For all the CIA's achievements, its success is still determined by the president's willingness to act

"Need to Know

By Nicholas Reynolds

Mariner, 487 pages, $29.99

A Question of Standing

By Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones

Oxford, 300 pages, $27.95

The United States has always depended on spies. In 1790 Congress allotted $40,000 so that George Washington could pay for them.

Within three years, the sum had reached $1 million, more than 10% of the federal budget.

 The inclination to spend ever more has never abated, particularly since World War II, when the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the United States' first foreign-intelligence agency and precursor to the CIA, was established.

The story of the OSS lies at the heart of Nicholas Reynolds's "Need to Know: World War II and the Rise of American Intelligence." As in previous accounts, one character cannot help but dominate the narrative -- the cinematic William "Wild Bill" Donovan, a hard-driving lawyer and World War I veteran who had received the Medal of Honor for heroics in the trenches. According to Mr. Reynolds, Donovan had spent "much of his life searching for adventure, as a British friend observed, 'with . . . the daring of an arrested adolescent.'" World War II would more than satisfy his yearning for danger and intrigue.

It was the incorrigible Donovan who did the most to encourage President Roosevelt, a former classmate at Columbia Law School, to set up the OSS in June 1942. "This was an unprecedented step in the American way of war," asserts Mr. Reynolds, a military historian who has worked for the CIA.

"The country had never had an agency quite like the OSS, with spies, commandos, and analysts under one roof."

 At first, it was an odd mix. "Its original makeup opened OSS up to taunts. One joke was that its initials stood for 'Oh So Social.' Another was that it was the 'Bad Eyes Brigade' because so many Ivy League intellectuals in Research and Analysis wore glasses."

The hyperactive Donovan was an inspirational leader, traveling count-less miles, from Burma to Moscow to Normandy, where he landed on Utah Beach the day after D-Day, aged 61, and "grinned happily" after coming under fire. Yet his beloved OSS had a mixed record. The acts of sabotage, the development of ingenious weapons such as explosives disguised as lumps of coal, and the many escapades behind enemy lines were arguably far less useful than the analysis and intelligence reports provided by OSS agents sitting behind desks.

Another standout was Allen Dulles, a brilliant lawyer and future head of the CIA whom Donovan recruited in 1941. A pipe-smoking Princeton graduate who had served in the State Department in the 1920s, Dulles had the greatest impact of Donovan's many hires, operating for much of the war from Bern in neutral Switzerland, running an intelligence hub with links to resistance networks throughout Europe. On Donovan's orders, Dulles negotiated the early "secret surrender" of German forces in Italy and Austria days before the formal end of the war, thereby saving many lives.

To Donovan's bitter disappointment, the OSS was dismantled in the fall of 1945. Donovan's days as a spy chief were over and instead, writes Mr. Reynolds, he had to "content himself with an ambassadorship to Thailand." He died in 1959, mourned by no less than President Eisenhower as America's "last hero." More than any other figure, Donovan had "developed a prototype that would endure -- that of an intelligence agency with branches for espionage, analysis, special operations, and counterintelligence."

It was clear after the demise of the OSS that some form of foreign-intelligence service should replace it. But what should be its core focus? "Would the spies incline more toward Donovan's special operations, paramilitary and political, and his bias for action -- sometimes for its own sake? Or would they see the merits of his loyal deputies . . . who called for careful planning, espionage, and analysis to satisfy their government's need to know?" The question remains relevant today, 75 years after the CIA was set up through the National Security Act of 1947.

Covert action and detached analysis can coexist. But too often its penchant for derring-do and skulduggery has marred the CIA's reputation, according to the veteran intelligence expert Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones. In "A Question of Standing: The History of the CIA," Mr. Jeffreys-Jones claims that the agency's covert actions have been deeply corrosive -- "the greatest single cause of anti-Americanism in the post-World War II era."

Mr. Jeffreys-Jones's history is fast-paced, mercifully jargon-free and often disturbing. Amid a long list of dark episodes with consequences still being felt today is the removal from power of Iran's Premier Mohammad Mosaddeq and his replacement by Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in 1953. The following year, the democratically elected government of Guatemala was overthrown with CIA involvement. The 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco and failed attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro are also fluently chronicled. The 1970s were perhaps the nadir for the agency, with revelations of domestic spying and other transgressions.

A new arena emerged after the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991. Now the key enemies were international criminals and terrorists. After 9/11, there followed the relentless quest to destroy al Qaeda. Targeted killing was permitted by the George W. Bush administration. President Obama continued the Bush policy of drone strikes, authorizing far more than his predecessor.

The killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011 was a success but the War on Terror raised questions about overreach and politicization. The CIA's "black sites" and the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba were but two of the many controversies that dogged the agency.

Mr. Jeffreys-Jones's incisive and judicious account is no one-sided condemnation. He is careful to remind us of the CIA's core mission "to inform the U.S. president about events, developments, and threats that he and his policymakers might not otherwise be able to perceive." For all its missteps, the CIA's standing is "far from uniformly toxic. The leaders of more than a few countries have denounced the CIA in public and availed themselves of its services in private. . . . Democratic oversight of the CIA has made it a model for other nations, has inspired emulation, and has been a spur to the study of secret-intelligence morality."

The CIA has from its outset depended on how it is perceived -- by the public, by Congress, abroad and, crucially, in the White House. Above all, the CIA's impact is determined by "the ability of a president to understand intelligence briefings but also on his willingness to heed them, a function of personality and political priorities."

Seventy-five years after its birth, the CIA remains essential to protecting the United States from foreign adversaries. But to what extent it succeeds still depends on who sits in the Oval Office.

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Mr. Kershaw is the author, most recently, of "Against All Odds: A True Story of Ultimate Courage and Survival in World War II."" [1]

1. REVIEW --- Books: America's Intelligence Quotient --- For all the CIA's achievements, its success is still determined by the president's willingness to act
Kershaw, Alex. 
Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 05 Nov 2022: C.7.