CONTENTS:

Acknowledgements
Foreword
COI Came First 
What Was OSS?
Research & Analysis
Special Operations
Secret Intelligence
X-2
Weapons and Spy Gear
OSS in Asia
An End and a Beginning
Suggested Readings



ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The Office of Public Affairs (OPA) wishes to thank Michael Warner, of the 
CIA History Staff in the Center for the Study of Intelligence, for his 
work in drafting and preparing this publication. OPA also expresses its 
gratitude to all the veterans and students of the Office of Strategic 
Services who gave of their time, insights, and memories in reviewing Dr. 
Warner's draft. Most of the photographs are from Record Group 226 (OSS) in 
the National Archives and Record Administration, College Park, Maryland. 
We also wish to thank H. Keith Melton for his permission to photograph 
items from his extensive collection of OSS artifacts, and Robert Viau for 
permission to use the photo of Major Cyr. The photo of Virginia Hall and 
permission to photograph her passports are courtesy of Lorna Catling; we 
wish to thank her as well. 


FORWARD

The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) left a legacy of daring and 
innovation that has influenced American military and intelligence thinking 
since World War II. OSS owed its successes to many factors, but most of 
all to the foresight and drive of William J. Donovan, who built and held 
together the office's divergent missions and personalities. Given the 
toughness of OSS's adversaries and the difficulty of the tasks assigned to 
the office, Donovan and his lieutenants could take pride in what they 
achieved. Ironically, by the end of the war, he had done his job so well 
that his presence was no longer essential to carry American intelligence 
into a new peacetime era. When the White House wanted to retire him in 
1945, it also took care to save valuable components of the office that he 
had created. Today's Central Intelligence Agency derives a significant 
institutional and spiritual legacy from OSS. In some cases this legacy 
descended directly; key personnel, files, funds, procedures, and contacts 
assembled by OSS found their way into the CIA more or less intact. In 
other cases the legacy is less tangible—but no less real. 

Intelligence agencies are usually laid open to public view only when a 
nation is defeated in war and its conquerors are able to ransack its 
archives. The Office of Strategic Services is perhaps unique among 
intelligence services in that most of its story has been opened up by 
voluntary release. Over the last two decades, the Central Intelligence 
Agency—the heir of OSS—has gradually transferred almost all of OSS's 
records in its custody to the National Archives and Records Administration 
in College Park, Maryland. Scholars and writers are mining these files to 
produce a growing body of accurate and insightful work on OSS.

OSS was perhaps too large and sprawling to describe in a single essay. 
General Donovan volunteered his office for a wide variety of missions, but 
he had little patience for administrative detail and never tried to force 
OSS into a neat organizational framework. The office restructured itself 
so frequently that no single chart can adequately summarize its many 
components. Indeed, the rapid proliferation of offices and missions means 
that many worthy components and exploits regretfully must be left out of 
such a brief survey in order to leave room for the overall picture. What 
follows is an attempt to describe some of the important components of OSS 
and to highlight some of its significant missions and personalities. 

Michael Warner
CIA History Staff
May 2000 



COI CAME FIRST

Before World War II, the US Government traditionally left intelligence to 
the principal executors of American foreign policy, the Department of 
State and the armed services. Attachés and diplomats collected the bulk of 
America's foreign intelligence, mostly in the course of official business 
but occasionally in clandestine meetings with secret contacts. In 
Washington, desk officers scrutinized their reports in the regional 
bureaus and the military intelligence services (the Office of Naval 
Intelligence [ONI] and the War Department's Military Intelligence 
Division, better known as the G-2). Important and timely information went 
up the chain of command, perhaps even to the President, and might be 
shared across departmental lines, but no one short of the White House 
tried to collate and assess all the vital information acquired by the US 
government. State and the military developed their own security and 
counterintelligence procedures, and the Army and Navy created separate 
offices to decipher and read foreign communications. Senior diplomat 
Robert Murphy later reflected "it must be confessed that our Intelligence 
organization in 1940 was primitive and inadequate. It was timid, 
parochial, and operating strictly in the tradition of the Spanish-American 
War."

As another European war loomed in the late 1930s, fears of fascist and 
Communist "Fifth Columns" in America prompted President Franklin D. 
Roosevelt to ask for greater coordination by the departmental intelligence 
arms. When little seemed to happen in response to his wish, he tried again 
in the spring of 1941, expressing his desire to make the traditional 
intelligence services take a strategic approach to the nation's 
challenges—and to cooperate so that he did not have to arbitrate their 
squabbles. A few weeks later, Roosevelt in frustration resorted to a 
characteristic stratagem. With some subtle prompting from a pair of 
British officials—Admiral John H. Godfrey and William Stephenson (later 
Sir William)—FDR created a new organization to duplicate some of the 
functions of the existing agencies. The President on 11 July 1941 
appointed William J. Donovan of New York to sort the mess as the 
Coordinator of Information (COI), the head of a new, civilian office 
attached to the White House. 

The office of the Coordinator of Information constituted the nation's 
first peacetime, nondepartmental intelligence organization. President 
Roosevelt authorized it to collect and analyze all information and data, 
which may bear upon national security: to correlate such information and 
data, and to make such informa- tion and data available to the President 
and to such departments and officials of the Government as the President 
may determine; and to carry out, when requested by the President, such 
supplementary activities as may facilitate the securing of information 
important for national security not now available to the Government. 


"Wild Bill" Donovan

[image caption: Colonel Donovan in St. Mihiel, France, September 1918]

"OSS was a direct reflection of Donovan's character. He was its spark 
plug, the moving force behind it. In a sense it can be said that Donovan 
was OSS."

[image caption: Stewart Alsop and Thomas Braden, Sub Rosa (1946)]

In selecting William J. Donovan as his Coordinator of Information in July 
1941, President Roosevelt chose an energetic civilian who shared his 
desire to do whatever it took to resist Nazism and the danger it posed to 
America. "Wild Bill" Donovan owned a sterling résumé, with distinguished 
military service, executive and legal experience, an abiding interest in 
foreign affairs, and a vision of the importance of "strategic" 
intelligence that colleagues found inspiring. 

Donovan was a Buffalo, New York, native who had earned his law degree at 
Columbia. He joined the 165th Infantry Regiment (also called the "Fighting 
69th" from its Civil War days) and earned a Medal of Honor as a battalion 
commander charging German lines in World War I. After the war he visited 
Europe, Siberia, and Japan, served as assistant attorney general in the 
Coolidge administration (briefly supervising a young J. Edgar Hoover and 
his new Federal Bureau of Investigation [FBI]), practiced antitrust law in 
New York City, and lost the 1932 election as the Republican candidate for 
Governor of New York. His interest in world affairs never diminished. Nor 
did his zest for being where the action was; he even toured the Italian 
battlelines in Ethiopia in 1935. Donovan also made wide contacts in 
government and among public-spirited financial and legal figures in New 
York City: men like Frank Knox, David Bruce, and the Dulles brothers, 
Allen and John Foster. 

When Frank Knox became FDR's new Secretary of the Navy in 1940, he brought 
William Donovan to Roosevelt's attention (FDR and Donovan had been 
classmates—although not companions—at Columbia Law School). That summer, 
Roosevelt confidentially asked Donovan to visit Britain and report on 
London's resolve and its staying power against Hitler. Donovan's British 
hosts understood his mission. Prime Minister Winston Churchill, hoping to 
win American support for Britain's desperate war effort, ensured that 
Donovan saw everything he wanted, granting him extraordinary access to 
defense and intelligence secrets. Donovan also toured the Balkans and 
British outposts in the Mediterranean in early 1941. Roosevelt was 
impressed with Donovan's reports and with his ideas on intelligence and 
its place in modern war. When the President decided to force the military 
and civilian services to cooperate on intelligence matters in the summer 
of 1941, Donovan was the man he tapped to perform this mission. 

William J. Donovan happily accepted the challenge and set to work with 
typical charisma and zeal. When the war came to America at Pearl Harbor, 
however, Donovan wanted to command troops on the battlefield again and 
hoped to gain a commission in the US Army. His hopes were soon dashed. An 
automobile accident in the spring of 1942 aggravated an old war wound, and 
Donovan realized that he would never again hold a field command. 
Nevertheless, he eventually wore a general's stars. As the Director of OSS 
and a representative of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Donovan commanded 
thousands of service personnel, and it was deemed helpful to recommission 
him for the duration of the war. He was placed on active duty and promoted 
to Brigadier General in March 1943 and won promotion to Major General in 
November 1944.


COI, said historian Thomas F. Troy, was "a novel attempt in American 
history to organize research, intelligence, propaganda, subversion, and 
commando operations as a unified and essential feature of modern warfare; 
a 'Fourth Arm' of the military services." The office grew quickly in the 
autumn before Pearl Harbor, with Donovan cheerfully accumulating various 
offices and staffs orphaned in their home departments. 

One of Donovan's hand-me-down units brought to COI a mission unforeseen 
even by him: espionage. Donovan had intended the clandestine intelligence 
gathering of his office to serve its analytical and propaganda branches; 
he had not originally sought to duplicate the foreign intelligence 
missions of the armed services. Nevertheless, it was the armed services, 
uncomfortable with the peacetime espionage mission, that persuaded COI in 
September 1941 to accept the small "undercover" intelligence branches of 
ONI and the G-2. Along with this acquisition, COI won authority to utilize 
"unvouchered" funds from the President's emergency fund. Unvouchered funds 
were the lifeblood of clandestine operations. They were granted by 
Congress to be spent at the personal responsibility of the President or 
one of his officers, and were not audited in detail—Donovan's signature on 
a note attesting to their proper use sufficed for accounting purposes. 
These funds, combined with the espionage authority granted COI by the 
military, planted the seed of the modern CIA's Directorate of Operations.

Donovan recruited Americans who traveled abroad or studied world affairs 
and, in that age, such people often represented "the best and the 
brightest" at East Coast universities, businesses, and law firms. As war 
against Hitler loomed, not a few of America's leading citizens looked for 
opportunities to join the struggle against Nazism. (COI's successor, OSS, 
eventually drew such a high proportion of socially prominent men and women 
that Washington wits dubbed it "Oh So Social.") These recruits brought 
into COI the practices and disciplines of their academic and legal 
backgrounds. 

Donovan himself had traveled widely since his Army service in World War I, 
and he had been a careful observer of social, political, and military 
conditions. Similarly, his legal briefs on behalf of corporate clients 
were patiently and voluminously documented. As Coordinator of Information, 
he saw an opportunity to make research a cornerstone of his new 
information agency. Donovan won cooperation from the Librarian of Congress 
(the poet Archibald MacLeish) for his plan to analyze Axis strengths and 
vulnerabilities. At roughly the same time, COI established its own 
Research and Analysis Branch (R&A) to test Donovan's hypothesis that 
answers to many intelligence problems could be found in libraries, 
newspapers, and the filing cabinets of government and industry:

We have, scattered throughout the various departments of our government, 
documents and memoranda concerning military and naval and air and economic 
potentials of the Axis which, if gathered together and studied in detail 
by carefully selected trained minds, with a knowledge both of the related 
languages and technique, would yield valuable and often decisive results. 

By autumn 1941, Donovan was proudly submitting the first of R&A's 
meticulously prepared studies to President Roosevelt. The Branch was still 
small and focused on Europe at the time of Pearl Harbor, however, and it 
had no role in the operational and intelligence failures surrounding that 
disaster.



WHAT WAS OSS?

America's entry into the war in December 1941 provoked new thinking about 
the place and role of COI. Donovan and his new office—with its $10 million 
budget, 600 staffers, and its charismatic director—had provoked hostility 
from the FBI, the G-2, and various war agencies. The new Joint Chiefs of 
Staff (JCS) initially shared this distrust, regarding Donovan, a civilian, 
as an interloper—but one they might be able to control and utilize if COI 
could be placed under JCS control. Surprisingly, Donovan himself, by now, 
was inclined to agree. Working with the Secretary of the JCS, Brig. Gen. 
Walter B. Smith, Donovan devised a plan to bring COI under the JCS in a 
way that would preserve the office's autonomy while winning it access to 
military support and resources.

President Roosevelt endorsed the idea of moving COI to the Joint Chiefs. 
The President, however, wanted to keep COI's Foreign Information Service 
(which conducted radio broadcasting) out of military hands. Thus he split 
the "black" and "white" propaganda missions, giving FIS the officially 
attributable side of the business—and half of COI's permanent staff—and 
sent it to the new Office of War Information. The remainder of COI then 
became the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) on 13 June 1942. The change 
of name to OSS marked the loss of the "white" propaganda mission, but it 
also fulfilled Donovan's wish for a title that reflected his sense of the 
"strategic" importance of intelligence and clandestine operations in 
modern war.

A month later, OSS's institutional rivals delivered another blow to 
Donovan's aspirations for the new outfit. The Department of State and the 
armed services arranged a Presidential decree that effectively banned OSS 
and several other agencies from acquiring and decoding the war's most 
important intelligence source: intercepted Axis communications. Donovan 
protested, but his complaints fell on deaf ears. The result was that OSS 
had no access to intercepts on Japan (codenamed MAGIC) and could read only 
certain types of German intercepts (called ULTRA by the Allies). Other 
edicts also limited OSS's scope and effectiveness. The FBI, G-2 and ONI, 
for instance, stood together to protect their monopoly on domestic 
counterintelligence work. OSS eventually developed a capable 
counterintelligence apparatus of its own overseas—the X-2 Branch—but it 
had no authority to operate in the Western Hemisphere, which was reserved 
for the FBI and Nelson Rockefeller's office of the Coordinator of Inter-
American Affairs.

OSS expanded in 1942 into full-fledged operations abroad. Donovan sent 
units to every theater of war that would have them. His can-do approach 
had already impressed the State Department, which in 1941 had desperately 
needed men to serve as intelligence officers in French North Africa. 
Donovan's COI sent a dozen officers to work as "vice consuls" in several 
North African ports, where they established networks and acquired 
information to guide the Allied landings (Operation TORCH) in November 
1942. The success of TORCH won OSS much needed praise and supporters in 
Washington. Unfortunately, General Douglas MacArthur in the South Pacific 
and Admiral Chester Nimitz in the Central Pacific saw little use for OSS, 
and the office was thus kept from contributing to the main American 
campaigns against Imperial Japan. Nonetheless, Donovan forged ahead and 
hoped for the best. Utilizing military cover for the most part, but with 
some officers under diplomatic and non-official cover, OSS began to build 
a world-wide clandestine capability.

This worldwide reach benefited from close OSS contacts with British 
intelligence services. The British had much to teach their American pupils 
when COI opened its London office in November 1941. Both sides gained from 
the partnership. OSS needed information, training, and experience, all of 
which the British organizations could provide. The British good-naturedly 
envied the relative wealth of resources seemingly at the command of OSS 
and other American agencies and hoped to share in that bounty to expand 
their own operations against the Axis. Despite a mutual desire to 
cooperate, however, relative harmony between OSS and its British 
counterparts took time to achieve. 

The slow maturing of inter-Allied cooperation had several causes. British 
intelligence services had their own operations and plans to protect and 
feared that working too closely with the inexperienced Americans would 
jeopardize the safety of their operatives in occupied Europe. This British 
caution kept the Americans in the awkward status of junior partners for 
much of the war, particularly during the planning for covert action in 
support of the D-Day landings in Normandy in 1944. For their part, OSS 
officers worried about making their new agency dependent on even a 
friendly foreign intelligence service. Conflicting policy goals 
occasionally hampered liaison with the British services in Asia. American 
diplomacy quietly frowned on British imperialism, and some OSS officers 
informally opposed British moves they viewed as efforts to expand the 
Empire. Despite these obstacles, however, the liaison relationship 
gradually grew closer as shared sacrifices and common goals forced 
officers in the field and in their respective headquarters to resolve 
their differences.

At its peak in late 1944, OSS employed almost 13,000 men and women. In 
relative terms, it was a little smaller than a US Army infantry division 
or a war agency like the Office of Price Administration, which governed 
prices for many commodities and products in the civilian economy. General 
Donovan employed thousands of officers and enlisted men seconded from the 
armed services, and he also found military slots for many of the people 
who came to OSS as civilians. US Army (and Army Air Forces) personnel 
comprised about two-thirds of its strength, with civilians from all walks 
of life making up another quarter; the remainder were from the Navy, 
Marines, or Coast Guard. About 7,500 OSS employees served overseas, and 
about 4,500 were women (with 900 of them serving in overseas postings). In 
Fiscal Year 1945, the office spent $43 million, bringing its total 
spending over its four-year life to around $135 million (almost $1.1 
billion in today's dollars).

1944 OSS Organization Chart



RESEARCH & ANALYSIS

American academics and experts in the Office of Strategic Services 
virtually invented the discipline of non-departmental strategic 
intelligence analysis—one of America's few unique contributions to the 
craft of intelligence. Inspired by General Donovan's vision of a service 
that could collate data from open sources and all departments of the 
government, analysts in OSS's Research and Analysis Branch (R&A) comprised 
a formidable intelligence resource. Although the Branch suffered its share 
of internal bickering and sometimes had trouble finding customers for its 
reports, R&A's experts made allies for OSS even in rival agencies. Even 
OSS's harshest critics softened their tone when speaking of R&A and its 
contributions, and when OSS was dissolved at the end of the war, R&A was 
the one component that everyone agreed needed to be saved.

Headed by Harvard historian William Langer, R&A assembled roughly 900 
scholars. Staffing R&A was not a problem. The Branch recruited from many 
disciplines, but especially favored historians, economists, political 
scientists, geographers, psychologists, anthropologists, and diplomats. 
Professors all over America welcomed the chance to serve the war effort 
with their academic skills. R&A's roster reads like a Who's Who of two 
generations of scholars: Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Walt W. Rostow, Edward 
Shils, Herbert Marcuse, H. Stuart Hughes, Gordon Craig, Crane Brinton, 
John King Fairbank, Sherman Kent, Ralph Bunche, and a host of 
distinguished colleagues and students joined the Branch. R&A veterans 
included seven future presidents of the American Historical Association, 
five of the American Economic Association, and two Nobel Laureates. 

[image caption: Bombs from 8th Air Force B-17s smash the FW-190 fighter 
plant at Marienburg, East Prussia, on 9 October 1943. R&A's Enemy 
Objectives Unit worked with British and Polish intelligence to locate the 
factory.]

R&A made one of its biggest contributions in its support to the Allied 
bombing campaign in Europe. Analyses by the Enemy Objectives Unit (EOU), a 
team of R&A economists posted to the US Embassy in London, sent Allied 
bombers toward German fighter aircraft factories in 1943 and early 1944. 
After the Luftwaffe's interceptor force was weakened, Allied bombers could 
strike German oil production, which EOU identified as the choke-point in 
the Nazi war effort. The idea was not original with OSS, but R&A's well-
documented support gave it credibility and helped convince Allied 
commanders to try it. When American bombers began hitting synthetic fuel 
plants, ULTRA intercepts quickly confirmed that the strikes had nearly 
panicked the German high command. Although the fighting in Normandy that 
summer delayed the full force of the "oil offensive," in the autumn of 
1944 Allied bombers returned to the synthetic fuel plants. The resulting 
scarcity of aviation fuel all but grounded Hitler's Luftwaffe and, by the 
end of the year, diesel and gasoline production had also plummeted, 
immobilizing thousands of German tanks and trucks. 

R&A's contribution notwithstanding, the coordination of intelligence 
remained a problem in Washington throughout the war. The Pearl Harbor 
disaster underscored the problems with inter-service cooperation and could 
serve as a metaphor for the fragmentation of the American wartime 
intelligence establishment. The Army and Navy signals intelligence 
organizations barely cooperated, jealously guarding their reports and 
their access to President Roosevelt. They also prevented R&A analysts 
(with the exception of a few in the Enemy Objectives Unit) from reading 
signals intelligence at all. Outside of the Oval Office, no one collated 
and analyzed the totality of the intelligence data collected by the US 
Government. This lack of government-wide coordination limited the success 
of R&A and prompted efforts to reform the intelligence establishment as 
soon as the war was won. 



SPECIAL OPERATIONS

The Special Operations Branch (SO) of OSS ran guerrilla campaigns in 
Europe and Asia. As with many other facets of OSS's work, the organization 
and doctrine of the Branch was guided by British experiences in the 
growing field of "psychological warfare." British strategists in the year 
between the fall of France in 1940 and Germany's invasion of the USSR in 
1941 had wondered how Britain—which then lacked the strength to force a 
landing on the European continent—could weaken the Reich and ultimately 
defeat Hitler. London chose a three-part strategy to utilize the only 
means at hand: naval blockade, sustained aerial bombing, and "subversion" 
of Nazi rule in the occupied nations. A civilian body, the Special 
Operations Executive (SOE), took command of the latter mission and began 
planning to "set Europe ablaze." This emphasis on guerrilla warfare and 
sabotage fit with William Donovan's vision of an offensive in depth, in 
which saboteurs, guerrillas, commandos, and agents behind enemy lines 
would support the army's advance. OSS thus seemed the natural point of 
contact and cooperation with SOE in combined planning and operations when 
the Anglo-American Combined Chiefs of Staff decided in 1942 that America 
would join Britain in the business of "subversion." 

The Special Operations Branch served as SOE's American partner. Together, 
SO and SOE created the famous "Jedburgh" teams parachuted into France in 
the summer of 1944 to support the Normandy landings. Jedburghs joined the 
French Resistance against the German occupiers. There were 93 three-man 
teams in all, each of them with two officers and an enlisted radio 
operator. Typically an OSS man would serve with a British officer and a 
radioman from the Free French forces loyal to General Charles de Gaulle. 
Trained as commandos at SOE's Milton Hall in the English countryside, they 
were a colorful and capable lot that included adventurers and soldiers of 
fortune, as well as author Stewart Alsop and future Director of Central 
Intelligence William Colby. Officers trained alongside enlisted men in 
informal comraderie because, once inside France, rank would have to be 
secondary to courage and ability. After landing (hopefully into the arms 
of the Resistance) the teams coordinated airdrops of arms and supplies, 
guided the partisans on hit-and-run attacks and sabotage, and did their 
best to assist the advancing Allied armies.

[image caption: Some of the passports issued to Virginia Hall during her 
OSS career.]


Virginia Hall 

[image caption: Virginia Hall of Special Operations Branch receiving the 
Distinguished Service Cross from General Donovan, September 1945.]
  
The story of Special Operations' Virginia Hall reads like a spy thriller. 
After spending more than a year working secretly for British intelligence 
in Vichy France, she joined OSS and volunteered for another mission in 
German-occupied territory. Hall not only survived but prospered, helping 
to organize French partisan groups and earning decorations from Britain 
and the United States.

Virginia Hall grew up in comfortable circumstances in Baltimore. She 
attended the best schools and colleges, but wanted to finish her studies 
in Europe. With help from her parents, she traveled the Continent and 
studied in France, Germany, and Austria, finally landing an appointment as 
a Consular Service clerk at the American Embassy in Warsaw in 1931. Hall 
hoped to join the Foreign Service, but suffered a terrible setback two 
years later when she lost her lower left leg in a hunting accident. The 
injury foreclosed whatever chance she might have had for a diplomatic 
career, and she resigned from the Department of State in 1939.

The coming of war that year found Hall in Paris. She joined the Ambulance 
Service before the fall of France and ended up in Vichy-controlled 
territory when the fighting stopped in the summer of 1940. Hall made her 
way to London and volunteered for Britain's newly formed Special 
Operations Executive, which sent her back to Vichy in August 1941. She 
spent the next 15 months there, helping to coordinate the activities of 
the underground in Vichy and the occupied zone of France. When the Germans 
suddenly seized all of France in November 1942, Hall barely escaped to 
Spain. Journeying back to London (after working for SOE for a time in 
Madrid), she was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire by order 
of King George VI.

Virginia Hall joined OSS's Special Operations Branch in March 1944 and 
asked to return to occupied France. She hardly needed training in 
clandestine work behind enemy lines, and OSS promptly granted her request 
and landed her from a British PT boat in Brittany (her artificial leg kept 
her from parachuting in). As "Diane," she eluded the Gestapo and contacted 
the Resistance in central France. She mapped drop zones for supplies and 
commandos from England, found safe houses, and linked up with a Jedburgh 
team after the Allies landed at Normandy. Hall helped train three 
battalions of Resistance forces to wage guerrilla warfare against the 
Germans and kept up a stream of valuable reporting until Allied troops 
overtook her small band in September.

For her efforts in France, General Donovan in September 1945 personally 
awarded Virginia Hall a Distinguished Service Cross—the only one awarded 
to a civilian woman in World War II. 


[image caption: Posting the news at Kyaukpyu Camp, Burma.]
 
In Burma, OSS's Detachment 101 came perhaps the closest to realizing 
General Donovan's original vision of "strategic" support to regular combat 
operations. Under the initial leadership of "the most dangerous colonel," 
Carl Eifler, Detachment 101 took time to develop its capabilities and 
relationships with native guides and agents. Within a year, however, the 
Detachment and its thousands of cooperating Kachin tribesmen were gleaning 
valuable intelligence from jungle sites behind Japanese lines. With barely 
120 Americans at any one time, the unit eventually recruited almost 11,000 
native Kachins to fight the Japanese occupiers. When Allied troops invaded 
Burma in 1944, Detachment 101 teams advanced well ahead of the combat 
formations, gathering intelligence, sowing rumors, sabotaging key 
installations, rescuing downed Allied fliers, and snuffing out isolated 
Japanese positions. Detachment 101 received the Presidential Distinguished 
Unit Citation for its service in the 1945 offensive that liberated 
Rangoon. 

Significant parts of OSS's paramilitary and psychological capabilities 
worked outside of the Special Operations Branch. In late 1942, the Joint 
Chiefs of Staff authorized OSS to run American commando units behind enemy 
lines. OSS promptly formed several "Operational Groups" to conduct these 
missions. These were small formations of specially trained US Army 
soldiers—many recruited from ethnic communities in America—who fought in 
uniform and had no obvious connection to OSS (so they would be less likely 
to be shot as spies if captured). Designated the 2671st Special 
Reconnaissance Battalion, Separate (Provisional) in 1944, Operational 
Groups fought in France, Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia, Burma, Malaya, and 
China, usually alongside partisan formations.

The Morale Operations Branch (MO) split from SO in 1943 to perform the 
"black" propaganda mission left behind in OSS when COI had been split the 
previous year. "Black" propaganda was supposed to look like it came from 
Germans or Japanese who were disgruntled with the war. It was intended to 
lower the morale of Axis troops and increase civilian resistance to the 
regimes in Berlin and Tokyo. In yet another example of the ways in which 
OSS organized itself to mirror British agencies, MO paralleled and worked 
with the Foreign Office's Political Warfare Executive. MO took more than a 
year to find its niche in OSS and the Washington wartime bureaucracy, but 
by mid-1944 it was functioning effectively. Eventually MO's early critics 
came to value its services, which included rumors about Hitler's health 
and sanity, vast quantities of subversive leaflets, stickers, and slogans, 
and fake German newspapers and radio broadcasts (featuring, for instance, 
Marlene Dietrich singing "Lilli Marlene"). By the end of the war, MO and 
its companion civilian and military agencies had convinced policymakers in 
Washington that modern wars need to be fought in the "psychological" as 
well as military and economic arenas.



SECRET INTELLIGENCE

William J. Donovan in 1941 had not intended his new intelligence service 
to become a "spy" agency, running espionage operations in foreign 
capitals. He wanted COI to support military operations in the field by 
providing research, propaganda, and commando support, but he quickly 
became convinced of the value of clandestine human reporting. In 1942 OSS 
established the Secret Intelligence Branch (SI) to open field stations, 
train case officers, run agent operations, and process reports in 
Washington. Headed from 1943 on by international executive and lawyer 
Whitney H. Shepardson, SI by the end of the war had become a full-fledged 
foreign intelligence service, with stations in Europe, Asia, and the 
Middle East, excellent liaison contacts with foreign services, and a 
growing body of operational doctrine.

In November 1942, the most famous SI station chief, Allen W. Dulles, set 
up shop on "Hitler's doorstep" in the American legation in Bern, 
Switzerland. He found there a complicated and ever-shifting scene. Dulles 
quickly adopted a remnant of the fine prewar French military intelligence 
service, which gratefully provided him reports on German deployments in 
France that were prized by Allied invasion planners. He also found that 
Allied agents sent into Nazi Germany had scant hope of eluding the 
Gestapo, but that travel between the Reich and neutral Switzerland was 
free enough to bring a variety of Germans to him. Dulles established wide 
contacts with German émigrés, resistance figures, and anti-Nazi 
intelligence officers (who linked him, through Hans Bernd Gisevius, to the 
tiny but daring opposition to Hitler in Germany itself). Although 
Washington barred Dulles from making firm commitments to the plotters of 
the 20 July 1944 attempt to assassinate Hitler, the conspirators 
nonetheless gave him reports on developments in Germany, including sketchy 
but accurate warnings of plans for Hitler's V-1 and V-2 missiles. In 
addition, Dulles was contacted by a German Foreign Ministry official, 
Fritz Kolbe, who volunteered to report from Berlin. Kolbe's periodic 
packets illuminated German foreign policy and military matters, and helped 
the British spot the German spy "Cicero" working in the household of the 
British ambassador to Turkey. 

Secret Intelligence Branch operations by 1945 had extended beyond the 
running of operations in foreign capitals to encompass the actual 
penetration of Nazi Germany. Donovan wanted to replicate the successes 
that the SI mission in Algiers had had in running the "Penny-Farthing" 
network in Southern France, but Germany, with no organized Resistance, was 
a much tougher objective. SI's mission in London, led by William J. Casey, 
found a solution by adopting the methods of a successful OSS Morale 
Operations Branch project in Italy. Casey's unit—knowing that no Americans 
could survive in Hitler's Germany—learned how to find "volunteer" agents 
among the thousands of Axis prisoners-of-war in England. Casey's London SI 
trained the agents, provided them with meticulously prepared clothing, 
documentation, and equipment, and dropped nearly 200 of them into the 
Third Reich to gather intelligence in the last months of the war. Agent 
teams established themselves in Bremen, Munich, Mainz, Dusseldorf, Essen, 
Stuttgart, and Vienna—and even in Berlin. They paid a high price in 
casualties—36 were killed, captured, or missing at war's end—but the data 
they collected on industrial and military targets significantly aided the 
final Allied air and ground assaults on Germany.
 

Allen W. Dulles 

[image caption: Allen W. Dulles in Bern, Switzerland.]

Allen Dulles was born to high affairs of state. The nephew of one 
Secretary of State and the grandson of another, he was graduated from 
Princeton and joined the Foreign Service in World War I. As a junior 
diplomat, he acquired a taste for intelligence work while serving in 
Vienna and—after America declared war—in the American Legation in Bern, 
Switzerland. He gained valuable experiences, one of which stuck with him 
for the rest of his life. In Bern in 1917, Dulles kept a tennis date with 
a young lady one Sunday morning instead of meeting with an obscure Russian 
revolutionary named Lenin. Ever afterward he insisted that anyone who 
knocked on a case officer's door deserved at least a hearing.

Dulles kept his career focused on foreign affairs after the war. Allen and 
his brother John Foster advised their uncle, Secretary of State Robert 
Lansing, at the Paris Peace negotiations at Versailles. More diplomatic 
postings followed in Berlin and Constantinople before Dulles returned to 
the State Department to head the Division of Near Eastern Affairs. He 
resigned from the government in 1926 to practice law and, for the next 15 
years, he practiced with the firm of Sullivan & Cromwell in New York. Like 
his acquaintance William J. Donovan, Dulles traveled frequently abroad for 
business and pleasure in the 1930s, meeting Hitler and Mussolini and other 
European leaders in the course of his journeys. He joined the Council on 
Foreign Relations, ran as a Republican for Congress (and lost) in 1938, 
and advised former colleagues in the Department of State.

An early foe of Hitler, Dulles joined the fight against Nazi Germany well 
before Pearl Harbor. He had persuaded Sullivan & Cromwell to close its 
Berlin office in 1935. As head of COI's New York office in the autumn of 
1941, Dulles worked with William Stephenson ("Intrepid") of British 
Security Coordination and gathered data on the Axis from refugees and from 
American businessmen and journalists with ties in Europe. His long 
institutional experience and wide contacts superbly equipped him to run 
wartime intelligence operations out of neutral Switzerland, and Dulles 
made the most of his many opportunities in Bern.


[image caption: Crew members of a B-24 bomber flown by OSS on special 
missions over Central Europe pose beside their plane at Area T.]

As defeat loomed for the Third Reich in the spring of 1945, Allen Dulles 
and SI made one of OSS's greatest contributions to the war effort. German 
generals and officials as high-ranking as SS chief Heinrich Himmler began 
floating secret peace proposals to the British and the Americans. While 
some of these offers were genuine, the Allied "unconditional surrender" 
policy—and fear of provoking the suspicions of Joseph Stalin—constrained 
American diplomats and intelligence officers who might otherwise have been 
able to encourage these peace feelers. One important exception was made. 
Despite the unconditional surrender policy, higher authority in Washington 
allowed Allen Dulles to meet with SS general Karl Wolff, who had secretly 
offered to broker a surrender of German forces in Italy. The result of the 
meetings was Operation SUNRISE, a dangerous and devilishly complicated 
series of contacts over the next several weeks. Dulles had to manage the 
contacts and negotiations from Bern. Time after time the scheme came right 
to the edge of breakdown or disaster, but in the end SUNRISE succeeded, 
bringing about an early end to the Italian campaign in late April 1945—and 
saving hundreds if not thousands of lives. 



X-2

Any appraisal of the Office of Strategic Services must begin with the fact 
that the best intelligence available to British and American commanders 
came from intercepted and deciphered Axis messages. Without ULTRA and 
MAGIC, the war might have been lost. OSS shared in only a small portion of 
this intelligence bounty, chiefly because the Army and Navy (backed by the 
JCS) refused to give General Donovan a role in procuring or analyzing 
enemy signals. There was, however, an important exception to this ban. 
OSS's counterintelligence branch, X-2, made good use of German ULTRA 
intelligence and by the end of the war had established itself as a 
formidable practitioner of clandestine operations.

William Donovan created the X-2 Branch in early 1943 to provide British 
intelligence services with a liaison office in OSS for sharing ULTRA. 
Using ULTRA intercepts, the British security services had captured every 
German agent in the United Kingdom; some agents were even "doubled" to 
send a steady flow of plausible but bogus reports to Berlin. British 
intelligence wanted American help in this campaign, but London insisted 
that the Americans imitate British security practices to protect the vital 
ULTRA secret from unauthorized disclosures (even to other OSS personnel). 
X-2 was the Branch that resulted from this deal; it had its own overseas 
stations and communications channels and operated in partnership with the 
British foreign and domestic intelligence services.

Headed by attorney James Murphy, X-2 swiftly became an elite within an 
elite. Its officers possessed the secret keys to many wartime intelligence 
puzzles and could veto operations proposed by SO and SI without having to 
explain their reasons for doing so. In consequence, X-2 was able to 
attract some of the best talent in OSS, but it also earned a reputation 
for aloofness that the other OSS Branches resented. James J. Angleton, X-2 
station chief in Rome for the last year of the war, proved a model of an 
innovative, activist counterintelligence officer whose contributions 
exceeded his job description. He cultivated Italian liaison contacts 
(hitherto shunned as former enemies by the other Allied agencies), 
reported on political machinations in Rome, and devised ways to make ULTRA 
information usable by US Army counterintelligence officers who were not 
cleared to see the actual intercepts.

X-2 did well in Europe, but OSS headquarters in Washington might have 
profited from more counterintelligence scrutiny. OSS had a dismal security 
reputation. Established agencies like the FBI and G-2 believed that 
Donovan's oddball outfit, built as it was from scratch with not a few 
corners cut in the hiring of its staff, had to be riddled with subversives 
and spies. This rap was not wholly fair; OSS headquarters was not in fact 
penetrated by Axis agents, and its field security (at least in Europe) was 
adequate. Nevertheless, X-2 hunted the agents of Axis—not Allied—services. 
Soviet sympathizers and even spies worked in OSS offices in Washington and 
the field. Some were hired precisely because they were Communists; Donovan 
wanted their help in dealing with partisan groups in Nazi-occupied Europe. 
Others who were not Communists, such as Donovan's aide Duncan C. Lee, R&A 
labor economist Donald Wheeler, MO Indonesia expert Jane Foster Zlatowski, 
and R&A Latin America specialist Maurice Halperin, nevertheless passed 
information to Moscow. OSS operations in China, moreover, were badly 
penetrated by Communist agents working as clerical and housekeeping staff, 
or training in OSS camps for operational missions. 



WEAPONS AND SPY GEAR

OSS activities created a steady demand for devices and documents that 
could be used to trick, attack, or demoralize the enemy. Finding few 
agencies or corporations willing to undertake this sort of low-volume, 
highly specialized work, General Donovan enthusiastically promoted an in-
house capability to fabricate the tools that OSS needed for its 
clandestine missions. By the end of the war, OSS engineers and technicians 
had formed a collection of labs, workshops, and experts that occasionally 
gave OSS a technological edge over its Axis foes.

The Special Operations and Secret Intelligence Branches frequently called 
on the technical prowess assembled in the Research & Development Branch 
(R&D) and related offices. R&D proved adept at inventing weapons and 
gadgets and in adapting Allied equipment to new missions. General Donovan 
hired Boston chemist and executive Stanley P. Lovell to be his "Professor 
Moriarty" in charge of R&D. The Division's products ranged from silenced 
pistols to limpet mines to "Aunt Jemima," an allegedly explosive powder 
packaged in Chinese flour bags. Tiny cameras and inconspicuous letter-
drops were devised to assist OSS agents in enemy territory. A companion 
unit, located in the Communications Branch but also confusingly titled the 
Research and Development Division, developed wiretap devices, electronic 
beacons for agents in the field, and excellent portable radios 
(particularly the "Joan-Eleanor" system, which allowed an agent to 
converse securely with an aircraft circling high overhead).

R&D's components also fabricated the myriad papers that an agent needed to 
create a plausible identity behind enemy lines. The latest German and 
Japanese-issued ration cards, work passes, identification cards, and even 
occupation currency all had to be secretly acquired, perfectly imitated, 
and securely passed to operatives preparing for missions that could end in 
sudden death if any part of their cover stories went awry. An agent's 
appearance had to be just as carefully prepared. In the words of the OSS 
official history: 

…each agent had to be equipped with clothing sewn exactly as it would have 
been sewn if it were made in the local area for which he was destined; his 
eyeglasses, dental work, toothbrush, razor, brief case, travelling bag, 
shoes, and every item of wearing apparel had to be microscopically 
accurate.

The growing number of OSS coastal infiltration and sabotage projects 
eventually gave rise to an independent branch, the Maritime Unit, to 
develop specialized boats, equipment, and explosives. The Unit fashioned 
underwater breathing gear, waterproof watches and compasses, an inflatable 
motorized surfboard, and a two-man kayak that proved so promising that 275 
were ordered by the British.

Some OSS schemes had a Rube Goldberg feel about them that seems almost 
comical today. Project CAMPBELL, for instance, was a remote-controlled 
speedboat, disguised as a local fishing craft and guided by aircraft, that 
would detonate against an anchored Japanese ship. The prototype sank a 
derelict freighter in trials, but the US Navy had no way of getting close 
enough to a Japanese harbor to launch CAMPBELL, and declined to develop 
the weapon. R&D built plenty of devices of its own that looked good on 
paper but either failed in tests or proved too impractical for combat use. 
But America was locked in a war for its very survival, and R&D chief 
Stanley Lovell felt that no idea could be overlooked: "It was my policy to 
consider any method whatever that might aid the war, however unorthodox or 
untried." Failures were accepted as a cost of doing business. 



OSS IN ASIA

Apart from Detachment 101 in Burma, OSS did not contribute much to the 
struggle against Japan until the last year of the war. Early in the 
conflict, Army and Navy commanders excluded OSS from their sectors of the 
Pacific, thereby forcing Donovan to fight the Japanese in the only region 
left open to him, the distant China-Burma-India Theater. The difficult 
geography involved and the complicated relations with America's British 
and Chinese allies further delayed OSS's deployments. When OSS finally 
began operating in strength, however, its operations made an impact on 
both theJapanese and on the shape of post-war policies in the region.

OSS had a difficult time winning authority or access to prosecute 
operations in China. The Nationalist regime in Chungking was a government 
in name only; Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek was more China's most powerful 
warlord than its national leader. He was fighting a war on two 
fronts—against the Japanese invaders on one side and against the Chinese 
Communists under Mao Zedong on the other. His secret police and 
intelligence chief, Tai Li, wanted American aid but had no intention of 
allowing Americans to operate independently on Chinese soil. American 
efforts to assist Chiang against the Japanese thus had to navigate a 
labyrinth of feuds and jealousies in Chungking before any implementation. 
Complicating matters still further, Tai Li demanded that American 
intelligence operations in China be run—wherever possible—by the office of 
Capt. Milton E. Miles, the commander of an unorthodox US Navy liaison 
unit. 

[image caption: OSS helped to train and equip Chinese guerrillas.]

Donovan in late 1943 personally told Tai Li that OSS would operate in 
China whether he liked it or not, but it still took a measure of 
subterfuge for Donovan's officers to win a role there. The problem was 
bigger than Tai Li. At least a dozen American intelligence units operated 
in China over the course of the war, all of them competing for sources, 
access, and resources. Ironically, Donovan and OSS eventually "thrived on 
chaos," according to historian Maochun Yu. OSS learned to provide services 
to American commanders that neither the Chinese nor other US organizations 
could match. Access and authorization followed in due course as OSS 
analysts and operatives proved that their methods materially assisted 
combat operations against the Japanese. For example, Gen. Claire L. 
Chennault, creator of the famous "Flying Tigers" and chief of US air power 
in China, needed accurate target intelligence. OSS filled his need through 
an "Air and Ground Forces Resources Technical Staff" (AGFRTS), and used 
this toe-hold to expand well beyond support for Chennault's squadrons at 
Kunming. When a new theater commander, Lt. Gen. Albert C. Wedemeyer, began 
cleaning house and asserting his authority over all US intelligence 
operations in China, OSS allied itself with him and transferred AGFRTS 
from 14th Air Force to theater headquarters. 

Although it never attained Donovan's goal of full independence in China, 
OSS was a key player in operations and analysis there by the war's end. On 
9 August 1945—the day that Nagasaki was destroyed by an atomic bomb—Maj. 
Paul Cyr, leading a team of Chinese guerrillas on "Mission Hound," dropped 
a strategic railroad bridge across the Yellow River near Kaifeng. Two 
spans of the bridge collapsed just as a Japanese troop train was crossing 
it. As soon as Japan capitulated, additional OSS teams ran "mercy 
missions" in Japanese-held territory to locate and evacuate Allied 
prisoners captured early in the war.

[image caption: Maj. Paul Cyr and Team Hound in training (courtesy of 
Robert Viau).]

OSS plans and activities in China sparked inter-office arguments over US 
policy. China's seemingly intractable troubles and the vast suffering of 
its people long confounded American policymakers. OSS officers who came 
aboard as China experts or sympathized with the Chinese people while 
serving there inevitably drew their own conclusions about the course of 
American diplomacy. Opinions in OSS ranged across the political spectrum, 
from admirers of Chiang in his struggles against Japanese invaders and 
Communist insurgents, to unabashed advocates of Communist leader Mao 
Zedong and his promise of justice for the peasantry through social 
revolution. Most OSS officers adhered to positions between these two 
poles, concerned about the dangers of Chinese Communism, but frustrated at 
the corruption of Chiang's regime and its reluctance to make reforms to 
increase the effectiveness of American aid and to broaden its popular base.

[image caption: Detachment 404 officers in Jessore, India, planning a 
supply drop, June 1945.]
 
OSS officers in Thailand faced a different set of policy issues and 
demonstrated a high degree of teamwork in tackling them. Thailand had 
actually declared war on the United States and Great Britain after Pearl 
Harbor and was host to several Japanese bases. Washington had ignored 
Bangkok's declaration, however, when it became clear that a portion of the 
Thai ruling elite quietly opposed Japan and hoped to keep their nation 
from being drawn more deeply into the conflict. For the rest of the war 
the British, Americans, and Japanese danced a complicated minuet around 
the possibility that the Thai opposition would rise against Japan and 
force Tokyo to divert badly needed combat troops to subjugating the 
country. Since the United States had no embassy in Bangkok, OSS officers 
eventually found themselves in the unlikely role of diplomats under the 
very noses of the Japanese troops guarding the city.

OSS efforts to contact the rumored Thai underground movement did not bear 
fruit until late 1944, after moderate opposition leaders in Bangkok ousted 
the dictatorship that had declared war on the Allies. Thai students 
recruited and trained by OSS (the "Free Thai") and the British SOE were 
able to meet with underground leaders and even to broadcast reports from 
secret locations. Encouraged by the sudden surge of reporting, General 
Donovan in January 1945 dispatched two OSS majors, Richard Greenlee and 
John Wester, on a mission to Bangkok. Hiding in a spare palace by day and 
working by night, Greenlee and Wester confirmed that the Thai underground 
was secretly led by the de facto head of state, Prince Regent Pridi 
Phanomyong (codenamed Ruth). Pridi and his followers provided intelligence 
on the Japanese and offered to rise up in revolt, but they needed arms and 
training which only SOE and OSS could provide. To complicate matters, 
Pridi and the Free Thai (as well as OSS observers) suspected that the 
British harbored imperial designs on Thailand. If Americans could build a 
Thai guerrilla force, OSS men on the scene believed, the Thais could 
harass the Japanese and bolster a postwar claim to independence from 
British tutelage. 

OSS officers promised American help for the projected Thai guerrillas. 
Back in Washington, the Department of State retroactively endorsed this 
commitment, which amounted to a change in US policy. In Bangkok, Greenlee, 
Wester, and their successors shuttled to meetings with Pridi and SOE in 
curtained limousines driven past the Japanese, who doubled their garrison 
in the country but dared not tear up the paper alliance between Thailand 
and Japan. The war ended in August 1945 before actual fighting broke out, 
but the diplomatic maneuvering continued. OSS officers close to the Thai 
peace delegation kept Washington informed of the course of Anglo-Thai 
peace talks and assisted American diplomats in advocating a settlement 
that ultimately helped ensure Thai independence. 

[image caption: A Royal Air Force Dakota supporting operations in Thailand 
had to be unstuck the old-fashioned way at a secret air strip in June 
1945.]
 
In China and Thailand, OSS graduated from a reporter of events to a shaper 
of American foreign policy. In China, OSS demonstrated that an American 
intelligence service aiding a foreign government against internal enemies 
could not remain aloof from the exhausting policy debates in Washington 
over the wisdom and means of backing the incumbent regime. By contrast, 
OSS officers in Thailand showed how much could be done through clandestine 
means to help a popular movement struggling against foreign domination. 

Both lessons would echo in the Cold War, especially when the United States 
became embroiled in the Vietnam War. Even there, the OSS left a small but 
significant legacy for US foreign policy. Against the wishes of America's 
French and Chinese allies, OSS "Mission DEER" had briefly aided Communist 
insurgent leader Ho Chi Minh in his fight against the Japanese in northern 
Indochina. Other OSS officers, such as Maj. Aaron Bank, arrived in Laos 
and in southern Vietnam as the war ended, and tried to make sense of the 
bewildering and violent nationalist and colonial rivalries among the 
French and Vietnamese factions there. OSS's Col. Peter Dewey in Saigon 
tragically became the first American killed in Indochina when his jeep was 
ambushed by Communist guerrillas (apparently in a case of mistaken 
identity) in September 1945.



AN END AND A BEGINNING

OSS trained many of the leaders and personnel who formed the Central 
Intelligence Agency (CIA). Their ranks included four future Directors of 
Central Intelligence: Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, William Colby, and 
William Casey. Ironically, however, the one OSS veteran who did the most 
to promote such an agency—William J. Donovan—did not make the transition 
to it. He had led from the front, visiting his troops and surveying the 
ground in England, France, Italy, Burma, China, and even Russia. General 
Donovan was a charismatic leader and empire builder who inspired his 
people, but he was also a mediocre administrator, enamored of operations 
but bored by procedural detail. Tales of OSS inefficiency and waste—some 
of them true—delighted Donovan's critics. He had tirelessly battled 
bureaucratic rivals in Washington and London, but as the war drew to an 
end his enemies began to fear that he might actually win his campaign to 
create a peacetime intelligence service modeled on OSS. President 
Roosevelt made no promises, however, and after his death in April 1945, 
the incoming President, Harry S. Truman, felt no obligation to save OSS.

Victory in Europe in May 1945 allowed OSS to concentrate on Japan, but it 
also meant months of bureaucratic limbo for Washington headquarters. 
President Truman disliked Donovan. Truman mocked him in his diary, perhaps 
fearing that Donovan's proposed intelligence establishment might one day 
be used against Americans. The mood in Congress, moreover, was running 
against "war agencies" like OSS. Once the victory was won, the nation and 
Congress wanted demobilization—fast. This obstacle alone might have 
blocked a presidential attempt to preserve OSS or to create a permanent 
peacetime intelligence agency along the lines of General Donovan's plan.

The White House's Bureau of the Budget drafted liquidation plans for OSS 
and other war agencies, but initially the Bureau assumed that the 
termination could be stretched over weeks or months so OSS could preserve 
its most valuable assets. OSS and the Budget Bureau were to have less time 
than they expected. In late August, the White House suddenly ordered that 
OSS be closed as soon as possible. Bureau staffers had already conceived 
the idea of giving the Research and Analysis Branch to the State 
Department as "a going concern." The imminent dissolution of OSS meant 
that something now had to be done quickly about the rest of the office. In 
response, a Budget Bureau staffer decided that the War Department should 
receive the remainder of OSS "for salvage and liquidation." The War 
Department, it was decided, might even continue to operate the SI and X-2 
Branches (and their overseas networks) for another year or so.

The Budget Bureau's plan for intelligence reorganization went to President 
Truman on 4 September 1945. Donovan protested the plan, but the President 
ignored him, telling the Bureau to proceed with "the dissolution of 
Donovan's outfit even if Donovan did not like it." Bureau staffers soon 
had the requisite papers ready for the President's signature. Executive 
Order 9621 on 20 September dissolved OSS as of 1 October 1945, sending R&A 
to the Department of State and everything else to the War Department. The 
Executive Order also directed the Secretary of War to liquidate OSS 
activities "whenever he deems it compatible with the national interest." 
That same day, President Truman sent a letter of appreciation to General 
Donovan. The transfer of R&A to State, wrote the President, marked "the 
beginning of the development of a coordinated system of foreign 
intelligence within the permanent framework of the Government." The 
President also implicitly affirmed that the War Department would continue 
to operate certain OSS components providing "services of a military nature 
the need for which will continue for some time."

Due to an oversight in the drafting of EO 9621, Donovan had just ten days 
to dismantle his sprawling agency. He was too busy to do much about saving 
the components of OSS bound for the War Department. Donovan microfilmed 
his office files and bade farewell to his troops at a 28 September rally 
in a converted skating rink down the hill from his headquarters at 2430 E 
Street, NW:

We have come to the end of an unusual experiment. This experiment was to 
determine whether a group of Americans constituting a cross section of 
racial origins, of abilities, temperaments and talents could meet and risk 
an encounter with the long-established and well- trained enemy 
organizations…. You can go with the assurance that you have made a 
beginning in showing the people of America that only by decisions of 
nation- al policy based upon accurate information can we have the chance 
of a peace that will endure.

OSS expired on 1 October 1945. Fortunately, Assistant Secretary of War 
John J. McCloy had saved the SI and X-2 Branches as the nucleus of a 
peacetime intelligence service. McCloy was a friend of Donovan's, and he 
interpreted the President's directive as broadly as possible in ordering 
OSS's Deputy Director for Intelligence, Brig. Gen. John Magruder, to 
preserve SI and X-2 "as a going operation" in a new office that McCloy 
dubbed the "Strategic Services Unit" (SSU). Secretary of War Robert 
Patterson confirmed this directive and ordered Magruder to "preserve as a 
unit such of these functions and facilities as are valuable for permanent 
peacetime purposes." 

Within two years the President and the Congress found a new home for the 
personnel and assets saved in SSU under Col. William W. Quinn. They went 
to a new organization called the Central Intelligence Group (CIG) until 
the National Security Act of 1947 turned CIG into the Central Intelligence 
Agency, to perform many of the missions that General Donovan had advocated 
for his proposed peacetime intelligence service. Although CIA differed 
from OSS in important ways (which is why Truman endorsed it and not OSS), 
Donovan and his office deserve credit as forefathers of the Agency. 
Without Donovan's tireless advocacy of a modern intelligence service—and 
the record built by OSS during the war—the Truman administration would 
have taken longer to create the new intelligence establishment that the 
President wanted and might not have done this task as well.

The US military in recent years has formally honored its own debt to OSS. 
In creating the US Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) in 1987, the 
Pentagon consciously looked back to the OSS model of inter-service 
cooperation and success in unconventional warfare. USSOCOM in a sense 
represented a fulfillment of Donovan's original hope that all-arms special 
operations would become an integral part of US warfighting doctrine and a 
key supplement to regular combat planning and operations. Special 
Operations Command personnel, like their CIA counterparts, regard Donovan 
and OSS to be true ancestors in spirit and deed. They wear the insignia to 
prove this heritage; USSOCOM's shoulder patch is a gold lance-head on a 
black field, and it was modeled on a patch worn unofficially in OSS.

In CIA and USSOCOM, the US Government fulfilled General Donovan's vision. 
Central intelligence and unconventional warfare capabilities are now built 
into the nation's command and security policies and ready at all times to 
protect America and its interests.

[image caption: A lapel pin was presented to each OSS employee upon the 
dissolution of the organization in October 1945.]


"To those of us here today, this is General Donovan's greatest legacy. He 
realized that a modern intelligence organization must not only provide 
today's tactical intelligence, it must provide tomorrow's long-term 
assessments. He recognized that an effective intelligence organization 
must not allow political pressures to influence its counsel. And, finally, 
he knew that no intelligence organization can succeed without recognizing 
the importance of people—people with discretion, ingenuity, loyalty, and a 
deep sense of responsibility to protect and promote American values." 

From DCI William Webster's remarks 
at the dedication of the statue of 
Gen. William J. Donovan, 
CIA Headquarters, 28 October 1988.



SUGGESTED READINGS

Richard J. Aldrich, Intelligence and the War Against Japan: Britain, 
America and the Politics of Secret Service (Cambridge: Cambridge 
University Press, 2000)

Aaron Bank, From OSS to Green Berets: The Birth of Special Forces (Novato, 
CA: Presidio, 1986)

Stewart Alsop and Thomas Braden, Sub Rosa: The OSS and American Espionage 
(New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1946)

Robert Louis Benson, "A History of US Communications Intelligence during 
World War II: Policy and Administration," Series IV (World War II) Volume 
8, National Security Agency Center for Cryptologic History, 1997

Anthony Cave Brown, The Last Hero: Wild Bill Donovan (New York: Times 
Books, 1982)

John W. Brunner, OSS Weapons (Williamstown, NJ: Phillips Publications, 
1994)

William J. Casey, The Secret War Against Hitler (Washington: Regnery 
Gateway, 1988)

George C. Chalou, editor, The Secrets War: The Office of Strategic 
Services in World War II (Washington: National Archives and Records 
Administration, 1991)

William E. Colby and Peter Forbath, Honorable Men: My Life in the CIA (New 
York: Simon & Schuster, 1978)

Max Corvo, The OSS in Italy, 1942-1945 (New York: Praeger, 1990)

Allen Dulles, The Secret Surrender (New York: Harper & Row, 1966)

Richard Dunlop, Behind Japanese Lines: With the OSS in Burma (Chicago: 
Rand McNally, 1979)

Richard Dunlop, Donovan: America's Master Spy (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1982)

Corey Ford, Donovan of OSS (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970)

Kirk Ford, OSS and the Yugoslav Resistance, 1943-1945 (College Station: 
Texas A&M University Press, 1992)

Peter Grose, Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles (Boston: Houghton 
Mifflin, 1994)

Gerald K. Haines, "Virginia Hall Goillot: Career Intelligence Officer," 
Prologue 26 (Winter 1994)

Jürgen Heideking and Christof Mauch, editors, American Intelligence and 
the German Resistance to Hitler: A Documentary History (Boulder, CO: 
Westview, 1996)

F.H. Hinsley, et al., British Intelligence in the Second World War, five 
volumes (London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1981 and later years)

Jay Jakub, Spies and Saboteurs: Anglo-American Collaboration and Rivalry 
in Human Intelligence Collection and Special Operations, 1940-45 (New 
York: St. Martin's, 1999)

Barry M. Katz, Foreign Intelligence: Research and Analysis in the Office 
of Strategic Services, 1942-1945 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 
1989)

Sherman Kent, Strategic Intelligence for American Foreign Policy (Hamden, 
CT: Archon, 1965 [1949])

Clayton D. Laurie, The Propaganda Warriors: America's Crusade against Nazi 
Germany (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1996)

Franklin A. Lindsay, Beacons in the Night: With the OSS and Tito's 
Partisans in Wartime Yugoslavia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 
1995) 

Elizabeth P. McIntosh, Sisterhood of Spies: The Women of the OSS 
(Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1998)

H. Keith Melton, OSS Special Weapons and Equipment: Spy Devices of World 
War II (New York: Sterling Publishing, 1991)

Hayden B. Peake, "OSS and the Venona Decrypts," Intelligence and National 
Security 12 (July 1997)

Joseph E. Persico, Piercing the Reich: The Penetration of Nazi Germany by 
American Secret Agents During World War II (New York: Viking, 1979)

Neal H. Petersen, editor, From Hitler's Doorstep: The Wartime Intelligence 
Reports of Allen Dulles, 1942-1945 (University Park: Pennsylvania State 
University Press, 1996)

Daniel C. Pinck, Geoffrey M.T. Jones, and Charles T. Pinck, editors, 
Stalking the History of the Office of Strategic Services: An OSS 
Bibliography (Boston: OSS/Donovan Press, 2000)

Kermit Roosevelt, editor, War Report of the OSS, two volumes (New York: 
Walker, 1976)

Walt W. Rostow, Pre-Invasion Bombing Strategy: General Eisenhower's 
Decision of March 25, 1944 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981)

David F. Rudgers, Creating the Secret State: The Origins of the Central 
Intelligence Agency, 1943-1947 (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 
2000)

Gerald Schwab, OSS Agents in Hitler's Heartland: Destination Innsbruck 
(Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996)

Bradley F. Smith and Elena Agarossi, Operation Sunrise: The Secret 
Surrender (New York: Basic Books, 1979)

Bradley F. Smith, The Shadow Warriors: OSS and the Origins of the CIA (New 
York: Basic, 1983)

Richard Harris Smith, OSS: The Secret History of America's First Central 
Intelligence Agency (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972)

Donald P. Steury, The Intelligence War (New York: Metrobooks, 2000)

Thomas F. Troy, Donovan and the CIA: A History of the Establishment of the 
Central Intelligence Agency (Frederick, MD: University Publications of 
America, 1981)

Thomas F. Troy, Wild Bill & Intrepid (New Haven: Yale University Press, 
1996)

US Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1945-1950, 
Emergence of the Intelligence Establishment (Washington, DC: Government 
Printing Office, 1996)

John H. Waller, The Unseen War in Europe: Espionage and Conspiracy in the 
Second World War (New York: Random House, 1996)

Michael Warner, "The Creation of the Central Intelligence Group," Studies 
in Intelligence 39 (1996)

Maochun Yu, OSS in China: Prelude to Cold War (New Haven: Yale University 
Press, 1996)
 
This sampling of works on the Office of Strategic Services and 
intelligence in World War II provides a range of views and information 
that can help the reader understand the role and significance of OSS. It 
is an initial guide to further reading and research and is not intended to 
be a complete list of books or articles on OSS, nor does the inclusion of 
a work on this list imply endorsement of its view or content by the US 
Government or any of its agencies or branches.