>> From the Library of
Congress in Washington, D.C.
>> John Cole: Well, good afternoon,
and welcome to the
Library of Congress.
I'm John Cole.
I'm the Director of the Center for
the Book in the Library of Congress
which is the reading and literacy
promotion arm of the Library.
Our Center was created in 1977
when Daniel Boorstin was
the Librarian of Congress.
And Dan Boorstin felt the Library
of Congress should do more to reach
out to the general public to
promote books and reading.
So the Center for the
Book was his baby.
We are also a public/private
partnership.
We raise private money for our
programming even though we are,
of course, all Library
of Congress employees.
We've expanded through the years
to not only include the Library's
first Young Reader Center
which is a programming place
for kids 16 and under as long
as they are accompanied by an adult
which is in the Jefferson Building.
And the Library of Congress Poetry
and Literature Program is now also
part of the Center for the Book.
I was just talking with our
guest today a little bit
about the National Book
Festival in which the Center
for the Book also plays
a major role.
This year the Book Festival will
be in the old time, late September,
which is how we started
15 years ago.
This year's festival is
going to be September 24th.
And it is in the Washington
Convention Center
which is a change for us.
It originated under Laura
Bush's auspices on the Mall,
but now we're inside where
we have air conditioning
and comfortable bathrooms and
a lot more programming space.
And so we after some initial
reluctance are happy to be
in the Convention Center.
The way this Books and
Beyond program is our way
of really pointing out that
authors do research in libraries,
and library places like
the Library of Congress
and other institutions are
really important resources today
for books and for new books.
And so we always celebrate new books
that have grown at least in part
out of the collections of
the Library of Congress,
and such is the case today.
Our speaker, Doug Waller, will
speak for 30 minutes or so.
We'll have a chance for questions.
And we'll have a book
signing outside that we need
to start no later than one o'clock.
All of these noontime author
programs are filmed for the Library
of Congress's and Center
for the Book's website,
as are the author programs for
the National Book Festival.
And we have several hundred of these
broadcasts for the Book Festival,
and more than 300 talks from
the Center for the Book.
So I often mention that
website as a wonderful resource
for people interested in
contemporary reading and literature
and to catch a snapshot of what's
happening in the world of books
and writing in America
really since 2001,
the year of the first Book Festival.
Because we're filmed and we'll
have a question and answer period,
I've asked you to turn
off all things electronic,
and we look forward to a lively
question and answer period.
The way that the rules work
if you ask a question you
are giving us permission
to we hope use your image and
your comments later in the website
that will be on our website.
Our speaker today, Doug Waller,
I think you probably know
a little bit about him.
He is really a wonderfully
prolific writer and author.
He is a former correspondent
for Newsweek and Time Magazines
where he covered the CIA, the
Pentagon, the State Department,
the White House and the Congress.
But he very early on, we were
chatting about this a bit,
got interested in some of the
subjects in which he was covering
and tried his hand at writing, and
has been a successful historian
and author for a number of years.
And he has several
different fields of expertise.
We were talking a little
bit about his biography
of General Billy Mitchell, World
War I, where he used the resources
of the Library of Congress
quite a bit.
He's, of course, best known
for I think Wild Bill Donovan,
the biography of the creator
of the OSS and that, in turn,
has led him to the current book that
he's going to be explaining to us.
He also has worked on a variety of
contemporary topics and did tell me
that the next book is
going to be [inaudible],
and I'll let you tell you more
about it about the Civil War
and intelligence during
the American Civil War.
So he's going to be back
doing a lot of research
at the Library of Congress.
So I'm very pleased to
present Doug Waller.
Please help me welcome him
for his talk about Disciples.
Thank you.
[ Applause ]
>> Douglas Waller:
Thanks a lot, John.
As he mentioned I'm a
regular customer here
of the Library of Congress.
I've camped out here for
the last two books, well,
actually the last three books
now, so I've accumulated a lot
of frequent flyer miles
with this organization.
After I published my biography
of General William Wild
Bill Donovan four years ago,
I really had a tough time
figuring out what to do next.
Because Donovan was
really larger than life.
A World War I hero who had been
awarded the Medal of Honor,
a Wall Street lawyer often mentioned
as a Presidential candidate,
and a man Franklin Roosevelt picked
to be his World War II spy master.
In July 1941 by way of background
Donovan began what eventually became
known as the Office of
Strategic Services, the OSS.
He really started out
this organization
with just one guy,
and that was himself.
But over the course of the war
he assembled a force of more
than 10,000 spies, saboteurs,
commandos, propagandists,
research analysts, many of them who
came from the Library of Congress,
and support personnel operating
in stations all over the world.
Wild Bill, he got that nickname
leading troops in World War I,
also was a controversial character.
His agents revered him.
His political enemies, and he
had a lot of them in Washington,
thought he was as big a threat to
the United States as Adolph Hitler.
So Donovan was going to
be a hard act to follow.
I finally settled on four
subjects for my next book.
These four were among the most
controversial directors the CIA has
ever had.
Allen Dulles who is down here
at the bottom, bottom left;
Richard Helms who is over on the
other -- I mean this bottom right,
bottom left there in the Navy
uniform; Bill Colby up here
in the corner; and Bill Casey.
Allen Dulles, who was America's
spy chief from 1953 to 61,
launched the calamitous operation
to land CIA trained gorillas,
anti-Castro gorillas,
in Cuba's Bay of Pigs.
Richard Helms, who was CIA
Director from 1966 to 73,
was convicted of lying to
Congress over the CIA's effort
to oust President Salvador
Allende in Chile.
Bill Colby, who was CIA
Director from 1973 to 76,
would become a pariah among
Langley's old hands for releasing
to Congress what eventually
became as the Family Jewels Report
on agency misdeeds in the
1950s, 60s and early 70s.
Bill Casey, who was CIA Director
from 1981 to 87, would nearly bring
down the agency and Ronald
Regan's Presidency from a scheme
that secretly supplied Nicaragua's
Contras with money racked off
from the sale of arms to
Iran for hostages in Beirut.
This was the Iran Contra scandal.
But before these four men became
their nation's spy master,
they served under Donovan
as operatives.
Disciples is about the secret
war they fought in the Office
of Strategic Service which became
the precursor to today's CIA.
These four men I quickly found out
were characters as rich and complex
and multifaceted as Donovan was.
Allen Dulles looked
like the head master
of an upper class English
boarding school.
He was usually dressed in a
bow tie and tweed sport coat.
His wiry gray hair
was slightly mussed,
his mustache always
carefully trimmed,
a pipe almost always
clenched between his teeth.
He has sparkling gray-blue eyes and
a soft voice that invited people
to pour their hearts out to him.
Dulles's secret of nature, however,
could be absolutely maddening.
One of his agents once
joked that if you asked him
if it was raining outside he'd laugh
at you and he wouldn't tell you.
Occasionally it was a hearty laugh
when he was truly amused
at something.
But more than not it was kind of a
mirthless ho-ho-ho that he turned
on when he was trying to ingratiate
himself with a stranger or trying
to deflect a question he
didn't want to answer.
That country gentleman routine
also masked a fierce competitor not
willing to give up a single
point on the tennis court,
a back alley fighter as one
of his agents said of him,
and a devious man who sized
up people based solely
on whether they were useful to him.
Richard Helms was a consummate spy.
He had a Mona Lisa-like smile.
His hair was always
slicked back neatly,
and he had a cold personality.
He didn't make friends easily,
and even with the close friends
he had he rarely let his guard
down with him.
You can find plenty
of stories in the CIA
about his colorful characters, and
he certainly had a lot of them.
But no one could think of
an anecdote about Helms.
The consummate intelligence
officer he left no trail behind.
People had to really think hard
to come up with something to say
about him because he made so
little impression on them.
At parties he was a good dancer
and a charming conversationalist,
but he rarely drank more than one
martini so his head remained clear,
and he was always the first one to
leave the party so he's be fresh
at the office the next day.
Or, if the gathering
was at his house,
he's shoo out his guests
when his bedtime neared.
He smoked two packs of Chesterfields
a day for most of his life.
He was always immaculately tailored.
His shoes were especially made
for his small high arch feet
at $700 a pair from Peal
& Company in London.
And he wore his belt with the buckle
on the side instead of the front
which I thought was kind of odd.
I don't know why.
Bill Colby was once asked his
definition of the perfect spy.
He gave a pretty obvious
answer, the one you don't see.
Colby looked like a man
who could be overlooked.
He was slightly built, he had pale,
dull eyes behind horned rim glasses.
And his hair was always
parted neatly on the side.
A private man he was unfailingly
polite with refined manners.
He paid no attention
to what he wore.
He repaired plumbing
and performed carpentry
around the house on the weekends.
But he had his guilty pleasures.
He enjoyed a good bottle
of Sauvignon Blanc.
And on weekends he liked to
drive his red Fiat sports car.
And he appreciate beautiful women,
although I could find no evidence
that he ever acted
on what he noticed.
Classical Greek and Roman
heroes intrigued Colby.
One of his favorite characters was
Lawrence of Arabia and the movie
where Peter O'Toole
played T.H. Lawrence.
Colby once told a family member
that he'd never had a nightmare
and never even dreamed
for that matter
which I thought was kind of odd.
In the OSS and later the CIA
colleagues recalled Bill Colby
as a dedicated soldier [inaudible]
but someone they really never knew.
An informal poll was once circulated
amongst nearly 60 CIA officers
with two questions.
Question number one, if you were
shipwrecked on a deserted island,
a pleasant deserted island
with plenty of food and liquor,
and every hope that a ship
would come by to rescue you,
who would you choose to be with?
Allen Dulles won handily over Colby
because he would be far better
company while they were stranded.
Second question, if you were stuck
on a miserable deserted island
with little food or hope of
survival, and you badly wanted
to escape, who would
you choose to be with?
Colby easily led Dulles because,
as one of the respondents said,
he would know how to build a
boat to get him off the island,
and he would build the
boat big enough for two.
Bill Casey always made a bad
and first impression on others,
even more so when he
became middle aged.
He was tall and lumpy.
He had a jolly face, thick
lips, eyes bulging and wisps
of white hair on his bald head.
He wore expensive suits
that were always rumpled,
his tie often stained with
what he'd eaten for lunch,
and he frequently mumbled
when he spoke
as if he had marbles
stuffed in his mouth.
His acquaintances usually ended
up being either lifelong friends
who worshiped him or skeptics
who just couldn't escape
the uneasy feeling
that he was some kind
of devious operator.
With Casey looks were deceiving.
That slovenly appearance masked a
body that was constantly on the go.
He once wrote a lengthy
article on how
to quickly consume
a nonfiction book.
Casey would read back to
front starting with the index
and the source notes to pick out
what he thought he needed to know,
and then he'd bypass the rest.
I would have hated to have him
read one of my books that way.
He had a photographic memory.
He could retain passages
almost verbatim from reports
and journal articles that he
seemed to be just flipping through.
He had an insatiably curious mind.
On family vacations in Europe
Casey's idea of fun was scooping
up the timetable brochures
at train stations,
studying them in his hotel room
overnight so he could recite
from memory the itinerary
for the next morning.
For all the differences among these
four guys, I found a common thread
that ran through Allen
Dulles, Richard Helms,
William Casey and William Colby.
They were all smart.
And, in fact, I think you
could call the intellectuals
because they were voracious
readers, they were thoughtful
and they were creatures of reason.
But these weren't the ivory tower
types who'd sit around for hours
in doubtful introspection.
These were strong, decisive and
supremely confident men of action.
They were doers who believed that
they could shape history rather
than letting it control them.
So what did they do in World War II?
Let's start with Dulles.
He was born in 1893
with a club foot.
Surgeons repaired it, but the
family always treated this
as some kind of deep, dark secret.
His father was a liberal
Presbyterian minister.
His mother came from
diplomatic nobility.
Allen's grandfather and an uncle
on his mother's side were
Secretaries of State.
Dulles was a precocious child.
When he was eight years old he wrote
a book on the Second World War.
It was only 31 pages long, it
had a lot of spelling mistakes,
but his grandfather, the Secretary
of State, published 700 copies
of it, and he got a good
review in the Washington Post.
He went to Princeton,
played around as much
as he studied until his senior year.
Then he finally buckled down.
In 1916 he joined the
State Department,
and during World War
II he was stationed
at the American Legation
in Bern, Switzerland.
By default he became the station's
or the legation's intelligence
officer.
There just wasn't anybody
else around for the job.
And neutral Switzerland was
really a spy haven at that time
for all the warring powers.
Dulles basically taught
himself how to be a spy,
and he learned some hard
lessons along the way.
Late one afternoon a man
with a thick Russian accent phoned
the legation and insisted on talking
with an American diplomat.
Dulles was late to a tennis
date, so he told the man
to come back the next morning when
the legation opened and he hung up.
Turned out he later found out that
the Russian was Vladimir Lenin
who was on his way to
Russia, and headed back
to his homeland the next morning.
Dulles would tell that
anecdote time and again
to new CIA recruits
who came to Langley.
Never turn down a meeting even
with the shadiest of characters.
He earned a law degree, left
the State Department in 1926
and joined Sullivan & Cromwell,
one of the most powerful law firms
in the world at that time.
And by 1930 Allen was having
numerous extramarital affairs
which is why Clover, of
course, didn't much appreciate.
In the months before Pearl Harbor
Dulles had picked up rumors
that Roosevelt had made Donovan
chief of some nefarious spy group
with secret funds that the
White House controlled.
Dulles knew Donovan.
He enjoyed beating him on the
tennis court, but he decided
to keep his distance from Donovan's
group to see what else might be open
to him if the United
States joined the war.
After Pearl Harbor, Dulles
decided to join the OSS.
Already wealthy from
his law practice,
he took the job at no salary.
His first job was organizing
a major intelligence outpost
in New York City to hatch covert
operations against Germany.
Turns out that New York was a good
spot for recruiting foreign spies.
The city was filled with immigrants,
deposed royalty, European expats,
many of them shady characters
dreaming up all kinds of schemes
in their Manhattan salons
for infiltrating gorillas
into Nazi Germany.
Dulles and Donovan weren't
particularly bothered that most
of these would be emigrated
spies turned
out to be a waste of their time.
New York became a laboratory
for Dulles's experiments
in intelligence gathering.
So, for example, he
organized a project
to counterfeit enemy currency there.
He bought clothes from European
refugees his men interviewed
so the OSS agents infiltrating
into enemy territory could
wear the garments to blend in.
He even started a secret
unit to tap into the records
that American insurance
companies held
on their access business
clients before the war.
Now, why would he be interested
in insurance files for the OSS?
Well, those files often
contained the blueprints
of buildings being insured.
Allied air force has found those
blueprints particularly helpful
when they were trying to decide
how the building should be bombed.
In November 1942, just after
the allies' Torch invasion
of North Africa, Dulles slipped into
Switzerland with orders from Donovan
to penetrate Nazi Germany.
In Bern he set up what amounted
to a mini CIA running espionage
operations, funding gorilla missions
in occupied France and Italy,
and inundating Washington
with foreign policy advice
on how to deal with the axis.
Most of it Washington ignored.
For his staff Dulles
recruited a handful
of Americans living in Switzerland.
One of them was Mary Bancroft,
an American socialite there,
who ended up being
Dulles's mistress.
He had scores of informants
on his payroll.
Many of them turned out to
be professional snitches
who often passed the same secrets
to the Germans in the morning,
to the British in the afternoon
and to Dulles in the evening.
Dulles met them all.
He didn't want to repeat
the same mistake he'd made
with Vladimir Lenin.
And he had some prize sources.
He recruited, for example,
Fritz Kolbe, a short,
bald German foreign office diplomat
with beady eyes and big ears
who delivered to him some 1,600
classified Nazi political,
military and intelligence cables.
Kolbe first had the
documents strapped
around his leg when
he came to Berlin.
Then Dulles gave him a miniature
camera to photograph them
and bring them to him
in a watch case.
Another valuable source
was Hans Bernd Gisevius
who was a stern [inaudible] major
who had come to detest
Adolph Hitler.
On his visits to Bern,
Gisevius would brief Dulles
on the dissidents remaining in
Nazi Germany who were laying plans
to assassinate Adolph Hitler in what
became known as the Valkyrie Plot
which failed on July 20, 1944.
You remember Tom Cruise
did a movie on Valkyrie.
Dulles gave Gisevius who was a hulk
of a man, he was over six feet tall,
just huge, the code name Tiny.
Now, let's turn to Bill Casey.
His birth in 1913 set a family
record his mother could have
done without.
He arrived weighing a
staggering 14 pounds.
Yeah, I know, everybody
always groans when I say that.
The son of New York
Tammany Hall bureaucrat,
Casey was a bright child,
but he drove the nuns
at the Catholic school nuts
because he seemed intent
on educating himself
the way he saw fit.
He went to Fordham University,
the first in his family
to go to college.
Then he went to Catholic
University of America here
in Washington to be a social worker.
But he quickly became
disenchanted with that calling
after several months as
a New York social worker.
He thought welfare
money was being wasted
and FDR was a bleeding
heart liberal.
Casey earned a law degree
going to night school,
and by the time Hitler invaded
Poland he was working has an analyst
for the Research Institute
of America,
a think tank that advised
businessmen on how
to land contracts with the New Deal.
After the United States entered
the war, Casey who soon was married
with a baby girl, wanted
in on the action.
He talked the navy into making
him a lieutenant junior grade.
It took some talking
and convincing, however.
The Navy at first didn't think he
was officer material, but they ended
up finding a place for him
in a ship buying program.
Bored with pushing paper for the
Navy, Casey noticed that a number
of wealthy young men had found
jobs in a secret organization
that Donovan was running.
He managed to wrangle an interview
with Donovan's recruiters,
but they also weren't particularly
impressed with this officer
who didn't seem to have
much military bearing.
But they hired him.
And they quickly realized that
Casey was a whiz at administration,
and from his Research Institute
of America days he could
analyze big chunks of information
and write clear intelligence
reports.
So they packed him off to the
OSS's very important station
at Grosvenor's Square in London.
This was to manage the
flow of paperwork there.
In short order Casey had his hand
in every major operation
the station was running.
He was kind of like a
human tornado there.
As one of the officers
there said of him,
you could not not pay
attention to Bill Casey.
Donovan soon was impressed with
this 31 year old Navy lieutenant,
and in December 1944 he made Casey
his chief of secret intelligence
for Europe and ordered him
to infiltrate the OSS
agents into the Third Reich.
That was a daunting mission.
Even though it was losing
the war at this time,
Nazi Germany was still one
of the world's most
tightly run police states.
The average German citizen had
up to 18 different basic
identity documents on him
that an OSS unit code named
Bach after the composer had
to figure out how to forge.
So Casey, who eventually
had 330 people working
for him, really had to scramble.
In the last five months of the war
he managed to parachute in more
than 150 agents into Germany
to radio back intelligence
for the advancing allied armies.
His spies often had to
improvise on the fly.
For example, one two-man team code
named Chauffeur enlisted the help
of two French women forced to
work in a Bavarian brothel.
The women would entice
military secrets
from their [inaudible] customers
between the sheets while one
of the OSS agents hid in the closet
with a flashlight taking notes.
Now, I'm not making this up, folks.
This really happened.
Bill Colby, our next subject.
He was born in 1920.
He was an Army brat.
His father who rose to the
rank of Colonel was something
of a curmudgeon, not a particularly
pleasant fellow to be around.
Colby spent his early years moving
from duty station to the next
which was an education in itself.
He wanted to follow his father's
footsteps and be an Army officer,
but he graduated from high school
ahead of schedule at the age of 16
as the yearbook nicknamed
him the brain,
and he was too young
to enter West Point.
So he went to Princeton
like Dulles did,
and was eventually commissioned
an ROTC second lieutenant
in August 1941 when he turned 21.
Bill Colby liked to quote
Napoleon's standing order to his men
which was march to
the sound of the guns.
But after Pearl Harbor it seemed
to Colby that he was marching
in the opposite direction farther
and farther away from that sound.
He was put in the artillery branch
and stuck in desolate Fort Sill,
Oklahoma teaching students
how to fire Howitzers.
One day he spotted a
notice on a bulletin board
that said the Army wanted volunteers
for an airborne artillery
unit, and he could sign up.
Colby applied, but he worried
that his poor eyesight,
he wore glasses, might
disqualify him.
So he memorized the eye chart when
the doctor wasn't in the room.
Of course the doctor caught him,
but he figured Colby's eyes
were probably good enough
to see the ground when he
parachuted to it so he passed him.
Bad luck then struck once more.
On a second jump at Fort Benning,
Georgia Colby broke his right ankle.
By the time it healed and
he finished what remained
of his airborne training, he
was stuck at a replacement pool
at Camp McCall, North
Carolina desperate to get
to the sound of those guns.
In mid October 1943 he
spotted another note tacked
on a bulletin board.
This one from some strange
organization he'd never heard
of called the OSS which said
if you were a paratrooper
and you spoke French, and Colby
spoke French, and you were looking
for adventure overseas
call this number.
So Colby called that number.
And by the end of the number he was
at the Congressional Country Club
just outside of Washington here
which the OSS had taken over
to train spies and saboteurs.
The secret organization
he was training
for which was code named Jedburgh
had been put together by the British
to drop three man commando teams
into France just after D-Day
to organize the French Resistance.
From the Congressional
Country Club Colby
and the other OSS recruits were
packed off for more gorilla training
to a remote camp at Maryland's
Catoctin Mountains near FDR's
Presidential Retreat which, of
course, today is called Camp David.
The next stop was Peterborough
just north of London
at a country estate called Milton
Hall where the British continued
to train what became a multinational
force of mainly British,
French and American commandos.
This was even more rigorous gorilla
training, and there was somewhat
of a culture clash between the
British and the American commandos.
For example, Colby and
the other Americans had
to learn the British
way of parachuting.
British commandos jumped
out of planes
at altitudes as low as 500 feet.
That's pretty low.
And their parachutes
didn't come with a spare.
At that low altitude you didn't
have time to deploy a spare anyway.
The instructors told
the American students
that if their chute didn't
open to bring it back
and we'll give you a new one.
The Americans, of course, didn't
find that joke particularly funny.
Finally, in August 1944
Colby's three man team dropped
into the Burgundy region
southeast of Paris
to organize French
resistance attacks
as Patton's third army came through.
The secret war they fought turned
out to be pretty complicated.
Colby's team had to deal with an
assortment of resistance factions
that were poorly trained and
equipped where each faction seemed
to have a private political
agenda, and they seemed
to be fighting among themselves
as much as they did the Germans.
And Colby didn't know
it at the time,
but one of the resistance
leaders he was working with,
a man named Roger Bardet
[phonetic], was a traitor.
He was secretly collaborating
with the Germans.
The [inaudible] top spy catcher in
France, a guy named Hugo Bleicher,
had recruited Bardet
to betray his country.
After the third army
passed through Burgundy
and Colby's Jedburgh
assignment ended,
he next led a Norwegian-American
commando team that parachuted
into frigid Norway in March, 1945.
Their mission which was code named
Repay [phonetic] after a local bird
that changed colors
with the season was
to help keep some 300,000 German
occupiers bottled up in Norway
so they couldn't be
transferred back to Germany
to fight the allied advance.
This was a tough mission.
Colby's men ended up fighting
Norway's brutal winter weather
as much as they did the Germans.
Half of his 32 man force
never made it to Norway
because the planes carrying
them couldn't find the drop zone
in the snow or they crashed
killing everyone onboard.
Colby's commandos did manage to blow
up a bridge and destroy a section
of railroad track in central
Norway on the Nordland Rail Line
which carried German
troops north to south.
But the raids were risky, and the
skiing was absolutely exhausting.
Colby's team, for example, nicknamed
one mountain they had to ski
over to escape a Nazi
patrol benzedrine hill
because practically all of them
had to gulp down stimulant pills
for the artificial
energy to get to the top.
Finally, Richard Helms.
He was born barely two weeks after
Casey in 1913, but any similarity
between the boys that [inaudible].
Helm's grandfather, Gates McGarrah,
was a famous international banker.
His father was an Alcoa executive
who, along with his mother,
suffered bouts of depression.
The family lived abroad where Helms
attended the pricey Le Rosey School
in Switzerland, and later the
[inaudible] in Freiburg, Germany.
It was a cosmopolitan education
that Helms later thought
was ideal for a spy.
Back home he became a big man
on campus at Williams College,
one of the little Ivy's
with a Phi Beta Kappa key,
and Harvard Law School opened
to him if he wanted it.
But Helms instead chose journalism.
He hoped to publish
a newspaper one day.
He signed on with the United
Press, and in 1935 became
of the news agency's
correspondent in Berlin
where Adolph Hitler
was wildly popular.
His prized assignment
came in September 1936
when he covered the annual Nazi
Party Congress in Nuremberg.
After the rally Hitler invited
Helms and a half dozen other
of the foreign correspondents
to a, quote,
light lunch, in Nuremberg's Castle.
Helms was surprised actually how
unremarkable the Fuhrer looked
to him.
The eyes that everybody claimed were
hypnotic were actually a dull slate
blue protruding from his eyes,
and Helms thought they
were quite ordinary.
His pasty white face was
tinged slightly pink.
Gold filled many of his teeth, and
his knees rocked back and forth
when he talked to the reporters
which Helms thought was kind of odd.
But it was clear to Helms after
his lunch with the dictator
that Hitler was intent
on going to war.
After Pearl Harbor Helms joined
the Navy and was perfectly happy
in the services of the New York
office plotting merchant ship
movements to avoid German
U-boat packs when out
of the blue the OSS summoned him to
its Washington headquarters in 1943.
Turns out Donovan's agency had sent
a request to the Navy for an officer
who spoke French and German
who had lived overseas
and who had worked as a reporter.
And IBM computer in the Navy's
personnel office immediately spit
out Helms's name.
The next thing Helms knew he was in
a farmhouse in the countryside north
of Baltimore for two
week's of spy training.
He learned how to build a cover
story to hide his identity,
how to pick locks, how
to burglarize offices,
how to blackmail foreign
officials, how to evade a shadowing
by Gestapo agents, how to fight
dirty with knives or pistols
or the jagged edge of a
whiskey bottle in a bar.
Toward the end of his second week
as a field exercise Helms was sent
out with just $18 in his
pocket to try to talk his way
into a Pittsburgh steel plant and
abscond with documents on the types
of war goods it manufactured.
The OSS called these
training exercises schemes.
His palms sweating, his stomach all
knotted up, Helms managed to get
into the plant, scoop up handfuls of
paper on an unattended desk and slip
out past inattentive guards.
Now, two weeks wasn't enough
to make Helms a proficient spy.
He'd need a lot more
training if he was going
to be going out to the field.
But it was enough for a staff job
at the OSS's Washington headquarters
on Navy Hill, which is right
next to the State Department now,
where he first served with
a planning group dreaming
up operations for overseas
stations and then work in a bureau
that coordinated intelligence
gathering on Germany.
He had other odd jobs as well.
Donovan one time brought Charles
de Gaulle's intelligence chief
who was this unsavory French
colonel to the United States
for what amounted to a
junket to butter him up.
Because he spoke French and had been
a newspaperman, Helms was assigned
to the escort team for
the colonel and his aids
with the very important mission
of keeping the Frenchman's visit
out of American newspapers.
So for three weeks a military
plane flew the Frenchman,
Helms and the other escorts around
the country to see the sights.
So they had an expensive night
out at Antoine's Restaurant
in New Orleans, and Hollywood
studio executives arranged
for high price call girls
to entertain the colonel
and his aids in their hotel room.
Helms was relieved that the
visit never got into the papers.
He finally made it to
London in January 1945.
He roomed with Casey
who lived like a slob,
and he worked with him keeping
an eye on the joe handlers.
The spies the OSS sent
out were called joes.
And an OSS handler was
assigned to watch over them
until they boarded the plane
that took them to the drop zone.
Helms would drive out to
Harrington Field north of London
with the handlers and their
joes, watch the planes take off
with the spies, then
he'd wait at the airport
until the aircraft returned
and the pilot reported
that the parachute drop
had been successful.
After Germany surrendered Helms and
Dulles moved into war torn Berlin
to set up a spy station there.
It's hard for us to imagine today
just out devastated, how chaotic
and how still violent
the European Theater was
after Germany's surrender.
The killing didn't
stop after May 8, 1945.
Berlin was like the wild
west when Helms arrived.
Millions of homeless and
starving souls filled the city.
Billions of flies buzzed
over thousands
of rotting corpses in the rubble.
Criminal gangs roamed the
streets, many of them made
up of tiny young orphans
shaking down American GIs.
And Soviet spies infested the
western sectors the Americans,
British and French occupied.
Helms and the station's other
officers hunted for war criminals,
tracked down artwork
the Nazis had stolen,
helped round up German scientists in
an operation code names Paperclip.
And even located the nurse from the
Fuhrer bunker near the [inaudible]
who detailed for them Hitler's
final days in the bunker.
The target of Helms's spying
soon shifted from the remnants
of Nazi Germany to the Soviets
who occupied East Berlin.
And under highly classified
orders from Donovan Helms
and the other operatives in
the Berlin station also spied
on the British and the
French in their sectors.
Donovan assumed that the British
and the French were spying
on the Americans so he
wanted to return the favor.
Helms, Dulles, Colby and
Casey all returned home
from the World War II not
emotionally scarred or drained
by what they had experienced.
You don't find any
PTSD among these guys.
Instead, they came back rather
invigorated from their fight
against Nazism, and eager
and ready for the next battle
which was against communism.
World War II had a huge
impact on their lives.
Dulles ran the CIA much as he
did the OSS station in Bern.
The OSS taught Helms
how to be a spy,
and after the war he decided
intelligence collection
and not the newspaper
business was his calling.
Bill Colby who wore his floppy
fatigue cap from the war
when he tended his garden got
a law degree when he returned.
But he quickly grew bored
with being a lawyer.
He joined the CIA to fight
Communists had he had the Nazis
for the OSS.
When Bill Casey became CIA
Director he hung two pictures
in his Langley office, one of
Ronald Regan and the other a photo
of his mentor, Wild Bill Donovan.
So I'll end it with that.
Any questions or comments or
anything else on your mind?
[ Applause ]
Yeah?
[ Inaudible Audience Question ]
>> OSS was really like an old
boys' network, an old boys' club.
But I know that there was
some woman in Florida,
especially one famous woman
who became famous later,
Julie Child, of course.
[inaudible].
>> Douglas Waller: Right.
>> How common was it for
women to work in OSS?
I mean she's unusual anyway.
She met her husband [inaudible].
>> Douglas Waller:
Right, Paul Child.
>> And how did the few women
who worked there relate
to this [inaudible] guys' network.
>> Douglas Waller: Right.
Yeah, it was a question
about women in the OSS.
You mentioned Julia Child is one
of the most noteworthy examples,
and how did they work and
relate to the guys on the OSS?
Actually it wasn't a small number
of women who were in the OSS.
Donovan hired about
4,000 women for the OSS.
It's interesting.
Even though Donovan actually had a
number of affairs over the years,
he had a number of mistresses,
he was still somewhat
of a feminist in other respects.
He paid the women at the OSS higher
salaries than they could earn
in any other federal agency.
So they liked working there.
Still there was a glass
ceiling in the organization.
A few of them rose up past the
ranks of the secretarial pool,
or like Julia Child who
was in morale operations,
eventually stationed in Salon.
Some of them became
a research analyst.
Although when they went over to
the Pentagon they were required
to walk behind the director
of research so as not
to appear equals to the guys there.
Donovan himself used women an
awful lot in the organization
as spies and propagandists.
Although he was a tyrant to work
for, at least among his secretaries.
In fact his secretaries -- Donovan's
code number in the OSS was 109
which just happened to be his room
number in the headquarters building.
The secretaries also gave
him another code name.
They called him Seabiscuit
because he was like the racehorse,
he always seemed to be
running around and demanding.
But he was really overly
demanding with his operatives.
But they had women working
not only in research
but also as spies, saboteurs.
Some of them worked with
the French Resistance,
and they had casualties
among the women, too.
Yeah?
>> I don't have a question,
but the question
that was just asked
makes me make a comment.
My mother was one of those women.
>> Douglas Waller: Oh, really?
What's her name.
>> Marian Freaswick [phonetic].
And she and my father
both worked in OSS.
>> Douglas Waller: Really?
>> They both stayed at the CIA.
My father retired from the
CIA after 40 some years.
But she was a research analyst.
They were both cartographers
in training and were brought
in to build the map division in OSS.
>> Douglas Waller: Right.
Yeah, the map division was actually
very, very important for the OSS.
Because a lot of places they
were dropping, particular allies,
they didn't have valuable
maps on it.
I mean they used Michelin
guides for the Torch invasion.
So that was actually a
very important division.
But, yeah, as I say, actually there
were a lot of couples in the OSS.
>> They met there and married.
>> Douglas Waller: And who
went on to work in the CIA.
How about that?
Yeah?
>> Briefly [inaudible] positions
these [inaudible] how did they get
to be [inaudible],
what was their path?
>> Douglas Waller: Oh, okay.
Yeah, how did my four
characters become CIA directors?
How did they raise up?
As I say, we'll start
with Allen Dulles.
He came back to the United
States after the war had ended
after a short time in
the Berlin station.
Went back to Sullivan &
Cromwell to the law firm.
Was bored silly with it.
Eventually joined what became
the CIA as a Deputy Director
under Bedell Smith who had been
Eisenhower's Chief of Staff
and was the first CIA Director.
Then he rose up from there
and became CIA Director
under Dwight Eisenhower.
Donovan actually, incidentally,
thought it was a --
Donovan was lobbying for CIA
Director under Eisenhower himself
and thought Dulles would
be a lousy administrator
and would screw up the agency.
Ironically Dulles also thought
he could have run the OSS better
than Donovan did.
Let's see, Richard Helms came next.
He came back from Berlin, the
Berlin station, and went immediately
into what were the successor
organizations to the CIA,
the Central Intelligence
Division at one point.
And at a very young age became the
manager of clandestine operations
for Europe and then really
for the entire world.
Rose up through the ranks quickly.
Worked for Dulles when
Dulles was CIA Director,
although Dulles always thought
Helms was a good administrator
but not a swashbuckler
like Dulles wanted.
In fact, a lot of people say
that if Helms had been in charge
of the covert branch that at the
time of the CIA Bay of Pigs fiasco
that it would have never occurred.
Helms would have limited
it in scope.
Bill Colby came back, as
I say, became a lawyer.
Worked in Donovan's
law firm for a while.
Then came to Washington, worked
at the National Labor Relations
Board for a little bit.
Was bored silly with it, and
eventually drifted into the CIA.
In fact, his wife Barbara found out
about that he had moved to the CIA
when one of the I guess
people in the car pool noticed
that Colby was always walking
in the opposite director
of the National Labor Relations
Board to where the CIA was located.
He rose up in the ranks, became
really a star for the agency,
particularly in the
East Asia division.
Went to Vietnam two times.
Was fairly controversial then.
Became linked or tarred by some
of the CIA operations in Vietnam,
particularly the Phoenix program.
And eventually when
Nixon fired Helms,
this is during the
Watergate scandal,
Helms actually drew the line at
one point on things he would not do
for Nixon and the Watergate scandal.
Nixon appointed Colby
as CIA director
because he thought he
could manage him better.
And then it turned out
that Colby later on really
to save the agency opened up what
were called the Family Jewels Report
on the agency misdeeds to Congress.
Bill Casey when he came back from
World War II he really wanted
to follow the same path that
Donovan had which was he wanted
to make his millions in New York
on Wall Street and then come back
to Washington to get
into national security
which is what basically Donovan did.
So after he did make his
millions he first worked
in Richard Nixon's campaign,
ghost wrote a book for Nixon,
and was noticed there, and
then became Ronald Regan's
campaign manager.
And Regan credited him with being I
guess what you'd call his Karl Rove,
the architect, to save his campaign.
Colby expected to be made Secretary
of State of Secretary of Defense
for getting Ronald Regan elected.
But Nancy Regan was horrified
at the notion of Colby
who was a real sloppy eater
being at diplomatic dinners.
And Caspar Weinberger who was a
member of the California Mafia,
the inner circle, had the
Defense Department locked up.
So Regan offered Casey the CIA.
And at first Casey told him,
well, I have to think about it.
He was kind of insulted which
kind of surprised Regan.
He thought it was a pretty good job.
Finally some of the OSS
veterans convinced Casey
that it was a perfect job for
him, particularly for, you know,
the hardline foreign
policy that he believed in
and that Regan was ushering in,
you know, the whole strategy
of rolling back Communism
instead of containing it.
So that real quick history
is how those four guys got
to where they did.
Yeah?
[ Inaudible Audience Question ]
Right. The question is
Colby's mysterious death.
Let's talk about that,
and the different theories
about what happened.
Colby, this was in Maryland at
his lakeside country home there,
went out in a boat and drowned.
His body was found later.
This was after he left the CIA.
And there have been all
kinds of conspiracy theories
that have been battered around that
maybe the KGB hit team got Colby
and killed him, or
that angry CIA officers
who still hated Colby
bumped him off.
Carl Colby who is one of
Colby's sons, did a documentary
where his theory was that Colby was
distraught over his role in Vietnam,
the Phoenix program, distraught over
the death of his daughter who died
of anorexia, a very tragic case.
I looked into all the
investigative files
and the autopsy and everything else.
And what you find a lot of
times in the spy business
and everything is the most
mundane explanation turns
out to be the true one.
In Colby's case after a nice clam
dinner and a bottle of wine he went
out and decided to take a row
in his rowboat out in the lake.
Suffered a massive heart attack
and a stroke, fell out of the boat
and drowned and that was it.
He was never distraught
over Vietnam.
He slept like a baby over Vietnam.
He was proud of what he did there.
And although he was sad
about his daughter's death,
he was not distraught
enough to take his life.
Even so I mean the conspiracy
theories have lasted to this day.
And I guess the most
prominent one is
that disgruntled CIA
officers bumped him off.
Actually interestingly
enough Sally Shelton-Colby,
who was Bill Colby's second wife,
told me she got I think phone calls
from ten people who said they
were CIA officers after Colby died
who said they thought
he got it coming to him,
the accident and everything.
Anything else?
Thank you very -- I'm sorry,
one more question, sorry.
[ Inaudible Audience Question ]
Yeah, that was Colby.
The Church Committee
and the Pike Committee
on the House side were
the two committees set
up to investigate the CIA
abuses in the 50s, 60s and 70s.
Colby was CIA Director then.
He faced really a critical choice
and decided to release a huge batch
of material and particularly
the Family Jewels Report
which is something like 700
pages long of CIA missives
in the 50s, 60s and early 70s.
There have been a lot of
theories on why he did it.
Some people thought he
was an overgrown Boy Scout
or a Jesuit going haywire
and confessing too much.
Or that he had other lofty
-- other motives behind it.
When I talked to Colby's
son, one of them is a lawyer,
he confided to him
exactly why he did it,
and it was because he was a lawyer.
And because in any court
case in a discovery case,
I don't know if we have any
lawyers in the group here,
if a judge demands discovery
and you don't produce everything
that's demanded by the court
for a particular trial or case, the
judge will just order the marshals
in to clear everything
out of your organization.
Well, Colby realized that in the
case of Congress if he didn't turn
over material to Congress they would
come in and just tear everything
out of the agency and
really disable it.
And so this way he managed to really
control what went to Capitol Hill
and ended up saving
the agency in the end.
It could have been broken
apart at that point.
>> John Cole: Doug, I
get the final question.
Would you say word about the role
that the Library of Congress played
in the creation of the CIA?
>> Douglas Waller: Oh, yes,
I'm glad you asked that.
Actually it played a
very prominent role.
When Donovan first formed the
agency, he said he actually started
from minus zero which was the case.
He only had one guy
and that was himself.
He had to set up -- he knew he
wanted to set up a research outfit
that eventually became the Research
and Analysis Branch of this agency.
But initially he set it up
here in the Library of Congress
and used academics here that
were associated with the Library
of Congress, the most notable
of which was Archibald
MacLeish who was the --
>> John Cole: Librarian at the time.
>> Douglas Waller: --
Librarian at the time, right.
>> John Cole: From 1939 to 44.
>> Douglas Waller: Who
helped Donovan set it
up for him here in the Library.
And, in fact, if you go
through the Manuscript Division,
and I went through
Archibald MacLeish's papers,
you can see all the memos
and letters that he wrote
to Donovan in that early period.
Eventually then they
moved the Research Branch
to navy Hill next to
the State Department.
But its start was here
in the Library.
>> John Cole: Thank you.
We'll take one more question.
>> Just a quick comment on
that with family relationships.
My great aunt's stepson was a guy
named George Kackley [phonetic],
he worked for the Legislative
Reference Service.
>> What's the last name?
>> George Kackley, grew up
in Berryville, Virginia.
>> Douglas Waller: Yeah.
>> And he worked for the
Legislative Reference Service.
And he worked for Bill Donovan
and later James Jesus
Angleton at the CIA.
And to take the ironies even
further, he was caretaker
of Oakhill Cemetery for a
while which is the same job
as David Baldacci's
protagonist [inaudible].
>> Douglas Waller: Oh, that
makes a great conspiracy.
I don't know what, but it
makes a great conspiracy.
>> George Kackley was also, this
was news to me, I learned this
in his obituary, he was a
paratrooper during World War II,
and he worked at the Library
prior to World War II.
So there might be some
OSS connection there.
>> Douglas Waller: Could be.
Oh, that's fascinating.
>> John Cole: We're
a shady agency here.
Join me in thanking Doug
Waller for a wonderful talk.
>> Douglas Waller: Thank you.
[ Applause ]
>> John Cole: We're going to
have a book signing out back.
You can buy a copy of
the book at the Library
of Congress discount, get it signed.
And I just want to comment I
can see the reporter in you
and the journalist in you.
You really did a terrific job
in presenting everybody's
story and kept it moving.
It was great fun.
One more round of applause for Doug.
[Applause]
>> This has been a presentation
of the Library of Congress.
Visit us at loc.gov.
