Notwithstanding a tendency among boosters of the CIA to talk up the Agency’s dynastic descent from the OSS because of the latter’s aura of heroism and derring-do, there were a number of incontrovertible continu-ities between the wartime agency and its peacetime successor, not least in the area of covert operations. To begin with, despite neither having any domestic responsibilities—indeed, both were expressly forbidden from operating at home—the two organizations showed the same tendency to reach inward into American society in order to discharge their secret missions abroad. Academics, émigrés, and labor officials all moved into and out of Donovan’s covert network, sharing their expert knowledge and contacts in foreign countries and blurring the boundaries between the official and the civil realms as they went—much as the spies themselves seemed not to distinguish between government service and personal duty (Donovan never collected any salary during his time as Coordinator of Information, falling back instead on his considerable private means).25 Then there was the OSS’s clear orientation toward covert action, as opposed to the less glamorous (but, many would argue, more worthwhile) business of information collection—its penchant not only for paramilitary sabotage and subversion but also for the subtler arts of “psychological warfare,” pro-
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paganda designed to undermine enemy morale and strengthen that of allies. “Persuasion, penetration, and intimidation . . . are the modern counterparts of sapping and mining in the siege warfare of former days,”
believed Donovan.26 No wonder, then, that in addition to a Special Operations (SO) branch, his spy agency had a whole division devoted to MO
(Morale Operations), in particular the production of materials designed to suggest widespread demoralization among ordinary Germans and Japanese.27 This prioritizing of covert operations, including “psy-war,” over espionage was one of the OSS’s more significant (and, arguably, regrettable) legacies to the CIA. Finally, it is possible to detect several social and political similarities between the two services: a common practice of recruiting their staff from elite universities such as Yale (not for nothing was the OSS nicknamed “Oh So Social”); a distinct predisposition toward internationalism, produced in many cases by the officers’ experience of living and fighting alongside foreign partisans during the war; and a surprising amount of liberalism, even leftism, again often the result of close wartime dealings with communist-dominated resistance movements. Indeed, several conservative critics complained, not without justification, that Donovan was harboring communists within the OSS.28
Of course, it would not do to exaggerate the leftward leanings of the Office of Strategic Services. Equally powerful—and, in terms of the later development of the CIA, historically more important—was an impulse toward anti communism. Take Frank G. Wisner, for example, chief of OSS
operations in the central Balkans during the latter stages of the war and the man responsible for implementing the CIA’s earliest covert operations. The Mississippi-born, powerfully built Wisner, who as well as earning top grades at the University of Virginia narrowly missed out on a place in the U.S. sprint team at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, was ostensibly in eastern Europe to spirit downed Allied airmen out of Nazi-occupied territory—an operation he carried out with dazzling success, rescuing nearly two thousand flyers. But his real mission was to report on communist attempts to take over the region as the German occupation ended. Rapidly establishing himself in Bucharest as a major broker of Rumanian politics (and enjoying the lavish hospitality available at the intrigue-ridden court of King Michael), Wisner built up HAMMERHEAD, a highly productive network of anticommunist espionage agents whose findings won him a reputation in Washington as a prophet of postwar Soviet intentions.
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“This place is wild with information,” reported one 1944 cable home,
“and Wisner is in his glory.”29 Shortly before leaving Rumania in February 1945, Wisner’s growing hatred of the communist system acquired an obsessive, even apocalyptic intensity when he impotently witnessed the herding of ethnic Germans onto trains bound for forced labor camps in the Soviet Union. “My husband was brutally, brutally shocked,” recalled his wife, Polly. “It was what probably affected his life more than any other single thing.”30 A few months later, when he was in Germany extracting intelligence about the Soviet Union from defeated Nazis, one of his lieutenants, the young Harvard historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.—
himself no slouch in the anticommunism stakes—was taken aback by Wisner’s ideological fervor. “He was already mobilizing for the Cold War,”
Schlesinger recalled later.31
But the Cold War had not started yet. Granted, cracks were appearing in the Grand Alliance even before the declaration of victory in Europe. Meanwhile, Franklin Roosevelt’s death in April 1945 ushered into the White House a plain-spoken, midwestern machine politician who soon “tired of babying the Soviets” (as he told an aide after just a few months in office).32 However, Harry S. Truman was no fan of the OSS
and seems to have taken a strong personal dislike to the “Black Republican leprechaun,” William Donovan.33 More convinced than ever of the United States’s need for a permanent secret service, and personally reveling in his role of American spymaster, Wild Bill had begun arguing as early as September 1943 for the extension of the OSS’s lifetime beyond the end of the war. Again, however, he encountered resistance at every turn, some from the usual quarters, such as Hoover’s FBI; and some in less expected places: it now appears that FDR himself authorized the leaking to the press of a memorandum from Donovan outlining his vision of a peacetime intelligence agency, which resulted in a storm of negative reports in the anti-Roosevelt press in February 1945. “New Deal Plans to Spy on World and Home Folks,” read a headline in the Chicago Tribune,
“and Super Gestapo Agency Is Under Consideration.”34 Wild Bill ploughed on manfully, but the game was up. Eventually granted access to the Oval Office, he presented Truman with an envelope containing his spy agency blueprint, which the new president tore in two and handed back to him. The OSS was formally dissolved in September 1945, with Research and Analysis hived off to the State Department and all the
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other branches going to the military. Demobilized by the end of 1945, Donovan, Dulles, and Wisner all returned reluctantly to their law practices in New York. It was, Dulles told John Kenneth Galbraith, “an appall-ing thing to come back, after heading a spy network, to handling corporate indentures.”35 History, it seemed, had passed him by again.
George F. Kennan was suffering from one of his chronic maladies—a de-bilitating combination of cold, fever, sinusitis, and toothache. Still, he had waited a long time for a chance like this, and he was not about to let it slip through his fingers. Princeton-educated, intensively trained at the U.S. foreign service’s elite school for Soviet specialists in the Baltic city of Riga, and steeped in Russian culture and history, Kennan had watched for years from his middle-ranking post at the American Embassy in Moscow as well-intentioned but naïve New Deal officials let Stalin and his des-potic regime get away, literally, with murder. Now, however, in February 1946, the Truman administration was uncertain as to how to handle its erstwhile ally. Some of the new president’s advisors counseled that Truman continue his predecessor’s wartime policy of cooperation, while others advised taking a hard-line stance. The State Department cabled the U.S. mission to Moscow requesting clarification of Soviet intentions.
Kennan’s superiors were at last asking for his opinion, and, as he later put it in his memoirs, “by God, they would have it.” Dictating to a secretary from his sickbed, the chargé d’affaires composed a 5,540-word telegram,
“all neatly divided, like an eighteenth-century Protestant sermon, into five separate parts,” which gave eloquent voice to his long pent-up personal frustrations, love of the Russian people, and hatred of Bolshevism.36
There was, Kennan’s “Long Telegram” explained, no possibility of continued cooperation with the Soviet leadership. A number of factors, including an instinctive sense of national insecurity and the expansionist imperatives of Marxism-Leninism, had made communist Russia into “a political force committed fanatically to the belief that with [the] U.S.
there can be no permanent modus vivendi, that it is desirable and necessary that the internal harmony of our society be disrupted, our traditional way of life be destroyed, the international authority of our state be broken, if Soviet power is to be secure.” This threat was all the more terrifying because, in addition to its vast internal resources, the Soviet Union had at
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its disposal “an elaborate and far-flung apparatus for exertion of its influence in other countries, an apparatus of amazing flexibility and versatility, managed by people whose experience and skill in underground methods are presumably without parallel in history.” Not only that, western societies contained a “wide variety of national associations or bodies which can be dominated or influenced by such penetration,” including “labor unions, youth leagues, women’s organizations, racial societies, religious societies, social organizations, cultural groups, liberal magazines [and] publishing houses.” In these circumstances, the only “manly” course of action open to the United States (Kennan was fond of using such gendered language to make his point) was to contain Soviet expansion with “the logic of force” in the hope that structural weaknesses within the communist system, chief of which was the Stalin regime’s lack of legitimacy in the eyes of ordinary Russians, would lead to its eventual disintegration.37