Office of Strategic Services

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Office of Strategic Services

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Office of Strategic Services

OSS

OSS Shoulder Insignia

Agency overview

Formed June 13, 1942

Dissolved September 20, 1945

Superseding agency Central Intelligence Agency

Employees 13,000 estimated[1]

Agency executivesMajor General William Joseph Donovan, Co-ordinator of Information

Brigadier General John Magruder, Director for Intelligence

The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was a UnitedStatesintelligence agency formed during World War II. It was thewartime intelligence agency, and it was a predecessor of the CentralIntelligence Agency (CIA). The OSS was formed in order tocoordinate espionage activities behind enemy lines for the branches ofthe United States Armed Forces.

Contents

[hide]

1 Origins and

activities

2 Transformation into the CIA
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3 Facilities

4 Personnel

o 4.1 Moe

Berg

5 Branches

6 Detachmentso 6.1 US

Army

unitsattached

to the

OSS

7 In popular

culture

8 See also

9 References

10 External links

[edit]Origins and activities

Prior to the formation of the OSS (the American version of theBritish Secret Intelligence Service and Special Operations Executive),American intelligence had been conducted on an ad-hoc basis by thevarious departments of the executive branch, includingthe State,Treasury, Navy, and War Departments. They had no overalldirection, coordination, or control. The U.S. Army and U.S. Navy hadseparate code-breaking departments (Signals Intelligence

Service and OP-20-G). Also, the original code-breaking operation of theState Department, MI-8, run by Herbert Yardley, had been shut down in1929 by Secretary of StateHenry Stimson, deeming it an inappropriatefunction for the diplomatic arm, because "gentlemen don't read eachother's mail".[2]

President Franklin D. Roosevelt was concerned about Americanintelligence deficiencies. On the suggestion of Canadian/Britishspymaster William Stephenson, the senior British intelligence officer inthe western hemisphere, Roosevelt requested that William J.Donovan draft a plan for an intelligence service. Colonel Donovan was

employed to evaluate the global military position in order to offersuggestions concerning American intelligence requirements becausethe U.S. did not have a central intelligence agency. After submitting hiswork, "Memorandum of Establishment of Service of StrategicInformation," Colonel Donovan was appointed as the "Co-ordinator ofInformation" in July 1941.
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General William J. Donovan reviews Operational Group members inBethesda, Marylandprior to their

departure for China in 1945

The Office of Strategic Services was established by a Presidentialmilitary order issued by President Roosevelt on June 13, 1942, tocollect and analyze strategic information required by theJoint Chiefs ofStaffand to conduct special operations not assigned to other agencies.During the War, the OSS supplied policy makers with facts andestimates, but the OSS never had jurisdiction over all foreignintelligence activities. The FBI was responsible for intelligence workin Latin America, and the Army and Navy guarded their areas ofresponsibility.

From 19431945, the OSS played a major role intraining Kuomintang troops in China and Burma, and recruited Kachin,and other indigenous irregular forces for sabotage as well as guides forAllied forces in Burma fighting the Japanese Army. Among otheractivities, the OSS helped arm, train and supply resistancemovements, including Mao Zedong's Red Army in China and the VietMinh in French Indochina, in areas occupied by the Axispowers during World War II. The OSS also recruited and ran one of thewar's most important spies, the German diplomat Fritz Kolbe. Otherfunctions of the OSS included the use

ofpropaganda, espionage, subversion, and post-war planning.

The OSS purchased Soviet code and cipher material (or Finnishinformation on them) from migr Finnish army officers in late 1944.Secretary of State Edward Stettinius, Jr., protested that this violated anagreement President Roosevelt made with the Soviet Union not tointerfere with Soviet cipher traffic from the United States. GeneralDonovan might have copied the papers before returning them the
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following January, but there is no record ofArlington Hall's receivingthem, and CIA and NSA archives have no surviving copies. Thiscodebook was in fact used as part of the Venonadecryption effort, whichhelped uncover large-scale Soviet espionage in North America.[3]

One of the greatest accomplishments of the OSS during World War IIwas its penetration ofNazi Germany by OSS operatives. The OSS wasresponsible for training German and Austrian individuals for missionsinside Germany. Some of these agents included exiled communists andSocialist party members, labor activists, anti-Nazi prisoners-of-war, andGerman and Jewish refugees. At the height of its influence duringWorld War II, the OSS employed almost 24,000 people.[4]

OSS 1st LieutenantGeorge Musulin behind enemy lines in German-occupied Serbia, as Chetnik, during hisfirst mission on November 1943. His second misson wasHalyard

In 1943, the Office of Strategic Services set up operations in Istanbul.[5] Turkey, as a neutral country during the Second World War, was aplace where both the Axis and Allied powers sought to set up networksof spies. The railroads connecting central Asia with Europe as well as

Turkey's close proximity to the Balkan states placed it at a crossroadsof intelligence gathering. The goal of the OSS Istanbul operation calledProject Net-1 was to infiltrate and extenuate subversive action in theold Ottoman andAustro-Hungarian Empires.[5]

Head of operations at OSS Istanbul was a banker from Chicago namedLanning "Packy" Macfarland who maintained the cover story as abanker for the American lend-lease program.[6] Macfarland hired
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Alfred Schwarz, a Czechoslovakian engineer and businessman whocame to be known as "Dogwood" and ended up establishing thenotorious Dogwood information chain.[7] Dogwood in turn hired apersonal assistant named Walter Arndt and established himself as anemployee of the Istanbul Western Electrik Kompani.[7] Through

Schwartz and Arndt the OSS was able to infiltrate anti-fascist groups inAustria, Hungary and Germany. Schwartz was able to convinceRomanian, Bulgarian, Hungarian and Swiss diplomatic couriers tosmuggle American intelligence information into these territories andestablish contact with elements antagonistic to the Nazis and theircollaborators.[8] Couriers and agents memorized information andproduced analytical reports; when they were not able to memorizeeffectively they recorded information on microfilm and hid it in theirshoes or hollowed pencils.[9] Through this process information aboutthe Nazi regime made its way to Macfarland and the OSS in Istanbuland eventually to Washington.

While the OSS "Dogwood-chain" produced a lot of information, itsreliability was increasingly questioned by British intelligence.Eventually by May 1944 through collaboration between the OSS, Britishintelligence, Cairo and Washington the entire "Dogwood-chain" wasfound to be unreliable and dangerous.[9] Planting phony informationinto the OSS was intended to misdirect the resources of the Allies.Schwartz's "Dogwood chain" which was the largest Americanintelligence gathering tool in occupied territory, was shortly thereaftershut down.[10]

In 1942, a young physician named Christian J. Lambertsen invented thefirst Self-contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus (SCUBA) anddemonstrated it to OSS after already being rejected by the U.S. Navy in a pool at a hotel in Washington D.C.[11] The OSS not only boughtinto the concept, they hired Lambertsen to lead the program and buildup the dive element of their maritime unit.[11]

[edit]Transformation into the CIA

One month after the war was won in the Pacific Theater of Operations,on September 20, 1945, the 33rd U.S. President Harry S Truman signed

an Executive Order which came into effect as of October 1, 1945. Thusin the following days from September 20, 1945 the functions of theOSS were split between the Department of State and the Departmentof War. The State Department received the Research and AnalysisBranch of OSS which was renamed the Interim Research andIntelligence Service or (IRIS) and headed by U.S. Army Colonel AlfredMcCormack. This was later renamed the Bureau of Intelligence andResearch.
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The War Department took over the Secret Intelligence (SI)and Counter-Espionage (X-2) Branches, which were then housed in anew office created for just this purposethe Strategic ServicesUnit (SSU). The Secretary of War appointed Brigadier GeneralJohnMagruder (formerly Donovan's Deputy Director for Intelligence in OSS)

as the director to oversee the liquidation of the OSS, and moreimportantly, the preservation of the clandestine intelligence capabilityof the OSS.

In January 1946, President Truman created the Central IntelligenceGroup (CIG) which was the direct precursor to the CIA. The assets ofthe SSU, which now constituted a streamlined "nucleus" of clandestineintelligence was transferred to the CIG in mid-1946 and reconstitutedas the Office of Special Operations (OSO). Next, the National SecurityAct of 1947 established the United States's first permanent peacetimeintelligence agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, which then took

up the functions of the OSS. The direct descendant of the paramilitarycomponent of the OSS is the Special Activities Division of the CIA.[12]

[edit]Facilities

Prince William Forest Park (then known as Chopawamsic RecreationalDemonstration Area) was the site of an OSS training camp thatoperated from 1942 to 1945. Area "C", consisting of approximately6,000 acres (24 km2), was used extensively for communicationstraining, whereas Area "A" was use for training some of theOGs. Catoctin Mountain Park, now the location ofCamp David, was thesite of OSS training Area "B." Congressional Country Club (Area F)in Bethesda, MD was the primary OSS training facility.

The London branch of the OSS, its first overseas facility, was at 70,Grosvenor Street, W1.

The Facilities of the Catalina Island Marine Institute at Toyon Bay onSanta Catalina Island, Calif., are composed (in part) of a former OSSsurvival training camp.

The National Park Service commissioned a study of OSS National Park

training facilities by Professor John Chambers of Rutgers University.

Camp X, near Oshawa, Ontario, Canada, where an "assassination andelimination" training program was operated by the OSS. It was dubbed"the school of mayhem and murder" by George Hunter White whotrained at the facility in the 1950s.[13]

[edit]Personnel
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The names of all OSS personnel and documents of their OSS service,previously a closely guarded secret, were released by the US NationalArchives on August 14, 2008. Among the 24,000 names were thoseofJulia Child, Arthur Goldberg, Saul K. Padover, Arthur Schlesinger,Jr., Bruce Sundlun, andJohn Ford.[4][14]The 750,000 pages in the

35,000 personnel files include applications of people who were notrecruited or hired, as well as the service records of those who were.[15]

[edit]Moe Berg

Major league baseball player Moe Bergof the Boston Red Sox was an OSS agent

Major League Baseball player Moe Berg, a graduate ofPrincetonUniversity and Columbia Law School, was recruited by NelsonRockefeller (the coordinator of the U.S.Office of Inter-American Affairs)and then by the OSS in 1943 because of his language skills.[16][17][18][19][20] He spoke unaccented German, as well as Italian, French,Spanish, Japanese, Greek, Russian, Hebrew, and Latin, in addition toEnglish.[21] He was given the code name "Remus",[22] was assignedto the Secret Intelligencebranch, and took part in missions in the

Caribbean, South America, France, and England.[23] He was alsoinvolved in the Balkans Campaign, parachuting intoYugoslaviatoevaluate the various resistance groups operating against the Nazis,and determining after meeting with him thatTito's were the mosteffective.[24][25] He next dropped behind German lines in occupiedNorway, where he met with Free Norwegian guerrillas and gatheredinformation leading to the destruction of a German plant being used todevelop atomic weapons.[17]
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Later, he was briefed in nuclear physics, provided a Beretta revolverand a cyanide pill (to kill himself if necessary), and sent to Zurich,Switzerland posing as a Swiss physics student.[26] His instructionswere to attend a December 1944 lecture at theTechnischeHochschule there by Germany's top nuclear scientist who was heading

their atomic bomb project, Werner Heisenberg, to an audience filledwith Nazi agents.[27][28] His orders were to kill the scientist if hedetermined that the Germans were far along in their efforts to build anatomic weapon.[18][20][21][29][30] He determined the scientist was not athreat.[29][31] President Roosevelt was pleased with the conclusions ofhis report.[25]

On another mission, he disguised himself as a Nazi German officer inorder to enter a munitions plant in Italy, to determine if new weaponswere being developed there.[20][21][32] He also parachuted behindGerman lines a number of times, in order to gain intelligence.[33]

Berg was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, but declined toaccept it as he was told that upon accepting it he would be forbiddenfrom saying what he had done to deserve the award.[34] He is also theonly former Major League Baseball player whose baseball card isdisplayed at CIA headquarters.[35]
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