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00:00.
00:35OSS. Today, the letters conjure up cloak-and-dagger images of romance and intrigue in far-flung corners of the
00:44world.
00:50Trenchcoat rituals staged on foggy airfields and in murky cafes,
00:56where secret agents exchanged microfilm for letters of transit.
01:02But in 1942, the letters OSS meant different things to different people.
01:09To an outsider, they stood for oh-so-secret, an enigmatic shadow organization of spies and saboteurs,
01:18the predecessor to today's CIA.
01:35And most influential families.
01:38The Astros.
01:40Melanys.
01:42Morgans.
01:44Dupont.
01:45Vanderbilt.
01:46Roosevelt.
01:50To those in military intelligence and the FBI, OSS meant amateur, civilian dilettantes who got in the way dabbling in
01:59the work of professionals.
02:01But to the line soldier ready to hit the beach or parachute into enemy territory, OSS often spelled the difference
02:10between life and death,
02:13depending on the accuracy of the intelligence those amateurs provided.
02:18The daring men and women of the Office of Strategic Services.
02:26In July 1940, three weeks after France fell, leaving Great Britain as the last outpost of democracy in Europe,
02:35America had a choice to make.
02:39Back Britain's stand against the Nazis or write off Europe and pursue the path of isolationism that many U.S.
02:46politicians were calling for.
02:51Against the advice of Joseph P. Kennedy, his ambassador to Great Britain, President Franklin Roosevelt sent a special envoy to
02:59London to gauge the English stomach for war.
03:06The envoy was a successful Wall Street lawyer named William J. Donovan.
03:12Donovan had been the most highly decorated hero of World War I.
03:18He knew Roosevelt personally, and although he was a Republican, Donovan shared FDR's view that America should assume the role
03:26of leadership in world affairs.
03:29Throughout the 1930s, Donovan had logged countless miles on fact-finding missions for the president.
03:38But this mission to England would be one of the most important assignments ever undertaken by an American citizen,
03:44because the fate of free Europe hung in the balance.
03:50In the ensuing days, Donovan met with Winston Churchill and visited the headquarters of the Special Operations Executive Branch
03:58of British Intelligence, the SOE.
04:03The SOE had recently been formed for the purposes of sabotage and subversion in German-occupied territory.
04:14When Donovan returned to Washington, he assured Roosevelt that the British resolve was strong
04:19and that America should back the island nation with all the support it could muster.
04:26The following spring, as the specter of war grew closer, FDR became increasingly frustrated with the disjointed and conflicting information
04:36he was getting from G2,
04:38the military intelligence branch of the Army and the FBI.
04:43Donovan proposed to the president the creation of a central agency for collecting, sifting, and analyzing this intelligence.
04:52On July 11, 1941, by executive order, the office of COI, Coordinator of Information, was established.
05:01The coordinator himself, not surprisingly, was to be William J. Donovan.
05:09Roosevelt's wording of the executive order was deliberately vague, so as not to antagonize G2 or the FBI.
05:19But that vagueness also gave Donovan unprecedented freedom in creating his intelligence service.
05:27Later, when America entered World War II, the COI was incorporated into the military under a new name, Office of
05:35Strategic Services.
05:39In the early days of the OSS, it wasn't what you knew, but whom you knew.
05:46Donovan's mission was to create an agency whose methods, indeed its very existence, needed to be top secret.
05:53But in 1941, there were spies everywhere.
05:56Who could be trusted?
05:59He began by recruiting his friends, people he'd known for years, people who'd traveled with international contacts,
06:07fellow lawyers, bankers, business clients, club members.
06:11Contacts he'd made from a lifetime of doing business among the wealthy and social elite.
06:21And those friends brought along their friends.
06:25All the cute girls wanted to work for the OSS because all the cute guys were there.
06:29A lot of marriages were made, more affairs were had.
06:33It was considered to be a very sort of shh.
06:59The game was intelligence, and he scoured the country for what he considered to be goods by material.
07:05Smart, talented, self-assured individualists.
07:11Donovan's organization grew quickly.
07:14To his rivals, like FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and General George V. Strong,
07:20Commander of G-2 Army Intelligence, it was much too quickly.
07:25But with Roosevelt's backing,
07:36Robert Sherwood,
07:38Writers Steven Vincent Binet,
07:40Thornton Wilder,
07:41Hope called Justice Faculty DC dot com until eight Syracة.
07:54Pe оказate is not the hero of Jerusalem, but compassion is no greater than historical attack of the BC.
08:06Hope is very powerful.
08:10T. Edgar and General George López
08:11I think I know some of the good things I see.
08:12Donovan signed up geographers, historians, mathematicians, cartographers, scientists, botanists, and anthropologists
08:23to create complete profiles of countries and terrain where the U.S. might be fighting.
08:29He was shocked at the lack of solid intelligence available from G2 and the State Department
08:34and came to rely heavily on his close association with William Stevenson, the head of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service in
08:42North America, the SIS.
08:48Stevenson had been sent to this country by Churchill to energize the British Secret Intelligence Service in the United States
08:56and to do everything possible to subvert German and Italian strength, business, commerce,
09:07not only in the United States but also in Canada and throughout South America.
09:14The British by this time were old hands at the espionage game.
09:19They'd been spying on friends and enemies alike for centuries.
09:25Donovan wanted to model his organization after SOE of Great Britain,
09:29which took a far more proactive approach to intelligence work
09:33by actively participating in sabotage and subversion, taking the war to the enemy.
09:42One of the first cooperative efforts between the COI and SIS was the interviewing of European refugees
09:49as they disembarked in America.
09:54Interrogating them and also collecting material that they were bringing with them
09:59that they could use maybe to send back with spies that we were going to send in.
10:03The books they had, the clothing, even the cigarettes that they were smoking.
10:08They were collecting all of this together with information about who was doing what.
10:13And they got a great deal of good material that way.
10:17Many of these refugees were recruited and sent back to their countries
10:21to work as allied liaisons with resistance movements.
10:29A short time after they established the COI, Donovan asked Roosevelt
10:33what he thought was the most important piece of intelligence he needed.
10:39Roosevelt replied that it was critical to know Japan's intentions with regard to entering the war.
10:46But in only a matter of months, Japan made its intentions very clear.
10:52The attack on Pearl Harbor caught the President and his new intelligence-gathering service completely by surprise.
11:02America, the powerful nation that beleaguered European countries hoped would be their salvation,
11:08had been dealt a crippling blow from which it appeared it might take years to recover.
11:15For the time being, Donovan told Roosevelt, America would have to wage a different kind of war.
11:23A guerrilla war. A war without rules.
11:35With America's entry into World War II at the end of 1941,
11:40Donovan's civilian COI was incorporated into the military as the Office of Strategic Services.
11:47The OSS was answerable only to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and indirectly to the President.
11:56Recruiting for the OSS wasn't a social matter anymore.
12:00Now it was serious business.
12:05Recruits were taken from all walks of life and every branch of the armed services.
12:10Any one of an assortment of proficiencies could get you an unsolicited interview with the OSS.
12:17Anything from fluency in a foreign language to specialized technical abilities.
12:23The process was so secret that oftentimes a prospect would have no idea that he or she was being recruited,
12:31let alone what they were being recruited for.
12:35Betty McIntosh was a newspaper correspondent in Washington, D.C.
12:40when she got an assignment to interview a mysterious man inside a carefully guarded building.
12:46But once inside it was Betty who became the interviewee.
12:51He asked me what I was doing and I told him.
12:54And he said, well would you be interested in working for the government?
12:58And I said, well what would I do?
13:01And he said, well you have studied Japanese and you're also a writer.
13:05I think we have a place for you.
13:07And I said, well what do I do then?
13:09He said, I can't tell you what you do until we get you cleared.
13:16Carlton Swift's interview was more harrowing than mysterious.
13:21My first interview I had, my serious minded fellow who had a lot of calico on his chest,
13:31looked me in the eye and said, are you ready to parachute jump into the Burma jungle?
13:36My throat went dry for a minute but I finally choked out a yes sir.
13:40So that got me into the OSS.
13:59The real college of the Oriental School in the past few days was the novice.
14:08The job of the Contributions was often short and sweet.
14:12But for the Cowboys the regimen was intense.
14:16In order to qualify for basic training,
14:19candidates needed to pass a 3 day ordeal known as assessment.
14:53I'll give you an example of one.
14:55They said, go out behind to the barn.
14:57There's a great big barn, and open the door and you'll get instructions.
15:02Well, you go out, open the door, it's pitch black.
15:04The speaker speaks up and says, close the door.
15:09So you close the door, turn left, feel your way along the wall,
15:12put your right hand out, come to a ladder.
15:15Well, they give you a series of instructions, and pretty soon, there's no question,
15:19you're four stories up in this black barn.
15:22And they said, reach out, there's a bar, pull yourself out, hang down,
15:26and then silence.
15:29At that point, a voice commanded the recruit to let go of the bar.
15:36What the hell do you do?
15:38You drop four stories in the black?
15:42Those recruits who obeyed the command dropped and were surprised to find a platform covered
15:47with hay just a few feet below.
15:51Those guys are your troops.
15:54They do what they're told, and they take instructions well.
15:59Recruits who thought better of it and climbed back down the ladder had a surprise waiting for them, too.
16:07How absurd to drop fourthly.
16:09Of course I won't do it.
16:11And they climb on back the way they came up, saying, well, I guess I'm not an OSS.
16:16Oh, yes you are.
16:17You have good judgment.
16:18You're the staff officers.
16:22Then there were the recruits who looked around for another option.
16:27Actually, if you were hanging there and kick your feet around, there's a ladder about two feet behind you.
16:32You can climb down the ladder to a floor and say, all right, next instructions.
16:37And those are guys who are, you know, potential commanders.
16:41They'd look for a third solution, something different, some way out of it.
16:46There were many others, each designed to gauge the candidate's mettle under simulated field conditions.
16:56Adding to the stress of it all was the fact that most recruits had no idea why they were being
17:02tested.
17:05Despite thorough background checks and tight security, the selection process was sometimes infiltrated.
17:13Someone started talking about some baseball story, and this guy answered wrong.
17:18He pretended to know, and it became patented.
17:21He didn't.
17:22Why is he pretending to know something he doesn't know at all?
17:26Well, finally they polygraphed him, I guess, and he was a German penetration.
17:33It had gotten almost all the way through.
17:36German intelligence wasn't the only organization interested in penetrating America's fledgling clandestine service.
17:45Even some of her allies had agents inside the OSS.
17:51OSS was very well infiltrated, penetrated, by the KGB.
17:56The head, for example, of the Latin America Division of Research and Analysis section was a KGB agent.
18:06Assessment weeded out 25% of OSS recruits before they reached basic training.
18:13The requirements were high in the sense that the men were being asked to participate in unconventional warfare.
18:22They not only would be fighting and exposed to death, but where they would not always have the protection of
18:29the uniform,
18:30where they would be spies or saboteurs or subversives, and consequently they would be exposed not only to dying in
18:39battle, but to mistreatment, torture.
18:45Recruits who did qualify were sent to one of several secret OSS training schools.
18:50The first and most famous of these was a British facility in Canada called Camp X.
19:00The British SOE was mindful that if there was an invasion in England, they needed the ability to have a
19:10fallback position or a school for training agents that was not in England.
19:16Camp X was such a secret that originally it was concealed from even the Canadian War Cabinet.
19:24They did not know of its existence, but it became somewhat legendary in its successes.
19:31Agents from SOE, the OSS, and even the FBI trained at Camp X.
19:38In the months following Pearl Harbor, the OSS established its own camps in the Maryland Mountains on Catalina Island off
19:46the California coast,
19:47and at Congressional Country Club in Maryland.
19:52In a grueling three weeks of 18-hour days, OSS agents learned to send Morse code, repair radio transmitters,
20:02how to operate in a hostile environment, and to develop and maintain a cover.
20:10We were taught to tell lies in a straight face, and so I decided I'd be a secretary.
20:16And the reason that my cover was finally blown was I can't type. I only have two fingers.
20:24You have to learn how to be right on your toes all the time.
20:29OSS candidates learned how to recruit agents and follow people without being seen,
20:35how to forge documents, sabotage utilities, and if necessary, to kill silently with the knife, garotte, or with their bare
20:48hands.
20:49By the time an agent completed OSS training, he or she was qualified in an array of subversive, criminal, or
20:58deadly practices.
21:01Everything from lock-picking to throat-cutting.
21:06But the enemy, too, had been trained, and after two years of war, he was experienced, ready, and waiting.
21:27In December of 1941, United States' ability to respond to Axis aggression.
21:37Time was needed.
21:39It would be long months before American industry could turn out the weapons and materiel necessary for an effective counterattack.
21:49In the meantime, the OSS prepared to fight what, for America, would be a new kind of war.
21:57Donovan's OSS was divided into seven separate branches, each with a specific purpose and mission.
22:05The RNA, or research and analysis branch, pieced together what Donovan called the raw material of strategy.
22:14It was staffed, for the most part, with the formidable group of scholars Donovan had appropriated from America's universities.
22:23RNA was headquartered in Washington.
22:26From here, they were able to actually create intelligence by analyzing thousands of seemingly unconnected bits of information.
22:37Uncle Sam is interested in any snapshots or photos you may have made on your travels abroad, showing cities, docks,
22:43railroads, airports, or any other places of strategic importance.
22:47Headed by Colonel William J. Donovan, an Office of Strategic Services has been set up for the Pictorial Records Branch
22:54to collect and sort such material.
22:58Research and analysis were the thinkers.
23:01They took the raw intelligence that came from our agents or our liaisons, the security elements that we could deal
23:08with, and put it together in more thoughtful reports.
23:12In fact, it was the RNA that got OSS started, because the problems with Pearl Harbor were that bits and
23:21pieces were handed out to consumers, and they weren't collated and drawn together.
23:27And Donovan saw quite easily that had they been drawn together, it was patent that the Japanese were going to
23:33attack.
23:35R&A scholars scanned the newspaper obituary columns to count the number of German officers killed in action.
23:43From these figures, they were able to provide the Allied leadership with a remarkably accurate count of German troop strength
23:50throughout the war.
23:53You don't have to have spies for everything.
23:56Spies are only used for a very small percentage of the total take of intelligence, even to this day, even
24:00more so to this day.
24:03The research and development branch was comprised of scientists, inventors, and even boasted a few crackpots.
24:12Their assignment was to develop unorthodox weapons, schemes, and plots.
24:18The sort of dirty tricks and booby traps, according to Donovan, that no enemy would suspect the straightforward fair-playing
24:25Americans to be capable of.
24:27R&D was as proficient in counterfeiting foreign currency as they were in developing a silent, flashless, submachine gun.
24:37But for every idea that paid off, there were many others that didn't.
24:45Stanley Lovell, head of R&D, devised a plot to inject Hitler's vegetables with female hormones, in hope that Hitler's
24:53already emotional temperament would be driven over the edge.
24:56The plan foundered when the OSS couldn't insert a gardener into Berkta's garden.
25:05The MO, or Morale Operations branch of the OSS, was made up of journalists, Madison Avenue copywriters, playwrights, and Hollywood
25:14screenwriters.
25:16These men and women of letters spent their days and nights turning out propaganda, both white and black, for enemy
25:23consumption.
25:26Morale Operations is supposed to undermine the morale of the frontline soldier.
25:33And when the morale of the frontline soldier is upset, he's not going to perform too well.
25:41And the whole frontline is going to crumble.
25:45White propaganda is information or material that doesn't disguise where it comes from.
25:52Its purpose is to convince the enemy that his cause is lost, and that surrender is his only choice.
25:59Black propaganda is false or misleading information that purports to come from the enemy's own home or headquarters.
26:08Donovan's scribblers spent countless hours in brainstorming sessions, dreaming up new and imaginative ways to confound the enemy.
26:19One good opportunity arrived late in the war when the OSS learned of an attempt by a faction of the
26:24German army to assassinate Hitler.
26:27The generals tried to kill Hitler.
26:29This was an excellent example of how you could move in right away and spread all kinds of rumors that
26:36Germany was collapsing and that people were not satisfied with Hitler.
26:39And we did that.
26:41And that's, again, morale operations, as we call it.
26:44And it's just changing people's minds.
26:49Changing the enemy's mind required more ingenuity than shooting at him.
26:53But it often proved to be a more effective way of defeating him.
26:59Also in the ammo payroll were expert forgers who fabricated false orders to German troops in the field.
27:06In Italy in 1943, certain units of Field Marshal Kesselring's command received orders to retreat.
27:15And it was so authentic that over the airwaves, Kesselring had to demand it, that he never issued such an
27:24order.
27:25Because units receiving these forged papers started retreating.
27:31It was suggested in the airwaves, but it was a very powerful officer, and, in the three months, an incident
27:48that the militaries were doing.
27:51And during the war room, it would have been ölÃfic at the science on the street at Rouse's suspicion.
27:55In 1945, Betty McIntosh was an OSS agent working in Morrell Operations operations,
28:01in India. Here the MO's primary mission was to help convince the Japanese army in Burma
28:07that they were losing the war and should surrender.
28:13I drew up
28:40The increase in subsequent surrenders by Japanese troops in Burma was attributed to this and other morale operations missions.
28:51Donovan encouraged his agents in R&D and MO to go to any length to undermine the enemy.
28:58His critics within the military high command decried the OSS's dirty tricks as
29:04waging below-the-belt warfare, but Donovan ignored them as he pressed his no-rules war.
29:12The MO spread rumors throughout the Reich. The Allies supposedly had developed a new bomb that sucked the oxygen out
29:20of the air, causing death by suffocation.
29:24The Allied rockets carrying bubonic plague were supposed to be landing in German towns.
29:31Heinrich Himmler had ordered German housewives to baby breeding farms.
29:39These rumors, and dozens more, were carefully calculated to chip away at the enemy's psyche and spirit.
29:47There's no way to measure the effectiveness of the black operations run by the choir boys of the morale operations
29:53branch of OSS.
29:56But it's been estimated that as many as 10,000 German troops deserted as a result of OSS propaganda.
30:05And while this war of rumor and disinformation was being caught, the cowboys of OSS were fighting an even riskier,
30:13unorthodox war of subversion, sabotage, and intelligence gathering deep behind enemy lines.
30:25The secret intelligence and special operations branches were the cowboys of Bill Donovan's OSS.
30:33They operated behind enemy lines, either on their own or in concert with members of the resistance.
30:42Their mission was to identify, recruit, train, and supply resistance groups in Axis-occupied countries.
30:51Meanwhile, sending back information regarding enemy defenses, supplies, railroad schedules, and troop movements, anything that could help Allied military planners.
31:04It was important to know who in France, who in Yugoslavia, who in Italy would work with the invading troops.
31:14It would be important to know what individuals were leaders, what resources they had, what capabilities they had to carry
31:24out specific tasks,
31:25such as blowing up bridges, demolishing railroad tracks, carrying on any kind of activity that would impede the movement of
31:36the Germans on the one hand,
31:38or that would facilitate the movements of the British and the Americans on the other.
31:44For his field agents, Donovan chose young people who were more likely to be fearless and daring.
31:52I think the age usually was between, say, 19 and 25, and we were awfully young.
32:01The Special Operations or Operations Group branches of OSS engaged the enemy in a less clandestine and more proactive way
32:10than the secret intelligence branch.
32:12SO, besides subverting and sabotaging through any means at hand, engaged enemy troops in paramilitary operations together with the resistance
32:23and as independent units.
32:26Operations Group, or OG units, wore uniforms in the hope that if captured they would be considered regular troops protected
32:33by the rules of the Geneva Convention.
32:39American military strategists had selected North Africa as the ideal launching area for an invasion of Axis-held Europe.
32:50But first the army would have to successfully land on and take control of the African coast.
32:57The area was controlled by the French Vichy government under the watchful eye of German intelligence.
33:04The Americans needed to determine what kind of resistance such a landing would encounter.
33:12The U.S. State Department had a trade agreement to sell food to the Vichy government,
33:17which included a provision for 12 American food control officers to supervise distribution.
33:25The 12 officers sent to North Africa were actually spies, code-named the 12 Disciples.
33:34Later, when America entered the war, the Disciples were assigned to the OSS.
33:40They set up clandestine radio stations.
33:53They set up a landing point in North Africa, not only about facilities, weather, berets, but people.
34:17At one point they really spirited out the harbormaster and helped guide troops on the land.
34:47to make contact with the Italian underground.
34:51In France, SI agents were dropped by parachute or put ashore by PT boat or submarine.
34:58The vast coastline was difficult to patrol effectively,
35:02and when the moon was down it was nearly impossible to spot a landing party.
35:09Many agents preferred these coastline drops to the even more dangerous night drops from an airplane.
35:17That in itself was a major clandestine operation, setting up a landing zone, setting up signals
35:25to make certain that they were dropped at the right time in the right location
35:29and the right people were there to meet them.
35:33Landing zones were prearranged with the resistance and marked with bonfires or crossed car headlights.
35:43Dropping down through the night sky, each agent hoped that his contact
35:47below hadn't been compromised and replaced by a Gestapo welcoming committee.
35:55Since a suitcase would be a dead giveaway on the ground, an agent had to wear everything he brought with
36:00him.
36:03It was imperative that an agent's cover be perfect.
36:07The Gestapo was everywhere, and any slip, however small, could have dire consequences.
36:14Many of the most effective SI operatives were women.
36:19As a courier, for instance, especially if a girl was British, had an enormous advantage.
36:25A girl could always smile and flirt a bit with the German soldiers, whereas of course a man couldn't do
36:34that.
36:36German intelligence operated vans with radio direction finders to track OSS transmissions.
36:42The trick to transmitting intelligence from hostile territory was to keep moving.
36:50In working any kind of radio, you've got to be very careful in terms of being spotted by the enemy,
36:56and they can find you, there's no question about that.
36:59It isn't as easy as Hollywood shows it, where they can get you in whatever hotel room you're in.
37:04It doesn't work that way. It never has.
37:07It was more secure to be in the city than in the country, because the idea would be an apartment
37:14building,
37:15where if you were on the air for too long, you could be spotted to the building, but not necessarily
37:21to the apartment.
37:23So if you had somebody watching, it was easier to run away.
37:28In rural France, SO units collaborated with the Maquis, resistance members who took their name from the spindly aromatic evergreen
37:37bush
37:37that grows wild in the French countryside, dense enough to conceal bandits.
37:44Working together, the OSS teams and Maquis units terrorized the occupying Germans to the point where they were afraid to
37:51move off the main roads,
37:53at less than convoy strength. The resistance disrupted supply lines so completely that some German troops were forced to live
38:01off the land nearly starving in the process.
38:07The resistance had no love for the German invaders. Their operations were swift and brutal. They took no prisoners.
38:17In the winter and spring of 1944, as the Allies prepared to invade Western Europe, there were more than 500
38:25OSS-controlled agents operating in France.
38:28There would soon be more.
38:33The OSS and SOE devised a plan to parachute fifty three-man teams into France to coordinate resistance activity for
38:42the Normandy invasion.
38:47These teams, consisting of an OSS or SOE officer, a French-speaking officer, and an enlisted radio operator, were codenamed
38:56Jedbergs, after a town in Scotland.
39:02Not only were the Jedbergs charged with preparing the resistance for D-Day, but an equal part of their job
39:08lay in keeping the lid on, scaling back underground operations so as not to attract German attention to the area.
39:17The resistance was not given the actual date of the landings, but told to commence operations when they heard the
39:23BBC broadcast the second verse of a poem by the French poet Berlain.
39:31The lengthening shadows, the sad strains of the violins, pierced my heart. On that signal, the Maquis swung into action,
39:41destroying key bridges and railroads, blocking German supply lines and hampering their retreat.
39:48The liberation of Europe was underway.
39:53Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, in the jungles of Southeast Asia, the OSS was fighting another guerrilla
40:00action, far behind enemy lines.
40:07In March of 1942, the Japanese army occupied into China and Thailand and was driving into Burma and Malaya.
40:18U.S. Army General Joseph W. Stilwell's 50,000-man army had been forced to retreat 200 miles from Burma
40:27into India by a Japanese force of vastly superior strength.
40:45U.S. Army General Joseph W. Stilwell's 50,000-man army had been forced into the Burmese jungle. Its mission
41:01was to harass and sabotage the enemy wherever it found him.
41:07All I want to hear, Stilwell told Eifler, is booms from the jungle.
41:13In the jungles of northern Burma, Detachment 101 encountered a fierce tribe of natives called Kachin.
41:32Burning their villages, and the tribes were more than happy to join with the Americans in a war of retribution.
41:40This group really attacked the Japanese from behind the lines and worked making life totally miserable for the Japanese in
41:49Burma.
41:50In those days, it was important to keep the Japanese occupied so they wouldn't push into India.
41:57The OSS trained the Kachin until they were expert with explosive handling and Morse code.
42:04In return, the Kachin showed their OSS partners how to rig deadly booby traps with a crossbow and trip wire,
42:11or how to hide bamboo spears on either side of a trail so that an ambushed Japanese patrol would be
42:19impaled while diving for cover.
42:25Within a year, Detachment 101 had 29 field stations in Burma and India,
42:31and was staging almost daily forays against the Japanese.
42:37General Donovan arrived unannounced in December 1943 to see for himself what was shaping up to be an OSS success
42:45story.
42:49Eifler flew Donovan 150 miles behind enemy lines to visit a guerrilla base,
42:56a somewhat reckless excursion considering what a prize a captured American intelligence commander would make for the Japanese.
43:05And they took off over Japanese lines,
43:08and they had something that they used to call an L-pill that the important people would have,
43:13and this would be a pill if you took it, you would be dead in an instant.
43:16And the general supposedly always carried one around.
43:20At this point, I was told by Colonel Eifler himself,
43:23Eifler asked Donovan if he had his L-pill along,
43:27and Donovan said, oh, I forgot it.
43:29And I have the feeling that Donovan never carried an L-pill being a good Catholic.
43:35Detachment 101, growing eventually to a force of 10,000 Kachin fighting alongside 500 Americans,
43:42stopped the Japanese advance cold.
43:46By the end of the war, they were responsible for 5,447 Japanese dead,
43:52and another 10,000 missing and wounded.
43:58During the same time, only 184 Kachin and 18 American officers were lost in those actions.
44:07Tenth Air Force, based in Assam, India, reported in 1944 that the Kachin operating with the OSS accounted for 85
44:15% of its intelligence on likely targets.
44:23As the war in Asia approached the end game stage, the OSS pursued other collaborations with Japan's enemies.
44:32Throughout the war, the Allies had been baffled in their attempts to enlist China's aid in fighting the war against
44:38Japan.
44:39The country was split into two main factions, the Nationalists, under Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek,
44:46and the Communists, led by Mao Zedong.
44:50In July 1944, frustrated by years of half-hearted and ineffective participation by the Nationalist Army,
44:58the OSS turned to the Chinese Communists.
45:03OSS sent a team of officers to Yenon on what was called the Dixie Mission,
45:09to meet with Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai and other members of the Chinese High Command
45:14in the hope of persuading the Communists to support the Nationalists in a concerted effort against the Japanese.
45:23But when strong political opposition to these overtures arose in Washington, the OSS was forced to withdraw the mission.
45:32That same year, OSS agents made another journey, this time to North Vietnam,
45:38where they hoped to enlist the aid of Viet Minh leaders against Japanese troops in Indochina.
45:45One of the things the team found was all of the Vietnamese, North Vietnamese leaders were all sick.
45:53And Paul Hoagland, the paramedic that was with the team, happened to have some...
46:02Top leaders.
46:13There was a tough fight.
46:16They also had in the back of their minds that they wanted to talk to the United States government to
46:20do the French colonial power.
46:22And that's the one thing that the U.S. government did not want to do, and so there was a
46:27falling out after the war.
46:28And basically, do you want to say that OSS saved a whole today so it could be a trouble to
46:34us later on?
46:35That's proof. We do save his life.
46:41When the end came, the OSS was in the midst of gathering intelligence for the invasion of Japan.
46:48The cost of lives the RNA people had determined would be enormous, suggested estimates of Allied casualties numbered as higher
46:57than me.
46:59The atomic bomb and the subsequent Japanese surrender brought a fire of relief to the entire world.
47:08A little more than a month afterwards, the OSS, America's first clandestine military organization, by now numbering nearly 13,000
47:17operatives,
47:18many of whom had risked their lives behind enemy lines, was officially disbanded by President Eric Truman.
47:26The new president had decided that an intelligence agency was not needed in Japan.
47:33Moreover, Truman, a Democrat, did not number among Donovan's fans.
47:38He considered the intelligence chief a dangerous Republican,
47:42and a potential foe who harbored plans to run for president himself.
47:48The contributions of the OSS received the services to winning the war were definite and simple.
47:56The OSS's role in organizing the resistance in Italy and France alone justified the resistance as a credible,
48:04often indispensable weapon in the hands of the Allies.
48:09Add to that the countless incidents of perversions and sabotage behind enemy lines in Africa, Europe, and across Asia.
48:20The life-saving information provided by the research and analysis section.
48:26The propaganda conceived and disseminated by the morale operations graph.
48:32All of these efforts and actions, both in one by one, were like deep things,
48:37each causing a sort of moment pain,
48:39yet their cumulative effects slowly and surely helped bring the axis giant to its speed.
48:47The significant accomplishment of OSS is that it was the vehicle by which modern American intelligence was created.
48:59Before the war, there was no central intelligence organization,
49:03no wish for one, no desire for one.
49:05It was a military and naval activity.
49:09What Donovan and OSS did was to project intelligence as not a narrow army or navy function,
49:20but as essentially a civilian function,
49:23which required the professionalism not of soldiers and sailors only,
49:28but of historians, geographers, psychologists, anthropologists, engineers, newsmen,
49:35broadcasters, and so on and so forth.
49:39It was Donovan's appreciation of the different character of modern warfare
49:45that enabled him to see that intelligence was no longer concerned only with armies and navies,
49:52but that it was concerned with the productive capacity of the country's farm,
49:57the industrial capacity, the mineral resources,
50:01the steel production, the shipping capacity.
50:04All of these things were now integral aspects of a much more comprehensive picture of intelligence
50:10than had ever really been envisioned.
50:13And it was Donovan's new vision of intelligence.
50:20In July of 1947, as Cold War tensions in the Soviet Union increased,
50:26President Truman signed into law the National Security Act,
50:29establishing the Central Intelligence Agency
50:32as the United States' first national civilian chief-line intelligence gathering organization.
50:38It was stabbed, to the most part, by veterans of the OSS,
50:44General William J. Donovan, who has not offered their post in the New York City.
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