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THE O.S.S. When I was asked to talk, I was given several topics about which it was thought I knew something about, then she to1d me what I should talk about was OSS. I didn't realize, in all honesty, when she told me what to do that this talk was medical history but I have looked over the whole situation and I realize that it is true indeed, that this is a form of medical history. It is a very specialized form of medicine that it concerns. It concerns something like super athletic medicine plus the psychiatry of the super normal. If you will accept the fact that there is a field that deals with extraordinarily fine specimens and extraordinarily fine emotionally stable human beings, then I would agree. Now the book we have here, one the few copies that I know of in existence, THE ASSESSMENT OF MEN, is a book that we wrote at the end of the war about this and I was looking through it and the majority of authors, seven of the authors, I was the major author, but there were many others who helped to write part of it. The majority of them were physicians, in that sense it is a history of medicine. The stories that I will tell are not all the stories I could tell. Some of the things that happened in the Office of Strategic Services still are confidential. This is the first time I have ever spoken to this large a group about this subject. I was interviewed about ten years ago in Ann Arbor on the subject and we got clearance from the CIA to talk about things I am going to talk about tonight. So, all these things have been declassified that I will be discussing. I wish I could tell you some of the other stories because if you think that some of the things I am talking about tonight are far out, I assure you the things I can't talk about were further out, or farther out as we look into conceptual space or real time space. The Office of Strategic Services was an absolutely amazing experience. I thought that I was in my twenties when I was in charge of the selection of all secret agents for the United States World War, I thought I'd never had a job as exciting as that one until the present one and I haven't. The present one is exciting but in an entirely different way I assure you. But, it was a most fascinating experience and I wouldn't have talked about if Joan asked me for I have never talked about it before. I have told some people some specific stories, like Hoyt Gardner will remember one of the specific stories I am telling about. How to organize something like this: I have decided to do it autobiographically, I don't know of any other way to do it. How I got into it, what happened, point by point. It will be a sort of continuity of personal experiences with a number of anecdotes, all of which I assure you are completely true. And I have to say that because I don't think you will believe me when I tell you about some of this. When I was an undergraduate at Harvard, I met Henry Murray. Henry Murray is a physician with a Ph.D. in Biochemistry. But, he is really a psychologist. He is the father and creator of the TAT tests, (Thematic Apperception tests). He is the richest psychologist who ever existed, who ever will exist. Murray Hill telephone exchange in New York City is named for him and he is a remarkable person because he is a complete intellect and an extremely charming man, attractive to men and much more attractive to women, very attractive to me as an undergraduate and a person who is as innovative a person as I have ever had the opportunity to work with. He wrote a book, EXPLORATIONS IN PERSONALITY, WHICH SOME PEOPLE MAY KNOW which described the development of the second Thematic Apperception Test when he was at Harvard and medical school. I had the opportunity to work with him, as I was an undergraduate, on the writing of that book. He is probably the greatest expert in Herman Melville, he wrote a seven-volume book on Herman Melville, that has ever lived. He has slept in every bed known that Herman Melville ever slept in and he is a remarkable person and it is important to realize that this sort of character was the central figure of the story. Because of his social contacts and his contacts in the business world, he became a friend of "Wild" Bill Donovan who was the founder and head of OSS. "Wild" Bill Donovan, as many of you know, was the Commanding General of the fighting 69th Irish Regiment in World War I., the only officer who had ever risen to rank of Colonel without going to West Point at that time. After World War I. he became Chief Counsel for the New York Stock Exchange, and then he ran against President Roosevelt in 1928 for the Governor of New York and was defeated by Roosevelt. There were only two people that FDR ever ran against whom he liked. One was "Wild" Bill Donovan and the other was Wendell Wilkie. He hated everybody else for obvious reasons; but he admired Donovan greatly because Donovan had a personality which is very hard to describe. He was the only man in World War I. who got the Distinguished Service Medal, the Distinguished Service Cross, and the Congressional Medal of Honor and still got out alive. He went behind enemy lines a half dozen times in World War I. and twice while he was the Head of OSS, the Chief of all secret intelligence, he went behind enemy lines during World War II. which was a most ridiculous thing to do as you can imagine. Had he been caught, there would have been a lot of operations which would have been destroyed. He was extremely fearless, obviously, he was Irish, he was daring, and sometimes he was stupid. He was so imaginative that he put into operation fantastic schemes, some of which paid off and some of which had the potential of destroying the country. There were always obviously good reasons for these different activities but he seemed to be unable to distinguish between a high risk and a low risk operation. But everywhere he did everything fascinatingly. I had a few opportunities to meet him. He was short and stout and fat and extremely attractive, and he and Henry Murray got along because they were both very attractive personalities. In 1940 Roosevelt saw the war coming, he was thinking about such things as giving destroyers to England, meeting with Churchill and he realized that the United States had never had, and did not, at that time, a secret intelligence force. Now it is true that we did have certain procedures and predecessors, there was Major Andre who was a singular individual in the Revolutionary war, as well as we all know. There were some prostitutes in Baltimore who carried information into Washington during the Civil War. In World War I. there was a "Black Circle", so called, a cipher code operation that attempted to decipher the German code. But we had nothing that corresponded to international secret intel1igence, which the British had as far back as 1880. The Egyptians, even the Syrian Empire had that, we did not have that in the United States, we were too pure. It was against the tradition of our country to play at war that way. Roosevelt recognized that we couldn't go into World War II., which he saw coming, without secret intelligence so he called in Donovan who, at that time, was again in his position as Chief Council for the New York Stock Exchange. He asked him to set up Secret Intelligence, gave him carte blanche, and trusted him completely and, of course, it was a political appointment; Donovan was a Republican. A secret appropriation was put into one of the military appropriations which the Congress, itself, did not know about. Much like the secret appropriation of two billion dollars which was taken for the atomic bomb. That's what supported the OSS. I wi11 say OSS never lacked for money. The money came from unvouchered accounts of the United States Government, they were not checked by any accountant, were not known by any of the Congress, and ___________ , at least, they were accepted just like everyone else; but, it always astounded me that indefinite sums of money were available and yet there was no congressional surveillance. Donovan called up Henry Murray one day and said, “We have had some personnel problems and you're a psychiatrist and I wonder if you can help us”. So he went down and talked. They had been personal friends, as I said, and in the various circles that they went in Long Island, Boston, and New York, and he gave Murray the following three examples: 1) We realize, having read a couple of paperback novels on secret intelligence, like REUNION IN VIENNA, that secrecy is one of the problems in a field like this but we didn't know how you could guarantee secrecy and be assured of security so I decided the best thing to do was include my friend. So I put it all on my friends, that were in law firms of New York and the Society of Long Island, and we got our secretaries by advertising surreptitiously in the Junior League Journal of New York. We didn't know how to clear people for security ___________________ literally, it was an idea that had not occurred to the United States Government in 1940. They thought of it since. So, we said, “We've got the following things: I invited one of my friends to be our representative in 1940-41 in Madrid, a neutral country, Spain and he took himself a blonde mistress. Now when you are trying to work against Hitler, you can perhaps have a mistress but you cannot have a blonde one, because she was working for Hitler and that created a problem. Then we had a situation where we dropped a man into a Buddhist Temple in Japanese occupied China and he lived there for a while and picked up this Chinese woman to keep house for him in this abandoned temple, he had radio contact with us but he got lonely after awhile for someone who spoke English so he radioed in for us to drop in a colleague and we dropped in a colleague and the Chinese woman liked the second man better than the first man, said the second man paid her one hundred Chinese dollars to shoot the first man and she shot and killed the first man and we lose personnel that way. He said, apparently my idea that we select people by selecting friends of friends, it may work in security but it doesn't work in preparing the emotional stability of your agents under emotionally stressful conditions. So he asked Henry Murray if he would set up an assessment unit, we didn’t call it that, at that time, but Murray invented the term; but the name of this book, ASSESSMENT OF MEN, is the word that Murray invented. It is now a standard word in psychology and psychiatry. To set up an assessment unit in order to evaluate people that would be involved in these positions. By this time, the organization had grown from a unit of some few hundred to several thousand and it eventually grew to many thousand. Now, Murray the year before had been asked by the British government to set up an Officer Selection Board, a selection board by Great Britain. His appointment as a Brigadier went before the House of Commons and had been turned down by the Commons because no non-British subject had ever been appointed to the rank of Brigadier. The House of Commons would not go along. So he advised the British in the development of some new physiological techniques which originated about 1938 for the selection of British subjects and he had been working on this with the Officers Corps as a consultant. So he decided that these were the methods that should be used and he discussed them with Donovan who approved and a Center was set up. The center was Area-S in Fairfax, Virginia, there is a picture of it here in the frontispiece of this book which I will pass around and you might also have a look right afterward at the authors of this book you will see that John Gardner, the former Secretary of HEW was one of them. In ____________________ position. Area-S was owned by Theodore Roosevelt's family and it was about a 186 acre estate about a block away from Fairfax County Court House. ________________________________ It was a private estate, a housing project and it was decided that the original screening or Assessment Unit would be set up there. The word "S" stands for school, everything in OSS had multiple levels of falsehood. Espionage is made up of multiple levels of deceit and so actually it was called a school because we didn't teach anybody there, what we did was select. Later, as you will see, and hear, we had a similar center less close in Ceylon and China, and in __________________, in many parts of the world, and in Versail1es outside of Paris and finally it was organized into a worldwide selection and screening program. At the end of the war, I succeeded Henry Murray in command of this total worldwide operation. They got together before I came in, at that time I was an intern at Mass. General and I had a year and a half of residency ahead of me. Henry Murray said, “Will you join an outfit with me in the Army which I cannot describe to you and will you sign this piece of paper without reading it.” And I said, “Of course, I would be delighted to,” and I did. I later found out that in signing this piece of paper that I had said that I would work in OSS and that I would go behind enemy lines, but I didn't know at the time that that's what I had signed to do and, as it turned out, I never had the opportunity. But I had to stay as a resident there in Psychiatry at Mass. General until my term was up because, as you know, the resident ________________. I went in and the day I got my $250 for my uniform which was July 1 ‘44, I got another $250 for OSS civilian work. And, as late as 1956 I was still wearing a suit of civilian clothes they bought for me at that time. I had no idea what I was doing and I got in under sort of the Grandfather Clause; that is, I knew Henry Murray was one of the people who had been involved in setting up the screening process, and that was all that was required. There were officers and civilians and enlisted men from all parts of the armed forces as well as many civilian activities in OSS. Many of them were very severely screened who were on the most constant type of surveillance that you can imagine. My wife, Jessie, never knew what I was doing although she knew __________________________. We never once mentioned it until the war was over, then it turns out that she had heard people discussing it one night driving by __________________________ Field in Cambridge and she had a pretty good idea what was going on. Now I think this was a typical situation. There was the impression of complete confidence and that was the only way you cou1d operate in the situation up there. But the fact of the matter was that when I was in Washington I was in uniform and when I was in Fairfax, I was in civilian clothes; and, somewhere en route between Washington and Fairfax I had to change my clothes. I remember one day when John Gardner went out with me, I went out starting to Fairfax in civilian clothes and upon leaving Fairfax we pulled into a forest where I usually changed my clothes. I was never very much worried about possibly being overseen changing from civilian clothes to uniform but being overseen changing clothes in the other direction did bother me a little bit because I wondered what people would think if they observed ___________________. John and I decided we would go away for the weekend together. He was big and handsome, he still had his hair, he was a first Lieutenant in the Marines. I was so short and squat and I outranked him as a Captain in the Army. When we walked down the street in Washington all the WAVE's saluted him, they paid not attention to me whatsoever. That's been the story of my life in relation to John ever since like that. But, I will explain to you in a moment why we were in civilian clothes. We went over to the military theaters later; and in a moment I will tell you, and while I was over in Europe I was in uniform. The tradition of the OSS was that if you wore the uniform of the body with which you were associated, if you were on some sort of military assignment so I had the interesting experience before the war when I was a medical student of having met Dr. Thacker who was the Dean of Harvard, School of Public Health as a civilian and then one day seeing him walking down the street in Washington as a Rear Admiral and then meeting him in Europe as a Major General. Now this is a fascinating experience to see the same man in civilian clothes, in military uniform, especially at the rank of Admiral, and then as a two star General but that's the sort of thing that went on in our outfit. It was quite characteristic. Now to turn to what we did. I didn't have any idea when I reported for duty on July 1, 1944, quite late in the war, what I was getting into. I went to a small school in Washington which had part of which had been turned into a sort of a cover operation for OSS. I had no idea why I was supposed to report to the small school at the corner of Third Street but I did, and it is no longer, by the way, in existence. I was told to go out and get my uniform and civilian clothes, that I would have no time to go through basic training, officer's training, I would have absolutely no training whatsoever. Indeed the first time after that I went out with my uniform on, I left my hat behind, not good military form, found myself saluting a straight ranking officer, that of Captain, but I never did, as it turned out, go through basic training. I am one of the few veterans that you have ever seen with no military training of any sort, they never had time to do it. Jack__________, a young psychiatrist, my age who went in at the same time had the same experience. This is just typical of the operation. If you can talk about anything, say a paratroop school of the First Marine Corps being G.I., we were 180 degrees off phase, we were as un-G.I. as it is possible for any military operation to be in. Of course, we weren't even military. We were just a melange. We reported directly to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, we had no channels except to the Joint Chiefs. The result of which was, I, as first Lieutenant, often go to a Colonel and take away his best people and simply walk off with very general orders and I traveled throughout Europe to all the armies with a driver, and a Jeep and orders signed by Eisenhower which permitted me to go anywhere I wanted to and no questions asked. And it was this type of thing that kept happening and it puzzled the M.P.’s, especially when I had to pick up a lady's ______ and you weren't supposed to ride with ladies in a Jeep so I had 144 fresh eggs that she was bringing back to ___________ near the Swiss border and I had to go through eight separate check points of M.P.’s and argue my way through to get into Paris with these eggs and this lady. These types of things kept happening all the time. We had more serious problems which was that it was illegal for us to mention the name of our organization which was secret and almost everything we did was top secret and the result was that if we met someone from our own outfit neither of us could say to the other that he worked for the outfit. You had the problem of somehow carrying on a quadrille, a sort of dance, like the mating dance of two lobsters you know, neither one daring to say what the topic was about, yet, finally, we were able to work out some general agreement that we were both in the same outfit. There were some fantastic situations, communication situations that arose under those particular types of regulations. So, I took a truck and went out to Fairfax and I found Henry Murray which reassured me, a bit. He was, at that time, a Lieutenant Colonel. He was so well to do, that he refused to sign the pay vouchers, one of my main problems with him was a year's work of pay vouchers and I said, “Henry, if you don't sign these things you are never going to get your pay.” __________ He was also unwilling to sign in and out so he was constantly technically on an A.W.O.L. situation and I had other problems with him but he was still a fascinating fellow. He explained our task was to screen all candidates. They had developed what they called the “Health Party Approach to Psychiatric Screening” and it turned out in the end that he was not exactly accurate. There were a few very high level candidates. For candidates who were needed in a situation in great urgency and there were also a wave of secretaries and cooks and so on, that were not screened by us but aside from that, I would say that probably 90 to 95% of all the thousands of people that worked in OSS went through one of our wight worldwide stations. Mainly through Area-S which was another location in that progression, during the time of World War II. I will say in conclusion right now that after the War an interim organization was set up which was known as CIAG, that's Central Intelligence Agency Group and I served there for a few weeks before my military term ended. CIAG then phased into CIA. One of my assistants became Director of that and I talked to him last year and he told me that as of last year, he left CIA, the operation was still going on. I know nothing whatsoever, and never have known anything about the CIA but apparently this type of screening is still going on today. Now what would happen on a typical day in the Area-S was that about four o'clock, a typical weekly occurrence, let's say on Sunday afternoon a truck wou1d come up with about 40 people, almost always men, perhaps one or two women, they would be wearing G.I. fatigues. They will have had about two or three days of preparation in advance in which they would be told that they had to think up a so called “cover story” to hide their identity. They were given a false name. They were all called “students” because this was a school, although it was not a school. But that, as I say, is typical. And, so you have a student “Rex” of class S-33 which would mean that this was the thirty-third class of this Area-S and Rex was his fake name and that's all you would know about him when he came. But he would have been spending the two days before devising, at length, after training a “cover” story which he would tell us and the other people, his fellow students, as to who he really was. The purpose of the story was to hide his real identity. He was also told that he could tell the members of the staff who identified themselves as members of the staff, when he was alone with them in the room with the door closed, his real identity all except certain basic facts as long as the member of the staff said “We are now talking under condition ‘X’”. And, unless he had that particular situation, he could not tell us the truth about himself, even under those circumstances he could not tell us his real name. Now the reason for not telling his real name was that there was too much danger to the country to have us who were on the staff know that many peop1e by their complete real identity, because we knew that OSS was infiltrated by the Germans and the Japanese and we thought it might, as well, be infiltrated by the Russians. The possibility of our being kidnapped and absconded with and then subjected to brainwashing and very much torture and getting the names of large numbers and the real identity of our agents was too dangerous for OSS to accept that. There were very few people in OSS who actually knew the identity of thousands of agents. But there was no way to get around it because we were the input terminal, as it were, and they had to come through us. Our personal lives were constantly monitored. Indeed, Jessie and I, at one time, went to New York. We spent the weekend together with Arthur Miller the playwright, and his wife; Arthur Miller's wife was Jessie's best friend in high school. And, indeed, I wrote a sonnet in a creative English Club that Mary Grace____________, a daily exercise naturally. And that was my great mistake, I wrote to Mrs. Arthur Miller (No.1) if I had just waited a little while, I could have met No.2. She was an attractive gal, probably the best of Arthur Miller's wives and about Tuesday of the next week I was called in and they said, “You and your wife were seen with Arthur Miller over the weekend in New York, and they said we are telling you not to be seen with him again until the end of the war,”; he was _______________________ and we do not want anyone ___ _______ from OSS who has written “CRUCIBLE”. This sort of thing happened and we had to assume that we were constantly being followed. This group that had come in about four o’clock with the “cover” story and with their identity hidden by the uniform, no indication of rank or status, their Phi Beta Kappa key torn off or the indication of a Brooks Bros. suit, or whatever it might be and they did not have the right to tell us who they were, tell their fellows in the group. We would all have dinner together, there would be some routine pencil and paper testing that night, psychological testing and things of that sort. The next day was mainly a physical battery of tests. We had what we called preceptile test which lasted for 4 hours. This was a British word, a combination of the words "problem" and an "obstacle" and, for example, the first obstacle was a 30 foot wall which they had to scale, when you got to the top of the 30 foot wall, we would walk out on a 2 x 4 which was 30 feet up in the air and blowing back and forth in the breeze. At the end of that there would be a little sign on a piece of wood that said “Prove that all numbers in the term ABC, ABC are divisible by 13 ______________ and then proceed. So here we are wobbling up 30 feet in the air on a 2 x 4, and so you would have to deal with that problem and down below someone with a stopwatch watching to see what you were going to do about it. And he starts talking, says, “Have you read the problem?” “Yes.” “Well, what's the answer?” Well, if they didn't say anything in two minutes he would say, “Well, now I will give you a hint.” And he gave us the number 1001. Of course it would take any number of A, B, C numbers; it might be 653 or 289 or 147 or any other and you multiply that by 1001 you have 147, 147; in other words, the 1,000 means that you have 4 decimal places. So all numbers in form ABC, ABC are obviously products of 1,00l and 10Ol is a product of 13 and that's a truth, an obvious truth, a simple truth but only a certain number of people got it. Then when you get it you could shimmy down this pole and then you had to crawl through a tunnel underground at the end of which was a large snake. And you again had another intellectual activity. Then you would go into an absolutely black barn which ________________and you had to climb by the end of a rope and drop into an abyss, you had no idea how far it goes. They said to drop, you had to drop. At the end it was only about 6 feet, six feet but you didn't know that and then you had to solve another thing, you had to go by a place where someone had vomited and you work out another problem. Then you were given a bayonet to charge a pig's bladder. When you had charged the pig's bladder you got blood all over you and then you had to go solve another one. Then you had to go through infiltration course where they were shooting right over the top of you and you had to crawl on your belly, and there were 12 of these situations and at one end, the total running time, whether or not you were going to make Rhodes Scholarship or not. Now this was typical of Henry Murray's type of testing which he had used and what they called a “situation test”. He invented this term. It was now used in psychology and psychiatry. When you put a person into a situation, more or less real, you go far beyond the pencil and paper projective type list like the Rorshack, the Levy, the man who brought the Rorshack to the United States was a member of this group. And, we used these other tests too. But situation tests were a new thing. You will see in that book, a picture in which in some ways is the most fantastic of them. We would have discussion tests, we would have tests where you have to lead a group of 8 through a mine field, we could have tests where you would have to observe in a brief period of time the community that you were dropped into and get out without being caught; but this particular one was called the “Construction Test” and in each the candidate was brought in independently, in a place behind the barn, and there was a great big clock with the second hand going around between 55 and 60 seconds, each time it came around there would be a very loud buzzer indicating clearly the passage of time. He was told he had 12 minutes, 10 minutes I guess it was, in order complete the construction test and that he had two assistants, they were named Kippie and Buster. Kippie was round and fat and sloven and lazy; Buster was thin, and aggressive and hostile and nasty and bright. And, these were the two assistants. He was given a cube made out of matchsticks with diagonals on 4 sides and told this was a model you're going to make. And out in front of him he had huge tinker toys, about 7 to 9 feet 1ong, 9 feet for the diagonals and corners and he was supposed to take these huge things with these two assistants and make a cube like this and do it in ten minutes. And we said we will be waiting to learn a lot of things and these three psychologists would stand and sort of put a board down and say “Go”, you know about this time immediately Buster had to go the john and when he came back Kippie had been directed to do something like where he said get the corners, everything was random, he could have worked on corners from now until doomsday because he wasn't very bright you know and use up all the time. Then, of course, Kippie would have to go to the john and then in the meantime, every time the candidate would come up with an idea on how to organize it, the bright one would give him ten reasons why it wouldn't work. Then he would have to go out for a drink at this time and this form of combination hostile attack versus heel-dragging reminds me of certain other administrative positions I have known, you had to cope with it. You somehow had to solve it. Well, we gave this particular test to nearly 3,000 candidates and nobody came close to completing the test. But we were able to rate these people independently and then pool the ratings on a number of psychological traits, including leadership, personal relations, emotional stability, and so on. We had a case where, of course, if a Brigadier General who was supposed to be undercover, a Brigadier General of the Marines, got so frustrated with this test said, “I don't know whether you people are in the Army, the Navy or the Marine Corps,” but he said, “If you by any chance happen to be military, I’m a Brigadier General in the Marines and you are Court Martialed.” He just couldn't stand it. Well, of course, we sent him home on the next boat because we felt it was true he couldn't forget he was a General in the Marines and that was the end of it. The Brigadier General wasn't so hot. It was a most frustrating experience. Well, the plight was you know, this was a tough problem to pick these secret agents and we really put them through some tough situations. Then we gave them about four hours of group psychoanalytic diagnostic experiences, rather traditional psychoanalytic experiences. Then we put them under individual Gestapo rule. This is a very interesting and revealing situation because what we did was we gave them ten minutes notice in advance and took them into a separate room. “You have been found in the pentagon without an ID card going through a filing case marked 'Top Secret'. Ten minutes to think through your defense, you will be brought before a court in ten minutes.” In ten minutes they were brought in and they were put down in sort of a rocking chair so we could observe their free motions with a bright light in their eyes and in the background is a group of scientists and staff headed by a Brooklyn lawyer who had spent al1 his life in the prosecution and we could scarcely be seen because the bright light in the eyes of the candidate, and the candidate was given 10 minutes to explain himself regardless of how he defended himself. There was a secret whispered conference at the end after which the lawyer said, “You have been found guilty, go to the third floor. You have failed and must suffer the penalties thereof,” and most assumed they were now out of the outfit. Some knew the outfit they were in and others didn't know. Some of these people had replied to an advertisement in the Mezuma, Montana newspaper for salesmen for the Frigidaire Company and they thought they were working for the Frigidaire Company. Some had all sorts of ideas of what they were doing. But whatever they did, they got the impression they hadn't done very well at this point and they go up there and they get the most plausible, easy-going, comfortably tennis shoe clad, jeans type of relaxed half Hippy psychiatrists you ever ran into; with his feet on the table, offer him a cigarette, sits down, says, “How are things going”, and closes the door and someone comes in and offers him a drink, says how would you like to have a cigarette and he says, “Things aren't going so well”. “What do you mean?” He says, “I was down in the basement.” “Where were you?” “I was down in that place you know about it, that place where they ask you questions” “Oh, there.” “Well, how are you doing?” “Well, they told me I failed and I just came up to talk to you.” “Oh, well, I'm sure it won't be that bad, I mean, te11 me about it.” And pretty soon he was not under X conditions, he was asking about his real life, where he was raised, his real name, and if they told their real name they were really out. The place that they got beaten was not mainly in the Gestapo, rather in the time after, under the relaxed, supportive conditions where they really broke their cover. It was interesting and the psychiatrists with us will find this particularly interesting and all the rest of you think in psychiatric terms and you will have to if you profit, I would not have predicted this. The people who really broke emotionally in the Gestapo building were relatively few, some had very good defenses, didn't know how to cope with this type of situation. But the ones who really broke were the ones most highly motivated, in particular the Jews. We had a certain number of Jews whose parents had been killed by Hitler and came in OSS one way or another and if you volunteered, of course you never get it. But they were highly motivated, had certain skills that we needed and we brought them in and they were so eager to fight Hitler that the Gestapo building brought back reality that they couldn't stand to see, and these people broke down. We found also that some former prisoners also broke down. The OSS had to free prisoners as we did by Presidential action, who were safe-crackers because we had to train our agents to crack safes in friendly embassies and things like that you see. And, we had to have people who were expert in this and a lot of them were in Leavenworth. These people who had been in two buildings before and had highly personal motivation like the Jews with families who had been burned up in one of the concentration camps are the ones who tended to break. Other people didn't, they did stupid jobs, but the ones that really broke, broke upstairs under the relaxed situation. Well, I could go on forever, but I can't go on forever. So I have to sort of sum up and I will tell you a few more things. I was assigned a task to write a chapter near the end of that book on evaluation. I was given a million dollars, it's the kind of money I like to operate in, you know, in Louisville too. And said to go out and find out are we doing a good job or not. And so we set up a statistical post-evaluation using four criteria: Peer reports from people who had worked as colleagues with our secret agents, whether they be spies or assassins, frogmen, black radio operators, our operators, or traffic men but whatever their role that made up propaganda, whatever they were, those fantastic jobs that were done, we tried to get a job description and many of these jobs we didn't even know what they were, and then we tried to get psychological and physical profiles for each of these. The question was how well do they fit the profile of the job for which they were chosen. We would ask their colleagues, as we have told you, which was the peer review, asked their commanding officers. We would go and observe them in the field and that was one of my jobs later on. And that was when I was traveling throughout the European Theater. Then we would bring them back to Area-S which some of you know now was like a professional country club, and a completely separate group of doctors, psychiatrists, and psychologists would re-evaluate independently, without any knowledge of the previous testor in order to see to what extent we had consensus between the two groups on these quantitative ratings. Ultimately we would write an overall authoritative case history of each of these by the staff and then we would have a profile of 75 ratings on about 10 personality variables because of so many scientific tests they had been given. We repeated that again. So it was a very expensive and expansive evaluation of 15,000 people that we carried out. I had the opportunity of going by Jeep when the French First Army was at Strasbourg the whole way through Patton's Third Army, I never got close to Patton, he was always 50 miles ahead of where ever I was and then the American First and Second Army and the British Army, in order to find our OSS detachments who were involved in tactical intelligence. We had two kinds of intelligence; that is, tactical and people who went through the lines and came back. Incidentally, we found that the ideal person for that was a sort of ugly, middle-aged woman with a pitchfork. And you could see her, she would walk right through the lines, get the information and come back and nobody would notice her. The type person you never want for a secret agent is a person who has an ego. An ego where he thinks he is Don Juan No.2 and the second of the Three Musketeers, or who is out defending his Jewish grandfather or his Irish mother, or his children who have been massacred, anybody who has this type of personal involvement. One of the reasons Howard Hunt, in my unqualified estimation, I hope you understand I am not qualified to judge on what happened. But the Howard Hunt of Watergate whose main problem is that he has got this ego. Anybody who would wear a red wig in that particular situation, who has written that many fine novels himself, is not a good agent. And so we say in our book. You cannot have someone who is egoistic, it must be someone who blends naturally in the background so you never see them. And those people were fantastic. These women, there were so many that I knew, who would, you know, speaking the language who would just go through who1e battles and come back and forth three times a week. And no one would know they were there, it was most incredible, they would sort of hide behind a dead horse and when no one was looking they would walk on and that is the way the thing was done. So we learned some rules which I presume CIA or somebody is now profiting from. Incidenta11y, I had the opportunity to go to Desgesdetaire when I was in France, the Department Generale Richexperimentale____________ which is the OSS in France and the British would never let us in their files, they were so unhappy. But the French were so different. We had liberated Paris and so on and I wanted to go to their assistance and it was nothing but the sex life of these people. It was like an advanced French Masters and Johnson. How do you like, would you prefer, normal statures of men or short statures of women, going on endlessly. This sort of thing you know. We didn't agree with them but it was terribly, terribly French. And a long investigation on the wines and so on that somehow had to do with the way you select French secret agents. We didn’t do it that way. Another time when I was in France, I am now really getting to medical history: I was assigned to running a clinic, about six weeks, for the females associated with our male agents and this included their sisters, mothers, their girl friends, mistresses. We had not questioned that they were an associated female. The reason being that we didn't trust any of our agents you know, not to be a double agent working for the other side too, or to come back so we thought the best way to insure that they would come back would be that we would take care of their women. I was assigned to take care of their women. One woman came in one day weeping, she was a French woman, because her child was about to die because of _____________ meningitis. I went over and I saw the saddest thing that I have ever seen. About 90 kids in cribs in this rural hospital had severe advanced ___________ meningitis, a form of encephalitis. And, of course, they had 100 percent fatalities. Well, we were using a rough form of penicillin which was available in large quantities in the French Army. They really hadn't gotten access to sulfa drugs at that time, so I went back and talked to the Major and he didn't think it could be done so I didn't talk to him any more. I simply took a very large carton of penicillin and took it over and gave it to them, showed them how to use it and went back and every crib was empty. It was a very dramatic experience to see these Sisters coming in, you know, crying on your shoulders because you saved the lives of those people. That was a really emotional experience, as you can tell from me of an impact on you, knowing popular pharmacology would have something to do with medicine which I had been told before but somehow I hadn't sighted. Fortunately nobody caught on to the fact that I had stolen the carton but this is a dramatic experience that came out of my clinical time there. Well, I could go on and on with stories of what happened there, but one day the War was over and I had the opportunity to liberate two Dutchmen. Before the war, our Society of Fellows at Harvard ________ about l0,000 bottles of____________,1933. And, every Monday night during the academic year this size group got together at dinner and we always had four wines and the red wines were always the __________. And I felt very strongly about this and it was a lovely wine. Well, one day when I was over in Paris I was called in by a Colonel, the Commanding Colonel, who is, I have forgotten his name right now, who later was our Ambassador to France, to Germany, to England, and recently to Spain, who was the only man who was ever the Ambassador _________________, David Bruce. He said, “Captain, we have two Dutchmen and we don't know what to do with them. What would you suggest?” I said, “What is the problem, Colonel?” And he said, “Well, we think they are double agents, we think they are working for the Germans and us. We have asked the Dutch what to do and they say we don’t care, kill them, we don't care.” So the Colonel said, “We don’t quite like to do that so the Dutch country made another suggestion which was put them in a small boat half way between Hawaii and Morgan, Australia and let them row home. We don't want to do this because the war is going to be over in a few weeks, why don't you do something about it.” So I said, “Well, I am in charge of training here, I suppose we could train them.” “They are your men, Captain, take them and you train them until the end of the war. We can't tell them what this is for.” So I called Captain Hecking who was working for me as a Belgian Captain assigned to us and I said, “Captain, could you go down somewhere in the middle of France and find a nice little place where we could set up a training center, we are going to train these two Dutchmen?” So he called me shortly on the French Department of _____________, a long distance call, and because it was absolutely impossible to hear over the French telephones, as you know, in those days, so I asked him to come on the American lines through the scrambler. Even though we had a scrambler as the American lines moved forward it laid down a long distance telephone line which I think France is still using which is still superior to what the French did have so we got the message worked out. He had commandeered the Chateau ________________. We sent him down and I have never seen the place _____________ but I was the Commanding Officer of the Chateau and if any of you have had that wine you know it is a fine wine. We just trained them to be in the war and released them. O.K. that’s the end of that story. I want to finish with a story which I have told Hoyt Gardiner and some of the rest of you because it tells you how we won the war. And if you wonder about the genius of America, I think it will set your heart at ease. I think you will still find something no country could come up with, an episode like this, and not be able to protect ourselves in the future, so I have a great deal of confidence in spite of Watergate.
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