Ivy Spooks
ROCHE, JOHN P.
Ivy Spooks Cloak & Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1938-1961 By Robin W. Winks Morrow. 607pp. $22.95. Reviewed by John P. Roche This is a tough book to review. It is delightful,...
...The critic who inquires what relationship our present military commitment in the Persian Gulf has to our national interest, for example, is also making a constructive contribution...
...Actually, German Ambassador Franz von Papen's initial report on this agent to Berlin was intercepted by "Ultra" and MI5 turned the affair into a classic disinformation caper...
...Obviously, I have never sought out probable prospects and suggested they call some unlisted phone in Washington...
...That does not necessarily mean becoming a cheerleader for any administration...
...Sir Hughe was supplied with phony plans for the Continental invasion (those of BODYGUARD, the fake Pas-de-Calais invasion to be mounted from Scotland...
...But any faculty member who serves as a covert campus recruiter should be kicked out...
...His sketches of some of the leading spooks are models...
...Ostensibly the dilemmas of the scholar in cloak and dagger organizations is the topic of Winks' book...
...In this book he almost succeeds in clarifying a drunken square dance that the OSS and the British Overseas Intelligence Agency MI6 sponsored in Spain, and a bizarre conflict between the Americans and the Brits (in this instance, Special Operations, Cairo) in Yugoslavia...
...So Field Marshal Rommel's forces stayed north of the Seine...
...Two errors might be noted: First, Winks says that the New York Times got the scoop on Nikita S. Khrushchev's "Secret Speech" to the 20th Party Congress of the CPSU...
...on our society for "repressive toleration" their lights have notably dimmed...
...Indeed, it bears a remarkable resemblance to Eric Larrabee's recent work on FDR, Commander in Chief, which in the first chapter portrays Roosevelt as the mastermind of our World War II global strategy, and then is completely devoted to superb vignettes of the leading military figures in whom he put his trust...
...The bulk of American academicians took, and still take, the position that they have an obligation to put their expertise at the disposal of the community as a whole...
...Both books are grand reads, with the main plot in each case seeming to be a number of talented characters in search of a plot...
...When the scenario arrived in Berlin the specialists of the Abwehrargued it must be fraudulent, but Hitler's favorite cheerleader, Walter Schellenberg, head of the SD, the Nazi Party foreign intelligence outfit that was out to blitz Admiral Canaris' foreign intelligence professionals, convinced the Führer the plans were authentic...
...Second, he credits the OSS with blowing "Cicero," the Albanian valet of British Ambassador Hughe KnathbullHugesson in Turkey who spied for the Nazis...
...This was surely the case with a number of the 1960s intellectual illuminati, but since the kamikaze raid by Herbert Marcuse & Co...
...As those who have read his earlier works know, Winks writes with sophisticated charm even on the most recondite topics...
...Similarly the CI A, like any other employer, should be allowed to recruit campus talent...
...To be explicit, for almost half a century I have resisted the notion that universities should be military posts...
...Whoever raised the point, as Winks proceeds to show, had a narrow notion of academic ideals...
...On the other hand, when on numerous occasions students have asked, I have told them that our intelligence agencies are valuable national assets in need of able young men and women...
...In short, Cloak & Gown doesn't go anywhere but the trip is fun...
...It is delightful, well-researched and wellwritten, but when you finish it you scratch your head and ask, "Now what was this supposed to be demonstrate...
...For starters, the view is premised on Karl Mannheim's assumption that intellectuals should be free-floating critics with no extraneous ballast such as patriotism or religious convictions: Like medieval clerks, they are in the civitas mundi but not of it...
...Yet there are some delicate Unes of demarcation, largely prudential...
...I see nothing wicked about an American Tibetan scholar who witnessed the recent rioting in Lhasa briefing the Central Intelligence Agency, the State Department or the press on his experience...
...in fact, The New Leader broke the story with the complete speech before the Times...
...Nowhere has the late James Jesus Angleton, the longtime director of CIA counterintelligence known as "Mother," been more insightfully limned...
...But possible consequences have to be figured into the equation: Two other Americans still in Tibet might be shot as spies...
...And his saga of Joseph Toy Curtiss, a young Yale English teacher who was shipped out to the Middle East in 1943—supposedly to purchase books and pamphlets on current affairs for a library consortium—and became an OSS jack of all trades in Istanbul, is practically worth the price of admission...
...thus I opposed mandatory ROTC, classified research, and the like...
...Rather than get mixed up in the Talmudic distinctions I have alluded to here that are the core of the very tricky problem, however, he has pursued a different course: He has indicated some ambivalence on the moral questions involved and then taken off on a safari to look into the leading scholars—particularly at Yale—who joined the Office of Strategic Services (later the first encadrement of the CIA), plus a number of their students who followed their tracks...
...Cloak & Gown began as Yale Professor Robin W. Winks' reaction to a colleague who indicated in acerbic terms that any faculty member who would get involved in clandestine government work was in essence a traitor to the ideals of the professoriat...
...After thinking they were the cutting edge of a cultural revolution, suddenly in the '70s Üiey realized they were all alone out there among the conservative cannibals and hastily settled back to the protection of "progressive toleration...
Vol. 70 • November 1987 • No. 18
