time is not the way we think about it where you're going to have a chocolate bar or a cookie. it is just a taste. it is a space. it is something you use in your meal to give it one of the flavors. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. douglas waller, former correspondent for "time" and "newsesweek" magazine recounts the life of wild bill and his leadership at the office of strategic services during the second world war and his thoughts on the use of counterintelligence. this lasts about an hour. >> i'm glad they have the photo of donovan up here. this is an iconic shot of him. you'll see that at the oss society meetings, and this is

the one folks identify him with. you notice his hair is cut short here. he has a crew cut. he was out in the field most of the time while running the oss and liked to go in on allied landings, and very often he had the ship's barber or the military barber give him a crew cut. of course, back at headquarters he got teased by the headquarters staff, and in fact, wallace duel, on his personal staff said, hey, that's some haircut you got there, mister. he loved it. he got the haircuts because he was in the field a lot making a lot of military landings. the book wild bill donovan is three stories. it's a biography of a truly heroic figure who suffered a lot of personal tragedy in his

life. it's a spy story with a lot of accounts of very daring operations they conducted, and as peter mentioned, it's also a story of political intrigue at the highest levels of government in washington and also overseas. that's the part that interested me the most. the personal story on donovan, it's a very, very rich one. i would have loved to have been a reporter back then covering donovan, and, in fact, i probably would have. he liked reporters. he leaked to them frequently. he had reporters on his staff. when he went overseas, particularly before he joined or formed the oss, he would work sometimes part time as a reporter. he -- he was an interesting man. he was probably about this high, actually fairly short, one large. when he ran the oss in the 60s, the female agent, some of them

thought he was penguined shape, and they mentioned to him, and he laughed and he didn't. he slept 5 hours or less a night, could speed read three books a week, could ballroom dance, loved irish songs and memorized the words. he didn't smoke, rarely drank. he enjoyed fine dining, but that put on the weight. he spent lavishly with no concept for a dollar. whenever he was traveling, there was an aid with him who kept money. he mooched off his aid. he never showed anger. instead, he let it boil inside him. he was rakishly hand smit as a young man, and even into his senior years, he had bright blue eyes women found captivating.

his daughter, his daughter-in-law, and a granddaughter all died at very early ages. he was born new year's day in 1883 in the first ward. he thought at one point he was going to be a catholic priest, but decided he was not cut out for the cloth, so he went to columbia university, was a quarterback of the columbia football team his senior year, went on to columbia law school, franklin roosevelt was a classmate of donovan's, but they never mixed. roosevelt was from a higher string than donovan was. he returned to buffalo, became a successful lawyer, married into wealth there, and in world war i, he won the med -- medal of honor.

he was fearless. he was one the few guys they met who actually enjoyed combat and commanded a regimen, and when he won the medal of honor, he was the executive officer and ground commander. that's where he got the nickname wild bill. before the u.s. entered into the war and he was training troops, he put them through grueling brutal training, and at one time after a long march, and they had been running all day with full packs and crawling through obstacle courses, his men collapsed in front of him, and he got up there, and said, what the hell is the matter with you? i've been, you know, running this same court with you, and i have not broken a sweat. out of the back somewhere, some trooper yelled out, he never found out who, but we're not as wild as you are, bill. from that day on, wild bill

donovan stuck. he claimed to be upset with the nickname, that it ran counter to his professional cool quiet image, but his wife, ruth, knew he really liked it. he returned to new york a hero. in 1932, he ran as a republican candidate for governor of new york. he was running against lieutenant governor herbert leiman who was roosevelt's cap date, and his ultimate goal was to be the country's first irish catholic president, and new york was the ideal steppingstone for a launch for the presidency. he ended up running as much against fdr as he did against herbert. he said some very nasty things about roosevelt because he was a republican, and he thought the whole new deal idea was crazy, so at one point he called roosevelt crafty.

back then, that was fighting words. on another stop, he called him a hyde park faker. roosevelt claimed he was a farmer, and donovan thought that was ridiculous. roosevelt, on the other hand, took a shot at donovan. he had surrogates whack him on the campaign trail. in fact, even eleanor roosevelt campaigned and took shots at donovan. he turned out to be a horrible campaigner. if he was in this room talking to you, he would totally meze mother rise you with those eyes and personality. on the trail, he was a terrible speaker. in fact, the lieutenant governor running with him thought he was so lousy that davidson thought he should have run for

governor. it's amazing that roosevelt later made donovan his spy master considering autothe nasty things they said about each other in the 3 # campaign, but fast forward to 1941. roosevelt is preparing the country for war. he's building up defenses. he knows he has to mobilize the country for what's coming down in the future. donovan is -- was a member of really the internationalist's wing of the republican party. he, too, believed that the country needed to mobilize for war, and needed to build up defenses and prepare. roosevelt also was beginning to think about forming a coalition cabinet much of the way winston churchill did in london, so he was bringing in republicans. both men found each other useful. in 1940-41, roosevelt sent

donovan on two unofficial trips to europe. the first one in 1940 was to england. basically, it was to assess whether britain could survive the war, whether the nazis would defeat them or ultimately come out the winner. donovan came back and reported britain could survive the war, but it would need u.s. arms and aid, in particular. the second time he went over in late 1940, early 1941, he had a long meeting with winston churchill, and he took a tour of eastern europe in the balcans and the middle east basically to deliver for winston churchill and also for roosevelt too, again, he was on unofficial basis there, but deliver the message that fdr did not intend to let great britain lose this war, and so if you, a balcan heard need to decide what side

you'll be on, and that better be the winning side. that side is the allies. he was delighted with that response and paid for his trip and at one point there was an escort for don von who later became the james bond novelist. he was upset about the trip because he's donovan going around to its embassies and foreign posts and meeting with foreign leaders with no diplomatic standing either in the united states government or the british government. at one point, state department aids debated internally whether he should be prosecutorred for violating the logan agent making it a crime for a private u.s. citizen to represent the u.s. government in foreign negotiations. fdr, on the other hand, was delighted that donovan was out there delivering this message, and, you know, bringing back intelligence for him because in

1941, he really -- this is the president -- he had no foreign service to speak of. there was not a lot of officers there, and many of the officers was considered a dumping ground for poor performers in the intelligence units at the time, so roosevelt was making major foreign policy decisions at this time, decisions that could affect his own reelection such as lend lease, operating nearly blind to what lay ahead of him overseas, and it worried him. in fact, it worried him so much that at times he became physically ill. okay, when donovan comes back to the missions, that's when our spy story begins. in july 1941, before pearl harbor, roosevelt signs a short executive order, about two pages, very, very vague. it said that colonel donovan,

because he was a kern in world war i, will collect information for me of national importance, and he'll do other unspecified duties. okay, and this was setting up an organization called the coordination of information. it later became the office of strategic services, the oss as we know it. it was such a vague order that roosevelt's other officers scratched their heads thinking what the heck is this guy up to? what are you getting into? he sent follow-up memos to explain exactly what this coordinator of information business was all about. donovan liked to say that he began his unit, his oss, from minus zero. in effect, he really started out with one guy, which was wild bill donovan, okay? in the beginning he was kind of like a player in a pick up

basketball game looking for agents or operations or covers wherever he really could find itment for example, the phillips lamp company who sold lamps overseas, donovan made arrangements with the phillips lamp company salesman when they went overseas that if they reason across anything of interest for him in their sales call, they reported back to don van. the eastman kodak company. my day it was the brownny camera, and now the disposable cameras. in that day there were thousands of camera clubs in the united states. he arranged to have him send photos people had taken of possibly important sites. pan-american airways, donovan signed secret contracts with some of its employees if ticket

agents in africa to be on the lookout and provide him any information of nazis moving around in africa. it was code name cigar. he cooked up wild schemes interested in any idea no matter how crazy it was and really willing to try almost anything. his code number on all the oss documents, the secret documents was 109, his room number and it was located across from what now is the state department. the secretaries called him sea biscuit after the racehorse because they saw him running all around, and they could never keep track of him. he kept $2,000 in a desk drawer in his desk that he used to pay, any sources that he med, and testifies constantly darting around washington on secret ran

day views -- rendezvez. there was a guy named stan -- stanley level who was an inventer dreaming up sky gadgets for him. he made pencil-like explosive devices, and one idea they were really high on were truth drugs. they decided to experiment a particular truth drug on a mofia thug named little oggy, a new york low-level mobster. one of donovan's officers who had been a former new york city cop and busted little oggy several times had him up to the apartment for smokes and a chat. laced in the cigarette were the truth drug chemical. he has a silly grin on his face

and tells the oss officer about the mob hits they carried out, working with lucky and all the congressmen he bribed. unfortunately, donovan could use it in a court, and little oggy's secrets were secure with the oss because they didn't want to have it out they were testing a truth drug. he proposed at one point that roosevelt have a button at his desk to push at any time, and it would transmit a radio message to every radio in the united states warning him if, you know, the japanese were going to attack or the germans were going to attack new york. roosevelt ignored the idea, but roosevelt enjoyed listening to all of donovan's ideas. he was really open to. donovan was kind of a spark plug for thinking outside of the box, and roosevelt, from his early days as a young man was intrigued with espionage and

spying. for example, one of the ideas stanley tested was fitting bats, you know, in the eves of houses with inside yarr devices, and they thought they'd drop the bats over tokyo, they fly into the eves of the houses, and the device goes off own burns down the houses no tokyo. this is an idea eleanor roosevelt picked up from somebody, passed it on to franklin, and he passed it to donovan. stanley and the men got out there over some desert, i can't remember where, but fitted bats with this device and dropped them out of a plane. the poor things sunk like a stone. the idea didn't work, but donovan was willing to try anything. in addition to being the father of modern american espionage and

special operations command in tampa, florida, there's portraits of donovan there, and one in his uniform, and the uniforms, they consider him the father of specific operations too. donovan was also the father of information warfare as we see it today, psychological operations. back in his day, it was morale operations, and it was crude consisting the leaflets, rumors, newspaper articles, and radio. for example, he had oss officers plant rumors in papers in the u.s., the "new york times" and overseas that top nazis were fleeing germany for south america and leaving the germans high and dry. deidreich, a famous singer there sang for the radio propaganda

broadcasts and there were, for example, the league of lonely women leaflets dropped off to german soldiers saying their wives and girlfriends back home joined the league of lonely women having sex with their comrades who were returning back from leave. another idea they this they tried out was dropping fax mail bags over germany stuffed with poisen pen letters. they got the addresses from german phone directories and other city directories, and they hoped that the german citizens would pick up the mail bag, figure it was lost, and give it to a german postmaster and deliver all the mail. stanley level even concocted a here moan that if they could ever get to hitler's vegetables, they would invice president-elect the hormone in the vegetables, and it would

make his mustache fall off and have a different vice, an upset for the murh. he was a horrible manager, and p while commanding the oss, he violated every rule they teach you in harlowgilesunger.com vade business school or administration schools. totally disorganized. in fact, at one point, a circle of his inner aids, a half dozen of them staged or tried to stage the palace revolt which was, they tried to oust him. they tried to see if they could move him up and out as a broad overseer of the organization, and donovan, or donovan's aids would run the day-to-day intelligence. donovan, # who by then launched enough cues to smell one on his own, squashed the revolt like a bug.

even so, he was a charismatic leader, and that's really what, you know, built the oss, and really defined his tenure over it. when we went out into the field, he rarely gave a command. he would ask somebody to do something, and the agents would always loyally follow him. eventually he built a spy organization and over 10,000 espionage agents, commandos, analysts, support people in stations all over the world which is a pretty remarkable achievement considering he started out with one guy, wild bill donovan. he mounted covert operations for the torch invasion, the invasion of north africa in november of 1941. it was fairly successful and the battle he provided eisenhower forces and far less successful in organizing the invaders coming in.

that basically failed. he mounted the oss with significant operations in sicily and italy. had a lot of trouble in italy. there were a lot of failed operations. marx 5th army had a lot of trouble in italy too. that was a big attrition battle. he had extensive operations in the balcans to help organize and supply the resistance there especially in greece. in asia, you had oss operations against the japanese and beer ma and -- berma and china. interestingly, douglas mccar-- mcarthur had nothing to do with donovan. for the normandy landing, donovan had a huge intelligence operation providing a lot of

good intelligence on the german defenses, a lot of intelligence for the air force for bombing targets, and they infiltrated by air, parachuted in, a number of command does, og's they called them, operational group command commandos that helped organize the french resistance in advance and during the normandy landing. donovan also had a thing for going in on landings. he went in on the normandy landing too. george marshall, the army chief of staff thought donovan was banned from going into the normandy landing for good reason. even the own men thought being that close to the come -- combat was not the place for the american strategic office to be,

and eisenhower realized were donovan captured, he'd be a valuable target with all the secrets in his head, but they were not able to stop wild bill. he managed to talk his way aboard a cruiser and was at utah beach for the normandy landing. had a great time, almost got shot up, and marched inland with david ke bruce, head of the london station, where they were pipped down at one point by a german machine gun nest. he had grand stories to tell after that. it took almost two years really for donovan to build up his organization to really get into the fight. keep in mind, it also took the u.s. army almost two years to really get into world war ii. they had to train their force and build it up along the way. it took awhile for the commando

operations to become proficient, and like all intelligence agencies, the oss experienced its share of failures, some spectacular failures. for example, donovan thought he had the silver bullet agent code name vessel who was planted inside the vatican in rome and was supplying him with transcripts of conversation that the pope was having with his envoys and other foreign envoys and with the japanese. turned out vessel though was an italian pornographer with a very vivid imagination and skilled at creating dialogue, completely suckered donovan and the oss, not unlike when you fast forward to, for example, the run up to the second iraq war where the cia thought it had a silver bullet intelligence agent and curve ball who was supplying them with information about

hussein's bilogical weapons capability, and that curve ball was a fabricator too, and he was just interviewed by the british press and admitted he made it all up, but as the u.s. army improved, donovan's oss improved as well, and toward the end of the war supplying a significant amount of intelligence, reames of it to the allies. this is also a story of political intrigue. he liked to say he had enemies in washington as fierce as hitler was in europe and ferocious battles who thought his organization was just a collection of am amateurs which in the beginning it was. the pentagon at first bitterly thought the formation of the oss and launched a gorilla operation against it practiceically throughout the war, and, in

fact, toward -- as the war matured for the u.s., towards the end, the pentagon formed a secret espionage unit behind donovan's back. mark is doing ground breaking work on that. it was nicknamed the pond, and not only spying on the axis, but spying on don van's men and himself. the generals and admirals in the pentagon, you know, they fight monk themselves -- among themselves in any war, and they certainly did in world war ii. britter and american officers squabbling. the squabbles with donovan were intense because they didn't understand what this guy was doing. when they talked about morale operations and sabotage and espionage and lonely women

leaflets, he was talking in a foreign language to them. they found a lot of his ideas disturbing and found him disturbing too. he never took no for an answer. he was famous for making end runs around a commander if he got a no to get the answer reversed from the higher ups. when the commander of the navy said i can't lend you officers for the oss, he went to the secretary of the navy and had frank knox pressure him to turn over the mep. that action does not wipe you a lot of friends. one time at the cocktail party, and he had his oss officers steel some papers from the office, bring it back to him at the cocktail party to show off to the admiral what his men could do. again, i don't know -- [laughter] i don't know if he was impressed

by that. donovan also had a pension for showing up late at pentagon meetings with other admirals, and he would come always impeccably dressed. his yiewn formed was designed in new york, and very often he would have on his medal of honor ribbon on it as a not so subtle reminder with the rest of the generals in the room that he was the only one that counted. when he was out in the field with his men, he could be what one agent said, civilian. his uniform was rumpled, and sometimes he'd wear a paisley ascot with his uniform too. i don't think they let them do that anymore nowadays. i think what the message donovan was trying to convey to the field is he was running an

unconventional operation, and he was an unconventional guy. for the allies, there was tension there as well. the british played a critical part in forming the oss. in china, are other allied i checked donovan set up a paper there are funded it three publisher. he planted in there to serve as

reporters but also to file intelligence reports on the side not only on what the japanese were doing in china but also what chang hi check was doing in china. the soviets, the soviets were our allies in world war ii. donovan at one point paid the intelligence service $62,500 for 1500 pages of soviet military and kgb do immense which included kgb codes. the state department when they learned about it was horrified over this because it would cause a huge diplomatic flap, and complained to roosevelt and roosevelt ordered donovan to turn the codes back over to the soviets. in fact donovan had his men taken to andre d'amico in washington who didn't believe for a new york minute that his men had an copy the codes inuit already. not only actually had donovan copied the codes but the enterprising then sold the codes

to the japanese where you were a think about 70,000 bucks. free enterprise you know lives alive and well. eventually donovan could not overcome his political enemies. he had drafted a plan for a post-war central intelligence agency, post-war cia that he wanted to lead but walter trail him, who was a white house reporter for the mccormick patterson chain which was very anti-roosevelt, a republican chain which published the "washington times" herald in washington got a copy of donovan's secret plan for setting up the cia and he published it in the paper. in a highly inflammatory story, he accused donovan of wanting to set up what amounted to an american gestapo despite on not only people overseas that americans at home and you call somebody a gestapo during world war ii and those are very incendiary words.

j. edgar hoover had an age and spread particularly nasty rumor with harry truman staff that eventually got to truman about donovan's personal life. i will let you read the book to find out what that is, but donovan had a number of affairs, had a number of extramarital affairs and it was well-known in washington and out in the field that he had. at one point, i remember the secret pentagon espionage unit arranged through an officer who was on the white house staff under roosevelt and then under truman that a 59 page report was placed on truman's desk, accusing the oss of all kinds of corruption, loan operations. they even accused them of staging an in india at one

point. truman also didn't like donovan personally. there was bad chemistry between these two guys. on one side you had a successful republican wall street lawyer. on the other side you had a haberdasher who who is a die-hard democrat that just, you know these guys were never going to match up. truman wanted an intelligence service. he knew he needed a national strategic intelligence service particularly after the war. he just didn't want donovan heading it up or the oss having anything to do with it so on september 20, 1945 he shut down the oss, parcel that it seems to the pentagon and the state department. truman eventually formed as i am sure all of you know a cia in 1947 modeled a good bit after donovan's vision of what the cia should he. donovan wanted to leave that agency. in fact he had intermediaries quietly lobbying truman to see

if he could be the head of the cia. of course treman wasn't going to have anything to do with that. donovan had said some mean things about truman on the presidential campaign trail. when dwight eisenhower came in he had surrogates lobby again to make him head of cia. instead eisenhower gave the job to allen dulles, which lets donovan very bitter even though dole said worked for donovan heading up his oss station. donovan always thought that dulles was a poor manager and that he would have been better as a cia director. instead, eisenhower made donovan ambassador to thailand as a consolation prize. with that i think i will end it there. if you have any questions about what donovan did after the war, the legacy of his organization's effect on modern intelligence i will be glad to field it.

>> frank fletcher. is a true that donovan handed over to b. and k. b. the or handed over to soviet intelligence and list of agents of oss in eastern europe? >> i am not. >> agents are assets. >> it is a little complicated. donovan proposed in the winter of 1943, to set up a liaison arrangement with the kgb and he flew to moscow to try and set that up. he thought he had roosevelt on board with it, the joint chiefs were pretty much on board with it, and they actually got something set up with powell fit and who was head of the kgb then. they were going to exchange officers and there was going to be a soviet group come to washington to come to moscow. both spy chiefs new that these

groups would be spying on the other. this was an opportunity to get into the soviet union with those agents in moscow. and also to get the material from the soviets used for the war. when j. edgar hoover heard about this plan he went bananas and lobbied roosevelt not to allow the soviet officers and, not to have this exchange program. hoover's view was he had his hands full already keeping an eye on all the soviets that were here already in the united states spying. so the plan got nick's to. even so, donovan had fairly robust exchange of information with the and kgb throughout 1943 on. they exchanged a lot of intelligence. donovan supplied gadgets to the soviets which they appreciated and they supplied information on some of the activities and what

they knew is was happening particularly in eastern europe. as the war was drawing to an end, and you know the russians were coming in and occupying eastern european balkan nations, i believe it was some point there, it may have even been romania but don't hold me to it, they wanted to know who were the oss officers that were in the country then because they actually were still working together trying to round up nazi holdovers towards the end of the war. so they exchanged information on that. eventually, though, the russians knew that the oss officers in eastern europe were going to be spying on them as much as working with them and they forced them all out of the balkan nations. but there was a brief exchange of information.

>> did the british air any of the details of the enigma operation with donovan? >> yes. they shared -- donovan had men and women at bletchley park working with the british and they got access to the raw take. in fact the british were very very important in helping donovan set up his counterintelligence operations called x tube. it is ironic that they actually shared or of their intercept work than the americans did with donovan. donovan never had direct access to magic. magic was the navy army code breaking capability of the japanese diplomatic and military codes. all he would get from magic word summaries of their reports.

organization to keep secrets. they thought he was loose on security, but in the case of the brits, they got direct access and there was very close cooperation. >> where do you see yourself differing from the two previous biographers of donovan? >> there are actually three biographies. the first one written by cory ford on donovan. he was screened by the donovan family and the donovan leisure law firm and largely wrote a hagiographic portrait of donovan. that is a law firm edited at the end. anthony cave brown wrote the last hero and he had access to the original donovan microfilm that he hastily took off all his files in his office and carted off to new york. he didn't have access to a lot of the newer material that has

come out and there is a lot of speculation in brown's book on things donovan did that when you look at the actual record it turns out it didn't happen. the other book was richard dunlop who rode a biography of donovan around the same time in the early '80s, based largely on anecdotes or reminiscences of former oss officers. as any historian or biographer will tell you, anecdotes are really very helpful to bring light to your story but memories fade after 10, 20, 30, 40 or so there were instances in his book too that they had donovan in different places. i called them elder sidings when i was doing the research. he wasn't there. he wasn't doing what they thought he did or maybe somebody recalled it vaguely. what i try to do was at least they said on the record and use the anecdotes. there are a lot of oral histories for oss officers.

>> what was the extent of the communist penetration of oss? >> they have done a lot of studies on that and i don't have the numbers in my head but it is in the book. there were at least like a half dozen in the oss headquarters who were believed to have had either communist sympathies or were feeding information to soviet intelligence. there were breaches and penetrations of stations all around, all around the world. the cia has a good analysis of that. donovan knew he had communist and his organization. we actually had a very complicated relation with the communist. he wanted to work with them, but he didn't necessarily want them working for him.

so, he would set up relationships with communist in the u.s. and the commonest party in the u.s. and with communist overseas but he could be very harsh on communist he found in his organization, particularly if they were being investigated by congress or the name popped up there or j. edgar hoover found out about them so he could be very harsh there. but he recognized event until the end even though he never said it publicly that there were probably i think i have in the book, the number of about 40 people in this organization that he thought were communist leaders or whatever. but there was never any evidence of that communist infiltration or the moles or anything did really anything to change the outcome of the war which -- because we were allies with the soviets then. so, they had done assessments since then so it didn't really have a huge effect. it just gave the soviets information on with the oss was

doing. now donovan tried to plant his own people in the sub a particularly as they moved into southern europe and even as he was trying to set up a liaison relationship with the nkgb. he had made arrangements with oil executives that were going under a lease to help the russians with oil exploration to report to him on anything they saw over their too. >> to donovan and the oss have any relationship with the effort with the atom bomb? >> say that again. >> to donovan and the oss have any relationships with the effort to -- the nazi atom bomb? >> yeah. they had a project. moe berg moberg who is a former catcher, major league catcher, was involved in that. leslie grove who was the general in charge of the manhattan project had gone to donovan, never told him in detail or

never told them anything about the manhattan project itself but he asked donovan to have his officers go out and scour anything they could find on german and italian scientific efforts and to develop a nuclear device. and they collected a lot of information for leslie grove and i think they'll suspected the reason they were collecting it was because the u.s. was building its nuclear weapon. and basically they came back with a conclusion that the germans in particular were far behind and a in the nuclear weapon development. >> i read a review of your book that mentioned very favorable in "the wall street journal," but it mentioned that donovan was sort of an early opponent of nazism and i wonder if you could

just explain a bit about that? >> yeah, he made a lot of trips international lawyer drumming up business for his law firm or representing clients overseas. this is in the 20s and the 30s. j. edgar hoover thought he was a nazi sympathizer. he collected a lot of information and made a lot of contacts in berlin, some of which grew to be useful much later during the war. but this was mainly in gathering business information and also in protecting his clients in germany as the nazis took over. so, he represented companies from major jewish families to try and prevent the nazis from ex-appropriating their property or their businesses. he signed a petition to i think

to give no prevent the prosecution of german jewish in court so he is very very active on that, and i mean he had no provisions about what the nazis were about and adolf hitler, he viewed hitler as come he told a friend that this was the incarnation of evil and he was really fascinated by hitler throughout the war. in fact at one point, he had a team of psychologists and psychiatrists do a very extensive psychological profile of hits lord -- hitler. i read through the whole thing. was fascinating and they predicted among other things that hitler would likely never surrender, he would hole up in commit suicide in the end. they also had a good bit of information they collected on hitler's sex life too and donovan have that spiced up and sent out as propaganda later on. he thought that would be a good topic get a tool.

>> as a biographer i know there are always questions you can't answer about your subject. is there anything about donovan you are still questioning are you still don't feel you know everything about? >> yeah, there are. he didn't, it is interesting, he never wanted to write an autobiography of himself. there were several publishers who approached him toward the end of the war asking if you would be interested and he didn't want to do that. he was very particular about the oss history and how that would be told. he edited the final history very very carefully. there are still kind of questions about where he was at certain points in the war that you really can't pin down. there have been a lot of rumors and some of the rumors i was able to discover were true. for example, there was a terrific rumor out there or a report actually in previous biographies that donovan went

into liberated france in a jeep with ernest hemingway and they went to the ritz hotel and had the bartender order up two dozen martinis there for everybody. thought it was a terrific at it though. i was going to use it in the book until i found out it wasn't true. it was david bruce that women with donovan and into the ritz hotel. there was a lot of speculation and i don't know, that donovan had secret meetings with admiral kunar as the head of the german intelligence. i could find nothing in the oss records to indicate that was ever the case. there was one approach by one of donovan's officers that never came about. maybe there is something there that nobody has seen but it would have probably turned up in the oss records. the good news about the oss records is that practically all of them are declassified. i don't think there is there's that much left classified now.

the bad news is all of them are declassified, millions and millions of pages in the national archives. just donovan's own personal papers in his office, and over 100,000 pages which i had to go through which took a wild. but yeah, i am sure there is a mystery out there. i have still got freedom of information act requests out there hoping to find the next edition. >> to questions. you touch on the world war ii -- how much of that could have come from world war i because you hear stories about the artillery office finding support. the other one is george b. strong who is the army chief who was a j.a.g. officer and that movements officer for the usn world war i where some of this

conflict could have calm from way back when. the other one and i know in your index you have colonel eddie, which is funny. >> are right. >> but do you touch on they 2677 oss regiment that operated in north africa and the mediterranean because i know you've mentioned the operations in greece which involve the only, as far as i know, the only u.s. army unit to be sent from the army to the oss as a unit. it was the 122nd. >> yeah, on the first thing on the world war i connection, there has been a story out there that his report -- repeated on a lot of books and you find on the internet that truman was supposed to supply artillery cover for the battle in

st. george. donovan won his medal of honor and got shot in the leg and that sherman didn't and donovan complained later on and truman heard about it and never forgot it. it turns out it is an old wives tale. it didn't happen. truman's unit wasn't there that day. it wasn't supplying artillery cover but for some reason this got repeated and gets mentioned kind of tangentially and anthony cave brown's but i went throughout the records that they german library to peace where chairman was and where donovan was and they weren't together during that battle. george strong, george b. strong who was head of army g2 the intelligence section was one of donovan's most implacable enemies. he is known as george the fifth is he is an imperialist that he was actually warrior scholar. he absolutely despise donovan

and fought him the whole time and donovan hated george the fifth too. i think that animosity built the minute the oss was born but i don't know how much there was any world war i connection. is far as colonel eddie, of course colonel eddie who headed up a lot of his covert action and warfare operations leading up to the torch invasion, he was a world war i hero who got his leg shot off and had rows of -- when he met george patton. at one point patton thought why this guy must really be one tough tough son of a gun. i think he perhaps used a little different word. it looks like he has been shot at quite a bit. and, eddie had some real good operations for donovan and north africa. again they were not able to deliver on their hope and promise that they could organize the french to support.

along with allied landing in north africa. >> the in one of the reasons i mentioned 2677 is its office at the oss had no effort and you find with the 2677 africa 101 which was a sickened unit and the army actually was making use out of one piece of it which kind of killed the effectiveness of the overall network. >> the there could've been something i said at the tactical level, at the national level. dobbin wanted to replicate magic too. he was denied access to it and in fact he set up a dummy corporation called fmap pq to set it up and in fact the leader of the secret spy unit, the military spy unit was biting at one point had been working on are actually was heading up for donovan that feq and donovan

basically got rid of them body was kind of a conspiracy buff. marshall eventually shut down that ad hoc intercept unit because he didn't want anything conflicting with magic. >> we have one more. >> why don't we take a couple more. >> hi, could you elaborate on the relationship or rivalry of donovan's british counterpart whose name i don't recall but he went by interested. he was known as intrepid. >> oh, stephenson. bill stevenson. stephenson. they were very very close, and stephenson was very very helpful for donovan in setting up the oss. provided him a lot of help in new york. donovan had tensor relationships with stuart menzies who was head of the british intelligence and charles gambro's who was head of british special operations,

british soe. there were constant fights. basically what happened was donovan really couldn't have beginning without revish help but it was like kind of a teenager. once you learn to drive dad's car you don't want dad sitting in the seat right next to you or following you on your dates which is what happened with the relationship between the british and the u.s.. the british would have preferred to have the oss be basically subject to the crown and work its auxiliaries for the british effort out there and their side of the story they had seasoned operatives out there out there for a long time and here were these american cowboys from the oss coming and and mucking up the works out there, getting in the way they thought. donovan knew that what the british wanted out of them. they knew he wanted -- they wanted him and his organization to be an auxiliary of the british special operations and

intelligence and he fought that very early on. in fact there was a famous line. he told the british special operations representative in new won't let me or my organization be novel. does anybody know what novel this? i didn't either until i looked it up in the dictionary. it is british slang for fixing a racehorse to lose and he was worried that the braves were going to be novel and can. he also thought the british used his organization for their own purposes and you know would discard him when they did not need him. the brits heard the statements. they didn't appreciate being called a horse fixer or a prostitute and so throughout the war, that tension between the two but donovan realized even at the end, at the very end that he

couldn't have built up what he had without the british help. >> in your research, did you get the feeling that roosevelt either did not discourage or actively encouraged the competition between donovan and military intelligence and solo players who volunteered at various times? >> yeah. roosevelt didn't discourage that competition. he liked the creative tension, so if you talk, or if you read the histories of roosevelt senior aides, even harry hopkins, even his closest people like steve early none of them really knew what roosevelt was up to with everything. he kept things compartmentalized and he played aides off of one another. donovan for example learned after he formed or after the

coordinators never mission was formed that roosevelt had a secret spy in the white house run by john franklin carter who was a columnist in washington, a newspaper columnist. in fact he ran the secret spy unit while he was writing columns all the time which kind of violates some press government rule. i'm not sure what it is but it certainly violates it. and donovan, i mean roosevelt encourage this tension between the two and every now and then he would donovan's chain back or he would let army intelligence george strong, you know george strong do something that would absolutely enrage donovan. donovan actually had a very complicated relationship with roosevelt too because again they were from opposite parties. roosevelt senior staff was decidedly worried about what they thought was the republican cast to the oss and all the best in the privacy brought in were the best and brightest from the republican party. and you had henry stimson the secretary of war, the secretary

of the navy and donovan who is head of the intelligence service and a lot of white house aides were thinking to themselves what are we doing here, running a farm team for their future presidential candidates? donovan wanted to be president of the united states at one point. frank knox had run for president on the republican ticket, so the two men -- roosevelt like donovan and liked his ideas but it was not a personal relationship and donovan really never wanted to make it a personal relationship. >> doug waller thank you for a terrific recitation and clearly a terrific book. [applause] >> for more information visit the author's web site, douglas c. waller.com.

>> host: we are now joined on "the communicators" by rebecca mackinnon at fellow with the new american foundation. rebecca mckinnon, what is the chinese self-discipline award? >> guest: the chinese self-discipline award is an award given out every year by the internet society of china, and what it is for the top 20 companies that do the best job at censoring contacts, so what goes on in china is china has a system where it is not only censoring at the network level, you know so when you try and access the web site and suddenly get an error message or something like that, but most people in china are using china's -- chinese internet platforms the chinese version of youtube and a chinese company that has their social networking sites, their blog posting platforms and all of those companies are required by

the government to police not only you know or copyright stuff, which companies here have to do but also police the platforms were a whole range of political content and they get regular instructions from the authority and if they don't do a good enough job at keeping this stuff off of their site they can lose their business license and if they do a very good job they get rewarded. one of the rewards is the self-discipline award. >> host: who sits on the chinese internet site -- society? >> guest: it is officially a non-governmental till organization but it is sort of very closely aligned with the government. so it has actually the chairman and a computer scientist who is actually not going to do anything the government doesn't want done.

>> host: rebecca mackinnon how did you get interested in chinese censorship on the internet issues? >> guest: well, it goes way back. used to work as a journalist in china. i worked for cnn there for many years so i experienced it first-hand. i was there in china in the '90s when the internet first showed up there commercially in 1995. very soon we were finding we were getting bought. so, i kind of experienced it as a user from the very beginning. but then after to make a long story short, i ended up leaving cnn and early 2004 and i was at havard, and i ended up spending quite a bit of time is something called the berkman center for internet society. and i was looking at the rise of citizen media and blogging all around the world and how this is challenging journalism, how it is challenging government, looking at it as a global

phenomenon but because i have this background in china, i. >> chinese and read chinese i quickly became fascinated with what is happening in china and the fact that on the one hand, you have an ocean of internet use. you have all kinds of social networking sites and you have got a lot of blogging going on yet at the same time the government manages to control it well enough to prevent people from using the internet to organize an opposition. and, the way in which they do that is fascinating. so, because i have the language facility and because i was sort of starting to become interested, i wrote one thing and suddenly people started asking me to write more things and help them with research and give a talk and then kind of suddenly before i knew it i was this expert on chinese internet censorship. >> host: how did they blog about facebook or chinese equivalent of facebook? >> guest: so there is several different levels of censorship in china.

we have facebook itself, right? facebook itself is not based in china. it is on computer servers outside of china. sofer web site that are located outside of china like facebook, what they do is they basically instruct the networks that when somebody types in www.facebook.com or some variant you get an error message. you just get a blank in your browser. and,. >> host: and they can stop at the border? >> guest: they can stop that at the border. that's what happened with youtube. it happens with twitter.com. it happens with you now tens of thousands of, hundreds of thousands of web sites where certain pages, because they have the ability to catch certain key words. and so there's a lot of stuff that is just block of the border essentially, as you say. but that is just to the web sites that are outside of china.

so then you have got all these chinese companies running chinese versions, you know kind of facebook clones or various blogspot clones and youtube ponds or whatever and so they are not being blocked at the border because it is much more effective to block something which people who have the technical ability can figure out how to get around the blocks, why block it when you can just take it off the internet? so for companies, if you are a chinese internet company your computer servers are inside china. you are inside chinese legal jurisdiction. the cops can show up at your facility and tell you to shut it down if you are not complying. and so you can tell the sites okay you know, this particular group on the chinese version of facebook needs to be shut down. these users need to be taken off-line. this particular blog needs to be, needs to be shut down or

deactivated or you know people's particular blog post. for instance, you know i kind of did they test him as recently. a chinese gentleman who just got the nobel peace prize. a couple of different things happened with that, right? overseas web sites that talk about him and the news of him getting the nobel peace prize, they were of course blocked so you couldn't access them. >> host: so "the new york times," you can go to "the new york times"? >> guest: "the new york times" and english they're not so worried about because it is a small elite -- they are worried about the chinese stuff like voice america chinese, bbc chinese and so on. but on the chinese platform on social networking services and chinese blogging services. i logged in and i took an article about him. i logged in, took an article about him, pasted it into the

little composure blog post here box and hit publish, right? and you get an error message saying we are sorry you cannot publish this material. contain sensitive words. so certain kinds of content you can even get on the internet or there were other services where he managed to publish it but within minutes it would disappear. and then you go back to the place where you had published it and there is this notice thing, we are sorry but you know the content you are looking for does not exist. and, so -- i am sorry. excuse me. yeah so the content literally no longer exists in that spot so basically you have a situation where it is not just blocking the content but taking sensitive content off the internet completely. >> host: this is a chinese

policy within china? the chinese companies? why should we care? >> guest: that is a very good question. i think there are a number of reasons. one is that china is a model really for how a government uses private companies as an extension of its power. and obviously china is the most extreme case but there are a lot of governments who are kind of seeing this and seeking to duplicate it in various ways. it is also something of a cautionary tale about the way in which private intermediaries can be used in an opaque way to manipulate speech and to conduct surveillance and why it is very very important that this digital layer that we are all depending

on now for our speech, i mean obviously you need to have some kind of governance of this space. you need to keep or not her purse -- there are all kinds of reasons why a company, why it is a good thing that facebook is keeping you you know certain types of people off their site. but you know how do we ensure that this privately operated layer is not doing things that infringe upon our rights either as a passive government or on their own, which diminish our ability to voice dissent and to organize politically and so on, and of course i am by no means equating the united united statd china. fare system and what they are doing has no basis for can send of government, but there are a think some concerns that people

have and the u.s., and in other democracies about the extent to which there is going to be sufficient due process and the mechanisms we set up. you know you have democratically elected politicians who are passing laws or requiring technical specifications so that we can you know fight crime, we can protect children, protect intellectual property. these are all admirable goals, but how are -- what kind of system are we setting up? how can it be abused if you have a government that is seeking to abuse its power? is the system transparent and accountable enough that you can correct for that? that is i think the real challenge we have in democracy. >> host: and, about a year ago you wrote a column for a

clutching news service, are china's demand for internet self discipline spreading to the west? do you see that? do you see evidence of that? >> guest: again it is a much more subtle thing. there is a lot of debate in the west right now about the extent to which private intermediaries should be held liable for what their users are doing on this site. and because part of what goes on in a place like china is that the government sets out rules and then it is left to the companies to decide oh you know i had to take this content down because it might get me in trouble. so you have a situation where companies are actually anticipating whether something may or may not be illegal and they are taking it off -- he might actually not be in violation of the law but just to be safe they take it down. and so if you impose too much

liability on intermediaries even for ostensibly good reasons you have a situation where intermediaries are taking things down that actually have a pretty good case that when really taking to court a challenge that the person to to you put it up has a right to express that speech. and so, the concern is about the erosion of people's ability to advocate opinions, to disseminate information that may not be particularly popular, but on the other hand, you know they have a first amendment right to say those things. and are we moving towards a situation where intermediaries are kind of may king decision just to be on the safe side before anybody has had their day in court? this is why a lot of people are concerned about the amazon case for instance, and wikileaks

where amazon took wikileaks off of their service and they were perfectly within their legal rights to do that, within their terms of service. absolutely nothing legally wrong with what they did, but you have a situation again where you have a private entity deciding that well maybe this person does have a first amendment right to say this is i don't want to wait for the case. this is too much trouble for me. i am going to dump them now. and if collectively your most private intermediaries -- make intermediaries to end up doing that with her controversial clients and we do have a problem. so again, it is subtle and one does not want to go too far in trying equal signs at all. but there is a continuum of issues and you know the other problem too is you know this is

a globally interconnected network and so you have technical norms and legal norms that are set up and democracies that make sense within the context of a country that has very robust legal systems, very robust protections but if you take the same technical norms, technical standards and dump them into iran or belarus which has been happening actually where you have a bunch of cases where the mobile phone systems being sold by western companies to iran and belarus came with legal intercepts capabilities so law-enforcement could intercept conversations, which is required under european law and american law, so all this technology enables authorities to protect people. it is basically acceptable to most citizens of democracies within the confines of this

legal constitutional situation but you take that same technology and you drop it into iran and belarus, you have got a very effective surveillance system, and so this is also a problem is that they are setting up norms that work better in some countries than others but they become the default in a world where you cannot count on governments and legal systems being on the side of the people. >> host: rebecca mackinnon google, facebook have -- and other companies, search engines have gotten quite a bit of criticism about their business practices in china but should u.s. companies besetting foreign-policy? shouldn't they just be following the rules determined by that nation? >> host: it is a difficult question. you know, there are issues related to corporate social responsibility that sometimes go, that can sometimes get quite murky, right?

and so there are people who talk for incense about, if you take some other interest -- make interstate say for example a mining company that goes into a repressive regime and the repressive regime says you have to allow our militias to do x,y and z, and to what extent should companies just go along with that and to what extent are they facilitating human rights abuses? and, they are beginning to be internationally and whole set up norms being set up or how you know their codes of conduct about what company shall not do despite the fact that the local government want to allow their militias or want you to fund their militias. even if that is the law, that is a a problem internationally. and, so with companies around the world, i mean it is a tough situation because on the one hand, the internet has brought

tremendous change and empowerment to everywhere and it -- certainly the people of china are much better off with the internet than without it and to say that no company should be doing business in china is over simplistic and i don't support that. but i do think that companies need to be mindful of how they are going about doing business. so it is not a matter of being there or not being there but it is just about how you were engaging. so, you have a situation early on where yahoo! went into china with the chinese e-mail service that they hosted on computer servers inside chinese jurisdiction and lo and behold they ended up being complicit and jailing several dissidents because when the police showed up in yahoo!'s beijing office their chinese staff refused to hand over the information, they too would go to jail. so that put them in a difficult position. when google went in, they chose not to offer a chinese version

of the e-mail so that they wouldn't be -- they decided to draw the line at okay we are not going to host user content inside china because we don't want to be in a position of sharing it with the chinese police but we will experiment with the censoring of the search engine kind of thing and they did that for a few years and ended up deciding they didn't want to do that anymore and took their search engine now. microsoft is still in there with their search engine. it is not being used by many people. they're trying to split the difference a little more in terms of notifying users that censorship is happening and kind of telling the government they are only getting response to legally binding request and we are not going to take random phonecalls from the cops. we need a court order and this kind of thing, to at least try to say look, we have to be grounded in the rule of law. but it is tough. it is a difficult situation for businesses and sometimes it is

very hard to know what the right thing is to do. but i think what we found with business and human rights and the social responsibility and other specters is that look, i can maximize my profit, my profit if i hire 12-year-olds but there are a full set of social norms about why that is not something i should do. because i'm living in a society and over the long run not only is that a moral thing not to do, but you know i will prosper as a business in the long run if i'm perceived as being a good company and if i'm actually doing things that are sustainable for the community. so, companies you know in the internet and technology space are going to need to think about what kind of internet are we contributing to? what kind of internet are we helping to create? if we just go along with

whatever every government wants us to do are we going to destroy the value of the internet in the first place? the whole value of the internet is that people can connect around the world. and, that gets destroyed, because people are saying oh wealth in order to get into this market i have to do this, that and the other, you may end up destroying the value of the thing you are suffering. so people definitely do need to think about the long run and also about their users, what you do when one country is going to have an impact on how you -- users trust you and other countries so if you are compromising people's freedom of speech and privacy in one market, people hear about it and then they say a oh i'm not sure if i want to use that company service. such and such happened in china. >> host: rebecca mackinnon how ubiquitous is the technology and advancement of technology? >> guest: so china now has

about 450 million internet users. >> host: a billion and a half population? >> guest: yes, 1.3 are probably more than that now. we will probably get an upgrade on that but yes somewhere approaching 1.5 million population. so it is less than half of the chinese people on line yet. mobile phone use is many more times that. i don't have to figure off my head. i think a mobile phone use is at 80%. you know, it is many times higher. mobile phone concentration is very high and you have a lot of internet services that leverage that, assuming that people are maybe mainly using their phone and then sort of chat services that you can use three or sms and interface the internet. so yes, there is a lot of growth there so it is a very attractive

market. >> host: as a former journalist for cnn did you ever have trouble doing a report in your reports you would send out ever get censored and were you ever encouraged in courage not to do something? >> guest: i got detained on quite a number of occasions. i got yelled at by the foreign ministry on a number of occasions. my boss got yelled at the foreign ministry on a few occasions. when he visited from headquarters, and at one point they threaten not to renew my visa, and you know a lot of access is kind of contention on whether you behave. so you didn't behave so we are not going to give you an interview with such and such official or we are not going to let you go to tibet and that kind of thing. it happens all the time. so there was a lot of that kind of thing. but i was there at a time, up until the very and when we started being able to send

compressed video out through the internet, most the time -- i was there from 92 until 2001. most of the time there were two -- three ways to get your video out of china. one was through a satellite uplink which was controlled by the government so if you said anything controversial, we have had a technical error. the other way is to fedex or air freighted to tokyo and they do the satellite uplink to atlanta. so you are kind of planting this -- and then the third way was somebody gets on a plane. so up until we got to the point where we could send press videos to the internet which really wasn't until 2000, for a bunch of reasons, we had -- we are handing interns to send to hong

kong. we couldn't beat them on the satellite because they would shut it down. so, it was challenging. now you can send just a compressed video file through broadband, but the most of the way they can show your reporting is they control your access to people so people they don't want reporters interviewing they put under house arrest, and that kind of thing or they will tell people you are not going to talk to journalists. they find ways to keep you from getting access, from getting access so that is primarily it. >> host: it doesn't sound like you won a lot of chinese self-discipline awards we were there. >> guest: no i didn't. >> host: is hong kong still free? i mean i know is recently rated as the number one open economy but when it comes to technology and the use of the internet is it still a unique area? >> guest: yes, well you know after hong kong reverted to

chinese rule in 1997, there was a deal that was made between the british and the chinese that the legal system and the political systems in hong kong would not change for 50 years. and so, hong kong still has free speech protection so that the internet there is not censored. you can -- that is why google move to hong kong, is that they don't have this problem in hong kong. you have got all kinds of logs. you have got the falun gong religious sect which is banned in china, big operation in hong kong. every year they do big parades and demonstrations on the street every day. as long as they don't violate the law, nobody can do anything about it. there are big pro-democracy demonstrations in hong kong every year. there are dissidents from mainland china living in hong kong, so there is that protection. the problem is that the media in hong kong is owned primarily by

business concerns who have business interests in mainland china, so a lot of it, you know there's a certain amount of kind of self-censorship or different people call it different things. people debate how bad it is but there are a lot of journalists in hong kong who complained that their editor told them not to pursue a particular story because publishers you now have concerns, have some other businesses in beijing and my not get a license you know so to kind of tone it down on certain things. >> host: finally rebecca mackinnon what and what is local voices on line and global network initiative and what is your involvement? >> guest: okay there are two different things. global voices on line is an international bloggers media network that i found it along with a dear friend and colleague of mine when i was up at havard

on the center for internet society and the idea is you know there are people all over the world using the internet to talk about all kinds of very interesting things, and when we started it in 2004 the idea was, there are all these bloggers in the middle east or in africa and around asia. we are talking about things happening in other countries at the media is not reporting on just because you know the media can only report so much etc., etc.. but it is really hard to find these loggers unless you know where to look. then you have to know who is credible, this guy who says he is blogging about lebanon is even in lebanon? how do you know? so we developed this team of bloggers around the world to curate what is the most interesting stuff coming out of different regions of the world and got a little funding and started translating things back and forth so we have people doing digests about what is coming out of the arabic blogosphere this week and what are the highest kind of conversations going on and what

is going on in the russian blogosphere and the russian internet? we have got several people who are following that, so it is a way to help, help people in the english-speaking world to get a better handle on the conversations that are happening on line globally and we have gotten a lot of volunteers were translating back and forth into a lot of different languages so it is a lot of fun. it is a nonprofit, and then global network initiatives is basically, it is a multi-stakeholder initiative around free speech and privacy for the internet and telecommunications sector, so the idea was that we got together -- it started coming together back in 2006 after google, yahoo! and microsoft and cisco got yelled at for what they have been doing in