Remarks for Admiral Eric T. Olson For Dedication Ceremony for the William J. Donovan Conference Room at The Department of State
1300 / 01 October 2010

Good afternoon. Under Secretary of State Kennedy, thank you for that kind introduction – I am honored to be here and in the presence of so many heroes. Today’s ceremony is a fitting tribute to one of our Nation’s finest and most innovative leaders – a heroic military officer, dedicated public servant, and most importantly, a PATRIOT… who consistently answered the bell for his country.

I would like to start by welcoming a few of the distinguished guests here today, Ambassador Hugh Montgomery, Director Robert Becker, Misters Dan and Charles Pinck, Generals Brown and Hughes, and most importantly the brave men and women of the Office of Strategic Services who are here today.

As everyone here knows - almost seven decades ago, President Franklin Roosevelt asked his Columbia Law School classmate; a powerful Wall Street lawyer, retired Army Colonel, and World War I Medal of Honor recipient, to evaluate the global security challenges faced by the U.S. military and provide strategic recommendations on how to best meet America’s intelligence requirements. This was a watershed moment in U.S. military history. Based on William Donovan’s recommendations –President Roosevelt appointed him the Coordinator of Information (COI) in July 1941 and less than a year later, America was engulfed in World War II; Donovan’s COI evolved into the Office of Strategic Services (OSS); and Wall Street Lawyer Bill Donovan was once again Colonel “Wild Bill” Donovan. World War II’s OSS was not like any other government agency in American history – established to meet the special conditions of WWII and tasked with intelligence and operations – the OSS was an enigma.

U.S. Special Operations Command traces its lineage to Major General Donovan’s OSS, as reflected in the emblem we wear and the unconventional warfare missions we train for and execute around the globe. However, it is not only the special operations and intelligence communities that benefited from Donovan’s patriotic service, the State Department also has reason to honor former Ambassador Donovan for his service as a post-war diplomat in Europe and as President Eisenhower’s Ambassador to Thailand in 1953. Major General Donovan was a man of many diverse endeavors and as President Eisenhower referred to him – quite possibly the “Last Hero.”

By all accounts, Major General Donovan was an imaginative, forceful, and dominating figure who was both loved and feared by the men and women of the OSS. He encouraged independence to the extreme and built the OSS on the characteristics of ingenuity, flexibility, self-reliance and risk-taking - traits that remain imperative to today’s SOF operators. For this reason, Major General Donovan is widely recognized as the “spiritual god father” of modern-day special operations. That said, as I was preparing for this afternoon’s ceremony, I tried to imagine what Wild Bill would think of this formal recognition. I finally concluded that given the General’s enduring impact on both the Defense and Intelligence establishments, it is only fitting that we recognize and remember him here at the center of American foreign policy. However, it did cross my mind that considering General Donovan’s well-known disdain for bureaucracy and high regard for innovation, improvisation, and independence – I think he might have preferred to have his office in Silicon Valley, Hollywood, or even behind enemy lines.

As we honor Major General Donovan today, we must remember that the past must be a force that propels us into the future. It must compel us to examine the circumstances and the men that carried us to this point in history. It cannot merely be a hollow memory that we look back upon during countless annual celebrations. In this light, Wild Bill Donovan was not only a World War I hero and accomplished World War II leader but more importantly, he is a current, albeit seasoned, strategist for today’s and tomorrow’s most pressing security challenges. Never before or since has one man so effectively merged men and women of varying backgrounds, skills, and motivations into an organization that accomplished so much but whose members were so few. The OSS brought together actors, authors, politicians, athletes, titans of industry, and numerous others to accomplish a single objective – “to merge operations with intelligence with great effect,” - “Wild Bill” Donovan’s “glorious amateurs” were hand-selected recruits from across the American landscape who were encouraged to improvise and innovate. Considering the importance of his objective, I would theorize that General Donovan would have wanted the two organizations that resulted from his brief experiment to optimize the most important characteristics of the OSS and be more OSS-like and less DoD-like.

If we use Donovan’s OSS-model to briefly examine how SOF has changed since 9/11, we can surmise that shooting has not changed significantly – we still shoot to kill. The movement and maneuverability of forces has changed significantly as technology has given rise to MRAPS, mini-submarines, and all matter of mobility platforms. However, it is our ability to communicate and gather data from a fully networked battlefield that is revolutionary. Like the OSS veterans of yesterday, SOF’s next step must be an increased contextual understanding of the places we operate and the enemies we face. Special operations forces must continue to thrive in ambiguous and uncertain environments and against our fiercest and most determined adversaries. To do so, we must continuously scrutinize ourselves, fearlessly address our shortfalls, and ultimately appreciate and master the cultural nuances of today’s ever-changing security environment. Major General Donovan’s visionary leadership style combined with the OSS’s innovative battlefield successes provide an outstanding operational template and may represent the path of tomorrow’s SOF.

Few quotes attributed to Wild Bill Donovan over the years are more timeless than the following two when we look back and remember his accomplishments and simultaneously use his OSS-model to look into the future. When asked to describe the ideal OSS candidate, Donovan once said a ”Ph.D. who can win a bar fight,” - in making this description Wild Bill accurately captured the characteristics and traits that have always described our country’s elite fighting forces…intelligent, agile, fierce, capable, and tough. Donovan also said, “We were not afraid to make mistakes because we were not afraid to try things that had not been tried before.” If the first quote addresses the personnel requirements for tomorrow’s SOF then the second quote completes the equation and forces today’s leaders to look into the future and search the voids between authorities and policies, processes and procedures, and finally between operations and intelligence. How will we most effectively fill these gaps in the future – I think that Wild Bill had the answer almost 70 years ago?

Thank you for allowing me to participate in today’s ceremony. Like General Donovan – this conference room will continue to bring innovative minds together in the pursuit of excellence for decades to come.

The New York Times
By Corey Kilgannon
14 October 2010

For more than 50 years, George Vujnovich was a mild-mannered salesman working away at his small business in Queens and living a quiet life on a quiet block in Jackson Heights. He never spoke, even to his closest friends, about his secret role organizing one of the greatest rescue missions of World War II.

“There was a strict rule in the O.S.S. and not talk about these things — they teach you to compartmentalize them and lock them away,” Mr. Vujnovich said.

The O.S.S. was the Office of Strategic Services — a precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency. And what Mr. Vujnovich kept locked away all these years was his key role as the operations officer for Operation Halyard, a daring rescue of more than 500 Allied forces airmen during World War II in Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia.

Read the complete story at The New York Times

We've been thinking a lot about Ross Perot these days -- hasn't everyone? -- what with elections coming up, and a certain splinter group that wants to take back America and such. But before the billionaire stormed the barricades of the two-party system with his 1992 independent presidential campaign, he was, of course, a businessman, a Navy man, a ferocious advocate for POWs, wounded soldiers and vets. So, no surprise that he practically glowed Saturday night at the Mandarin Oriental in the presence of the military brass and retired spooks at an OSS Society dinner gathering...

Read the complete story at The Washington Post...

The New York Times
Dennis Hevesi
28 April 2010

Whitney Harris, one of the last of the prosecutors who brought high-ranking Nazi war criminals to justice at the Nuremberg trials and who, a half-century later, was a significant voice in the creation of the International Criminal Court, died on April 21 at his home in St. Louis. He was 97.

The cause was cancer, his wife, Anna, said.

“Whitney was the last-surviving of the podium prosecutors, or in-court prosecutors, for the international tribunal,” John Q. Barrett, a law professor at St. John’s University and an expert on the Nuremberg trials, said Monday.

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One of the greatest courtroom dramas in history, NUREMBERG shows how the international prosecutors built their case against the top Nazi war criminals using the Nazis' own films and records. These films were found and edited for presentation in the Nuremberg courtroom by a special OSS War Crimes team that was part of John Ford's larger Field Photographic Branch. The trial established the "Nuremberg principles" -- the foundation for all subsequent trials for crimes against the peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Though shown in Germany as part of the Allies' denazification campaign in 1948 and 1949, US officials decided not to release NUREMBERG to US theaters, nor was it shown in any other country. Over the years, the picture negative was lost or destroyed. Sandra Schulberg & Josh Waletzky's restoration uses original audio from the trial, allowing you to hear the defendants' and prosecutors' voices for the first time. The film ends with Justice Robert H. Jackson's stirring words -- "Let Nuremberg stand as a warning to all who plan and wage aggressive war" -- words which leap the decades and make NUREMBERG startlingly contemporary. For more information: www.nurembergfilm.org

Additional information is being sought about the officers and secretaries who served in the OSS Field Photo Branch, based in the South Agriculture building in Washington, DC, and about the men and women assigned to its War Crimes unit and sent to Germany to locate and prepare film evidence for the Nuremberg trial between June and December 1945. Please contact SSchulberg@aol.com.

Published in the International Herald Tribune
March 18, 2010

Istvan Rev’s article about Quentin Tarantino’s film “Inglorious Basterds” (“An absurdist film that touches closely on wartime reality,” Views, March 15) referred to my Washington Times opinion article about this and another film.

The subject of my article was the distorted perception about the composition of O.S.S. personnel created by “Inglorious Basterds” and another recent film, “The Good Shepherd.” My objection to “Inglorious Basterds” was that Mr. Tarantino’s fictional Jewish O.S.S. commandos were depicted as little better than the Nazis they were fighting, killing them with baseball bats and then scalping them. Mr. Rev suggested I would be “surprised” to learn the history that he lays out about the fate of Karl Wolff, the model for the Nazi colonel in the film, Hans Landa. I am very familiar with this history, but it was simply not the subject of my article.

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On January 25th, Congressman Charles Rangel of New York presented the Bronze Star to Jonathan S. Gould, son of the late Joseph Gould, who served in the London office of the OSS from June 1944 through V-E Day. This medal presentation ceremony marked the end of a long quest by his family to obtain this award, which had been approved by War Department Decorations Board in February 1946 but after Army Lt. Joseph Gould received his honorary discharge from military service and returned to New York to rejoin his wife Betty.

However, because of the extended period of time that OSS personnel files remained classified, Joseph Gould was never able to claim his award before his death in 1993. Now, because of the release of these personnel files to the National Archives in August 2008, the long wait endured by his family has finally ended. With the support of Congressman Rangel’s office, the Army Decorations Board reviewed documents obtained from Joseph Gould’s personnel file showing that he had been recommended and approved for the Bronze Star after the war. As a result, the Board formally approved the release of the medal to Congressman Rangel and requested that he present it to Jonathan Gould on behalf of Joseph Gould’s family.

Within months after the United States entered World War II following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Joseph Gould enlisted in the US Army. Because of training he received from the Officer Reserve Corp while attending Columbia Journalism School, he was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant and ordered to report for basic infantry training at Camp Croft in South Carolina in July 1942.

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Published in Sphere

As Congress prepares to start hearings on the Christmas Day attack on Northwest Airlines Flight 253, there will be an inevitable focus on how to use the latest technology – better databases, full-body scanners and the like – to detect and prevent future attacks.

But the fact is that despite remarkable advances in technology, intelligence remains a distinctly human endeavor. There is no machine that can substitute for a human being's intellect, judgment, instinct or courage.

And if lawmakers want to truly reform our intelligence community, they would be wise to look backward instead of forward – all the way back to World War II's Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the predecessor to the CIA and U.S. Special Operations Forces.

This "unusual experiment," as its visionary founder, Maj. Gen. William J. "Wild Bill" Donovan, described it in his 1945 farewell address, succeeded principally because of its diverse and brilliant personnel, many of whom probably would never get admitted into today's intelligence services.

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