Book of the week: Wild Bill Donovan: The Spymaster Who Created the OSS and Modern American Espionage by Douglas Waller

(Free Press, $30)

William J. Donovan, who created the nation’s first unified intelligence agency, was an “authentic American hero,” said Joseph C. Goulden in The Washington Times. A decorated World War I veteran whose taste for danger earned him the nickname “Wild Bill,” he was nevertheless an unlikely choice to build what became Franklin Roosevelt’s Office of Strategic Services. Though he’d become a successful Wall Street lawyer, the lowborn Irish Catholic was also a staunch New York Republican who railed publicly against Roosevelt’s blue-blooded “delusions of grandeur” before the war in Europe made the two men allies. In a book that must now be considered the “defining” work on Donovan, Douglas Waller doesn’t omit his subject’s flaws. More striking, though, are the “enormous energies” Donovan demonstrated in almost single-handedly building the cadre of 10,000 “analysts, covert operators,” and “saboteurs” who helped secure the Allied victory.

Waller’s book is filled with thrilling tales of “OSS derring-do,” said Andrew Roberts in The Wall Street Journal. Donovan developed covert schemes on the fly, and some were plain harebrained. He arranged to have time-delayed bombs strapped onto live bats that were then released over Germany. (“The poor creatures dropped like stones.”) He had female sex hormones injected into Hitler’s vegetables, thinking the tactic would cause the führer’s mustache to fall out and make his voice “go soprano.” But there were great successes, too: The theft of 1,600 secret Nazi documents by double agent Fritz Kolbe; the “extraordinary” lifting of diplomatic codebooks each month from the Spanish Embassy in Washington.

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Readers seeking “a comprehensive appraisal of the OSS’s far-flung intelligence operations” won’t find such analysis here, said Jennet Conant in The New York Times. “Waller is more concerned with the politics of personality,” including Donovan’s relationships with FDR and with his “implacable foe,” FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. The rival intelligence chiefs kept detailed dossiers on each other—Hoover’s was filled with accounts of Donovan’s womanizing, Donovan’s with evidence of Hoover’s homosexuality. Donovan later blamed Hoover for “sabotaging” his bid to lead what would become the CIA. There was truth in that, but it was true too that this “bold innovator and imprudent rule bender” had burned too many bridges while helping win a war.