Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Disciples: The World War II Missions of the CIA Directors Who Fought for Wild Bill Donovan
    Disciples: The World War II Missions of the CIA Directors Who Fought for Wild Bill Donovan
    Disciples: The World War II Missions of the CIA Directors Who Fought for Wild Bill Donovan
    Audiobook16 hours

    Disciples: The World War II Missions of the CIA Directors Who Fought for Wild Bill Donovan

    Written by Douglas Waller

    Narrated by George Newbern

    4/5

    ()

    Switch to ebook

    About this audiobook

    “A fantastic book, one of the very finest accounts of wartime spookery” (The Wall Street Journal)—a spellbinding adventure story of four secret OSS agents who would all later lead the CIA and their daring espionage and sabotage in wartime Europe from the author of the bestselling Wild Bill Donavan.

    They are the most famous and controversial directors the CIA has ever had—Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, William Colby, and William Casey. Before each of these four men became their country’s top spymaster, they fought in World War II as secret warriors for Wild Bill Donovan’s Office of Strategic Services.

    Allen Dulles ran the OSS’s most successful spy operation against the Axis. Bill Casey organized dangerous missions to penetrate Nazi Germany. Bill Colby led OSS commando raids behind the lines in occupied France and Norway. Richard Helms mounted risky intelligence programs against the Russians in the ruins of Berlin. Later, they were the most controversial directors the CIA has ever had. Dulles launched the calamitous operation at Cuba’s Bay of Pigs. Helms was convicted of lying to Congress over the CIA’s role in the ousting of President Salvador Allende in Chile. Colby would become a pariah for releasing a report on CIA misdeeds during the 1950s, sixties and early seventies. Casey would nearly bring down the CIA—and Ronald Reagan’s presidency—from a scheme that secretly supplied Nicaragua’s contras with money raked off from the sale of arms to Iran for American hostages in Beirut.

    Mining thousands of once-secret World War II documents and interviewing scores, Waller has written a worthy successor to Wild Bill Donovan. “Entertaining and richly detailed” (The Washington Post), Disciples is the story of these four dynamic agents and their daring espionage and sabotage in wartime Europe.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster Audio
    Release dateOct 6, 2015
    ISBN9781442394445
    Author

    Douglas Waller

    Douglas Waller is a former correspondent for Newsweek and Time, where he covered the CIA, Pentagon, State Department, White House, and Congress. He is the author of the bestsellers Wild Bill Donovan, Big Red, and The Commandos, as well as critically acclaimed works such as Disciples, the story of four CIA directors who fought for Donovan in World War II, and A Question of Loyalty, a biography of General Billy Mitchell. He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina.

    Related to Disciples

    Related audiobooks

    Wars & Military For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Carlos Hathcock 1942-1999

      Jun 27, 2019

      One of the things I feel most fortunate about when travelling the places I do is meeting extraordinary people along the way. It never ceases to amaze me just how small the world of hunting and conservation is, and it normally doesn’t take much to mak

      2 min read

    • Article

      'The Road Not Taken,' A Biography Of Edward Lansdale, Makes No Secret Of Its Belief In Its Hero

      Jan 9, 2018

      The book is comprehensively researched and insightfully written. Max Boot is, as always, an extremely talented writer.

      3 min read

    • Article

      Big Business, Books And Atom Bombs

      Apr 21, 2023

      Unshackled by Jeff van Rooyen (Bookstorm, R290) The soccer, music, movies and pavement gambling of Van Rooyen’s 1950s childhood in Alexandra and Riverlea, Johannesburg, are quite vividly sketched in this autobiography. The difference for Van Rooyen w

      2 min read

    • Article

      The Unconventional Collecting Methods of “Baby Face” Nelson

      Nov 9, 2021

      Back in 2012, I did a several month series in Bank Note Reporter on the banks robbed by the infamous 1930’s gangster John Dillinger and his gang. This month, we’ll take a look at another robbery of a national bank, this time by Dillinger’s contempora

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Misunderstood Queen

      Aug 3, 2022

      The Misunderstood Queen
      5 min read

    • Article

      America’s Love-hate Relationship With FDR

      May 1, 2020

      It seems to be a quality of the Roosevelt character either to inspire a mad devotion that can see no flaw, or to kindle a hatred of an intensity that will admit of no virtue. To those of us who followed the late Theodore Roosevelt, there seems nothin

      1 min read

    • Article

      The Villain Of The Piece

      Dec 30, 2020

      HAVING unleashed a much-debated list of heroes out into the world (December 16/23), we come to the really juicy competition: the 50 greatest film villains of all time. The same rules apply—animated characters and super-villains can quibble over who’s

      6 min read

    • Article

      Multiple Moans From The Get-go

      Mar 30, 2023

      Multiple Moans From The Get-go
      3 min read

    • Article

      Don Rickles

      Apr 15, 2017

      Don Rickles
      1 min read

    • Article

      The Man Without a Country

      Jan 5, 2021

      The Man Without a Country
      5 min read

    • Article

      Company Men

      Feb 21, 2023

      Company Men
      2 min read

    • Article

      Final Analysis

      Jan 6, 2024

      Toddler Dod Miller had recently moved to New York from Moscow with his parents when President John F Kennedy was assassinated on 22 November 1963, by former US Marine Lee Harvey Oswald as the president rode in a motorcade along Elm Street through Dea

      2 min read

    • Article

      Mary Sanchez: What If ‘The Donald’ Hadn’t Cheated On Ivana?

      Jul 15, 2022

      It’s both fitting and on Trumpian brand that the death of the First Mrs. Trump, Ivana, was announced on her ex’s social media network. Truth Social is the fledgling platform that he created because his behavior on Twitter had grown too crass, his scr

      3 min read

    • Article

      The War Goes On

      Apr 17, 2020

      The War Goes On
      3 min read

    • Article

      The Vulgar Goes Mainstream

      May 3, 2018

      To be vulgar once earned societal disapproval, ostracism from polite company and -- in my grandmother's era -- put a young person in danger of having his mouth washed out with soap. Today, vulgarities are now mainstream. People speaking in a way that

      2 min read

    • Article

      Call The Junk-monger

      May 27, 2021

      WHENEVER A PRIME Ministerial family is feeling a bit skint it has only to call for Lord Brownlow of Deep Pocket in the County of Dosh and those pecuniary blues will be magicked away. This former rozzer has never needed to importune a passing premier

      3 min read

    • Article

      What’s Worth Watching Week 2

      May 18, 2023

      What’s Worth Watching Week 2
      1 min read

    • Article

      Readers’ Letters

      Sep 21, 2022

      Readers’ Letters
      6 min read

    • Article

      Fighting Fascism

      Oct 29, 2020

      The Good Germans: Resisting the Nazis 1933–1945 by Catrine Clay Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 416 pages, £20 Julius Leber was one of many Germans who found themselves at odds with the Nazis when they rose to power. As a leading Social Democrat, he was promp

      2 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Disciples

    4/5

    12 ratings3 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      Informative, well-researched book on the Wild Bill Donovan protegees and their exploits during WWII.Unfortunately, as I was reading this book I listened to a talk by the author on C-span and it colored the rest of the book for me. I did not find him an interesting speaker and he did not have anything to add to what was in the book.
    • 5/5
      Excellent! It's amazing how history works. Waller covers the history of the CIA through the stories of four of the men who ran it; Allen Dulles, Bill Casey, Bill Colby and Richard Helms. All were proteges of the founder, Wild Bill Donovan. All had their good points, and their faults. Waller explains the early stages of the men's careers, through their leadership, and after they left the agency. The author presents a thorough, very fair, seemingly unbiased, examination of each man. If you read this, you cannot help but come away with a better understanding of why history has played itself out the way that it has. I highly recommend this book.I received this book from NetGalley, in exchange for a fair review.
    • 3/5
      This is a difficult book to rate. I have much respect for the time and research that the author put into writing this book, but the execution was problematic for me. The content is extensive, perhaps too much so for one book. We start with the CIA directors. The first four chapters are early biographies of each of these men, covering their childhoods through to them joining the CIA. We also go back through their family trees, meeting their parents, siblings, and anyone else who might have influenced them early on. From there, we go on to the start of their careers in intelligence and espionage. At this point, we meet countless more players and travel the world with all of them. We follow the timeline of the war, from start to finish, alongside all four men and all of the people with whom they interact. For the most part, I was overwhelmed rather than intrigued by the sheer volume of content. I felt like a needed a chart to keep track of all the people and their relationships. And, while it's impressive that the author was able to unearth so much detail, from where people sat at meetings to what they wore and ate, the way it was all laid out felt like an information dump. There was no time to explore a specific aspect or feeling before the next activity and new people joined the throng. The writing style is straightforward and conversational, but feels too much like a recitation of facts. It mostly reads like a dry textbook, rather than narrative nonfiction. I didn't get a real sense of emotion. I was told, at times, how each of these men felt about a certain thing, but I didn't see it or feel it from their perspectives. This book will have a strong appeal for readers who enjoy meticulously detailed history. Perhaps they are more patient readers than I am.*I was provided with an e-book copy by the publisher, via NetGalley, in exchange for my honest review.*