Our textbooks missed this small friction between Hoover and Donovan.I have read a number of accounts of this era, and the personalities involved,but I cannot recall one that touched on the Donovon and Smith angle as much as this one does....

... IAN FLEMING KNEW from his attempts to mediate the Hoover-Donovan feud that Central Intelligence could not survive, let alone earn the respect of the British services, unless it was headed by someone willing to step hard on the FBI director’s toes. Those toes were “covered with corns,” as Bond’s boss warned him in Live and Let Die, but in October 1950 CIA finally got a director who did not care. He was the incarnation of everything Fleming and the British loved about America. New World culture might be corrupt—in Fleming’s words, “bad but plentiful food, shiny toys such as the automobile and the television, and the ‘quick buck’ ”—and its style might be dreadful —“chilly white nylon shirts with white points to the collars, garishly patterned foulard ties, overcoats with over-buttressed shoulders”—but James Bond envied the American spirit. In Americans there still lived the rugged energy and individualist drive which had characterized England’s Victorian age. “We don’t show any teeth any more—just gums,” a disillusioned old boy would tell Bond, but American intelligence had men who could still bite. CIA now had the man whom Churchill himself had nicknamed “Bulldog,” and it was due to this man, more than any other, that the British were eventually forced to acknowledge the superiority of America’s Central Intelligence, and J. Edgar Hoover its permanence.

Yet his tenure would also climax in what Agency and Bureau men would later call one of the “lowest” times in the history of inter-agency relations, for Hoover came down hard on suspected communists in the Agency, and investigated one outgoing CIA director as a possible Soviet spy.

WALTER BEDELL SMITH, FBI files noted, was “a man of great personal force.” As CIA analyst Ray Cline recalled, “It was often said he was the most even-tempered man in the world—he was always angry.” That irascibility had made the career military officer a valuable chief of staff for Eisenhower, in whose service Smith had gained an ulcerous stomach and more decorations than he could wear. He had never gone to college but had an encyclopedic mind, and his conversation was interlaced with lengthy verbatim quotations from military authorities. He was antisocial and yet could be, as an associate put it, “one of the most loyal friends you could have; if you were his man, he would really back you.” Unbending when he believed himself right, which was all the time, he was frank to the point of indiscretion, and had a proclivity for popping off. The only other bad thing you might say about Smith was that he drove himself too hard and always seemed to be tired. Said one of his colleagues, interviewed by the FBI during a background check: “If Smith is not the ablest, he is one of the three ablest men in my generation anywhere in the world.” Kim Philby, who worried after the defection of Maclean that Smith might suspect him of treason, put it somewhat differently: “He had a cold, fishy eye and a precision-tool brain…. Smith, I had an uneasy feeling, would be apt to think that two and two made four rather than five.”
https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2020/05/part-4-wedge-secret-war-between-cia-fbi.html