Free Ike's Spies by Stephen E. Ambrose Page B

agency, as was its reputation on the outside.
    Two decades later, former agents looked back on the fifties with strong feelings of nostalgia. Gone were the greats—Frank Wisner, Richard Bissell, Tracey Barnes—and Allen Dulles. Nearly to a man, veterans felt that never again did the CIA have a leader to match Dulles. His motives were pure, his loyalty to his subordinatescomplete, his cause inspiring, his methods brilliant—or so at least it seemed to the ex-agents, in retrospect.
    To the outside world, he seemed more difficult to assess. To some commentators, he appeared to be a rather bumbling imitation of the British master spy, a man who used the twist of a knife here, or a well-staged riot there, to gain and hold an empire. A somewhat contrary view regarded Allen Dulles as the evil genius who was at the center of the capitalist conspiracy to rule the world for the benefit of American corporations, the epitome of the immoral imperialist. Others saw him as a man who could be relied upon to protect American interests around the world, by whatever means were necessary.
    Dulles was a leader who made some mistakes, enjoyed many triumphs. Nothing says more about Ike’s view of Dulles than the fact that the President kept him on the job for eight years, a job that was crucial to the success of the Eisenhower administration, and a job that was clearly the most sensitive in the government. Ike decided he would rather have Allen Dulles as his chief spy, even with his limitations, than anyone else he knew. By itself, that was a powerful endorsement and recommendation.
    INTERVIEWING IKE ABOUT HIS SPIES in his Gettysburg office, when he was in his mid-seventies, it was obvious that he enjoyed dwelling on the war years more than on the years with the CIA . Like many old men, he could remember events of thirty years past more vivdly than those of ten years past. When thinking about the war, he would grin and laugh as he recalled how the Allies won a victory, grimace and redden as he remembered something that had gone wrong.
    Talking about Operation FORTITUDE , he would point out where Patton had created a dummy tank corps, or how the strategic bombing pattern convinced the Germans that the Allies would land at the Pas de Calais rather than Normandy. In the middle of discussing one or another of the myriad of elements that went into FORTITUDE , he would look skyward, frown, then smile, turn toward me with that wonderful grin, slap his hand down on his thigh, and exclaim, “By God, we really fooled them, didn’t we!”
    And he would laugh that big gusty Eisenhower laugh, and still get a kick out of remembering it, after all those years and all those rememberings. “By God, we really fooled them, didn’t we!” Youwould have thought he was Tom Sawyer, pulling off a fast one on Aunt Polly.
    And indeed Ike’s spies did fool the Germans, generally throughout the war but especially so in the crucial OVERLORD battle. Make no mistake about it. OVERLORD was no sure thing. It was about as even a battle, taking all things into consideration, as ever happens. Either side could have won, without the victory being a fluke or the result of some piece of sheer luck. If intelligence and subterfuge did not win the war for the Allies, as might be argued, it is clear that without the edge in intelligence and subterfuge that they achieved and maintained, the Allies might not have won the war.
    â€œWE REALLY FOOLED THEM.” With Ike, the emphasis was always on the “we,” even though he of all men in the Allied world had the right to claim, “I really fooled them.” Partly that “we” was due to native modesty, but mainly it was a recognition of fact. Ike headed a team. He was not a professional intelligence officer, never had been. But through the war he learned how to command an intelligence effort, as he progressed from Robert Murphy and Mark Clark to Mockler-Ferryman and finally to