By the beginning of the twentieth century, the United States had a handful of departments within the Navy, the Army, and the State Department that gathered intelligence but there was no coordination among these departments. In fact, these departments were often in fierce competition with each other. It was not ideal. By the start of World War II, President Roosevelt realized the need for some sort of coordination for the gathering of intelligence.
Donovan was a highly decorated hero of the First World War and was awarded the Medal of Honor, among several other orders and medals. By , Donovan, a graduate of Columbia Law School, had a highly successful career predating the first war as a lawyer in private practice in government service.
The OSS would be heavily populated by lawyers during its existence. The same was true of many wartime recruits of the British intelligence services as well. Whether this was a result of personal connections, the broad usefulness of legal training, or a natural gift for intrigue and deviousness among lawyers is perhaps unknowable and beyond the scope of this article.
Donovan, a child of poor Irish immigrants, was, ironically, quite a strong Anglophile. COI was not created soon enough or well established enough to avert the major intelligence failures that preceded the attack on Pearl Harbor six months later.
Over the course of the war it grew both in size and professionalism. SI officers were responsible for recruiting foreign agents, while X-2 was counterespionage, tasked with combating enemy spies overseas. The Branch recruited from many disciplines, but especially favored historians, economists, political scientists, geographers, psychologists, anthropologists, and diplomats. In , the State Department, which had taken over the bulk of Research and Analysis Branch files after the war, began releasing records to the National Archives.
The largest series consists of intelligence reports relating to political, economic, military, and morale information about almost every nation on the earth. Each series is arranged by document number. The records are accessible only though a card index developed by the Central Information Division library. After years of use at the CIA, the SSU's original system of arrangement was largely lost, the various series often becoming mixed due to frequent relocation and re-shelving.
Records were first reviewed for declassification by the CIA, with sensitive documents withdrawn before transfer. The transfer, processing, and creation of finding aids followed at the National Archives and records were made available to the public.
Needing to throw together an agency quickly, he turned to his circle of friends in New York and hired blue bloods by the dozen. But holidays on the Riviera were a far cry from war. Even more than aristocrats, however, Donovan loved misfits, and he staffed OSS with a bizarre array of talent.
There were mafia contract killers and theology professors. There were bartenders, anthropologists, and pro wrestlers. There were orthodontists, ornithologists, and felons on leave from federal penitentiaries. Donovan did hire some brilliant misfits as well, including the chief scientist, Stanley Lovell. He and his labmates developed bombs that looked like mollusks to attach to ships.
They crafted shoes and buttons and batteries with secret cavities to conceal documents. They invented pencils and cigarettes that shot bullets. They devised an explosive powder called Aunt Jemima with the consistency of flour that could be mixed with water and even baked into biscuits and nibbled on without any danger; only when ignited with a fuse did Aunt Jemima detonate. Read: The tools of espionage are going mainstream. One, called caccolube, destroyed car engines far more thoroughly than sugar or sand when dumped into gas tanks.
Another weapon involved creating artificial goat turds to bombard North Africa with, in the hope of attracting flies that spread diseases. They called it Project Capricious. After hearing that Hitler and Mussolini would be holding a summit at the Brenner Pass between Austria and Italy, Lovell devised a scheme to dump a vial of caustic liquid into a vase of flowers in the conference room.
Within 20 minutes, this volatile liquid would evaporate, turning into mustard gas and frying the corneas of everyone present.
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