Smith, Richard Harris. OSS: The Secret History of America's First Central Intelligence Agency. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981. First published in 1972. 458 pages.

Smith resigned from a brief CIA career in 1968 and began work on this history of OSS. Although he was not able to obtain access to OSS archives, he did contact some 200 OSS and State Department alumni. More importantly, he has the delightful habit of providing hundreds of career updates through footnotes: so-and-so of the OSS went on to become CIA station chief in whatever country from this year to that year, etc. -- which makes this book a NameBase inputter's dream come true.

The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was the major U.S. intelligence agency during WW2. Its research branch consisted largely of conscientious humanities and social science liberals from Harvard and Yale. Their sudden access to international secrets, when mixed with inbred academic elitism, proved quite compelling. By war's end, these opinion-makers had become converts to OSS director William Donovan's vision of a postwar agency. Despite Truman's reluctance, Donovan's old-boy network was formalized into the CIA; the pipe-smoking liberal of the thirties became the cold warrior of the fifties. It wasn't until the 1960s that the academic community would begin to recover its social conscience.
ISBN 0-520-04246-8

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