Word: precursors
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...operations of hostile espionage agents, particularly those of the Soviet KGB, at home and abroad. The task offered few rewards and demanded an angler's perseverance and patience, unflagging watchfulness and a passion for anonymity. General William Donovan, the director of the Office of Strategic Services (a precursor to the CIA), called him the OSS's "most professional counterintelligence officer." In the years that followed, all the directors of the CIA leaned on him. Allen Dulles seldom made a move on the clandestine side without first consulting him. Walter Bedell Smith made him his youthful éminence grise...
BERGMAN SAYS he had to experience the things in this film before he could write it, and since his own life is a sort of precursor to the unconventional convention people in the U.S. called the sexual revolution, it is hardly surprising that his portrait of marriage in our society, stripped down, gives a picture of separation and rebirth no more credible than a modern mate-swapper's claim of rebirth in the space of an evening. The changes the characters ascribe to themselves are not born out by the facts--they still talk about each other in the same...
...dispatches from wartime China that the Senate Judiciary Committee decided to publish three years ago. That committee, which is not in the habit of collecting scholarly information on the Far East, obtained this material in 1945 in a rather spectacular fashion. After an agent of the OSS (wartime precursor of the CIA) noticed passages from a classified report printed verbatim in the left-wing journal Amerasia, he alerted his superiors, touching off a surreptitious investigation. The investigation culminated in a nighttime raid of the magazine's offices, where government agents seized piles of documents. Some of these dispatches (plus many...
...British. After the war, he studied economics at the University of Hamurg, where he was a star pupil of Karl Schiller, who later served as Brandt's first Finance Minister. Schmidt entered politics while still a student and became leader of the German Socialist Student Union, precursor of today's vociferous, left-wing Young Socialists (Jusos). He won a seat in the Bundestag on the Social Democratic ticket in 1953, and 14 years later became the party's parliamentary floor leader. In 1968 he stepped up to the party's vice chairmanship under Brandt...
...less-known artists were involved in the poetic and artistic movement known as symbolism, which flourished in France and flickered briefly in Belgium at the end of the 19th century. It had enough in common with surrealism, which it predated by 30 years, to be regarded as its precursor. For though the surrealists took Freud for their patron saint, whereas the symbolists resorted to the cabala and the mystical gobbledygook of the Rosicrucians, both wanted to make painting abandon what Magritte called "that dreary part people would have the real world play." Both were fascinated by dream and ambiguity...