Wild Bill Donovan
The Spymaster Who Created the OSS and Modern American Espionage
by Douglas Waller
Free Press, 480 pp., $30
The operations officers of the National Clandestine Service, with whom I worked during seven years as an analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency, were among the most talented, charismatic, and driven people I have ever met. It takes a special kind of brio to persuade Russian or Chinese officials to share their government’s secrets, to spend years in Iraq or Afghanistan recruiting and training tribesmen to fight America’s enemies, or to develop ways to track the pursuit of nuclear weapons. They are the furthest point of the “pointy end of the spear” of America’s defenses.
William Donovan (1883-1959) is their spiritual godfather. A major general in the Army, “Wild Bill” Donovan founded and led the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in World War II. The OSS was America’s first professional human spy organization and the institutional forerunner of the CIA. A professional networker with legendary magnetism and charm, Donovan was the perfect embodiment of America’s spies.
His story deserves to be better known. Born a poor Irish Catholic New Yorker, he went to Columbia and its law school and became a millionaire Wall Street lawyer—a striking example of social mobility and success for a Catholic in his day (helped, no doubt, by his marriage into an elite Protestant New England family). He organized and led an infantry regiment in the First World War and won the Congressional Medal of Honor for his leadership under fire at the Battle of Landres-et-Saint-Georges. He returned home with wealth, connections, and an enviable war record. He sought to ride his rising star to the governor’s mansion in Albany as a Republican in 1932, but his campaign was sloppy and founded on poor research—a sign of things to come. He became an unofficial ambassador-at-large for his erstwhile political rival, President Franklin Roosevelt, touring Europe and collecting firsthand intelligence about the leaders and movements that would collide in the next war. This role led naturally to his becoming FDR’s “Coordinator of Information” in 1941 and then head of the renamed OSS the following year.
But Donovan’s story is hard to come by in a complete, impartial accounting. Donovan, like most accomplished statesmen, especially those with élan, earned both fanatical enemies and fawning followers. His most notable achievements were done in secret and documented only in files that remained classified for decades. The two most recent biographies appeared in the early 1980s before the OSS files were declassified. Earlier efforts were commissioned and vetted by his family and law firm.
Comes now Douglas Waller with the first full biography in a quarter-century, and certainly the most impartial and best researched. Waller has done a fine job weaving together the main narrative of Donovan’s wartime service. Donovan was a visionary. He saw well before almost anyone else the need for a truly global network of informants to provide the president and chiefs of staff with intelligence on the political and military environment in which American troops would be operating. He persuaded the president to back his vision—his memo to Roosevelt was later enshrined in a time capsule buried in the cornerstone of the CIA’s headquarters building—and placed at the helm he built an organization from scratch that eventually comprised over 10,000 employees.
Wild Bill Donovan, however, cannot be considered a full biography. Waller summarizes Donovan’s first 35 years in two brief, slightly dull chapters and pays too little attention to Donovan’s personal life throughout. Donovan considered entering the priesthood and even enrolled in a preparatory school for it; but a priest dissuaded him. Why? What did Donovan’s faith mean to him? We learn nothing about any spiritual crisis that surely attended the enrollment. Donovan’s Protestant in-laws disapproved of him; did his Roman Catholic family return the sentiment? Did he face ostracism for leaving his Irish, Catholic, Democratic roots to become a member of a well-heeled Republican elite? How did he feel about his social evolution? We get no answers. Donovan did not have a good marriage, but he and his wife chose to stay together after they lost a daughter in an automobile accident. We get no insight into Donovan’s inner life. Perhaps he left no record and did not keep a journal; the author does not say.
But Waller is on solid ground for the main story. The OSS engendered myths and exaggerations of its successes and failures over the years. By some accounts it was a collection of heroes who could have won the war singlehanded if they had been let off the leash. By others, it was a gang of criminals who foreshadowed the CIA’s abuses of later decades. Waller avoids either cliché: He knows this ground well, has better access to previously classified documents than previous biographers, and has done his homework.
In his telling, Americans were amateurs at espionage in 1941—but they were amateurs at nearly every other aspect of global war as well. The OSS did no worse than the rest of the Army. The analysis by OSS researchers was the most valuable service the agency performed because they were putting together the big picture in a way no other organization did or could. The raw reporting from informants around the world could be tremendously helpful, but was often unreliable, because OSS agents lacked even rudimentary training in how to vet sources. Guerrilla, paramilitary, and covert operations were least useful because they were often poorly planned, had unrealistic aims, and could not compete with the overwhelming power of total war. Waller’s conclusions should not be mistaken for a veiled critique of contemporary covert operations: To his great credit, he avoids weighing in on current events and does not use Wild Bill Donovan as a vehicle to editorialize about the CIA.
Why didn’t Donovan lead the CIA? As head of the OSS he argued strenuously for its continuance after 1945. He bitterly opposed President Harry Truman’s decision to disband the OSS and split up its functions among the State Department and the military. Events quickly proved Donovan right and Truman wrong, and Truman came around within two years to back the establishment of a permanent spy organization. Of course, Donovan would have been the natural choice to lead it, but even Donovan’s admirers grant that he was a poor administrator who often led more by intuition than by planning. The OSS was an organizational mess, and some operations gave covert action a reputation for being harebrained. Additionally, Donovan was blessed with an excess of confidence, and he was a conservative Republican—too conservative for GOP leading lights like Thomas Dewey—and in the Washington of the 1940s his womanizing gave ammunition to enemies who wanted to paint him as a playboy who lacked self-control. Instead of leading the CIA he became ambassador to Thailand.
If Donovan had become director of Central Intelligence under Truman, he would have been a leading contender to head the State or Defense Department under President Dwight D. Eisenhower and become a principal architect of Cold War strategy. He would have earned a place among the pantheon of statesmen who did not become president, men like Henry Clay, William Seward, Elihu Root, and George Marshall. These figures founded (or refounded) institutions, articulated clear, strong ideas about the meaning of self-government or America’s role in the world, and proved superbly effective at marshaling resources and directing action. Donovan failed—but only just failed—to earn a place among them. He was overconfident, sloppy in execution, and earned too many enemies. But that may simply come with the terrain. Clandestine intelligence needs to rely on intuition, charisma, and gut. America needs the likes of William J. Donovan.
Paul D. Miller is assistant professor of international security studies at the National Defense University. He served as director for Afghanistan in the National Security Council under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
