A state of mind should be encouraged that anything can be sabotaged. That’s from the introduction, and I took it to heart. It was an ideology and I was an idealist.
When it was finished, they ran a thousand copies and off it went to the field agents… the field agents—we tended to go a little slack-jawed when the field agents came through. They were mysterious, sublimely aloof creatures. The administrative officers were always at their wits’ ends over the agents’ behavior. They’d go tearing off through the French countryside, drop out of communication for weeks, sometimes months, with no regard for their orders, and back in D.C., command would be irate—smashing furniture, threatening to shut down entire operations—until lo and behold one day in waltzes the field man for debriefing and here’s the admin officer, the CEO of Ohio Steel out in the real world, suddenly quiet as a mouse, fetching coffee for this twenty-year-old in full beard who hadn’t even bothered to salute. We’d hear reports from China or Afghanistan about field officers marrying multiple women or running liquor, spending money like water, but did anyone raise a finger? Necessary evils of deep cover. An unholy mess, the whole thing. Donovan kept it all together by the force of his personality. He was very close to Roosevelt.
OSS did have a reputation—one we cultivated, I suppose—of being a New Haven social club where waiters in bow ties and waistcoats served sidecars on silver platters. But our agents’ survival odds were abysmal. And if they did survive a mission, they were redeployed quickly, usually into a more dangerous scenario than the last. It was almost as if command was simply trying to see what it would take to kill you. So it took the edge off to pretend that we were a poetry discussion group, I suppose. A number of the field officers were foreign-born—liberated prisoners of Gestapo prisons, Spanish Republicans who’d landed in French refugee camps, what have you. The recruiting pitch was, We’ll get you out of this dungeon, but you have to go back in for us, deal? Those boys and girls, let me tell you. They’d kill you as soon as look at you. They’d been to the white-hot center of hell and escaped Satan himself.
I didn’t meet many field agents during my time at headquarters. That came later. Just fleeting glimpses of them in Washington. They were ghosts. They trained in Canada or on the Chesapeake, and then sailed to England for deployment. Most were captured by the Nazis, who classified them as terrorists, which according to the laws of war allowed them to carry out on-the-spot executions, but in most cases it was torture and interrogation first, then execution. We were aware of this, of course. No one who went over actually expected to return.
That was a grisly business, field operations. When OSS officers did the killing, they killed intimately, in darkness. You were trained to creep through the brush, clinging to the shadows, emerge behind a sentry, embrace him, slit his throat. You felt the struggle of the life draining out of the man when you killed that way, pulling him back into your body, your hand over his mouth, his blood pouring out over your arms. You felt the heat of it. And you knew that at any moment you could suffer the same fate. You could be killed going in, killed coming out. Your drop plane could fly into the side of a mountain. You could parachute into the sea. You could complete your mission, reach the extraction site, lift off, break through the clouds, and be safely on your way to England, and somewhere over the Channel have your plane cut in half by ME-109s. Any number of ways to die. The instructors trained you to deal with your fear by cultivating an uncompromising belief in your own immortality, which isn’t all so difficult when you’re twenty, is it? But all the same.
And of course I was jealous of them, those dashing young spies, and that helped me take the work seriously. I absorbed the lessons of that manual. Anything—anything—could be an instrument of sabotage, and anything could be sabotaged. Doing your typing job poorly was a form of simple sabotage. Being stupid—we intended to teach people to be stupid, to behave like idiots, as a form of subversion. A difficult proposition during wartime, when a factory worker whose deepest sense of pride—the only pride he has left now that the Nazis have plundered everything else he had—is invested in the quality of his product. A bolt or a tank tread or whatever it might be. Consider who one of these potential civilian saboteurs was. He was too old to fight in his country’s army, or he was a cripple. For whatever reason, he’s unable to go to the front with his neighbors and defend his homeland. He’s left back home with the women and children. And his wages had been cut and cut, everything had been rationed, the food on his table was made of sawdust, his cigarettes tasted like kerosene, his alcohol was long gone. What little manhood he had at the beginning of the war had shriveled. German soldiers groped his wife and daughters. Was he angry? You bet. Was he angry enough to sacrifice the last of his pride, though?
That’s the question the operative had to pose. The worker is in conflict with himself, and must be convinced to work slower, to make mistakes, to use his tools incorrectly, to dull their edges, to break them, to waste oil, to forget procedure, and to pretend to be confused and weak. He must be made willing to sacrifice his intellect and spirit for the cause. And what a cause! A cause which ends not with an explosion and a curtain of flame, but a secret, impotent, dim fizzle. It’s quite a hurdle to clear. Yesterday, this factory worker was the best at his job—or at least competent. But now he must will himself to become even worse than the most contemptibly stupid son of a bitch in the entire factory. Other workers will all say, What the hell happened to old Tomasz, he used to be so efficient, and look at him now. And what can old Tomasz say? If he’s committed to his role in fighting Hitler, he can only shrug the idiot’s shrug. Unless, that is, he can convert his friends. And then you have something like the beginning of a revolution. That was the idea, at least.
Minuscule acts of subversion. Harass and demoralize. Millions of people, each one slashing a single Nazi tire. Delivering Nazi mail to the wrong address. An entire country slowly tipping over, felled by a plague of incompetence.
The manual went to press in January ’44. I moved back to the Polish section to work on propaganda but I wasn’t there long, maybe two weeks, before the field section started calling people in for interviews. I was called in first by the head of Morale Operations. I walked in and he said, Take a seat, Saltwater. Manual three, page fifteen, subheading E.
He had this way of speaking that made you feel the words were emanating from his chest, as though he wasn’t even moving his mouth. I was afraid that if I answered incorrectly, I wouldn’t be allowed to work on the next manual, so I closed my eyes and concentrated. Of course, I have no idea what’s on that page he’s asking about. I know the manual by heart, but I don’t have a photographic memory, so I think, Well, that’s somewhere in the Specific Suggestions section, and I worked it out from there, following the logic of the manual. Tools, lubrication, cooling systems, gas and oil, electric motors. A, B, C, D, E. So there I had it. Electric motors, I said.
I saw from his face I’d gotten it right and I felt a thrill, like a schoolboy who’d pleased his teacher. He wasn’t quizzing me to evaluate my fitness for more editorial work, of course. They were up against the wall. I have wondered: If I’d gotten the answer wrong, what might he have done? Probably would have sent me anyway. They’d lost so many field agents in Poland, they were really scraping the bottom of the barrel by the time they got to me. I wasn’t even an officer, but they hopped me right up to second lieutenant.