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CHAPTER 2
WE CANNOT AFFORD METHODS LESS RUTHLESS THAN THOSE OF OUR OPPOSITION.
—JOHN LE CARRÉ, THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD
With the end of the war growing near, Donovan remembered the lessons of Pearl Harbor and the value of intelligence in occupied Europe and other theaters of war. At the behest of President Roosevelt, he prepared a detailed memorandum calling for the creation of a permanent postwar agency to act as a central clearinghouse for intelligence. In the covering letter of this 1944 memo, Donovan wrote: “When our enemies are defeated, the demand will be equally pressing for information that will aid us in solving the problems of peace . . .”1
However, Washington politics during the last days of World War II eroded Donovan’s influence along with his dream of forming a civilian central intelligence service. Many in government considered the OSS a temporary wartime agency, not needed in peace time any more than the Office of Price Administration, which oversaw the rationing of sugar and car tires. For them espionage was an inconvenient wartime necessity like gas coupons and war bond drives. Unable to see future challenges to national security, they believed America’s involvement in spying should end with the war.
Donovan’s memo, intended for the private consideration of the President and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was leaked to the press. Columnist Walter Trohan, leading the charge against a standing intelligence agency, wrote in February 1945, in the Chicago Tribuneand New York Daily News: “Creation of an all-powerful intelligence service to spy on the postwar world and to pry into the lives of citizens at home is under serious consideration by the New Deal. The unit would operate under an independent budget and presumably have secret funds for spy work along the lines of bribing and luxury living described in the novels of E. Phillips Oppenheim.”2
This was a direct policy and class attack on Donovan and his “blue-blooded” operatives, even down to the mention of Oppenheim. A popular and prolific British spy novelist of the day, Oppenheim pioneered the genre that would eventually became known as the international thriller, rarely missed an opportunity to have his characters revel in extravagant luxury. The message was clear: spying was elitist, unsavory, and un-American.
After Donovan’s confidential report remained unacted on by Roosevelt, a second negative report made its way to President Truman’s desk. This one, prepared by a Roosevelt aide, Colonel Richard Park, Jr., offered a devastating review of the OSS and with it, Donovan’s proposed peacetime intelligence agency.3 Truman accepted Park’s position and wasted no time acting. Within weeks of V-J Day in mid-August, the President signed an order on September 20, 1945, abolishing OSS and directing it to disband by October 1, 1945.4 Providing only ten days for the dissolution of the agency, the executive order left no time for a political counteroffensive by Donovan and OSS supporters.5
Two days prior to its official termination, the OSS staff gathered in Washington at the Rock Creek Park Drive skating rink (near the present-day Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts) to bid farewell to one another. Addressing the assembled crowd, Donovan said, “We have come to the end of an unusual experiment. This experiment was to determine whether a group of Americans constituting a cross-section of racial origins, of abilities, temperaments and talents, could risk an encounter with the long-established and well-trained enemy organizations.”6
Closing down of OSS did not completely dissolve its capabilities. Bits and pieces of the organization were seen as valuable and absorbed into other government entities. Research and Analysis was moved to the State Department, and other sections were incorporated into the War Department (later the Department of Defense) under the name Strategic Services Unit. Those transferred included overseas OSS stations and a skeleton crew from operations and technical support made up of a few experts in wireless communications, agent documentation, and secret writing (SW).7 However, the majority of OSS engineers, scientists, and craftsman assembled for wartime duty, returned to the private sector, taking with them their expertise in producing the specialized equipment required for intelligence operations.
America was without a functioning centralized intelligence agency, though not for long. In January of 1946, two months before Winston Churchill warned of the coming Soviet challenge in his historic “Iron Curtain Speech” in Fulton, Missouri, President Truman signed the Central Intelligence Group (CIG) into existence. The occasion became a jovial ceremony where attendees were supplied black cloaks, black hats, and wooden daggers.
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