Office of Strategic Services

The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was a United States intelligence agency formed during World War II. It was the wartime (but not direct) precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency.

X-2

OSS had a dismal security reputation. Established agencies like the FBI and G-2 believed that Donovan's oddball outfit, built as it was from scratch with not a few corners cut in the hiring of its staff, had to be riddled with subversives and spies. This rap was not wholly fair; OSS headquarters was not in fact penetrated by Axis agents, and its field security (at least in Europe) was adequate. Nevertheless, X-2 hunted the agents of Axis?not Allied?services. Soviet sympathizers and even spies worked in OSS offices in Washington and the field. Some were hired precisely because they were Communists; Donovan wanted their help in dealing with partisan groups in Nazi-occupied Europe. Others who were not Communists, such as Donovan's aide Duncan Lee, Research and Analysis (R&A) labor economist Donald Wheeler, Morale Operations Indonesia expert Jane Foster Zlatowski, and R&A Latin America specialist Maurice Halperin, nevertheless passed information to Moscow. OSS operations in China, moreover, were badly penetrated by Communist agents working as clerical and housekeeping staff, or training in OSS camps for operational missions.{{NamedRef|X-2|1}}

Related Topics:
FBI - G-2 - Subversives - Communists - Duncan Lee - Donald Wheeler - Jane Foster Zlatowski - Maurice Halperin - China

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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.'s protested 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.

Related Topics:
Edward Stettinius, Jr. - Arlington Hall

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In October 1945 the OSS was dissolved and its functions 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 Department of War 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. In January of 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 intellignce 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.

Related Topics:
1945 - 1947 - National Security Act - Central Intelligence Agency

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