SUB ROSA: THE OSS AND AMERICAN ESPIONAGE
by Stewart Alsop andThomas Braden '40. Reynal if Hitchcock,1946, 23J pp., $2.50.
Late last summer the Office of Strategic Services, which had previously distinguished itself by a passion for anonymity, broke out in a rash of publicity. The authors of this volume had at that time just returned to America after serving OSS in the exciting and exacting role of parachuting into France to provide liaison with maquis groups. In Washington they were assigned to preparing press handouts, an assignment which necessitated personal interviews and research in the agency's archives. In consequence, few persons are more qualified than' they to speak knowingly of the successes and failures of OSS.
As the authors rightly say, OSS "did two main jobs. One was tying the resistance effort of the occupied countries to the military effort of the Allied powers. The other was ferreting out and accumulating .... intelligence. .... " Accordingly the bulk of the book is taken up by vivid descriptions of episodes of resistance and espionage, perhaps the most exciting of which is the account, written with the freshness and bravura which comes from first-hand experience, of what the "Jedburghs" did in collaboration with the maquis in France. Nor will Dartmouth men want to miss the account of Bill Eddy's exploits in North Africa.
Sub Rosa does not purport to be a history of OSS. It does not, for one thing, discuss all the activities in which OSS usefully engaged, such as, for example, efforts to confuse and mislead the enemy by deceitful propaganda. A systematic history of OSS, furthermore, would deal with the problems of organization and coordination which beset the agency from start to finish, and which provide an interesting case study in public administration. But Alsop and Braden are frankly bored with the administrative history of the agency, and this is not the book to tell you, therefore, how all the amateur administrators, the vice-behemoths and deputy mastodons, gored one another in the jungles of Washington. Nevertheless, Sub Rosa presents an honest picture of the agency and its head (as all candid people who served in OSS will testify). The authors' wholesome and somewhat astringent detachment about the agency in general serves to point up with all the greater effect their thrilling samples of OSS participation in the war effort.
