Office of Strategic Services

Office of Strategic Services. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was the approximate US counterpart of the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, and Special Operations Executive, SOE, with which it co-operated on more or less equal terms throughout the war and after it. It was created by presidential Military Order on 13 June 1942. It functioned as the principal US intelligence organization, in all theatres, for the rest of the Second World War.

Origins

In July 1940, at the personal request of Roosevelt, William J. Donovan undertook the first of a series of overseas missions to appraise the global military situation and to make recommendations about American intelligence requirements. The USA had, at this time, no central agency responsible for the collection, analysis, and dissemination of information bearing on national security, these functions having been dispersed among the armed services (G-2 and N-2 for the army and navy, respectively), regional desks in the state department, and various other agencies and departments.

On his return Donovan submitted to the president a ‘Memorandum of Establishment of Service of Strategic Information’ in which he urged that a regular channel of strategic information be created, and predicted that political and psychological factors would play a major role in the war. Roosevelt accepted these recommendations, and in July 1941 appointed General Donovan to the civilian post of ‘Co-ordinator of Information’ (COI). The COI was instructed to consolidate these tasks, under the authority of the president and the Joint Chiefs of Staff ( JCS).

In its first year the COI grew rapidly under Donovan's aggressive leadership, and claimed the functions of information gathering, propaganda, espionage, subversion, and post-war planning. This led both to an unwieldy organization and to jurisdictional rivalries with other government agencies. On 13 June 1942, the overt propaganda functions of the COI were severed and autonomously constituted as the Office of War Information (OWI), while the COI itself was reorganized as the Office of Strategic Services.

Organization

The OSS was instructed by the president to ‘collect and analyse such strategic information as may be required’ and ‘plan and operate such special services as may be directed’ by the JCS. The streamlined organization of the agency reflected this dual mandate.

The Deputy Director for Intelligence Services, Brig-General John Magruder, was responsible for the activities of four intelligence branches: Secret Intelligence (SI) procured, frequently through unorthodox means, data about Axis and Axis-occupied countries; Counter-Intelligence (X-2) monitored the intelligence operations of other nations, ran double agents in the field, and evaluated the credibility of foreign nationals offering their services to American officials; the Foreign Nationalities Branch (FN) interviewed refugees and foreign citizens residing in the USA.

The largest of the intelligence branches, corresponding to General Donovan's belief that at the heart of modern intelligence work lay ‘good old-fashioned intellectual sweat’, was Research and Analysis (R&A). This unit, directed by William L. Langer, a historian from Harvard University, drew heavily upon specialists from the American and refugee academic communities and included a large number of distinguished scholars. The R&A Branch produced analytical reports on economic, political, geographical, and cultural topics pertaining to all theatres of operation, the USSR, and Latin America. R&A also produced a number of highly regarded publications which served as weekly digests that were used throughout the government.

Parallel to the intelligence branches were the operational branches, overseen by a Deputy Director for Strategic Services and Operations. The Special Operations Branch (SO), engaged in acts of physical subversion including sabotage, the support of resistance movements, raiding and other irregular combat missions in support of military and intelligence requirements; the first SO operations were conducted in north-west Africa in late 1942. Morale Operations (MO) conducted psychological warfare including planted rumours, leaflets, and covert or ‘black’ radio broadcasts directed at the Axis populations (see also subversive warfare).

Finally, the highly innovative work of the technical support services of OSS deserves to be mentioned since there was literally no precedent for the actual implementation of the tasks with which the new agency was charged. These included a Research and Development group that devised specialized communications equipment, weapons, and contraband; a Field Photographic Unit whose staff produced a vast array of materials for informational and propaganda purposes; the Interdepartmental Committee for the Acquisition of Foreign Periodicals amassed an enormous body of invaluable primary documentation; the Presentation Branch employed an exceptional group of artists, architects, and graphic designers who worked on projects ranging from the visual presentation of statistical data for the president to the design of the legal chambers in which the Nuremberg trials were held. The work of the these groups would be felt long into the post-war era, both in intelligence and in a broad range of civilian professions.

The headquarters of the OSS were in Washington, but it also maintained overseas outposts which engaged in information-gathering, liaison activities with Allied intelligence agencies, prisoner-of-war interrogations, and the interviewing of foreign nationals. Chief among the overseas units was the London Outpost, established at the end of 1941 to provide Washington with a listening-post in Europe, to facilitate co-operation between Allied intelligence services, and to serve as a base of operations for intelligence, espionage, and operational activities. Outposts were also created in neutral Stockholm and Berne, and subsequently in Algiers, Rome, Caserta, Paris, Wiesbaden, Salzburg, and finally Berlin. OSS was also active in the Middle East, especially Cairo and Istanbul, and in Asia, where it maintained outposts in Chungking, New Delhi, Kandy, and elsewhere.

Effects

The Office of Strategic Services was designed to be an apolitical service agency, specifically excluded from policy-making roles in Washington and strictly subordinated to the military theatre commanders overseas. These constraints resulted in a limited influence on military and diplomatic policy, and a considerable measure of frustration on the part of agents, analysts, and administrators. However, they also enabled OSS to gain a reputation for disinterested objectivity and to make a number of significant contributions to the war effort. Its principal fields of activity included the following:

North Africa

OSS penetrated North Africa before the North African campaign started in November 1942 (TORCH), to gather intelligence, identify informants, rally political support, and lay a communications network. These softening-up operations, together with extensive documentation prepared by the Research and Analysis Branch in Washington, were considered to be of exceptional importance in facilitating TORCH. The North African campaign served as the first major test of Donovan's organization (see also Agency Africa).

Enemy Objectives Unit (EOU)

From the autumn of 1942, a highly trained group of OSS economists, working under the auspices of the Economic Warfare Division of the US embassy in London, developed a programme of strategic aerial warfare based on precision bombing of selected industrial targets. The concept, designed to cause maximum disruption of strategic supplies, represented an early application of economic theory to military practice. It was applied to a limited extent by the Eighth and the Fifteenth Army Air Forces in Germany, Eastern Europe, and occupied France (see strategic air offensives, 1 and 2), and remained a basic strategic concept until well into the nuclear age.

Mediterranean theatre

OSS operational teams and intelligence officers worked in close co-operation with military forces in the North African and Italian campaigns, and in the Balkans. Between the start of the Sicilian campaign, in July 1943, and the fall of Rome 11 months later, OSS units conducted missions throughout central and northern Italy in support of resistance activities, frequently in conjunction with SOE and MI6. The SI and X-2 Branches engaged in intelligence-gathering activities, and R&A units in Caserta and Rome reported extensively on political, economic, and strategic matters.

Balkans

In mid- 1943 Force 266—OSS teams attached to SOE missions—were allowed into Yugoslavia, where they supplied and conducted paramilitary operations with the forces of both Tito and Mihailović. Officially, OSS attempted to encourage anti-Nazi resistance from whatever source, whether communist or royalist. In the same period some 300 agents were infiltrated into Greece where they collected intelligence and engaged in extensive subversion. Force 266 was absorbed into the Balkan Air Force's Force 399 in June 1944. According to one historian ( K. Ford, OSS and the Yugoslav Resistance, Texas, 1992, pp. 82–4), OSS was, from this date, heavily penetrated by communist sympathizers.

Normandy landings

The OSS operated in close co-operation with the UK's secret services in the period following the Allied invasion of Normandy in June 1944 (see OVERLORD). Specially trained Jedburgh teams, made up of American OSS and British SOE officers, and representatives of de Gaulle's Free French, conducted successful operations in northern and southern France, and OSS members were part of the Sussex teams which were also dropped into France before OVERLORD. R&A teams followed the advancing armies and set up their own intelligence-gathering activities in newly-liberated territories.

Operation SUNRISE

In November 1942, Allen Dulles arrived at the OSS mission in Berne, Switzerland, bearing the title ‘Special Legal Assistant to the US Ambassador’ and an agenda that was simultaneously military (the defeat of Nazi Germany) and political (the neutralization of Soviet influence in the period of post-war reconstruction). In addition to maintaining a far-flung network of agents and informants, Dulles was able to establish contact with representatives of the anti-Nazi resistance in Germany, including leading members of the failed conspiracy of 20 July 1944 (see Schwarze Kapelle). In February 1945, Dulles' office began to receive peace overtures from the German generals through various civilian intermediaries. These led ultimately to negotiations between OSS/Berne and SS General Karl Wolff for the surrender of the German armies in north Italy under his command. The German surrender was accepted on 2 May 1945, to the great consternation of Soviet leaders who still feared a separate peace and who suspected OSS of acting to pre-empt communist elements of the Italian resistance.

Penetration of Germany

One of the signal accomplishments of American intelligence was to achieve the actual penetration of Nazi Germany by OSS operatives. In autumn 1944, in the context of the surprising success of the German counter-offensive in the Ardennes, the decision was made to activate plans for the penetration of the Reich that had been in preparation almost from the beginning of the war. The OSS Labor Branch, the London Special Operations Branch, OSS Berne, and other units began to identify German and Austrian individuals who had made their way to the west, and to train and equip them for specific missions inside Germany. Following General Donovan's dictum that ‘I'd put Stalin on the OSS payroll if I thought it would help defeat Hitler,’ exiled communist and socialist party members were the first to be recruited; they were followed by an assortment of labour activists, anti-Nazi prisoners-of-war, German deserters, expatriate Poles, Jewish refugees, and at least one White Russian ( Youri Vinogradov) who, according to one source (see J. Persico, Piercing the Reich, London, 1979), managed to penetrate the command of the German Security Service, the Sicherheitsdienst (see RSHA) in Berlin. Operating at great personal risk, these men and women undertook to report on conditions within the Reich, to evaluate the unexpected tenacity of the German forces, to identify strategic targets and resources, and to promote acts of resistance, sabotage, and subversion. By the following spring OSS had infiltrated a number of agents into Germany and Austria who were operating in virtually every militarily important city in the Reich. The achievements of the teams and individuals who penetrated Nazi Germany varied greatly. Collectively, their greatest significance was probably to provide independent confirmation of Allied intelligence with regard to the evaluation of military targets, political tendencies, and significant personalities in the last months of the war.

Military Occupation, Denazification, and War Crimes

OSS was actively engaged in planning for the post-war governance of Germany and German-occupied territories well in advance of Germany's capitulation (see also Allied Control Commissions). At the end of 1943, R&A was commissioned by the Civil Affairs Division of the War Department to outline the programme for the American military occupation, denazification, and democratic reconstruction of post-war Germany. This massive research project resulted in extensive documentation of German occupation policies in Europe, as well as a series of detailed handbooks and guides for the use of occupation authorities which dealt with every aspect of political, economic, and cultural life. In general, OSS recommendations were considerably more sweeping than the anti-Nazi measures actually carried out.

A related activity was the identification of prominent Nazis to be investigated, detained, or tried for war crimes. Political and legal theorists in R&A, working in co-operation with the departments of war and justice, helped to devise the set of guidelines used by the American prosecutors at the Nuremberg War Crimes tribunal. The OSS series on ‘Nazi Plans for Dominating Germany and Europe’, prepared for the use of the War Crimes staff, provided some of the most detailed documentation available on the extent of Nazi criminality, including the extermination campaign against the European Jews (see Final Solution).

Asia and the Pacific

In the Asian theatre OSS had to manoeuvre among nationalist, communist, and imperialist interests; these difficulties were aggravated by a reluctance on the part of General MacArthur and Admiral Nimitz to allow OSS agents to operate freely. Throughout the region, OSS was subject to the control of American, British, and Chinese military authorities, and never gained much autonomy. However, despite these constraints, OSS units made a number of important contributions to the war in the China–Burma–India theatre.

The first COI/OSS presence on the Asian mainland was in China where SI and R&A units began gathering intelligence from Chungking in 1942. To this continuing activity was added the OSS component of the multi-service ‘Dixie Mission’, an American military detachment stationed in the communist capital of Fushih from July 1944, which gathered intelligence and maintained a politically delicate liaison with the Chinese communists. OSS operations in Japanese-occupied Thailand were paralysed by differences among the Allies over European colonial interests in the postwar configuration of South-East Asia. In October 1944, Free Thai units began to infiltrate Thailand from OSS bases in China and to perform valuable intelligence functions. OSS and SOE were arming, training, and equipping units of the Free Thai underground organization in preparation for an eventual uprising at the time of the Japanese surrender. Following the end of hostilities in Europe a considerable number of experienced OSS units were transferred to China and French Indo-China, where they established contacts with nationalist and communist guerrilla movements. However, in general, OSS operations in the region were marginal to the air and naval campaigns mounted by the conventional military forces.

Elsewhere in the Far Eastern Theatre, an SO combat unit known as Detachment 101 was formed in April 1942, in support of American military objectives in the China–Burma–India theatre.

The rapid advance of Japanese forces through South-East Asia threatened the only remaining supply route to nearly 4 million Chinese forces under Chiang Kai-shek. With the Pacific Fleet badly damaged at Pearl Harbor, and the bulk of American air and ground power committed in Europe, General Stilwell accepted a proposal to conduct intelligence gathering and unconventional warfare activities in Burma. Colonel Carl Eifler was named commanding officer of the proposed detachment; seriously wounded in late 1943, he was succeeded by Colonel William R. Peers.

Operating from a secret base in northern Assam, the unit—initially only 21 strong—raised a considerable force of Burmese nationals whom they trained in intelligence collection and internal propaganda, as well as espionage, sabotage, and harassment operations against Japanese targets. By the end of 1942 Detachment 101 had infiltrated Burma, and by the end of 1943 six bases, staffed by Americans and Kachin guerrilla forces, were operating behind Japanese lines. By the end of the war the detachment fielded some 120 Americans and 10,800 American-trained Burmese guerrillas, and it figured importantly in the eventual recapture of the Burma Road.

Among its other principal accomplishments, the detachment disrupted Japanese air defences so as to secure the Hump supply flights and thus maintain the viability of Chinese nationalist forces. Secondly, an estimated 85% of all the intelligence received by Stilwell's Northern Combat Area Command came from Detachment 101 sources. Third, its sabotage and guerrilla activities proved exceedingly costly to the Japanese occupation army, in terms of men, matériel, and perhaps morale.

Conclusion

The Office of Strategic Services was terminated abruptly by Executive Order 9620, signed by President Truman on 20 September 1945 and effective ten days later. Among civilian critics, concerns had been growing about the propriety of a secret intelligence agency within an open society during peacetime. Within the government, OSS was often regarded as an interloper, usurping functions properly belonging to the military zservices or the Department of State. OSS involvement in political controversies within the French, Yugoslav, Chinese, and German resistance movements, and its efforts to avert a superpower stand-off in the post-war era, gave it a reputation for leftist sympathies which further discredited it in the waning months of the war.

Accordingly, the teams of Special Operations, Secret Intelligence, and Counter-Intelligence agents were mostly disbanded and dispersed throughout the Strategic Services Unit of the war department. Exceptional efforts were made to keep the Research and Analysis Branch intact. Donovan was among many who believed that the experience of Pearl Harbor demonstrated the need for a permanent intelligence apparatus, and argued with little success that the trained specialists he had gathered for this task should not be dispersed. Some R&A personnel were transferred to the Interim Research and Intelligence Service (IRIS) in the state department, but within a few years the majority had returned to academic life.

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), created by the National Security Act of 1947 and the successor to the wartime OSS, assumed custody of its records. In 1980 the CIA began the process of transferring the majority of these materials to the US National Archives.

Barry M. Katz

Bibliography

Chalou, G. (ed.), The Secrets War: The Office of Strategic Services in World War II (Washington, DC, 1992).
Katz, B. M. , Foreign Intelligence. Research and Analysis in the Office of Strategic Services. 1942–1945 (Cambridge, 1989).
Smith, B. F. , The Shadow Warriors. OSS and the Origins of the CIA (New York, 1983).
War Report of the OSS, 2 vols. (New York, 1976).