Donovan's Devils

by Albert Lulushi

  The war is won. Our job is done. Each of you can be proud of your individual contribution to a unique achievement. The Operational Groups of this battalion were a wholy new idea in the US Army, and their success has far exceeded expectations. The potentialities of resistance and partisan groups in supplementing operations of the armies was developed further in each successive campaign in the Mediterranean Theater. The experience of and new techniques used by this battalion are an important development in military tactics.3

  At the time, however, there was very little effort to capture and reflect on the experience of the OGs, Jedburghs, and other special operations that the OSS conducted. Donovan was locked in a fierce struggle with the Washington establishment to transform the OSS into a peacetime central intelligence service reporting directly to the president. Donovan began advocating for the consolidation of postwar intelligence functions as early as 1943, but he formalized his proposal in a memorandum to President Roosevelt on November 18, 1944. He described the intelligence field at the time as:

  [A]nalagous to a large industrial plant producing parts of a complicated product without an assembly line. Our intelligence system consists of a number of disparate agencies, each trying vainly to satisfy national requirements. The ill-defined functions of each permit confusion, duplication, and inevitable competition. The resulting waste of manpower and talent, while deplorable, is not the worst aspect. None of the agencies had both adequate resources and logical scope of activity to satisfy national requirements.4

  Donovan recommended the creation of a “focal agency where all subject intelligence material is finally evaluated, analyzed, and synthesized.” This new Central Intelligence Service would not be permited to carry out police or law enforcement actions at home or abroad, but it would engage in subversive operations abroad or any other functions related to intelligence as directed by the president.5

  In the early days as coordinator of intelligence, Donovan had been very mindful of the opposition that his ideas would encounter in the intelligence establishment. He advised his subordinates, “being a new outfit, we don’t want to be presumptuous. There is a great deal of sales resistance to this kind of thing.” At the time, he said, he had sense enough to understand that if he had tried to coordinate all intelligence activities, “we would just start a thirty-year war that would be fiercer than any war we are in now. So that all I proposed is that we would try to coordinate the information that was brought in—and that exists in every department of the government.”6

  With his November 1944 proposal to transform the OSS into a permanent peacetime central intelligence service, Donovan triggered the all-out struggle he had managed to avoid in 1941. His opponents leaked the proposal to the press where some columnists characterized Donovan’s efforts as an attempt to create an American Gestapo—loaded words that preempted any desire FDR may have had to support the idea.

  When Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945, Donovan lost his strongest supporter in Washington. The new president, Harry Truman, a fiscally conservative Democrat, considered the OSS one of the many government agencies that had mushroomed in Washington as a result of the war and that had to be eliminated as soon as the conflict was over. At his first meeting with Donovan on May 18, 1945, Truman said, “The OSS has been a credit to America. You and your men are to be congratulated on doing a remarkable job for the country, but the OSS belongs to a nation at war. It can have no place in an America at peace.”7 When Donovan tried to argue the case for a continued use of the OSS after the war, Truman said:

  I am completely opposed to international spying on the part of the United States. It is un-American. I cannot be certain in my mind that a formidable clandestine organization such as the OSS designed to spy abroad will not in time spy upon the American people themselves. The OSS represents a threat to the liberties of the American people. An all-powerful intelligence apparatus in the hands of an unprincipled president can be a dangerous instrument. I would never use such a tool against my own people, but there is always the risk, and I cannot entertain such a risk.8

  At the end of that meeting, Donovan had no doubts that the OSS would not last after the war. On September 20, 1945, Truman issued Executive Order 9621 dissolving the OSS, effective October 1, 1945. The functions of the Research and Analysis and Presentations Branches were transferred to the State Department. The War Department subsumed the rest of the organization and the Secretary of War received the authority to discontinue any of its activities deemed no longer necessary. In the transfer, the military preserved most of the Secret Intelligence (SI) and Counter-Intelligence (X-2) functions, but eliminated those related to paramilitary operations and unorthodox warfare, including Special Operations, Jedburgh, and Operational Group capabilities. Most of the personnel from these branches of the OSS was demobilized and entered civilian life.

  President Truman’s letter to General Donovan on September 20, 1945, informing him of the dissolution of the OSS.

  * * *

  It would not take long for interest in paramilitary and special operations capabilities to be revived. The alliance between the Soviet Union and the Western democracies that defeated the Axis powers shattered immediately after the war. In the cold war that ensued and that lasted for the next forty-five years, covert warfare became an important component of operations designed to counteract Soviet and Soviet-inspired activities throughout the world. The Central Intelligence Agency, America’s first peacetime intelligence agency, came into existence on September 18, 1947, mostly by bringing under one roof the functions and capabilities of the old OSS that still survived in the areas of research and analysis, intelligence, and counterintelligence. These capabilities were expanded with the creation of the Office of Policy Coordination on September 1, 1948, tasked to conduct covert paramilitary operations that included:

  Any covert activities related to: propaganda; economic warfare; preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance movements, guerrillas, and refugee liberation groups, and support to indigenous anti-Communist elements in threatened countries around the world.9

  The ranks of OPC were quickly filled with former OSS staffers, who dusted off and adopted the OSS training methods and procedures as they set about recruiting, training, and organizing agents for action behind the Iron Curtain. Over the years, these capabilities evolved through trial and error, through successes and failures to today’s National Clandestine Service Directorate of Operations, whose paramilitary operations officers regularly engage in unconventional warfare, including training and leading guerrilla units.

  The advent of the Cold War caused the armed forces to reevaluate the need for special operations behind enemy lines, as well. In a paper written for the Joint Chiefs of Staff on October 20, 1948, Colonel Russell J. Livermore, the former head of the Operational Group Command, pointed out that while the intelligence functions of the OSS had found a home in successive organizations, its operational side had been lost. Livermore wrote:

  Nothing had been done to perpetuate it or to be ready for a war with Russia, which may be staring us in the face. The personnel who learned the techniques of special operations have disappeared into thin air and unless they hold army reserve commissions even their whereabouts is unknown…. The army has no organization for Special Operations, either as part of the regular army or its reserve. No forward planning is being done and no research and experimentation is being carried on in the technical skills of radio and other means of communication, use of light planes and helicopters, packing of arms and supplies, and improving air drops of personnel and supplies. We started from scratch in our knowledge of these things in the last war and learned by the hard slow costly way of trial and error. Do we have to repeat this in case of another national emergency?10

  Livermore urged the JCS to direct the Army, the Air Force, and the Navy to immediately set up sections devoted to special operations.
Each component would have its specialty areas, but all three would work jointly in training, infiltration, and evacuation methods, use of weapons, and communication equipment. The Korean War provided urgency for the idea. In 1952, Colonel Aaron Bank created the first formal unconventional warfare unit in the United States Army, the Tenth Special Forces Group (Airborne), or the Green Berets, at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. A veteran of the OSS Special Operations Command and a former Jedburgh, Bank set up the initial training curriculum of the Special Forces Group based on the OSS manuals and experience. Bank is celebrated as the father of Special Forces. To this day, the US Special Operations Command traces its lineage to the OSS and regards Donovan “as the spiritual godfather of modern-day special operations,” in the words of Admiral Eric Olson, commander of the US Special Operations Command from 2007 to 2011.

  One of the key factors for the success of the OSS Operational Groups, Jedburghs, and other special operations teams during World War II was the close coordination between the intelligence and operations arms of the organization. In his 1948 paper to the JCS, Livermore wrote, “Obviously, there must be the closest liaison between them as the operations produce a vast amount of intelligence, and the OGs must depend on an intelligence network for initial penetration of enemy-held areas.”11 With the dissolution of the OSS, intelligence operations, represented by the CIA, separated from special operations, represented by the US Special Operations Command. They followed separate paths that intersected occasionally but in general moved forward independently. If the attack on Pearl Harbor served as a catalyst for the creation of the OSS, the attacks on September 11, 2001, had a similarly profound effect in bringing the CIA and the US Special Operations Command much closer together, thus reuniting the two halves of the OSS legacy. In the words of the CIA director, John Brennan, “This Nation’s response to the attacks of 9/11 brought the two main branches of the OSS back together. Intelligence officers and special operators are once again working hand-in-hand to take the fight to our adversaries.”12

  This convergence began immediately after the 9/11 attacks, when one hundred CIA paramilitary officers entered Afghanistan, laid the groundwork for 350 Special Forces soldiers, and, together, led fifteen thousand Northern Alliance fighters to drive the Taliban out of power.13 It proved successful in a number of operations since, including the May 2011 raid to kill Osama bin Laden. It also drove the reorganization of the CIA announced on March 6, 2015, in which the National Clandestine Service was renamed the Directorate of Operations, and the Directorate of Intelligence was renamed the Directorate of Analysis. These directorates maintain the responsibility for developing officers with the specialized skills unique to the directorates, for developing tradecraft, and for maintaining a strategic perspective that cuts across all issues and regions. However, the day-to-day operations are conducted in mission centers, which are integrated pools of assets, people, and resources from the agency’s direcorates that “bring the full range of operational, analytic, support, technical, and digital personnel and capabilities to bear on the nation’s most pressing security issues and interests.” Not unlike the way OSS operated out of London, Algiers, Caserta, Bari, Sienna, and other locations during World War II.14

  Notes

  Prologue

  1 Captain Robert J. Bulkley, Jr, At Close Quarters: PT Boats in the United States Navy (Washington, DC: Naval History Division, 1962), 277. NavSource Online, Motor Torpedo Boat Photo Archive, PT-203.

  2 The Bureau of Ships, Know your PT Boat (Washington, DC: Navy Department, 1945), 2.

  3 Bulkley.

  4 The Bureau of Ships, 26.

  5 National Museum of the Pacific War, PT Boat Virtual Tour.

  6 The Bureau of Ships, 20–22. National Museum of the Pacific War.

  7 National Museum of the Pacific War.

  8 National Museum of the Pacific War. NavSource Online.

  9 NavSource Online.

  10 The Bureau of Ships, 4.

  11 NARA, RG 226, Entry 99, Boxes 45–46.

  Chapter 1: Office of Strategic Services

  1 United States Department of State, Office of the Historian, American Isolationism in the 1930s, n.d.

  2 Byron Darnton, “Vast Throng Jams the Mall to Cheer American Day Fete,” New York Times, May 19, 1941, 1.

  3 “Bill Robinson,” Biography.com, n.d.

  4 Lisa Belkin, “Lucy Monroe Dies; A Celebrated Singer Of National Anthem,” New York Times, October 16, 1987, B5.

  5 “God Bless America,” Library of Congress, n.d.

  6 Darnton.

  7 “Lindbergh Joins in Wheeler Plea to U.S. to Shun War,” New York Times, May 24, 1941, 1.

  8 Allen W. Dulles, “William J. Donovan and the National Security,” Studies in Intelligence, Summer 1959.

  9 Elizabeth R. Valentine, “Fact-Finder and Fighing Man,” New York Times, May 4, 1941, SM8.

  10 Dulles.

  11 Dulles. Valentine.

  12 Ibid.

  13 “Drive Begun Here for Polish Relief,” New York Times, February 26, 1940, 2.

  14 “Bids Convention Back Cabinet Appointees,” New York Times, June 22, 1940, 10.

  15 “House of Commons Debate, May 13, 1940,” Hansard 1803–2005, n.d.

  16 “House of Commons Debate, June 4, 1940,” Hansard 1803–2005, n.d.

  17 “House of Commons Debate, June 18, 1940,” Hansard 1803–2005, n.d.

  18 William J. Donovan and Edgar Mowrer, “Germans Said to Spend Vast Sums Abroad to Pave Way for Conquest,” New York Times, August 23, 1940, 5.

  19 “Col. Donovan Back, Has Seen ‘A Lot,’” New York Times, March 19, 1941, 9.

  20 Dulles.

  21 Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Executive Order Designating a Coordinator of Intelligence,” The White House, July 11, 1941.

  22 Ibid.

  23 Arthur B. Darling, “Origins of Central Intelligence,” Center for the Study of Intelligence, Volume 8, Number 3 (1953).

  24 NARA, Troy Papers, Box 2, Folder 19.

  25 Darling.

  26 Arthur Krock, “The War in Pictures,” New York Times, October 8, 1941, 4.

  27 Darling and Troy Papers, Box 2, Folder 19.

  28 Kermit Roosevelt, War Report of the OSS (New York: Walker and Company, 1976), 80.

  29 Troy Papers, Box 2, Folder 19.

  30 Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Military Order Office of Strategic Services,” The White House, June 13, 1942.

  31 Troy Papers, Box 3, Folder 22.

  32 Ibid.

  33 Ibid.

  34 “General Joseph T. McNarney,” US Air Force, n.d. “Horne,” Naval Historical Center, July 11, 2007.

  35 Roosevelt, War Report of the OSS, 83–84.

  36 Eleony Moorhead, “The OSS and Operation TORCH: The Beginning of the Beginning,” Tempus: The Harvard College History Review, Vol. X, Issue 1, Summer 2009.

  37 Kermit Roosevelt, The Overseas Targets: War Report of the OSS, Volume II (New York: Walker and Company, 1976), 11–18.

  38 Roosevelt, War Report of the OSS, 105.

  39 Ibid.

  Chapter 2: Irregular Warfare in the Early Years of World War II

  1 Russell Miller, The Commandos (Chicago: Time-Life Books, Inc., 1981), 129–141.

  2 Gordon Williamson, German Special Forces of World War II (Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2009), 4–19.

  3 Miller, 20.

  4 Winston S. Churchill, London to Ladysmith Via Pretoria (London: Longman, Green, and Co., 1900), 449–466.

  5 “Boers Traits and British Traits,” New York Times, March 6, 1900, 8.

  6 Miller, 21.

  7 Miller, 22.

  8 Miller, 24.

  9 “Lofoten Islands Raid,” Combined Operations Command, n.d. “The Lofoten Raid.” Lofoten War Museum, n.d.

  10 Miller, 29.

  11 “British Commandos Raid Hitler’s Europe,” Life, January 26, 1942, 17–21.

  12 Hugh Sebag-Montefiore, Enigma: The Battle for the Code (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2000), 197–198.

&nb
sp; 13 “British Commandos Raid Hitler’s Europe.”

  14 Christopher M. Bell, Churchill and Sea Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 214.

  15 “Service in a Commando,” Commando Veterans Association, n.d.

  16 Michael J. King, “Rangers: Selected Combat Operations in World War II,” US Army Combined Arms Center, June 1985, 1–11.

  17 James Owen, Commando: Winning WW2 Behind Enemy Lines (London: Little, Brown Book Group, 2013), 132.

  18 “Rangers Are Impressed by British And Canadians on Dieppe Foray,” New York Times, August 22, 1942: 4.

  19 Robert W. Black, Rangers in World War II (New York: Presidio Press, 1992), 35.

  20 Julian Thompson, “The Dieppe Raid,” BBC History, n.d.

  21 Ibid.

  22 Doug Schmidt, “New research suggests World War II raid on Dieppe may have been attempt to find Nazi Enigma machine,” Canada.com, August 17 2012.

  23 Susan Ratcliffe, Concise Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 101.

  24 “Nazis Threaten to Shackle Britons As Reply to Alleged Dieppe Order,” New York Times, September 3, 1942, 1.

  25 Owen, 171.

  26 “Convention Between the United States of America and Other Powers, Relating to Prisoners of War; July 27, 1929,” The Avalon Project, n.d.

  27 Raymond Daniell, “British Would End Reprisals,” New York Times, October 18, 1942, E4.

  28 “London Threatens to Tie Up Captives,” New York Times, October 9, 1942, 1.

  29 “Close Combat Without and With Weapons As Taught At SOE STS 103,” IndaBook, n.d.

  30 Ibid.

  31 P. J. Philip, “Canada Chains 1,376 Nazis In Reprisal Against Berlin,” New York Times, October 11, 1942, 1.

  32 “All War Prisoners Face Nazi Threat,” New York Times, October 16, 1942, 6.

  33 “Britain Unshackles Captives, Nazis Talk,” New York Times. December 12, 1942, 55.

  34 Cornell University Law Library, Donovan Nuremberg Trial Collection, n.d.