Intelligence Agency in Embryo

Abstract

The genesis of the OSS harkens to that period between the outbreak of World War II (September 1, 1939) and America’s entry in the war on December 7, 1941, when it became evident to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his key advisors that conflict was imminent. What had passed for American intelligence operations until the outbreak of hostilities were random efforts that relied on the imperfect operations of rival, incongruent, and sometimes competing government Departments of State, Treasury, Army, and Navy, as well as information obtained from British intelligence sources. In operation since early in the twentieth century, by the beginning of World War II Great Britain’s MI5 controlled English national security secret intelligence activities thereby becoming the chief British Security Service initiative responsible for protecting the UK. Its intelligence-gathering skills had become both legendary and the envy of other nations including the USA. If it was to assume a major and decisive role given the exigencies of modern warfare, Americans would have to develop a vastly more cohesive and interrelated intelligence initiative. From the outset of war Great Britain sedulously cultivated all forms of American aid including secret intelligence. To that end, the British opened the innocuous-sounding British Security Coordination (BSC) headquarters in New York City, which, although originally manned by amateurs, was strengthened by professional agents like the celebrated William Stephenson, the master spy code-named “Intrepid” whose exploits inspired Hollywood to make the James Bond genre. As Stephenson put it, “I had been twenty years in the professional secret-intelligence service when in 1940 London sent me to British Security Coordination headquarters in New York to help maintain that secrecy. BSC had been manned by amateurs, and it was thought my special experience was required there.”1 In utmost secrecy he then proceeded to draw up a blueprint for an American intelligence operation with detailed tables of organization and specified relationships between various internal offices. By the spring of 1940 it was clear that President Roosevelt was determined that the USA would assist Great Britain and that there should be a firm understanding of cooperation between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the British Secret Service.2 Churchill went out of his way to cultivate OSS chief William Donovan and Ernest Cuneo, the president’s special liaison officer, who was in fact an OSS agent.3