WASHINGTON — Where do you look when you want to recruit spies? Just about everywhere, judging from the formerly top-secret records of the World War II agency that became today’s CIA.
Names and details on nearly 24,000 one-time intelligence workers are included among 750,000 formerly top-secret government records released Thursday by the National Archives. The documents describe a worldwide spy network during World War II managed by the Office of Strategic Services, the intelligence outfit that later became the CIA.
The personnel files, long withheld from the public, provide insights into young agents now known for other careers. For instance, when Julia McWilliams, later the ebullient chef Julia Child, applied to work for the spy agency, she admitted at least one failing: impulsiveness.
At 28 as an advertising manager at W&J Sloane furniture store in Beverly Hills, Calif., she clashed with new store managers and left her job abruptly.
“I made a tactical error and was out,” she explained in a handwritten note attached to her application to join OSS.
“However, I learned a lot about advertising and wish I had been older and more experienced so that I could have handled the situation, as it was a most interesting position.”
She was hired in the summer of 1942 for clerical work with the intelligence agency and later worked directly for OSS Director William Donovan, the personnel records show.
Some of the others:
• Acclaimed movie director John Ford, whose skill as a videographer qualified him to manage wartime spy photography.
The records show that Ford left his successful Hollywood life as a movie director to become a secret agent in 1941. He was cited by his superiors for bravery, taking a position to film one mission that was “an obvious and clear target.” He survived “continuous attack and was wounded” while he continued filming, one commendation in his file states.
Ford already had won three of his four Academy Awards for films directed before joining OSS, including “The Grapes of Wrath.”
• Arthur Schlesinger, who spent much of his time with OSS working in London as an intelligence officer and writer on the political staff, producing reports on political activities.
“His understanding and familiarity with the political history of European countries, achieved by years of study and firsthand observation . . . admirably qualify him for this responsible work,” one OSS official wrote about Schlesinger.
