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