Boys Will Be Boys : THE OLD BOYS: The American Elite and the Origins of the CIA <i> By Burton Hersh</i> , <i> (Charles Scribner’s Sons: $29.95; 536 pp</i> .<i> , illustrated) </i>

The trouble with men known as “old boys,” among them those who created the Central Intelligence Agency, is that for all their sophistication, education, worldly privilege and connections, they remained such boys. The trouble with what they called “The Great Game”--espionage, intelligence, the secret war--is that to them, despite its deadliness to others, that is what it always was. Games, after all, have no consequences, and the men whose lives that Burton Hersh traces so vividly in this book--especially William J. Donovan, Allen Dulles, Frank Gardiner Wisner and William C. Bullitt--behaved exactly as if their wildest impulse was justified not by what it would lead to but by the fact that it was such splendid men--themselves--having it. What had they been trained for in their posh schools, prepared for in their Wall Street offices and celebrated for in their clubs if not the sport of rearranging the world?

After World War II, a contingent of former OSS men, spirited diplomats and corporate lawyers went beyond the official doctrine of “containment” and devised a strategy for “rolling back” the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. Although it involved relatively harmless elements like radio broadcasts and clandestine drops behind the Iron Curtain and an embrace of emigre reactionaries who’d fled to the West, that strategy consisted essentially in actively encouraging in-place resisters in East Bloc countries to revolt against the Soviet occupiers. They were supported with money, material and, always, promises that Uncle Sam would join in any uprising they launched.

Nothing embodies the Cold War-era CIA’s inhumanity--and adolescent game-playing--better than the abandonment of all of the freedom fighters whom it coaxed into streets and onto beaches, from Berlin to Budapest to Cuba. CIA coaches always stayed on the sidelines once their games turned “wet.” The uprisings all failed. “Rollback” failed. And meanwhile, in its primary mission, that of providing intelligence, the CIA was failing miserably too. (American Presidents had no or inadequate warnings of the Russian A-Bomb in ‘49, the Northern Korean invasion in ‘50, Stalin’s death in ‘53, the Budapest uprising in ‘56, the British invasion of Suez in ‘56, Sputnik in ‘57, the capacity of Soviet SAMs to shoot down the U-2 in ’60.)

The “successes” of the CIA in the period under study in this book were even more disastrous. The CIA overthrows of Mossadegh in Iran in 1953 and Arbenz Guzman in Guatemala in 1954, and its installation of Ngo Dinh Diem as prime minister of South Vietnam in 1954, all touted at the time as triumphs, all led directly to generation-spanning American nightmares and to heinous suffering inflicted on millions in Central America, Southeast Asia and the Middle East.

In addition to the harm it inflicted around the world, the CIA’s covert-action ethos infected the American government itself, as we learned in Watergate and Iran-Contra. It is widely accepted in the United States that we need an active intelligence service, but a review of the CIA’s performance makes it hard to believe that the world--or America’s place in it--would be worse off if the CIA had simply never come into existence.

Burton Hersh has written an important book about all of this. His account of the Dulles brothers’ activities as lawyers for international corporations in the ‘30s, especially German ones, reveals a fatal early willingness to do business with fascists. Late in the war and immediately afterward, Allen Dulles is portrayed as rather all too eager to spare high-ranking Nazis on the chance they could be useful against the Soviets.

The American intelligence service was born in moral compromise and grew up in it. It comes as no surprise when Hersh lays out the “old boys’ ” commercial connections to the United Fruit Company in explaining their 1950s interest in doing its violent bidding in Central America. The men whom first Donovan and then Allen Dulles recruited, as Hersh writes, “couldn’t really help imbuing their crusade with Wall Street’s ethos. A fever for long-shot deals and overnight profit-taking overstimulated the swelling secret enterprise. . . .

“Too often secrecy guaranteed impunity, and impunity irresponsibility.”

According to Hersh’s largely convincing saga, there was little hesitation to embrace a morality in which the ends justified the means. Since the Church Committee’s investigations nearly two decades ago, we know that the means, including assassination, were often heinous, but it is a shock to realize, as Hersh helps us to, how rarely the ends were achieved in any case. If the ends don’t justify the means, nothing does.

As a book that wants to be a major summary of a crucial part of the Cold War story, “The Old Boys” has large shortcomings. Most obvious and most intrusive is the author’s penchant for overblown and imprecise use of language. Hersh’s style involves a regular stringing together of snappy and often woefully mixed metaphors, and even when his exuberant images illuminate his point, they draw far too much attention to themselves. This description, for example:

“The Bay of Pigs would constitute the last true blow-off of classical-era covert, something like the Fourth-of-July finale when all the whistlers and rockets and chrysanthemums of streaming light arc through the blackness above stiffening onlookers. Every mistake went up. When everything came down the men around JFK stood gawking at a kind of giant East-West road accident, while scavengers from the media hopped back and forth in the mess to peck the entrails into view.”

Or this:

“A bucktoothed, dumpy little manipulatrix with collaborationist impulses whose hold over Premier Paul Renaud helped compound the travesty, the Comtesse had never scrupled to call on political influence to supplement her boudoir requirements.”

“The Old Boys” begins with an account of the Dulles brothers as young portfolio carriers at Versailles, and it ends at the Bay of Pigs four decades later. Hersh is clearly acquainted with all of the complicated elements of this story, and most of the players in the “game,” but his failure to draw a uniting narrative line through many complexities often leaves the reader confused, wondering if something isn’t missing. For example, Hersh’s preoccupation with the European “game” leads to the crippling omission of any substantial treatment of what the old boys were up to in Southeast Asia during the same period. Since Vietnam will always stand as the ultimate CIA-engendered disaster, operatives like Desmond Fitzgerald and Edward G. Lansdale deserve more than the bare mentions Hersh gives them.

One finally questions whether Hersh’s lack of narrative consistency, like his disjointed sense of metaphor and often inappropriate word choice, doesn’t result from an inability to keep a multifaceted subject in intelligent focus. Ironically, “The Old Boys” seems to lack an organizing principle, going off whimsically in odd directions, much like the CIA itself, which was always at the mercy of the odd personalities of those in charge. Hersh’s exuberant style, like the CIA’s, works against his larger purpose.

But in the end this is a book that can help us begin to understand what has happened to America through the years of the Cold War. Hersh writes of the CIA without the romantic filters of Norman Mailer’s “Harlot’s Ghost” or the blinding paranoia of Oliver Stone’s “JFK.” Something went badly wrong with our government at the end of World War II, and now perhaps we can begin to correct it.

Hersh tells the story of Wild Bill Donovan presenting himself to Harry Truman shortly after F.D.R.’s death. Donovan handed Truman a memo outlining a proposed permanent postwar intelligence Establishment. Truman thanked Donovan “for all you’ve done for your country,” but he also said, “I am completely opposed to international spying on the part of the United States. It is un-American.”

“And then,” according to Donovan’s account, “he took the envelope and tore it in half, and handed the two halves back to me.”

Of course Truman was a “realist” who went on to preside over the formal establishment of a CIA that institutionalized the puerile esprit and essential irresponsibility of the first old boys. Their “Great Game” was no fun to the millions who died in it for no purpose; the CIA played no part in the eventual “rollback” of Communism, and it offered far more harm to democracy than protection. Burton Hersh’s bold and passionate book will make readers wish that Harry Truman had stuck by his impulsive response to Donovan. Oh, to be able to rip the thing in half and start over.

BOOK MARK: For an excerpt from “The Old Boys,” see the Opinion section, Page 3.