OSS THE SECRET HISTORY OF AMERICA'S FIRST CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY.

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP75-00001R000100010018-7
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: November 16, 2016
• Document Release Date: April 24, 2000
• Sequence Number: 18
• Publication Date: September 17, 1972
• Content Type: NSPR

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THE NEW YORK TIDES BOOK REVIEW
CPYRGHT
Approved For Release mono : ciAlFbizeitogii?R000l000looi
430
The Secret History of America's
First Central Intelligence Agency.
By R. Harris Smith.
Illustrated. 458 pp. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
$10.95.
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? ll't to reach the truth, to separate
Net from fiction, the historian might
rell need as many trained researchers
as there were operators in the, O.S.S.
Donovan's diaries were cryptic, de-
Ever since the Greeks filled a
wooden horse with soldiers and pre-
sented it to the Trojans, the world
has been fascinated by the deceptive
methods of espionage and counter
intelligence. The craft of intelligence,
by its very nature, is so secret that
clandestine activities are cloaked
either in the ridiculous and the ab-
surd or the sublime and the practical.
In this hook, II. Harris Smith, who
J
worked briefly as a research analyst
for the C.I.A. and now lectures in po-
litical science at the University of
California's Extension Division, seems
to have discovered only the first two.
Perhaps that's all he was meant to
find. It would appear that old 0.S.S,
men never dice, their stories simply
get better while their secrets remain
intact. :
The fault is not really Smith's, It
.is doubtful that anyone can write
the true and authentic "Secret His-
tory of America's First Central In-
telligence Agency," the wartime Of-
fice of Strategic Services.
I have some reason to know. Back
in the early sixties, as part of a
research project, I was granted un-
usual access to the papers, files and
diaries of the late Maj. Gen. William
"Wild Bill" Donovan, founder of the
Wartime Office of Strategic Services
? the country's first real intelli-
gence agency and the forerunner of
C.I.A. I was astonished at the size
of the collection. To catalog Dono-
van's voluminous papers required the
full-time services of a trained staff
for over two years, and even this
- fascinating cache did not include the
real body of still highly sensitive
O.S.S. records. Stepping even briefly
, into Donovan's mysterious world was
enough to convince me of the awe-
some task awaiting the historian who
might, one day, write the O.S.S. of-
ficial history. Indeed, because of the
many secret faces of intelligence it- ,
Cornelius Ryan is the author of
two volumes about World War
"The Longest Day" and "The Last
Battle." He is currently working on
a third volume entitled, "A Bridge
Too Far." Approved For Releas
signed toTraffie. A. single entry writ-
ten in his neat handwriting might
read: "Operation Scorpion began to-
c ay" and nothing else! To un-
eoarth the story of Operation Scorpion
might require the assimilation of pa-
pers from perhaps 100 Mirciated file
Orawers of material. Compounding
tie security compartmentalization
even further, each operative M those
I les had a code name. To understand
rhat had occurred demanded months
of frustrating reading ? only to find
t rat even then one might never learn
tic total truth. But Mr. Smith has
c early fallen foul of the very first
Lw of reportage: Believe nothing oa-
k ss it can be corroborated by others
ad substantiated by definitive back-
ground records.
Unfortunately, because the author
yeas denied access to official papers,
b a was forced, for the most part,
to rely on contemporary espionage
a id intelligence accounts and,
ith the exception of perhaps half-
a dozen valuable works, there is
trobably no body of World War II
erature so distorted and misleading.
h arch of it was meant to be so.
Taose World War II intelligence
a emits who wrote- of their exploits
-
a 'ter the conflict deliberately falsi-
f ed names, dates and places and, of-
ten, the very nature of their assign-
ents. To act otherwise might gravely
Inaveimperiled agents still in the field.
Mr. Smith has drawn on much of
this literature, repeating in many in-
s ,anees old inaccuracies. One of the
n ost prominent concerns Allen Dul-
les, the late director of C.I.A., who,
daring World War II, was undoubted-
Irt, Donovan's most brilliant agent. Be-
fore the war, Smith writes, Dulles in
c mjunction with his legal work at
Slullivan fa: Cromwell "met the elite
04' German industry the same men
v ho financed and actively supported
the NaZi dictatorship. ? He and a fu-
t ire O.S.S. aide, Russian emigre Val-
e tie Lada-hlocarski, also sat on the
board of Directors of the American
boanch of the powerful Schroeder
!yanking house." The German parent
f rm, the author added, "was headed
bar a scar-faced Prussian baron who
served as a general in the SS, Hitler's
e.ite guard." Smith has got the story
tally half right. Dulles was a director
of the J. henry Schroeder Banking
Arita gr tWOje,MPI6. CtOR
t ic German Schroeder Bank.
Elsewhere he repea ?s tie legend
that, in 1941, "unaware that a top
secret Naval intelligence team had
broken the JaPanese military code,
O.S.S. men in Portugal secretly en-
tered the Japanese Embassy and stol
a copy of the enemy's code book."
Discovering the theft, the Japanese,
according to Smith, "promptly
changed their ciphers. Washington
was left without a vital source of
information and the Joint Chiefs of
Staff were irate?' Again, Smith is only
half right. The O.S.S. did. not burgle
the Japanese Embassy in Portugal,
but in Lisbon they obtained a few
pages of a "low level" Japanese ci-
pher. This cipher was not the all-
important code that the Navy crypto-
analysts had cracked. The fact is
the United States continued to take
advantage of the Japanese codes for
the entire war.
To augment his research, the au-
thor has drawn on the reminiscences .
of some 200 O.S.S. veterans ---- of
whom there are no more entertaining
storytellers alive. How mem of these
intelligence agents, without benefit of
after-action reports, operational pol-
icy directives or, indeed, their own
transmitted messages, could accu-
rately recall after 25 years what hap-
pened on any specific operation? How
many would own up that their tales
grow in exaggeration and importance
with each yearly O.S.S. veterans' din-
ner? To them it is usually all good
fun. The outsider must learn to take
it that way, too. But did, in fact, the
highly trained deceptors deliberately
deceive? There are indications that
the author was left short on detail of
various missions, for many of the
anecdotes consist of tag lines without
a beginning or a middle and the
eader is left frustrated, wondering
what actually took place: "Every ec-
centric schemer," writes Smith, "with
a ? harebrained plan for secret opera-
tions (from phosphorescent foxes to
incendiary bats) would find a sym-
pathetic ear in Donovan's office.".
continued
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