The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was the second non-departmental civilian intelligence agency of the United States. It was formed during World War II as the direct successor of the Office of the Coordinator of Information (COI). The OSS was created as an agency of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) to coordinate espionage activities behind enemy lines for all branches of the United States Armed Forces. Other OSS functions included the use of propaganda, subversion, and post-war planning.

The OSS was dissolved a month after the end of the war. Intelligence tasks were soon resumed and carried over by its successors, the Strategic Services Unit (SSU), the Department of State's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), the Central Intelligence Group (CIG), the intermediary precursor to the independent Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the United States Army Special Forces, colloquially known as the "Green Berets".

On December 14, 2016, the organization was collectively honored with a Congressional Gold Medal.

Origin

Before the OSS, the various departments of the executive branch, including the State, Treasury, Navy, and War Departments, conducted American intelligence activities on an ad hoc basis, with no overall direction, coordination, or control. The US Army and US Navy had separate code-breaking departments: Signal Intelligence Service and OP-20-G. (A previous code-breaking operation of the State Department, the 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."Stimson, Henry L. On Active Service in Peace and War (1948). per Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 16th ed.) The FBI was responsible for domestic security and anti-espionage operations.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt was concerned about American intelligence deficiencies. On the suggestion of William "Little Bill" Stephenson, the senior British intelligence officer in the western hemisphere, Roosevelt requested that William "Wild Bill" Donovan draft a plan for an intelligence service based on the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) and Special Operations Executive (SOE). Donovan envisioned a single agency responsible for foreign intelligence and special operations involving commandos, disinformation, partisan and guerrilla activities. Donovan worked closely with Australian-born British intelligence officer Charles Howard 'Dick' Ellis, who has been credited with writing the blueprint.

Said Ellis:

I was soon requested to draft a blueprint for an American intelligence agency, the equivalent of BSC [British Security Co-ordination] and based on these British wartime improvisations... detailed tables of organisation were disclosed to Washington... among these were the organisational tables that led to the birth of General William Donovan's OSS.

After submitting his (and Ellis's) work, "Memorandum of Establishment of Service of Strategic Information", Donovan was appointed "Coordinator of Information" on July 11, 1941, heading the new organization known as the Office of the Coordinator of Information (COI).

Ellis, described as Donovan's "right-hand man", "effectively ran the organization".

Writes Fink:

Ellis was sent from New York by William Stephenson "to Washington to open a sub-station to facilitate daily liaison with Donovan, who reciprocated by sending [future Director of Central Intelligence, DCI] Allen Welsh Dulles to liaise with BSC in the Rockefeller Center". According to Thomas F. Troy, paraphrasing Stephenson, Ellis 'was the tradecraft expert, the organization man, the one who furnished Bill Donovan with charts and memoranda on running an intelligence organization".

Donovan had responsibilities but no actual powers and the existing US agencies were skeptical if not hostile to the British. Until some months after Pearl Harbor, the bulk of OSS intelligence came from the UK. British Security Co-ordination (BSC), under the direction of Ellis, trained the first OSS agents 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.The Secret History of British Intelligence in the Americas, 1940-1945, p27-28

Writes Fink:

William Casey, who headed up OSS's Europe-based human-intelligence operations, the Secret Intelligence Branch, and went on to become director of the CIA, wrote in his autobiography, The Secret War Against Hitler, that Ellis was not only writing blueprints but involved in on-the-ground, logistical programs: "Dick Ellis, [an] experienced British pro, helped establish training centres, mostly around Washington." United States Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle commented: "The really active head of the intelligence section in [William] Donovan's [OSS] group is [Ellis] ... in other words, [Stephenson's] assistant in the British intelligence [sic] is running Donovan's intelligence service."

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 policymakers with facts and estimates, but the OSS never had jurisdiction over all foreign intelligence activities. The Special Intelligence Service (SIS) of 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.

Donald Downes, who was developing counterintelligence capabilities in Washington, explained the situation in his memoir:

Edgar Hoover was out for Donovan's scalp and any type of co-operation was pretty well one-sided. Not only OSS, but the British Secret Intelligence, many of whose investigations were bound to lead to America, were constantly being hounded by the FBI... A friend of ours in the Department of Justice had warned us that Edgar Hoover believed we were 'penetrating' embassies and that he was annoyed.

Activities

OSS proved especially useful in providing a worldwide overview of the German war effort, its strengths and weaknesses. In direct operations it was successful in supporting Operation Torch in French North Africa in 1942, where it identified pro-Allied potential supporters and located landing sites. OSS operations in neutral countries, especially Stockholm, Sweden, provided in-depth information on German advanced technology. The Madrid station set up agent networks in France that supported the Allied invasion of southern France in 1944. Most famous were the operations in Switzerland run by Allen Dulles that provided extensive information on German strength, air defenses, submarine production, and the V-1 and V-2 weapons. It revealed some of the secret German efforts in chemical and biological warfare. Switzerland's station also supported resistance fighters in France, Austria and Italy, and helped with the surrender of German forces in Italy in 1945.G.J.A. O'Toole, Honorable Treachery: A History of U. S. Intelligence, Espionage, and Covert Action from the American Revolution to the CIA pp 418-19.

For the duration of 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, and providing military training for anti-Japanese guerrilla movements in Asia, among other things.Smith, R. Harris. OSS: The Secret History of America's First Central Intelligence Agency. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972. At the height of its influence during World War II, the OSS employed almost 24,000 people."Chef Julia Child, others part of WWII spy network" , CNN, August 14, 2008

From 1943 to 1945, the OSS played a major role in training Kuomintang troops in China and British 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 in areas militarily occupied by the Japanese Empire during World War II, including Mao Zedong's Red Army in China (known as the Dixie Mission), Ho Chi Minh's Viet Minh in French Indochina in which OSS officer Archimedes Patti played a central role in OSS operations in Indochina and met frequently with Ho Chi Minh in 1945 as well as Korean Liberation Army partisans on the Korean Peninsula (known as the Eagle Project).

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.

From 1943 the OSS was in contact with the Austrian resistance group around Kaplan Heinrich Maier. As a result, plans and production facilities for V-2 rockets, Tiger tanks and aircraft (Messerschmitt Bf 109, Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet, etc.) were passed on to Allied general staffs in order to enable Allied bombers to get accurate air strikes. The Maier group informed very early about the mass murder of Jews through its contacts with the Semperit factory near Auschwitz. The group was gradually dismantled by the German authorities because of a double agent who worked for both the OSS and the Gestapo. This uncovered a transfer of money from the Americans to Vienna via Istanbul and Budapest, and most of the members were executed after a People's Court hearing.Peter Broucek "Die österreichische Identität im Widerstand 1938–1945" (2008), p 163.Hansjakob Stehle "Die Spione aus dem Pfarrhaus (German: The spy from the rectory)" In: Die Zeit, January 5, 1996.

In 1943, the Office of Strategic Services set up operations in Istanbul.Hassell and McCrae, p.158 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.