NO BANNERS, NO BANDS: MORE TALES OF THE O.S.S.

By Robert Hayden Alcorn '31. New York: David McKayCo., Inc., 1965. 275 pp. $4.50.

In the year of our Lord 007, it is refreshing to meet some genuine secret agents who are recognizable human beings armed with a relatively primitive technology - at least by James Bondian standards. A confidant of General Donovan and a Connecticut squire, ex-Colonel Bob Alcorn, who personally seems a most improbable paymaster/spymaster, has already given us insightful amusement and instruction in No Bugles forSpies as to why and how intelligence operatives click as well as who makes them click. This second installment in racing prose kept me enthralled with the daring and the pure guts of the often weird personalities who risked more than their lives in advancing VE and VJ days in World War II.

We, and the British, of course, used "patriots" as agents, as did the Russki, although patriotism had a slightly more international flavor; the Reichssicherheitshauptamt on the other hand, tended to use paid types as did the Deuxieme Bureau. But this does not tell us anything really, because there must be some curious quirk of masochism. and often sadism - not to mention a latent suicidal wish - which impels the secret operator to volunteer to go back to hell. Loners and deviants certainly and no one is more alone than in enemy country!

But, of course, OSS did more than ferret out information: Lt. David (cover-cover name), wonderfully enough a clean-cut Middle Western youth, gave his moral all for behind-the-Japanese-lines sabotage through establishing solid entente with the Gurkhas by deflowering ceremonially the ten to twelve-year-old daughter of their most powerful chieftain. If only Congress had been aware that U.S. money had been employed to commit the statutory rape of young virgins! Olaf (predictably Norwegian) was mangled by the still unbelievable SD after exceptional work because he liked women too much and trusted the wrong one; a German counterspy.

Then there was three-times married Alicia, part Parsee and part English, who in the honored Mata Hari tradition, as a spiteful observer truthfully observed, "did most of her war service on her back." In fact, she maintained an elegant and successful salon in Paris as the mistress of a German head-quarter colonel up to the Liberation. "She was a natural agent. Intrigue, deceit, manipulation and control, these apparently meant more to her than love." Odd people - but you had better read the book.

Professor of Sociology