Need to Know: World War II and the Rise of American Intelligence

Former CIA officer Reynolds (Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy) delivers an exhaustively researched critical history of American military intelligence from 1940 to the beginning of the Cold War. Before WWII, Reynolds notes, the U.S. had no permanent spy agency. At the war’s outset, President Franklin Roosevelt’s “haphazard approach” led to multiple counterintelligence programs: the Army and Navy each had its own systems for tracking and breaking encrypted messages; J. Edgar Hoover’s nascent FBI had begun foreign campaigns in Latin America; and William “Wild Bill” Donovan’s Office of Strategic Services, an independent department based on the British intelligence services, changed its mission according to the whims of its impulsive founder. Reynolds spends little time recounting far-flung spy missions, choosing instead to focus on the internal conflicts and personality clashes that roiled these intelligence agencies, including the battle for power between Donovan and Hoover. Light is also shed on lesser-known figures including Kenneth A. Knowles, a former gunnery officer who led the Navy’s efforts to track German U-boats in the Atlantic. Though the extensive cast of characters can be hard to keep track of, Reynolds’s scrupulous and well-rounded approach reveals the good, the bad, and the reckless in the early days of U.S. intelligence. Espionage buffs will be fascinated. (Sept.)