Calculatingly Reckless with Disciplined Daring

Friday, April 22nd, 2011

It’s a bit odd to think that it took a character like Wild Bill Donovan to get our government to even form a “real” spy organization:

Donovan, who had come to admire FDR proposed to the president the creation of a spy and sabotage service based on Britain’s MI6, “with men calculatingly reckless with disciplined daring.” With the support of the secretary of the Navy, Frank Knox, but in the teeth of the opposition of practically everyone else, Donovan was appointed “Coordinator of Information” in July 1941. Roosevelt loved the intelligence with which Donovan then deluged him — more than 200 memos in his first six months — calling him “my secret legs.”
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“Hush-Hush” Donovan hired anyone of ability, believing that “later on we’ll find out what they can do.” Future CIA directors Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, William Colby and William Casey all served under Donovan. From its headquarters at 25th & E streets on Navy Hill in Washington and at Rockefeller Center in New York, the Office of Strategic Services became America’s first world-wide intelligence service. World-wide except for Latin America, which Hoover managed to ring-fence for the FBI. Donovan and Hoover — who each kept files on the other—maintained a fiction of professionalism that barely hid their mutual detestation.

Comments

  1. FDR enunciated the great principle of bureaucratic management: never let your right hand know what your left hand is doing (and vice versa). That way, if FDR’s left hand and right hand had a policy disagreement, FDR’s brain was the only arbiter.

    FDR would apply this principle in real life by appointing two rivals that hated each other as cabinet secretary and the undersecretary. This arrangement let FDR arbitrate every important decision because number one and number two at some alphabet agency couldn’t agree on a major issue, enhancing FDR’s control of the federal government. FDR probably learned this while following the path of cousin Teddy and serving as the chronically insubordinate Assistant Secretary of the Navy under Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels in the Wilson Administration.

    FDR’s appointment of Wild Bill followed a habit FDR sometimes indulged in of bringing the gentlemen amateurs of his social class into underhanded skullduggery. His curious plan involving one of the Astors, a yacht, and the Japanese fleet is a good example.

  2. ICR says:

    Onkel Adolf’s government was also notorious for its use of conflicting and overlapping bureaucracy below the top level. Probably all war-loving megalomaniacs operate like that.

  3. Isegoria says:

    When I finally seize power, I’ll make sure to appoint Fouché to head one bureaucracy and ICR to head another.

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