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<title>RSS Feed</title><link>http://www.ossreborn.com/index.html</link><description>OSS NEWS</description><dc:language>en</dc:language><dc:creator>OSS REBORN</dc:creator><dc:rights>Copyright OSS REBORN</dc:rights><dc:date>2008-12-19T10:10:41-05:00</dc:date><admin:generatorAgent rdf:resource="http://www.realmacsoftware.com/" />
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<lastBuildDate>Tue, 27 May 2008 00:30:16 -0400</lastBuildDate><item><title>OSS Training in the National Parks</title><dc:creator>OSS REBORN</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2008-12-19T10:10:41-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.ossreborn.com/index_files/35.html#unique-entry-id-38</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.ossreborn.com/index_files/35.html#unique-entry-id-38</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[The National Park Service has posted on its website an extensive report entitled, &ldquo;OSS Training in the National Parks and Service Abroad in World War II,&rdquo; prepared for the Park Service by John Whiteclay Chambers II, professor of history at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey.   The typescript report runs more than 600 pages of text, footnotes and bibliography, plus nearly 90 pages of illustrations.


For a book for a wider audience, Professor Chambers is now preparing an shorter, revised, and updated study for possible publication by Rutgers University Press in 2009. 


The National Park Service report is located on the NPS website.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Valkyrie - An Insider&#x2019;s Account of the Plot to Kill Hitler</title><dc:creator>OSS REBORN</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2008-12-05T07:25:33-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.ossreborn.com/index_files/34.html#unique-entry-id-36</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.ossreborn.com/index_files/34.html#unique-entry-id-36</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[By Hans Bernd Gisevius


Da Capo Press


When on July 20, 1944, a bomb&mdash;boldly place inside Hitler&rsquo;s headquarters by Colonel Claus Count von Stauffenberg&mdash;exploded without killing the F&uuml;hrer, the subsequent coup d&rsquo;&eacute;tat against the Third Reich, codenamed Valkyrie, collapsed.   The conspirators were summarily shot or condemned in show trials and sadistically hanged.


&nbsp;


One of the few survivors of the conspiracy was Hans Bernd Gisevius , who had used his positions in the Gestapo and the Abwehr (military intelligence) to further the anti-Nazi plot.   He knew well or had met the major figures involved in planning Valkyrie, including General August Beck, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, Colonel Hans Oster, and von Stauffenberg.   The conspiracy was widespread, involving a wide circle of former politicians, diplomats, and government officials as well as senior military men.   The anti-Hitler movement, largely motivated by moral outrage than by political expediency, had started as early as 1933 and involved several putsches and assassination attempts.


&nbsp;


Valkyrie, an abridgment of Gisevius&rsquo;s classic insider&rsquo;s account To the Bitter End, is an intimate memoir as riveting as it is exceptional.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>OSS: Greek &#x26; Norwegian OGs</title><dc:creator>OSS REBORN</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2008-11-23T09:35:54-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.ossreborn.com/index_files/33.html#unique-entry-id-35</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.ossreborn.com/index_files/33.html#unique-entry-id-35</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[OSS: Greek & Norwegian OGs, training in Scotland, 1945 with&nbsp;Lt.   Roger Hall.  &nbsp; 


Greeks on one side, Norwegians on the other.


See More OSS Photos In Our Photo Section...]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Arabian Knight: Colonel Bill Eddy USMC and the Rise of American Power in the Middle East</title><dc:creator>OSS REBORN</dc:creator><category>Joseph C. Goulden</category><dc:date>2008-10-28T16:33:38-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.ossreborn.com/index_files/32.html#unique-entry-id-34</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.ossreborn.com/index_files/32.html#unique-entry-id-34</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Eddy returned to the Marines as war neared, quickly switched to the Office of Strategic Services and was sent to North Africa to do political spadework for the Allied invasion. ...  The operator took the money, then told Eddy, who wrote his daughter, "We are taking the francs and composing fake conversations for him to report to them, conversations which should give the Germans plenty of phony information."


Next came the seminal assignment of Eddy's career: establishing relations with Ibn Saud, the king of Saudi Arabia, an impoverished backwater considered to be insignificant.   But President Roosevelt sensed Saudi Arabia's future importance as a source of oil, and as a U.S. toehold in the Middle East. 

...FDR's fear was that insolvency would drive the kingdom back into the British sphere, with the United States excluded from oil concessions. ...  King Saud was favorably disposed to the United States because he was determined that "his country will not become a ward or a mere instrument for profit for some foreign government." ...  Eddy (and a few others) felt, "the Arabic people, as they gained independence, would face a choice of external loyalties and that it would be far preferable for them to align themselves with the United States than with the looming great rival, the Soviet Union."


...Eddy left the Marines (as a colonel) and plunged into the fierce war over creation of the U.S. intelligence establishment.   He spoke for the State Department in negotiations over creation of the CIA and eventually ran the department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research.   He served briefly as ambassador to Yemen, but resigned in 1947 over President Truman's decision to support creation of a new Jewish state in Palestine.


...Lippman writes, "To support instead what Arabs saw as the expansionist, usurper state created by the Zionists in Palestine would bring down upon America the relentless rage of militant Islam. 

...Eddy returned to the Middle East as a "consultant" to ARAMCO, which U.S. oil companies owned in conjunction with the Saudis. ...  Eddy was not on the U.S. government payroll, "throughout his years with ARAMCO he reported regularly to the CIA, where he had been present at the creation, and was a trusted informant, about Arab politics and personalities." ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>The Lost Spy: An American In Stalin&#x2019;s Secret Service</title><dc:creator>OSS REBORN</dc:creator><category>Joseph C. Goulden</category><dc:date>2008-10-28T16:27:02-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.ossreborn.com/index_files/31.html#unique-entry-id-33</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.ossreborn.com/index_files/31.html#unique-entry-id-33</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[A former Moscow correspondent for Time, Meier gained access to Soviet files on Oggins, as well as dossiers in other countries; he also tracked down a long-lost son in upstate New York  who retained a few fading memories of his father&rsquo;s odyssey.


...After graduation from Columbia University, he met and wed a communist firebrand named Nerma Berman, She wrote for The Daily Worker, agitated for the release of &ldquo;political prisoners,&rdquo; and apparently wooed Oggins across the line separating idealism from radicalism.    He joined the Workers Party of America, as the Communist Party, USA, was then disguised, and off they went to Europe, vanishing  into the misty shadows of the espionage underworld. 


...(His true mission, Meier believes, was to keep tabs on the refugee Romanovs and other anti-Red Russians.)  

...Sumner Wells, the under secretary of state, cabled the Moscow embassy, &ldquo;It is possible that he has been acting for years as an agent of a foreign power or an international revolutionary movement.&rdquo; ...  Embassy officers reported at the time that the Soviets were not about to free someone who knew the horrors of the gulag.   Given the wartime need not to offend Stalin, the US did not make an issue of Oggins&rsquo;s case. 


Meier&rsquo;s son seemingly did not know the full story, complaining to Meier, &ldquo;The government just let Dad sit in a Soviet jail and rot.&rdquo; ...  Documents showed that he had been used  as a guinea pig for testing of curare, a poison long used in South America, to determine whether the substance could be detected in a corpse after death. 


The administering &ldquo;physician&rdquo; &ndash; I use the quotation marks deliberately &ndash;  reported  &ldquo;cyanosis and death with symptoms of suffocation while retaining complete conscious.   Death was excruciating, but  the man was deprived of his ability to shout or move while retaining complete consciousness....death...ensued with ten to fifteen minutes....&rdquo;


...But  Meier&rsquo;s decision to present his narrative in non-chronological fashion, skipping back and forth,  resulted in a jumble of a book that I frankly found highly confusing.   Nonetheless, The Last Spy deserves one&rsquo;s attention because it points up once again how well-meaning &ldquo;revolutionaries&rdquo; can end up with burned fingers &ndash; or worse &ndash; if they insist on sticking their fingers into the fire.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>The Brenner Assignment</title><dc:creator>OSS REBORN</dc:creator><dc:subject>NEWS</dc:subject><dc:date>2008-10-28T16:13:17-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.ossreborn.com/index_files/30.html#unique-entry-id-32</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.ossreborn.com/index_files/30.html#unique-entry-id-32</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[The never-before-told true story of a small team of American saboteurs with orders to sever the Third Reich&rsquo;s main supply artery&mdash;the Brenner Pass.    Like a scene from Where Eagles Dare, a small team of American special operatives parachutes into Italy under the noses of thousands of German troops.   Their orders: link up with local partisans in the mountains and sabotage the well-guarded Brenner Pass, the crucial route through the Alps for the Nazi war machine.   Without the supplies that travel this route, the German war effort in Italy will grind to a halt. 


Using thousands of recently declassified files, personal interviews, and private documents, including a behind-the-lines diary buried in a bottle, military historian Patrick K.   O&rsquo;Donnell has written a cinematic World War II adventure story.


The unforgettable cast of characters includes the dashing and daring team leader; the romantic idealist who plans the operation; the seductive Italian countess who is also a double-agent; and the maniacal SS officer who will stop at nothing to kill the team and their partisan collaborators.


The Brenner Assignment is also a World War II story that resonates today, revealing lessons for the war on terror and illustrating the complex nature of insurgency.


Packed with action, suspense, intrigue, and even romance, this exciting true tale of survival and sabotage behind enemy l ines is one of the greatest untold adventure stories of World War II.


www.brennerassignment.com]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington</title><dc:creator>OSS REBORN</dc:creator><category>Joseph C. Goulden</category><dc:date>2008-10-01T17:01:32-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.ossreborn.com/index_files/29.html#unique-entry-id-31</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.ossreborn.com/index_files/29.html#unique-entry-id-31</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[It is, first of all, a highly readable primer on propaganda operations, and a strong statement as to why intelligence organizations mount operations on the turf of &ldquo;friendly nations.&rdquo;   Britain literally was fighting for its life in the months before Pearl Harbor, and a strong isolationist segment of the American population wanted no part of the European War. 

...But Dahl&rsquo;s most valuable on-going contact was the millionaire newspaper publisher Charles Marsh, who despite awesomely uncouth manners and speech managed to befriend persons such as Henry Wallace, the vice-president, and a number of Roosevelt cabinet officers. 

...But in the early 1940s, James Reston of the New York Times would call him the &ldquo;Assistant President,&rdquo; writing, &ldquo;Henry Wallace is now the administration&rsquo;s head man on Capital Hill, its defense chief, economic boss, and No. 1 post-war planner.&rdquo; 


Dahl shared his superiors&rsquo; view of Wallace as a political nitwit, but made nice with him nonetheless because of the quality of information obtained he provided British intelligence.   Because of his contracts, Dahl was able to alert London that FDR would dump Wallace from the 1944 presidential tickets six months before he actually did so. 


...She obtained, from the publisher&rsquo;s son, access to his personal papers, and the draft of an unpublished Marsh biography by Ralph Ingersoll, a prominent journalist of the era.   Among the fascinating characters who waft through her book is the lithesome Alice Glass, a sleep-around beauty who was Marsh&rsquo;s mistress, then his wife. ...  The much-wiser Dahl, not wishing to offend a man who was feeding him high-level political information, wisely resisted Glass&rsquo;s amorous overtures. 


...Pearson&rsquo;s sources were good enough to give him who-said-what accounts of cabinet meetings &ndash; information that passed quickly to Marsh, thence to Dahl and on to London. 


Other BSC officers during the period &ndash; &ldquo;The Irregulars,&rdquo; they were called &ndash; including Ian Flem Fleming, creator of James Bond (Dahl later would write the movie script for You Only Live Twice) and the advertising genius David Ogilvy. 


One especially unorthodox assignment given the dashing Dahl was to bed Republican Representative Clare Booth Luce of Connecticut, the gorgeous playwright wife of Time-Life publisher Henry Luce, in hopes she &ndash; and her husband &ndash; would &ldquo;warm&rdquo; to the British position on post-war issues such as colonialism and aviation rights.20Mrs. ...  His comments about her sexual stamina cannot be repeated here; suffice to quote him as telling Ambassador Lord Halifax after three nights, &ldquo;You know, it&rsquo;s a great assignment, but I just can&rsquo;t go on.&rdquo; ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>John Taylor of National Archives Dies</title><dc:creator>OSS REBORN</dc:creator><dc:subject>NEWS</dc:subject><dc:date>2008-09-24T16:49:50-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.ossreborn.com/index_files/28.html#unique-entry-id-30</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.ossreborn.com/index_files/28.html#unique-entry-id-30</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[''Every time I went back to the archives to see him, I felt I was visiting a mentor,'' said Ms. ...  He'd leave a message suggesting a researcher he thought I should get in touch with. 

...Taylor was honored by the Office of Strategic Services Society, whose members worked for the predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency; the Japanese Embassy, which thanked him for his assistance to Japanese historians; and the American Jewish Historical Society, which gave him its first distinguished archivist award.   The National Archives named its collection of intelligence and espionage books in his honor, and colleagues said many of the collection's 857 volumes were signed by authors who refer to Mr. 

...John Edward Taylor was born in 1921 in Sparkman, Ark., and graduated from the University of Arkansas in 1945.   Blind in one eye, he was ineligible for military service and took the Civil Service exam while still in college.


...Taylor's wife of 44 years, the former Dolly Haney, died in 1995, said his niece, Ms. ...  A brother, James, also died before him.   He is also survived by a nephew, James E. 

...In an oral history interview for the National Archives, Mr. 

...''I remember walking from the front door through the stacks to 8W,'' he said, referring to an area of the sprawling collection of government documents, ''and what I noticed was the smell of the records.''


''After I had been there for a few days, or a few weeks, I started to open the boxes,'' he added.   ''I was fascinated, and I have been fascinated ever since.'']]></content:encoded></item><item><title>American Intelligence in War-time London: The Story of the OSS</title><dc:creator>OSS REBORN</dc:creator><dc:subject>NEWS</dc:subject><dc:date>2008-09-17T00:28:37-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.ossreborn.com/index_files/27.html#unique-entry-id-29</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.ossreborn.com/index_files/27.html#unique-entry-id-29</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[These chapters present an enormously detailed account of the operations of the London office against the background of start-up turmoil within the neophyte intelligence agency, particularly with the centralization demands of Washington headquarters, the inter-branch rivalries both in Washington and the London outpost; and the ambivalence in the &ldquo;competitive cooperation&rdquo; with British organizations 


...The author gives unstinting praise to Bill Casey&rsquo;s SI efforts in the penetration of Germany, modest commendation for the JEDBURGH (SO and British SOE) and SUSSEX (SI and British SIS) operations in the OVERLORD invasion, but other OSS efforts are derided as na&iuml;ve, confused, or just ineffective in the war effort. 


...According to the treatise, R&A, &ldquo;in contradiction to its postwar reputation as a unique collection of scholarly operatives mobilized by an ingenious William Donovan&rdquo;. . . &ldquo;spent its existence in a desperate, if largely futile, struggle to secure a me aningful role.&rdquo;  &nbsp; Elsewhere, &ldquo;R&A developed into a highly skilled irrelevancy&rdquo;; throughout the war it kept trying to establish its basic mission &ndash; what customers it was to serve and with what kind of materials.   At one point it goes to this extreme: The R&A/EOU [Enemy Objectives Unit] &ldquo;illustrates the perversion of the intelligence cycle. . .

...Donovan is depicted as a brilliant courageous leader but &ldquo;often erratic and less than deft in dealing with the ferocious intricacies of the Washington and London power centers.&rdquo; ...  Finally: &ldquo;Donovan&rsquo;s shortcomings were compounded by his erratic behavior and all of these factors contributed by 1945 to a widespread antipathy for Donovan personally which gravely undermined his attempts at securing OSS as the postwar intelligence bureaucracy.&rdquo; 


...One Phillips was a rather shady intelligence operative who showed up in the early days of the London office with vague connections to Washington intelligence agencies. 

...Surprisingly, the conclusions drawn in the final chapter of the treatise present a much more balanced picture, quite unlike the chapter evaluations, and give a constructive and interesting overall assessment, part of which is worth repeating:


...US intelligence was not shaped by one Machiavellian manipulation by SIS and SOE, or by the prophetic genius of William Donovan.   It was instead moulded through the forging of an Anglo-American intelligence partnership that paved the way for realizing a concrete capacity for professional American intelligence. ...  The various OSS branches were instead accepted by their British counterparts as partners in joint endeavo rs, in the course of which OSS/London achieved an accelerated capability which matched, and in some cases surpassed, that of the British services. ...  MO&rsquo;s efforts were limited by the problematic nature of its work, whereas R&A served mainly as an underachieving disappointment that hinted at the possibilities of applying scholarly methods to intelligence analysis without matching those already attained by Britain.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>OSS Invasion of Martha&#x27;s Vineyard</title><dc:creator>OSS REBORN</dc:creator><category>Charles Pinck</category><dc:date>2008-08-28T08:40:31-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.ossreborn.com/index_files/26.html#unique-entry-id-27</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.ossreborn.com/index_files/26.html#unique-entry-id-27</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Legend has it that&nbsp;General Donovan brought a silenced 22-caliber pistol developed by OSS&nbsp;into the Oval Office to show President Roosevelt, who was on the phone at the time. ...  After hanging up, President Roosevelt told General Donovan that he was the only Republican allowed into the Oval Office with a gun.


...A security officer examining Hemingway's equipment prior to his parachute jump in Europe asked him about it. 

...&nbsp;Major Serge Obolensky led a&nbsp;team of OSS Operational Group trainees - forerunners of&nbsp;today's U.S.  &nbsp;Special Forces -&nbsp;in an amphibious training raid in which they were to simulate an attack behind enemy lines at night. 

...Army's oldest paratrooper at age 53, he led a daring parachute drop into Sardinia, carrying General Eisenhower's letters and successfully talking the Italians into surrendering.


Major Obolensky's and his group's orders were to arrive on the Vineyard&nbsp;by landing craft, place marks on various buildings as proof of their visit in lieu of actual explosives, and&nbsp;then withdraw - all undetected.


The OSS team came across the Vineyard Sound&nbsp;from Camp Edwards on Cape Cod, dressed in camouflage and wearing black makeup. ...  After marking the building as ordered, they returned to their boats,&nbsp;released the driver, and&nbsp;returned to Cape Cod. 

...When he finally got untied late that night, he went racing over to the police and said a huge army of goons had taken over Martha's Vineyard.   He said that black men all covered with grease had climbed out of the ocean and attacked him.   The authorities there had one immediate reaction: they pulled all panic switches, sirens blew, searchlights were turned on, and telephone calls went to Washington, to the army, air force, navy, marines. 

...Training exercises such as the one that took place on Martha's Vineyard would prove critical to the success of OSS operations overseas.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Documents detailing early spy network released</title><dc:creator>OSS REBORN</dc:creator><dc:subject>NEWS</dc:subject><dc:date>2008-08-13T19:29:52-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.ossreborn.com/index_files/25.html#unique-entry-id-26</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.ossreborn.com/index_files/25.html#unique-entry-id-26</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Other notables identified in the files include John Hemingway, son of author Ernest Hemingway; Quentin and Kermit Roosevelt, sons of President Theodore Roosevelt, and Miles Copeland, father of Stewart Copeland, drummer for the band The Police.


The release of the OSS personnel files uncloaks one of the last secrets from the short-lived wartime intelligence agency, which for the most part later was folded into the CIA after President Truman disbanded it in 1945.


"I think it's terrific," said Elizabeth McIntosh, 93, a former OSS agent now living in Woodbridge, Va.   "They've finally, after all these years, they've gotten the names out.   All of these people had been told never to mention they were with the OSS."


...But former CIA Director William Casey, himself an OSS veteran, cleared the way for transfer of millions of OSS documents to the National Archives when he took over the agency in 1981. 

...Information about OSS involvement was so guarded that relatives often couldn't confirm a family member's work with the group.


Walter Mess, who handled covert OSS operations in Poland and North Africa, said he kept quiet for more than 50 years, only recently telling his wife of 62 years about his OSS activity.


"I was told to keep my mouth shut," said Mess, now 93 and living in Falls Church, Va.


The files will offer new information even for those most familiar with the agency.   Charles Pinck, president of the OSS Society created by former OSS agents and their relatives, said the nearly 24,000 employees included in the archives far exceeds previous estimates of 13,000.


The newly released documents will clarify these and other issues, said William Cunliffe, an archivist who has worked extensively with the OSS records at the National Archives.


"We're saying the OSS was a lot bigger than they were saying," Cunliffe said]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>National Archives to Open Official Personnel Files of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS)</title><dc:creator>OSS REBORN</dc:creator><dc:subject>NEWS</dc:subject><dc:date>2008-08-08T09:22:46-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.ossreborn.com/index_files/24.html#unique-entry-id-25</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.ossreborn.com/index_files/24.html#unique-entry-id-25</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[The National Archives will open more than 35,000 official personnel files of men and women who served in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) which was the U.S. wartime intelligence agency during World War II.   The files cover civilian and military personnel who served and were later transferred, discharged, reassigned, or died while in service prior to 1947.   These records are available for research in the textual research room at the National Archives facility in College Park.


On the day of the opening, the press office will distribute CDs that include selected files of some of the notable people who served in the OSS, including former CIA directors Allen Dulles and William Casey, famed chef Julia Child, Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, Arab/Israeli peace negotiator and civil rights advocate Ralph Bunche, and Hollywood actor Sterling Hayden.


The 750,000 pages include initial applications to join the OSS; preliminary training and subsequent work assignments; pay, leave and travel documents; evaluations, basic medical information; and awards, decorations and discharge papers.   Occasionally, photographs are included in the application file.   Senior officials, officers and men engaged in special combat actions, such as Detachment 101, Jedburghs, X-2, espionage, and major intelligence missions may have citations summarizing those efforts in the files.


Name searches for individuals who served in the OSS can be found online in the Archival Research Catalogue listing for the OSS Personnel Files posted as ARC # 1593270 at http://arcweb.archives.gov/arc.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>William Donovan and Special Operations</title><dc:creator>OSS REBORN</dc:creator><category>Bob Bergin</category><dc:date>2008-08-01T08:23:07-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.ossreborn.com/index_files/22.html#unique-entry-id-24</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.ossreborn.com/index_files/22.html#unique-entry-id-24</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Special operations conducted by the OSS during World War II were the foundation on which the U.S.   Special Forces were built, and the basis for the special operations conducted by U.S. forces today.   &nbsp;The Special Operations (SO) Branch was one of two major divisions created by William Donovan when he organized the OSS.  &nbsp; Donovan&rsquo;s thinking on the role and the nature of special operations is as relevant today as it was in the early days of World War II.


A July 30, 2008&nbsp;Washington Post article &ldquo;Strategy against Al-Qaeda Faulted&rdquo; cites a major new Rand Corporation study critical of the course the U.S. is following in what has become known as the &ldquo;war on terrorism&rdquo;.  &nbsp; The study advocates that terrorists should be described as criminals, not warriors, and argues that the fight against terrorists is better waged by law enforcement agencies than armies.   &nbsp;According to the Post, the authors of the study say that &ldquo;when military forces are needed, the emphasis should be on local troops, which understand the terrain and culture and tend to have greater legitimacy.

...&nbsp; Singlaub was a young OSS officer when he parachuted into German-occupied France in 1944 to organize, train and lead a French Resistance unit.

...Singlaub commented on William Donovan&rsquo;s thinking about special operations even before the U.S. became directly involved in World War II:&nbsp; &ldquo;President Roosevelt had authorized William &ldquo;Wild Bill&rdquo; Donovan, who later conceived and organized the OSS, to go to Great Britain in 1940 to look into things like espionage that we didn&rsquo;t know very much about.

...Later in the same interview, when asked what most struck him as he looked back over a long and eventful career, Singlaub said:&nbsp; &ldquo;It&rsquo;s clear that Donovan really understood that Special Operations were to be conducted as unconventional warfare.  &nbsp; We were given a mission and sent off to it with resources we had, whether we were in occupied France, China, or Vietnam....  &nbsp; The emphasis now seems to be on direct action &ndash; to launch an attack with our own highly trained people to kill the enemy or kick down doors.   There seems to be too much emphasis on the direct action part of special operations &ndash; rather than keeping our own participation low, and training the indigenous people to do the job.&rdquo;]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>An OSS memorial was installed at the Airborne and Special Operations Museum in Fayetteville&#x2c; NC on July 28&#x2c; 2008.  A dedication ceremony will be held later this year.</title><dc:creator>OSS REBORN</dc:creator><dc:subject>NEWS</dc:subject><dc:date>2008-08-01T08:23:18-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.ossreborn.com/index_files/23.html#unique-entry-id-23</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.ossreborn.com/index_files/23.html#unique-entry-id-23</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[(null)]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>UN Logo Designer Celebrates His Centennial</title><dc:creator>OSS REBORN</dc:creator><dc:subject>NEWS</dc:subject><dc:date>2008-07-30T14:11:46-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.ossreborn.com/index_files/21.html#unique-entry-id-22</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.ossreborn.com/index_files/21.html#unique-entry-id-22</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[To fix this problem, he drew the globe as an azimuthally equidistant projection so that all the countries of the world could fit into the circle. 

...The lapel pin and accompanying Charter displayed a globe projected in a way that showed all the continents surrounded by olive branches to represent peace. 

..."We had been using maps all throughout the war and we picked up on that projection," McLaughlin said.   "The idea that we had was to represent one world through this projection."


..."The map was turned a quarter to the left so the east and west were in balance," whereas the logo on the Charter had North America on the centerline and the rest of the world upside down.


...Although McLaughlin went on to be a successful architect and worked on many notable projects, such as the designing of the flagship Tiffany and Co. store in Manhattan, this will remain his most outstanding achievement.


"It's the one thing I'm known for," he said. 

...About 150 people gathered to celebrate the career, life, and 100th birthday of McLaughlin yesterday at the town hall in his hometown of Garrett Park, Maryland, including the United Nations Association of the National Capital Area.


The chapter, who wrote McLaughlin a special letter commending him for his contribution and wishing him well, delivered the letter to him personally at the party.


"We thought it was a meaningful thing to do, and it seemed a very natural thing for us to do," said Richard Griffis, the chapter's vice president for programs. 

..."I'm really dazzled by the whole thing, by the whole idea [that my design is seen all around the world]" he said. ...  I'm very proud of it &hellip; I think the United Nations is the only answer for world peace."


...Lyons is a junior at the University of Southern California Annenberg School of Communication and a UNA-USA Publications intern.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Roger Hall; Memoirist of World War II Espionage</title><dc:creator>OSS REBORN</dc:creator><dc:subject>NEWS</dc:subject><dc:date>2008-07-23T06:44:40-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.ossreborn.com/index_files/20.html#unique-entry-id-21</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.ossreborn.com/index_files/20.html#unique-entry-id-21</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA["There were no parameters, and you did what the hell you wanted, up to legal and military limits," he told The Washington Post in 2002. 

...One of his favorite OSS stories involved a colleague sent to occupied France to destroy a seemingly impenetrable German tank at a key crossroads. 

...Hall learned guerrilla warfare at Congressional Country Club, which the OSS had taken over for training, and infiltrated a Philadelphia circuit breaker plant on a test run.   He not only got a job at the plant, but the handsome trainee also wangled a date with a woman in the personnel office who happened to be the company vice president's daughter.


His made-up identity included a falsehood about being wounded while parachuting into Sicily, and the vice president was so taken with his bravery that he invited Mr. 

...Hall spent much of the war in Great Britain, training and working alongside a motley gang of paratroopers: new recruits, war-hardened Poles and the occasional rising star, such as future CIA director William E. 

..."My father did not feel I was mature enough to go to college," he told The Post, explaining the year at Severn. 

...At U-Va., he became captain of the lacrosse team and a member of the Punch and Julep dramatic society before graduating in 1941.   He wrote for the yearbook and singled out his own fine performance in an all-male revue perceptively titled "That's No Lady."


...The job ended because the Colts' management did not appreciate his reaction to a referee's call against the team on what could have been its winning field goal.


...In the early 1970s, he had a stint, his favorite job, as cartoon editor for the old True magazine in New York.


He also was the host of radio shows, including one called "You Can't Fight Roger Hall," and wrote two novels, "All My Pretty Ones" (1959), a humorous book based on his relationship with a fashion model, and "19" (1970), a spy story.


...Adam Bernstein wrote the introduction to "You're Stepping on My Cloak and Dagger" when it was reissued in 2004 by the Naval Institute Press.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>McCain Advocates a New Go-Get-&#x27;Em Spy Agency</title><dc:creator>OSS REBORN</dc:creator><dc:subject>NEWS</dc:subject><dc:date>2008-07-08T06:59:19-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.ossreborn.com/index_files/19.html#unique-entry-id-20</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.ossreborn.com/index_files/19.html#unique-entry-id-20</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[How would a new OSS avoid overlap with all those other agencies, which currently pursue many of the same tasks McCain lays out? ...  And how much oversight would be needed to prevent abuses by a brand-new organization with such a sweeping mandate to spy and conduct covert action?


Many veterans of the CIA also bristle at McCain's suggestion that the CIA is risk averse and operates "almost entirely" out of U.S. ...  The CIA has struggled to improve its ability to send personnel overseas on what it calls "nonofficial cover," where CIA officers pose as businessmen or other professionals to steal secrets without the protection of a diplomatic passport. 

...I don't think so," fumes Burton Gerber, who served in the CIA's Clandestine Service for 39 years and was CIA chief of station in Sofia, Belgrade, and Moscow. 

..."A modern-day OSS could draw together unconventional-warfare, civil-affairs, paramilitary and psychological-warfare specialists from the military together with covert-action operators from our intelligence agencies and experts in anthropology, advertising, foreign cultures, and numerous other disciplines from inside and outside government," he says.


An agency that potentially sprawls across so many areas would require plenty of its own bureaucracy to establish, manage, and support all those missions.


...It comes down to fighting about who is really in charge, which is quite stupid," says Robert Grenier, a former CIA chief of station in Pakistan who is now a managing director at the risk management firm Kroll Inc.   "To suggest that we could eliminate that by creating a new organization to pull all those elements together is completely unrealistic and in the short term would be enormously destructive."


The mention of a new organization that would undertake covert action also raises the ugly specter of the CIA's abuses in the 1960s and 1970s. 

...The CIA used to have broader powers to conduct missions to topple governments (with doomed operations like the Bay of Pigs), assassinate foreign targets, and even eavesdrop illegally on Americans.   After some of its worst abuses were exposed in the 1970s (along with embarrassing episodes like the CIA's attempt to hire a mobster to assassinate Castro and its failed plot to poison the toothbrush of a Congolese rebel leader), a new, more rigorous oversight regime was put in place, and assassinations were forbidden.


In recent years, the CIA has been authorized to capture&mdash;or kill&mdash;some of the most high-value terrorist targets, but these orders now require a presidential sign-off.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Georgetown University Honors Richard Helms</title><dc:creator>OSS REBORN</dc:creator><dc:subject>NEWS</dc:subject><dc:date>2008-06-04T17:53:34-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.ossreborn.com/index_files/18.html#unique-entry-id-19</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.ossreborn.com/index_files/18.html#unique-entry-id-19</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[For example, at a symposium held at the CIA not many years ago, all of guests received in the mail a page titled "Security Information."   We were told: &ldquo;Firearms, explosives, weapons, computers, computer diskettes, cellular phones, tape recorders, and chemicals such as Mace are prohibited on the compound.&rdquo; ...  &nbsp;&nbsp;We were also told to send a check for $15, made out to Lundy&rsquo;s, to cover the cost of breakfast and lunch.   The security advice from Georgetown was simple: &ldquo;You must have a photo ID with you when you check in.   Please be advised for security reasons, NO BAGS (with the exception of small, clutch-sized purses), COMPUTERS OR BRIEF CASES are permitted in Gaston Hall. ...  I had a brown, canvas briefcase, with a book, half a tuna fish sandwich, a soft drink I took from the airplane that morning, and a notebook. 

...Her role was to sing The Man I Love over the loud speakers as each of the Honorables walked on stage and found their seats. ...  The second wave of the all-star program was led by CIA Director General Michael V. 

...&ldquo;When the SALT negotiations began, I knew more about the Soviet&rsquo;s weapons than Breznev did, thanks to a briefing by the CIA.&rdquo; 

...Hayden batted clean-up to lead the second half of the symposium by noting that &ldquo;Richard Helms was the consummate intelligence professional.&rdquo; 

...OSS veterans whom I saw -- I can&rsquo;t believe I didn&rsquo;t&nbsp;overlook a few of them -- were William Hood, Major&nbsp;General John K. 

...Helms and her son donated Richard Helms&rsquo; papers and pertinent memorabilia to the Special Collections&nbsp;Division of the Georgetown University Library. ...  In the historical pamphlet given to each guest at the symposium, is a DVD containing over 800 documents and 4,100 pages of formerly classified material. ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>The Missing Thai Silk King:&#xd;A Niece&#x2019;s Search for Jim Thompson&#xd;</title><dc:creator>OSS REBORN</dc:creator><dc:subject>NEWS</dc:subject><dc:date>2008-05-27T00:24:47-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.ossreborn.com/index_files/17.html#unique-entry-id-18</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.ossreborn.com/index_files/17.html#unique-entry-id-18</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Was he on a secret mission for Thai royalty? ...  Was he killed by employees of his Thai Silk Company?   Did he simply get lost in the jungle while out for a late-afternoon walk? ...  Was he killed by the Chinese in Vietnam? ...  Was he on a secret mission to persuade Chinese Communists to stop supporting the Viet Cong?


...Galleher and her husband Earl made two visits to the Far East to try to unravel the mystery of her step-uncle&rsquo;s disappearance. ...  Miss Marple, Agatha Christie, Sherlock Holmes and Charlie Chan could not have done a better job.   During their search, they interviewed an international line-up of sources of information, from ambassadors, generals, intelligence operatives, high government officials in many countries, and U. 

...Galleher might have been on a promising  track when, two pages from the end of her book, she states: &ldquo;Whatever his reasons, I believe Jim headed for China after he disappeared.&rdquo;   How did she reach this assumption and from whose office did it originate? 


...Reviewers of mystery books properly do not tell readers cogent clues or answers to the mystery. 

...The disappearance of James Harrison Wilson Thompson is compensated &ndash; if this is the right word &ndash; by the appearance of his niece&rsquo;s book.   An adroit scriptwriter and other highly competent professionals in Hollywood could produce a good movie about Mrs. ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>OSS--Of Swashbuckling Sages</title><dc:creator>OSS REBORN</dc:creator><category>Charles Pinck</category><dc:date>2008-04-16T06:53:04-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.ossreborn.com/index_files/16.html#unique-entry-id-17</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.ossreborn.com/index_files/16.html#unique-entry-id-17</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[The Nation, April 21, 2007


Robert Dreyfuss, in "Hothead McCain" [March 24], describes the Office of Strategic Services, predecessor of the CIA, as a "rambunctious, often out-of-control World War II-era covert-ops team."   Led by the legendary "Wild Bill" Donovan, the OSS was a visionary, daring, innovative, unorthodox, effective intelligence organization.   It abetted Allied victories in North Africa, Europe, Southeast Asia and elsewhere.   Donovan recruited an array of "glorious amateurs," as he called them, including Arthur Schlesinger Jr.  , Ralph Bunche, Arthur Goldberg, Julia Child, John Ford [and Nation puzzle setter Frank W.   Lewis--Ed.].   Many OSS personnel--including my father--risked their lives volunteering for missions behind enemy lines.


Creating a new intelligence service patterned after the OSS is an intriguing notion that deserves serious consideration, not Dreyfuss's casual dismissal.


Charles Pinck, president


The OSS Society]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America</title><dc:creator>OSS REBORN</dc:creator><category>Dan Pinck</category><dc:date>2008-04-11T06:42:52-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.ossreborn.com/index_files/15.html#unique-entry-id-16</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.ossreborn.com/index_files/15.html#unique-entry-id-16</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[The British traitor Kim Philby was the Washington liaison between the Office of Policy Coordination and MI6; he gave the information to the Soviets and all of our agents were killed by Hoxha&rsquo;s men. 

...Do we know beyond a doubt that he was responsible for the overthrow of Mohammad Mossedagh in Iran; that he was responsible for the recruitment of former members of the Nazi Party to help us in covert operations against the Soviet Union?   Do we know for certain that he and Allen Dulles tried to upend American democracy by creating an imposing number of fronts and by persuading influential American newspaper publishers, editors and journalists to feed information to the CIA and to prevent damaging information from being printed in their publications?  ...  Do we know that his office was responsible for recruiting a variety of academic departments to support the training of foreign nationals and, through varied fronts, to entice students, labor unions and religious organizations, including the International Catholic Youth Federation and the Young Women&rsquo;s Christian Association (for heaven&rsquo;s sake), museum directors, including the New York Museum of Modern Art, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Boston Symphony Orchestra (for gosh sakes), the American Society of African Culture, and a host of other organizations? 

...Wilford quotes from a biography of Munzenberg titled The Red Millionaire: &ldquo;Out of these early efforts grew the so-called Munzenberg trust, a vast media of newspapers, publishing houses, movie houses, and theaters which, &lsquo;on paper at least,&rsquo; stretched from Berlin &lsquo;to Paris to London to New York to Hollywood to Shanghai to Delhi.&rdquo;  

...We can follow it for fun as well as our asking the question: Was everyone in the CIA or used, without their knowledge, by the CIA? ...  Matthiessen, John Crowe Ransom, Georgia O&rsquo;Keefe, George Orwell, Jackson Pollack, Elmore Schwartz, Stephen Spender, Gertrude Stein, John Wayne, Arthur Hayes Sulzberger, De Witt Wallace, Ernest Hemingway, Clement Greenberg, Lionel Hampton, James Cagney, Aaron Copeland, Isaiah Berlin, and many others. 

...Wisner recruited more than 450 journalists and writers on our leading newspapers, magazines, and left-leaning periodicals to provide the CIA with information &ndash; you can call it spying in many instances &ndash; about people and organizations in the United States and in other nations; and, in addition, co-opting them to go easy on writing and publishing incriminating articles about the CIA&rsquo;s operations. 

...We learn this about Dulles: &ldquo;The eve of World War II found Dulles as genial and raffish as ever (qualities that apparently made him irresistible to women &ndash; his sexual conquests, in addition to his long-suffering wife Clover, included the queen (sic) of Greece, a daughter of Toscanini, and Clare Booth Luce) but drifting professionally.&rdquo;  

...His intelligence career &ndash; at least those parts of it that set off firecrackers &ndash; is mentioned in many books about the CIA. ...  All I do know is that he had a few outstanding persons who worked closely with him and achieved well-deserved prominence in our society after they left the CIA. 

...Donovan&rsquo;s contribution in his new book &ndash; well, that&rsquo;s to be expected; in three books by British historians that I&rsquo;ve read in the past few months, the writers slam General Donovan and his career in intelligence.  

...The interest and outcry against our own intelligence system that began with the expose in Ramparts magazine in 1966 of the CIA and its Mighty Wurlitzer surpasses our interest in, and our outcry against, foreign intelligence operation. ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title> In The Ruins of Empire: The Japanese Surrender And The Battle for Postwar Asia</title><dc:creator>OSS REBORN</dc:creator><category>Dan Pinck</category><dc:date>2008-03-25T07:07:29-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.ossreborn.com/index_files/14.html#unique-entry-id-15</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.ossreborn.com/index_files/14.html#unique-entry-id-15</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[What were the elements that contributed to the long postwar years of grim struggle during which many suffered far more than they had during World War II itself. ...  After the American experiences in Iraq it is unnecessary to explain that military occupations that follow on the areas of mainland Asia that had formed part of Japan&rsquo;s empire.&rdquo;


MY COMMENT: Our first responsibility in World War II in Asia, as it was in all theaters, was to win the war, to defeat our enemies, to save as many lives as possible, and to get home as soon as we could. ...  Were these wars generated by our failure in not providing a large army to sustain the Nationalist Chinese in their continuing war against the Chinese Communists, following the Japanese surrender and by our not building and sustaining an omnipotent military occupation in China, Indochina and Korea after Japan surrendered? ...  Spector correctly, and maybe I don&rsquo;t, I wonder about his statement: &ldquo;After the American experiences in Iraq it is unnecessary to explain that military occupations that follow on the areas of mainland Asia that had formed part of Japan&rsquo;s empire.&rdquo;


...In 1942, President Roosevelt wrote to his son, Elliott, &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t think for a moment that Americans would be dying in the Pacific tonight if it hadn&rsquo;t been for the short-sighted greed of the French and the British and the Dutch.&rdquo;  ...  You ought to know that the Dutch was the most malevolent of the imperialists; the natives in Dutch-ruled territories, in general, at first welcomed the Japanese and would do almost anything to get out of the clutches of the Dutch.  

...Mencken&rsquo;s magazine a year or two later in which he predicted that if we didn&rsquo;t force the Japanese out of China, there would soon be a major war in China. 

...&ldquo;On his first visit to Yenan, Hurley, resplendent in major general&rsquo;s uniform with full medals, had greeted Mao-tung and other Communist leaders with a loud Choctaw war  whoop as he disembarked from his plane....&rsquo;

...Ho said that he could not understand why the principle of self-determination set forth in the Atlantic Charter and other Allied declarations should not apply to Vietnam and why the United States remained passive while the French and British re-erected the old Colonial system.  

...Donovan, a Wall Street lawyer, Republican political operator, and hero of World War I, OSS was conceived as a single agency that would coordinate the collection and analysis of foreign intelligence and conduct special operations such  as commando raids and disinformation campaigns and work with partisan and guerrilla groups behind enemy lines. 

...General Chennault, the head of our 14th Air Force in China, and before our entry into World War II, the head of the Flying Tigers, observed after the war: &ldquo;I always found the Chinese friendly and cooperative.  

...To add to this bouillabaisse of history, Mao Ze-dong, who began his professional life as a librarian and ended it as the killer of 60 million of his own people, learned his craft of killing during the Second World War. 
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>The Hunt For Nazi Spies: Fighting Espionage in Vichy France </title><dc:creator>OSS REBORN</dc:creator><category>Joseph C. Goulden</category><dc:date>2008-03-11T11:43:53-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.ossreborn.com/index_files/13.html#unique-entry-id-14</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.ossreborn.com/index_files/13.html#unique-entry-id-14</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[The story is at once confusing and fascinating.   The&nbsp; Vichy regime tracked down left wing resistants&nbsp; and supporters of Charles de Gaulle&rsquo;s Free French forces.   It deported slave works and Jews to Germany.   Yet concurrently, it tracked down and arrested hundreds of German agents who sought to further undermine France militarily.   More than one hundred of them were sentenced to death, and Kitson&nbsp; writes that he found &ldquo;formal proof&rdquo; that eight were actually executed.  &nbsp; A ranking French counterintelligence officer, Paul Paillole, puts the number of 42, which to Kitson &ldquo;seems credible.&rdquo;  &nbsp; Other efforts were directed against British officers seeking to organize resistance groups preparing for the inevitable invasion.   As the papers make plain, the French military harbored a keen sense that it was &ldquo;betrayed&rdquo; by England in the opening months of the war.


To understate, French internal politics of the era were devilishly confused.   Curiosity directed me to a book remainder house, where I found a 2005 biography of Petain by Charles Williams, a former Labour member of the British House of Lords.   As I frequently discover as I age, the &ldquo;full story&rdquo; is often more complex than we were taught in school.   So be it with Petain&rsquo;s Vichy government.


Kitson is a highly-recommended&nbsp; read for anyone interested in the intricacies of counterintelligence.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Endgame&#x2c; 1945: The Missing Final Chapter of World War II</title><dc:creator>OSS REBORN</dc:creator><category>Dan Pinck</category><dc:date>2008-02-12T19:55:10-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.ossreborn.com/index_files/12.html#unique-entry-id-12</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.ossreborn.com/index_files/12.html#unique-entry-id-12</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Some notable events at that time, as well as events before the war are viewed through the eyes of individuals who lived through them as prisoners, reporters, soldiers, intelligence agents and relief workers in Germany, Poland, Russia, Italy and France and in other nations.   The individuals he mentions are presented with a pointillist touch that captures a vivid, I-was-there, personal element in his history. ...  Robert Ellis, a member of the Tenth Mountain Division who fought as an infantryman in the Appennines; Bryan  Samain, who fought as a commando from Normandy to the Baltic Sea and who served also as an intelligence operative; Geoffrey Cox, a frontline, British intelligence officer in Italy; Leonard Linton, who was a paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne Division; Geoffrey Cox, who fought with the New Zealand Second Division in Italy; Robert Reid, a BBC war correspondent who provided some of the most informative and depressing public accounts of Nazi behavior; Francesca Wilson, an Englishwoman who was a relief worker at a displaced persons camp in Bavaria and who visited several concentration camps at the end of the war; and others.   


As an UNNRA representative, Ms Wilson went to Fohrenwald, built originally as a model Nazi workers village in Bavaria, where her job was to supervise the schools for  eight hundred children whose languages included Estonian, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Serb, Polish and German. 

...Fey von Hassell was a political prisoner, a Sippenhafte, whose fate was to be shuffled with thousands of other political prisoners from concentration camp to concentration camp. ...  The Third Reich used a variety of ways to kill upwards of a quarter of a million of these people; they burned some in barns; they machine-gunned others; they shot them when they stopped to tie their shoelaces &ndash; if they weren&rsquo;t barefoot; they starved them; many froze to death; guards shot the exhausted. 

...Heinrich Himmler, on March 21, 1933, just two months after Hitler came to power, announced that Dachau had been  selected as the location of a &ldquo;detention camp for the enemies of National Socialism. 

...Reid&rsquo;s wartime reports &ndash; and there are many of them in this book &ndash; are far superior to Edward R. 

...Reid: &ldquo;There is a trail of death one hundred and twenty-five miles long across Germany &ndash; not the death of soldiers killed in combat but the murder of those luckless inmates of the concentration camps of Buchenwald and Flossenburg who were forced by their Nazi jailers to take to the road when the Americans approached both camps.&rdquo;   Roughly twenty-five hundred out of five thousand prisoners from Buchenwald had been killed by the time they arrived at Flossenburg concentration camp near the Czech border. 

...After I finished reading Endgame, 1945 I made a walkthrough of it with my coach of history, Edward Hallett Carr, to ascertain my high opinion of Mr. 

...Formerly the director of the Canadian Institute of International Affairs and an Adjunct Professor of History at the University of Toronto, Stafford is now the project director at the Center for the Study of the Two World Wars at the University of Edinburgh.   Among his previous books are Camp X: OSS, &ldquo;Intrepid,&rdquo; and the Allies&rsquo; North American Training Camp for Secret Agents, 1941-1945; Britain and European Resistance 1940-45;  Ten Days to D-Day; and Secret Agent: The True Story of the Special Operations Executive. 
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Dragon&#x2019;s War: Allied Operations and the Fate of China 1937-1947</title><dc:creator>OSS REBORN</dc:creator><dc:subject>NEWS</dc:subject><dc:date>2008-02-07T21:41:55-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.ossreborn.com/index_files/11.html#unique-entry-id-11</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.ossreborn.com/index_files/11.html#unique-entry-id-11</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[I greatly enjoyed being challenged by his book, mainly because I&rsquo;m one of those skeptical experts who feels that he knows what may have taken place in China and I&rsquo;m cynical enough to doubt almost all authorities.   Even though I believe I ventured into as many points of the compass in China, as all but a few other Americans, from French Indochina to north of the Great Wall, and from the mountains in the west to the South China Sea in the east, and had many singular adventures, I still quote Pearl Buck whenever I&rsquo;m invited to talk about China. 

...His overriding conclusion based on his interpretation of historical records --I choose to let him state this in his own words &ndash; is: &ldquo;In essence, this book attempts to illustrate how these foreign operations served to challenge the authority and legitimacy of the Chinese Nationalist government under Chiang Kai-shek to successfully handle and control foreign operations during World War II greatly contributed to its own demise four years after the war ended.&rdquo;  ...  Although the British and the French had only one goal in their Chinese efforts: to secure their postwar, overseas empires, and they, in fact, pursued their own selfish goals in Nationalist China and Asia throughout the war, the United States provided substantial help in many sectors.   Without our help, China might well have been totally defeated by the Japanese before the end of the war. ...  But it&rsquo;s sensible to recognize that, despite so many lamentably poor diplomatic and military American leaders making a miserable hash of our joint work with the Chinese, we still made a noble effort.   And, in its mysterious way, so did the Nationalist Chinese who fought from 1931 to 1945, and after the end of the Second World War, from 1945 to 1949, in fighting the Chinese Communists who were supported by the USSR. 

...Yu adds President Roosevelt and Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morganthau, to the list of those leaders who, either by omission or commission, succeeded in shortchanging the Nationalists by making promises of funds and materiel they never kept. 

...To add to the ingredients of the cockeyed world of Chiang Kai-shek, we should not overlook his own involvement with Moscow.   As a member of the &ldquo;fledgling&rdquo; (Yu&rsquo;s adjective) Chinese Communist Party, Chiang traveled to Moscow to gain Russia&rsquo;s political and military help. ...  In 1927, with Lenin dead as well as the founder of the Chinese Nationalist Party,Sun Yat-sen, Chiang went on a mission to purge and kill Chinese Communists. ...  To add to this bouillabaisse of history, Mao Zedong, who began his professional life as a librarian and ended it as the killer of 60,000,000 of his own people, learned his craft of killing during the Second World War.


...Without being tied up in China, the great majority of Japanese troops would probably have been sent to fight us in the Pacific. ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>A Day in the Life of a Real Spy -- New Book Reveals Author&#x27;s Extensive Experiences as An Intelligence Agent During WWII</title><dc:creator>OSS REBORN</dc:creator><dc:subject>NEWS</dc:subject><dc:date>2008-02-02T09:51:09-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.ossreborn.com/index_files/10.html#unique-entry-id-10</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.ossreborn.com/index_files/10.html#unique-entry-id-10</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[I Was Trained To Be A Spy follows the story of an American-born boy who grew up in a small village on the Greek island of Crete.   During his final years in high school, he is present during the German invasion of his island as WWII began.   At the age of eighteen, he joined a resistance group and supplied crucial information to the SOE, the arm of the English Intelligence Service. ...  There, Doundoulakis and his brother were asked to join the English Intelligence Service, only to pursue the American OSS (Office of Strategic Services) which was the newly formed American intelligence counterpart. ...  Army and attached to the OSS, where the author was trained for intelligence as well as other combat skills.   After being oriented into a highly-skilled "spy," Doundoulakis was sent back to Greece along with a Greek naval intelligence officer, and later set up a communications cell with a wireless radio he smuggled in, hidden inside a can of olive oil!


Filled with historical references, I Was Trained To Become A Spy is a detailed and lively account of one young man's spy training that truly brings to life the daily routines and mentality of a real spy. ...  Highly-recommended to history enthusiasts, military personnel and fans of espionage, I Was Trained To Be A Spy is now available for ordering online at Xlibris.com and at your local bookstore.


...At the age of two years old, his family returned to Crete, Greece, and there they lived uneventfully until the German elite paratroopers invaded Crete in 1941.   After his two-year involvement with the Cretan Resistance and English intelligence Service, he and his brother, George, a leader in the Resistance, escaped to Cairo, Egypt with the help of an English torpedo boat, to avoid capture by the Gestapo.   He enlisted in the American army and was trained as a spy in Cairo, by the newly created OSS, Office of Strategic Services and also by the English Intelligence Service, and was sent as a spy to Salonica, the second largest city in Greece, on a dangerous undergound mission.   He was the only American soldier in that city for a period of nine months, sending daily messages to OSS headquarters in Cairo on German movements.   With the information sent by these cryptic messages, many Axis ships were sunk, trains bombed, and thousands of Germans were killed. ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>A North Africa Story: The Anthropologist as OSS Agent 1941-1943</title><dc:creator>OSS REBORN</dc:creator><category>Dan Pinck</category><dc:date>2008-01-30T17:13:39-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.ossreborn.com/index_files/9.html#unique-entry-id-9</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.ossreborn.com/index_files/9.html#unique-entry-id-9</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[ I don&rsquo;t mean to be so ignorant and opinionated, which I frequently am, to evade the fact that many historians of war have written, and continue to write, supremely good books. ...  However, there&rsquo;s no sidestepping the assumption that the most rewarding illuminations are in books written by men and women who have risked their lives in operations against their enemies.


...Coon, a noted anthropologist who studied under Earnest Hooton, wrote a masterful book about his OSS experiences in North Africa, Corsica and Italy. ...  If there were an OSS Hall of Fame Carlton Coon and Gordon Browne, deserve a niche in it. 

...&ldquo;By all accounts, not only this one, life in the OSS appears to have had a character all its own.   Coon describes it by saying, &lsquo;I never took an oath for the COI or OSS. 

...Not remarkable for any secret it discloses, it is noteworthy for the sense of immediacy it conveys, for its picture of people doing extraordinary things in an ordinary manner, and as a rare glimpse into an agent&rsquo;s mind while he is on the job, or at any rate what he feels he can set down about it.&rdquo;


...Unlike the majority of OSS representative, he knew as much as any American about the North African territories the history, the people, and the languages -- in which he was engaged.     He was one of General Donovan&rsquo;s &ldquo;glorious amateurs&rdquo; when it came to intelligence and covert operations. ...  But he was a consummate professional when it came to understand the land and the cultures of natives.   


...Browne became intelligence agents in Operation Torch, our code name for the Anglo-American invasion of North Africa. ...  They helped to sort out and identify fascists and traitors in Vichy&rsquo;s line-up from those Frenchmen determined to help to fight the Germans and Italians.


...Coon&rsquo;s adventures, I suggest that you also read FDR&rsquo;s 12 Apostles: The Spies Who Paved the Way for the Invasion of North Africa, by Hal Vaughan.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Prisoners and/of War</title><dc:creator>OSS REBORN</dc:creator><category>Dan Pinck</category><dc:date>2005-12-01T16:05:08-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.ossreborn.com/index_files/4.html#unique-entry-id-8</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.ossreborn.com/index_files/4.html#unique-entry-id-8</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Harris, an American historian, whose book, Factories od Death: Japanese Secret Biological Warfare, 1932-1945, and the American Cover-Up, recounts his twenty years of research into Japanese biological warfare in Manchuria and occupied China. 

...An Indian prisoner of war in New Guinea said at a war crimes trial, &ldquo;At this stage the Japanese started selecting prisoners and every day one prisoner was taken out and killed and eaten by the Japanese. 

...The notion that Germany was any less brutal than Japan in its treatment of prisoners is dispelled by the fact that of about 2,800,000 out of a total of 7,800,000 Soviet prisoners died in Germany.


...This number increased by the end of the war and when prisoners held by Australia and New Zealand are added to it, the number increased to more than 7,000. 

...The Japanese Government&rsquo;s protest was sent to London where the Far Eastern Department of the Foreign Office warned that if Japanese prisoners were killed in Commonwealth camps, then the lives of British and Commonwealth prisoners in Japanese POW camps would be at great risk of retaliatory actions. 

...When you consider the atrocities committed by Japanese to Allied prisoners -- and the humiliating indignities, such as measuring penises &ndash; it&rsquo;s remarkable that many Japanese captors were not killed after the Japanese surrender. 

...began gaining victories and with them a small number of prisoners, we asked our British and Commonwealth Allies if they would hold the soldiers whom we captured.  ...  When they picked up more than 200 American survivors, they found out that the two transports on which the survivors were from, carried a total of 2,200 Allied prisoners. 

...The Charter stated: &ldquo;The American member of a military tribunal trying persons accused with violations of the laws of war is not bound by the specific requirements of the United States Constitution and the Articles of War since the Supreme Court has decided that neither constitutional safeguards nor Articles of War apply in such proceedings (ex parte Quirin, 317 U. 

...A just and fair accounting must recognize that not all Japanese neither acted with any measure of cruelty toward their enemies nor did they have any feeling but repulsion toward their government&rsquo;s actions during the war.   When I was in China, there were several incidents that I heard about in which Japanese soldiers, sickened by the atrocities of their colleagues, managed to load trucks with armament of various sorts and deliver them to Chinese forces. ...  There were Japanese soldiers, high officials, diplomats and civilians who acted humanely, at great risk to themselves and their families at home in pursuing what they knew to be righteous conduct. 

...The fact that a member of the Royal family was repelled by Japanese conduct and was willing to take his objection to the Emperor suggests that a few persons, at least, in the highest reaches of society were opposed to their nation&rsquo;s savage behaviour.  ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>To Your Stealth: Honoring the OSS</title><dc:creator>OSS REBORN</dc:creator><dc:subject>NEWS</dc:subject><dc:date>2003-06-30T16:00:26-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.ossreborn.com/index_files/1.html#unique-entry-id-7</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.ossreborn.com/index_files/1.html#unique-entry-id-7</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[As an adult, Charles Pinck became a private eye specializing in corporate skulduggery, but his father's war is still vivid and alive for him.   Inside his bright workspace at Global Options Inc. on L Street NW, he preserves the OSS legacy with posters, stickers, lapel pins, distinguished service medals and an agency flag emblazoned with a spearhead design.

...That reunion, held at Washington's Mayflower Hotel, was one of the first OSS gatherings not intended solely as a social occasion. 

...Its agents were selected not for formal military expertise, but because they could use their wits and find innovative ways, in dodgy situations, to win the war.


..."What headquarters decided, ingeniously, is to find someone who is neither old enough or smart enough to be fearful," Dan Pinck, now 79, recounted last month at a speech at the International Spy Museum. 

...The OSS sent him to a small village in southeast China called Hotien to report intelligence about enemy troop movements, weather patterns and possible bombing targets along the Japanese-held coastline 19 miles away.


...He carried with him a curious array of tools, including $ 1 million in cash to pay his Nationalist army assistants and boxes of condoms that he was told would greatly please Nationalist military officers. 

...Sure enough, Pinck wrote in his memoir, they found a page from the Boy Scout manual and an incriminating scroll with information about Pinck and his associates. 

...Charles Pinck, who lives in Georgetown, is the only one of the four to have a lasting fascination with his father's war tales.


...The father exposed his son early on to OSS friends who had lively war careers and maintained a sense of derring-do later in life. 

...He saw the connection between his own work and his father's wartime responsibilities, even if it is less dangerous to pore over public records than foil spies.


Since becoming president of the 1,000-member OSS Society last year, he has been working on an oral history project with the Smithsonian Institution, publishing quarterly newsletters and overseeing an e-mail discussion group with requests from the descendants of OSS agents asking for information about their relatives. 

..."For a lot of people, including my father, if it wasn't the best part of their lives," he says, "it was certainly the most interesting part of their lives."]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Breaking Bread; For Teen Spy&#x2c; A Little Trouble in Big China</title><dc:creator>OSS REBORN</dc:creator><dc:subject>NEWS</dc:subject><dc:date>2003-08-13T15:52:46-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.ossreborn.com/index_files/2.html#unique-entry-id-6</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.ossreborn.com/index_files/2.html#unique-entry-id-6</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Some of the anecdotes he's weaving are recorded in his new book, "Journey to Peking," a delightful, insightful, and playful memoir about his 18 months in China as a secret agent for the Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency.


...Pinck, now 79, was a spy to defy the stereotype, not as bold as Herb Philbrick in "I Led Three Lives" nor as altruistic as William Holden in "Counterfeit Traitor" - and never as hedonistic as James Bond in "Diamonds Are Forever," which is to say that Pinck was never dressed by a London tailor, never ordered a martini shaken, and never cavorted in exotic European capitals with wanton women.


...Having enlisted in the Army as a freshman at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va., he was elated to receive orders to active duty on the very morning in 1942 that he was scheduled to take an exam in calculus, about which he says he didn't know beans and was certain to flunk.


...On his first day in the Army, when a sergeant woke him at 4:30, Pinck told the sergeant to go to hell, and as a result he spent his first day in the Army on KP (kitchen patrol).


...Think of Joseph Heller's novel "Catch 22," about the madness of a military bureaucracy gone amok, and especially the character Yossarian, who was ineligible for a mental health discharge from combat because merely asking for one demonstrated that he was sane.


...He was assigned to the Army Air Corps and sent to Miami Beach, where he lived in the penthouse of an Art Deco hotel, sometimes playing tennis, sometimes marching down Collins Boulevard, singing an Army song.


..."I didn't know what a brothel was, but the idea was that you'd go inside and if you saw Americans having sex, you were to tap them on the shoulder, get them out of there and arrest them," he says. 

...Although Pinck was only 19, had no experience in espionage, had never been to China, and did not speak the language, he won the assignment, he says, because his commanding officer lived not far from him in Bethesda, and they knew a lot of the same people.


...Rather than send the teenager to his new assignment unprepared, the officer gave him two days indoctrination that consisted principally of teaching him how to insert a detonator into plastic to blow up something and how to use the dozen pencil-shaped, tubelike guns he was given, each with a single .22-caliber bullet, in case he was captured by the Japanese and wanted to commit suicide.


...It was in China that Pinck began taking notes for the book that, in various incarnations, was rejected by more than 40 publishers until Pinck's son, Charles, a private investigator in Washington, persuaded the Naval Institute Press to publish it.


..."There were scholars here, including till near the end of his life, John King Fairbank of Harvard, who was - I wouldn't say duped - but he'd been in the OSS in China and he thought Mao was an agrarian reformer. 

..."The miracle is that when Deng Xiaoping came along and revamped the economic system and talked about property rights, this was remarkable because if China had gone into economic ruin, there'd have been another revolution."


...In Pinck's library are hundreds of books about espionage and mementos of his time in China, including an American flag made by the people of Hotien that has red stripes where white should be and white where red should be.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Historical Footnote On Press Leaks</title><dc:creator>OSS REBORN</dc:creator><category>Dan Pinck</category><dc:date>2007-12-01T23:32:56-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.ossreborn.com/index_files/5.html#unique-entry-id-5</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.ossreborn.com/index_files/5.html#unique-entry-id-5</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[A brief summation of the newspaper&rsquo;s actions is based on the following: in late May of 1942 our Navy cryptographers decoded a Japanese navy cipher, JN-25-C, used by Admiral Yamamoto who stated that he intended to invade Midway. 

...Three days later, on June 7, 1942, a page one article titled Navy Had Word Of  Jap Plan To Strike At Sea appeared in the Chicago Tribune and in its two sister newspapers, the New York News and the Washington Times-Herald. ...  &ndash; The strength of the Japanese forces with which the American Navy is battling somewhere west of Midway Island in what is believed to be the war&rsquo;s greatest naval battle, was well-known in American naval circles, reliable sources in the naval intelligence disclosed here tonight.&rdquo;  

...On August 7, 1942, Francis Biddle, our Solicitor General, announced that a Grand Jury would be convened in Chicago to investigate Johnston&rsquo;s article.  ...  Thacher, Solicitor General 1930-1933, that if the Navy had seen fit to present evidence to the Chicago Grand Jury in 1942 on the background of how we  got Admiral Yamamoto&rsquo;s plan of operation, those responsible for the article would have been indicted for treason.&rdquo;


...Holland, of  Pennsylvania, lambasting the Tribune, said:  &ldquo;American boys will die because of this article,&rdquo; adding &ldquo;somehow our Navy had secured and broken the secret code of the Japanese Navy.&rdquo; 

...(In the interest of full disclosure, I note that I attended Sidwell Friends School in Washington and met some of the major players in the government, including Wheeler, and that I rarely ever looked at the Times-Herald  but, nontheless, knew that it was, as James Thurber might say, further right than a soup spoon. 

...Walter Trohan, the newspaper&rsquo;s Washington correspondent whose string of vile reporting equaled his longevity (he died at age one hundred), wrote an article that appeared simultaneously in the Tribune and the Times-Herald on February 9, 1945.   This time, the newspapers aimed to cover their tails by printing the following at the beginning of the report: &ldquo;The Washington Times-Herald and the Chicago Tribune yesterday secured exclusively a copy of a highly confidential memorandum from Brig.


...The Office of Strategic Services was the forerunner of the CIA and it had an honorable record during the war, with upwards of four hundred men and women behind enemy lines in Europe and Asia. ...  Striving again for a safety net, the Tribune stated at the end of Trohan&rsquo;s article: &ldquo;Although these documents and those submitted to the White House by General Donovanwere made available to the Chicago Tribune, they were never officially in possession of this newspaper. 

...Liebling, one of our best press critics, in a Wayward Press column in The New Yorker (March 25, 1950) reported that McCormick said, in an interview with a Tribune correspondent in Cairo: &ldquo;France is atheist and anarchic. 

...I&rsquo;ll rest for the present an observation that Liebling made in 1961: &ldquo;I think that anybody who talks often with people about newspapers nowadays must be impressed by the growing distrust of the information they contain.&rdquo; ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Dulles papers released by CIA to Princeton</title><dc:creator>OSS REBORN</dc:creator><dc:subject>NEWS</dc:subject><dc:date>2008-01-23T20:40:37-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.ossreborn.com/index_files/7.html#unique-entry-id-4</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.ossreborn.com/index_files/7.html#unique-entry-id-4</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[The material related to his espionage work during World War II is especially illuminating," said Daniel Linke, curator of Public Policy Papers at the Seeley G. ...  &nbsp; The CIA retains many documents related to Dulles' time as head of that agency, but Linke noted that those released "provide insight into not only Dulles, but the classification process and, in my opinion, its shortcomings. 

...Dulles Digital Files released to Princeton contain scanned images of professional correspondence, reports, lectures and administrative papers covering Dulles' tenure with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) -- a U.S. intelligence agency created during World War II and forerunner of the CIA -- as well as his career with the CIA and his retirement. 

...The collection includes correspondence and narrative statements documenting Dulles' activities during World War II, especially relating to the work of individuals involved in the war effort in Europe. ...  Documents from the 1950s and 1960s deal almost exclusively with the Cold War, mostly focusing on intelligence and the Soviet Union along with some covering Sen. ...  Items relating to Dulles' time with the CIA have been heavily redacted, obscuring the names of correspondents as well as individuals and events mentioned in reports and letters.


...In 1950, he was named the CIA's deputy director of plans, the agency's covert operations arm, and in 1951, he became the CIA's deputy director. 

...His brother, John Foster Dulles (a 1908 Princeton graduate), served as Eisenhower's secretary of state, and the two men worked closely during their joint service.   The CIA under Dulles' leadership established the dual policy of collecting intelligence through a wide variety of means, as well as taking direct action against perceived threats.


Dulles' notable achievements in intelligence gathering included the development of the U-2 spy plane program, the recruitment of Soviet Lieutenant General Pyotr Popov as a U.S. spy, and the tapping of a sensitive East Berlin phone junction by tunneling under the Berlin Wall. ...  However, efforts to oust Fidel Castro from Cuba following his rise to power consisted of a series of failures culminating in the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961. 

...He was called to public service once again in 1963, when he was named to the Warren Commission that investigated the assassination of President Kennedy.   His connection to the CIA and its activities in Cuba would fuel later speculation about possible U.S. government complicity in Kennedy's assassination.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Glorious Amateurs: A New OSS</title><dc:creator>OSS REBORN</dc:creator><category>Charles Pinck</category><category>Dan Pinck</category><dc:date>2008-01-24T08:57:53-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.ossreborn.com/index_files/8.html#unique-entry-id-3</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.ossreborn.com/index_files/8.html#unique-entry-id-3</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Since 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, occasional proposals have been made to re-create the OSS, an ad hoc intelligence organization created by President Franklin D. 

...Its mission was twofold: first, to provide the President with timely, comprehensive and coordinated intelligence and analysis that he failed to receive from any single government intelligence agency or department, including the military, the State Department, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.   Secondly, the President wanted to have an independent group that would engage in clandestine and covert actions on many fronts patterned after Britain's Special Operations Executive (SOE), which Winston Churchill directed to "set Europe ablaze."


...It was so successful that four months after end of the war and six months after Roosevelt's death, the generals and admirals, the State and War Departments, and the FBI conspired to persuade President Truman to disband the organization, which he did, on October 1, 1945.


...The creation of the OSS was itself a&nbsp;small miracle made possible only by the strong support of President Roosevelt and his close personal relationship with General Donovan. ...  &nbsp; (After witnessing Donovan fire a silenced .22 caliber pistol designed by the OSS, Roosevelt famously quipped that Donovan was the only Republican he would allow in the Oval Office with a gun.

...The most striking attributes of the OSS were its leadership, the background of its members, and the fact that the organization reported directly to President Roosevelt.   In July 1941, before the US entered World War II, Roosevelt accepted Donovan's plan for a new intelligence organization called the Coordinator of Information (COI), which actually was the name of our first peacetime intelligence organization. ...  After we entered the war, Roosevelt signed a military order on June 13, 1942 establishing the OSS and appointing Donovan as its director. 

...OSS veteran Fisher Howe said it best: "If you define leadership as having a vision for an organization and the ability to attract, motivate, and guide others to fulfill that vision, then you have Bill Donovan in spades."


...For example, a young woman from Baltimore, who had served in Europe in a minor diplomatic job before Pearl Harbor, wanted to join the OSS and volunteered for risky work, despite losing a leg in a horse riding accident. 

...Aaron Bank, the founder of the Green Berets, and Ralph Bunche, a foreign affairs specialist who became the Under Secretary-General of the United Nations and the first African American to win the Nobel Peace Prize, have in common? 

...A wise leader of a newly-created OSS might be able to recruit a similar group of remarkable people today and unleash their creativity, much like Donovan did.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>The Best Spies Didn&#x27;t Wear Suits</title><dc:creator>OSS REBORN</dc:creator><category>Charles Pinck</category><category>Dan Pinck</category><dc:date>2004-12-10T15:36:02-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.ossreborn.com/index_files/3.html#unique-entry-id-2</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.ossreborn.com/index_files/3.html#unique-entry-id-2</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Donovan, known as Wild Bill, who was a World War I Medal of Honor winner, Wall Street lawyer, former United States attorney in Buffalo and 1932 Republican candidate for governor of New York.   Although a member of the opposition party, Donovan got along well with Roosevelt, and the men shared an unfashionable belief that America's liberty was threatened by foreign powers.


...Eventually he convinced the president of the need for a centralized spying agency, and in July 1941 Roosevelt created a civilian agency within the White House to oversee American intelligence, naming Donovan to the new post of "coordinator of information."


...Perhaps Donovan's greatest skill was his ability to recruit talented men and women from other fields, whether they came from the Ivy League, Wall Street or, believe it or not, prison. ...  William Quinn, then running the Strategic Services Unit, an interim organization created after the dissolution of the O.S.S. in 1945, was alerted by Treasury agents to the presence of master forgers in his ranks.   Unknown to Quinn, Donovan had arranged for the release of these men from prison during the war to work for the O.S.S.)


...He understood and accepted the inherent risks associated with intelligence work - often telling O.S.S. personnel that "you can't succeed without taking chances" - and was as willing to take responsibility for failures as for successes.


...It was a freewheeling organization devoted to finding effective ways of winning a war that imperiled the nation's future, a situation we find ourselves in once again. 

...Donovan was also one of the first spy chiefs to recognize the importance of covert action and the need for "actionable intelligence" (information gathered and interpreted quickly enough that action can still be taken to change the situation).


When the war ended, President Harry Truman, who knew little about intelligence issues, disbanded the O.S.S. - only to realize his mistake two years later and create the Central Intelligence Agency. 

...While this wasn't necessarily a fatal flaw during the cold war, a war of diplomacy and proxy armies in which data collection was often more important than covert action, it would be crippling in the hot war against terrorism.


...In addition, granting tremendous new powers to a "terrorism czar" will work only if that person is, like Donovan, truly independent and above the infighting we will certainly see from the Pentagon and other departments. 

...Fisher Howe, a leading O.S.S. officer, once said that "if you define leadership as having a vision for an organization, and the ability to attract, motivate and guide followers to fulfill that mission, you have Bill Donovan in spades." ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Letter to the Editor</title><dc:creator>OSS REBORN</dc:creator><category>Charles Pinck</category><dc:date>2008-01-21T15:36:05-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.ossreborn.com/index_files/6.html#unique-entry-id-1</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.ossreborn.com/index_files/6.html#unique-entry-id-1</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[In his Dec. 24 column, "Subverting Bush at Langley," Robert D.   Novak included a swipe at the Office of Strategic Services, the World War II predecessor of the CIA. ...  Novak wrote that the OSS "was infiltrated by communists."


The Soviet Union was our ally during World War II.   The OSS was not infiltrated by communists during the war; it hired them.   They helped to identify native recruits to infiltrate enemy forces and organizations.   OSS founder William Donovan reportedly said that he would "put Stalin on the OSS payroll if it would help defeat Hitler."


After the war, a plague of invective assaulted&nbsp; Donovan and the OSS.   He was not only accused of harboring communists but of a far worse crime: proposing a peacetime successor to the OSS that&nbsp; critics called a Gestapo.  &nbsp; Donovan believed that the main culprit was J.   Edgar Hoover, who had vehemently opposed creation of the OSS in 1942.   The OSS was disbanded by President Harry S. 

...Regarding Hoover,&nbsp; Donovan once said that his greatest enemies were in Washington, not Europe. ]]></content:encoded></item></channel>
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