IN WASHINGTON: A PRIDE OF FORMER SPOOKS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-01208R000100090049-1
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: February 22, 2011
• Sequence Number: 49
• Publication Date: November 12, 1979
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

STAT
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/22 : CIA-RDP90-01208R000100090049-1
ARTICLE APPEARE
ON PAGE Jt2 -
TIME
12 November 1979
American Scene
In Washington: A Pride of Former Spooks
T he black ties and bald heads could
belong to old college classmates at a
40th reunion. The Supreme de . Volaille
Eugenie on the menu is standard hotel
chicken with yellow gravy, and the plat-
itudes served _up by the speakers might
be heard at any nostalgic or vaguely pa-
triotic gathering. But the memories are
not of the promise of youth or of bright
college years. Mostly, they are of -spying.
In the ballroom of the Hilton in Wash-
ington, D.C., former spooks are reliving
the fears and joys of parachuting behind
enemy lines, breaking codes, forging.doc-
uments and blowing up bridges. The gray-
ing, mostly: prosperous-looking men and
women are veterans of the Office of Stra-
tegic Services, the World War II prede-
cessor of the Central Intelligence Agen-
cy. The occasion is their annual bash, the
William J. Donovan Award Dinner.
General "Wild Bill" Donovan, who
died- 20 years ago, was the Wall Street law-
yer whom President Franklin Roosevelt
commissioned to set up an intelligence
service in 1941, five months before Pearl
Harbor. At the time, the U.S. had no for-
mal espionage arm. Snooping had been
in disrepute; a decade earlier, Secretary
The spies' much prized award
of State Henry Stimson had declared that
"gentlemen 'do not read 'each other's'
mail." But Donovan persuaded F.D.R.
that such etiquette need not apply in deal-
ings with Nazi Germany and Imperial.
Japan, and thus the U.S.'s first indepen-
dent intelligence agency was born.
The attendance at this Donovan din-
ner, the twelfth since 1962, is unusually
large. The crowd of more- than 400. in-
cludes not only oss veterans and friends
and family members but eight Senators,
FBI Director William Webster and two
wartime spymasters who went on to head
the CIA, Richard Helms and William Col-
by. The' old espionage hands come partly
out of nostalgia for a simpler age of spy-
ing, before cold wars and dirty tricks scan-
dals and congressional oversight commit-
tees. There is also a perceptible closing
of the ranks behind 'the nation's now-
beset intelligence establishment...
Earlier in the day, a group of 100 or
so oss veterans listened grimly to a series
of gloomy speeches. Wyoming Republi-
can Senator Malcolm Wallop scoffed that
CIA agents have become not spies but "bu-
reaucrats." Frank Barnett of the Nation-
al Strategy Information Center, a hawk-
ish' think tank, warned of a "Soviet
window of opportunity" in the 1980s. Ray
Cline, a former top CIA officer who now di-
rects strategic and international studies
at" Georgetown University, offered a dis-
mal report card on his old outfit: D- in
covert activities, C- in counterintelli
gene, C- in information gathering. It
is all very depressing to the OSS alumni.
Laments Carl Eifler, who ran OSS oper-
ations in Asia and later got a doctor of di-
vinity degree: "Their team's got 50 well-
'protected big fellas. Then.there is our
team: four guys in tennis shoes and
shorts."
By the time pre-dinner cocktails are
served, the mood is cheerier. "We were
:marvelous amateurs," sighs' Margaret
'Sherman, a Norwalk, Conn., housewife
,Who served in a counterintelligence unit
In London and Paris.-Donovan ignored
,.the advice of the creator of James Bond,
Author Ian Fleming, who as a British na-
Ival intelligence officer in. 1941 described
the ideal spy as middle-aged, sober, dis-
creet and experienced. Instead, Wild Bill
sought out impatient young people who
did not mind being bold. or even "calcu-
latingly reckless."
'0 ne.of these was Frederick Mayer, now `
a retired radio engineer who lives in
' West Virginia. A Jewish refugee from
Germany who arrived in Brooklyn in
1938, Mayer was an Army corporal in
training in Arizona when one of Dono-
van's recruiters persuaded .him to volun-
teer for something "more exciting." it.
'was.- In 1944 he parachuted into Nazi-
held Austria, stole a German uniform and
posed asa Wehrmacht officer while he
monitored. enemy troop movements.
Laughs. Mayer. "I was even promoted.
Later,. after getting a job in a Messer-
schmitt factory to spy on the development
of German jet fighters, he was caught and
tortured by the Gestapo. He managed to
escape in a German staff car.
Donovan was an eclectic recruiter;
among the people he brought into the Oss
were Conservative Columnist Stewart Al-
sop, Marxist Political Philosopher Her-
bert Marcuse, and Chef Julia Child, who
tended intelligence files at the OSS office
in Chongqing (Chungking). So many OSS
people were listed in the Social Register
that critics complained that the initials
stood for "Oh So Social."
Donovan's love of ingenuity .was in-
fectious. William Duff, a retired book pub-
lisher who was sent to Algiers to recruit
agents for spying in France, recalls one
example: "We had a chap in Cairo who
designed a land mine that looked remark-
ably like a camel turd. He put it in the dip-
lomatic pouch and sent it to London. I'm
not sure they knew quite what to make
of it." Thibaut de Saint Phalle, now a di-
rector of the Export-Import Bank, discov-
ered that Chinese pirates were very adept
at blowing up Japanese ships, and he went
to the offshore island of Quemoy to re-
cruit them for the Allied cause: On the is-
land, he remembers, he found himself liv-
ing "in 12th century splendor. The pirates
had stolen some very fine old furniture."
Kay Halle, an elegant Cleveland de-
partment store heiress, was recruited for,
the oss at a Washington cocktail party.
What was her job? "Black propaganda,"
she replies sweetly. On her right at table
33; Andre Pacatte bursts into the Mar-
seillaise as a U.S. Army band plays the
French national anthem. Before and af-
ter the war, Pacatte ran the Berlitz school
'in Washington; during the war he used.
his language skills behind German lines
in France and Italy. He recalls taking a
14-hour plane flight-with Donovan and a
group of shell-shocked American flyers
returning home for psychiatric treatment.
"The crazy flyers were babbling things
like `Me-109 at 2 o'clock high!' and going
`Ack-ack-ack-ack!' General Donovan as
looking through my briefcase and reawd
ing everything in it, including letters to
me from my wife.',' Why did he do that?
Exclaims Pacatte: "Why? Because he was
General Donovan!".. ?
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 Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/22 : CIA-RDP90-01208R000100090049-1
eneath a huge sepia photograph of the
general, the speakers are extolling his
qualities as citizen-soldier-statesman-spy.
The Donovan award is given by the Vet-
erans of the oss, the agency's alumni as-
sociation, to people who exemplify Don-
ovan's virtues,. a category broad enough
to include Earl Mountbatten of Burma,
the Apollo 11 astronauts and Senator Ev-
erett Dirksen of Illinois. This year's win-
ner is Jacques Chaban-Delmas, a hero of
the French Resistance who is now pres-
ident of the French National Assembly.
The first guest speaker, Senator Daniel In-
ouye of Hawaii, comes down squarely in
favor of "duty, honor, country, courage."
Then Ambassador Kenneth Rush returns
to the Decline of Everything theme ex-
plored earlier in the day. Finally, Chaban-
Delmas receives his award and praises lib-
erty in charmingly broken English.
After dinner, the old spooks'are still
wondering what went wrong with the in-
telligence establishment. "Well," says'
Maryland Housewife Mary Furman, who
interrogated prisoners during. the war
with the help of exiles from Poland an
.other Nazi-occupied countries, "we wet
civilians. " She stops, hearing ' hersel
sounding holier than thou, and reflects
quietly, "We never beat prisoners. 0
course, the Poles were standing right
there, and they were happy to oblige, and
the prisoners knew it. But we never had
any trouble. We never had. to do any-
. thing." Bill Duff, the Oss man in Algiers,
has another explanation., "It was World
War II. The war was so- He pauses.
"Clear. _.,_... _..--- EvanThomas\
Beneath Wild Bill's portrait, OSS veterans fondly recall spying in a simpler age
Today it is "50 well protected bigfellas vs. four guys in tennis shoes and shorts.".
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