Word: oss
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...President, dwarfed by a giant sepia photograph of OSS Founder William ("Wild Bill") Donovan behind the rostrum, paid generous tribute to these erstwhile practitioners of the dark arts of spying, espionage, sabotage and behind-the-lines derring-do. The OSS's achievements, said Reagan, were of the sort for which "praise and thanks can only come from history and not your contemporaries." But he tried to make up for the slight, saying, "We honor you, we salute you, we thank you for a job well done...
...doubt that, as Professor Hoffmann suggests, anyone was drafted to work for the OSS in World War II. In my letter, I clearly stated that scholars are under no obligation to assist the CIA. To say that American intelligence would be improved if scholars offered help if they as individuals so desire, is hardly comparable, as Professor Hoffmann implied, to advocating state sponsored propaganda. While I have no objections to being labeled a neo-conservative--though my political views, no less than Professor Hoffmann's, deny such easy categorization--references to unnamed "ideologues" who are willing to justify any means...
...Bradley, Actor-Producer John Houseman ("For me, it was a madly exciting time") and Poet John Ciardi ("When you're on a mission and you saw a Japanese plane go down, you cheered. This was a football game"). One might also include Irving Goff, Spanish Civil War veteran, OSS operative and the reputed model for Robert Jordan in Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls...
...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...
...there are tunes of glory here, like the OSS rescue of 1,350 imprisoned U.S. airmen from Rumania, or the daring of an OSS man who, armed only with loudspeakers, persuaded an entrenched German force at Cherbourg to surrender. If Donovan's failures appeared to outshine his triumphs, it may be because his major strategic accomplishment- distracting the Germans from Normandy by concentrating OSS sabotage and other disruptive efforts in southern Europe - was not immediately obvious...