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redrangerki — Office of Strategic Services

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Published: 2017-07-31 22:39:42 +0000 UTC; Views: 3093; Favourites: 44; Downloads: 3
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Description the 3 Main Characters 
1 Tank Dempsey
2 Peter McCain
3 Charles Green Sr.

Backstory behind the OSS

Prior to the formation of the OSS, American intelligence had been conducted on an ad-hoc  basis by the various departments of the executive branch, including the StateTreasuryNavy , and War  Departments. It had no overall direction, coordination, or control. The US Army  and US Navy  had separate code-breaking departments: Signal Intelligence Service  and OP-20-G . (A previous code-breaking operation of the State Department, the MI-8 , run by Herbert Yardley , had been shut down in 1929 by Secretary of State Henry Stimson , deeming it an inappropriate function for the diplomatic arm, because "gentlemen don't read each other's mail".

The FBI  was responsible for domestic security and anti-espionage operations.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt  was concerned about American intelligence deficiencies. On the suggestion of William Stephenson , the senior British intelligence officer in the western hemisphere, Roosevelt requested that William J. Donovan  draft a plan for an intelligence service based on the British Secret Intelligence Service  (MI6) and Special Operations Executive  (SOE). Colonel Donovan was employed to evaluate the global military position to offer suggestions concerning American intelligence requirements because the U.S. did not have a central intelligence agency. After submitting his work, "Memorandum of Establishment of Service of Strategic Information," Colonel Donovan was appointed "coordinator of information" on July 11, 1941 heading the new organization known as the office of the Coordinator of Information (COI). Thereafter the organization was developed with British assistance; Donovan had responsibilities but no actual powers and the existing US agencies were skeptical if not hostile. Until some months after Pearl Harbor, the bulk of OSS intelligence came from the UK. British Security Coordination  (BSC) trained the first OSS agents in Canada, until training stations were set up in the US with guidance from BSC instructors, who also provided information on how the SOE was arranged and managed. The British immediately made available their short-wave broadcasting capabilities to Europe, Africa, and the Far East and provided equipment for agents until American production was established. The Office of Strategic Services was established by a Presidential military order issued by President Roosevelt on June 13, 1942, to collect and analyze strategic information required by the Joint Chiefs of Staff  and to conduct special operations not assigned to other agencies. During the war, the OSS supplied policymakers with facts and estimates, but the OSS never had jurisdiction over all foreign intelligence activities. The FBI  was left responsible for intelligence work in Latin America, and the Army and Navy continued to develop and rely on their own sources of intelligence.

For the duration of World War II, the Office of Strategic Services was conducting multiple activities and missions, including collecting intelligence by spying, performing acts of sabotage, waging propaganda war, organizing and coordinating anti-Nazi resistance groups in Europe, providing military training for anti-Japanese guerrilla movement in Asia, among other things.At the height of its influence during World War II, the OSS employed almost 24,000 people.From 1943–1945, the OSS played a major role in training Kuomintang  troops in China and Burma , and recruited Kachin , and other indigenous irregular forces for sabotage as well as guides for Allied forces in Burma  fighting the Japanese Army. Among other activities, the OSS helped arm, train and supply resistance movements , including Mao Zedong 's Red Army  in China and the Viet Minh  in French Indochina , in areas occupied  by the Axis powers  during World War II . OSS officer Archimedes Patti  played a central role in OSS operations in French Indochina  and met frequently with Ho Chi Minh  in 1945.n the "40th Bomb Group Association Memories Issue # 14 March 1987 Date of event: Summer of 1944 to early Spring, 1945 Date written: September, 1986 Written by: Louis Jones": The Dixie Mission  in China was composed of approximately 20 people, including two OSS officers. One of the greatest accomplishments of the OSS during World War II was its penetration of Nazi Germany  by OSS operatives. The OSS was responsible for training German and Austrian individuals for missions inside Germany. Some of these agents included exiled communists and Socialist party members, labor activists, anti-Nazi prisoners-of-war, and German and Jewish refugees. The OSS also recruited and ran one of the war's most important spies, the German diplomat Fritz Kolbe .

In 1943, the Office of Strategic Services set up operations in Istanbul.[11]  Turkey, as a neutral country during the Second World War, was a place where both the Axis and Allied powers had spy networks. The railroads connecting central Asia with Europe as well as Turkey's close proximity to the Balkan states placed it at a crossroads of intelligence gathering. The goal of the OSS Istanbul operation called Project Net-1 was to infiltrate and extenuate subversive action in the old Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires .Head of operations at OSS Istanbul was a banker from Chicago named Lanning "Packy" Macfarland who maintained the cover story as a banker for the American lend-lease program .

Macfarlane hired Alfred Schwarz, a Czechoslovakian engineer and businessman who came to be known as "Dogwood" and ended up establishing the Dogwood information chain. Dogwood in turn hired a personal assistant named Walter Arndt and established himself as an employee of the Istanbul Western Electrik Company.  Through Schwartz and Arndt the OSS was able to infiltrate anti-fascist  groups in Austria, Hungary and Germany. Schwartz was able to convince Romanian, Bulgarian, Hungarian and Swiss diplomatic couriers to smuggle American intelligence information into these territories and establish contact with elements antagonistic to the Nazis and their collaborators. Couriers and agents memorized information and produced analytical reports; when they were not able to memorize effectively they recorded information on microfilm  and hid it in their shoes or hollowed pencils.  Through this process information about the Nazi regime made its way to Macfarland and the OSS in Istanbul and eventually to Washington.

While the OSS "Dogwood-chain" produced a lot of information, its reliability was increasingly questioned by British intelligence. Eventually by May 1944 through collaboration between the OSS, British intelligence, Cairo and Washington the entire Dogwood-chain was found to be unreliable and dangerous. Planting phony information into the OSS was intended to misdirect the resources of the Allies. Schwartz's Dogwood-chain, which was the largest American intelligence gathering tool in occupied territory, was shortly thereafter shut down.

The OSS purchased Soviet code and cipher material (or Finnish information on them) from émigré Finnish army  officers in late 1944. Secretary of State Edward Stettinius, Jr. , protested that this violated an agreement President Roosevelt made with the Soviet Union not to interfere with Soviet cipher traffic from the United States. General Donovan might have copied the papers before returning them the following January, but there is no record of Arlington Hall 's receiving them, and CIA and NSA archives have no surviving copies. This codebook was in fact used as part of the Venona  decryption effort, which helped uncover large-scale Soviet espionage in North America.



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AlbertW25 [2024-04-16 19:13:25 +0000 UTC]

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