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>>> Yale - A Great Nursery of Spooks


By GODFREY HODGSON

AUG. 16, 1987

The New York Times Archives



https://www.nytimes.com/1987/08/16/books/yale-a-great-nursery-of-spooks.html


CLOAK & GOWN Scholars in the Secret War, 1939-1961. By Robin W. Winks. Illustrated. 607 pp. New York: William Morrow & Company. $22.95.

IT was a Yale man, Henry L. Stimson, who is supposed to have closed down the State Department's counterespionage Black Chamber in 1929 with the words, ''Gentlemen do not read each other's mail.'' The remark, as Robin W. Winks points out, is probably apocryphal. Indeed, it is possible that it was put into Stimson's mouth by another Yale man, McGeorge Bundy, the co-author of Mr. Stimson's ''On Active Service in Peace and War.''

The fact is, though, that Yale University has been a great nursery of spooks. A statue of Nathan Hale with a British noose about his neck, only regretting that he has but one life to give for his country, stands in front of the Central Intelligence Agency's headquarters in Langley, Va. Appropriately, it is a copy of the one that stands on Yale's Old Campus in New Haven, for Hale was a member of the Yale class of 1773. In more recent years, Yale has had, as Mr. Winks shows, a curiously persistent connection with the business of intelligence gathering. No other American university, it appears, has sent so many of its graduates into the profession.

To a remarkable extent, the ethos first of the World War II Office of Strategic Services, and then of its offspring, the C.I.A., was influenced by Yale men, and therefore presumably by Yale. Think - naming names almost at random - of James Jesus Angleton, C. Tracy Barnes, Richard Bissell, William Bundy, Cord Meyer Jr. and Sherman Kent.

Sometime in the 1970's Mr. Winks, who teaches history at Yale, found himself in an argument with a colleague about the ethics of cooperating with intelligence agencies. His antagonist claimed that academics had never done so in the past. Nonsense, thought Mr. Winks, and in that instant what was originally conceived of as an article, and eventually evolved into ''Cloak & Gown,'' was born. As he worked, Mr. Winks narrowed his target to a study of Yale and intelligence.

For those of us who did not go to Yale, there is something faintly self-important, even comic, about such an enterprise. My own first reaction was that this would be a book with a nostalgic, Edwardian flavor, and to be sure there is about Mr. Winks the faint aroma of the Oldest Member. He does go on a bit, as they say. To make the rather obvious point, for example, that someone other than Sherman Kent might have emerged as the most influential historian in the O.S.S., but didn't, Mr. Winks lists, in his ''Notes'' section, three pages of alternative names.

There is a slight suspicion that he is too fond of the sound of his own voice. And for a man who lays such stress on the scholar's dedication to accuracy, there are a truly startling number of uncorrected printers' errors. I assume, that is, that they are errors by anonymous printers or copy editors. For surely the master of Yale's Berkeley College - a man who is forthright in his high opinion of scholarship in general, and Yale's in particular - must be incapable of misspelling the name of Gordon Seagrave, the American doctor who spent his life in northern Burma; of giving the first name of the distinguished editor of The Washington Post as both Albert and Alfred Friendly; or of giving Mr. Stimson's middle initial as both L. and B. Facts are free, we journalists say, but middle initials are sacred.

Mr. Winks's book, in fact, could have done with some checking as well as some pruning. For all that, it is a delight. It has the flavor of one of those British dining clubs used by John Buchan as a device to introduce his tales of strange goings-on around the fringes of empire. You recall the scene. The port goes round. The company is convivial and knowledgeable. The fire blazes merrily in the grate, and old Winks has the floor. ''Yale never had anything to do with intelligence?'' he snorts. ''A likely tale. Why, the crew coach was a recruiter for the agency. Old Skip Walz! Bet you didn't know that!''

If Mr. Winks's manner does occasionally invite such irreverent parody, it is lightly offered. For ''Cloak & Gown'' is not only an entertaining contribution to the secret history of the 1940's and 50's, it is also an important one.

The book begins with a chapter about Yale's involvement with intelligence as a whole that documents how deeply American higher education was affected by World War II. It was not just that, as Mr. Winks estimates, 42 members of the class of '43 went into the O.S.S., or that altogether at least 60 of the 397 Yale graduates who lost their lives in the war did so in the secret service. More insidious changes were at work. It was then that the F.B.I. first gained access to confidential files, and that so-called enemy alien faculty were put under surveillance, indeed made to turn in their shortwave radios. Worse still, from the point of view of academic freedom, university programs, like those of Yale's Institute of International Studies, or of the Institute of Human Relations' cross-cultural survey, were converted to the purposes of wartime intelligence. The line between asking anthropologists about the cultures of the Pacific theater and using them as covers might be blurred, but it was a dangerous one that many American (and some other) universities crossed.

In his second chapter, on research and analysis in the O.S.S., Mr. Winks makes the point that the whole tradition of area studies was influenced by the requirements of the intelligence community. He quotes McGeorge Bundy that ''the area study programs developed in American universities in the years after the war were manned, directed, or stimulated by graduates of the OSS.'' THE body of the book is provided by biographical chapters about a quartet of Yale men who became intelligence agents, and a very diverse bunch they are. In the summer of 1942, the O.S.S. found itself desperately short of printed materials from inside Nazi-controlled Europe. To remedy this shortage, Yale's Sterling Memorial Library was used as a front. The head of the O.S.S., William Donovan, called his friend Wallace Notestein, a historian of 17th-century Britain, who in turn tapped a young instructor, Joseph Toy Curtiss, to run the project.

The original idea was that Curtiss would work in Switzerland, incidentally providing cover for Allen Dulles, who later became the Director of Central Intelligence. When Switzerland was cut off by the Nazi invasion of southern France, Curtiss went instead to Istanbul, where he operated as an O.S.S. agent under cover of Robert College - an early precedent for the unhappy practice of using American educational institutions overseas as covers for espionage.

The man who recruited Curtiss for this role, Donald Downes (Yale '26), was to become one of the most controversial figures in the history of the O.S.S. He was the classic secret agent of fiction: patriotic, idealistic, romantically fascinated by complexity and by the intrigue of the bazaar and the backstairs in such haunts of fantasy as Istanbul, Macedonia and Beirut. He recruited teams of agents with names like Donald's Ducks and the Twelve Apostles. He was brave and resourceful, but somehow too many of his operations went wrong, and he took the blame, justly or unjustly, for the worst single disaster the O.S.S. suffered in the entire war - Operation Banana, in which an O.S.S. team was infiltrated into Andalusia, then abandoned, and 18 men, it was assumed, died.

After the war Mr. Downes became a tragic figure, a big fat man with a red beard, trying with indifferent success to fulfill himself as a writer, and convinced -with some justification, Mr. Winks believes - that he was being secretly hounded by the F.B.I.

Norman Holmes Pearson, the apostle of American studies at Yale, had a more gentlemanly war working within the X-2, or counterintelligence, branch of the O.S.S. with the top-secret code-breakers in England. It must have been pleasant dining at Quaglino's, which his British colleagues couldn't afford, and the contacts with British writers and academics were rewarding. After the war, Pearson was able to help his colleague, Sir John Masterman, bust the British secrecy rules by publishing his classic account, ''The Double-Cross System.''

The longest and perhaps the least satisfactory section in the book struggles against infinite regress in the wilderness of mirrors inhabited by the legendary head of C.I.A. counterintelligence, the late James Jesus Angleton. Mr. Winks draws a careful and sympathetic portrait of that subtle and paranoid man. He does not resolve the all-important question of whether Mr. Angleton's conviction that the C.I.A. was penetrated by a deep-burrowing Soviet mole was a delusion or not. Indeed, he does not try to resolve it. Instead, he analyzes the alternative theses and leaves readers to make what they will of the evidence.

Solving puzzles is not what Mr. Winks is about. His purpose is to take his scholarly machete to the jungle of myth about the club-land heroes of the O.S.S. and the C.I.A. What is left after his clearing operations is a picture quite different both from the left's nightmare of Establishment manipulation and from the right's nightmare of liberal treason. Instead, Mr. Winks suggests, these spies were the champions of a ''sentimental imperialism,'' missionaries dedicated to improving the world. He implies that there have been worse causes, and no doubt that is true.

Yet after the C.I.A.'s Phoenix program in Vietnam and the Church committee investigations of the agency in the mid-1970's, after Iran and Irangate, the noble ambition of spreading the American ideal of democracy to the world has the nostalgic fragrance of pressed flowers. The best and the brightest of the clandestine imperialists from Yale begin to look like American Bengal Lancers - brave and romantic, yet as obsolete as cavalry in a world of populism and publicity, of nationalism and technology, of Nixon, networks and North.

PARANOIA FINDS ROMANCE

Robin W. Winks, the master of Yale University's Berkeley College and the Randolph W. Townsend Jr. Professor of History there, is not now, and never was, a spy. ''That is what I always tell the students who ask, but of course what they always say is well, you wouldn't admit it if you were,'' he said in a recent telephone interview from his home in New Haven. ''There is a certain paranoia coupled with a kind of romance that goes with this notion, of course,'' he added.

Mr. Winks, who is 56 years old, gained this curious reputation long before he started his latest book, ''Cloak & Gown,'' which investigates the intimate relationship between Yale and American intelligence agencies.

''I think possibly one of the reasons students get the notion that I must have worked with intelligence is that I've been to lots of remote places,'' he said. ''But I just happen to enjoy getting to remote places'' - among them Malaysia, New Zealand and Australia.

In addition to being a frequent traveler, Mr. Winks is a prolific writer (he is the author of seven books and the editor of nine others), a collector of old maps, an outdoorsman and a veteran of the Foreign Service. He is also an avid reader of detective and spy fiction. He has written two books on the genre, but he refuses to say if has written any thrillers himself.

These various pursuits, Mr. Winks said, ''all relate to one central interest - the study of how people perceive themselves and what it is that they take pride in.''

As a historian specializing in the British empire, he sees himself more as a detective than as a spy. ''In effect, what the historian is doing is seeking out evidence and interrogating that evidence and assessing that evidence, very much in the manner of the figure in detective fiction,'' he said. ''Cloak & Dagger'' emerged out of a desire to combine his interests in history and detective fiction: ''I wanted to write something factual, something that would help me to see to what extent the fiction had any basis in reality.''

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