The Truth About Wild Bill Donovan And The Precursor To The CIA: OSS
The historical record does not match the facts. The same problems plaguing OSS, have continued with CIA.
After 911, there were calls to end CIA in some quarters. It was pointed out the CIA didn't share information with the other 19 Intel agencies (and their subgroups), that it spent enormous amounts of time fighting and spying on these same agencies going so far as to recruit people in other groups to spy on them for CIA!
Few realize that the Directors of CIA answer to a board that restricts any reform. The vast majority of classified files are to hide incompetence and stupidity, usually of our politicians. Attempts to classify less and declassify more don’t get very far, politicians determine budgets!
Enormous amonts of time were being wasted on silly James Bond like plots, inept station chiefs who didn't even meet with their people in the field and were thus out of touch. Technology had replaced old fashioned feet on the ground spy work. Even John McCain called for a new O.S.S. to replace the barely functioning CIA.
What most people don't realize, including John McCain, is that the group CIA replaced, The Office Of Strategic Services (O.S.S.) had all the same criticisms levelled at it!
O.S.S. during World War 2 was a cross section of different races, temperaments and talents. From its start, Donovan a Catholic, had a siege mentality. His funding was controlled by conservative Protestants who did not mix with Catholics. Their private clubs and bars excluded Catholics. So Donovan initiated a strategy of sending Protestant members to those clubs and bars, and he became a flamboyant man about town to keep the funding coming in.He was the one Catholic allowed at WASP parties, and he loved going to them. The OSS quickly became known as the Oh So Social group.
In those days, gays often made the best agents. Society, even in the worker's paradise of Russia, frowned on homosexuality. All gays had to marry, have kids, while living a separate lifestyle and keeping it secret. This is pretty much what a spy does. Find an enemy and discover he is gay, you had an informant for life. Within OSS however, flamboyant natures were encouraged. Pretty soon the Protestants were calling OSS the Oh So Social group as a putdown.
Wasting time on silly plots to kill Hitler, breaking into foreign embassies in Washington, truth be told, OSS had very little to show for its efforts throughout the war. Part of the problem was Donovan himself, in love with special operations and gadgets, bored to death with routine paperwork and running an administration.
But the boredom with day to day administration led to a bigger problem. Infiltration of OSS by pro- Russian spies. John Grombach counted 15 spies in his OSS office alone, when you start adding up all the OSS offices here and abroad, this was a massive security breach.
So OSS was never anymore effective than CIA was on 911. Which is to say, not at all. I believe I have a theory why. You see OSS when it folded would have a big impact on CIA. Four of its heads would go on to head and form CIA. Allan Dulles, Richard Helms, William Casey and William Colby were all CIA men. In my opinion, they simply took the problems with OSS over to CIA.
Allan Dulles, compromised early in WW 2 by the Germans!
Allan Dulles, the first head of CIA, would play a monumental role in bringing down Joe McCarthy- by feeding him a fake name and dossier on a military figure. Though still classified, look for a military leader accused by Joe McCarthy. Dulles himself had been completely compromised by the Germans in WW 2 and was pretty much useless during the war. He failed upwards.
The FBI record is also dismal. They often knew who the spies were in the FDR administration, but because they used illegal methods to gather their information none of them could be prosecuted. On record they could show they had the names, but off the record we now know why they didn’t prosecute them.
The top priority of both CIA and the FBI is protecting Democrats.
Along with the propaganda campaign to destroy Joe McCarthy, was a campaign to hide and disguise the true nature of the Democratic Party. Today young people are taught the myth that racists who had controlled the Democratic Party for decades advocating lynchings, beatings, whippings, bombings and segregation left the party with the passage of the Civil Rights Act.
Since George Wallace and Lester Maddox have been carefully removed from their history books, students don't realize the battle over segregation went on until the 1980's. Democratic cities such as Chicago blocked blacks from jobs ranging from police to garbage men. Boston would see adults armed with baseball bats push over school buses filled with black elementary kids who were then beaten. Democrats would patrol fiercely Democratic areas of Bridgeport in Chicago beating blacks caught in the area after dark. This is the true face of the Democratic Party. That face would exist until the 1980's, long after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Democrats fought employment directives in the courts for years. Then, when they lost, they claimed to be progressive because they were hiring the same blacks they had fought to keep from public service.
FDR was the first President to go to J. Edger Hoover of the FBI and ask for information on the sex lives of his friends and foes. This began early in his first term, and FDR quickly began using the information to put his administration into a state of fear. While our government was being infiltrated by a giant Soviet shadow government, Hoover was busy sending his agents out to report on and entrap FDR's friends and enemies alike.
Add to this that the depression, contrary to popular urban legend, would continue until after World War 2, those with jobs were too terrified of losing them to speak out.
In the film POINT OF ORDER, a film about the McCarthy hearings which had Soviet spies as advisers, there is a sequence about a black cleaning woman who worked in a kitchen and somehow found herself elevated to handling classified documents had been accused by McCarthy as a Communist in a spy ring (it turned out, she was), being questioned by the committee out to destroy McCarthy. Get the transcripts and watch the "documentary". Every single racist anti-gay and offensive remark by the anti- McCarthy panel has been removed from the film.
Today Democrats can claim the years from the 1930's on they were progressive and fighting for civil liberties. There is only one thing in the way of that propaganda.
The truth.
Do the wings of CIA and the Democratic Party even know today why they have such a strong alliance to the point of putting several hundred FBI agents into the crowd on Jan. 6th dressed as Trump supporters?
Probably not. Our history is so propaganda filled that anyone running for office today has no idea of our real history. Add to that, that the majority of politicians today have never served in the military it is fair to say they don’t know shit from shinola.
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