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OSS: The Secret History of America's First Central Intelligence Agency |
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You Are Here: Home > History Books > Hockey History > Item 121
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OSS: The Secret History of America's First Central Intelligence Agency
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by Richard Harris Smith
Sales Rank: 278781
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List Price: $16.95
$11.53
At Amazon
on 8-7-2008.
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Features
Cover Type: Paperback with 456 pages
Published by: The Lyons Press; First edition August 1, 2005
Written in: English
ISBN 10 Number: 1592287298
ISBN 13 Number: 978-1592287291
Book Dimensions:
8.9 x 6.2 x 1.3 inches
Weighs: 1.6 pounds
Product Review
"The best book about America's first modern secret service . . . Smith, combining the style of a journalist with the scholarly approach of the political scientist, has provided an great overview of the role of OSS during the two-front war against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan . . . Tracing the names, the half-submerged links between the intelligence community and what Richard Rovere has called the American Establishment, is what makes Smith's book so fascinating and valuable."--Washington Post Book World
"Smith's absorbing book is really an introduction to what the OSS and its crew of generally exceptionally able and imaginative employees was all about."--Foreign Service Journal
"He describes how the OSS figured in, and was related to, the whole diplomatic and military history of the war."--Annals
Product Description
“The best book about America’s first modern secret service.”
--Washington Post Book World
In the months before World War II, FDR prepared the country for conflict with Germany and Japan by reshuffling various government agencies to create the Office of Strategic Services--America’s first intelligence agency and the direct precursor to the CIA. When he charged William (“Wild Bill”) Donovan, a successful Wall Street lawyer and Wilkie Republican, to head up the office, the die was set for some of the most fantastic and fascinating operations the U.S. government has ever conducted. Author Richard Harris Smith, himself an ex-CIA hand, documents the controversial agency from its conception as a spin-off of the Office of the Coordinator for Information to its demise under Harry Truman and reconfiguration as the CIA.
During his tenure, Donovan oversaw a chaotic cast of some ten thousand agents drawn from the most conservative financial scions to the country’s most idealistic New Deal true believers. Together they usurped the roles of government agencies both foreign and domestic, concocted unbelievably complicated conspiracies, and fought the good fight against the Axis powers of Germany and Japan. For example, when OSS operatives stole vital military codebooks from the Japanese embassy in Portugal, the operation was considered a success. But the success turned into a flop as the Japanese discovered what had happened, and hastily
changed a code that had already been decrypted by the U.S. Navy.
Colorful personalities and truly priceless anecdotes abound in what may
arguably be called the most authoritative work on the subject.
Reader Reviews
This work was the first genuinely scholarly work on the OSS. The author, an academician, wrote it way back when most OSS works were memoirs or compilations of tales of derring do or sensationalistic political acreeds concerning intelligence matters; although the still interesting memoirs and tales were fact based, those early books were based solely on memory and not on sound documentation. In addition many sensational critiques of intelligence agencies and the CIA msntioned some OSS activities. The date of 2005 given is that of the reprint, not the original 1972. The former files of the OSS remained in use by the OSS's two successor agencies: the State Department's Intelligence Bureau (INR) and the War Department's Special Services Unit (SSU), which carried on the OSS's HUMINT clandestine operations. SSU in turn was folded in 1947 into the newly estabished CIA, which continued to use the classified OSS files and added to them. The former OSS files then continued in use for many years; in the eighties, the CIA finally weeded out sll the long since unecessary files concerning operational, organizational and procedural matters and sent them to the Nationsl Archives. Thia action resulted in a huge quantity of memoirs being written by veterans of OSS (c.f. Elizabeth MacIntosh's study of women in the OSS, "Sisterhood of Spies"), in technicals studies (c.f. John Brunner's "OSS Weapons" and in organizational histories (c.f. Yu's "OSS in China"). All of these and many similar recent studies I have reviewed on this site. This pioneering work by Harris is necessarily sketchy due to lack of sources, being based on a few scattered memoirs and incomplete and undocumented popular publications and interviews, snd riddled with omissions and errors, has been overtaken by events. The book is best looked at as a curiosity demonstrating the lack of public knowledge in its day, when CIA insiders remaining in the intelligence business were actively discouraged from publishing. Harris, having never been in the OSS, was not constrained by secrecy oaths from publishing what he could glean from no longer serving veterans and other sources. Why this was reprinted is beyond me. There are enough copies to be found in the used book trade to satisfy the completist collector of OSS related works while to those who are doing current research, it is simply an obsolete curiousity. Not all works published in the last fifty years are no longer of continuing validity; many first hand accounts and compilations of derring do tales are still valuble, for example "You're Stepping on My Cloak and Dagger". (c.f reviews on this site.)
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OSS: The Secret History of America's First Central Intelligence Agency
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Updated on 8-7-2008.
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