OSS/CIA not dominated by bluebloods

[Melvin Loh]

I recall CHARLIE WILSON'S WAR (both the book & the movie), where Gust Avrakotos held much resentment towards his superiors & many of his colleagues who were from the WASP elite Ivy League background, & who looked down upon himself for his immigrant working-class origins- as exemplified in his heated confrontation with his boss in the movie over his being turned down for the case officer position in Finland- "People have been wanting to kill me for 26 yrs, people who know how. Now do you think that's because I'm the son of a Greek soda-pop merchant, or because I'm an American spy ? Go f---- yourself, you f----ing child !" (window smashed)

Also, a joke about the OSS during WWII was that the letters stood for 'Oh So Social' given the prominence of Ivy Leaguers within its ranks

So, WI the OSS & CIA from the outset did indeed from the outset have a more focused recruitment of ppl from a much wider range of backgrounds- such as Gust's background- as opposed to being dominated by the blueblood elite ?

 

[Riain]

Then it would have more dickheads who were too stupid too get into Ivy League colleges?

 

[Tyr]

Not everyone who goes to a good school is a blood blood I'm sure.
And not everyone who doesn't is stupid. Especially in America where its expensive to go to good schools.

You'd need to change America so that it isn't dominated by blue bloods I'd think.
Stop the Ivy League charging so much and bring it more under government control, set in place quotas of kids from state schools they have to take in, etc...

 

[gemini83]

You misunderstand. I suspect the Ivy League was substantially less meritocratic when the OSS was formed, or even 40 years ago (and certainly 50 years ago). The question is how to get a spy agency to have a culture more like the FBI, which I understand has a different cultural orientation. More broadly the problem is the nature of spy agencies--you have to change how the SIS developed to change how the OSS developed. I suspect there's some contingency, but the general aristocratic pattern (in Britain and the U.S., at least without giant PoDs that would also eliminate the OSS/CIA as such) would seem difficult to change.

 

[strangeland]

You misunderstand. I suspect the Ivy League was substantially less meritocratic when the OSS was formed, or even 40 years ago (and certainly 50 years ago).

very true and something that's often forgotten: for a very long time, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale were basically social clubs for rich and well-connected old money families, and students were pipelined there from elite prep schools like Choate, Andover, and Phillips Exeter. In fact even today you'll find those schools are vastly overrepresented among students who matriculate into Ivy League schools.

But as to a POD for this, you might want to have a different founding group for the U.S. intelligence agencies, though I'm not sure who that would be.

 

[Riain]

Is there merit in blueblood? Surely a family which can get to the top and stay there for a long time does so for a reason?

 

[mowque]

Is there merit in blueblood? Surely a family which can get to the top and stay there for a long time does so for a reason?

Not really. Because the one who did all the climbing is usually dead. Then the advantages merely rests on money and education and enhanced opportunities.

 

[jkay]

Bush II hardly did as good a job as his daddy....

Taking from the best schools' probably good for the cipher staff, but aristocrats aren't so good at putting themselves in others' boots, just as needed for most other spy work.

 

[DValdron]

Is there merit in blueblood? Surely a family which can get to the top and stay there for a long time does so for a reason?

Not really. Basically its money and old boys connections. If anything, I'd say that bluebloods are less competent than those who actually had to work their way up.

 

[DValdron]

I dunno, kind of an interesting thought. An OSS/CIA composed of people who were competent, pragmatic, multi-ethnic. You might have seen a much more competent organisation. Certainly the CIA's history has been plagued by massive ideologically based intelligence and operations failures, and even its successes have been dubious in the long term.

 

[Cash]

The OSS founder, General William "Wild Bill" Donovan, was an Irish Catholic who graduated from Columbia University with FDR and went on to work as a high-powered attorney on Wall Street. (He also won the Medal of Honor during WWI.) He recruited a good many agents from Ivy League colleges.

But if you want to "democratize" the OSS/CIA, you should look to Cornelius V. Starr, the founder of AIG, which he started as American Asiatic Insurance in Shanghai in 1919. Starr played a key role in OSS Pacific operations during World War II (Starr's company and the OSS shared a building in San Francisco), and the three core men who created the CIA in the late 1940s all had AIG connections. AIG now operates out of the same New York offices that the OSS had during World War II (the OSS in turn had inherited them from the American branch of MI6). Since the 1940s a current or former head of the CIA has always sat on AIG's board of directors, and the company's modern operations in China are well known to serve as cover for a number of CIA operatives.

So have Starr imbue his employees with a Hoover-like distrust of bluebloods and recruit from ethnic minorities such as Irish Catholics, and that might go a long way toward shifting the internal culture of the CIA.

 

[MNP]

Not really. Basically its money and old boys connections. If anything, I'd say that bluebloods are less competent than those who actually had to work their way up.

It's hard to even go that far. It might be functionally true because their lack of experience, but there's no inherent virtue in being poor or working class either.

Well, what are the requirements for top level intelligence agency officers as opposed to lower ranks or FBI officers? I would assume political connections that the aristocracy has are going to have value in budgetary areas at the least.

 

[Keith Robertsson]

As I understand the situation, the blue bloods got the in because the politicos organizing the agencies knew them. Remember, the problem was how to vet a large number of worker bees and their supervisors. When you know someone you've known since the fifth grade\form, the job is that much easier. It also let's in problems like the Philby ring.

 

[Ernest K Gannn]

The elite makeup of the "Oh-So-Social" and early CIA allowed a small but sophisticated group of players far more leverage in directing policy than their (miniscule) numbers would support -- an influence more consistent with what with their (considerable) intelligence, education, and worldliness justified. In an increasingly democratic society such as the Post-WW-II U.S. this was no small achievement.

At the end of WW-II the U.S. faced an entirely new situation in human history: the need to contest a horriffic enemy to the bitter end -- but in a way that did not bring down the nuclear apocalypse on all Mankind. Some elements in the U.S., still misty-eyed with the utopian paradise of Uncle Joe Stalin's butchers, refused to be mean and nasty to such a wellmeaning group of Social Improvers. Other U.S. elements, such as militarists like Gen. Curtis LeMay, pushed hard for a preemptive nuclear attack on the USSR while the U.S. still retained the nuclear capability to make such a horror thinkable.

The Yale and Princeton toffs, to Mankind's great good fortune, had a less primative outlook than the two previous groups. They could see the Soviets must be resisted, AND they could also see it had to be done by methods short of overt war. The conniving, backalley skulldugery -- and the sacrifice of proxy armies of third world peasants -- met both requirements. It was cruel, sordid, cynical -- and successful in its aims. At whatever cost, today we're neither Dead nor Red.

Without the priviledged, snotty, insufferable bluebloods who ran CIA during the critical early Cold War years, America (and the world) would have come to grief on the shallow-minded shoals of the other two (far larger and more powerful) contenders for U.S. policy direction.

 

[Ibn Warraq]

I'm not sure the CIA would have been more successful if it had recruited fewer blue-bloods and more "ethnic minorities", which in those days meant Irish Catholics like the FBI.

It's not like the FBI didn't have at least as checkered a history as the CIA.

 

[YLi]

The purpose of any intelligence agency is to keep its founder in power. America is run by bluebloods. It will recruit fellow bluebloods to keep the government in power. This is the way of the world.

 

[gemini83]

Was the CIA actually critical? The KGB always beat it tactically in my understanding. I suppose a key question is how Cold War policy was actually made and more broadly how the Cold War "actually happened."

 

[Magniac]

I think Norman Mailer's last good work was Harlot's Ghost, a novel that goes into great detail about the elite Wasp culture in the Agency. That book with meritocratic characters would read a lot like le Carre's A Perfect Spy, FWIW.

Okay, so I don't know what that means for the CIA in real life, I just thought I'd point out that it would make for different narratives in pop culture.

Then it would have more dickheads who were too stupid too get into Ivy League colleges?

Actually, fewer gentlemanly William F Buckley & Arthur Scheslinger types in US intelligence mean more guys like wartime OSS Captain Sterling Hayden being recruited by Langley.
Anyway, Google 'Ivy League Legacies'.

Not everyone who went to those colleges before about 1970 were the best and the brightest.

 

[Ernest K Gannn]

Gemini83: "Was the CIA actually critical? The KGB always beat it tactically in my understanding."

We'll probably never know for sure. Certainly from around 1970 on there were horriffic failures in U.S. intelligence, including CIA's Aldrich Ames. Some of the worst, though, such as the Walkers, Pollard, and Hanssen, were Navy, DoD, and FBI respectivelly, not CIA. In other cases, such as the Viet Nam debacle, although the war itself was a disaster CIA's reporting and analysis throughout were rather accurate: to a considerable extent CIA was tarred simply for having been present. Especially upon defeat, shite rolls downhill.

I think there's no question that as the Cold War progressed CIA grew more and more sloppy and incompetant -- increasingly depending on using unlimited gobs of money to "buy" its way past any problems instead of displaying the skill and dedication it had shown earlier.

But I suspect it was the Cold War's early years, perhaps 1945-60, that were the critical ones -- in which it might have gone either way. After that, the war became more like a "war of attrition" -- from which point the enormous economic and technological advantages of the U.S. heavily affected the eventual outcome.

In the early days, operating at first nearly ad hoc with near-amateurs, CIA bribes reversed the all-but-certain outcomes of several elections in Italy and France, maintained a painful enough infiltration and propaganda agression from West Berlin to prompt construction of the Berlin Wall (one of the Eastern Bloc's worst propaganda humilliations in the entire war) and operated the U-2 program: a staggeringly advanced (for its era) operation that provided Kennedy enough data about the Soviets' limited ICBM capabilities for the U.S. to back down the Soviets in the Cuban Missile Crisis, among many other advantages the operation gave the U.S.

Despite its later failures and sloppiness, I suspect CIA's early successes set the course of the Cold War. The Soviets were put on notice that: A. the U.S. was willing to play dirty, and, B. it was fully capable, on occasion, of getting the thumb into the eye and the knee into the groin. After Trotsky, the Soviets' "world revolution" program was more opportunistically oriented toward gathering easy pickings than fanatically dedicated to Death or Victory for the World Revolution. By indicating early on that we were serious and could be bast*rds, CIA warned off the Soviets from over-reaching into adventures that could well have led the world to disaster.

It was an ugly win, but a win nevertheless, at least from my outsider's viewpoint.

 

[gemini83]

An interesting analysis. I did not think things in Europe were so close (did Communists ever come to power fairly through free elections)?