THE ORGANIZATION SPOOK

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-01208R000100090017-6
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: February 22, 2011
• Sequence Number: 17
• Publication Date: December 1, 1984
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

11
STAT-
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/22 : CIA-RDP90-01208R000100090017-6
ARTICLE AFPEiEE
ON PAGE
WASHINGTON MONTHLY
December 1084 .
By the fall of 1944, Mario Morpurgo had
discovered that the life of a secret agent was not
all trench coats and smokey-eyed blondes. An
operative for the U.S. Office of Strategic Services
(OSS), Morpurgo had parachuted into German-
occupied southern France on August 11. Upon
his arrival he found the local Resistance fighters
more concerned with internal politics than with
battling the enemy. In quick order his command-
ing officer was captured, his truck was com-
mandeered by the Gestapo (he was in it at the
time), and he was ambushed by his own men.
Fortunately for Morpurgo, his men. were very
poor shots.
Moving south to work with' Italian partisans
battling Mussolini, the young OSS man lived for
weeks on nothing but boiled sheep, and often
found himself deserted by his paisanos at the first
sound of gunfire. "Being of Italian origin it is
most painful for me to make this statement," said
Morpurgo in his mission report, "but I really was
surprised and ashamed of their behavior." One
of his most irritating problems, however, had
nothing to do with the situation behind enemy
lines. Apparently the radio operators at the OSS
base in Algiers who received Morpurgo's
clandestine communications had the work habits
of Commerce Department clerks. "The receiving
operators seemed to be rather in a hurry to finish
and go home, and several times they cut the
broadcast just saying they had to go, without
bothering about giving an extra appointment
time," complained Morpurgo. "On Sundays it
was almost impossible to make contact... they
never listened to the emergency calls at one
o'clock in the morning'."
In films and spy novels, secret services are
almost always efficient. The KGB, CIA, and M16
are shown moving with an institutional agility
IBM managers can only envy; secret weapons are
ready on time, and never seem to need
maintenance; threats are quickly identified and
attacked; and the word "budget" never, ever
passes anyone's lips. In this respect Bond-type
adventure novels differ but marginally from the
Peter Grier is a staff writer in the Washington bureau of
the Christian Science Monitor.
more "authentic" LeCarre school of espionage
fiction. In the former, the hero gets to either ski
or wear a tuxedo en route to saving Judeo-
Christian civilization; in the latter, western agents
are morally troubled, less athletic, and more
poorly dressed-but also ultimately successful.
Perhaps because of these portrayals, to many
people actual secret services are awesome agen-
cies, capable of accomplishing almost any deed,
devious or otherwise, with dispatch. This attitude
at times is taken by those who should know bet-
ter. A friend of mine, a man with extensive State
Department experience, believes the CIA knows
who is behind El Salvador's death squads. When
asked why, he sighs as if the question were utter-
ly naive and says, "Come now. They have to
know'.'
Any old spook can attest that there's no
bureaucracy like a secret bureaucracy. Games are
routinely played at the CIA and other intelligence
agencies that are remarkably similar to the turf-
protecting, memo shuffling, budget. protection;
and other bureaucratic games that go on at the
Department of Agriculture. The only difference
is that, because the secret agencies have no reason
to fear public disapproval, their bureaucracies are
often more chaotic. This is particularly disturb-
ing when one considers that at secret agencies the
stakes are. higher; after all, the collection of in-
telligence is an activity fraught with more danger
than the administration of farm price supports.
Playing musical desks
Power struggles over spying, especially.between
agencies, can be "peculiarly savage," notes An-
thony Cave Brown, a biographer of William J.
("Wild Bill") Donovan, founder of the OSS. I
have been reading quite a bit about Donovan and
the OSS lately in a cramped room on the 13th
floor of the National Archives as I have riffled,
through box upon box of OSS operational
records. These documents, just declassified by the
CIA, provide an account of the day-to-day life
of a modern spy agency perhaps more detailed
than any ever made public bye U.S. govern-
ment. They describe great bravery and
violence-as well as agents entangled by red tape,
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IF Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/22 : CIA-RDP90-01208R000100090017-6