Books in Brief: Cloak & Gown

Cloak & Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939-1961, by Robin W. Winks (Morrow, 607 pp., $22.95)

On his return to Yale from two years as a cultural attaché in London, Robin Winks, a professor of history, found himself under the suspicion of his colleagues: he had served the Enemy. Disturbed by the assumption that government service inevitably compromised the academic, he began Cloak & Gown, an engaging study of the hard case: Yale men who served their country in intelligence work, and of the assonance and dissonance of the ways of scholars and spies. The Yale angle is a more than adequate window on every branch of intelligence, each represented by a Yale man from the OSS or CIA. The most fascinating is James Jesus Angleton, who kept American intelligence free of Soviet penetration until he was downgraded by Schlesinger, discarded by Colby, and excoriated by Turner. Angleton is the occasion for Winks’s most penetrating insights into the similarities between intelligence work and the true academic life. Other works might convey more of the global activities of the OSS, but Winks puts us inside his subjects’ minds. His contention that academic skills, particularly those of the historian, are vital to intelligence work is demonstrated as much by the sympathetic insight he brings to the topic as by the results of his study. He is sympathetic even when criticizing his subjects; reflecting on Angleton’s unusual testimony before the various witch-hunters of the 1970s, he notes of academics and agents alike:

MC

About the Author

Mark Cunningham

Featured Tags

Cloak & Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939-1961, by Robin W. Winks (Morrow, 607 pp., $22.95)

On his return to Yale from two years as a cultural attaché in London, Robin Winks, a professor of history, found himself under the suspicion of his colleagues: he had served the Enemy. Disturbed by the assumption that government service inevitably compromised the academic, he began Cloak & Gown, an engaging study of the hard case: Yale men who served their country in intelligence work, and of the assonance and dissonance of the ways of scholars and spies. The Yale angle is a more than adequate window on every branch of intelligence, each represented by a Yale man from the OSS or CIA. The most fascinating is James Jesus Angleton, who kept American intelligence free of Soviet penetration until he was downgraded by Schlesinger, discarded by Colby, and excoriated by Turner. Angleton is the occasion for Winks’s most penetrating insights into the similarities between intelligence work and the true academic life. Other works might convey more of the global activities of the OSS, but Winks puts us inside his subjects’ minds. His contention that academic skills, particularly those of the historian, are vital to intelligence work is demonstrated as much by the sympathetic insight he brings to the topic as by the results of his study. He is sympathetic even when criticizing his subjects; reflecting on Angleton’s unusual testimony before the various witch-hunters of the 1970s, he notes of academics and agents alike: