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SECTION I
AT THE BEGINNING
CONFIDENTIAL 7 September 1951
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Effective immediately the Operational Aids Division is redesignate<1 the Technical Services Staff.
CHAPTER 1
My Hair Stood on End
The weapons of secrecy have no place in an ideal world.
—Sir William Stephenson, A Man Called Intrepid
On a quiet autumn evening in 1942, as World War II raged across Europe and Asia, two men sat in one of Washington’s most stately homes discussing a type of warfare very different from that of high-altitude bombers and infantry assaults. The host, Colonel William J. Donovan, known as “Wild Bill” since his days as an officer during World War I, was close to sixty. A war hero whose valor had earned him the Medal of Honor, Donovan was now back in uniform.1 Donovan responded to the call to duty and put aside a successful Wall Street law practice to become Director of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and America’s first spymaster.2
Donovan’s guest, for whom he graciously poured sherry, was Stanley Platt Lovell.3 A New Englander in his early fifties, Lovell was an American success story. Orphaned at an early age, he worked his way through Cornell University to ascend the ranks of business and science by sheer determination and ingenuity. As president of the Lovell Chemical Company, he held more than seventy patents, though still described himself as a “sauce pan chemist.”
Donovan understood that the fight against the Axis powers required effective intelligence operations along with a new style of clandestine warfare. Just as important, he appreciated the role men like Lovell could play in those operations. “I need every subtle device and every underhanded trick to use against the Germans and the Japanese—by our own people—but especially by the underground in the occupied countries,” he had told Lovell a few days earlier. “You’ll have to invent them all . . . because you’re going to be my man.”4
The wartime job offered to the mild-mannered chemist was to head the Research and Development (R&D) Branch of the OSS, a role Donovan compared to that of Professor Moriarty, the criminal mastermind of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories.5 Lovell, although initially intrigued by the offer, was now having doubts and came to Donovan’s Georgetown home to express those reservations.6 He had been in government service since that spring at a civilian agency called the National Development and Research Committee (NDRC). Created by President Roosevelt at the urging of a group of prominent scientists and engineers, the NDRC’s mission was to look into new weapons for what seemed to be America’s inevitable entry into the war. Lovell had joined the NDRC to act as liaison—a bridge—between the military, academics, and business.7 But what Donovan proposed now was something altogether different.
IMAGE 1:
OSS scientists discovered that explosives in powder form could be mixed with wheat flour and safely shipped, shaped, and even baked until needed for sabotage operations. The “explosive flour” could pass inspection as ordinary flour except under microscopic examination.
IMAGE2: The Tear Gas Pen was a personal defensive weapon designed for carrying in a pocket or purse. The pen had an effective range of six feet, firing strong tear gas to incapacitate the target or attacker long enough to allow an escape.
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