In Washington: A Pride of Former Spooks

The black ties and bald heads could belong to old college classmates at a 40th reunion. The Supreme de Volatile Eugenie on the menu is standard hotel chicken with yellow gravy, and the platitudes served up by the speakers might be heard at any nostalgic or vaguely patriotic gathering. But the memories are not of the promise of youth or of bright college years. Mostly, they are of spying.

In the ballroom of the Hilton in Washington, D.C., former spooks are reliving the fears and joys of parachuting behind enemy lines, breaking codes, forging documents and blowing up bridges. The graying, mostly prosperous-looking men and women are veterans of the Office of Strategic Services, the World War II predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency. The occasion is their annual bash, the William J. Donovan Award Dinner.

General "Wild Bill" Donovan, who died 20 years ago, was the Wall Street lawyer whom President Franklin Roosevelt commissioned to set up an intelligence service in 1941, five months before Pearl Harbor. At the time, the U.S. had no formal espionage arm. Snooping had been in disrepute; a decade earlier, Secretary of State Henry Stimson had declared that "gentlemen do not read each other's mail." But Donovan persuaded F.D.R. that such etiquette need not apply in dealings with Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, and thus the U.S.'s first independent intelligence agency was born.

The attendance at this Donovan dinner, the twelfth since 1962, is unusually large. The crowd of more than 400 includes not only OSS veterans and friends and family members but eight Senators, FBI Director William Webster and two wartime spymasters who went on to head the CIA, Richard Helms and William Colby. The old espionage hands come partly out of nostalgia for a simpler age of spying, before cold wars and dirty tricks scandals and congressional oversight committees. There is also a perceptible closing of the ranks behind the nation's now-beset intelligence establishment.

Earlier in the day, a group of 100 or so OSS veterans listened grimly to a series of gloomy speeches. Wyoming Republican Senator Malcolm Wallop scoffed that CIA agents have become not spies but "bureaucrats." Frank Barnett of the National Strategy Information Center, a hawkish think tank, warned of a "Soviet window of opportunity" in the 1980s. Ray Cline, a former top CIA officer who now directs strategic and international studies at Georgetown University, offered a dismal report card on his old outfit: D— in covert activities, C— in counterintelligence, C— in information gathering. It is all very depressing to the OSS alumni.

Laments Carl Eifler, who ran OSS operations in Asia and later got a doctor of divinity degree: "Their team's got 50 well-protected big fellas. Then there is our team: four guys in tennis shoes and shorts."