A ‘Game’ Without Rules : Former OSS agent Tom Moon tells about sabotage behind enemy lines and the ‘intrepid secret warriors’ who executed those missions.

They were top scientists, language experts, Ivy League professors, cops and career military men. That’s not to mention criminals and gangsters proficient in the “arts” of safecracking, picking pockets and forgery.

This hodgepodge of unique talents, which President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered to be formed five months before Pearl Harbor, became known as the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor of the Central Intelligence Agency.

America’s “intrepid secret warriors” are the subject of Garden Grove author Tom Moon’s new nonfiction book, “This Grim and Savage Game: OSS and the Beginning of U.S. Covert Operations in World War II” (Burning Gate Press; $21.95).

OSS agents were trained in hand-to-hand combat, explosives, forgery, arson, lock-picking, map-reading, Morse code, cryptography, silent ways of killing sentries and “black propaganda” (rumors, bribery and blackmail).

Whether sent to the Far East, Europe, Africa or any other part of the globe, they shared the same mission: to gather information to aid the armed forces and to carry out sabotage and guerrilla operations behind enemy lines.

The OSS represented a new dimension in American warfare.

As Moon, himself an OSS veteran, writes, “the rules of warfare were to be abolished for this organization. . . . Anything that could hurt the enemy and aid the Allies was fair game.”

In writing his book, Moon said in an interview, “I wanted to tell the story the way I saw it, to try to clarify things and explain to people why we did things that were illegal and immoral. Putting poison in enemy hospitals isn’t quite cricket.”

True, but it wins wars. Initially derided by the military--one admiral called the OSS a “Tinker Toy group spying on spies”--the OSS would experience considerable success.

In Burma and South China, for example, the OSS is credited with identifying 90% of the air force targets--hidden Japanese ammo dumps and planes, supply lines--and disrupting enemy communications. And in France, large numbers of Nazi tanks were destroyed with a tiny device known as the firefly: Dropped into the gas tank during fueling, it later dissolved and blew up.

The book, which Moon believes is the first to provide a comprehensive worldwide overview of the OSS, covers operations in Asia, Europe and Africa.

It also provides a fascinating glimpse at OSS headquarters in Washington where Dr. Stanley Lovell, a noted chemist and inventor, was enlisted to develop the exotic weapons and poisons that formed the OSS’s unorthodox arsenal.

Dubbed “Prof. Moriarty” by OSS commander Gen. William (Wild Bill) Donovan, Lovell, like the scheming Prof. Moriarty of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, was equally devious.

He created a bag of “toys” that included a silent and flashless gun, exploding candles designed for European women to put on the night stand of their German conquerors, a device to blow the wheels off trains and a single-shot weapon the size of a golfer’s snub pencil.

But the central figure of “This Grim and Savage Game” is Col. Carl Eifler, commander of OSS operations in the Far East, which ultimately involved 800 Americans and up to 10,000 native guerrillas.

Hollywood couldn’t have cast anyone better for the role than the imposing, tough-as-nails Eifler, a man who:

* Did not think twice about grabbing a deadly 10-foot king cobra by the tail and swiftly beheading it with a knife.

* Was an expert marksman who could shoot a cigarette out of the mouth of anyone foolish enough to hold it between his lips and likewise was not afraid to be on the receiving end.

* Frequently challenged his men to “hit me in the stomach as hard as you can” and when they did, neither flinched nor moved.

Moon not only interviewed Eifler extensively for his 1976 book about Eifler, “The Deadliest Colonel,” but he served under him during the war.

One of the OSS’s youngest agents, Moon was a 19-year-old draftee from Lincoln, Neb., when he was plucked out of the Engineer Corps in Louisiana and transferred to the OSS. Having been subjected to “rigid discipline and training” and willing to do “anything to get out,” Moon was gung-ho for the “freedom” his OSS assignment represented.

Freedom was not without a potential price, however.

“They told us the odds were we wouldn’t be coming back,” recalled Moon, now 68. “The instructors told us to take as many (enemy) as you could and check out gracefully.”

Eleven months after being drafted, Moon was in North Burma parachuting 120 miles into enemy territory to distribute “dope and machine guns” to guerrillas fighting against the Japanese. (Because money had no value in the jungle, Moon explained, the guerrillas were paid in opium.)

Being an OSS agent, Moon said, “was like playing chess for real.

“Matching wits with the enemy was really kind of an exciting thing,” he said. “You get on a high with it because you’re gambling with your life. And, let’s face it, it was very heady for a 19-year-old kid out of Nebraska.”

He and his OSS compatriots were not overly concerned by their slim odds of survival. “We figured it was war and at this point we were still losing the war,” he said. “A lot of us had (already) written farewell letters.”

And if things got too tough--say they were captured by the Japanese--they always had the option of taking an L pill, a rubber-coated cyanide capsule.

Moon, who was involved in guerrilla operations and cryptography in Burma, South China and India, fortunately never had cause to take an L pill.

After the war, he worked sporadically as a free-lance writer, writing for nightclub comics, radio and TV then went into the insurance business in Garden Grove.

Over the years, Moon has become a familiar figure in Orange County: He was a founding director of the Orange County Performing Arts Center and served as a singer and business manager for the Master Chorale of Orange County for 18 years. He’s also founding president of the Orange County Chamber Orchestra and served as president and board member of the Grove Shakespeare Festival.

Three years ago a friend asked Moon to give a talk on his OSS experiences. He now gives about five talks a month, mostly to service clubs.

Indeed, 50 years after the start of World War II, people are still fascinated by the role of the OSS during the war.

“They really are,” said Moon. “I love to give the talks because people are so rapt, so anxious to hear: ‘Did we really do that? We bugged Catholic confessional booths? That’s awful. . . . Tell us more.’ ”