Iraq and Afghanistan

Today's paper carries an Op-Ed by two experts on World War II's Office of Strategic Services (OSS) that was headed by William Donovan. Interested readers can find a somewhat fuller discussion on-line at this web site.

The main thrust of the argument is that intelligence was much more productive when it was run by a bunch of skilled amateurs who really had the goals of the effort in view, as contrasted with their personal advancement in a large bureaucratic organization. The OSS grew out of an effort by President Roosevelt to improve the foreign intelligence available to him at the beginning of World War II. Then, as now, intelligence was riven by many feuds among agencies, and none of them wanted to share their sources or power with upstarts. The FBI and the military service intelligence groups were the main culprits. Up to the end of the war, this new agency that was supposed to be handling intelligence gathering directly for the President was not granted access to information coming from the breaking of most Axis codes, it had no role in Latin America, and was largely frozen out of the Pacific Theatre of operations by the opposition of leading admirals. Nevertheless it persisted, and did good work developing working relations with the British. It also had a research and intelligence branch that recruited the best and the brightest from American universities, allowing the country to have a much better idea of the enemies they were facing. The OSS also developed an action unit that conducted a wide variety of secret operations behind enemy lines. At the end of the war, Truman was quick to dissolve OSS. Donovan had a poor reputation as an administrator, hated bureaucracy, and was personally disliked by Truman. Since Donovan relied so heavily on the Ivy League for his staff, it is possible that there was a cultural gap here as well (which continues today between the Midwest and Southwest and New England).

But what seems most useful today in thinking about how intelligence should be restructured goes back to the thirties when Roosevelt began to use Donovan as a personal "reporter" on what was going on in the world. He sent him to England to see how resilient they might be, and so forth. The reports back were directly to him. It seems to me that in the highly bureaucratized Washington of today with everyone with their own personal as well as ideological and national agendas, this model might be useful as a supplement. If a President could find a group of five or so persons of different political persuasions who would work silently for him throughout the world as his eyes and ears and personal advisors, he would be in a much improved position to make informed decisions. These advisors should be essentially nameless. They should either be beyond retirement age or have other professions they could easily go back to. One of their tasks should be to find out what people in the existing intelligence communities in this country and elsewhere "really think". They should be able to move comfortably through a variety of cultures and political systems, reporting back what they think is going on or likely to go on. They should be able to have informed opinions on the capabilities of action agencies or military services that might be enlisted in performing needed secret or nonsecret operations.