Briefly Noted
The Catalogue of the Seventh Annual Antiques Show Benefit in Philadelphia for the University of Pennsylvania Hospital is a collector's item. Its 115 pages feature the offerings of some 57 booth-holders from North Carolinia to Maine. Beautiful photographs, some in color, cover rare Americana from orreries to ship models, from paintings and silver to porcelains and old lottery tickets. "When Lotteries Were 'innocent'" by Philip Gardiner Nordell '16 challenges the widely held belief that most early lotteries were corrupt. It discusses 2000 major and honest lotteries in Philadelphia between 1744 and 1840. Profiting were churches and colleges (the original Dartmouth Hall, for example) with the approval of leading citizens. In the history of American lotteries now being written, Mr. Nordell would be grateful for information about lottery tickets before 1830.
Interested in Model A Fords? If so, you had better spend a dollar. It will buy you a booklet entitled A Wee Bit of Cruising'Way Down Under' Including Vigorous Research on the Model A. The author is Norman Frederic Page '27. On a 93-day, 32,570mile voyage he searched out and examined in loving detail Model A's in New Zealand, Australia, the Hawaiian Islands, and Japan.
Three Dartmouth authors are represented in a new anthology called Great True SpyStories, edited by Allan Dulles, from Harper & Row, $6.95.
In "Spymaster George Washington" Corey Ford '21 tells the story of America's first organized espionage service called "The Culper Ring." Although operated by Colonel Benjamin Tallmadge, the Ring was largely under the personal direction of the Commander-in-Chief, who was obliged to recruit amateurs untrained in the business of spying. Nathan Hale's capture and death had pointed the need of a more efficient undercover operation; their unit was the result of his sacrifice.
Ford also tells us the little that is known of Robert Townsend, the handsome, young Quaker merchant from Oyster Bay, whose liaison with Agent 355 served to advance the Revolutionary cause for months, and gave him all he knew of happiness and despair. Besides the historical mystery surrounding "355," the formula for an invisible ink developed in London by Sir James Jay, brother of John Jay, and successfully used by the Revolutionary leaders has never been penetrated. Ford's story indicates that the American Revolution isn't yet completely documented.
John L. Steele's ('39) "Assassin Disarmed by Love" recounts another example of how the best-laid plans go astray even with the Soviet KGB.
This is the story of Bogdan Stashinskiy, product of Soviet Intelligence training from the time he was a school boy, and dedicated to his appointed function as a professional assassin.
In 1957 he killed the Ukrainian emigre leader, Lev Rebet, with a secret weapon - a short, light, aluminum cylinder designed to spray potassium cyanide gas into the victim's face at short range. In 1959 he liquidated another Ukrainian, Stepan Badera, with the same type of weapon, and his star blazed in the Soviet Intelligence scheme.
On one of his trips to East Berlin in pursuit of Rebet, however, he met Inge Pohl, a quite unexceptional hairdresser of rather slatternly habits. Despite vigorous official protests, they were married with the understanding that they would live in Moscow. But his unhappy wife soon enveloped him in a web of suspicion and surveillance, and Stashinskiy knew he must make an end of it first. The death of their baby son provided the means of escape, and they arrived in West Berlin, August 12, 1961, the day before the wall was reared creating the two Germanies. The price? To stand trial for the slaying of Rebet and Badera.
A former Dartmouth English professor, William A. Eddy, '34h, plays a major role in "Prelude to Invasion" by Stewart Alsop and Thomas W. Braden '40.
The extremely versatile Mr. Eddy, bilingual in English and Arabic, with a highly decorated military career, was to become president of Hobart and William Smith Colleges, first American Minister Plenipotentiary to Saudi Arabia, and a consultant for ARAMCO and TAPLINE. The Middle East was his metier, as Operation TORCH would prove.
The Allies were preparing for the invasion of North Africa, and the OSS was soon enlisted for its first big operational task. It needed an intelligence "beachhead" in the seething international zone that was Tangier, Algeria, and the two Moroccos, filled with the spies, agents, black marketeers, and soldiers of fortune of all nations.
Eddy, who had rejoined the Marine Corps in 1941, arrived in Tangier in 1942 with instructions to establish intelligence posts in North Africa's principal cities, maintain liaison with, and between, them and the States, attempt to nullify French opposition and win French support, encourage the French to resist the Germans in a possible invasion and, of course, keep in touch with the British. For assistance, he was to have Robert Murphy's corps of North African consular "inspectors."
How all this was done in the face of American non-support, the loss of General Weygand's tacit aid, the rise of the Laval government, and the increasing Axis grip surely must be one of the most memorable pages in the annals of the OSS. The events of the last four months before invasion make fascinating reading, and the fact that the Allied host of 109,000 lost only 900 men must be attributed to Messrs. Eddy and Murphy whose unflagging efforts virtually immobilized the French army on behalf of the Allies.
