Volume 30, Number 8 · May 12, 1983
The Underground Entrepreneur
By Thomas Powers
The Last Hero: Wild Bill Donovan
by Anthony Cave Brown
Times Books, 891 pp., $24.95
Donovan: America's Master Spy
by Richard Dunlop
Rand McNally, 562 pp., $19.95
Donovan and the CIA: A History of the Establishment of the Central Intelligence Agency
by Thomas F. Troy
University Publications of America, 589 pp., $29.50
The Shadow Warriors: OSS and the Origins of the CIA
by Bradley F. Smith
Basic Books, 507 pp., $20.75
On the eve of World War II, the United States was the world's only great power without an intelligence service. Many agencies collected information of one kind or another, some of it secretly, but no one was in overall charge of knowing what was what. This made the country something of an innocent on the international scene. One characteristic of a nation without an intelligence service is that its officials, all jealous of their own responsibilities, have a hard time seeing why it might need one. The British, probably hoping it would help the United States to see why it ought to join the war, urged President Roosevelt to create such an organization.
Review, 6016 words
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