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The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was a United States intelligence agency formed during World War II. It was the wartime intelligence agency, and a predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The OSS was formed in order to coordinate espionage activities behind enemy lines for the branches of the United States Armed Forces. Other functions of the OSS included the use of propaganda, subversion, and post-war planning.
Prior to the formation of the OSS, American intelligence had been conducted on an ad-hoc basis by the various departments of the executive branch, including the State, Treasury, Navy, and War Departments. It had no overall direction, coordination, or control. The US Army and US Navy had separate code-breaking departments: Signals Intelligence Service and OP-20-G. (A previous 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, deeming it an inappropriate function for the diplomatic arm, because "gentlemen don't read each other's mail".[4]) The FBI was responsible for domestic security and anti-espionage operations.
President British Security Coordination (BSC) in Canada, until training stations were set up in the US with guidance from BSC instructors, who also provided information on how the SOE was arranged and managed. The British immediately made available their short-wave broadcasting capabilities to Europe, Africa and the Far East and provided equipment for agents until American production was established.[5]
The Office of Strategic Services was established by a Presidential military order issued by President 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 left responsible for intelligence work in Latin America, and the Army and Navy continued to develop and rely on their own sources of intelligence.
For the duration of the 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, providing military training for anti-Japanese guerrilla movement in Asia, among other things.[6] At the height of its influence during WWII, the OSS employed almost 24,000 people.[7]
From 1943–1945, the OSS played a major role in training Kuomintang 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 World War II. OSS officer Archimedes Patti played a central role in OSS operations in French Indochina and met frequently with Ho Chi Minh in 1945.[8] In the "40th Bomb Group Association Memories Issue # 14 March,1987 Date of event: Summer of 1944 to early Spring, 1945 Date written: September, 1986 Written by: Louis Jones":
The Dixie Mission in China was composed of approximately 20 people, including two OSS officers.[9]
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.
In 1943, the Office of Strategic Services set up operations in Istanbul.[10] Turkey, as a neutral country during the Second World War, was a place where both the Axis and Allied powers had spy networks. The railroads connecting central Asia with Europe as well as Turkey's close proximity to the Balkan states placed it at a crossroads of intelligence gathering. The goal of the OSS Istanbul operation called Project Net-1 was to infiltrate and extenuate subversive action in the old Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires.[10]
Head of operations at OSS Istanbul was a banker from Chicago named Lanning "Packy" Macfarland who maintained the cover story as a banker for the American lend-lease program.[11] Macfarland hired Alfred Schwarz, a Czechoslovakian engineer and businessman who came to be known as "Dogwood" and ended up establishing the Dogwood information chain.[12] Dogwood in turn hired a personal assistant named Walter Arndt and established himself as an employee of the Istanbul Western Electrik Kompani.[12] Through Schwartz and Arndt the OSS was able to infiltrate anti-fascist groups in Austria, Hungary and Germany. Schwartz was able to convince Romanian, Bulgarian, Hungarian and Swiss diplomatic couriers to smuggle American intelligence information into these territories and establish contact with elements antagonistic to the Nazis and their collaborators.[13] Couriers and agents memorized information and produced analytical reports; when they were not able to memorize effectively they recorded information on microfilm and hid it in their shoes or hollowed pencils.[14] Through this process information about the Nazi regime made its way to Macfarland and the OSS in Istanbul and eventually to Washington.
While the OSS "Dogwood-chain" produced a lot of information, its reliability was increasingly questioned by British intelligence. Eventually by May 1944 through collaboration between the OSS, British intelligence, Cairo and Washington the entire Dogwood-chain was found to be unreliable and dangerous.[14] Planting phony information into the OSS was intended to misdirect the resources of the Allies. Schwartz's Dogwood-chain, which was the largest American intelligence gathering tool in occupied territory, was shortly thereafter shut down.[15]
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 United States. General Donovan might have copied the papers before returning them the following January, but there is no record of Arlington Hall's 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.[16]
The OSS espionage and sabotage operations produced a steady demand for highly specialized equipment.[6] After realizing that, General Donovan invited experts, organized workshops and funded labs that formed a core of the later established Research & Development Branch. Boston chemist Stanley P. Lovell became its first head, and Donovan humorously called him - "his Professor Moriarty".[17]:101 Throughout the war years, the OSS Research & Development was successfully adapting Allied weapons and espionage equipment, and producing 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, among others.[17][18] In addition, innovative communication equipment was developed, such as wiretap gadgets, electronic beacons for locating agents, and the "Joan-Eleanor" portable radio system that made 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, various passes, ration cards and counterfeit money.[19]
On August 28, 1943, Stanley Lovell was asked to make a presentation in front of a not very friendly audience of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, since the U.S. top brass were largely skeptical of all OSS plans beyond collecting military intelligence and were ready to split the OSS between the Army and the Navy.[20]:5–7 While explaining the purpose and mission of his department and introducing various gadgets and tools, he reportedly casually dropped into a waste basket the Hedy, a panic-inducing type of a device in a 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 a Hollywood star Hedy Lamarr for her ability to distract men, saved lives of some trapped OSS operatives.[21]:184–185
Not all projects worked. Some ideas were outright goofy, such as producing pathogenic synthetic goat dung in PROJECT Capricious (1942) to spread anthrax by using flies among German troops in Spanish Morocco to prevent Spain from joining the Axis powers. Donovan was not informed about PROJECT Capricious due to its uttermost secrecy, the Germans eventually evacuated and Operation Capricious was aborted.[22]:150–151 There were also ideas to introduce estrogen into Hitler's food to deprive him of his trademark mustache and — recognizable by all Germans — baritone voice. A more deadly plot included hiding a capsule with mustard gas in flowers to cause blindness among Nazi generals inside the German High Command Headquarters.[22]:149 All in all, Stanley Lovell worked hard to level the playing field for the OSS in the WWII arena of espionage, and was later quoted saying, "It was my policy to consider any method whatever that might aid the war, however unorthodox or untried".[23]
In 1939, a young physician named
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Taro and Mitsu Yashima, both Japanese political dissidents who were imprisoned in Japan for protesting its regime, worked for the OSS in psychological warfare against the Japanese Empire.[52][53]
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.[51]
Major League Baseball player Moe Berg was recruited by the OSS in 1943 because of his language skills,[32][33][34][35][36] assigned to the Secret Intelligence branch, and took part in missions in the Caribbean, South America, France, England, Norway, Italy, and the Balkans.[33][36][37][38][39][40][41] Later, Berg was briefed in nuclear physics, and sent to Zürich, Switzerland posing as a Swiss physics student,[42] with the mission of attending a lecture at the Technische Hochschule by Germany's top nuclear scientist, Werner Heisenberg.[43][44] His orders were to kill the scientist if he determined that the Germans were far along in their efforts to build an atomic weapon;[34][36][40][45][46] he found that the scientist was not a threat.[45][47][48] Berg was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, but declined to accept it as he was forbidden from saying what he had done to receive the award.[49] He is the only former Major League Baseball player whose baseball card is displayed at CIA headquarters.[50]
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, Ralph Bunche, Arthur Goldberg, Saul K. Padover, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Bruce Sundlun, and John Ford.[7][30] The 750,000 pages in the 35,000 personnel files include applications of people who were not recruited or hired, as well as the service records of those who were.[31]
[29] At
The National Park Service commissioned a study of OSS National Park training facilities by Professor John Chambers of Rutgers University.
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 London branch of the OSS, its first overseas facility, was at 70 Grosvenor Street, W1.
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. 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.
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, were transferred to the CIG in mid-1946 and reconstituted as the Office of Special Operations (OSO). Next, the National Security Act of 1947 established the United States's first permanent peacetime intelligence agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, which then took up the functions of the OSS. The direct descendant of the paramilitary component of the OSS is the Special Activities Division of the CIA.[28]
The War Department took over the Secret Intelligence (SI) and Counter-Espionage (X-2) Branches, which were then 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 the director to oversee the liquidation of the OSS, and more importantly, the preservation of the clandestine intelligence capability of the OSS.
After victory in Europe in May 1945, the OSS was better able to concentrate on operations in Japan. One month after the war was won in the Pacific Theater of Operations, on September 20, 1945, President Truman signed Executive Order 9621, which came into effect as of October 1, 1945. Thus in the following days from September 20, 1945, the functions of the OSS were split between the Department of State and the Department of War. The State Department received the Research and Analysis Branch of OSS which was renamed the Interim [27] Research and Intelligence Service or (IRIS) and headed by U.S. Army Colonel Alfred McCormack. This was later renamed the Bureau of Intelligence and Research.
Growing involvement of the OSS with coastal infiltration and water-based sabotage eventually led to creation of the OSS Maritime Unit. [26][24] 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".[25]
Internal Revenue Service, United States Mint, United States federal executive departments, United States Department of Justice, United States Department of Homeland Security
Office of Strategic Services, World War II, United States Department of State, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Staff (military)
United States Department of Defense, Espionage, Office of Strategic Services, Central Intelligence Agency, Secret Intelligence Service