Office of Strategic Services
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Office of Strategic Services
Agency overview
Formed June 13, 1942
Dissolved September 20, 1945
Superseding agency Central Intelligence Agency
Agency Executives Major General William Joseph Donovan, Co-ordinator of Information
 
Brigadier General John Magruder, Deputy Director for Intelligence

The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was a United States intelligence agency formed during World War II. It was the wartime intelligence agency and was the predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency.


Contents

Origins and Activities

Prior to the formation of the OSS (the counterpart of the British Secret Intelligence Service), American intelligence had been conducted on an ad-hoc basis by the various departments of the executive branch, including State, Treasury, Navy and War. They had no overall direction, coordination, or control. The Army and the Navy had separate code-breaking departments (Signals Intelligence Service and OP-20-G) that not only competed, but refused to share break-throughs. Also, the original code-breaking operation of the State Department, MI-8, run by Herbert Yardley, had been shut down in 1929 by Secretary of State Henry Stimson because "gentlemen don't read each other's mail".[1] President Franklin D. Roosevelt was concerned about American intelligence deficiencies. On the suggestion of Canadian spymaster William Stephenson, the senior representative of British intelligence in the western hemisphere, Roosevelt directed Stephenson's friend William J. Donovan, a World War I veteran, Medal of Honor recipient and New York lawyer, to draft a plan for an intelligence service. Donovan was employed to evaluate the global military position in order to offer suggestions concerning American intelligence requirements because the US did not have a central intelligence agency. After submitting his work, "Memorandum of Establishment of Service of Strategic Information," Gen. Donovan was appointed as the "Co-ordinator of Information" in July, 1941.

The Office of Strategic Services was established by a presidential military order issued by Roosevelt on June 13, 1942, to collect and analyze strategic information required by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and to conduct special operations not assigned to other agencies. During the War, the OSS supplied policy makers with facts and estimates, but the OSS never had jurisdiction over all foreign intelligence activities—the FBI was responsible for intelligence work in Latin America, and the military guarded their areas of responsibility.

General William J. Donovan reviews Operational Group members in Bethesda, Maryland, prior to their departure for China in 1945
General William J. Donovan reviews Operational Group members in Bethesda, Maryland, prior to their departure for China in 1945

From 1943-1945, the OSS played a major role in training Nationalist Chinese troops in China and 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, including Mao Zedong's Red Army in China and the Viet Minh in French Indochina, in areas occupied by the Axis powers during the Second World War. The OSS also recruited and ran one of the war's most important spies, the German diplomat Fritz Kolbe. Other functions of the OSS included the use of propaganda, espionage, subversion, and post-war planning.

The OSS purchased Soviet code and cipher material (or Finnish information on them) from émigré Finnish army officers in late 1944. Secretary of State Edward Stettinius, Jr. protested that this violated an agreement President Roosevelt made with the Soviet Union not to interfere with Soviet cipher traffic from the U.S. Donovan might have copied the papers before returning them the following January, but there is no record of Arlington Hall receiving them, and CIA and NSA archives have no surviving copies. This codebook was in fact used as part of the Venona decryption effort, which helped uncover large-scale Soviet espionage in North America.[2]

One of the greatest accomplishments of the OSS during World War II was its penetration of 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 POWs, and German and Jewish refugees. At the height of its influence during World War II, the OSS employed almost 24,000 people.[3]

Transformation into the CIA

A month and a half after the war was won, on September 20, 1945, the OSS was disbanded by President Truman. In the following month the functions of the OSS were split between the Departments of State and War. State received the Research and Analysis Branch of OSS which was renamed the Interim Research and Intelligence Service (IRIS) and headed by Alfred McCormack. The War Department took over the Secret Intelligence (SI) and Counter-espionage (X-2) Branches that were housed in a new office created for just this purpose - The Strategic Services Unit (SSU). The Secretary of War appointed Brigadier General John Magruder (formerly Donovan's Deputy Director for Intelligence in OSS) as director to oversee the liquidation, and more importantly the preservation of the OSS' clandestine intelligence capability.

Yet in January 1946, President Truman created the Central Intelligence Group (CIG) which was the direct precursor to the CIA. The assets of the SSU, which now constituted a streamlined "nucleus" of clandestine intelligence, was transferred to the CIG in mid-1946 and reconstituted as the Office of Special Operations (OSO). In 1947 the National Security Act established America's first permanent peacetime intelligence agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, which took up the functions of the OSS.

Branches

  • Secret Intelligence
  • Research and Analysis
  • Special Operations
  • X-2 (counterespionage)
  • Research & Development
  • Morale Operations
  • Maritime Units
  • Operational Groups
  • Communications
  • Medical Services

Facilities

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 use for training some of the OGs. Catoctin Mountain Park, now the location of Camp David, was the site of OSS training Area "B." Congressional Country Club (Area F) in Bethesda, MD was the primary OSS training facility.

The Facilities of Catalina Island Marine Institute at Toyon Bay on Santa Catalina Island are composed (in part) of a former OSS survival training camp.

US Army units seconded to the OSS

Personnel

The names of all OSS personnel and documents of their OSS service, previously a closely guarded secret, were released by the US National Archives on August 14, 2008. Among the 24,000 names were those of Julia Child, Arthur Goldberg, Moe Berg, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and John Ford[4][5]. The 750,000 pages in the 35,000 personnel files include applications of people who were not recruited, as well as service records.

In popular culture

  • Most games in the Medal of Honor video game franchise feature a fictional OSS agent as the main character.

See also

References

Notes

  1. ^ Stimson, Henry L. On Active Service in Peace and War (1948). per Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 16th ed.
  2. ^ The Mitrokhin Archive, Volume 1: The KGB in Europe and the West, by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, 1999.
  3. ^ Chef Julia Child, others part of WWII spy network, CNN, 2008-08-14
  4. ^ Brett J. Blackledge and Randy Herschaft, "Documents: Julia Child part of WWII-era spy ring", Associated Press
  5. ^ "Chef Julia Child, others part of WWII spy network", CNN

Bibliography

  • Stanley P. Lovell, Of Spies and Stratagems (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1963).
  • Anthony Cave Brown, The Last Hero: Wild Bill Donovan, 1982, ISBN 0686959752.
  • Anthony Cave Brown, Secret War Report of the OSS, ISBN 0425032531.
  • Dan Pinck's Journey to Peking: A Secret Agent in Wartime China (Naval Institute Press, 2003), tells the true story of an OSS agent sent behind enemy lines in China. W.E.B. Griffin described the book as a "valuable addition to history."

External links


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