Books: Serviceman

THE LAST HERO:

WILD BILL DONOVAN

by Anthony Cave Brown Times Books; 891 pages; $24.95

Four men—a scholar, two former intelligence agents and Author Cornelius Ryan (The Longest Day)—died trying to write this book. There is no evidence of foul play in any of their ends, but the quadruple coincidence is a fitting postscript to the life of William J. ("Wild Bill") Donovan. Founder of the Office of Strategic Services, the nation's first spy agency, Donovan was a figure of epic personal courage, vast energy and enduring mystery. "What a man!" President Dwight D. Eisenhower declared when Donovan died in 1959. "We have lost the last hero."

Anthony Cave Brown, a Briton whose 1975 book, Bodyguard of Lies, described the intelligence work that preceded the 1944 Normandy invasion, has done an appropriately heroic job of separating the leader from the legend. Brown had some advantages over his ill-fated predecessors, among them Donovan's private papers and his wife's 65-year diary. The result is a memo-studded, overweight history of the OSS, relieved by tales of counterespionage and by the story of Donovan himself.

He was indeed quite a man. From the Irish precincts of Buffalo, he rose to become a battlefield legend in World War I as commander of the "Fighting 69th" infantry. After the war he grew rich as a lawyer for moneyed interests, constantly dashing off on shadowy foreign missions of commerce or diplomacy. He was a Republican candidate for Governor of New York, acting Attorney General of the U.S. under Calvin Coolidge and an oft-mentioned presidential possibility. When Franklin D. Roosevelt asked him to form a civilian intelligence service at the outset of World War II, Donovan followed the dictum of Stewart Menzies, his counterpart in the British secret service: "Intelligence is the business of gentlemen." Columnist Drew Pearson accurately described Donovan's fledgling OSS as "one of the fanciest groups of dilettante diplomats, Wall Street bankers and amateur detectives ever seen in Washington."

In the beginning, their performances were tragically unprofessional. OSS networks in Istanbul and Rome were penetrated by German agents. An anti-Nazi official who was slipping papers to Allen Dulles, Donovan's man in Switzerland, was mistakenly suspected of being a German double agent. Although Winston Churchill was a Donovan drinking buddy, the British undermined efforts to put OSS agents in the Balkans, Scandinavia, Burma, India and other places where their own agents were already at work.

In Washington, Donovan's reputation for disregarding budgets, organization tables and other bureaucratic niceties won him no friends. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and General George Strong, head of military intelligence, labored to eliminate the oss as a threat to their own intelligence functions. After the war, President Harry Truman pointedly chose not to name Donovan head of the OSS's successor, the Central Intelligence Agency.