One OSS captain who chafed at fighting the Nazis from undercover in Yugoslavia slipped into Germany to personally mail an expletive-laden postcard to Adolf Hitler, according to reports. Banks III, an Army major who studied OSS recruitment. There were “dramatic mental crackups” from the stress, according to Louie M.
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Knowing how to speak French in a tux didn’t necessarily prepare recruits for parachuting into enemy territory or blowing up bridges. They “had traveled (or lived) in Europe, and knew the languages and the cultures.” Nevertheless, the prominence of the well-bred in the OSS prompted sophisticates to snicker that its initials stood for “Oh so social.” Goulden, author of “ The Dictionary of Espionage,” recently wrote. “That many of the early officers came from the Ivy League was a natural progression of events,” Joseph C. The Office of Strategic Services, as it was called, quickly discovered that many of the Ivy-educated men (and a few women) it dispatched to Nazi-occupied Europe were unsuited for the job. Had my recruiters, who put me through reams of tests, somehow known that? It would be 25 years before I had a clue.Īfter the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in late 1941, the Roosevelt administration slapped together a wartime spying and sabotage service virtually overnight. I often wondered why I had been such a natural spy, though. I lived in an alternate universe, seeing spies at work, real or imagined, everywhere in Washington.
But even after I hung up my badge, the intense indoctrination in the clandestine life - the habit of eliciting scraps of information from unwitting people, the quick instinct to deflect personal questions and even check to see if I was being followed - stayed with me for years. If the war hadn’t been so wrong, I might have stayed in, or moved to the CIA. I won a medal and came home relatively unscarred. The war stunk, but I wasn’t shooting at anybody, and I was good at being a spy. The mission, to prevent or disrupt rocket attacks on the city or U.S. But other than connecting briefly with a secret courier on a deserted beach every few days and slipping into decrepit hotels for meetings with my top spy, it wasn’t anything like the scenario we had been trained for, to dispatch agents into Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe from West Berlin.īut in the end, it was the most interesting, and perhaps meaningful, thing I’ve ever done. I spent a year living undercover and running a spy net. After a year in language school, I would ship out to Da Nang. On my final training exercise, I slipped into Connecticut via submarine, en route to my target in a Midwestern city.Īlas, with the Vietnam War raging, Berlin (where “ The Spy Who Came in From the Cold” was set) wasn’t in the cards. Espionage training, it turned out, was a gas - a boy’s life, really, what with running around Baltimore planting “dead drops” under park benches, eluding spy catchers, practicing “brush passes” on city streets, writing messages in “invisible ink.” We learned how to send an agent behind the Iron Curtain and get him back out. The rest of us, a little anxious, stayed put.Īnd then we were off. Anyone who objected, he concluded, could walk out right now. We were going to learn how to lie, steal, cheat to accomplish our mission, he said - and betray people who trusted us, if need be. Put another way, he went on, we were going to persuade foreigners to be traitors, to steal their countries’ secrets. We were not going to be turned into spies, he explained, but “case officers” - the people who recruit foreigners to be spies. I remember him saying something like: “This is the only thing in the Army that you can volunteer for and then get out of if you change your mind.” That’s because we had signed up for something illegal, even immoral, according to some people, he said. A rectangular red sign, “SECRET,” was slid into a bracket on the front wall. A cross between “Mission: Impossible” and “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold,” maybe.
I doubt that any of us knew exactly what to expect. Of course, intelligence did sound exciting, and only vaguely dangerous. Most of us had volunteered for an extra year’s enlistment in intelligence to avoid being shipped off to South Vietnam with a rifle. Truth be told, few of us expected to be turned into James Bonds. In fact, we were going to learn to be spies.
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