A SPOOK WHEN YOUNG

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP99-00418R000100050035-9
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: May 11, 2012
• Sequence Number: 35
• Publication Date: September 25, 1988
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

ILL Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/11: CIA-RDP99-00418R000100050035-9
A Spook When Young
ILLEGIB
THE SECRET WAR AGAINST HITLER
By William Casey.
Illustrated 304 pp. Washington:
Regnery Gateway. $19.95.
By Robert Sherrod
E reading public barely noticed when William
J. Casey's book on the American Revolution was
published in 1976. But in 1978 the tax lawyer
mounted his history hobbyhorse again and pro-
duced 600 rough-hewn manuscript pages about his time
with the Office of Strategic Services in 1943-45.
Casey never quite finished the book - a final
chapter is obviously lacking - because big-time Re-
publican politics intervened. In 1979 he raised great
gobs of East Coast money for Ronald Reagan's second
run at the White House and in 1980 became campaign
manager when John P. Sears was fired. President
Reagan rewarded Casey, not with the State Depart-
ment he wanted, but with the colossal Central Intelli-
gence Agency and all the power, mostly invisible, that it
embodied. Casey held the job for six stormy years until
a brain tumor killed him in May, 1987, just as Congress
opened hearings on the Iran-contra scandal, in which he
was at least waist-deep.
Now the 600 pages have been wrestled into print
and grandiosely titled "The Secret War Against Hitler."
Half history, half memoir, the book is a useful guide to
O.S.S. operations run out of London, where Casey, then
30 years old and a lieutenant in the Navy, started out as
Col. David K E. Bruce's administrative assistant. The
O.S.S. office on Grosvenor Street was populated by the
likes of Navy Capt. Junius Morgan of the banking
family, Comdr. Lester Armour of the Chicago meat-
packing clan and Lieut. Comdr. Raymond Guest, "fresh
from the polo fields of Long Island and Virginia." Maj.
Gen. William (Wild Bill) Donovan, founding father of
the O.S.S., did have an affinity for the well connected.
Malcolm Muggeridge, then a major in the British
army, remembered the early O.S.S. men "arriving like.
jeunes filles en fleur straight from a finishing school, all
fresh and innocent, to start work in our frowsy old
intelligence brothel." These bewildered Americans
were "a pain in the neck" to Kim Philby of the Foreign
Office, who knew a thing or two about spying - as he
starkly revealed upon defecting to Moscow two decades
later. But the British and the Yanks soon adjusted to'
their difficult marriage, due in no small measure to
stroking by the urbane David Bruce, who would become
not only Ambassador to Britain but also to France and
Germany.
Robert Sherrod has written five books about World
War II, including "Tarawa: The Story of a Battle."
he Washington Post
e New York Times OoK E V, p
The Washington Times
The Wall Street Journal
The Christian Science Monitor
New York Daily News
USA Today
The Chicago Tribune
Date 25 50V-19% i
Relations with Gen. Dwight Eisenhower's subordi-
nates ranged from good to terrible. Lieut. Col. William
Quinn, G-2 (head of intelligence) of the Seventh Army,
was delighted to have O.S.S. parachutes blossoming
behind German Ines in the south of France, dropping
spies - Stewart Alsop and Thomas Braden, later to be
newspaper columnists, among them - to join the
maquis and to radio information about gun emplace-
ments and minefields that smoothed the way for the
Seventh's tanks. But Col. Benjamin A. (Monk) Dickson,
G-2 of the First Army, banished the O.S.S. from his turf.
Casey tartly observes that Dickson was relaxing in
Paris as the enemy juggernaut poured through First
Army lines in the fog-shrouded Ardennes during the
Battle of the Bulge. Code-breaking flopped because the
Germans maintained radio silence; hence spies were
required.
But the Bulge was contained and the war moved
toward Germany. Four months before it ended, Casey,
now clad in civvies (the better to deal, with colonels and
generals) got a command of his own: Chief of Secret
Intelligence for the European Theater, meaning spy-
master in charge of operations inside Germany. In-
stead of fresh-faced young Americans, he enlisted a
mixed bag of Poles, German prisoners of war, Russian
emigres, Belgians and Dutch. Altogether he dropped 28
two-man teams - there were others under French
command - into Germany beyond the Rhine. (Some of
these spies were Communists; General Donovan said,
"Never mind that, win the war.") Casey's spies, incredi-
bly brave, were mostly too late; the advancing Allied
armies caught up with them before they passed much
information to the special relay planes flying overhead.
It does seem, however, that Casey should have received
a better medal than the Bronze Star.
e e 0
"The Secret War Against Hitler" underwent consid-
erable change between the galleys sent to reviewers
and copies sold in bookstores. Sim Smiley had done
some research in O.S.S. files for Casey in his last year,
at a time when he still hoped to return to the work She
has now edited and expanded the book from 225 printed
pages to 304, the increment consisting mostly of docu-
ments declassified eight months after Casey's death.
dividend is an angry foreword by M. R. D.
Foot, the historian of British Special Operations, who
laments that his friend Casey has become "everybody's
whipping boy" now that he can "neither answer back
nor sue for libel." An index has been supplied which,
sadly, omits such key players as Brig. Gen. Thomas
Betts, Eisenhower's contact man for Casey's 1945 oper-
ations in Germany, and Brig. Gen. Frederick B. Butler,
commander of Task Force Butler, which, with O.S.S.
assistance, swept up the Germans after the August 1944
landings in southern France. 0
Page 2,7,
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/11: CIA-RDP99-00418R000100050035-9