmark of McLaughlin's distinguished career can fit on a button one and one-sixteenth inches in diameter.

McLaughlin, who celebrated his 100th birthday on July 26, designed the lapel pin for the United Nations Conference on International Organization held in San Francisco in 1945. At the time, he had no idea his creation would be a symbol of peace and global cooperation throughout the world.

His design, which is stamped on the UN Charter signed June 26, 1945, remains the emblem of the UN today and one of the most recognizable symbols throughout the world.

McLaughlin, who was working at the State Departments's Office of Strategic Services (OSS) at the time of the conference, said the assignment came to him more by the luck of the draw.

"The previous three years during the war, I was employed by "Wild Bill" Donavan in the OSS as chief of graphics in that division," McLaughlin explained. "The war came to an end and the State Department was planning a meeting of United Nations in San Francisco and th ey asked my boss if they could employ our presentation division to help out there … among the things they needed was an identifying pin for all the delegates."

After McLaughlin and his team of artists drafted about nine different designs, a final illustration was chosen, although not without the breaking of some basic architectural rules, he said.

"The hardest part of the project was fitting the design and copy onto the small, circular pin that was one and one-sixteenth inches in diameter," McLaughlin said. "I did my thesis at Yale involving circular design and when I finished that I swore I'd never do another circular design because everything has to radiate from one center point."

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By Adam Bernstein Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, July 22, 2008; B06

Roger Hall, 89, who wrote "You're Stepping on My Cloak and Dagger," a wry memoir about World War II spycraft that became a cult classic in intelligence circles and appealed to a wide audience for its irreverence, died July 20 at his home in Wilmington, Del. He had congestive heart failure.

Mr. Hall's 1957 bestseller, dedicated "to whom it may concern," was based on his time in the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime precursor to the CIA. The appeal was in Mr. Hall's narrative as a man of nerve battling the enemy and his pompous superiors.

Hayden Peake, a former Army intelligence and CIA agent and an authority on the literature of intelligence, called the book "one of the best OSS memoirs," saying it was written by "someone who could perform [dangerous work] but was a kind of a free spirit."

Critic Charles Poore, writing in the New York Times in 1957, called the memoir "the funniest (unofficial, that is) record of rugged adventure in the O.S.S."

The son of a Navy captain, Mr. Hall grew up in Annapolis. He said the OSS book was not meant to show "contempt for authority, but bridling at authority."

Mr. Hall described himself as an ideal match for the OSS, which was interested less in formal military expertise than in recruiting agents who could use their wits and innovation in sticky situations to win the war.

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But his plan, a slap at the CIA, could create a whole new set of problems

By Kevin Whitelaw
US News & World Report

Sen. John McCain is taking on the Central Intelligence Agency on the campaign trail.

The attack is a subtle one, contained in his call for a new espionage agency patterned on the World War II-era Office of Strategic Services. McCain's proposal, which has yet to be debated publicly in the presidential campaign, is clearly an indictment of the CIA for being too bureaucratic and risk averse.

"In the spirit of the original OSS, this would be a small, nimble, can-do organization that would fight terrorist subversion across the world and in cyberspace," says McCain. "It could take risks that our bureaucracies today are afraid to take—risks such as infiltrating agents who lack diplomatic cover into terrorist organizations. It could even lead in the frontline efforts to rebuild failed states. A cadre of such undercover operatives would allow us to gain the intelligence on terrorist activities that we don't get today from our high-tech surveillance systems and from a CIA clandestine service that works almost entirely out of our embassies abroad."

The idea for a new spy organization is a direct outgrowth of a burgeoning Republican critique of the CIA, given new life by the controversy over the agency's analysis on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. In the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, proponents of the war blasted the CIA for not being able to find evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The CIA took even more flak in the aftermath of the invasion for its shoddy prewar intelligence, when it turned out that Saddam Hussein no longer had any such WMDs.

The McCain campaign has yet to issue a white paper detailing this new OSS, so many questions remain unanswered. The original OSS was a freewheeling organization of intelligence pioneers who operated with little oversight and whose primary mission was conducting sabotage operations in war-torn Europe. Today, there is a massive intelligence community made up of 16 different agencies that employ more than 100,000 people.

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By Dan Pinck
 
In a superbly-conceived program, titled A Life in Intelligence: A Symposium on Richard Helms, held on April 28, 2008 in Gaston Hall at Georgetown University, the intelligence and diplomatic career of  Richard Helms was noted by nine noteworthy speakers. Each person highlighted some of his contributions to our nation. During his service as Director of Central Intelligence and Ambassador to Iran, Richard Helms played a central role in initiating and managing intelligence operations. He did this with flair, imagination and constancy of purpose. Beyond a doubt, in the academic setting of Georgetown, Mr. Helms deserved the generally solid A that each speaker awarded him.

The symposium, moderated by Burton Gerber, a CIA station chief at several hot spots during the Cold War who now teaches at Georgetown, was infused by history that modestly and excitingly melded facts with observations. Most of the speakers worked with Mr. Helms and they knew him and his wife, Cynthia, well. Listening to the speakers, one after another, you soon realized that you were listening to a biography, each person contributing a chapter. Their comments were totally devoid of corn meal mush. I doubt that Mr. Helms would have excised more than a few sentences from the five-hour, living biography. The memories and thoughts of all of the speakers were in imposing condition; and much of what they said was pointed and memorable. I felt as though the speakers were academic progeny of the eminent historian, Edward Hallett Carr. (If you care to pursue this connection, I suggest that you read his book, What Is History?, based on the George Macauley Trevelyan Lectures that he delivered at the University of Cambridge in the winter of 1961.)

You and I have attended many suffocating, cliche-ridden symposia that more often than not have reminded us of what  we have forgotton over the years. We recall that little was said that would have ever caught the interest of Walter Mitty or anyone else who had the slightest experience in any branch of intelligence. From beginning to end, the symposium on Richard Helms captured the wide-awake attention of almost every participant, whose average age was far higher than average. In five hours, I noticed only one person who had nodded off. Six hundred and twenty-five guests were engrossed by the commentaries – minus one guest who slumped in dreamland. That’s remarkable; and no one left until the end of the symposium. Each speaker did his homework.   

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By Martha Galleher
The Espionage Press, 219 pages, $25
Ivy Book Store/ 6080 Falls Road/ Baltimore, Maryland 21209
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.

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The Nation, April 21, 2007

Robert Dreyfuss, in "Hothead McCain" [March 24], describes the Office of Strategic Services, predecessor of the CIA, as a "rambunctious, often out-of-control World War II-era covert-ops team." Led by the legendary "Wild Bill" Donovan, the OSS was a visionary, daring, innovative, unorthodox, effective intelligence organization. It abetted Allied victories in North Africa, Europe, Southeast Asia and elsewhere. Donovan recruited an array of "glorious amateurs," as he called them, including Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Ralph Bunche, Arthur Goldberg, Julia Child, John Ford [and Nation puzzle setter Frank W. Lewis--Ed.]. Many OSS personnel--including my father--risked their lives volunteering for missions behind enemy lines.

Creating a new intelligence service patterned after the OSS is an intriguing notion that deserves serious consideration, not Dreyfuss's casual dismissal.

Charles Pinck, president

The OSS Society

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.

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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.

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The story is at once confusing and fascinating. The  Vichy regime tracked down left wing resistants  and supporters of Charles de Gaulle’s Free French forces. It deported slave works and Jews to Germany. Yet concurrently, it tracked down and arrested hundreds of German agents who sought to further undermine France militarily. More than one hundred of them were sentenced to death, and Kitson  writes that he found “formal proof” that eight were actually executed.  A ranking French counterintelligence officer, Paul Paillole, puts the number of 42, which to Kitson “seems credible.”  Other efforts were directed against British officers seeking to organize resistance groups preparing for the inevitable invasion. As the papers make plain, the French military harbored a keen sense that it was “betrayed” by England in the opening months of the war.

To understate, French internal politics of the era were devilishly confused. Curiosity directed me to a book remainder house, where I found a 2005 biography of Petain by Charles Williams, a former Labour member of the British House of Lords. As I frequently discover as I age, the “full story” is often more complex than we were taught in school. So be it with Petain’s Vichy government.

Kitson is a highly-recommended  read for anyone interested in the intricacies of counterintelligence.  

The time-frame of Mr. Stafford’s history is roughly three months centered on the formal end of the war in Europe. He notes that the war continued after Germany’s surrender. Some notable events at that time, as well as events before the war are viewed through the eyes of individuals who lived through them as prisoners, reporters, soldiers, intelligence agents and relief workers in Germany, Poland, Russia, Italy and France and in other nations. The individuals he mentions are presented with a pointillist touch that captures a vivid, I-was-there, personal element in his history. They include Fey von Hassell, the daughter of a conspirator of the failed attempt to kill Hitler. She spent the war in many concentration camps. Robert Ellis, a member of the Tenth Mountain Division who fought as an infantryman in the Appennines; Bryan Samain, who fought as a commando from Normandy to the Baltic Sea and who served also as an intelligence operative; Geoffrey Cox, a frontline, British intelligence officer in Italy; Leonard Linton, who was a paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne Division; Geoffrey Cox, who fought with the New Zealand Second Division in Italy; Robert Reid, a BBC war correspondent who provided some of the most informative and depressing public accounts of Nazi behavior; Francesca Wilson, an Englishwoman who was a relief worker at a displaced persons camp in Bavaria and who visited several concentration camps at the end of the war; and others.

As an UNNRA representative, Ms Wilson went to Fohrenwald, built originally as a model Nazi workers village in Bavaria, where her job was to supervise the schools for eight hundred children whose languages included Estonian, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Serb, Polish and German. She found one school, headed by an Estonian, “a woman with a genius for handling small children.” The schools included Holocaust survivors. She traveled to Munich to find books for her school. She opened a mathematics textbook, and she read: “Germany has 100,000 epileptics and 250,000 mental defectives. It costs 2 .50 marks a day to keep each one of them. How many babies could go to nursery school at a cost of 1 mark daily for the same sum?” Nazification infected everything in Germany. Ms Wilson had to search widely for appropriate books for children.

Fey von Hassell was a political prisoner, a Sippenhafte, whose fate was to be shuffled with thousands of other political prisoners from concentration camp to concentration camp. The evacuations became death marches. The Third Reich used a variety of ways to kill upwards of a quarter of a million of these people; they burned some in barns; they machine-gunned others; they shot them when they stopped to tie their shoelaces – if they weren’t barefoot; they starved them; many froze to death; guards shot the exhausted. The Gestapo made no distinction between German prisoners and those from other nations.

These savage marches happened a few days, weeks and months before the end of the war, and after it. Ms. von Hassell’s last camp was Dachau. She and other political prisoners had a grand tour of concentration camps throughout the war. She survived.

Inevitably and properly, Mr. Stafford gives us a guidebook, if you will, to life and death in German concentration camps. Even though most of us will be depressed by increasing our knowledge of some of them, we will be alarmed by the depth of Nazi depravities. Concentration camps were not a wartime invention. Heinrich Himmler, on March 21, 1933, just two months after Hitler came to power, announced that Dachau had been selected as the location of a “detention camp for the enemies of National Socialism. Early on, its first inmates were Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, clergymen, and gypsies. Nazis began stocking Jews there after Kristallnacht in 1938. Once the war started, many other groups, including dissident Polish priests, dissident Wehrmacht officers, and anti-German émigrés captured in Paris, Prague and Amsterdam, were imprisoned. (About fifty thousand Dutch collaborators were given prison sentences after the war and more than one hundred and fifty were condemned to death, and only forty were executed.)

Robert Reid’s BBC reports were far-ranging and incisive. He covered battles and knew many of the Allied military leaders, including General Patton. Reid was smart and fearless. As the war neared its end and Nazis were trying to cover their tails, he concentrated on concentration camps. And David Stafford concentrates on him and his reportage.

I’ll observe that Mr. Reid’s wartime reports – and there are many of them in this book – are far superior to Edward R. Morrow’s. Let Mr. Stafford introduce Mr.Reid: “Victory brought jubilation to thousands, but for other victims of Hitler’s Third Reich, liberation dawned amid death and despair. And Reid was determined that in the flush of victory this story should not be lost. It offered a somber and sobering counterpoint to the otherwise benign scene he had been reporting recently from the lush Bavarian countryside.”

And now Mr. Reid: “There is a trail of death one hundred and twenty-five miles long across Germany – not the death of soldiers killed in combat but the murder of those luckless inmates of the concentration camps of Buchenwald and Flossenburg who were forced by their Nazi jailers to take to the road when the Americans approached both camps.” Roughly twenty-five hundred out of five thousand prisoners from Buchenwald had been killed by the time they arrived at Flossenburg concentration camp near the Czech border. A large number of prisoners had been hanged in front of other prisoners at Flossenburg. By the site of the gallows, there was a decorated Christmas tree. Similar bestialities occurred at most of the other camps. Need I say more?

After I finished reading Endgame, 1945 I made a walkthrough of it with my coach of history, Edward Hallett Carr, to ascertain my high opinion of Mr. Stafford’s book. On all counts, Mr. Carr helps to confirm my respect for this book. “Study the historian before you begin to study the facts.” “History cannot be written unless the historian can achieve some kind of contact with the mind of those about whom he is writing.” “What is history? It is a continuous process between the historian and his facts, an unending dialogue between the present and the past.” Based on these guideposts of Mr. Carr, I have no doubt that Mr. Stafford has written an outstanding book and that his previous books reinforced his capabilities to write this one. It ranks with historian John Lukacs’s The Last European War: September 1939-December 1941.

Formerly the director of the Canadian Institute of International Affairs and an Adjunct Professor of History at the University of Toronto, Stafford is now the project director at the Center for the Study of the Two World Wars at the University of Edinburgh. Among his previous books are Camp X: OSS, “Intrepid,” and the Allies’ North American Training Camp for Secret Agents, 1941-1945; Britain and European Resistance 1940-45; Ten Days to D-Day; and Secret Agent: The True Story of the Special Operations Executive.

I greatly enjoyed being challenged by his book, mainly because I’m one of those skeptical experts who feels that he knows what may have taken place in China and I’m cynical enough to doubt almost all authorities. Even though I believe I ventured into as many points of the compass in China, as all but a few other Americans, from French Indochina to north of the Great Wall, and from the mountains in the west to the South China Sea in the east, and had many singular adventures, I still quote Pearl Buck whenever I’m invited to talk about China. She said: “There are no experts on China, only varying degrees of ignorance.” I was provoked by this book and by Mr. Mu’s conclusions. Often, I talked back to him as I turned the pages. I’m not as ignorant as I was before I met Maochun Yu. He is a good teacher and he compelled me to question some of my comfortably soft-headed assumptions. You can’t ask for more than that.

His overriding conclusion based on his interpretation of historical records --I choose to let him state this in his own words – is: “In essence, this book attempts to illustrate how these foreign operations served to challenge the authority and legitimacy of the Chinese Nationalist government under Chiang Kai-shek to successfully handle and control foreign operations during World War II greatly contributed to its own demise four years after the war ended.” His conclusion warrants respect. But it’s hugely debateable. Although the British and the French had only one goal in their Chinese efforts: to secure their postwar, overseas empires, and they, in fact, pursued their own selfish goals in Nationalist China and Asia throughout the war, the United States provided substantial help in many sectors. Without our help, China might well have been totally defeated by the Japanese before the end of the war. After all, China was fighting two wars, one against the Japanese and the other against the Chinese Communists. This may be debatable, too. But it’s sensible to recognize that, despite so many lamentably poor diplomatic and military American leaders making a miserable hash of our joint work with the Chinese, we still made a noble effort. And, in its mysterious way, so did the Nationalist Chinese who fought from 1931 to 1945, and after the end of the Second World War, from 1945 to 1949, in fighting the Chinese Communists who were supported by the USSR. We know that we didn’t lose China. The Chinese lost China.

China, as we know, was a graveyard of reputations of some outstanding Americans. In his research, Mr. Yu adds President Roosevelt and Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morganthau, to the list of those leaders who, either by omission or commission, succeeded in shortchanging the Nationalists by making promises of funds and materiel they never kept. (China received 3.2 per cent of all countries receiving Lend-Lease material or $1,548,794, 966). We might recognize the accuracy of General Chennault’s observation after the war, quoted by Mr. Yu: “I always found the Chinese friendly and cooperative. The Japanese gave me a little trouble at times, but not very much. The British in Burma were quite difficult sometimes. But Washington gave me trouble night and day throughout the war.”

Professor Yu praises Admiral Milton Miles, the head of SACO, and his nefarious colleague, Tai Li, the head of Chinese intelligence. He gives a failing grade to General William J. Donovan and to Richard Heppner, the head of OSS in China. He gives a passing grade to Ambassador Patrick Hurley. (Who among us would salute Hurley, who, being introduced to Chiang Kai-shek, said, “Hello, Mr. Shek.”?) Hurley was undoubtedy soft in the head.

Professor Yu cites the German contribution to Chiang Kai-shek and the prolonged Nazi involvement with the Chinese forces. German military aid (arms and instruction) began in earnest in 1928 and lasted until 1938. I don’t know how Germany contributed to Chiang’s inability to fight the Chinese Communists. General Alexander von Falkenhausen made sure that Chinese forces learned to march in the German goose-step. Mu cites William Kirby’s book, Germany and the Republic of China, published by Stanford University Press in 1984. Read it and believe it.

To add to the ingredients of the cockeyed world of Chiang Kai-shek, we should not overlook his own involvement with Moscow. As a member of the “fledgling” (Yu’s adjective) Chinese Communist Party, Chiang traveled to Moscow to gain Russia’s political and military help. With Lenin’s approval, he came back to China with two million rubles. In 1927, with Lenin dead as well as the founder of the Chinese Nationalist Party,Sun Yat-sen, Chiang went on a mission to purge and kill Chinese Communists. He slaughtered thousands of Communists in Canton. To add to this bouillabaisse of history, Mao Zedong, who began his professional life as a librarian and ended it as the killer of 60,000,000 of his own people, learned his craft of killing during the Second World War.

The evidence is that the war in China was an indisputable and direct benefit to us. There were roughly 60,000 Americans (a high estimate) in China. Roughly fewer than four to five thousand Americans died there (my estimate). This was fewer than the number of Americans killed at Iwo Jima. How did we gain from helping China? The answer is that more than 1 million Japanese soldiers remained in China during the latter part of the war. Without being tied up in China, the great majority of Japanese troops would probably have been sent to fight us in the Pacific. And many more Americans would have been killed.

I Was Trained To Be A Spy follows the story of an American-born boy who grew up in a small village on the Greek island of Crete. During his final years in high school, he is present during the German invasion of his island as WWII began. At the age of eighteen, he joined a resistance group and supplied crucial information to the SOE, the arm of the English Intelligence Service. This group, however, is uncovered, resulting in their hasty evacuation by the SOE, to Cairo, Egypt. There, Doundoulakis and his brother were asked to join the English Intelligence Service, only to pursue the American OSS (Office of Strategic Services) which was the newly formed American intelligence counterpart. As such, they were enlisted into the U.S. Army and attached to the OSS, where the author was trained for intelligence as well as other combat skills. After being oriented into a highly-skilled "spy," Doundoulakis was sent back to Greece along with a Greek naval intelligence officer, and later set up a communications cell with a wireless radio he smuggled in, hidden inside a can of olive oil!

Filled with historical references, I Was Trained To Become A Spy is a detailed and lively account of one young man's spy training that truly brings to life the daily routines and mentality of a real spy. Driving the reading experience is the constant danger of being caught, which will undoubtedly keep readers fascinated from one page to another. Highly-recommended to history enthusiasts, military personnel and fans of espionage, I Was Trained To Be A Spy is now available for ordering online at Xlibris.com and at your local bookstore.

About the Author

Helias Doundoulakis was born in Canton, Ohio, in 1923, of Greek-immigrant parents. At the age of two years old, his family returned to Crete, Greece, and there they lived uneventfully until the German elite paratroopers invaded Crete in 1941. After his two-year involvement with the Cretan Resistance and English intelligence Service, he and his brother, George, a leader in the Resistance, escaped to Cairo, Egypt with the help of an English torpedo boat, to avoid capture by the Gestapo. He enlisted in the American army and was trained as a spy in Cairo, by the newly created OSS, Office of Strategic Services and also by the English Intelligence Service, and was sent as a spy to Salonica, the second largest city in Greece, on a dangerous undergound mission. He was the only American soldier in that city for a period of nine months, sending daily messages to OSS headquarters in Cairo on German movements. With the information sent by these cryptic messages, many Axis ships were sunk, trains bombed, and thousands of Germans were killed. At the wars conclusion, he was decorated by the United States Army and the Greek Government.

I don’t mean to be so ignorant and opinionated, which I frequently am, to evade the fact that many historians of war have written, and continue to write, supremely good books. There’s really no doubt of that. However, there’s no sidestepping the assumption that the most rewarding illuminations are in books written by men and women who have risked their lives in operations against their enemies.

Carlton S. Coon, a noted anthropologist who studied under Earnest Hooton, wrote a masterful book about his OSS experiences in North Africa, Corsica and Italy. He and his colleagues, among them Gordon H. Browne, received high decorations for their valor. If there were an OSS Hall of Fame Carlton Coon and Gordon Browne, deserve a niche in it. I quote from Mark Saxton’s from his preface to Mr. Coon’s book:

“By all accounts, not only this one, life in the OSS appears to have had a character all its own. Coon describes it by saying, ‘I never took an oath for the COI or OSS. We were all gentlemen volunteers on our honor. We were never under orders. We were always asked, ‘Would you like to … (e. g. get yourself killed)?’To which we always said ‘Yes.”

That feeling comes clearly through this account. Not remarkable for any secret it discloses, it is noteworthy for the sense of immediacy it conveys, for its picture of people doing extraordinary things in an ordinary manner, and as a rare glimpse into an agent’s mind while he is on the job, or at any rate what he feels he can set down about it.”

He had the best of preparations for his OSS assignments. Unlike the majority of OSS representative, he knew as much as any American about the North African territories the history, the people, and the languages -- in which he was engaged. He was one of General Donovan’s “glorious amateurs” when it came to intelligence and covert operations. No doubt of that. But he was a consummate professional when it came to understand the land and the cultures of natives.

Mr. Coon and Mr. Browne became intelligence agents in Operation Torch, our code name for the Anglo-American invasion of North Africa. They helped to provide intelligence keys before the invasion and conducted dangerous operations after it. For much of the time, their cover was as vice consuls. They helped to sort out and identify fascists and traitors in Vichy’s line-up from those Frenchmen determined to help to fight the Germans and Italians.

If you want to read a historic overview of Operation Torch to complement Mr. Coon’s adventures, I suggest that you also read FDR’s 12 Apostles: The Spies Who Paved the Way for the Invasion of North Africa, by Hal Vaughan.

You may have difficulty finding a copy of Mr. Coon’s book. But you will find a copy in some of the better libraries. This book should be reprinted. It’s a gem.

Since 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, occasional proposals have been made to re-create the OSS, an ad hoc intelligence organization created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and led by Major General William "Wild Bill" Donovan that holds a special place in the history of intelligence.

Its mission was twofold: first, to provide the President with timely, comprehensive and coordinated intelligence and analysis that he failed to receive from any single government intelligence agency or department, including the military, the State Department, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Secondly, the President wanted to have an independent group that would engage in clandestine and covert actions on many fronts patterned after Britain's Special Operations Executive (SOE), which Winston Churchill directed to "set Europe ablaze."

The OSS had an outstanding record in its secret war. It was so successful that four months after end of the war and six months after Roosevelt's death, the generals and admirals, the State and War Departments, and the FBI conspired to persuade President Truman to disband the organization, which he did, on October 1, 1945.

Consequently, the US did not have an effective intelligence agency during the start of the Cold War. Two years later, Truman realized that he needed the peacetime intelligence agency that Donovan had proposed in 1944 and had, in fact, named the Central Intelligence Agency. On September 18, 1947, Truman signed the National Security Act, creating the CIA.  (SOCOM, the US Special Operations Command, also traces its lineage to the OSS.)

Spying is generally an anathema to Americans, especially since some distasteful events have been exposed or revealed during the past sixty years or more. For many reasons, we seemingly have an inbred aversion to clandestine activities. When a secret service's work is not secret, we no longer have a secret service. Or at least a service that has the potentiality of accomplishing much over a period of time. In our time, the CIA is a handy instrument that functions as a centralized punching bag to blame almost every event that appears to go wrong, from geopolitics to warfare. Our national obsession to heap contumely on the CIA emanates from the White House, Congress, the Defense Department, the State Department, the media and the public. The CIA is no longer the prime and first responder to the President. It now reports to the Director of the National Intelligence, an office with some 1,500 staffers. The CIA has a tough time running its own show. How did the OSS succeed?  How would we begin to construct a new OSS today?

The creation of the OSS was itself a small miracle made possible only by the strong support of President Roosevelt and his close personal relationship with General Donovan. Their bipartisan relationship should serve as a role model for today's leaders.  (After witnessing Donovan fire a silenced .22 caliber pistol designed by the OSS, Roosevelt famously quipped that Donovan was the only Republican he would allow in the Oval Office with a gun.  Bipartisanship has its limits.)

The most striking attributes of the OSS were its leadership, the background of its members, and the fact that the organization reported directly to President Roosevelt. In July 1941, before the US entered World War II, Roosevelt accepted Donovan's plan for a new intelligence organization called the Coordinator of Information (COI), which actually was the name of our first peacetime intelligence organization. The COI was a civilian group that reported to the President. After we entered the war, Roosevelt signed a military order on June 13, 1942 establishing the OSS and appointing Donovan as its director. On paper, the OSS was placed under the direction of the Joint Chiefs, but it still had President Roosevelt's ear. A new OSS would need the same independence and presidential support in order to succeed.

Donovan was unconventional, fearless, visionary, imaginative, willing to take the same risks that he asked of others. He took personal responsibility for mistakes. He frequently told OSS personnel that they couldn't succeed without taking chances. He had a facility at selecting and recruiting men and women some of whom reflected his traits. His primary concern was in making OSS an effective force to defeat the enemy. He was renowned for never rejecting any idea of out hand. He built the OSS in his own image, a potent combination of brain, brawn and bravado. In his farewell address, Donovan described the OSS as an "unusual experiment."

OSS veteran Fisher Howe said it best: "If you define leadership as having a vision for an organization and the ability to attract, motivate, and guide others to fulfill that vision, then you have Bill Donovan in spades."

Bureaucracy was anathema to him and most management practices were distended. His hobby was making organizational charts and never following any of them. He often referred to OSS members as "glorious amateurs" and that is precisely what many of them were.  He had a talent for hiring people who were beyond the scope of most military leaders. For example, a young woman from Baltimore, who had served in Europe in a minor diplomatic job before Pearl Harbor, wanted to join the OSS and volunteered for risky work, despite losing a leg in a horse riding accident. She became an OSS agent and was sent to occupied France twice to work with the Resistance. Virginia Hall would become the only civilian woman to be awarded the Distinguished Service Cross in World War II.

The OSS was a small, nimble organization with slightly more than 13,000 members. More than sixty percent of its personnel were seconded from the Army, Navy, Marines and Coast Guard. About 4,000 were women and 900 of them served overseas. Contrary to popular perception, OSS personnel came from extremely diverse backgrounds, including Jews, African Americans and recent immigrants from many European countries. To Donovan, they were all his glorious amateurs. Few, if any, had an intelligence background. Consider this mixture: classicists, historians, policemen, artists, lawyers, newspaper editors and writers, archeologists, scientists, college presidents, labor leaders, counterfeiters, bankers, movie actors and directors, economists, baseball players, football players, farmers, and yachtsmen. 

What do Saul Steinberg, the artist, John Ford, the movie director, Moe Berg, the baseball player who knew twelve languages, Julia Child, Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, historian and Kennedy aide Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Carlton S. Coon,  the anthropologist, Norman Holmes Pearson, a professor of English, Stewart Alsop, the columnist, Sterling Hayden, an actor, Paul Mellon, a multi-millionaire, Col. Aaron Bank, the founder of the Green Berets, and Ralph Bunche, a foreign affairs specialist who became the Under Secretary-General of the United Nations and the first African American to win the Nobel Peace Prize, have in common? They were all in the OSS. 

It's a safe bet that no organization in American history assembled such a dazzling array of talent. Donovan believed that smart, talented and motivated people could accomplish things. They still can.

Special mention must be made about academics who served in OSS. At least 300 faculty members from leading universities joined the OSS and made significant contributions to the organization's Research and Analysis (R&A) unit. Donovan attributed some of OSS's greatest contributions to this group.

A wise leader of a newly-created OSS might be able to recruit a similar group of remarkable people today and unleash their creativity, much like Donovan did.

Senator McCain and Mitt Romney believe that the revival of the OSS is our best chance to defeat terrorism.  But where will they find a visionary leader like General Donovan?

During World War II, Donovan said that his greatest enemies were in Washington, not Europe. Could a new OSS sustain its independence from the large number of formidable bureaucracies that sank the original OSS? Let's hope so.

"These materials, long estranged from the Allen Dulles Papers, help round out the documentary legacy of Dulles and his pivotal role in American intelligence history. The material related to his espionage work during World War II is especially illuminating," said Daniel Linke, curator of Public Policy Papers at the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, which houses the Dulles Papers.  The CIA retains many documents related to Dulles' time as head of that agency, but Linke noted that those released "provide insight into not only Dulles, but the classification process and, in my opinion, its shortcomings. Scholars reviewing some of this material will scratch their heads and wonder why the agency thought it necessary to restrict some of these documents for decades."

The Allen W. Dulles Digital Files released to Princeton contain scanned images of professional correspondence, reports, lectures and administrative papers covering Dulles' tenure with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) -- a U.S. intelligence agency created during World War II and forerunner of the CIA -- as well as his career with the CIA and his retirement. The CIA culled these documents from Dulles' home office, and the agency maintains the originals.

The collection includes correspondence and narrative statements documenting Dulles' activities during World War II, especially relating to the work of individuals involved in the war effort in Europe. The files also include more than 1,000 war telegrams from the OSS office to Washington, D.C. Documents from the 1950s and 1960s deal almost exclusively with the Cold War, mostly focusing on intelligence and the Soviet Union along with some covering Sen. Joseph McCarthy and the Communist threat in the United States. Items relating to Dulles' time with the CIA have been heavily redacted, obscuring the names of correspondents as well as individuals and events mentioned in reports and letters.

These digital files complement the Allen W. Dulles Papers maintained by Mudd Library. More information on that collection can be found online.

Dulles earned a bachelor's degree in 1914 and a master's degree in 1916 from Princeton, both in politics, and received an honorary doctorate in 1957. He was a veteran of the OSS and served as chief of its Bern, Switzerland, office. His successes there led to Dulles being named chairman of an intelligence review committee in 1948 that faulted the organization of the then-fledgling CIA. In 1950, he was named the CIA's deputy director of plans, the agency's covert operations arm, and in 1951, he became the CIA's deputy director. After the November 1952 election, President Eisenhower appointed Dulles as CIA director.

His brother, John Foster Dulles (a 1908 Princeton graduate), served as Eisenhower's secretary of state, and the two men worked closely during their joint service. The CIA under Dulles' leadership established the dual policy of collecting intelligence through a wide variety of means, as well as taking direct action against perceived threats.

Dulles' notable achievements in intelligence gathering included the development of the U-2 spy plane program, the recruitment of Soviet Lieutenant General Pyotr Popov as a U.S. spy, and the tapping of a sensitive East Berlin phone junction by tunneling under the Berlin Wall. The CIA's direct actions during Dulles' tenure included notable successes and failures. CIA operatives orchestrated the overthrow of the government of Iran in 1953 and Jacob Arbenz's regime in Guatemala in 1954. However, efforts to oust Fidel Castro from Cuba following his rise to power consisted of a series of failures culminating in the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961. Dulles retired shortly thereafter.

In retirement, Dulles wrote books (including two autobiographical works) about his career in intelligence and appeared on numerous television programs to discuss foreign policy. He was called to public service once again in 1963, when he was named to the Warren Commission that investigated the assassination of President Kennedy. His connection to the CIA and its activities in Cuba would fuel later speculation about possible U.S. government complicity in Kennedy's assassination.

In his Dec. 24 column, "Subverting Bush at Langley," Robert D. Novak included a swipe at the Office of Strategic Services, the World War II predecessor of the CIA. Mr. Novak wrote that the OSS "was infiltrated by communists."

The Soviet Union was our ally during World War II. The OSS was not infiltrated by communists during the war; it hired them. They helped to identify native recruits to infiltrate enemy forces and organizations. OSS founder William Donovan reportedly said that he would "put Stalin on the OSS payroll if it would help defeat Hitler."

After the war, a plague of invective assaulted  Donovan and the OSS. He was not only accused of harboring communists but of a far worse crime: proposing a peacetime successor to the OSS that  critics called a Gestapo.  Donovan believed that the main culprit was J. Edgar Hoover, who had vehemently opposed creation of the OSS in 1942. The OSS was disbanded by President Harry S. Truman in 1945.

Regarding Hoover,  Donovan once said that his greatest enemies were in Washington, not Europe. Apparently they still are.

Charles Pinck, President
The OSS Society