David Alvarez and Eduard Mark. Spying through a Glass Darkly: American Espionage against the Soviet Union, 1945–1946.

Abstract

In Spying through a Glass Darkly: American Espionage against the Soviet Union, 1945–1946, David Alvarez and the late Eduard Mark note that “the intelligence history of the war [World War II] itself has been well studied, as has the early history of the Central Intelligence Agency after that agency’s creation in September 1947, but the immediate postwar period makes hardly an appearance in the many books and articles devoted to American espionage” (268). The authors fill in this “lost time” with an intensely documented account focused on the twelve months following the end of World War II. The result fulfills the need admirably and will likely be the standard scholarly account of this period for many years. The authors cover the institutional changes to American intelligence in this period as well as the hesitant and cautious shifting of the priority targets of American intelligence interest. They discuss the devastating results of the rapid demobilization of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and of the separate army and navy intelligence arms, which began with the surrender of Germany but increased at breakneck speed with the surrender of Japan. By the fall of 1945, OSS personnel had been reduced by nearly half, and numerous OSS stations had either closed or been reduced to holding operations that barely functioned as experienced staff returned to civilian life. By the end of December, the London station had lost 90 percent of its personnel. This process accelerated when President Harry S. Truman dissolved the OSS on September 20, 1945.