Office of Strategic Services

Origin

Before the OSS, the various departments of the executive branch, including the State, Treasury, Navy, and War Departments, conducted American intelligence activities on an ad hoc basis, with no overall direction, coordination, or control. The US Army and US Navy had separate code-breaking departments: Signal Intelligence Service and OP-20-G. (A previous code-breaking operation of the State Department, the MI-8, run by Herbert Yardley, had been shut down in 1929 by Secretary of State Henry Stimson, deeming it an inappropriate function for the diplomatic arm, because "gentlemen don't read each other's mail.") The FBI was responsible for domestic security and anti-espionage operations.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt was concerned about American intelligence deficiencies. On the suggestion of William "Little Bill" Stephenson, the senior British intelligence officer in the western hemisphere, Roosevelt requested that William "Wild Bill" Donovan draft a plan for an intelligence service based on the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) and Special Operations Executive (SOE). Donovan envisioned a single agency responsible for foreign intelligence and special operations involving commandos, disinformation, partisan and guerrilla activities. Donovan worked closely with Australian-born British intelligence officer Charles Howard 'Dick' Ellis, who has been credited with writing the blueprint.

Said Ellis:

I was soon requested to draft a blueprint for an American intelligence agency, the equivalent of BSC [British Security Co-ordination] and based on these British wartime improvisations... detailed tables of organisation were disclosed to Washington... among these were the organisational tables that led to the birth of General William Donovan's OSS.

After submitting his (and Ellis's) work, "Memorandum of Establishment of Service of Strategic Information", Donovan was appointed "Coordinator of Information" on July 11, 1941, heading the new organization known as the Office of the Coordinator of Information (COI).

Ellis, described as Donovan's "right-hand man", "effectively ran the organization".

Writes Fink:

Activities

OSS proved especially useful in providing a worldwide overview of the German war effort, its strengths and weaknesses. In direct operations it was successful in supporting Operation Torch in French North Africa in 1942, where it identified pro-Allied potential supporters and located landing sites. OSS operations in neutral countries, especially Stockholm, Sweden, provided in-depth information on German advanced technology. The Madrid station set up agent networks in France that supported the Allied invasion of southern France in 1944. Most famous were the operations in Switzerland run by Allen Dulles that provided extensive information on German strength, air defenses, submarine production, and the V-1 and V-2 weapons. It revealed some of the secret German efforts in chemical and biological warfare. Switzerland's station also supported resistance fighters in France, Austria and Italy, and helped with the surrender of German forces in Italy in 1945.

For the duration of World War II, the Office of Strategic Services was conducting multiple activities and missions, including collecting intelligence by spying, performing acts of sabotage, waging propaganda war, organizing and coordinating anti-Nazi resistance groups in Europe, and providing military training for anti-Japanese guerrilla movements in Asia, among other things. At the height of its influence during World War II, the OSS employed almost 24,000 people.

From 1943 to 1945, the OSS played a major role in training Kuomintang troops in China and British Burma, and recruited Kachin and other indigenous irregular forces for sabotage as well as guides for Allied forces in Burma fighting the Japanese Army. Among other activities, the OSS helped arm, train, and supply resistance movements in areas militarily occupied by the Japanese Empire during World War II, including Mao Zedong's Red Army in China (known as the Dixie Mission), Ho Chi Minh's Viet Minh in French Indochina in which OSS officer Archimedes Patti played a central role in OSS operations in Indochina and met frequently with Ho Chi Minh in 1945 as well as Korean Liberation Army partisans on the Korean Peninsula (known as the Eagle Project).

One of the greatest accomplishments of the OSS during World War II was its penetration of Nazi Germany by OSS operatives. The OSS was responsible for training German and Austrian individuals for missions inside Germany. Some of these agents included exiled communists and Socialist party members, labor activists, anti-Nazi prisoners-of-war, and German and Jewish refugees. The OSS also recruited and ran one of the war's most important spies, the German diplomat Fritz Kolbe.

Weapons and gadgets

The OSS espionage and sabotage operations produced a steady demand for highly specialized equipment. General Donovan invited experts, organized workshops, and funded labs that later formed the core of the Research & Development Branch. Boston chemist Stanley P. Lovell became its first head, and Donovan humorously called him his "Professor Moriarty". Throughout the war years, the OSS Research & Development successfully adapted Allied weapons and espionage equipment, and produced its own line of novel spy tools and gadgets, including silenced pistols, lightweight sub-machine guns, "Beano" grenades that exploded upon impact, explosives disguised as lumps of coal ("Black Joe") or bags of Chinese flour ("Aunt Jemima"), acetone time delay fuses for limpet mines, compasses hidden in uniform buttons, playing cards that concealed maps, a 16mm Kodak camera in the shape of a matchbox, tasteless poison tablets ("K" and "L" pills), and cigarettes laced with tetrahydrocannabinol acetate (an extract of Indian hemp) to induce uncontrollable chattiness.

The OSS also developed innovative communication equipment such as wiretap gadgets, electronic beacons for locating agents, and the "Joan-Eleanor" portable radio system that made it possible for operatives on the ground to establish secure contact with a plane that was preparing to land or drop cargo. The OSS Research & Development also printed fake German and Japanese-issued identification cards, and various passes, ration cards, and counterfeit money.

On August 28, 1943, Stanley Lovell was asked to make a presentation in front of a hostile Joint Chiefs of Staff, who were skeptical of OSS plans beyond collecting military intelligence and were ready to split the OSS between the Army and the Navy. While explaining the purpose and mission of his department and introducing various gadgets and tools, he reportedly casually dropped into a waste basket a Hedy, a panic-inducing explosive device in the shape of a firecracker, which shortly produced a loud shrieking sound followed by a deafening boom. The presentation was interrupted and did not resume since everyone in the room fled. In reality, the Hedy, jokingly named after Hollywood movie star Hedy Lamarr for her ability to distract men, later saved the lives of some trapped OSS operatives.

Not all projects worked. Some ideas were odd, such as a failed attempt to use insects to spread anthrax in Spain. Stanley Lovell was later quoted saying, "It was my policy to consider any method whatever that might aid the war, however unorthodox or untried".In 1939, a young physician named Christian J. Lambertsen developed an oxygen rebreather set (the Lambertsen Amphibious Respiratory Unit) and demonstrated it to the OSS—after already being rejected by the U.S. Navy—in a pool at the Shoreham Hotel in Washington D.C., in 1942. The OSS not only bought into the concept, they hired Lambertsen to lead the program and build up the dive element for the organization. His responsibilities included training and developing methods of combining self-contained diving and swimmer delivery including the Lambertsen Amphibious Respiratory Unit for the OSS "Operational Swimmer Group". Growing involvement of the OSS with coastal infiltration and water-based sabotage eventually led to creation of the OSS Maritime Unit.

Headquarters and field offices

Headquarters

The COI was created out of offices in New York City, at 30 Rockefeller Plaza. They shared offices with the BSC for some time at 3603, where Donovan, Dulles, and the British worked closely together to draw-up the plans for the organization. Millard Preston Goodfellow was also drawn from the New York social elite. New York was a short distance from training facilities at the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) New York field office, and Whitby, Ontario. OSS maintained a presence in New York until its dissolution in 1945.

The bulk of the OSS, after the expansion out of and away from COI, eventually found itself headquartered at a complex near 23rd Street and E Street in Washington, D.C. The E Street Complex was unassuming, appearing to be a mix of normal government offices and apartment buildings to nearby residents and office workers. The OSS Society and State Department have engaged in efforts with the National Park Service to add the Headquarters complex to the National Register of Historic Places.

Throughout the war, because of the secrecy of its work, the X-2 Counterintelligence Branch (CI) would maintain its own field bases detached from the rest of the OSS operations, hence the need for different addresses in several cities.

London Outpost

The largest and most impactful OSS office outside of the United States was at OSS/London, and covered activities within the European Theatre of Operations. OSS/London was located at 70 and 72 Grosvenor Street, Mayfair, London. This office was established within the COI at the end of 1941, and was absorbed into the OSS through the merger. Unlike some other field bases, which were only staffed by a single branch of OSS, OSS/London was staffed by members of every forward branch of the OSS. London has occasionally been referred to as the Forward Headquarters of OSS. William J. Casey ran SI Branch activities in London, who ran Free German and TOOL insertions into mainland Europe. The SO Branch also operated here, and their counterpart in the SOE in London was known as the "London Group," and these two groups, alongside SHAEF, organized the creation and management of Operation Jedburgh. Letters from Lieutenant Leonard Wilson, the chief of the London Maps Division, show that the Maps Division of R&A operated out of 51 Grosvenor Street.

Field Offices

Throughout the war, OSS had forward office headquarters in many cities. There were over 40 overseas bases around the world:

Training facilities

At Camp X, near Whitby, Ontario, an "assassination and elimination" training program was operated by the British Special Operations Executive, assigning exceptional masters in the art of knife-wielding combat, such as William E. Fairbairn and Eric A. Sykes, to instruct trainees. Many members of the Office of Strategic Services also were trained there. It was dubbed "the school of mayhem and murder" by George Hunter White who trained at the facility in the 1940's. Beginning in January 1941, Colonel Millard Preston Goodfellow, creator and Director of the Special Operations Branch (at this time still known as SA/G within the COI), negotiated with the National Park Service to obtain three tracts of land to be dedicated as training camps for both SA/G and SA/B. In March, he assigned Garland H. Williams to be the Training Director of these facilities.

Commander N.G.A Woolley was loaned to COI by the British Navy and helped Donovan and Goodfellow to organize underwater training and craft landing.

From these incipient beginnings, the Office of Strategic Services opened camps in the United States, and finally abroad. Prince William Forest Park (then known as Chopawamsic Recreational Demonstration Area) was the site of an OSS training camp that operated from 1942 to 1945. Area "C", consisting of approximately 6,000 acres (24 km2), was used extensively for communications training, whereas Area "A" was used for training some of the OGs (Operational Groups). Catoctin Mountain Park, now the location of Camp David, was the site of OSS training Area "B" where the first Special Operations, or SO, were trained. Special Operations was modeled after Great Britain's Special Operations Executive, which included parachute, sabotage, self-defense, weapons, and leadership training to support guerrilla or partisan resistance. Considered most mysterious of all was the "cloak and dagger" Secret Intelligence, or SI branch. Secret Intelligence employed "country estates as schools for introducing recruits into the murky world of espionage. Thus, it established Training Areas E and RTU-11 ("the Farm") in spacious manor houses with surrounding horse farms." Morale Operations training included psychological warfare and propaganda. The Congressional Country Club (Area F) in Bethesda, Maryland, was the primary OSS training facility. The Facilities of the Catalina Island Marine Institute at Toyon Bay on Santa Catalina Island, Calif., are composed (in part) of a former OSS survival training camp. The National Park Service commissioned a study of OSS National Park training facilities by Professor John Chambers of Rutgers University.

Personnel

Civilian

At the time of staffing COI and later the OSS, the British, and especially C, held firm to the notion that "intelligence is the business of gentlemen". Bill Donovan agreed with C on this point, and recruited the majority of these early members from the social elite of the Eastern Seaboard. So many of these were the relations of people on the "Social Register" that the OSS was often referred to as the "Oh So Social Club". COI attracted some of the top scientists, artists, economists, poets, and adventurers in the country.

Many of these original recruits were graduates of Ivy League schools, and especially linked to the Skull and Bones at Yale University. One prominent Skull at COI was Archibald MacLeish, who created the Research and Analysis Branch (R&A) and headquartered it out of the Library of Congress. For staffing its R&A, MacLeish and COI recruited from leading academic figures at institutions across the country, where by the war's end, R&A employed over 900 academics.

The members of the Research and Development Branch (R&D) recruited by Donovan and Goodfellow to work for Stanley Platt Lovell, however, were more or less considered pyromaniacs and mavericks who enjoyed making things blow up – which is why they were eventually tasked with such experiments as silenced pistols, the bat bomb and cat bomb.

Not all civilian academics were well-suited for their positions. In one specific example, OSS officer Kermit Roosevelt Jr. writes in the second volume of the official history of the OSS regarding officers deployed into Africa, that one contract agent completely ignored his assignment and effectively used OSS to fund his research: "...one anthropologist spent his six-month tour of duty acquiring apes, caring for them when they fell ill and eventually catching their disease himself." Roosevelt does not name the agent, but many anthropologists were indeed deployed by OSS around the world.

Julia Child, who later authored cookbooks, worked directly under Donovan.

Military

OSS military personnel, including soldiers, commandos, and frogmen were primarily inducted from the United States Armed Forces. These recruits came from all branches; the Army, Marines, Navy, and especially vital to maritime successes were its members from the Coast Guard. Among the hundreds of foreign nationals in its ranks were Prince Serge Obolensky and other displaced people from the former czarist Russia.

Donovan sought independent thinkers, saying: "I'd rather have a young lieutenant with enough guts to disobey a direct order than a colonel too regimented to think for himself." Seeking intelligent, quick-witted people who could think out-of-the box, he chose them from all walks of life, backgrounds, without distinction to culture or religion. Inspired by Britain's Special Operations Executive, he had clinical psychologists evaluate OSS candidates, including at Station S in northern Virginia near today's Dulles International Airport, whose records describe a quest for independent thought, effective intelligence, and interpersonal skills. In months, he formed an organization that soon rivalled Great Britain's Secret Intelligence Service. One such agent was Ivy League polyglot and Jewish American baseball catcher Moe Berg, who played 15 seasons in the major leagues. As an intelligence agent, he was dispatched to seek information on German physicist Werner Heisenberg and his knowledge on the atomic bomb. One of the most highly decorated and flamboyant OSS soldiers was US Marine Colonel Peter Ortiz. Enlisting early in the war as a French Foreign Legionnaire, he went on to join the OSS and to be the most highly decorated US Marine in the OSS during World War II. René Joyeuse M.D., MS, FACS was a Swiss, French and American soldier, physician and researcher, who distinguished himself as an agent of Allied intelligence in German-occupied France during World War II. He received the US Army Distinguished Service Cross for his actions with the OSS, after the war he became a physician, researcher and co-founder of the American Trauma Society.

"Jumping" Joe Savoldi (code name Sampson) was recruited by the OSS in 1942 because of his hand-to-hand combat and language skills as well as his deep knowledge of Italian geography and Benito Mussolini's compound. He was assigned to the Special Operations Branch and took part in missions in North Africa, Italy, and France during 1943–1945.

One of the forefathers of today's commandos was Navy Lieutenant Jack Taylor. He was sequestered by the OSS early in the war and had a long career behind enemy lines.

Women in the OSS

Of the estimated 13,000 people who served in the OSS during World War II, more than 4,000 were women. Their work in a wide range of roles—espionage, intelligence analysis, research, communications, cartography, clerical work, and more—contributed to the organization's wartime success and helped shift gender norms in the decades that followed. Among them were Julia Child, who served in Washington, D.C., Ceylon, and China, where she handled the movement of classified documents in India;Marion A. Frieswyk, who as the first female intelligence cartographer for the Cartography Section helped create high-precision maps used in Allied military operations; and Eloise Page, William Donovan's secretary, nicknamed the "Iron Butterfly" for her manner and rank.

Many worked on black propaganda in the MO department. Some gained internal renown as "glamour girls", such as Virginia Hall, singer Marlene Dietrich, Betty McIntosh, and Barbara Lauwers. In Sisterhood of Spies, McIntosh reflects on the women's ability to "understand gossip in a way men never could". Lauwers worked on Operation Sauerkraut, which dispatched OSS to Allied prisoner-of-war camps to find and train German and Czech POWs to travel back across enemy lines to spread black propaganda meant to dismay Axis troops. Black propaganda for psychological effect was one of Donovan's key initiatives, inspired by the Nazis. Lauwers created the "League of Lonely War Women" to demoralize German soldiers: it spoke of a "custom" under which German soldiers on leave could find companionship by pinning a heart to their lapel, implying that the wives and partners of soldiers were being unfaithful at home.

Many women had familial or spousal connection to the war effort. Jane Hutton-Smith, wife and daughter to military officers, worked as the Washington manager of Far East MO, and trained field agents in spreading propaganda against Japanese soldiers. Her weekly Rumour Mill session with the staff involved spreading "devastating lies" about the wellbeing of the families of Japanese soldiers, creating misinformation on planned attacks, and disrupting "puppet" relations between Japan and China. She and her colleagues generally spoke Japanese, Russian, or had other linguistic skills.

Women served as liaisons with resistance groups in France, Yugoslavia, and elsewhere, shaping U.S. relations with these nations during and after the war. Hall helped organize, supply and train the French resistance. Novelist Mary Bancroft acted as a liaison between OSS officer Allen Dulles and German resistance groups.

Dissolution into other agencies

On September 20, 1945, President Harry S. Truman signed Executive Order 9621, terminating the OSS. Due to administrative error, the order only allowed the agency ten days to close. The State Department took over the Research and Analysis Branch (R&A); it became the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, The War Department took over the Secret Intelligence (SI) and Counter-Espionage (X-2) Branches, which were then housed in the new Strategic Services Unit (SSU). Brigadier General John Magruder (formerly Donovan's Deputy Director for Intelligence in OSS) became the new SSU director. He oversaw the liquidation of the OSS and managed the institutional preservation of its clandestine intelligence capability.

In January 1946, President Truman created the Central Intelligence Group (CIG), which was the direct precursor to the CIA. SSU assets, which now constituted a streamlined "nucleus" of clandestine intelligence, were transferred to the CIG in mid-1946 and reconstituted as the Office of Special Operations (OSO). The National Security Act of 1947 established the Central Intelligence Agency, which then took up some OSS functions. The direct descendant of the paramilitary component of the OSS is the CIA Special Activities Division.

Today, the joint-branch United States Special Operations Command, founded in 1987, uses the same spearhead design on its insignia, as homage to its indirect lineage. The Defense Intelligence Agency currently manages the OSS' mandate to provide strategic military intelligence to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Secretary of Defense and to coordinate human espionage activities across the United States Armed Forces (through the Defense Clandestine Service) and was awarded status as an OSS Heritage organization by the OSS Society.

Detachments

US Army units attached to the OSS