Global Gumshoeing

By an executive order last week the fabled Office of Strategic Services lost its identity, but not its life. Harry Truman transplanted two of its branches to the State Department, promised that by Jan. 1 "a coordinated system of foreign intelligence" would be a permanent arm of the government.

To OSS's wartime director, stocky, blue-eyed Major General William J. ("Wild Bill") Donovan, 62, this was half a victory and much better than none. In the atomic age, the U.S. for the first time would have a clearing house to tie to gether all agencies' intelligence work. It could have used one before Pearl Harbor, when global gumshoeing was a fine art among other powers. (Britain's S.I.S.-- --Secret Intelligence Service -- and its pre cursors had helped the Crown keep tab on good & bad neighbors for nearly 400 years.) Three decades of intensive globetrotting, politicking and lawyering had prepared General Donovan for the job he did in setting up the U.S. in world espionage. One generation removed from County Cork, he was the mild-mannered, studious type, got his antonymous nickname as a quarterback at Columbia. He was heroic, but no wild man, in World War I, where he picked up seven decorations, including the Congressional Medal. The Law & Politics. After the war he poked around China and Siberia, came home to work profitably at corporation law, less profitably at Republican politics. He helped mastermind the Hoover campaign, but the attorney-generalship plum fell to William D. Mitchell. Donovan ran for governor of New York, but the year was 1932, so the winner was Democrat Herbert Lehman.

Between such ventures Wild Bill sandwiched jaunts abroad. As an observer in Ethiopia he had a tent next door to Marshal Badoglio's. In Spain he watched the Axis rehearse its new techniques of war.

When Franklin Roosevelt made him "Coordinator of Information" in the summer of 1941, Donovan started building a task force whose real size, strength and most private deeds are still secret. OSS, born the next year, went underground, tiptoed through the war. It held no press conferences, issued no handouts, made no reply to gibes that OSS meant "O So Secret," "O So Social."

Cloak & Dagger. But last month, fretting lest OSS land in the postwar dustbin with other wartime agencies, Wild Bill threw aside its cloak and gave the U.S. a glimpse of the dagger. In daily press releases OSS (sounding a little like one unaccustomed to public speaking) told some of its exploits. OSS men had wormed their way into Gestapo schools. Others had infiltrated Siam to turn Bangkok into an Allied listening post. They had manned a mosquito fleet running munitions and information to the Greek resistance movement, worked 18 months as advance men in Africa for the invasion.

Wild Bill Donovan wanted the salvageable parts of this machine to get independent status, under the President. Last week he could settle for its peacetime placement beneath Jimmy Byrnes' wing. But his own reconversion to the law would seem prosaic.

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