Office of Strategic Services

The Office of Strategic Services was a US intelligence agency 1942-1945.

The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was a US intelligence agency, 1942-1945, founded by William J. Donovan [1].

History

On July 11, 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt appointed William J. Donovan to head a new civilian office attached to the White House, the Coordinator of Information (COI). The COI was charged with collecting and analyzing information which may have had bearing upon national security, correlating such information and data, and making this information available to the President, authorized departments, and authorized officials of the government. After the start of World War II, Donovan worked with the newly created Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) to place the COI under JCS control; while preserving COI autonomy, and gaining access to military support and resources.

In July 1941 the Librarian of Congress, Archibald MacLeish, established a Division of Special Information exclusively to support Donovan's CIO effort. Within the COI Donovan created a Research and Analysis group and, within that, a Central Information Division. These two units were housed within the Library of Congress.

On June 13, 1942, the COI became the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). The OSS gathered intelligence information about practically every country in existence, but was not allowed to conduct operations in the Pacific Theater, which General Douglas MacArthur claimed as his own. J. Edgar Hoover of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Nelson Rockefeller, the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, insisted that the OSS should not operate in the Western hemisphere. For these reasons, the records of OSS covert operations are almost entirely confined to Europe, Asia, and North Africa. The OSS established more than 40 overseas offices during World War II, extending from Casablanca to Shanghai, and from Stockholm to Pretoria.

The OSS was terminated on September 20, 1945. Much of its operations and records later became part of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) created on July 26, 1947.

Numerous documentalists and librarians served in the OSS, especially in its Research and Analysis Branch (R&A). These included:

• Burton W. Adkinson was Assistant Chief of the Map Intelligence Section, 1944-45.
• Frederick G. Kilgour supervised the collection of documents from neutral and enemy controlled territories.
• Eugene B. Power was also engaged in collecting information.
• Jesse Shera experimented with indexing collected material.
• Philip O. Keeney was chief librarian of CIO then of OSS, leaving in 1943.

Others included Vernon Dale Tate.

Further reading

On OSS:

• "Office of Strategic Services" Wkipedia [2]

On OSS documentalists and librarians:

• Burton W. Adkinson served as microfilm expert.
• Burke, Colin B. America's information wars: The untold story of information systems in America's conflicts and politics from World War II to the internet age. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
• Graham, Elyse. Book and dagger: How scholars and librarians bcame the unlikely spies of World War II. NewYork: Ecco, 2024.
• McReynolds, R. & L. S. Robbins. The librarian spies : Philip and Mary Jane Keeney and Cold War espionage. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2009 pp 72-73.

Papers

National Archives, College Park, MD. 1919-49 (bulk 1941-46). 7,565.527 cu. ft. / 13,334 items. Microfilm, maps and charts, motion pictures, sound recordings, images. [3]