INTELLIGENCE IN RECENT PUBLIC LITERATURE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP84-00499R000500080003-1
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: S
• Document Page Count: 10
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: January 18, 2012
• Sequence Number: 3
• Publication Date: January 1, 2000
• Content Type: BOOK

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INTELLIGENCE IN RECENT PUBLIC LITERATURE
OSS: THE SECRET HISTORY OF AMERICA'S FIRST CENTRAL INTEL-
LIGENCE AGENCY. By R[ichard] Harris Smith. (University of California
Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, Calif., 1972. 458 pages.)*
On its face, at least, this work on the OSS has made and will continue to make
a good impression. Even a cursory glance reveals the diligence of the young author
who has done a large amount of research and who writes engagingly. Several
discerning readers have given him very good marks for his effort, among them
Arthur Schlesinger whom the author thanks for his pre-publication tour through
the entire manuscript and for his helpful comment and criticism. Other OSS
alumni were consulted about parts of the book in which they had a notable role,
and some of them thought the effort commendable and said as much. One at
least was well pleased at Mr. Smith's approach to his subject, which he saw as an
implicit rebuttal of the cynical interpretation of American foreign policy which
revisionist historians of the New Left have been touting. (More about this ap-
proach later.) I must confess that my own first reactions were favorable; to be
sure I found a number of errors in the chapters whose content, was most familiar
to me and a number of surprising omissions, but as some readers will, I charitably
concluded that other chapters-the ones whose substance lay not within my
personal OSS experience-were probably sounder than the ones I knew about.
The earmarks of scholarly endeavor which stuck out all over the book were an
earnest of the author's training in systematic research.
A word about these earmarks-because in most works on a secret organiza-
tion like OSS they are signally lacking. Spread through the book's 11 chapters
and 353 pages of text there are 823 references which will lead you ultimately to a
bibliography of 344 items (books, articles, and documents-published and un-
published). They will also lead you to a list of 75 persons whom the author
interviewed (man-to-man or by telephone) and 103 other persons from whom he
received written communication. Practically all of his respondents were OSS
alumni. In addition to this display of scholarly apparatus, there are 238 proper
footnotes at the bottom of the page which furnish important bits of information
about people and things. Some of this is striking in its detail--even in the case of
relatively minor figures. It is added evidence of Mr. Smith's busy researches and
his tact in not revealing a present CIA connection of certain individuals who
would prefer it that way.
All of the above, taken with the style of the writing and the scope of the
book-it covers the field activities of OSS wherever they took place: Africa, west-
ern and southeastern Europe, China, and Southeast Asia-is bound to incline a
reader to a ready-for-the-best frame of mind. I regret that a little time invested
in a careful and critical second reading leaves me with a very different impres-
sion. Almost every way I look at it, I find the book wanting in most of the at-
tributes of quality. My objections can be covered under four headings: general
approach, approach to sourcing and the sourcing itself, errors, and omissions.
As one takes the book in big gulps, he gets the distinct feeling of reading
about an institution whose inner soul-and outward conscious policy-was one
*With this, all thanks to Walter Pforzheimer and his associates, Linda Benton and Corinne De
Lisle, for a lot of invaluable help.
`HS,
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in sympathy with the world's leftist movements. At a guess this is the residue of
an earlier essay on OSS which Mr. Smith submitted to a graduate school for an
advanced degree. Its central theme was that OSS was disciple and leader of what
M.r. Smith called "social idealism" and that OSS had a conscious policy of back-
ing-say-the extreme left against the extreme right, and the left of center
versus the right of center, in all its major initiatives. Another guess is that some-
one who knew better tried to set Mr. Smith right in the matter. They explained
that there were all kinds of people in OSS, ranging from Serge Obolensky (who
wore his Tsarist ribbons) at one end of the political spectrum, to some ideological
Marxists and self-professing Communists at the other. They also must have
explained that just because a lot of OSS field officers were sympathetic to foreign
leftist causes, and a lot more were unsympathetic with rightist ideologies related
to that which we were trying to extirpate in general war, there was little reason to
coalesce these individual (and in the circumstances quite normal) attitudes into a
formal OSS party line. Those who knew General Donovan best knew that he had
one overriding goal for his agency, and that was to do the enemy the greatest
hurt in as many ways, in as many places, and as fast as possible. They also knew
that he was a stickler for observing broad lines of national policy where they had
been clearly established, such as, for an obvious example, the maintenance of the
solidarity of the alliance. As to other lines of national policy-especially those on
non-war issues, and those affecting the post-war world-few indeed had been
clearly defined anywhere, and Donovan's people were no less free to roam this
undemarcated area than the officers of other departments and agencies of the
government. Many roamed freely. Mr. Smith's second effort, the book under
review, shows that he was aware of the great diversity of people in OSS, but that
lie could not bring himself to reject out of hand his cherished dream thesis. The
result is that you get both points of view throughout the book-with the
emphasis on the earlier thesis.
It seems gratuitous to call attention once more to the fact that Americans
everywhere were conscious of the political, social, and economic goals of the
New Deal and that many Americans, especially young Americans, were sympa-
thetic to them. It seems unnecessary to state that innate distrust of Soviet
Communism was inevitably softened by the realization that the USSR was an
ally, and an ally which was absorbing the overwhelming proportion of the Nazi
war potential, and that, after all, the enemy was the Fascist Axis. As if these
were not in themselves enough to account for the left-leaning posture of many
young (and old) officers of OSS, there were also compelling pragmatic reasons.
To be pro-monarchy in Italy was not merely to back a royal family which had
gone along with Mussolini, but also to back a sure loser. To be pro-Tito and for
the Communist irregulars in northern Italy and in France was perhaps far less
to be accounted for on ideological grounds, than upon a realization that among
the sketchily reported hordes of underground warriors these stood out for
their organizing ability, their courage, skill, and resolve. That another OSS
group had a close relationship with Ho Chi Minh in northern Indochina is not
so much to be cited as evidence of OSS's moral devotion to anti-colonialism,
as evidence of the fact that the principal task of the group was to collect intel-
ligence, and they found Ho's apparatus an admirable source of supply. I do not
wish to suggest that Mr. Smith is ignorant of how these practical consider-
ations influenced OSS Chiefs and lone Indians, but I do wish to say that he
plays down their importance to nurture the alternative thesis.
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The saddest result of all this turns up in the final chapter, where-to clinch
his point about OSS-he chooses to contrast that agency with what he would
term its direct lineal descendant, the CIA. According to Mr. Smith, critics of the
present organization
have often wondered how an amateur secret service that once gave hope to
Ho Chi Minh's guerrillas could have evolved into an "invisible government"
of the Cold War era. The answer is simple. The CIA is no aberrant muta-
tion of "Donovan's dreamers" [the heading of Smith's first chapter]; it is
in many ways the mirror image of OSS.
The comparison thus drawn between the two institutions must be weighed in
terms of Mr. Smith's license to speak usefully about either. As is already clear, I
cannot share one of his basic thoughts about OSS, and I am not ready to admit
that he knows much more about CIA. While awaiting proof to the contrary, we
must guess that his store of knowledge of the Agency derives from a nine
months' tour in headquarters at a junior grade and the reading of the materials
cited in his bibliography like the books of Tully,* Wise and Ross,** and the long
article of Fred Cook which constituted a special issue of the New York Nation.***
There is another aspect of Mr. Smith's general approach which calls for
comment, and this is the undue stress he gives to the lack of organization and
discipline in OSS. It is just irresponsible journalism to decorate Chapter One
with pixie tales of General Donovan's supposed impatience with organization
diagrams and administrative detail. Whatever example of this sort the General
may have set, it stopped right there. It did not go beyond the Buxtons, Chestons,
Magruders, the branch directors, and on down the line. Administration at head-
quarters and in the large units overseas was no more chaotic than anywhere else
in a wartime government, and a lot less than in many another war agency. With
a few notable -and to me inexplicable-exceptions, Donovan's principal lieu-
tenants were an able no-nonsense group. What went on in tiny units operating
far afield in friendly and especially in enemy territory obviously could not be
controlled as closely as a headquarters company. Even so, there was a lot less
irresponsible free wheeling than Mr. Smith and the other romanticizers of OSS
like to pretend.
"Insubordination became a way of life for OSS officers, but Donovan was
unconcerned," begins a paragraph in the first chapter. The theme then continues
for the best part of three pages and is recalled elsewhere in the book. If the
reader comes away with the feeling that indiscipline was basic to the institution,
this is not because he has misread Mr. Smith. Yet how wrong he was. And how
better to illustrate his wrongness than his own account of General Donovan's
peremptory handling of Robert Solborg's and Arthur Roseborough's disregard
of instructions. This sort of response is far closer to the way most OSS alumni will
think of the matter of indiscipline than in terms of the whimsical anecdotes of
uncaught and unpunished culprits.
Now about the sources for Mr Smith's book and the way he used them. The
first thing to say on this subject is that Mr. Smith, like his recent predecessors,
did not have access to the official OSS archive. He knew that this was the way it
was going to be before he started, and that if he was to write the book he would
*CIA, The Inside Story (Morrow, New York, 1962).
**The Invisible Government (Random House, New York, 1964) and The Espionage Establish-
ment (Random House, New York, 1967).
***The Nation (Special Issue, 24 June 1961).
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have to use the next best thing. A more discriminating student would have
perceived that the next best thing--with a few exceptions-was a pretty poor
substitute, and that a book resting upon it was doomed from the start. Solid
workmanlike history has seldom, if ever, been written from the stuff that leaks
out around the edges of a secret organization.
Have a look at what Mr. Smith had to work with. The very best of it con-
sists of papers which some officers of OSS took with them into private life and
then turned over to public repositories. There is, for example, the collection which
Preston Goodfellow, a chief of the Special Operations branch and trusted
Donovan lieutenant, bestowed upon the Hoover Institution at Stanford (sup-
posedly under seal until 1980)! Judging only from Mr. Smith's footnote refer-
ences, the documents touch upon a number of OSS matters and are highly il-
luminating. There are also the papers of Joseph Hayden, who began life in OSS
as a member of the Board of Analysts of the Research and Analysis Branch (he
was a political scientist by trade, with a specialty in the Far East), and moved
over to one of the clandestine branches and served in China. There are the papers
of Captain (later Vice Admiral) Miles, famous as the American deputy director
of the Sino-American Cooperative Organization and for 10 months the Chief of
OSS in the Far East; the papers of Francis P. Miller (one of the principal officers
in the Sussex operation) and among which Mr. Smith says he found a copy of the
official history of Sussex. Lastly there are the papers of Harley Stevens (who,
among other jobs, was commander of the OSS detachment in Chungking); of
Leland Rounds (one of the control officers in North Africa nominally in place to
police the U.S.-North African economic accords and in fact one of the purveyors
of highly important intelligence prior to the Torch operation of 1942); and of
DeWitt Poole (Chief of the Foreign Nationalities Branch of OSS).
There can be no question of the value of this sort of material to a historian,
but one suspects that it cannot illuminate more than a tiny fraction of the vast
screen of total OSS activities.
So it will be with the next echelon of material. This consists of books and
articles written by OSS officers at a time when their memories were still fresh, or
perhaps later with the aid of letters or diaries; plus similar publications of other
civilian officials and military men whose business took them into contact with
this or that part of OSS. I would include in this group books like Mr. Dulles's
Secret Surrender,* which, though published in 1966, rests solidly upon a long
memo for the record which Mr. Dulles and his colleague Gaevernitz wrote in
1945; Carlton Hayes's Wartime Mission in Spain,** and General Stilwell's
Papers.*** I would include some others like the books of Donald Downes and
Peter Tompkins with a warning about their reliability. These books, with the
documents of my first category, would constitute what a critical scholar would
call his primary materials. When taken all together and stacked against what one
ought to have at hand to describe the multifarious real-life activity, the myriad
undertakings, and signal successes and failures of the OSS, you have something
perilously close to nothing at all.
Of course, Mr. Smith must have been aware of just that, and so he dropped
down to the next category of written testimony. This is the material that con-
stitutes the bulk of the bibliography and an odd lot it is. Some of it has no more
*Harper & Row, New York, 1966.
**Macmillan, New York, 1945.
***Sloane, New York, 1948.
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than a whiff of relevance to Mr. Smith's task. For example, he includes some
books which recount the adventures of some British Special Operations Execu-
tive operatives in Italy, perhaps to compensate for what Mr. Smith could not
find out about OSS's special operations in this theatre. He includes the book of
Joyce Lussu (wife of the liberal Italian political figure) which was published in
1969 and is seemingly an undocumented reminiscence. The book is about the
turmoil in Italy and about Lussu; on one page the author adverts to Benedetto
Croce's presence on Capri in the fall of 1943. Since it was at this time that Croce
recommended to Donovan that the Americans put the Italian General Pavone
in charge of a combat legion of anti-Fascist Italians to fight at the side of the
Anglo-American forces in Italy, the Croce incident becomes relevant to the OSS
story, and the Lussu book which relates to Croce becomes, by extension, a legiti-
mate item of the bibliography. There are a good number of entries whose claim to
notice are as tenuous as this one.
Others have a much better claim, in that their content and their authors are
closer to the subject and to OSS activities. But the bulk of this group of books was
written long after the fact, largely on the basis of unaided memory-few if any
reveal any other source and to this reviewer seem in large part trivial, self-
serving, or grossly inaccurate, or all three. Take for example the two books of
Robert Alcorn. Mr. Alcorn in 1962 and 1965 wrote as if he had been a privileged
and important OSS insider, while in fact he held a modest administrative position
in London which afforded him no more than observer status-and that, usually,
at several removes from the action. In these circumstances I for one am not
surprised to find a number of Mr. Smith's passages written upon Alcorn's
authority that I know to be aimless woolgathering or inexcusably erroneous.
The peril of relying upon this sort of published material was nowhere
better illustrated than in Mr. Smith's use of the book of James Dugan and
Carroll Stewart (cited in a footnote only) on the Ploesti raids. In a section
devoted to the evacuation of downed American flyers from Rumania, the authors
take a breather from their main task to recount how an OSS team came to
recently-liberated Bucharest to lend a hand in the rescue, to inventory the
damage to the Ploesti refineries, and to pick up any materials of intelligence
interest which the retreating Germans had left behind. The Dugan/Stewart ac-
count is full of jocular fantasy, most of which Mr. Smith found out when he
checked the story with Frederick Burkhardt-one of the OSS team members.
Despite what nonsense Burkhardt was able to purge from Mr. Smith's original
understanding, perhaps a dozen significant errors remain in Mr. Smith's single
paragraph.
Mixed among the irrelevancies and the balderdash of the bibliography are
perhaps a score of books written after the events they describe which are sober,
sound, and careful. I note them with pleasure as a judicious corrective to what
has just gone before. But let me add that there is no critical phrase anywhere in
the bibliography which will identify them. In your innocence you will be left
to flip a coin as to which is the better book: the Corey Ford, Alistair McBaine
Cloak and Dagger,* which contains scarcely a paragraph without some dismal
error of omission or commission, or the Roger Hall You're Stepping on my Cloak
and Dagger,** which is a humorous and at the same time accurate account of an
OSS man's training for irregular warfare. If Mr. Smith knew the difference, he
does not let on.
*Grosset & Dunlap, New York, 1946.
**Norton, New York, 1957.
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Beyond the written word there was that vast reservoir of oral testimony to
be tapped, and Mr. Smith exploited this with commendable zeal. He uncovered an
astonishing number of OSS alumni (and less than half a dozen alumnae), got in
touch with them, and pumped. Some of what he got from them is cited in the
footnotes, but no one save the author can know what else they contributed. Where
his informants requested anonymity, they got it. There can be no question of the
value of the information Mr. Smith acquired from these interviews and
exchanges of correspondence. Important parts of the book could not have been
composed without them. Yet in his use of oral testimony Mr. Smith was up
against two disadvantages. The first is the obvious one that these memories which
he tried to journey through were already 25 years stale. The second is that, how-
ever good or poor individual memories were, Mr. Smith approached them with-
out the basic tool of the interrogator's trade- -namely, as full a pre-knowledge of
the subject as only the official or other authoritative sources could afford.
Without access to the OSS archive, and without an inventory of solid background
information, Mr. Smith was at best at a very serious disadvantage. The results
are clear. Holes and misremembrances in this or that man's recollections are all
but impossible to cope with, and the other non-additive episodic memories which
were tapped led more surely to misconstructions and distortions than to the
detached overview that Mr. Smith sought. In fact, the business of trying to
patch together scores and scores of flawed and disparate bits of oral testimony
is, I fancy, one of the reasons that the book is as it is.
Surely it will account for some of the errors, not all. Irrespective of their
source, there are far too many of them. Some of the most damaging are the errors
of innocence. Not one of these is much in itself; in fact, most would be wholly
unimportant if they did not underscore the fact that no part of what Mr. Smith
knows of his subject derives from his personal experience. OSS was one year dead
before Mr. Smith took his first breath, and as far as he is concerned, OSS might
almost as well have existed in the forties of the nineteenth or eighteenth
centuries. That there were living witnesses around to query seems not to have
compensated for his unfamiliarity with the institution or its era. How, for
example, could anyone professing a knowledge of intelligence matters put the
headquarters of the Gehlen organization in an "OSS compound near Frankfurt"
and have the Gehlen group "fed and clothed by Donovan's officers"? How could
a serious investigator of OSS put Rudolph Winnacker, Milwaukee- and Madison-
educated and an American citizen since young manhood, among the recent
German emigres on the R and A staff, or speak in the same phrase of Edward
Mason and Walt Rostow as if they were co-equals? In the early 1940's, Mr.
Mason was already a senior Harvard professor and among our country's half
dozen leading economists; Walt Rostow, still in his mid-twenties, was a junior
research assistant to Mason. How could one mention Harold Macmillan three
times with three different points of reference without once connecting him to the
man with the same name who became the British Prime Minister. Is it possible
that Mr. Smith did not know? When he speaks of someone in "OSS uniform," an-
other "with the assimilated rank of OSS Major," and identifies the Purple Gang
with Shia, one is nudged to fear the worst.
The damage which this sort of error does to Mr. Smith's credibility on more
important matters is augmented by the multitude of simple run-of-the-mill
mistakes. There are hundreds of them. One group of them has so incensed a
reader that he has muttered about legal action. Another, surrounding the murder
of William Holohan in northern Italy, by ignoring the findings of the Italian
court and accepting the story of one of those found guilty by it in absentia, has
stirred justifiable muttering of another sort. Among the many other errors there
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are two at least of special concern to readers of this review: one is the canard
which identifies Mr. Dulles as one of the directors of the J. Henry Schroder
banking concern (which is correct) and which then links that concern with that
of the German financier, Kurt von Schroeder, who was one of the Nazis' finan-
cial angels (the linkage is dead wrong). Through this line of argument, Mr. Dulles
becomes part of the circle of Hitler's early well-wishers and financial backers.
This malevolent and silly story began in one of the publications of the Soviet
propaganda mill in a pamphlet called Falsificators of History,* published in
1948 in Moscow in English. Fred Cook borrowed it (without attribution) for his
previously cited article on CIA in the Nation. Inasmuch as the Moscow piece
does not appear in Mr. Smith's bibliography and the Cook: article does, one
must assume that the source was Cook. Incidentally if Mr. Smith has concluded
that the OSS was motivated by the spirit of liberal idealism, his reading of Fred
Cook would cast the CIA as its mirror image, and make no mistake.
Another error which offers more important hurt to the reputation of OSS
is the allegation (p. 6) that
unaware that a top secret [U.S.] naval intelligence team had. broken the
Japanese military code, OSS men in Portugal secretly entered the Japanese
embassy and stole a copy of the enemy's code book. The Japanese discovered
the theft and promptly changed their ciphers. Washington was left without
a vital source of information, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were irate.
Mr. Smith's source for this is a popular book, Cloak and Cipher, by Dan Moore
and Martha Waller.** What he learned from this book he incorporated in that
paragraph of Chapter I which begins "Insubordination became a way of life for
OSS officers, but Donovan was unconcerned," and in which he goes on to list a
few places where OSS operatives got out of line without bringing down directorial
reprimand or punishment. The story from Moore and Waller so nicely fitted the
requirements of the paragraph as perhaps to inhibit more research into the
matter which might add confirmation (unnecessary?) or denial (unwanted?). In
all events, there is no evidence that Mr. Smith knew that the primary source was
a far more credible and weighty affair than the slight offering he seized upon. The
true source was part of a long letter which none other than General George C.
Marshall addressed to Governor Thomas Dewey (dated 27 September 1944) and
which a year later General Marshall introduced in his testimony to the Congres-
sional committee investigating the Pearl Harbor attack. (The committee sub-
sequently published it.) Toward the end of the communication is the following:
...some of Donovan's people (the OSS), without telling us, instituted a
secret search of the Japanese Embassy offices in Portugal. As a result the
entire military attache Japanese code all over the world was changed, and
though this occurred over a year ago, we have not been able to break the new
code and have thus lost this invaluable source of information, particularly
regarding the European situation.
The occasion for the letter was General Marshall's concern that Governor
Dewey, in the heat of the presidential campaign, would reiterate the allegation
of President Roosevelt's complicity in the Pearl Harbor attack and in so doing
build his case on Roosevelt's familiarity with Japanese diplomatic traffic and
the U.S. capability to read it. To avoid the horrendous consequences of such a
disclosure, General Marshall sent the Governor what has been called "the most
*Soviet Information Bureau, Moscow, February 1948.
**Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis, 1962.
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revealing single document in the annals of cryptology."* In it he told of the
stunning successes of the U.S. crypt-analytic effort on Japanese communications,
and how they had made possible a number of decisive American naval actions
against the Japanese. Wishing above all to underscore the sensitivity of the
source, he noted that the report of Justice Roberts on Pearl Harbor had had to
be purged of all reference to our ability to read the Japanese traffic before it was
made public. And then just to cap the point, he included the two sentences I
have quoted about OSS in Portugal.
Most readers of this review will know that General Marshall's initiative was
successful; that Governor Dewey with some reluctance read the letter and then
scrupulously observed its injunction. Few readers will know that General Mar-
shall had been previously misinformed about the incident regarding OSS in
Lisbon, and had made an incorrect charge which the likes of Moore and Waller
and now Richard Harris Smith perpetuate. No one without access to the OSS
and other intelligence records could possibly set the matter to rights. ** The short
of it is that whatever the OSS people in Lisbon got out of the Japanese naval
attache's office was not related to the attache code, and that whether or not the
Japanese were alarmed at the scent of an OSS penetration of the Lisbon premises,
they did little or nothing to make the attache communications system more
difficult to read. We were reading virtually all of it both during and after the
events at issue. With this I hope that OSS is exculpated from what would appear
the most damaging charge ever made against it.
As I have remarked, little personal blame should be attached to Mr. Smith
for his (unknowingly, to be sure) going along with General Marshall in this
particular error. His omissions, on the other hand, are not so easily pardoned.
From something that he wrote to one of his contacts-and which is borne out by
the general character of the book--his concern focused on the overseas field
operations of OSS. His successes, such as they are, lie largely in his accounts of
the doings of the secret intelligence (SI) and special operations (SO) branches and
the operational groups (OG). But the other field activities-X-2 (counter-
espionage), MO (morale operations), MU (Maritime Unit), even the FP (field
photographic), all of which had substantial duties (and successes) overseas-get
little notice or none at all. But this is not the worst.
Far more serious is the omission of almost all reference to the entire Washing-
ton scene. If this was a well-formulated intention, it would have been considerate
of him to have put some such confession into his subtitle instead of the garish
"The Secret History of America's First Central Intelligence Agency." It would
have been prudent of him to have given the matter a paragraph in his preface.
But he did not, with the result that the studious reader is left to wonder about
what formed, directed, and nurtured these overseas empires, who received what
they reported, and what was done with it.
Setting his sights thus, Mr. Smith is under no obligation to examine the
fundamental problems of the OSS: things like General Donovan's leadership
where it counted-his relationship with the President, the Congress, the Joint
Chiefs, the Services and their intelligence branches, and the rest of the war
agencies. There is no obligation to look to the principal executives and adminis-
trators (the men I have mentioned earlier and a number of others), to their tasks,
and how they performed them. There is no need to look at recruitment, training,
cover, commo, the medics, security, the vast logistics service, personnel and its
problems with both the Civil Service Commission and the military, and the OSS
*David Kahn, The Codebreakers, Macmillan, New York, 1967, p. 605.
**My thanks to Mr. Thomas F. Troy who led me to the appropriate OSS folders.
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budget. With the bathwater, out went these babies plus another which is to the
reviewer painful on both personal and professional accounts. This is the Research
and Analysis Branch, which to be sure gets its marginal mentions (often wrong)
in the context of its people in the overseas posts, but nothing else.
The large majority of R and A's staff stayed in Washington, and the bulk
of its work was designed for high-level consumption within the national govern-
ment and the Pentagon building. Clearly, then, it was not within Mr. Smith's
terms of reference, but in leaving it out he denied himself the chance to discuss a
"first," and a distinguished one, in American intelligence history and an important
contribution to OSS's remarkable record. Incidentally, of all the branches, R and
A was the most overt, the one most authoritatively commented upon by former
insiders, and the one whose substantive output has been largely declassified.
Leaving it out of the story was to leave out the part most manageable to a diligent
student working without benefit of the closed official record.
Is this the kind of book that OSS is owed? The answer is, of course, no. Is
this the best that can be expected? The answer here is both no and yes. In the
first place, given Mr. Smith's diligence, his book did not have to have this one's
grievous shortcomings. With more skepticism about what he read and what he
heard and more caution about what he decided to commit to print, he could have
written a much better book. But it would still be far short of what the subject
requires. It would be because the job is bigger than a two-man/year stint with the
materials which Mr. Smith used, and bigger than a 20-man/year stint with access
to the official OSS archive. Other scholars have looked at the task, plumbed its
magnitude and turned to more rewarding projects when they learned that the
archive would not be opened to them.
Our cousins have made a start of doing things differently; they have liberated
part of the archive of the British "Special Operations Executive" and made it
available to a mature and critical scholar, M. R. D. Foot. Mr. Foot's book,
SOE in France: An Account of the Work of the British Special Operations Executive
in France, 1940-1944* is a praiseworthy example of an outsider trying "simply to
explain what happened, without conscious bias in any direction," and endeavoring
to write a healthy corrective to "the turmoil of under-informed publicity that has
surrounded what has so far appeared in English about secret operations in
France. . . ." The writing of the book's first draft took more than two years
(note: for SOE in France, only). What happened next-namely, the clearance by
"a number of people who had a claim to be heard on what it said," the consequent
"further research and . . . some changes and amplifications of text," plus the
actual publication-took another four years. From the book's beginning, when
Prime Minister Macmillan authorized some research on the subject, through an
official announcement of the project made to Parliament, to the actual printing,
which was done by Her Majesty's Stationery Office, it had the standing of a
piece of government-sponsored business. This is one way to handle an important
bit of national history whose sources were highly classified 30 years ago. There
are many other ways, any one of which would probably better serve the national
interest than the one adopted by the author of OSS.
*Her Majesty's Stationery Office, London, 1966.
SECRET 79
Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/01/18: CIA-RDP84-00499R000500080003-1
 Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/01/18: CIA-RDP84-00499R000500080003-1
THE DOUBLE-CROSS SYSTEM IN THE WAR OF 1939-1945. By J. C.
Masterman. (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1972. 203
pages.)
TIE COUNTERFEIT SPY. By Sefton Delmer. (Harper & Row, New York,
1971. 256 pages.)
These two books deal largely with the same subject. The most important
theme of each is a description of the various Allied deception efforts-particularly
in the preparations for the Normandy invasion-in which the Allies were extra-
ordinarily successful. One of the primary factors in achieving these deceptions,
Masterman asserts, was that from June 1940 onward, the British controlled all
German espionage agents in the United Kingdom. Through those who became
double agents, they were able to feed the Germans a great deal of misleading
material. Masterman's book deals with the whole British double agent operation
of World War Two from the start, and describes all deception efforts springing
from that operation. Delmer's book centers on one double agent, a Spaniard the
British called Garbo, the Germans Cato, and whom Delmer calls Jorge Antonio.
This Spaniard, a long-time double agent, was an important part of the Nor-
mandy invasion deception effort, which Delmer describes in considerable detail.
Garbo's case is also described by Masterman.
Masterman was with the double agent side of MI-5, while Delmer was chief
of the main British black radio propaganda effort, Soldatensender West.
Masterman wrote his book in the period July through September 1945, his
last months with MI-5. It was the official history of the double agent operations,
and so he had access to all pertinent documents. He explains this briefly in the
preface and in an article in the Yale Alumni Magazine of February 1972. He took
a copy of his (Top Secret) work with him when he retired to civilian life, and--as
the years went by-started efforts to get permission to have it published. He felt
very strongly that this should be done to "improve the image" of the Secret
Service, which had suffered so many blows in the security flaps of the 1950's and
1960's. He did not succeed in getting it past the authorities until he turned it
over to the Yale University Press.
In reading Masterman's book one is constantly struck by the fact that here
is (1) a wonderful book describing (2) an astounding intelligence achievement,
and one is continually getting the two mixed up. Perhaps it would be best first
to describe the achievement in rough outline. The British intelligence services,
military and civilian, the Foreign Office, the Home Office, etc., later on to be
joined by an OSS representative, formed a committee to handle double agent
cases. In war, double agent spells deception faster than in peace, and is much more
important, so the committee was a vital affair. It was called "The Twenty Com-
mittee" after the Roman numerals XX, which also stand for double-cross. At
the start there was the usual interdepartmental bickering, but after the committee
was formed in January 1941, it met weekly until May 1945. Its chairman---
Masterman-was appointed by the chief of MI-5. It had its teething troubles,
but despite the fact that it had very little in the way of formal guidance and rules
of procedure, "the organization had the supreme merit of working."
During the war the British gained control of some 120 German agents
dispatched by the Germans. Many were of no importance and were not developed,
but 39 were developed into double agent cases, some lasting three or four years,
through whom a wide variety of deception material was fed to the Germans. As
the British gradually and incredulously came to believe, they controlled all
German agents in the U.K.
Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/01/18: CIA-RDP84-00499R000500080003-1