THE SECRET WAR AGAINST HITLER
William Casey
New York: Regnery Gateway, 1988
225 pp., $19.95
Bill Casey, who died in 1987 after a spectacular and controversial six-year stint as Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), has left us a literary legacy. It is a historical account of the work of the OSS (Office of Strategic Services, precursor of the CIA) in the European theater during the assault on France and Germany at the end of the World War II. The narrative is fascinating and worth reading in its own right, but it is especially valuable because it conveys the moral and intellectual qualities that shaped Casey's life.
Without any element of pretentiousness or forecasting, Casey's book, The Secret War Against Hitler, illuminates the issues that complicate the work of a secret intelligence agency in an open and, on the whole, innocent, democratic society. It is a guide to the multiple dilemmas of those who conduct clandestine intelligence operations to protect national security.
Coming of Age During World War II
Casey came to work at the OSS in the summer of 1943, a successful young lawyer and economic research analyst who had gotten himself commissioned in the Navy. He was highly motivated to do something to win the war America had so belatedly been forced into by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. His book makes evident the quasi-philosophic bent of mind of the well-educated, upwardly mobile young men of his generation. He does not talk about his generation explicitly, but he demonstrates the outlook by describing what he did for the OSS as a natural consequence of his views.
This is also my generation--and that of John F. Kennedy and George Bush. These two were a few years younger than Casey and went directly into combat, becoming military heroes at a tender age. They, like Casey and nearly all of us in that generation, felt that our elders had failed in not seeing early on that Hitler and his allies meant to destroy our way of life. Many in our generation believed that somehow Americans could have garnered the necessary intelligence data and acted on it to prevent the rise to power of the Axis dictatorships.
Kennedy forthrightly, albeit somewhat flamboyantly, was representing the fighting spirit of this generation when he said in his inaugural speech:
“Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation, born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage, and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.”
This credo was certainly congenial for Casey; it was consistent with his own wartime and postwar experience.
Pioneering
Like Casey, I
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