Smith, Bradley F. The Shadow Warriors: OSS and the Origins of the CIA.
New York: Basic Books, 1983. 507 pages.
At least four books on William Donovan and OSS appeared in 1981-1983,
by authors Thomas F. Troy, Richard Dunlop, Anthony Cave Brown, and Bradley
F. Smith. There are several ways to explain this excess: 1) much primary
source material was now available from government archives; 2) OSS man
William Casey helped to resurrect the myth (Casey encouraged Anthony Cave
Brown to write his book, and the CIA released Donovan's papers to him);
3) congressional hearings on CIA misdeeds in the mid-1970s may have prompted
OSS veterans to defend their heritage; 4) the backlash against the "Vietnam
syndrome" invited nostalgia for the moral clarity of World War II; and
5) many OSS officers were recruited from academia, so scholarly interest in
U.S. intelligence has always been abundant. After the nitpicking and boring
prose, one realizes that these books generally fawn over Donovan. Apparently
his only shortcoming was in 1945, when peace broke out and briefly threatened
an end to covert activities. Author Bradley Smith is more cynical than most,
but he concentrates more on Donovan's bureaucratic wars in Washington than
on the campaigns in the field. One tidbit from Smith is that in the fall of
1940, Donovan used the U.S. media to play up the bogus threat of a Nazi
"fifth column" in order to promote his plans for an intelligence agency
(pages 38-39). In other words, what the OSS called "psychological warfare"
when issued as foreign propaganda, was first used on U.S. citizens.
ISBN 0-465-07756-0
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