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In peacetime they were cooks and lawyers, bankers and housewives, athletes and teachers. In wartime they were spies in the ferocious espionage battle against Nazism. Sworn to secrecy, few ever divulged the crucial part that they played in winning the war.
Yesterday these members of a wartime intelligence network created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and modelled directly on the British MI6 were revealed when the US Government opened the files on 24,000 people who spied for America during the Second World War. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which would later evolve into the CIA, played a key role in the war but the personal details of the men and women, civilian and military, who fought America’s secret war against the Nazis have never been made formally public before.
Officially the OSS employed 13,000 people in various clandestine activities during the war. The personnel files, declassified yesterday and now accessible at the National Archives in Washington, reveal a far larger organisation that recruited from every walk of life. The ranks of America’s spy army included soldiers, academics, historians, geographers, actors, anthropologists, diplomats, scientists, society hostesses, sportsmen and philosophers. There were two Nobel prizewinners, four future directors of CIA and a number of communist sympathisers. A quarter of the force were civilians, and more than 4,500 were women.
Some OSS recruits went on to become household names, such as Julia Child, the television chef, Moe Berg, the baseball player, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr, the historian. For decades, the CIA resisted pressure to release the OSS records.
“Finally, after all these years, they have gotten the names out,” Elizabeth McIntosh, 93, a one-time OSS agent, said yesterday. “All of these people had been told never to mention they were with the OSS”.
After Pearl Harbor brought the US into the war, Roosevelt concluded that the US needed an intelligence-gathering operation along British lines, and appointed a New York lawyer and First World War veteran, General William J. Donovan, to create it. In June 1942, Donovan, known as “Wild Bill”, set about creating a top-secret organisation to gather military intelligence and wreak havoc on the enemy by any means. He insisted on recruiting the brightest and the best, so much so that the OSS was nicknamed “Oh So Social” by other government agencies, piqued by the exclusivity of the new network.
The work of the OSS was highly effective: intelligence gathering, guerrilla warfare, psychological tactics, propaganda, sabotage, infiltration of enemy organisations, supporting and training resistance movements, codebreaking and subversion. The OSS was bankrolled by Roosevelt’s emergency fund, which meant that it could bypass the usual accounting methods.
In the course of its wartime life, the OSS spent $135 million – more than $1 billion at today’s prices.
The 750,000 pages of documents released yesterday reveal the full extent of the OSS network, which swiftly evolved into a vital element in the US war machine. The new organisation took its cue directly from MI6 and the Special Operations Executive, the group detailed to “set Europe ablaze”, in Churchill’s words. As Michael Warner, a CIA historian, writes: “The British had much to teach their American pupils . . . OSS needed information, training, and experience, all of which the British could provide.”
Among others working in this shadowy world were Herbert Marcuse, the German philosopher, Ralph Bunche, the African-American diplomat, Sterling Hayden, the actor, and Miles Copeland, father of Stewart Copeland, the drummer in the band the Police.
Liaising with MI6, the OSS proved particularly adept at recruiting spies to operate within Germany. Some 200 agents, mostly antiNazi prisoners of war, were dropped into Germany equipped with meticulously prepared clothing and documents.
Other agents linked up with Resistance fighters in France, and partisans in Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia, Burma, Malaya and China. Many of these were prepared for action behind the lines at the OSS training camp in the Catoctin Mountain Park, which is now the location of Camp David, the presidential retreat. Meanwhile the OSS psychological operations team churned out rafts of information and misinformation designed to mislead, bewilder and demoralise the enemy: rumours about Hitler’s health and sanity, subversive leaflets and fake broadcasts.
American technicians excelled at the technological aspects of secret war, perfecting a range of miniature cameras, limpet mines, wiretaps, electronic beacons and other gizmos.
Every agent was meticulously equipped. “His eyeglasses, dental work, toothbrush, razor, brief case, travelling bag, shoes and every item of wearing apparel had to be microscopically accurate,” the OSS official history states.
The OSS’s greatest coup was the recruitment and deployment of the antiNazi German diplomat Fritz Kolbe, one of the most important spies of the war. A diplomatic courier, Kolbe, codenamed George Wood, passed some 2,600 documents to his US handlers, including information on the German expectations for D-Day, the V1 and V2 rockets, and the activities of the German spy codenamed Cicero who was working as a butler in the British Embassy in Ankara.
Donovan was the ideal man to head a network of such varied talents and distinct personalities. Decorated for bravery after charging the enemy lines in the First World War, he was energetic, ruthless, imaginative and tough as teak.
His first secret assignment was in 1919, reporting on antiBolshevik movements in Siberia, a mission that he combined with his honeymoon. “It wasn’t your usual honeymoon, but Mrs Donovan was very understanding,” he recalled.
Donovan’s assistant at OSS Headquarters in Washington was Julia Child, whose job was to type the details of thousands of agents to enable the American spymasters to keep track of the network. These are the files that have now been released.
Perhaps the strangest aspect of the new intelligence organisation was that no such thing existed before the war. Until 1942 America had gathered intelligence in an ad hoc way, without overall direction. Rival military branches declined to share their secrets. A fledgeling codebreaking department within the State Department was closed in 1929 on the ground that “gentlemen don’t read each other’s mail”.
From such fastidious beginnings would emerge the CIA, an organisation not noted for gentlemanly methods. But not all the OSS activities proved to be good long-term investments. Among other operations, the OSS helped to train resistance movements such as Mao’s Red Army and the Viet Minh in French Indochina as tools to undermine Axis control in those areas.
President Truman was no fan of the fire-breathing General Donovan, and the OSS was terminated in September 1945. Most of its functions, and at least part of its philosophy, were later assumed by the CIA.
Donovan himself was under no illusions about the huge and powerful weapon he had created: “Espionage is not a nice thing, nor are the methods employed exemplary. Neither are demolition bombs nor poison gas.
“We face an enemy who believes one of his chief weapons is that none but he will employ terror. But we will turn terror against him.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article4535088.ece
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"Korea has not been the only battle ground since the end of the Second World War. Men have fought and died in Malaya, in Greece, in the Philippines, in Algeria and Cuba, and Cyprus and almost continuously on the Indo-Chinese Peninsula. No nuclear weapons have been fired. No massive nuclear retaliation has been considered appropriate. This is another type of war, new in its intensity, ancient in its origin--war by guerrillas, subversives, insurgents, assassins, war by ambush instead of by combat; by infiltration, instead of aggression, seeking victory by eroding and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him. It is a form of warfare uniquely adapted to what has been strangely called 'wars of liberation,' to undermine the efforts of new and poor countries to maintain the freedom that they have finally achieved. It preys on economic unrest and ethnic conflicts. It requires in those situations where we must counter it, and these are the kinds of challenges that will be before us in the next decade if freedom is to be saved, a whole new kind of strategy, a wholly different kind of force, and therefore a new and wholly different kind of military training."-President Kennedy's Address at Graduation Exercises of the U.S. Military Academy, 1962
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"The reason I'll be released is the same reason you think I'll be convicted. I do rub shoulders with some of the most vile, sadistic men calling themselves leaders today. But some of these men are the enemies of your enemies. And while the biggest arms dealer in the world is your boss - the President of the United States, who ships more merchandise in a day than I do in a year - sometimes it's embarrassing to have his fingerprints on the guns. Sometimes he needs a freelancer like me to supply forces he can't be seen supplying. So. You call me evil, but unfortunately for you, I'm a necessary evil."-Yuri Orlov, Lord of War
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"Of all the weapons in the vast soviet arsenal, nothing was more profitable than Avtomat Kalashnikova model of 1947. More commonly known as the AK-47, or Kalashnikov. It's the world's most popular assault rifle. A weapon all fighters love. An elegantly simple 9 pound amalgamation of forged steel and plywood. It doesn't break, jam, or overheat. It'll shoot whether it's covered in mud or filled with sand. It's so easy, even a child can use it; and they do. The Soviets put the gun on a coin. Mozambique put it on their flag. Since the end of the Cold War, the Kalashnikov has become the Russian people's greatest export. After that comes vodka, caviar, and suicidal novelists. One thing is for sure, no one was lining up to buy their cars."-Yuri Orlov, Lord of War
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