The Forgotten 500

by Gregory A. Freeman

  Established in June 1942 as the country revved up for full-scale war with the Axis, the OSS was charged with collecting and analyzing strategic information required by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and conducting special operations not assigned to other agencies. Right off the bat, however, those other agencies started to feel that the OSS was encroaching on their turf. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, under the direction of the fiery and extremely powerful J. Edgar Hoover, was insistent that this upstart bunch of academics and wannabe spies neither get in the way nor usurp its own areas of operation. The FBI retained all responsibility for fieldwork in Latin America and essentially shut the OSS out of work in the Western Hemisphere. But the OSS was nobody’s meek little brother. The organization was conceived and developed by William J. Donovan, known as “Wild Bill,” a charismatic, energetic leader and one of the few men who could stand toe-to-toe with Hoover and not be intimidated.

  Born in Buffalo, New York, Donovan was a college football star at Columbia University, graduating in 1905. Donovan was a member of the New York City establishment, a powerful Wall Street lawyer and a Columbia law school classmate of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Donovan first became known for his military exploits in 1912, when he formed and led a troop of cavalry of the New York State Militia that in 1916 served on the U.S.-Mexico border in the Pancho Villa Expedition. In World War I, Donovan led a regiment of the United States Army, the 165th Regiment of the 42nd Division, the successors to the famed 69th New York Volunteers, on the battlefield in France. He was awarded the Medal of Honor for leading a successful assault despite serious wounds. By the end of the war he was a full colonel.

  The disaster at Pearl Harbor had underscored what many in Washington already knew: The country was terribly deficient in its foreign intelligence and special operations. Nobody in Washington or anywhere else had put the pieces of the puzzle together and figured out that Japan was about to strike, and intelligence in the ever-darkening Europe was no better. President Roosevelt was preparing for the next world war, and he was ready to take bold news steps regarding intelligence, ready to undertake operations that the country had never pursued before. He was looking for men who had already proven themselves, and Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox recommended Donovan. Roosevelt gave him a number of increasingly important assignments, trusting him absolutely even though Roosevelt was a Democrat and Donovan a staunch Republican. In 1940 and 1941 Donovan served as an emissary for Knox and President Roosevelt, traveling to Britain and parts of Europe that were not under Nazi control. When he persuaded Roosevelt in 1942 that the country needed a more extensive and aggressive network of spies, analysts, and secret agents across the world, the OSS was born and Donovan became one of the most powerful men in Washington.

  This cloak-and-dagger society was housed in a nondescript government building a short distance west of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, in the former home of the National Health Institute. It was in a rundown section of town, far from the gleaming white Capitol and the other glamorous structures of the city. But inside, brainy academics were performing some of the most important work of World War II, and others were supervising the dangerous, nerve-racking work of OSS agents in the field halfway around the world. The National Health Institute had been hastily evicted to make way for the rapidly growing OSS, and they hadn’t completely vacated the premises by the time the OSS moved in. The health researchers left behind an experimental laboratory full of live monkeys, goats, and guinea pigs, all inoculated with deadly diseases, and the OSS staff were none too happy about sharing their space with them. More important was the need for the space taken up by the menagerie. So Donovan, in the creative style that he would employ throughout the war, complained to the National Health Institute that one of the monkeys had bitten a stenographer and caused a rebellion among the staff, who were afraid that the plague would sweep through the building. The scientists doubted the whole story but were forced to remove the laboratory and give the space over to the OSS. Nazi propaganda seized on the incident to broadcast gleeful accounts of how the supposedly fearsome OSS was really nothing more than “fifty professors, twenty monkeys, ten goats, twelve guinea pigs, and a staff of Jewish scribblers.” As soon as Donovan had taken the helm at the OSS, Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels focused on him, directing more hate toward him than any American other than President Roosevelt.

  The OSS had been designed from the start as a different kind of government agency. Even the FBI, as powerful as it was under Hoover, adhered to a strict bureaucracy that was every bit as rigid as the bureaucracy in any more mundane government operation and sometimes more so. But with the OSS, the whole purpose was to do things differently. President Roosevelt’s order establishing the OSS had defined its purpose as being “to collect and analyze strategic information, and to plan and operate special services,” which were described as “all measures . . . taken to enforce our will upon the enemy by means other than military action, as may be applied in support of actual or planned military operations or in furtherance of the war effort.” Roosevelt and Donovan understood that to mean anything the country needed, anything that the regular military could not accomplish logistically or could not do ethically. When a task had to be performed out of the public eye and without any obvious ties to the United States, that was a job for the men and women working under Donovan.

  Donovan’s stamp was all over the OSS, never more so than in the type of agents it recruited. When the OSS structure was just being planned in 1941, a high-ranking officer in the British Naval Intelligence named Ian Fleming, later the creator of James Bond, advised Donovan to select agents who fit the bill of the quintessential gentleman spy. They should be between forty and fifty years old and possess “absolute discretion, sobriety, devotion to duty, languages, and wide experience,” Ian advised. Donovan ignored the advice and instead told President Roosevelt that he intended to bring in young men and women who were “calculatingly reckless” and trained for “aggressive action.”

  The OSS attracted some of the best and brightest in the country, even though it was still an obscure agency known only to government wonks and military leaders. Donovan’s extensive network of contacts in business, academia, and the military, along with his own stellar reputation and gregarious personality, enabled him to recruit the top players in any field, many of whom would go on to their own high-profile accomplishments after a stint in the OSS. Recruiting was a major task for OSS leaders because the agency needed a lot of bodies at desks and in the field. Analysts were chosen for their skill in languages, mathematics, codes, sciences—any specialty that could be of use. Field agents—spies in the truest sense of the word—were chosen on more esoteric but equally stringent guidelines. The most important qualification, Donovan declared, was strength of character. While some suggested recruiting petty criminals experienced in deception, Donovan refused. He wanted good men and women who had nothing to hide, who were upstanding people with no experience living a double life. The reason was simple, Donovan explained: It was easier to train an honest citizen to engage in subterfuge for the good of his country than it was to teach a dishonest man to be a trustworthy agent. The people who fancied themselves secret agents and wanted to live a glamorous but dangerous life behind enemy lines always raised red flags with Donovan and his subordinates. Donovan found that the staid businessman, the type who would have led a perfectly sedate and uneventful live if not recruited to the OSS, made the perfect field agents. The OSS also made a point of recruiting people who could get along well with others, especially people of other races and cultures, and conducted psychological testing to confirm that trait.

  The result was perhaps the most unusual collection of spies and analysts ever assembled, a mix of wealthy blue bloods, sons and daughters of the rich and powerful, men and women who looked more like the businesspeople they were before the war and not the skilled killers they were training to be. Newspapers joked that OSS must stand for “Oh So Social” because the recruits looked as th
ough they had been taken from the Social Register. The halls of the OSS were full of DuPonts, Vander bilts, Roosevelts, Morgans, and Mellons. The cousin of Winston Churchill, a star polo player, worked in the OSS. So did Ilya Tolstoy, grandson of the famous novelist. A columnist for the Washington Times wrote of the new OSS that:

  If you should by chance wander in the labyrinth of the OSS, you’d behold ex-polo players, millionaires, Russian princes, society gambol boys, scientists, and dilettante detectives. All of them are now at the OSS where they used to be allocated between New York, Palm Beach, Long Island, Newport, and other meccas frequented by the blue bloods of democracy. And the girls! The prettiest, best born, snappiest girls who used to graduate from debutantedom to boredom now bend their blond and brunette locks, or their colorful hats, over their work in the OSS, the super-ultra-intelligence-counter-espionage unit that is headed by the brilliant “Wild Bill” Donovan.

  Other notable members of the OSS were Jumping Joe Savoldi, a full-back at Notre Dame and a professional wrestler, and John Ringling North, the owner of Barnum & Bailey Circus. Quentin Roosevelt, grandson of the president, died on an OSS mission in China. Julia Child worked for the OSS in Ceylon before becoming a world-famous chef, claiming she was only a lowly file clerk but nevertheless winning the Emblem of Meritorious Service. Actor Sterling Hayden, often called “the most beautiful man in Hollywood,” was recruited by the OSS to command a fleet of ships that ran guns and supplies to Yugoslavia.

  OSS recruiters were always on the lookout for anyone with a special connection that might be useful, so many people with no special ambitions to be a spy—like George Vujnovich—found themselves approached with a unique offer. If you had spent significant time in a European country, or if you spoke a language that was in demand—like George Musulin—the OSS might come looking for you. The military ranks were often screened for those with needed skills, particularly languages spoken in Europe. Sometimes the recruit’s value was less obvious but could prove vital in wartime. The OSS recruited a former Paris bartender from the Yale Club, a former German sergeant who could help forge military passes, a Swiss mountain climber who knew the high passes of the Apennines, and a Catholic missionary who had lived with the Kachin tribesmen in northern Burma. When the OSS spotted someone who could add to the agency’s skill set, one or two men approached without warning and explained that his country needed his services. Questions were met with cryptic responses that provided little detail, not even the name of the outfit that wanted him to join. The men emphasized that he would be making a great contribution to his country, but they also were clear that he would be participating in extremely dangerous missions with a good chance that he would never return. In the patriotic fervor of the early war years, few of those approached by the OSS refused.

  Donovan’s whole approach to the OSS mission was to employ real people in real situations. He had no patience for those who thought the spy game was nothing but shooting and knifing the enemy or conducting explosive raids, or for the dilettante diplomats and amateur detectives. Donovan knew that in wartime, advances were often made not by the dramatic charge of a thousand troops but by one lightweight, bespectacled former accountant asking the right question of a bored farmer driving his sheep down a country road. While the work of OSS agents was often extremely dangerous, until the agents got caught their work encompassed the pedestrian more than the exotic. After the war, Donovan explained: “Our experience showed us that a half hour spent with the brakeman of a freight train running into occupied France would produce more useful information than a Mata Hari could learn in a year. We did not rely on the seductive blonde or the phony mustache. The major part of our intelligence was the result of good old-fashioned intellectual sweat.” In addition to their particular skills, field agents were selected for their idealism. Most were under thirty years old, and they had a clear conception that the Allies were right and the Axis was wrong. When they parachuted into villages in Europe and lived with the people fighting bare-handed against the Nazis, they developed immense respect for the plight of those people.

  The OSS would employ some thirty thousand people by the end of the war, and its zeal for assembling a broad collection of resources meant that the particular skill or knowledge possessed by the recruit could overshadow nearly anything else that might make the person undesirable for an intelligence post. If a dishwasher in Chicago spoke fluent Italian and had worked on the railway in his home country, he might be recruited for the OSS even if he spent every Tuesday night at a meeting of the Communist Party USA. Donovan had no love for Communists, but he also did not hate them so much that he let their politics get in the way of a larger goal. After all, this was the 1940s, before Westerners recognized that Communism was more than just an extreme political movement and the very word “Communist” became synonymous with evil. Largely because of the number of upper-class Ivy League graduates in the ranks, OSS agents at desks in Washington and in the field around the world tended to share a social idealism, the same unwavering faith in the common man espoused by Donovan. This idealistic view of the working man was more common among those who had spent time at Yale and on yachts in Bar Harbor than the recruits from the regular military, but the blue-blood idealism often meshed with the thinking of the Italian immigrant who had fled Fascists in his homeland and was recruited while waiting tables in New York. It was not uncommon for OSS agents serving in Europe to be immigrants who had fled the Nazi onslaught and joined the Communist movement mostly because it was staunchly anti-Fascist. The result was an OSS that was not nearly as inhospitable to Communists as other branches of the military or the government, especially Hoover’s FBI, where any Communist trying to infiltrate had to keep a very low profile.

  Donovan regularly confirmed that Communists were found throughout his organization. When the OSS sent a group of four confirmed Communists into Italy to send back information, an American congressman investigated and angrily informed Donovan that one of the group was said to be on the honor roll of the Young Communist League. Donovan didn’t deny the charge but made it clear that he didn’t care as long as the men continued sending back useful intelligence from Italy. “I don’t know if he’s on the Communist honor roll, but for the job he’s doing in Italy, he’s on the honor roll of OSS.” Donovan’s attitude was, again, pragmatic above all else. When the FBI presented him with dossiers proving that three OSS employees were Communists and demanded their firing, Donovan scoffed and replied, “I know they’re Communists. That’s why I hired them.” The agents in question had fought for the Republican Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39, in a brigade sponsored by the American Communist Party. As far as Donovan was concerned, they were good fighters with a healthy hatred for Nazis, and that was good enough for him.

  That attitude permeated the OSS, with all involved adopting the idea that they could and should do whatever was necessary to achieve the end goal and not worry about meaningless details along the way. This approach grew out of the very freedom that the OSS was founded on, the idea that its reason for existing was to get things done creatively, without the usual restrictions that hindered other military units. To some extent that was an effective way to cut through the bureaucracy that could bog down such important work, but some critics said the OSS took it too far and became a rogue outfit, too undisciplined for its own good. Though the majority of OSS operatives held military rank, they ignored most military protocol, rarely saluting and by necessity eschewing military uniforms. Most agents in the field, and even those working desks in foreign posts, were allowed to dress however they wanted, growing beards and long hair if they felt like it. Insubordination was a way of life in the OSS. The same instruction that would have been considered a direct order in the army might be considered a mere suggestion in the OSS. If a superior annoyed a junior officer, a request for information might be “lost.” This was not the regular army, in more ways than one.

  The OSS favored results over drama, but there was no denying that OSS agents
had the opportunity for more romantic roles in the war than most soldiers. Rather than fighting on the front lines with a rifle or in a tank, the OSS agent lived inconspicuously behind enemy lines, blending into the often exotic locales and charming his or her way into the lives of people who could provide important information. Instead of a foxhole in Belgium, the OSS agent might be living in an apartment in occupied Paris. Plenty of agents, however, like Musulin, spent their time out in the countryside with local people who were just barely getting by. OSS agents went where they were needed and blended in wherever they were.

  The OSS was designed to be creative, and it led the way in developing some of the most ingenious devices and methodologies used in World War II. Propaganda was a major focus, with the OSS facilitating radio broadcasts into enemy territory, leaflet drops to lower the morale of Axis soldiers, and even some strategies aimed at convincing the people of Germany that the war was lost. Intelligence gathering was perhaps the primary activity for an agent, but sabotage also occupied OSS agents to a great extent, sometimes with the aim of softening up an area before conventional forces moved in, sometimes with the goal of harassing and slowing down enemy forces in a given area. Donovan thought that his men had to be clever and devious because the Germans were the eight-hundred-pound gorilla of international warfare. There was no denying that Hitler had the arms, the soldiers, and the ruthless attitude necessary to take what he wanted, so Donovan’s theory was that his men would take the other tack, slipping in behind enemy lines to create mayhem. They could nip at the heels of the Nazis, slowing them down as they ravaged another country and distracting them until the big guns of American firepower could come in for the kill.