Word: oss
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
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...
...writer whose real name is not John Ross Macdonald at all but Kenneth Millar. ("At least," allows John D., "the guy is literate, even if he does keep hitting the same barrel.") The real MacDonald is a graduate of Syracuse University, the Harvard School of Business Administration and the OSS in World...
...rejected because of his poor eyesight. Instead, he worked for the U.S. State Department for two years in the Office of Strategic Services, using his fluency in English. Czech, German, and French, his reading knowledge of Latin, and his general understanding of Spanish and Russian for OSS intelligence analysis...