Winks, Robin W. Cloak and Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939-1961. New York: William Morrow, 1987. 607 pages.

Robin Winks is a history professor at Yale, a university which has thoroughly earned its reputation as the CIA's alma mater. That this should be a source of pride for Winks is par for the course. One huge chapter (117 pages) is on James Angleton; one long endnote (pp. 495-7) brags about all the historians in academia who were in OSS, and proceeds to list 50 along with their current positions. Despite (or perhaps because of) all this expertise, Winks still gets things wrong: He agrees with his friends that "the CIA played no significant role in the overthrow of President Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973" (p. 446).

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 0-688-07300-X

Extract the names from this source

Back to search page