John Lisle

Fear of missing out had numerous countries building dirty tricks departments in the lead up to World War II. They developed spies, cover stories, secret weapons, tools and lots of code-named plans to annihilate each other. So with USA. Franklin Roosevelt authorized the creation of the Office of Special Services (OSS), specifically to undermine Germany before it could undermine the USA. The Dirty Tricks Department, by John Lisle is a recitation of that history, and the larger than life characters it assembled to pull it off.


The book covers the careerspan of Stanley Lovell, a chemist plucked from obscurity to build a laboratory of dirty tricks and weapons. (Before he even accepted the job, General (Wild) Bill Donovan, a certified war maniac, started calling him Professor Moriarity). He had unparalleled freedom because no one had any idea what was needed or wanted at the time. Lovell experimented, designed, built and tested innovative weapons of all kinds, turning a golf course into a bombing range and trying out new weapons in the wilds of southeast Asia. Many became the stuff of fiction, like the L-pill made with cyanide for instant death to avoid torture. Donovan admitted to no expertise in this, and Lovell’s instructions were to build it and show him, rather than propose it and ask permission.

As the decades passed, Lovell, immersed in his mission, became oblivious of the implications of ever-increasing death machines. He became a proponent of bioweapons and poisons. He no longer cared how many civilians he took down in order to disrupt an enemy supply chain. He rationalized everything as shortening the war. The 1920s Stanley Lovell would have been mortified by the 1940s Stanley Lovell.

Fortunately, FDR would have none of it, a hugely important check on the power of the OSS. Then Truman shut it down completely. Sadly, the Cold War meant the USA had to have some sort of such service operating, so it created the CIA. The CIA wasted no paragraph of history and largely recreated the OSS, its labs, testing sites, and networks. It is fair to say the CIA is the successor to the OSS. For those who demonize the CIA, this book will explain exactly where it all came from, soon after World War I a hundred years ago.

There is an interesting side trip with Harry Anslinger, the director of the Bureau of Narcotics in the same era. He was so upset at the budget cuts for his agency in the 30s (there was a Depression going on), that he took it upon himself to create a crisis only his agency could solve. That crisis was marijuana, very little understood by white government officials. He made up all kinds of stories about its nefarious powers and damaging illnesses. It had to be banned outright, and his agency had to enforce it with arrests all over the country, assuming funds were provided. And so the USA spent the last 90 years putting millions in prison for possession of marijuana. Meanwhile, Anslinger became the go-to expert on marijuana (as a truth-inducing drug), and appears in numerous roles advising or evaluating projects at the OSS.

Lisle only barely touches on the great ironies. First of all, there was the atomic bomb. Although it was top secret, inside the beltway (as we say today), it seems everyone knew they were working on it and that it was imminent. This means all the intense efforts to develop umbrella guns, timed pencil bombs, exploding flour and bomblets of diseases carried by bats were microscopically trivial by comparison. And pointless.

Then too, there was the lingering suspicion, now fully proven, that all the spy networks changed nothing. Net zero. Assassinating a spy or blowing up a facility from the ground instead of from the air, ultimately made no difference. And for all their ever-increasingly sophisticated, secret, code-named missions all over the world, the same is true of the CIA today. If anything, they have made things worse as the embarrassing details become public knowledge. The CIA has taken upon itself the mission to demolish any government that doesn’t sufficiently toe the US line. It makes enemies, where the OSS fought them.

A third irony is that for all their intelligence efforts, the OSS never leveraged the glaringly obvious: that Germany was always short of petroleum and relied on horses to transport supplies. Beginning right with the invasion of Poland to kick off the war, horses were everywhere and critical to the effort. As Himmler said at Nuremburg, if the Americans had looked for a way to sicken horses, the war would have been a lot shorter. Instead, it invented self-attaching limpet mines and perfected forgeries the Germans lauded.

The book is an easy, fast and entertaining read, in spite of, or more likely because it is simply a collection of fun anecdotes. Good, old-fashioned stories of crazy-dedicated men and women. Some are less believable than others, but all together they make for a fine look into the machinations of the nascent American spy business. Every little story has a cited source, to the point where there are 600 endnotes in a book just 225 pages long. That’s about three stories a page, so it never gets stale.

However. All of these stories are well known. I have read them (and reviewed them) myself in other such volumes, such as 2019’s Poisoner in Chief, the story of the CIA’s Sidney Gottlieb, who basically recreated what Lovell had built, and then took it much farther. For example he masterminded a mission to give massive doses of LSD to unsuspecting American and Canadian hospital patients in the fruitless search for a truth serum. What I’m trying not to say is that there is nothing at all new here. It is a remix of the legendary stories of the OSS and American spying. Except it was in a time of war, not of peace. This, for many, has given the CIA a terrible reputation, compared to the admirable heroics of the OSS.

The way things work in this culture is that everything past is forgotten. From that angle, Lisle’s effort to rekindle these stories with this new book, is an important thing. However, for those who have read into the OSS, the CIA and their British and German equivalents will find absolutely nothing new here. There are no bombshell discoveries, no new insights and no controversial interpretations. It’s another very human, character-driven re-look at a wild time.

David Wineberg… (altro)

nonfiction, historical-places-events, historical-research, historical-figures, history-and-culture, espionage, assassins, chemist, sabotage, counterfeit-money, research-and-development, arson, counterfeit-documents, poisons, 20th-century,*****

In that time they were fighting a monstrous lunatic.
The development of the counter intelligence units in the US began in response to what was developing in Europe while this country was still in isolation mode. Much of that origination was aided by the work already being done by the professionals in London. One man who was deeply involved with the research and development aspects was Stanley Lovell. His life diverged after 1945, but the business of espionage and worse did not end with the war. The writing is well researched in declassified documents and documented during and after the prose. But it's hardly all grim and does slip in some very sly humor--"a terminal illness in front of a firing squad." A good read and perfect for those of us who geek history.
I requested and received an EARC from St. Martin's Press via NetGalley. Thank you!… (altro)

The Dirty Tricks Department by John Lisle is a very interesting read that, while containing a lot of information, was actually more enjoyable simply as a narrative telling of factual events.

I should clarify. I expected a decent read but one with a lot of, to some, dry details. I am one of those who enjoy such dryness when it serves to expand my knowledge in an area I like. This book offered plenty of facts, not quite as much depth as I had hoped, but all told in a very engaging manner. This is neither positive nor negative, just a difference in what I expected and what I got. If anyone is worried this might be dry, don't worry, it is an enjoyable read that informs while it entertains.

Lovell, as well as the other key players, were all exceptionally talented people in their fields and, even in some of their questionable work, were working for what they believed to be the good cause. The work they did illustrates clearly just how important creativity is to good science.

Recommended for readers with an interest in WWII history, espionage, and gadgetry in general.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.… (altro)