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
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