IN CONCLUSION

On October 1, 1945, after a wartime life of a little more than four years, during which it had spent in the neighborhood of 135 million of the taxpayers’ dollars, the Office of Strategic Services went out of existence. The Research and Analysis Branch went to the State Department, and the rest, what was called the Cloak and Dagger end, was placed under the Army, where it may or may not be allowed to die. For a few weeks before that date, OSS had been gradually winding up its affairs, in accordance with President Truman’s decision in September to abolish the agency.

There are various stories about that decision. One is that the old enemies of the agency, certain men in the Army G-2 and the FBI who bitterly opposed General Donovan’s plan to retain his organization as the basis for a peacetime intelligence agency, worked through the Bureau of the Budget to kill OSS. Another is that President Truman was deeply disturbed by the publicity campaign instituted by the organization at the end of the war; that he does not look very favorably upon the idea of clandestine intelligence anyhow. Whatever the reason for President Truman’s decision, OSS was able to point with justifiable pride to a long list of accomplishments in both the intelligence and resistance fields.

Some of the major OSS intelligence work has been reviewed in previous chapters. There are thousands of other examples, any one of which could form a chapter in itself. A very few of them may be worth noting:

An agent in Switzerland, whose connections led directly into the Abwehr, the secret police of the German Army, told OSS about the preparation of V-1 and V-2 bombs, and with other sources, led to the identification of Peenemuende as the German proving ground for new weapons.

Through that same man, OSS knew, 10 days before it happened, about the plot on Hitler’s life, and the names of the principal participants. OSS learned that: the Germans had succeeded in deciphering the secret code of the American Legation in Berne, and notified the ministry in time to prevent important State Department documents from falling into the hands of the enemy.

Another source in Switzerland turned over to OSS during a period of 18 months more than 1,600 copies of secret and top secret German diplomatic correspondence between the German foreign office and 20 countries. Reports from German military and air attachés in Japan, data on the structure of the German secret service in Spain, Switzerland, and Sweden, and information regarding German espionage in England were all revealed.

An OSS team in France identified the presence of the SS Panzer Lehr Division for which SHAEF was deeply grateful. To a field commander, information that a crack armored division, thought to be on the Russian front, is about to strike his left flank, is the greatest service an agent can render.

An OSS team covering Le Bourget airfield in Paris obtained and sent to London complete plans of two important factories. The first, a powder factory, was located by message on July 9, 1943, and was destroyed by bombers the following day. On August 3, the team located a submarine and aircraft oil refinery. It was demolished by bombers on August 10.

One agent lived in a house near the Vierzon bridge over the Loire River at Orleans for a month and a half, during which time he reported every single German vehicle which went over it. When the Allied Command, scanning his reports, decided that the traffic on the bridge was getting heavy, Thunderbolts destroyed it.

OSS agents, according to General Alexander M. Patch, commander of the United States Seventh Army, obtained 60 per cent of the intelligence upon which the Allies were able to take the calculated risk of invading southern France with an assault force of only three American divisions and a small Allied airborne force.

Afterwards, those same agents located the hole through which the Seventh Army dashed 150 miles around the German Nineteenth Army’s left flank from Lyon to Besançon and on to Vesoul. It located also the only remaining panzer division on the Seventh Army’s front in the Vosges, and the air force caught it and mauled it.

OSS agents in Burma, according to Major General Howard C. Davidson, commanding the Tenth Air Force, “furnished the principal intelligence regarding Japanese troop concentration, hostile natives, and enemy movement.”

An agent who penetrated Germany in September, 1944, found in the Ruhr a group of socialists and trade-unionists who had kept in touch with each other surreptitiously since Hitler had come to power. Most of them had been involved in the July 20 attempt to assassinate Hitler. With their help the agent began organizing small groups of workmen to rise against the Germans at the proper moment. Only the military collapse of the German Army prevented them from trying it, but they were able to identify the Nazi leaders for the Allies, when the Ruhr was freed.

Another OSS agent in Germany, in the uniform of a German sergeant, located the 116th Panzer Division and so helped the Ninth Army cross the Rhine, against very little initial opposition.

In Italy, the OSS Fifth Army Detachment located the first enemy reinforcements at Anzio, reported the arrival of the Herman Goering Division, and correctly determined that the main enemy counterattack would come from the direction of Albano, rather than Cisterna, as the enemy hoped to infer. American forces were ready for the attack when it came.

OSS agents serving the British Eighth Army in Italy located a huge enemy supply depot at Belluno containing over $600,000 worth of gasoline, tires, and bridge-repair materials, and pin-pointed it for destruction by the Desert Air Force.

OSS Eighth Army men obtained complete drawings of the Gothic Line in Italy, and also of the Piave River Line, the latter sketches said by Fifteenth Army Group Headquarters to be “the best piece of ground intelligence work that has come out of Italy.”

These are a few examples of intelligence work, chosen at random. OSS work with the resistance is a little harder to exemplify. Again, the major phases of it have been covered in previous chapters. In addition, the organization could and did say that it had supplied the resistance forces in Europe alone with nearly 20,000 tons of ammunition, weapons, and food. It had, through close liaison with resistance forces, been able to hide, and bring back to safety nearly 5,000 American airmen who had been shot down over occupied territory. It had parachuted over 1,000 American soldiers behind the enemy lines to help supply the resistance and provide it with liaison and direction.

Perhaps the best estimate of the work in this field was made by General Eisenhower, who said, in a letter to Colonel Russell Forgan, the organization’s liaison chief: “In no previous war, and in no other theater during this war, have resistance forces been so closely harnessed to the main military effort.” For that fact, OSS could take the principal bow.

Nevertheless, both intelligence and aid to the resistance are intangible achievements. The value of intelligence ought to be measured not only on the basis of what is discovered about the enemy, but on the basis of what is not discovered. Accomplishments in the resistance field also ought to be measured against what was not accomplished.

Such an estimate is impossible to make at the present time. The facts about Germany and Japan are still being uncovered. The strengths and potentials of the resistance movements in various countries are by now the secrets of the responsible governments which have taken over in those countries. On the intelligence side, some evidence exists that the Allies were misinformed about the German war potential after the Allied break-through and the consequent German retreat through France. On the resistance side, some maquis leaders insisted that they would have been able to accomplish a great deal more if they had been able to receive not more supplies, but more frequent deliveries.

But it must be remembered that OSS did not have the sole responsibility for intelligence during the war, that in order to get itself accepted as a reliable intelligence source, it had to fight a running battle with Army G-2. It must be remembered also that OSS did not have its own air force to supply the resistance, and that the Army Air Forces understandably delegated planes for the use of OSS only when they were not needed to support American troops in the field.

Lastly it must be remembered that OSS was a totally new weapon of warfare, organized hastily within four wartime years, and that in those years there was very little time for the kind of introspection which might lead to reorganization, and improvement.

On the whole, there seems very little doubt that the experiment called OSS was worth the effort it expended, and the money it spent, and a great deal more.

Most of the men and women who served behind the lines have come home to begin the process of trying to find, in a new and completely different life, the excitement and pleasure and satisfaction which occasionally they realized abroad. They came first to Washington, and there, before they signed out of the office and the Army, they had a chance to see old friends and reminisce; to take a look at the huge Washington organization which had directed their activities, to talk about OSS and what they thought of it, and to discover what was being done about American intelligence now that the war was over, and their own work was through.

Most of them were highly critical of what they found. They had much to say about the back-slapping, back-knifing fight for personal power and prestige which continually raged about the person and the offices of General Donovan, and which seemed strange and small and wrong to men who had been fighting in a war.

There was much kidding, not all of it good-natured, about the large number of decorations which were handed out to high-ranking OSS officers, some of whom had gone through the war without ever having heard a shot fired.

There was some wishing out loud that the OSS role in the war had not been quite so secret, that somebody in authority had told Americans, before the war ended, that many of the men and women in OSS were doing necessary and sometimes dangerous jobs, even though it couldn’t be said what the jobs were. A woman agent who won the DSC in France disagreed with this opinion. She had turned her decoration down with the explanation, “Everyone did his job. I don’t think we ought to be decorated for that.”

But Major Andy Rogers, a big blond Texan who served in Yugoslavia, Greece, and northern Italy during his tour overseas, summed up the gripe of many an OSS soldier when he said, “While I was on leave, people asked me what I did, and when I said I was in OSS, I could tell they thought I’d spent the war going to Washington cocktail parties. So after awhile, I just gave it up, and said, ‘Hell, I was in some parachute outfit, but it didn’t do much so you never heard of it.’”

Finally OSS men wondered whether all they had done in the war, the great mass of experience and knowledge which they had helped to gain for OSS in four wartime years, would be of any use to their country in the future.

They knew that for other countries intelligence had more than a strictly wartime function. All of them had seen how our allies, the British, worked, and they knew that SIS, the Secret Intelligence Service of the British government, was as much a part of the British method of dealing with the outside world as was the Royal Navy or the Foreign Office. They knew that SIS had its agents abroad in peace as well as in war, as did the services of every other great nation.

The OSS men who had been to France had heard of the Deuxième Bureau, and those who had worked in China, which had become the main theater of OSS effort in the last months of the war, knew that Tai Li’s intelligence organization was an integral part of the Central Government, and that Tai Li’s efforts were not necessarily limited to the Japs. Although they had no proof, it seemed logical to the OSS men that Russia, like the other great powers, supported an intelligence organization whose functions were not exclusively military.

The idea of a central intelligence agency for America was in the air. OSS men knew that General Donovan had outlined a plan for such a peacetime agency more than a year before, and that it was still being discussed and debated behind the scenes. Some of the men had enjoyed their wartime work and thought vaguely of making it a peacetime career. Those who were sufficiently curious to inquire more closely into the status of plans for America’s postwar intelligence effort found a general unanimity in the government that some sort of intelligence work should be continued, but a divergence of opinion as to how and in what form.

OSS had been carved up. The Research and Analysis Branch, which had undramatically contributed much to the winning of the war by close study of available material, had gone to the State Department, by order of President Truman, there to continue its work during peacetime. What was left of OSS, what was called the Cloak and Dagger branches, had now become the Strategic Services Unit, under the direction of able Brigadier General John Magruder, who had been with OSS throughout the war.

There was one influential group within the government which was in favor of reviving OSS on a peacetime basis, as a central intelligence agency divorced from the control of any government department. Ninety per cent of the work of such an agency would, this group claimed, be merely a continuation of the work of Research and Analysis, the collection and collation of available material so that all branches of the government with the responsibility of dealing with the world outside of the United States might be well informed. But, to fill in the gaps, 10 per cent would be aggressive, clandestine intelligence work. It would be, in effect, peacetime espionage.

Another influential group argued for dissolving the Cloak and Dagger side of OSS completely and finally, keeping Research and Analysis under the State Department, and depending on a committee system to co-ordinate the intelligence and counterintelligence effort of the United States. Any intelligence work under this system would be sedentary and open. There would be no espionage. The United States, the proponents of this system argued, had never believed in spies in peacetime. The American system of government and the American psychology left no place for espionage.

To spy or not to spy, that was the question.

Some of the OSS men who had worked behind the lines abroad and who had returned, became interested in the question, and argued it among themselves. At first it seemed to most of them that if other countries had their espionage systems in peacetime, it was only the minimum essential of American security in the atomic age that the United States should have one too. But some, as they thought more deeply about it, as they related the idea of peacetime espionage to their own experiences in the field, began to wonder if indeed the game would be worth the candle. It seemed an obvious first premise to these men that the first target of any American clandestine effort would be the Soviet Union, the other great world power. As they thought about it, as they considered the difficulties of obtaining intelligence clandestinely from a country so closely controlled internally as the USSR, they became increasingly convinced, quite apart from the moral rights and wrongs of the matter, that in trying to compete with Russia in the collection of secret intelligence, the United States would be playing a game in which all the trumps were in its opponent’s hands. America is a free and open country, and OSS men, like any Americans, hoped that it would remain so. But to indulge on an equal basis in an espionage effort against Russia, America would have to become as close and controlled as Russia itself.

But most of the men who had worked abroad for OSS did not bother their heads about the matter. The war was over, and they had their terminal leave. They did not look back on OSS as a whole with the same pride as the Marines for example, look back upon the Marine Corps, or the men of the First Division look back to their unit. By its very nature OSS had not been able to give its men the same pride and faith in their unit which a crack division inspires in its soldiers.

Nevertheless, no matter what its shortcomings, OSS had provided its men with opportunities for the most amazing adventures recorded in any war since that of King Arthur. They were aware of that fact, and grateful. There were a few, of course, who cracked under the strain, who are still nervous cases in hospitals and out. Most of them, even those who experienced torture and the worst of fear, returned to peace-time life, not regretfully to be sure, but with a definite nostalgia for the excitement and the freedom they had known behind the lines.

There was another opportunity which OSS had given its men, and which was given in the same degree to no other group of soldiers who fought in the war. That was the opportunity for knowing other nations, for discovering that the qualities which make good Americans also made good Frenchmen or good Italians or good Chinese, that the American soldier’s phrase, “a good guy” means exactly the same thing in another language.

Looking back, it was inevitable perhaps that they should have learned this, but it had been fun learning. The OSS man’s attitude toward the countries he knew and the people with whom he fought was far far different from that of the American soldier who fought the warfare of the front lines or spent his time in the dull supply echelons of the rear. War alliances and soldier meetings have not made for world friendship. Any Allied soldier can refute the cheerful ignorance of the hands-across-the-sea articles in the Reader’s Digest simply by reviewing the prejudices he developed while he was overseas. Most American soldiers hated the countries they fought in simply because the time they spent there was an uncomfortable, drab, lonely time. Their hate is one reason why the myth of “Our GI Ambassadors” is one of the minor falsehoods to come out of World War II.

A man who spent his time in Italy, for example, who moved from one restricted replacement center to another, who found himself finally in a cave on a mountain, was wounded in a painful moment, and made his way back again through a chain of army hospitals, cannot truthfully be said to know Italy or the Italians, even though he proclaims loudly and understandably that he hates both.

OSS men who fought behind the lines in Italy do not know this hate and find it hard to understand. They fought side by side with the partisans, learned to speak the language, and share a common faith. Their hopes and fears, for the time at least, were the same as those of the partisans. They got to know Italy because the Army wasn’t in the way.

Italy is only an example. Whenever OSS men gather they speak with affection of the countries that they knew, talk of letters from their friends who once formed the armies of the resistance, and of schemes for going abroad to see them again. Listening to them you get the idea that in some vague way, their desire to return is partly a search for excitement. As one of them said to his friends during a discussion of the next war or how to avoid it, “If it comes and I’m too old, I’ve got some damn good advice for my son. I’ll tell him to stay away from all the army baloney, and jump in behind the lines.”