Cloak and Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939-1961.

Cloak & Gown

ON HIS return to Yale from two years as a cultural attache 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:

A life spent in the chosen discipline will reinforce the personality characteristics to the point that one cannot separate the individual from the disciplinarian. . . . At times those who practice a given discipline may not be able to recall the days when they knew that the discipline was only a way of ordering reality. . . . The disciplinarian or methodologist begins to forget that most people do not see reality as he sees it, and that they therefore act on different realities.

But Winks is not perfect; examining the intelligence trade from the perspective of the university, he probes the values, professed and truly held, of the "secret warriors" rather more than he does those of the tower-dwellers. But he honors those who make Xenophon's choice, rather than Plato's, and his unique perspective lets him break through the fallacy that led Colby and Turner to their rape of the Agency: that intelligence can succeed without the information the enemy tries hardest to hide, and without the best, most subtle minds evaluating that information.