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Salient. Victoria University Student Newspaper. Volume 38, No 5. April 3 1975
Ancestry
Ancestry
In this cursory summary of the OSS and its activities I have tried to place emphasis on the features of its ideology and practice which were incorporated into its post-war equivalent the Central Intelligence Agency. As Smith has written: The OSS was the direct lineal ancestor of today's CIA. The CIA is no aberrant mutation of 'Donovan's Dreamers', it is in many ways the mirror image of OSS' Edmond Taylor, the OSS man who fought Vichyism in Africa and colonialism in Asia, reflected in a recent memoir that the wartime activities of his organisation established 'a precedent, or a pattern, for United States intervention in the revolutionary struggles of the postwar age.' One feature which does not seem to have been retained, however, is the political heterogeneity of the staff. After the experience of McCarthyism and the Cold War there is now no room for Marxist academics or members of the Young Communist League.
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Alān Welsh Dulles who later became director of the CIA. Since the war former OSS officers have represented the US as ambassadors in over twenty countries. Also included in the exclusive club of OSS veterans are Presidential advisers Arthur Schlestnger Jr. and Watt Rostow. and former CIA director Richard Helms.
Writing in the Chicago Tribune about a proposal in 1944 to create a permanent American intelligence service, journalist Walter Trohan claimed that the organisation proposed by Donovan would be an 'all-powerful intelligence service to spy on the post-war world and to pry into the lives of citizens at home.....The unit would operate under an independent budget and presumably have secret funds for work along the lines of bribery and luxury living described in the novels of E Phillips Oppenheim.' These words proved to be astonishingly prophetic.
(To be continued next week)
| (1) | The vagueness of this mandate is echoed in one of the provisions of the National Security Act of 194 7 (which established the CIA) that permits the CIA 'to perform such other functions and duties related to intelligence .... as the national Security Council may from time to time direct." |
| (2) | OSS R Harris Smith, New York 1972. Subsequent quotations are also taken from this book. |
| (3) | Liter employees of this firm were Ziegler, Chapin, and Haldeman of Watergate fame. H R Haldeman was a vice-president (no pun intended). |
| (4) | See pages 8 and 13. This is another Rockefeller firm. |
| (5) | As Smith notes, however, 'The resistance forces naturally assumed that these young idealists were official representative of their nation's foreign policy . . Behind enemy lines, the most casual word that fell from the unguarded lips of the youngest second lieutenant in the American army - he might have been a writer, lawyer, corporation executive, or artist in peace-lime - would be considered holy writ by leaders of the resistance. Hit views had no importance in the eyes of State Department representatives thousands of miles away....' OSS, p.31. |
The post-war role which the United States did eventually assume in Vietnam was markedly different from that foreseen by Ho Chi Minh and only now is it coming to an end as the US military puppets fall in the face of Ho Chi Minh's successors.