Office of Strategic Services OSS

Before World War II the United States had no central intelligence service. In July 1941 President Franklin Roosevelt created the office of the Coordinator of Information, led by the lawyer and World War I hero William Donovan, and after Pearl Harbor it was reorganized as the Office of Strategic Services by a military order of June 13, 1942, under the Joint Chiefs of Staff. At its peak it had about 13,000 personnel, including soldiers, scholars, lawyers, and many women.

The OSS gathered intelligence through spies and research analysts, conducted sabotage and guerrilla operations behind enemy lines, supported resistance movements in occupied Europe and Asia, and ran propaganda and deception campaigns. Its Jedburgh teams parachuted into France before and after D-Day, its agents operated in Switzerland, North Africa, Yugoslavia, Burma, and China, and its Research and Analysis Branch pioneered the use of academic experts to study enemy economies and societies. It worked closely with British intelligence, which helped train it.

Fearing a peacetime secret police and facing rivalry from the military services and the FBI, President Harry Truman abolished the OSS by an executive order effective October 1, 1945, dividing its functions between the State and War Departments. Within months the need for coordinated intelligence led to the Central Intelligence Group in 1946 and then the Central Intelligence Agency under the National Security Act of 1947, staffed by many OSS veterans. Admirers credit the OSS with founding modern American intelligence and special operations, while historians also note its mixed wartime results and the questions it raised about secrecy in a democracy.