Postwar Period: End of the OSS and Return to the Park Service

OSS may have won its battles in the field, but it lost its final campaign—in Washington. It was better prepared to fight armed enemies overseas than bureaucratic enemies in the nation’s capital. The OSS was terminated within a month after the end of World War II.

To a great extent, this was due to Donovan himself. Always the romantic adventurer, he spent much of his time away from Washington in the war zones. Unlike desk-bound, bureaucratic spymasters, Donovan, a World War I hero, enjoyed being on or near the front lines. His restless energy, dynamism, and personal attention inspired the men and women of the OSS. An inspiring and visionary leader, he conceived of America’s first centralized intelligence and special operations agency, forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency and Army Special Forces.

Yet, Donovan was inattentive as an administrator and uncompromising as a bureaucrat.¹ Fascinated with strategic visions and actual field operations, he was bored by organizational detail. He personally disdained office work and left the daily running of his agency to others, as he had done at his law firm. Consequently, the administration of his rapidly burgeoning, worldwide organization was often chaotic. Because the OSS recruited imaginative, free-wheeling, assertive individuals, the organization was probably inherently difficult to manage, but Donovan’s absences and inattention made it more so. While that management style contributed to individual and local initiative, it also left the organization vulnerable to its critics. Indeed, significant discontent existed even within the top echelon of the OSS itself.²

One of Donovan’s dictums was that because he was dealing with a new form of warfare, he would rather see OSS people think imaginatively and fail than be constrained to narrow, traditional, routine responses out of fear of failure. “I’d rather have a young lieutenant with guts enough to disobey an order than a colonel too regimented to think and act for himself,” Donovan often said.³ But while this endeared him to many OSSers and produced results, it also produced some mistakes, which helped to make the organization vulnerable to its enemies in Washington. And Donovan certainly had his enemies in the nation’s capital. In the ongoing bureaucratic turf battles, the OSS threatened a number of powerful old line, congressionally mandated agencies, including the War and Navy Departments, the State Department, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In contrast, the OSS was a temporary, wartime agency, created under the President’s executive authority as commander-in-chief. Its main assets, the support of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the unrestricted funds he unilaterally authorized, were a distinct advantage to the new and temporary agency and a stimulant to the jealousy and opposition of its powerful competitors.

Battle in Washington over the OSS

Donovan believed the OSS would serve as a model for a permanent central intelligence agency in the postwar period. But his organization, composed primarily of wartime civilian volunteers rather than professional soldiers or spies, lost the immediate battle for permanence in the bureaucratic arena in Washington, which in the immediate aftermath of the war saw little need for such a permanent, centralized clandestine agency as the OSS. The predominant mood in America was for demobilization and the enjoyment of peace. Donovan had made too many enemies and in the end proved incapable of achieving his goal of maintaining the OSS as a permanent central intelligence agency with himself as its head.

By the fall of 1944, it was evident that the Allies would be victorious and the war was reaching its final phases. The White House’s Bureau of the Budget began making plans for liquidation of the temporary wartime agencies and for reduction of the federal government to peacetime conditions. The Army and Navy began serious planning for the postwar missions, size and structure, including military intelligence. The State Department sought responsibility for foreign political and diplomatic intelligence, and the FBI claimed authority in the area of domestic intelligence and counterintelligence operations. In such a contentious climate, Donovan made a major bid for a permanent central intelligence agency.⁴

“When our enemies are defeated,” Donovan wrote to President Roosevelt on 18 November 1944, “the demand will be equally pressing for information that will aid us in solving the problems of peace.”⁵ Fissures were already emerging in the wartime alliance of the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union, and Donovan was beginning to envision intelligence networks to deal with the rivalries and differing power relationships and goals of the former Allies in the postwar world. Donovan’s proposal was for a “Central Intelligence Service.” While departmental intelligence bureaus would continue to collect and analyze the tactical intelligence directly related to the duties of their agencies, the new organization would focus on strategic intelligence, coordinating, collecting, and producing intelligence and reporting directly to the President. It would provide the Chief Executive with the foreign intelligence necessary to plan and execute national policy and strategy. From the beginning, Donovan believed not only that the new agency should produce intelligence from various means, including espionage, counterespionage, and the kind of investigations conducted by the OSS’s highly successful Research and Analysis Branch, but that it should, like the Special Operations and Morale Operations branches, have the authority to conduct “subversive operations abroad” and perform “such other functions and duties reliant to intelligence” as the President might direct.⁶

This new, permanent, and independent Central Intelligence Service would have its own budget and authority for “procurement, training, and supervision of its intelligence personnel.” In the OSS, Donovan noted, there existed personnel already trained and experienced in the missions of the new organization. Warning that these assets should not be lost, Donovan suggested that the President not wait for the end of the war to establish the new agency. “There are common sense reasons,” he wrote to Roosevelt in November 1944, “why you may desire to lay the keel of the ship at once.”⁷

The fight against the launching of a new central intelligence service began immediately. When Roosevelt circulated Donovan’s proposal to established government agencies with intelligence functions, they sought to block it through memos, lobbying and delay, but some went further and started a smear campaign in the press. On the morning of 9 February 1945, Donovan opened the front door of his Georgetown home, picked up the morning newspapers and was appalled to read the front-page headline on the Washington Times-Herald: “Donovan Proposes Super-spy System for Postwar New Deal: Would Take over FBI, Secret Service, ONI and G-2 to Watch Home, Abroad.” Washington correspondent Walter Trohan’s story ran on the front page of this and other newspapers of the isolationist, anti-Roosevelt, McCormick-Patterson chain, including the Chicago Tribune, and New York Daily News. Announcing that the President was considering a plan from Donovan for a central intelligence service, the newspaper account then launched into a sensationalist diatribe against the OSS, Donovan, and his proposal. Trohan inaccurately claimed that the proposed agency would “supersede all existing Federal police and intelligence units” and he predicted that it would create “an all-powerful intelligence service to spy on the postwar world and to pry into the lives of citizens at home.” Likening the proposed agency to the Nazis’ dreaded secret police, Trohan warned that it could become an “American Gestapo.”⁸

Donovan’s plan for a postwar, worldwide intelligence service received balanced coverage from much of the press and even favorable editorial comment from internationalist newspapers such as the Washington Post, New York Herald-Tribune, and New York Times.⁹ But the Trohan story and its accusations caused a sensation and, as intended by the FBI and military intelligence agencies that leaked it to the press, prevented any chance of the President immediately supporting Donovan’s proposal.¹⁰

Roosevelt had made no promises to Donovan about a postwar agency. He had accepted the need, at least in wartime, for effective and centralized intelligence, although he had limited some of Donovan’s wartime proposals in response to appeals from competing agencies. In regard to Donovan’s proposal for a permanent OSS type organization, the President was willing in November 1944 to circulate the idea, but he certainly kept his options open. On 5 April 1945, two months after the furor caused by the original Trohan article, Roosevelt resumed consideration of the issue of postwar intelligence. Just before leaving for a vacation at Warm Springs, Georgia, the tired and ailing President asked Donovan to assemble the heads of the ten dozen federal units concerned with foreign intelligence and internal security to “contribute their suggestions to the proposed centralized intelligence service….so that a consensus of opinion can be secured.”¹¹ Roosevelt’s managerial style was to solicit various opinions, even allowing people with opposing views to think they had his support, all the while keeping his own counsel and deferring his own decision, and certainly not disclosing it, until he had to do so. Clearly he was listening to the other agencies as well as to Donovan on the subject. It is unclear what Roosevelt would have done about the proposal if he had lived. But while at Warm Springs, Roosevelt suddenly died from a cerebral hemorrhage on 12 April 1945.

President Harry S Truman and the OSS

With his death, Donovan and the OSS lost their most important patron. The new President, Harry S Truman,¹² was no friend of Donovan or his organization. Indeed, Truman felt no obligation to sustain Donovan and the OSS beyond the end of the war. A pro-New Deal, but fiscally conservative Democrat from Missouri, Truman was suspicious of Donovan and his free-wheeling, expensive wartime agency from the beginning. That skepticism was reinforced by Bureau of the Budget Director Harold B. Smith, whom Truman considered an efficient and honest public servant opposed to empire building and increased government spending. In several meetings in late April 1945, Smith cautioned Truman about taking hasty action approving any of the plans for a postwar intelligence system and suggested that the President allow the Budget Bureau to assess the situation and recommend a sound and well-organized strategic intelligence system. Truman agreed.¹³

The new President was thus already suspicious of Donovan when he first met the OSS director on 14 May 1945, and increasingly, he came to dislike him.¹⁴ In a brief entry in his appointment book, Truman noted snidely that Donovan had come in to “tell how important the Secret Service [sic] is and how much he would do to run the government on an even basis.”¹⁵ Donovan’s own recollection of that meeting was that Truman told him that “the OSS has been a credit to America. You and all your men are to be congratulated on doing a remarkable job for our country, but the OSS belongs to a nation at war. It can have no place in an America at peace.” When Donovan argued that the OSS would be even more important in the troubled peace, Truman declared, in words similar to the Walter Trohan newspaper story, “I am completely opposed to international spying on the part of the United States. It is un-American. I cannot be certain in my mind that a formidable and clandestine organization such as the OSS designed to spy abroad will not in time spy upon the American people themselves. The OSS represents a threat to the liberties of the American people.”¹⁶

Truman’s hostility toward Donovan and his organization may have come from a variety of sources. Some of them may have been matters of policy, such as the concerns of Truman and Smith about the costs and dangers of a permanent central intelligence agency. Donovan later blamed Truman and the Army and Navy for blocking his plan.¹⁷ Other reasons for the new President’s hostility may have been more personal, including Truman’s attitudes toward Donovan himself.¹⁸ From Truman’s alleged remarks to Donovan at their first meeting in May 1945, it appears that he may also have been influenced by the articles in the McCormick-Patterson newspaper chain and a key, antiOSS source Trohan had used. Shortly after taking office, President Truman had been informed of a secret, scathing internal report on the OSS authored by Colonel Richard Park, Jr. of Army Intelligence (G-2). Park, who had served briefly as a military aide to President Roosevelt, may have mentioned his report when he met with Truman on 13 April 1945, the day after Roosevelt’s death. Certainly, he soon sent the new President a copy of his hostile report.¹⁹

Classified ‘Top Secret,” the Park Report on the OSS ran 56 doubled-spaced pages.²⁰ According to Park, President Roosevelt had asked him to make an informal investigation of the OSS and report on his findings and conclusions. His report, Park said, was gathered “in an informal manner and from personal impressions gained on a tour of the Italian and Western Fronts.” It was almost entirely a compilation of denunciations of the OSS, most of the accusations being based on second-hand information, suspicions or rumors, and most were from unnamed sources. The report’s overriding theme was that the OSS was a body of amateurs in contrast to established intelligence professionals and consequently had made major mistakes in recruitment, training, and security procedures as well as in the handling of its funds. All of these alleged errors, Park concluded, had embarrassed the United States, especially its professional agencies, wasted enormous sums of money, and resulted in “badly conceived, overlapping, and unauthorized activities,” including the capture and execution of its agents. Park cited accusations from unnamed sources in Army and Navy Intelligence, the State Department, and the FBI, and he declared as further evidence of OSS’s unworthiness that General Douglas MacArthur and Admiral Chester Nimitz had banned it from their theaters. Finally, Park concluded, drawing on accusations from a number of unnamed critics that “many improper persons have penetrated into the O.S.S” As he put it, “the Communist element in the O.S.S. is believed to be of dangerously large proportions,” and at the same time, “the O.S.S. is hopelessly compromised to foreign governments, particularly the British, rendering it useless as a prospective independent, postwar espionage agency.”²¹

Park’s accusations obviously reflected the views of OSS’s critics, particularly its rivals in the old line intelligence services. Donovan apparently never saw Park’s report, although he knew many of its assertions through the Trohan article, which had drawn upon it. While the OSS certainly did make mistakes, Park’s “report” was hardly an independent assessment; instead, it was filled with rumor, half-truths, innuendo, and other distortions. For example, Donovan had recruited a few communists or communist sympathizers because they had been in particular regions, such as Spain, or because they could organize and work with anti-Nazi communist partisans in occupied countries, but they were never more than a handful. Duncan Lee, a Yale graduate, formerly of Donovan’s law firm who was Donovan’s executive assistant at OSS and later head of the China section of SI, was the only communist in or near the leadership. Communists certainly were not in the organization in “dangerously large proportions” as Park put it, and congressional hearings following the Trohan articles left the OSS relatively unblemished. But conservatives’ suspicions remained.²² In fact, the OSS leadership was in fact dominated by business-oriented lawyers and businessmen. As for the British influence, while it had been substantial in the founding and initial development of Donovan’s organization, the OSS and British SOE and SIS soon became rivals, diverging in many of their goals and methods. B the winter of 1944-1945, OSS had clearly established an aggressive independence along with a skeptical attitude and sometimes hostile relationship toward the British Ally and its postwar goals.²³

One example of Park’s use of innuendo is his suggestion of massive waste by the OSS. As he put it, “If the O.S.S. is investigated after the war it may easily prove to have been relatively the most expensive and wasteful agency of the government. With a $57,000,000 budget, $37,000,000 of which may be expended without provision of law governing use of public funds for material and personnel, the possibilities of waste are apparent. There are indications that some official investigation of O.S.S. may be forced after the war. It is believed the organization would have a difficult time justifying the expenditure of extremely large sums of money by results accomplished.”²⁴ In fact, no such massive irregularities were ever discovered by the media or the government. Although OSS, like other wartime agencies, surely had made errors and wasted funds, most of Park’s indictment of overall incompetence, mismanagement, and waste, is simply incorrect.²⁵

Within the 56-page diatribe against Donovan’s organization, Park devoted three pages to kind words about two OSS branches. Special Operations, he said, had “performed some excellent sabotage and rescue work.” Research and Analysis Branch “has done an outstanding job.” Both had been “the subject of commendatory letters from theater commanders and others.”²⁶ SO and R&A, Park said, had elements and personnel that “can and should be salvaged” by the War Department and the Department of State. This brief exception did little to offset the overall thrust of Park’s harangue, which also included the danger of a “new secret, world-wide intelligence agency which would control all other U.S. intelligence agencies.” Park said Donovan’s proposal had “all the earmarks of a Gestapo system.” Indeed, he warned that both Congress and the press “may be interested in exposing what many claim to be an American Gestapo.”²⁷

The “Gestapo” quote and other hostile sections of Park’s report had been lifted almost verbatim by Walter Trohan in his denunciatory newspaper article in the McCormick-Patterson press.²⁸ Not surprisingly, Park’s recommendations matched those of the traditional intelligence agencies. The OSS should be terminated, Donovan replaced, and those components and personnel determined to be worthy should be transferred to appropriate agencies such as the War Department and State Department. The postwar intelligence/ counter-intelligence operation should be a cooperative arrangement modeled on the collaborative structure established by the Army G-2, ONI, the State Department, and the FBI for use in the Western Hemisphere during the war.²⁹

Donovan’s Dilemmas

As Donovan recognized, the long-term future of OSS was in jeopardy by the summer of 1945 even as the role of the OSS expanded dramatically in China. Informed by the military chiefs, Truman now knew that the primary intelligence successes of the war had been through cryptology –the deciphering of enemy codes through MAGIC and ULTRA. This had been the result of signals intelligence breakthroughs achieved by the intelligence sections of the U.S. Army and Navy in the case of MAGIC, the reading of the Japanese codes, and the Poles and the British in the case of the German codes.³⁰ It had not been due to espionage or research and analysis which were the focus of OSS’s secret intelligence efforts. Furthermore, unlike its rivals, the OSS was, after all, a temporary war agency created by executive order with no underlying foundation in congressional statute. Unlike the departments and bureaus that opposed it, OSS had no long traditions, no influential alumni, no established personal and economic connections with Congress. Because it had been a secret organization, the American public knew little about it. The first burst of publicity, the Trohan series about the threats to Americans posed by Donovan’s plan for a postwar super-spy agency, had cast it in a bad light at a time when the emphasis was on forthcoming demobilization and the reduction of the expanded and costly wartime governmental bureaucracy.

Economizers in government led by Senator Harry Byrd, a powerful Virginia Democrat, pressed for reduction of agencies and personnel and cut backs in expenditures and taxes. The OSS’s rivals and the McCormick-Patterson press resumed their attacks on Donovan’s organization. Its proposed budget for the next fiscal year was cut almost in half.³¹ OSS was in an extremely precarious position. As Thomas Troy, a CIA historian, has written, in mid-1945, Donovan “had been stymied by the big four [State, War, Navy and the FBI], ignored by the President, and was unsupported in the Congress. He had been smeared by the press—he [allegedly] harbored Communists, was controlled by the British, was rebuffed by heroes MacArthur and Nimitz, traveled with self-seeking bankers, financiers, industrialists and socialites, had squandered money, and was marked for sensational exposé.”³²

Once again Donovan hurt his own cause by refusing to accept a compromise. Given the formidable opposition, his deputy, Brigadier General John Magruder, had advised Donovan in May to concede temporarily on both the independence of the director and the timing of the creation of a peacetime central intelligence agency. But Donovan refused.³³ He took a hard line. In a letter several months later to Samuel Rosenman, one of Truman’s key advisers on postwar reorganization, Donovan declared bluntly: “I understand that there has been talk of attempting to allocate different segments of the [OSS] organization to different departments. This would be an absurd and unsatisfactory thing to do. The organization was set up as an entity, every function supporting and supplementing the other. It’s time for us to grow up, Sam, and realize that the new responsibilities we have assumed require an adequate intelligence system.”³⁴

Instead of negotiating within the bureaucracy, Donovan launched a publicity campaign to build political support by informing the public of the OSS’s contributions to winning the war. This presented somewhat of a paradox: publicity for a super secret organization. When recruited, OSS personnel had been sworn to secrecy, taking an oath sometimes reinforced by threats of imprisonment for violation on the grounds of national security. They could not even tell their families what they had done during the war. Most of the former OSS men and women maintained that secrecy for decades—until the declassification of the records of the OSS by the CIA beginning in the 1980s. Some remain unwilling to talk fully about their wartime secret service even to the present day. But beginning in August 1945, Donovan and a group of writers and publicity persons on his staff began a media blitz, declassifying reports and providing interviews with OSS heroes to obtain credit and public recognition for the difficult and sometimes highly dangerous work of an organization about which the public knew virtually nothing.³⁵ By early September, sympathetic magazines and newspapers, including the Washington Post, Chicago Daily News, New York Times, Life and the Saturday Evening Post, supported the OSS with news stories of its heroic exploits, including the recent rescues from Japanese prison camps of General Jonathan Wainwright, aviators from the Doolittle Raid, and thousands of other American POWs, and editorials supporting its “Daring Exploits” and what one of them called “Our Priceless Spy System.”³⁶

It was already too late. Initially, the Budget Bureau had assumed that the liquidation of OSS would take place over several months so that its most valuable assets could be saved and distributed to other agencies. Donovan too had assumed even in midAugust that OSS had at least several more months to continue achievements and publicize its part in the Allied victory. But in the third week of August 1945, the White House, having already ordered the immediate end of the Office of War Information (OWI), the government’s unpopular wartime propaganda agency, suddenly directed that OSS too be terminated as quickly as possible.³⁷ Based on previous discussions, the Budget Bureau agreed that OSS’s Research and Analysis Branch would go to the State Department. The newly-imposed time constraint led the Bureau to recommend that the rest of the OSS be turned over to the War Department “for salvage and liquidation.” On 4 September 1945, Budget Director Smith submitted a general intelligence reorganization plan to President Truman. Predictably, Donovan fumed when he heard about it, and he protested vigorously. But Truman ignored him, and on 13 September, the President authorized the Budget Bureau to draft an Executive Order terminating the OSS. According to Smith’s diary entry that day, “The President again commented that he has in mind a broad intelligence service attached to the President’s office. He stated that we would recommend the dissolution of Donovan’s outfit even if Donovan did not like it.”³⁸ Although Truman may have been thinking of a broad agency attached to the Executive Office, the Bureau of the Budget and the old line departments were thinking of departmental units coordinated by an advisory group. There was deliberately no place for Donovan. Indeed, since some of the OSS assets would continue by being transferred to other agencies, and since Truman did want some kind of postwar strategic intelligence coordination in order, as he said many times, to prevent another Pearl Harbor surprise attack, the decision to dissolve the OSS may well have been based at least in part to force out Donovan.

Sudden End of the OSS

On 20 September 1945, Truman signed Executive Order 9621, dissolving the OSS effective 1 October 1945. The functions, properties and personnel of the Research and Analysis Branch and Presentation Branch were transferred to the State Department. All of the other functions and properties and most of the nearly ten thousand persons in the OSS were transferred to the War Department, which was interested mainly only in those with military experience in Secret Intelligence (SI) and Counter-Intelligence (X-2). Most of the OSS personnel would be discharged, including Donovan himself. The functions of the OSS Director were transferred to the Secretary of War, who “shall whenever he deems it compatible with the national interest, discontinue any [OSS] activity transferred by this paragraph and wind up all affairs relating thereto.” ³⁹

In a separate and rather chilly letter of appreciation to “My dear General Donovan,” written for the President by the Budget Bureau staff, Truman acknowledged Donovan’s “capable leadership” in “a vital wartime activity.” The letter assured Donovan that “the peacetime intelligence services of the Government are being erected on the foundation of the facilities and resources mobilized through the [Office of Strategic Services] during the war.” Rubbing salt in the wound, Truman’s letter stated that that transfer of the OSS Research and Analysis Branch to the State Department marked “the beginning of the development of a coordinated system of foreign intelligence within the permanent framework of the Government.”⁴⁰

The historic episode that occurred in the Oval Office at 3 o’clock, 20 September 1945, was recorded by Budget Director Harold Smith in his diary: “When I gave the President the Order on OSS for his signature, I told him that this was the best disposition we could make of the matter and that General Donovan . . . would not like it. I showed the President our communication with [Secretary of State] Byrnes and indicated that the State Department was willing to accept certain of the OSS functions while the rest would go to the War Department. The President glanced over the documents and signed the Order. He commented, as he has done before, that he has in mind a different kind of intelligence service from what this country has had in the past.”⁴¹

It was an abrupt end to the OSS. As a result of an oversight in the wording of the Executive Order, the agency had to be dismantled within only ten days.⁴² Donovan and his key assistants spent those few days microfilming the files of the director’s office from the previous four years in order to preserve that record.⁴³ On 28 September 1945, Donovan bade farewell to the OSS staff in Washington. The sad ceremony was held in large building at the foot of the hill below the OSS buildings, in the Riverside Skating Rink on Rock Creek Drive. Closing out the wartime experience of America’s first national intelligence agency, the 62-year-old Donovan reassured the faithful crowd of about 2,000 men and women:

We have come to the end of an unusual experiment. This experiment was to determine whether a group of Americans constituting a cross-section of racial [ethnic] origins, of abilities, temperaments and talents, could risk an encounter with the long-established and well-trained enemy organizations.

How well that experiment has succeeded is measured by your accomplishments and by the recognition of your achievements. You should feel deeply gratified by President Truman’s expression of the purpose of basing a coordinated intelligence service upon the techniques and resources that you have initiated and developed. . . . .

When I speak of your achievements, that does not mean we did not make mistakes. We were not afraid to make mistakes because we were not afraid to try things that had not been tried before. All of us would like to think that we could have done a better job; but all of you must know that, whatever the errors or failures, the job you did was honest and self-respecting….

Within a few days each one of us will be going to new tasks, whether in civilian life or in government service. You can go with the assurance that you have made a beginning in showing the people of America that only by decisions of national policy based upon accurate information can we have the chance of a peace that will endure.⁴⁴

Two days later on October 1, 1945 the OSS ceased to exist. Some of the civilian staffers had already left and returned to their prewar occupations or taken new positions, but for most of the OSS personnel, the change had been so sudden and unexpected that the majority simply waited to see what would happen to them as the State and War Departments made the crucial decisions. Meanwhile, most of the OSS military personnel returning from overseas were put up temporarily in holding areas, primarily at Area F, but some also at Area C, until they could be mustered out or accepted new assignments in the military.

OSS Veterans Return to the Training Camps from Overseas

Some of the OSS training camps had been used as holding areas for returnees from overseas since late1944 when significant numbers of OSS veterans came back from Western Europe and North Africa. Although some of the returnees were housed at Areas A and C in Prince William Forest Park (Area B at Catoctin Mountain Park was being relinquished by OSS at that time), the majority were sent to Area F at the former Congressional Country Club in Bethesda, Maryland, because of its hotel-like facilities and its closeness to Washington.⁴⁵

Hundreds of OSS veterans flocked back from Europe in 1944-1945 and spent time at the holding area at Area F or overflow areas at A and C before being reassigned to the Far East, or mustered out at the end of the war. In December 1944, Donovan ordered that Areas F, A, and C, be made available for the relaxation and recreation of OSS personnel returning from overseas.⁴⁶ While military training was provided at the camps for those being sent to the Far East, other returning veterans enjoyed a period of rest and relaxation, particularly in the second half of 1945. Dances and other forms of entertainment were held at all three areas. Returning from England to Area C in late 1944, radioman Roger Belanger from Portland, Maine, found a much different atmosphere then when he had left. “They had a couple of dances in the mess hall,” he recalled. “WAVES from Arlington Farm—a Navy communications station, where they also handled secret work—[came over] in buses blacked out so they could not see where they were going. A bus load of them came in late 1944, came in their uniforms. We had a band. I think they were musicians from the group….We also went to a place in Manassas, the Social Circle, a dance hall, and they served local beers. They took us down in a bus on Friday or Saturday night. We had a Class A pass and could leave the base anytime we were not on duty. They would also take us in a truck to Washington, D.C. and pick us up Sunday night in front of Union Station there. We had a good time.”⁴⁷ By the beginning of summer 1945, however, OSS headquarters became concerned, and the Communications Branch was asked “to discontinue dances at Areas ‘A’ and ‘C’ because of the serious embarrassment which might arise if [there was] an official investigation of such recreation at ‘Secret’ areas.”⁴⁸ However, dances, movies, lectures, and sightseeing trips continued on a regular basis at Area F, now the official center for OSS returnees from the combat zones.⁴⁹

An OSS softball league was organized that included games between teams from various OSS branches or between training areas. On 27 June 1945, a hotly-contested match between the undefeated teams of Area F and Area C was played at Prince William Forest Park. Pitching for Area F was Captain Joseph Lazarsky, former instructor at Area B and now recently returned from combat duty with Detachment 101 in Burma. As the sports reporter for the Area F newspaper reported, “The lead exchanged hands every inning until the final, when ‘Captain Joe’ pitching his first game in three years and facing the heaviest hitter of Area ‘C’ proved himself a real ‘money’ player and put out the side in one, two, three order. Area F beat Area C, 14 to 12. A week later the “Holdees” at Area F won the league championship for the first half of the season. But two months later, as the second half of the league season drew to a close, Area F had plummeted. On 14 August 1945, the team was playing the Reproduction Branch softball team in Potomac Park in Washington, D.C., when in the sixth inning, the city learned of the Japanese decision to surrender and “pandemonium broke loose—whistles, shrieks, horns blowing, etc., heralding the end of the war.” As the Area F newspaper reported, “the boys [were] fearful the game would run into extra innings and postpone their taking part in the general revelry and victory celebration.” “Captain Joe” Lazarsky kept “pitching steady ball,” but Reproduction Branch scored two home runs in the seventh, one on an error, and won the game. Area F fell to fifth place, and it was Area C, from Prince William Forest Park, with the only undefeated 5-0 record that won the championship.⁵⁰ With the sudden end of the war, all military training at OSS camps was terminated and all except Area F were closed. At the former Congressional County Club, the focus shifted to informational programs to help with the transition from service to civilian life—speakers were brought in to describe job and educational opportunities, the G.I. Bill, and wartime insurance and pensions—as more and more OSS veterans returned from overseas and were mustered out.⁵¹

OSS tried to take care of its veterans returning from the war zones. Private First Class David A. Kenney, a radio base station operator who had trained at Area A and C and served in Europe and the Far East was in Chichiang, China, on15 August 1945, the day Tokyo announced it would surrender. He was sent with an OSS team to Nanchang to investigate reports of Japanese atrocities for war crimes trials. In the middle of the investigation, he was suddenly summoned to Shanghai, where the OSS commanding officer handed him a telegram and told him that his mother had died a few days earlier. “He made me a courier, and they let me fly back to the States by plane instead of by boat,” Kennedy recalled, noting that air travel was highly restricted. “OSS had respect and compassion for its people.” Kennedy was mustered out of the service two days before Christmas in 1945.⁵²

Navy Seaman First Class Spiro (“Gus”) Cappony, a radio operator who trained at Areas C and B with actor Sterling Hayden and then was sent on a bridge-blowing OSS mission to German-occupied Greece, returned to Washington, D.C. Cappony, who had been wounded, was the first member of the mission to return to the States, and he said that Secretary of State Cordell Hull immediately summoned him to his office and questioned the 20-year-old Greek American about the political situation between contending partisan groups in northern Greece. After the interview, Cappony went to Area F. “I had not been paid. I didn’t have any money,” Cappony recalled. “Captain John Hamilton [Sterling Hayden], he was my buddy. I met him in the Congressional Country Club. He says, ‘Hey, Gus, What are you doing here?’ I said, ‘I can’t get out of here. I don’t have any money.’ He said, ‘Go out and get drunk.’ I said, `I’d love to get drunk.’ He said, ‘Here’s twenty bucks.’” He subsequently got paid and was granted a 30-day leave.⁵³

“Commo” Branch radio operator Arthur (“Art”) Reinhardt came back to the Unites States from China at the end of 1945 with two dozen other OSS veterans and more than a thousand GIs jammed aboard the troopship, Marine Angel. Crossing the Pacific, he slept on deck in an Abercrombie and Fitch sleeping bag supplied by the OSS. He never forgot the scene when the vessel arrived back in the United States on 16 December 1945.

“As we were coming into port, into Tacoma, a big USO [United Service Organization] boat comes up with all the [USO] girls and the flashing lights and flags and everything, and the loud speaker says: ‘There are twenty-four OSS members aboard ship, and they will disembark immediately! We are going to pull the launch alongside, and you will get off!’ So, that’s what happened. They said, ‘We have a train waiting for you.’ Some of the GIs [on deck] remarked, ‘Who are these bastards?’ And we casually climbed down onto this launch, or this fairly large boat, which took us in to Fort Lewis, I guess. We had a big steak dinner. We were taken out to the train. It turns out that twenty-four of us had two Pullman cars [deluxe railroad cars], which were attached to a troop train….By the time we arrived in Washington [D.C.], there was probably only six of us left, because the other guys would peel off along the way, saying, ‘Well, you know, I’m only 200 miles from home.’ We were coming across the country, and we had the time of our life. I can remember in Billings, Montana, 10 degrees below Zero, and we were running down the street in our shirt sleeves to buy some milk. We were happy troopers to get back.” After spending a couple of days at Area F, Reinhardt was granted leave to go home to the family farm outside of Buffalo and was mustered out a month later in January 1946. The former farm boy turned communications specialist, who had spent more than fourteen months in war-torn China, much of it behind enemy lines, was only 20 years old.⁵⁴

In the wake of the Allied victory in Europe in May 1945, Donovan, in addition to heading the OSS and battling for a permanent central intelligence agency, served from June to November 1945 as Deputy U.S. Prosecutor for the International War Crimes Tribunal at Nuremberg. The Chief U.S. Prosecutor Robert H. Jackson, an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, asked him to serve because of all the work that the OSS Research and Analysis Branch was doing after the German surrender in gathering written and visual evidence to document the Nazi war crimes.⁵⁵ In the pre-trial period, Donovan, who spoke German, personally questioned Hermann Göring, the secondhighest ranking Nazi. But during the summer, Donovan and Jackson became deadlocked over best method of prosecuting leading Nazis. Jackson decided to rely solely on contemporary documentary evidence, which provided overwhelmingly convincing proof of guilt. Taking a larger view, Donovan contended that basing the case only on written documents, while legally convincing, would not have the impact that seeing and listening to witnesses of the war crimes—perpetrators, observers, surviving victims—would have upon public opinion both in Germany and in the world. As Donovan explained, he “wanted to make it clear to the German people that the trials were not a retribution but were because of the Nazis’ unprecedented outrage against humanity.”⁵⁶ Donovan would not change his position, so just before the trials began in November 1945, Jackson dismissed him from the prosecutorial team. The OSS had been terminated the previous month, but Donovan remained technically on active duty as a Major General until January 1946.⁵⁷ After watching the trials begin in Nuremberg, Donovan returned to the United States, to his horse farm in Berryville, Virginia and his apartment at 2 Sutton Place in Manhattan, and resumed his law practice on Wall Street.

President Truman invited Donovan to the White House in January 1946, to receive an Oak Leaf Cluster to the Distinguished Service Medal, he had won in the First World War. The President credited the former OSS chief with great service in “secret intelligence, research and analysis, and the conduct of unorthodox methods of warfare in support of military operations.”⁵⁸

Transitions

With the termination of OSS in October 1945, the remains of Donovan’s former agency were divided organizationally between the War and State Departments. The minority, 1,362 of the OSS civilian men and women in the Research and Analysis and Presentation Branches, were transferred to the State Department in a new unit called the Interim Research and Intelligence Service. The rest—9,028 other OSS civilian and military personnel—were transferred to the War Department. There a reluctant Brigadier General John Magruder, a former OSS deputy director, was put in charge of a remnant entitled the Strategic Services Unit (SSU). With the support of Secretary of War Robert Patterson and Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy, who was a friend of Donovan’s and a firm believer in central intelligence, SSU had been created to keep the OSS personnel, records, budget, and assets separate from the Military Intelligence Division (G-2) of the U.S. Army.⁵⁹ McCloy ordered Magruder to disband the paramilitary units, Special Operations, Operational Groups, Detachment 101, and the Jedburghs, as well as Morale Operations and the rest, but to preserve the OSS’s intelligence assets, including their field stations and foreign agent networks concerned with fascism and communism in Europe, the Middle East, and the Far East, over to SSU.⁶⁰ In anticipation of escalating tensions with the Soviet Union, Donovan’s organization had during 1945 been identifying or planting networks of foreign agents in areas of Eastern Europe and China and Korea occupied by the Red Army as well as in countries around the globe deemed to be of strategic interest to the United States.

Over the following months, the size of SSU would shrink rapidly, as thousands of former OSSers were let go from civilian service or discharged from the armed forces. Magruder’s deputy and successor, Colonel William W. (“Buffalo Bill”) Quinn, was a career soldier, but as head of G-2 for the Seventh Army in southern France he had come to appreciate the value of the OSS. Years later, recalling the immediate post-war period, he wrote that “My initial business was primarily liquidation. The main problem was the discharge of literally thousands of people. Consequently, the intelligence effort more or less came to a standstill.”⁶¹ Five out of every six OSS men and women left, and numbers of Donovan’s old organization plummeted in three months from some 10,000 down to just under 2,000 by the end of 1945.⁶² The Strategic Services Unit was reduced to perhaps one-twentieth of the dimensions of the OSS, and the sources of U.S. foreign intelligence contracted accordingly.

It was that situation—the immobilization of the OSS assets, the threat that Congress would reduce the intelligence budget and that the Army might absorb the SSU into the G-2 bureaucracy, as well as disagreement between State, War, and Navy on one hand and the Bureau of the Budget and the FBI on the other—that led to a new coordinated if not yet centralized intelligence agency, the Central Intelligence Group (CIG).⁶³ The Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) submitted a plan that would save SSU and its assets and its espionage and liaison with friendly foreign intelligence services by putting SSU under a proposed National Intelligence Authority, a collaborative body drawing upon the intelligence units in several governmental departments. In December 1945, Truman had chosen the JCS plan over State’s attempt to dominate national intelligence, and on 22 January 1946, the President created the Central Intelligence Group.⁶⁴ Two days later, he appointed as the first Director of Central Intelligence, Rear Admiral Sidney Souers, a former Missouri businessman and a reservist serving as Assistant Chief of Naval Intelligence. Donovan publicly criticized it as lacking centralization, independence, and civilian control.⁶⁵ In June 1946, with the appointment of Lieutenant General Hoyt S. Vandenberg, a career officer in the Army Air Forces, the small CIG, previously an empty shell, began to absorb the much larger SSU and its clandestine foreign intelligence activities. For more than a year, the Central Intelligence Group served, under several different directors, as a coordinating intelligence body, until the establishment in1947 of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).⁶⁶

OSS’s Legacy and the Central Intelligence Agency

The emergence of a “Cold War” between the United States and the Soviet Union and the reorganization of the U.S. military and national security establishment led through the National Security Act of 26 July 1947 to the creation of the truly independent, centralized, and congressionally mandated Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The Director of Central Intelligence reported directly to the President. Donovan, who had come out of the war with enhanced public prestige and as an authority on foreign intelligence, had, along with former OSSers like, attorney Lawrence R. Houston and exchief of the London station, David K.E. Bruce, helped shape the final bill, which was largely a reprise of his own proposal at the end of the war. Since it was largely a return to Donovan’s proposal in 1944-1945, the former head of the OSS was delighted with the intelligence sections of the National Security Act.⁶⁷ In the Congressional debate, considerable concern was expressed about whether the new agency would become a “Gestapo,” spying on and arresting American citizens, and as a result Congress denied the CIA law enforcement or subpoena powers and prohibited it from any internal security role in the United States.⁶⁸ All agreed that the primary mission of the CIA was to collect and analyze intelligence from other countries. The OSS headquarters in the old National Institute of Health buildings at 24th and E Streets NW in Washington, D.C., became the first headquarters of the CIA in 1947 until the new CIA campus complex was built in Langley, Virginia, in the 1950s. (The old OSS temporary structures, the “Q” and “M” Buildings, down the hill were later torn down as eyesores, and ultimately replaced by the Kennedy Center.) With many former OSSers employed by the new central intelligence agency, often via the transitional units of SSU and CIG, it used many of the OSS’s training methods and operational techniques regarding intelligence gathering and analysis. Peter Sichel, an SI agent with the U.S. Seventh Army in France and Germany in World War II, continued doing secret intelligence there for the next seven years. “I was in Berlin from 1945 to May 1952,” he recalled. “I did the same job, just different employers, OSS, SU, CIA.”⁶⁹

Little attention was paid in the public discussion or congressional debate in 1947 to a clause in the National Security Act authorizing the CIA to perform “other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security.” But almost from the beginning that provision was used as the legal basis for “covert operations,” which soon became a major, if later highly controversial, part of the activities of the CIA.⁷⁰ When in the summer of 1948, the National Security Council authorized the CIA to conduct “special operations” that agency quickly began to develop covert operations capability under Frank G. Wisner, head of its new Office of Policy Coordination. A former OSS Secret Intelligence officer in Istanbul and Bucharest, Wisner had been at the State Department since the OSS was terminated.⁷¹ The CIA’s operational branch employed then or soon afterwards a number of former OSS SO or OG personnel either directly, as in the case of William Colby, Al Cox, James Kellis, Joseph Lazarsky, Hans Tofte, and Lucien Conein, or indirectly on detached service from the Army such as William R. (“Ray”) Peers, Leopold (“Leo”) Karwaski, and others. “Basically, the Agency hired people who had already been trained. They hired from the OSS and from the military,” recalled Caesar J. Civitella, a former member of the OSS Italian OGs, who served with the Army’s Special Forces from 1952 until his retirement in 1964, and then worked for the CIA from 1964 to 1983. “When I was in the military, I did attend an ‘E and E’ course at ‘the Farm.’ The instructor was an old OSS guy. They did use former OSS training at ‘the Farm.’”⁷² Civitella was referring to the CIA’s large, wooded, swampy training reservation in southeastern Virginia. Located outside of Williamsburg, it is much larger and quite distant from the country house training site, RTU-11, that OSS referred to informally as “the Farm.”

Although the Central Intelligence Agency was institutionally the direct descendant of Donovan’s wartime organization, veterans of the Office of Strategic Services, like other Americans, divided over many of the policies pursued by the CIA since its creation in 1947. The greatest divisions came over the subversive role of political and military covert operations. Donovan, unlike his British counterparts, had united intelligence gathering and analysis and covert action in a single agency, and the CIA maintained his organizational model. As the Cold War mentality came to dominant Washington in response to the threat seen as posed by the Soviet empire and the challenges of communist movements around the globe, the clandestine operations branch of the CIA became an important instrument in U.S. foreign and national security policy. It was not just the agency itself, but many in the foreign policy and national security establishment who supported that concept that Donovan had celebrated as effective in World War II. In addition to the institutional and practical grounds for employing clandestine political, psychological, and guerrilla operations beyond its missions of intelligence collection and analysis, the CIA claimed also to inherit the OSS’s mantle of moral justification for such actions. During the global struggle against the evils of fascism in World War II there had been no questioning of the ethicality of the OSS’s foreign intervention and subversion in countries occupied by the ruthless forces of the Nazi and Japanese regimes. Many former OSSers in leadership positions in the CIA, including most prominently Allen Dulles, Frank Wisner, Richard Helms, William Colby, James Angleton, Thomas Braden, and much later, William Casey, took the Donovan model and applied it aggressively in the “Cold War” era.⁷³ But while the model and even some of the personnel remained the same, the world in which they operated had changed dramatically.

In World War II, OSS had actively encouraged and supported resistance movements against the foreign armies of occupation and Nazi or Japanese regimes that had seized and controlled their countries. But in subsequent decades, the CIA routinely encouraged and supported resistance movements to undermine national governments, some of them popularly elected, deemed too sympathetic to the Soviet Union and hostile to the United States. The justification was based on a “Cold War” mentality which stressed that any gain in influence by the totalitarian regimes in the Soviet Union and Communist China was a loss for the United States. To numbers of former OSSers, in or outside of the CIA, as to many other Americans, the ends seemed to justify the means, and they generally supported the actions of the agency.⁷⁴ The CIA and its intelligence gathering and covert operations continue to enjoy endorsement by many surviving OSS veterans.⁷⁵

There has also been, however, considerable dissent by OSS veterans against what they see as misuse of the CIA and a betrayal of the legacy of the OSS. As strident anticommunism and vengeful McCarthyism in the 1950s pushed the agency to exercise its covert operations in support of regimes of political repression and right-wing dictatorships and to engage in heavy-handed intervention in the politics of underdeveloped nations, dissent was increasingly suppressed within the agency. But dissent continued to exist among some OSS and CIA veterans.⁷⁶ “The CIA is an entirely different group than the OSS, although the early CIA was built on the bones of the OSS, so to speak,” explained Rafael D. Hirtz, a former OSS officer who had served with Operational Groups in France and China. “The unfortunate thing, what happened to the CIA, at least in my belief, is that it became too political,” Hirtz said in an interview in the 1980s.”⁷⁷ Peter Sichel, who served with the 7th Army OSS unit in France, and later worked for the CIA in Berlin, Washington, and Hong Kong, resigned from the CIA in 1959. “I resigned because they were doing things I did not like,” he said. “They were sending people into nonexistent [resistance] groups in China. I did not like it when they did it in the Ukraine, but I accepted it then. Not the second time. They were sending them to their deaths or lifetime imprisonment. This was Cold War madness.”⁷⁸

Divisions among OSS veterans over polices of the CIA have continued to the present day.⁷⁹ Former intelligence officer R. Harris Smith had decried the fact that the legacy of liberalism and dissent in the CIA became a forgotten part of its history, and he argued that it was important to understand that history in order to restore legitimacy to an institution under attack for its failures and for yielding to political pressures.⁸⁰ This plea was somewhat echoed in 2007 by New York Times reporter Tim Weiner in his book, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA. This latest attack argues that from the beginning of the CIA in 1947, and despite efforts from Allen Dulles to William Casey to link its spirit to the old OSS, the CIA was essentially unable to fulfill its role as America’s central intelligence service. There were, according to Weiner, only a few halcyon moments: When Richard Helms, an OSS veteran and head of the CIA, confronted President Lyndon Johnson and then President Richard Nixon with the facts about the Vietnam War that they did not want to hear and when Robert Gates headed the CIA and “kept calm and carried on as the Soviet Union crumbled.” But as Weiner concluded, in the world the United States faced in 2007 and possibly for years to come, the country needs an effective espionage service against its enemies. “The CIA someday may serve as its founders intended,” he hoped, for in the long run, “we must depend upon it.”⁸¹

The Special Forces: Another OSS Legacy

Like the CIA, the U.S. Army’s Special Forces are also a legacy of the OSS. Because Donovan’s wartime agency was technically a civilian rather than a military organization, the U.S. Army lineage organization does not officially acknowledge a direct heritage between the OSS and the Army’s Special Forces. However, the heritage owed by today’s Special Forces to Donovan’s Special Operations, Operational Groups, and Maritime Unit is widely recognized, even by the Special Forces themselves.⁸² OSS SO teams, and particularly the Operational Groups of the OSS, were designed, like today’s Special Forces, to have the ability to conduct lengthy, long-range penetration deep into enemy area in order to organize, train, equip, and direct indigenous guerrilla forces. Unhampered by official criteria, the U.S. Army’s main historical study of its Special Forces concludes that the OSS, while not a strictly military organization, left a legacy of knowledge, which together with the experience of a few officers in guerrilla warfare “was instrumental in the creation of the Special Forces in 1952. This gave the Army a formal, continuing capability for unconventional warfare for the first time in its history.”⁸³

With the demise of the OSS in October 1945, although some of the intelligence and communications assets had been retained by the War Department and State Department, the Jedburghs, SO, and OGs, were demobilized. With the onset of the Cold War, the Army briefly considered creating special operations units in 1947; however, much of the Army leadership, still suspicious of the OSS’s achievements and focused primarily on big unit conventional warfare, quickly dismissed the idea.⁸⁴ But by 1950 with the war in Korea and the escalation of the Cold War around the globe, the United States Government sought to develop means for unconventional warfare—psychological as well as guerrilla operations—as well as dramatically increased conventional and nuclear war-making capabilities to confront the Soviet Empire and Communist China.

The Army had initially supported and cooperated with the CIA’s office of covert operations, offering it assistance in the field of guerrilla warfare by setting up a training course at the Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia. When the Korean War broke out in 1950, the Army lent some of its personnel to the CIA engaged in guerrilla activities behind enemy lines in Korea and in mainland China. But by the spring of 1951, Army leaders began to express concerns about the secrecy and relative autonomy with which the CIA was operating and whether its covert operations were actually effective. The Army’s suspicion and hostility was reciprocated by the CIA. Both were also jockeying for primary responsibility for conducting the expanding unconventional warfare.⁸⁵

Brigadier General Robert A. McClure, chief of the Army’s Psychological Warfare Office, and especially his assistant, Colonel Aaron Bank, a former OSS Jedburgh, worked to convince senior managers of the Army and the Joint Chiefs of Staff that the military should explore the development of Special Forces capabilities for behind the lines guerrilla operations. On 14 April 1952, under control of the commanding general of the U.S. Third Army, McClure was able to establish the U.S. Army’s Psychological Warfare (PSYWAR) and Special Forces Center at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. This marked the unofficial beginning of the U.S. Army’s Special Forces.⁸⁶

Bank, who later be celebrated as the “Founder of Special Forces,” had trained at OSS Areas F and B as well as SOE camps in Britain and served as a Jedburgh in France and an SO/SI rescue team leader in French Indochina. Remaining in the Army, he had been in the Counter-Intelligence Corps in Europe, and when the Korean War broke out, he had been sent to Korean with an Airborne Regimental Combat Team. In 1951, he had been brought back to Washington, as an assistant to General McClure as the Army resumed it study of unconventional warfare. Bank helped persuade the Army to include guerrilla warfare, and in the spring of 1952, he was appointed the head of the Special Forces Department in the new PSYWAR Center at Fort Bragg and commanding officer of the new 10th Special Forces Group, the first Special Forces unit, which was targeted for Europe.⁸⁷

Training, doctrine, and mission of Special Forces were based specifically on OSS concepts, especially the Operational Groups, rather than on those of the Airborne, the Rangers, or the First Special Service Group.⁸⁸ To recruit a staff for the Special Forces Department at the PSYWAR Center at Fort Bragg and to help him lead the first Special Forces unit, Bank began with two other OSS veterans in the Army. Lieutenant Colonel Jack T. Shannon, originally from Iowa, had joined OSS, trained in SO, and jumped into France on a three-man, Inter-Allied Team “Bergamotte,” in July 1944, and subsequently fought behind Japanese lines with Detachment 101 in Burma in 1945.⁸⁹ He was brought to Bragg as Bank’s deputy. Lieutenant Caesar J. Civitella from Philadelphia had trained at Areas F and B as an enlisted man in the OSS Italian OG and fought in southern France and northern Italy in World War II. Civitella had rejoined the Army in 1947 and served in the intelligence section of the 82th Airborne Division before being sent to Officers Candidate School in1951 and receiving his commission. Civitella was assigned as a recruiter and as an instructor teaching courses in guerrilla warfare and in air operations and support.⁹⁰ The three-man cadre quickly recruited a staff. Among the first of their volunteers were three OSSers. Lieutenant Colonel James Goodwin, from upstate New York, had been a student and then instructor at Area B in1942, then served with OSS in Europe. Captain Herbert R. Brucker, Alsatian born U.S. citizen and OSS trained radio operator, had served on a three-man SOE mission in France in 1944 and then an SO team in China in 1945. Brucker had been assigned to the Army’s Counter Intelligence Corps in occupied Germany after the war, then to the 82nd Airborne Division. Recruited for Special Forces, Brucker was made head of security. Subsequently, he taught clandestine operations and trade craft (dead letter drops, eliminations, etc.) in the 10th Special Forces Group He provided training not only for that group, but also developed the first “escape and evasion” training course for U.S. Navy aviators in case they were downed behind enemy lines.⁹¹ The staff also included other OSSers, like Lief Bangsboll and Jack Hemingway, plus Army veterans of World War II and the fighting in Korea.⁹²

The initial assignment was to develop an eight-week course on guerrilla warfare, escape and evasion, and subversion of a hostile state. The only existent Army Field Manual related to the topic, FM 31-21, Organization and Conduct of Guerrilla Warfare, had been prepared largely on the basis of the personal experiences of Army officers in the Philippines, like Lieutenant Colonels Wendell Fertig and Russell W. Volkmann, who had refused the order to surrender and, although untrained in unconventional warfare, had led Filipino resistance groups on Mindinao and Luzon throughout the Japanese occupation. Volckmann had worked with Bank to convince the Army about the value of special forces and was part of staff. The manual was used in the Special Forces curriculum, but, as Civitella recalled, “most of the stuff we used was from the OSS.” For constructing the curriculum, the cadre drew heavily upon OSS assessment techniques, lesson plans, and after action reports and interviews. Plus in their lectures, they drew on their own personal experiences. Bank had personally brought many classified OSS documents down from Washington in the trunk of his car. Civitella had put them in the safe from which they were used in building lesson plans, sometimes verbatim, as in the case of the description of the OG Command.⁹³

Similar to the OG sections, the basic Special Forces unit, an A Team, consisted of approximately a dozen men. Recruits had to volunteer for parachuting as well as hazardous duty. Many of them came from the Rangers, then being deactivated. The new unit was super secret, even within the Army. As in OSS, the early training of the Special Forces emphasized self-confidence and élan as well as individual skills: operations and intelligence, light and heavy weapons, demolitions, radio communications, and medical aid. Each enlisted man specialized in one area but also learned the rudiments of the others. There were also courses in organization of resistance movements and operation of their networks, agent training to include espionage and sabotage, guerrilla warfare, codes and radio communication, survival, the Fairbairn method of hand-to-hand combat, and Rex Applegate’s instinctive, point-and-shoot, pistol firing technique.⁹⁴ Aaron Bank was fanatical about training, according to former Jedburgh, Major General John K. Singlaub, “He believed that Soldiers must have expert knowledge of their weapons systems—so much knowledge and firing the equipment should be ‘second nature.’ Then the Soldier could focus solely on the mission.”⁹⁵

To provide adequate room for field exercises, Bank obtained the use of one of Fort Bragg’s satellite training areas, Camp Mackall.⁹⁶ There, as at Areas A and B in World War II, the trainees became adept at demolition work, guerrilla tactics, and ambushes. The swampy areas with abundance of snakes, frogs, and rodents proved useful in practicing survival strategies, living off of nature. But for a more practical exercise in clandestine activity, the training staff decided to take the more than 600 members of new 10th Special Forces Group outside an Army base, and into a rural, forested civilian area which would include residents, barns and safe houses, places to meet, gather and train indigenous guerrillas, as well as targets for simulated sabotage such as bridges, railroad tracks, telephone and electrical lines and power stations. For the realistic operations for the Group’s A Teams, they chose Chattahoochee National Forest in the Appalachian Mountains of northern Georgia. Special Forces used the mountainous timberlands of the U.S. Forest Service in late 1952 the way OSS had used the woods of the National Park Service in World War II.⁹⁷ In the summer of 1953, Donovan visited Fort Bragg to inspect the troops of the new 10th Special Forces Group. Impressed after a day of briefing and demonstrations, Donovan recognized that they had adopted the traditions, heritage, and legacy of OSS Special Operations. “You have revived precious memories,” he said as he left. “You are the offspring of the OSS.⁹⁸

The emphasis on the training of the Army’s Special Forces in the early 1950s was on supporting guerrilla operations and that was because the mission that was envisioned was helping anti-communist, anti-Soviet resistance groups operate in non-Russian territories of Eastern and Central Europe occupied by an invading Red Army, just as OSS groups had aided anti-fascist resistance groups behind German and Japanese lines in World War II. Indeed, after rioting broke out in cities in East Germany in the summer of 1953, Colonel Bank and the 10th Special Forces Group was sent to Bad Tölz, in the Bavarian Alps near Munich (a new unit, the 77th –later 7th--Special Forces Group was created under former OSS officer Jack Shannon, based in Fort Bragg; it was later sent to Korea).

There was little or no attention given in these early years to counterinsurgency operations against guerrilla forces. That would come in the late 1950s and early 1960s and would initiate a doctrinal battle within the U.S. Army about the proper role of Special Forces.⁹⁹

From Guerrilla to Counter-Guerrilla Warfare and the “Green Berets”

“A lot of people think Special Forces came into existence in 1952, but we were not officially recognized [then]. We were a small, secret group. It was not until 1961 when [President John F.] Kennedy recognized us that we came officially into existence,” said Caesar J. Civitella, a former OSSer and Special Forces member. “We existed in fact, and some of our people had been killed, but officially we didn’t exist before 1961.”¹⁰⁰ As the Cold War shifted to the Third World and Communists sought to control independence movements and anti-colonial guerrilla wars through “wars of national liberation,” President Kennedy saw the Special Forces as potentially effective agents of counterinsurgency. Kennedy provided the Special Forces with increased resources and status and allowed them to become the first American soldiers to wear berets, for which they became popularly known as “the Green Berets.” In the 1960s, Special Forces groups, now emphasizing counter-insurgency tactics, and the multiplier effect of having 12-man Special Forces teams that could assist or lead indigenous forces of up to 300 or 500 men, advised or actually fought against Communist-inspired guerrillas in Latin America and Southeast Asia. Although the Army’s Special Forces were cut back after the Vietnam War, they regained strength in the 1980s. The following decade, they were part of an allservice, quick-response command, the U.S. Special Operations Command created in 1997 that included an expanded force of Army Rangers as well as Navy Seals, and special operations units in the Air Force and Marines.¹⁰¹ During the first decade of the twentyfirst century there was a major new emphasis placed on the use of Special Forces.

Colonel Aaron Bank retired from the Army in 1958 but was named Honorary Colonel of the 1st Special Forces Regiment in 1986 and remained so until his death at the age of 101 in 2004.¹⁰² Like Shannon, Civitella, Brucker and others, Bank was a personal link between the OSS and the Special Forces, and he credited the OSS with being the predecessor of the Special Forces. “Although it occurred indirectly, there is no doubt that OSS gave birth not only to CIA but also the Green Berets in 1952,” Bank wrote. “All the Green Beret training programs, maneuvers, concepts, and conduct of operations were based on those of OSS. I feel that Donovan should have bestowed upon him the honor and credit for this continuity of the heritage and traditions established through his genius and foresight.”¹⁰³

Return of the Parks: Prince William Forest Park

With the end of Donovan’s organization on 1 October 1945, its successor, the War Department’s Strategic Services Unit (SSU) began to liquidate the OSS’s facilities. The Schools and Training Branch under Colonel Henson L. Robinson had been shutting down training facilities for several months and quickened the pace since August.¹⁰⁴ Area A, the Advanced Special Operations training camp, had been terminated as a training facility in early 1945. Sub-camps A-2, A-3, and A-4 were completely closed, all personnel had left, and in October the contents of the sub-camps were being inventoried for return to the National Park Service. At A-4, the headquarters for Area A, no trainees or instructors remained but there was a small staff of officers and enlisted men required to complete the closing of Area A. On 4 October, Colonel Henson L. Robins, chief of the Schools and Training Branch, estimated that the job would be completed by the middle of the month.¹⁰⁵

The process of shutting down Area A and evaluating and preparing the site for return to the National Park Service had been going on since January. After the end of training there, the staff had destroyed a number of instructional items directly related to the OSS’s sabotage and espionage operations, which would be of no use to the National Park Service. Among these were scaling ladders, firing mechanisms, door sets for lock pickers, and model girder bridges, railroad tracks, and radio towers, which had been used for teaching trainees where to place explosive charges.¹⁰⁶

In February 1945, under the supervision of Captain James E. Rodgers, the last commanding office of Detachment A, Technical Sergeant John T. Gum, a longtime employee of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC ) at the site and subsequently liaison between NPS and the OSS at Area A, had prepared a relevant inventory¹⁰⁷ Having been at the park since the late 1930s, Gum, in his multiple wartime roles as a representative of the CCC, the NPS, the Army, and the OSS, had supervised much of the OSS construction in Area A. When Area A finally shut down completely, Sergeant Gum was transferred to Area C, the OSS Communications Branch facility, in the eastern sector of the park. In addition, the NPS Park Manager, Captain Ira B. Lykes, U.S. Marine Corps, Reserves, who performed the dual role of forestry officer at the Quantico Marine Base during the weekdays and park manager on weekends, was directed by NPS headquarters to provide a final inspection of the sub-camps, when the OSS finally left. Lykes’ inspection would confirm whether the War Department had performed its responsibilities under the leasing agreement, which were to restore the grounds and facilities to their prewar condition except for changes that were acceptable to the National Park Service. In addition to those conditions, NPS wanted to make sure that the approximately 1,000 to 1,500 more acres purchased by the War Department for Area were included when the park was returned to the Department of the Interior.¹⁰⁸

Preparing the inventories in 1945, the Army distinguished in Area A between properties of the National Park Service under the Department of the Interior and of the Civilian Conservation Corps. Until the early 1940s when it was terminated, the CCC had operated under the War Department or temporary New Deal agencies. OSS sub-camp A- 4 was an old CCC work camp, and the Schools and Training Branch believed that National Park Service had in its words, “nothing to do with the buildings and equipment” there, so they were not covered by the leasing agreement. The OSS inventory listed 24 buildings in the CCC camp that had been taken over by OSS and remained there. The inventory listed contrasting uses made of them by the CCC and the OSS. Often these were similar: the CCC headquarters building, for example, became the OSS headquarters; the CCC barracks, each holding 40 men, became the OSS barracks; and the CCC oil house became the OSS Motor Pool Office. But sometimes they were put to new uses: The CCC infirmary became the OSS Guard House; a CCC structure listed only as “Building,” became the OSS Post Exchange and Recreation Hall. The mess hall had been retained, but it was remodeled and its kitchen augmented with new equipment, including three gas ranges, two portable electric refrigerators, two steam tables, a deep fat fryer, an electric peeler, and a dishwashing machine.

OSS had erected nearly a dozen new buildings in Area A-4, and they remained there at least at the time of the inventory in early 1945. Among them were a one-hundred man, standard Army latrine, actually a latrine/washroom that included toilets, washstands, showers and hot water heaters and that replaced the CCC’s two portable pit latrines. There was also an auto washing building, carpenter shop, storage house, commissary, small code room/storage building, a sentry box, and most expensive, a tenroom Bachelor Officers’ Quarters (BOQ) accommodation. At A-4, OSS had also constructed a rifle practice range with ten standard targets.¹⁰⁹ A report on A-4 by Sergeant Gum in October 1945 indicated that the National Park Service would not ask that these new or remodeled buildings be returned to their previous condition, because “prior to our occupancy, the National Park Service had no definite plans for using this area [this former CCC facility] as a summer camp.”¹¹⁰

Unlike the former CCC facility, the other OSS sub-camps at Area A had previously been built and used by the National Park Service as summer camps. The OSS had not removed or destroyed any of the NPS buildings, but it had made changes, which it considered necessary improvements. Most importantly, most of the buildings in all the sub-camps as well as the CCC facility had been winterized. Insulated wallboard had been installed inside and the outside creosoted. Wood or coal-burning heating stoves had been added. OSS installed 29 hot water tanks in the washroom/latrines, mess halls, and infirmaries, as well as the headquarters, guard house, instructors’ quarters, students’ quarters, and Bachelor Officers’ Quarters. Other improvements included a new sewer field; porch enclosures for a few buildings, and upgrading of the kitchens and mess halls in each sub-camp.¹¹¹

A number of new structures had been built in Area A. At A-2, these included several wooden buildings: four 25-man latrine/washrooms, an enclosed 20 by 40 foot Pistol House; and an 8 by 8 foot guard house. At A-3, a latrine/washroom was the only new building, but a demolition area was constructed there for practice with explosives. At A-5, OSS had constructed a 12 by 16 foot Boat House on the little lake on the South Fork of Quantico Creek for practice in water crossings and boat landings.¹¹²

The OSS understood that it would have to “obliterate” the facilities it had constructed for use of weaponry and explosives. The Special Use Permit granted to the War Department stipulated that “structures of a purely military technical nature” would be removed by the War Department and “the site restored as nearly as possible to its condition at the time of issuance of this permit.” The dangerous facilities to be “obliterated” and restored to prior condition included the Demolition Area, where trainees had practiced with explosives, the two brick or cinderblock magazines for storing ammunition, and outdoor pistol, rifle, and hand grenade ranges and a mortar range.¹¹³ Other military structures in Area A to be demolished were a “Mystery House” or “House of Horrors,” and three “Problem Houses.” The Problem Houses may have been used to pose particular challenges for the trainees to solve or they may have represented a village in enemy territory. The Mystery House contained a number of pop-up targets, resembling armed enemy soldiers, to test the trainee’s nerves and skill in instinctive pistol firing in frightening conditions.¹¹⁴

Area C in Prince William Forest Park

At the two sub-camps, C-1 and C-4, in Area C, the OSS Communications Training School, located in the eastern sector of Prince William Forest Park, formal training of any sort stopped prior to 1 October 1945, and the staff was ordered to prepare the camps for closing. Colonel Robinson expected that would be completed by 1 November, and the personnel involved then reassigned or transferred.¹¹⁵ Sergeant Joseph J. Tully had been part of the C-1 cadre since his return from the London base station in November 1944. Years later, he remembered that in September 1945, he and a couple of the other enlisted men at Area C were kept busy transferring the remaining ammunition and weaponry from the magazine and arsenal at the training camp to the Corps of Engineers post at nearby Fort Belvoir, Virginia. “We made a trip every other day. A couple of guys would load up a truck—a two and a half ton—and take it over. We took over all the excess ammunition—small arms stuff and grenades—and weapons too, mostly ‘Tommy guns,’ rifles, and .45s.”¹¹⁶

Donovan’s organization had maintained and even improved existing National Park Service buildings at the two sub-camps in Area C. The Army winterized the buildings, made some changes to various lodgehalls, and dramatically upgraded the equipment and facilities at the mess halls and kitchens. In addition, the OSS erected several new wooden structures. At C-1, these included most prominently a radio repair shop, but also a radio transmitter building, a 25-man latrine/washroom, a guard house, two 8-by-8 foot sentry boxes, and an undesignated, portable wooden structure, 16 by 16 feet, labeled simply, “Plywood Building,” which may have been a classroom. C-4 was the primary training area for the Communications Branch. There, the main new construction, much more extensive than at C-1, included a Recreation Hall, originally called a “Multi-Purpose Building,” which cost $24,000, and a Bachelor Officers’ Quarters, which cost $12,000. Other new structures included a 100-man latrine/washroom, three 16-by-16 foot “Plywood Buildings,” possibly serving as classrooms, and an addition to the mess hall. The Army had also brought in a prefabricated, metal Quonset Hut. To house even more trainees, the OSS provided 25 combination wood and canvas tents, each holding four men, creating a so-called “tent city” capable of housing 100 men, for a total cost of $5,000. The “tent city” was dismantled, but most of the new wooden buildings were retained by the National Park Service. For weapons practice in Area C, the OSS had constructed a outdoor pistol range, a rifle range, and a hand grenade range. Like the magazine and arsenal, these weapons ranges were to be totally obliterated before the facility was returned to the National Park Service.¹¹⁷

Wartime Hazards and Mysteries in the Park

To return Prince William Forest Park to the National Park Service, official procedure required that the Army first certify that Training Areas A and C were “surplus” property, that is, no longer needed by the Army. That process began on 16 October, when Lieutenant Colonel Ainsworth Blogg, former commander of Area B who had spent most of the war as Executive Officer of the Schools and Training Branch, informed the SSU Counsel’s Office that Areas A and C were being closed by the Schools and Training Branch and would be considered surplus to the branch’s needs as of 1 November 1945. Referring to the terms of the lease, Blogg reported that the areas’ “present condition is equal to or better than the condition when received by OSS. Certain changes in landscaping have been made which may not be desirable from the standpoint of the National Park Service and certain buildings have been constructed, and certain changes made in existing buildings, but by and large the property is in excellent condition.”¹¹⁸

Although the War Department subsequently declared the property surplus as of 1 November 1945, a hitch occurred in returning the area to the National Park Service because of unexploded shells and other hazards that remained from the OSS use of the park.¹¹⁹ Colonel Blogg had declared that portions of the area could be used without limitation by the National Park Service “except for one area which was used for a mortar range and which contains unexploded shells.” Schools and Training Branch had requested the Corps of Engineers at Fort Belvoir for assist in a “decontamination of this area.”¹²⁰ There were actually three abandoned mortar target ranges in Area A, and the process of getting Army Engineers with metal detectors to locate and remove unexploded shells, “duds,” or other hazardous items from those and other areas in the park had begun a year earlier in October 1944. Sergeant John Gum tried throughout 1945 to get the Post Engineer’s Office at Fort Belvoir to check Area A for “unexploded booby traps, antipersonnel mines, and dud mortar shells.”¹²¹ Colonel Robinson pressed the Engineers again in January 1946.¹²² But was not until August 1946, NPS was able to obtain written assurance from the Army Engineers’ Bomb and Shell Disposal unit at Fort Belvoir that Areas A and C were “long since cleared” of unexploded mortar shells, grenades, boobytraps and other explosives.¹²³

The area was returned to the National Park Service in 1946. However, occasionally over the following years, a “dud” shell, fragment, or other remnant from the OSS training in World War II, would be found in the park. Long after the war, NPS rangers part of a rifle-launched grenade in a building roof, the tip of a bazooka round in a mound of each, and most mysteriously, a giant stone with an iron pipe that looked like a gun barrel, protruding from it.¹²⁴ This last may have been a mock tank for trainees to practice using destroying with bazookas or improvised devices such as “Molotov cocktails,” bottles filled with gasoline and a flaming cloth wick.

Perhaps the strangest remnant that remained, at least temporarily, from the War Department’s occupation of Prince William Forest Park was an odd barrack-like building in the southeastern part of the park. Robert A. Noile was six years old when the OSS left in 1945. He grew up across Old Joplin Road, only 300 yards away from the park. Together with other neighborhood youngsters, including the children of Ira Lykes and John Gum, he frequently played in the park immediately after the war and for several years afterwards. The youngsters simply crossed the street and entered the park to play in the woods and the abandoned buildings. On hot days, they would swim in a big, lidless wooden water tower or in the lake. But what still puzzles Noile, now a ranger in one of the nearby county parks, is a weird, barrack-like building that they discovered. What made this structure unusual was that the floor and the walls up to the windows were covered inside with sheet metal. Similarly intriguing, there were carvings in German on the wooden frameworks around the windows. “We played in those barracks,” Noile remembered, “and we had no idea what that [metal sheathing] meant. We kept seeing carvings on the wood, names. We didn’t know German. I understand now that it was German, but we didn’t know [then] what it was.”¹²⁵

No written record of such a structure has appeared, but a couple of different explanations of the use of such a building are plausible. One is that it was a simulated Nazi interrogation cell used in training spies and saboteurs to resist or escape or to test their abilities to withstand interrogation by the Gestapo. Another explanation is that after the OSS abandoned Area A in January 1945, German POWs might have been brought and housed there temporarily. Recent disclosures have revealed that the Army and Navy ran a super secret POW holding and interrogation facility (known only by as “P.O. Box 1142”) for special prisoners—submarine crews or high ranking officers or scientists—not far away at Fort Hunt in Fairfax County, Virginia, in what is today part of the George Washington Memorial Parkway.¹²⁶ Until more evidence becomes available, the function of the metal-sheathed room, long since demolished, at Prince William Forest Park remains a mystery.

Return of the Park to the National Park Service in 1946

“After I was mustered out [of the Marines] in January 1946, I immediately went back to the job,” former Park Manager Ira Lykes recalled. “Of course, OSS had closed up and left a lot of fine development in some of the campgrounds, [but] they left an awful mess in some other places.”¹²⁷ One day shortly after he returned, he was walking over a meadow, and he found “one whole field had signs all around it, ‘Do Not Cross—Mine Area.’ Well, I, of course, wondered immediately what to do. OSS had been disbanded….” Lykes drove to Fort Belvoir to see a colonel named Hogg, who had worked on the Alcan Highway to Alaska in World War II. The Park Manager wanted Hogg to remove them if they were still there, and he also asked whether the Army Engineers could help restore and improve the property, specifically whether they could build a network of internal roads to connect the cabin camps, because at the time it was a nine mile ride over external state roads to get, for example, from cabin camps that were actually not far apart in the northeastern and southeastern parts of the part. Lykes had hoped the OSS would do this, but they had not. Now, however, Hogg agreed that the Army Engineers could complete that construction if Lykes could provide the materials. As part of the postwar combat training exercises, units of combat engineers from Fort Belvoir were being sent to nearby Fort A.P. Hill to build roads and bridges and other facilties. But afterwards, they would demolish them, so a new unit could do the same thing. This was wasteful and bad for morale, Hogg said, but if Lykes could rename the projects he wanted and link them to military missions, the Army engineers could build them. So Lykes ordered military roads and bridges and asked for a landing strip that would become a play field. A dam for a swimming pool was called an impoundment, a riding stable was termed an advance post, a watch tower was as an observation post.

Lykes obtained $35,000 for materials the first year from the National Park Service, and the Army Engineers arrived in September 1946 and immediately went to work building roads, bridges, and dams and other facilities. As they worked, Lykes was surprised to see small planes fly overhead and drop bags of flour simulating bombs and shells and combat conditions. The Army Engineers often worked as fast as Lykes could mark out the projects. Many of these engineer troops were African-American soldiers and Lykes said that when they learned that the cabin camps in the northeast end of the park were for underprivileged black children from the capital, “believe me they really put their heart and soul in it, because they felt they were helping their own people and, most importantly, they knew that what they were doing was not going to be torn up by the next troop that came down, that it was going to stay. It was something lasting and something of value.”¹²⁸

This innovative partnership continued from 1946 until the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950. By February 1948, the Army Engineers had completed 47 miles of internal roads, plus trails, two bridges, an earth filled dam and swimming area, an administration building and traffic circle, a central service area and two ranger stations. They had also demolished unusable portable and temporary buildings left by the OSS near Cabin Camp 4 and relocated the OSS-constructed Boat House from Cabin Camp 5 to Cabin Camp 2.¹²⁹ More work was done over the next two years, including a new entrance road, this one about a quarter of a mile from U.S. Route One. Lykes estimated that over the nearly four-year period, the labor and equipment used by the Corps of Engineers in this “practice work” would otherwise have cost the National Park Service well over one million dollars.¹³⁰

With the return of the park to civilian usage in 1946, Lykes had begun immediately to restore it, resume camping, and to give it a new name. Chopawamsic Recreational Demonstration Area now seemed archaic, cumbersome, and inappropriate as it was no longer an RDA but a permanent part of the National Park System. National Park Service officials concurred with the idea of a new name, but instead of Lykes’ suggestion of “Old Dominion” to link the park to the entire State of Virginia, they recommended naming it in honor of the county. Local authorities concurred, and on 20 August 1948, the facility was renamed Prince William Forest Park.¹³¹

Chopawamsic Recreational Demonstration Area and its successor, Prince William Forest Park, were originally designed only for organized and extended group cabin camping, not for casual day usage. Until 1951, when the Pine Grove Picnic Area was constructed, there were no day use facilities in the park. During World War II, the park had been, of course, closed to the public while the OSS was there, but even after it reopened, there was little if any day usage. The few roads within the park were unpaved and made of practical if uninviting, rough gravel. The memory among local residents of the forbidden access during the war and the armed sentries, also surely deterred prospective visitors. If these were not enough, signs posted around the perimeter of the park after the war warned: “Federal Reservation: Closed except to persons holding camping permits.”¹³²

The relationship of the park with the military and national security did not end in 1946 when the NPS resumed control. The Army Engineers had helped with improvements from 1946 to 1950. In the early 1950s, when the Central Intelligence Agency expanded its covert operations and abandoned its use of Army training facilities, it briefly considered using the old OSS training area. In the opening months of 1951, during the massive military build-up that accompanied the Korean War, the CIA informed the National Park Service that it intended to take over the entire park as a training area. Opposition led by local civic leaders including the editor of the Washington Star and the district’s influential member of Congress, Representative Howard W. Smith, turned back the CIA’s bid to resume the training of spies, saboteurs, and other covert operators in the park.¹³³ Instead, the CIA built its own training facility for clandestine services on ten thousand acres at Camp Peary, near Williamsburg, Virginia.

Relations with the Marine Corps

Given its proximity to the U.S. Marine Corps Base in Quantico, Virginia, Prince William Forest Park has had a continuing relationship with the Marine Corps and its parent organization, the Department of the Navy. In World War I, Congress had appropriated funds for the Navy to purchase a site for a Marine Barracks not far from Washington, D.C. The site chosen was in the Virginia woodlands at Quantico, some 35 miles south of the capital. The barracks were built and thousands of Marines were trained there in the First World War. By 1920, the facility was expanded to included a centralized officer training program, at the new Marine Corps Schools, which eventually developed into today’s Marine Corps University.¹³⁴

The National Park Service arrived at what would become Prince William Forest Park in 1935, and from the beginning consulted with officials at the Marine Corps base in regard to plans for the recreational area, because the park and the base shared a common boundary for a considerable distance. NPS and the USMC also worked together to find what Marine officials had called “mutually advantageous” ways to utilize these “contiguous areas under Federal control.”¹³⁵ In 1938, for example, the Department of the Interior granted the Department of the Navy permission to build a dam and reservoir on the Chopawamsic Creek in the park land to store water for the Marine base. For the next few years, until it became unnecessary after the United States entered the war in December 1941, the Park Service provided permits for military training exercises by Marines on park land.¹³⁶

In World War II, the Marine Corps expanded dramatically, growing from 25,000 officers and men in 1939 to 143,000 by mid-1942 and nearly 500,000 by the end of the war in 1945.¹³⁷ As early as 1938, the Marines began conducting military maneuvers in the adjacent, NPS wood lands.¹³⁸ After the declaration of war in December 1941, and the rapid growth of the Marine Corps, field maneuvers on the park lands became so frequent in May 1942, Park Manager Ira Lykes complained that the Marines “have assumed the right to enter upon the area without advising or even consulting this office.”¹³⁹ At the same time, Lykes continued to maintain a cooperative relationship with the personnel of the Marine base. He emphasized the park’s recreational value to military personnel, including fishing in its well stocked streams and ponds.¹⁴⁰ In the hot, dry summer of 1942, Lykes voluntarily taught Marines the latest techniques in fighting forest fires so they could more effectively control fires when they began in the woodlands of their reservation.¹⁴¹

During most of the war, Lykes actually served in the Marine Corps while continuing his now limited responsibilities at the park, which, since it was occupied by the OSS, was closed to the public for the duration. Maj. Gen. Philip H. Torrey, commanding officer at Quantico, obtained a commission for Lykes as a first lieutenant in the Marines and an appointment to serve at the Marine Base at Quantico as a provost marshal or security officer, particularly responsible for the forestry program, for the prevention or control of fire on some 94,000 wooded acres of the Marine base. That included approximately 5,000 acres of the park land south of Joplin Road that the Marines used as an extension of their base during the war and declined after the war to relinquish it to the park service. That was an area, Lykes later recalled, that the Marines called the “Guadalcanal Area” after the fierce jungle battles with the Japanese on the Pacific Island of Guadalcanal in the winter of 1942-43. The Marines had 13 firing ranges, mockup villages, and other installations for field exercises.¹⁴² The little village of Joplin, a hamlet with a general store and a schoolhouse, near the intersection of old Joplin Road and Breckinridge Road, was torn down by the Marine Corps. All that remained is a cement slab, the foundation for the old schoolhouse, and some of the big oak trees.¹⁴³ Assigned to active duty on 3 April 1943, Lykes reported directly to the Commanding General of the Marine Barracks, Quantico, for what was called Engineering duty. The National Park Service officially put Lykes on furlough due to military service.¹⁴⁴ But because the base and the park were adjacent, Lykes, as he later recalled, could “serve two masters.”¹⁴⁵

Lykes remained at his new duties with the Marines on weekdays during the war, but he would resume his responsibilities as manager of the park on weekends. As indicated in Chapter Seven, Lykes remained in the park manager’s house just south of Joplin Road for the duration of the war, and he maintained social and professional relations with the commanding officers of the OSS training camps, such as Capt. Arden Dow at Area A and Maj. Albert Jenkins at area C, as well as the Marine Corps, Maj. Gen. Phillip Torrey. Lykes kept an eye on the park property, the area north of Joplin Road being occupied by the OSS and south of that road being used by the Marine Corps. During weekdays, the sole administrative employee of the park was Ms. Thelma Williams, Lykes’ secretary. She worked in a one-room temporary headquarters for the park off Joplin Road. Sharing the office with her was a clerical employee of the OSS, a secretive man, who Lykes reported was given to drink. Thelma Williams would fill Lykes in on the week’s developments when he returned to the office at the end of each week.¹⁴⁶

At the end of the war, the Marine Corps relieved Captain Lykes from active duty and put him on terminal leave on 3 December 1945, and he returned to his former position as park manager with NPS on that date, more than a month before his terminal leave from the Marines ended and he received a Certificate of Honorable Discharge from the Marine Corps on 21 January 1946. In fact, by that time, he had already been back at work at the park fulltime since the beginning of December 1945.¹⁴⁷

Expansion of the Marine Base into the Park

The Marine Corps’ wartime expansion of a force of 500,000 was accompanied by major enlargement of the Marine base at Quantico. What had started out in 1917 as a base covering five miles of forest bordering the Potomac River, had grown during the next several decades to a vast military reservation and training area covering nearly 100 square miles and a community of more than 12,000 military and civilian personnel, including families.₁₄₈ That expansion led to a rather longstanding controversy about control over the southern area of the park. At issue were 4,862 acres south of Route 619, the old Joplin Road. As the Marine base expanded during World War II and acquired some 50,420 acres west of U.S. Route 1, it also sought utilization for training purposes of the 4,862-acre tract of adjoining park land south of Route 619. That part of the park had never been developed for recreation and had preserved as a wilderness by NPS with only a one-room temporary office and a small maintenance area in it.¹⁴⁹ Talks between Marine Corps’ generals and National Park Service officials over the tract began as early as 1941, and by 1943, when the park north of Route 619 was already being used by the OSS, the Marines were actively utilizing the park land south of Route 619. Park Manager Lykes had conversations with some Marine generals in which the possibility of the Marine Corps purchasing and adding to the park, approximately 1,900 acres of Quantico Creek watershed lands west of the park in exchange for a like amount in the wilderness tract on the Chopawamsic Creek watershed in the south part of the park being added to the Marine Corps Reservation.¹⁵⁰ The National Park Service worked on a land transfer agreement. Due to wartime needs, and in anticipation of such an exchange and permanent agreement, the Marine Corps was issued a temporary permit in 1943 to use the entire 4,862 acre-tract of park land south of Route 619 for the duration of the war plus six months.¹⁵¹

During the war, the Marines used the Park Service tract south of Route 619 for military field exercises, lumbering, and other operations, but although the 1943 agreement was technically terminated in 1946, the entire tract of nearly 5,000 acres appeared to be a fixture of the Marine Corps Schools. Negotiations began at the level of the Secretaries of the Interior and the Navy by their respective legal and real estate divisions, but the talks soon broke down.¹⁵² They resumed, however, and reached an agreement. Based on that agreement, Congress, on 22 June 1948, Congress adopted Public Law 736. The 1948 legislation authorized the transfer of nearly 5,000 acres of park land to the Navy to be used by the Marines; it also authorized up to $10,000 for the purchase of 1,500 acres of privately owned land in and around the park; and it provided for the transfer to the park of 1,139 acres that the War Department had purchased during the war.¹⁵³ Although the War Department’s land was transferred to the park, the $10,000 for the purchase of additional park lands was never appropriated, and consequently, the transfer agreement between the park and the Marine base was not carried through. Instead of resolving the issue, the law itself became the subject of continuing dispute between the Navy and Interior departments, which disagreed over questions of jurisdiction, funding, and the special use permit that had been granted to the Marine Corps during the war.¹⁵⁴

The dispute would continue long after Park Superintendent Ira Lykes left Prince William Forest Park in 1951. Lykes left to become superintendent of Shiloh National Military Park, at the site of the Civil War Battle of Shiloh, at Pittsburgh Landing, Tennessee. There in addition to managing the national park and cemetery he raised funds for and produced and directed an award winning documentary film, Shiloh—Portrait of a Battle. In 1956, he was assigned to NPS headquarters, where he served in the park planning office as chief of the Park Practice Program, established to expand aspects of the park and recreation program. He retired in 1963, but was called back to continue that work. When his wife, Betty, died in 1968, Lykes sold their home in West Springfield, Virginia, and moved to Lake City, Florida, where he taught classes at the Forest Ranger School there and Lake City Junior College.¹⁵⁵

Resolving a Half Century Jurisdictional Dispute

The dispute between the Marine Corps Base and Prince William Forest Park over the southern part of the park south of old Joplin Road continued for half a century. The Marine Corps continued to use the nearly 5,000 acre special use permit tract. But the National Park Service, claiming that the Navy Department had not fulfilled an obligation to purchase and transfer some 1,500 to 1,900 acres surrounding the park in exchange for the southern part it had occupied, declined to provide the Marine Corps with permanent legal jurisdiction over the contested tract of 4,862 acres south of old Joplin Road. There were several attempts at solutions, one a personal attempt at a compromise by NPS Director George B. Hartzog, Jr., but advocates of all or nothing on both sides defeated such attempts at a compromise solution.¹⁵⁶ By the 1980s, after the new Interstate 95 had opened up the area to commercial development, it was clear that soaring property values had made prohibitively expensive any acquisition and donation of land by the Navy to the National Park Service.

Robert (“Bob”) Hickman became superintendent at Prince William Forest Park in October 1994. He had been a member of the Park Service since 1973, and had been site manager of NPS section of the Baltimore-Washington Parkways from 1984 to 1992. In 1987, he has served as acting Chief Ranger and Assistant Superintendent at Catoctin Mountain Park.¹⁵⁷ At Prince William Forest Park, Hickman found that the contested jurisdiction issue took up more of his time than anything else. “We began to explore each option again,” he said. “We went to the Marine Corps to see if they would be interested in dividing the property in the spirit of the 1948 law—1,500 to 1,700 acres for the park, and the Marine Corps to get the rest,” Hickman recalled.” The Corps was interested. Negotiations started with Brigadier General Edwin C. Kelley, Jr. and concluded with his successor, Brigadier General Frances C. Wilson. On 10 March 1998 in Lejeune Hall on the Marine Corps Base, she and Hickman signed a breakthrough Memorandum of Understanding.¹⁵⁸

Emphasizing mutual goals of both the park and the base and providing a scenario of future actions to achieve these, the Memorandum of Understanding of 1998 sought to settle the land issue by fulfilling the 1948 legislation without any cost to the government and to resolve the longstanding dispute over boundary and jurisdictional issues. Shifting to cooperation, representatives of the park and the base agreed to develop the watersheds jointly, keep the clearing of forests to a minimum, and provide joint recreational use of Breckinridge Reservoir and along mutual border, including development of a “Green Corridor,” a strip extending 300 feet on either side of Route 619, which runs between the park and the base.¹⁵⁹ In addition to jointly addressing common concerns, the parties understood that they would resolve the jurisdictional dispute by splitting the contested acreage. Park Service would regain complete public use of a sizable block of property south of old Joplin Road (Route 619), and the Marine Corps would receive permanent jurisdiction over lands to the east, south and west of that property.¹⁶⁰

With the two federal entities now in agreement, Congress authorized the transfer of jurisdiction over the land, and President George W. Bush signed the authorization into law in December 2002.¹⁶¹ Under the actual jurisdictional transfer agreement signed between the two federal entities in August 2003 and made effective 22 September 2003, the jurisdictional confusion perpetuated by the half-century old dispute was finally resolved. In effect, the park gained or regained full jurisdiction over about 1,700 acres south of old Joplin Road (Virginia Route 1619) that it had lost to the Marine base as a result of World War II. The Marines kept nearly 3,400 acres.¹⁶² “The Marines under the1948 legislation were to receive 5,000 acres,” Bob Hickman said in reflecting on the agreement. “Instead the park retained lands and gained their full use for the public, and gained some Marine Corps’ land, and the Marines received 3,398 acres that they could use exclusively for their purposes. And a confusing patchwork of jurisdictions was simplified to a point which each agency could pursue its mission more effectively.”¹⁶³

Prince William Forest Park Today

Prince William Forest Park continued to evolve in the decades after the war. Especially since the 1960s, its mission had grown from preservation and group camping to include day use. Organized camping resumed immediately after the war, but the subsequent transformation into an increasingly suburban area and the large number of daily visitors, led to a new and equal emphasis on day-use facilities. Ira Lykes’s successors as park superintendent shifted the emphasis away from long term organized camping in permanent structures for a few character building organizations toward facilities for tent camping, hiking, motoring, picnicking, fishing, canoeing, and swimming for larger numbers of users. The result was the creation of an internal scenic driving looping through the park, picnic grounds, tent campgrounds, a nature center, and a Visitor Center.¹⁶⁴

In 2007, nearly 250,000 visitors a year came to Prince William Forest Park, which under Park Superintendent Robert Hickman continued to offer day usage as well as overnight camping in the cabin camps and in a concession operated trailer park. In addition, the park has preserved one of the largest representative samples of Piedmont Forest in the National Park Service. It also acts as a sanctuary for many different kinds of plants, animals, birds and other forms of wildlife, and it protects most of the Quantico Creek watershed.

More than 150 of the 250 structures in the park are listed on the National Register of Historic Places, some of them constructed by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s and some by the Office of Strategic Services in World War II. The Visitor Center includes information about the Prince William Forest Park for the tens of thousands of visitors who stop by each year. There is information about camping and recreational usage of the park, material about the resources of the park, its physical characteristics, its flora and fauna. There is also material about the history of the area from prehistoric times when Native Americans used the natural resources in the park to the present day. The visitor’s center also contains materials and artifacts concerning the history of the park itself. It begins with its founding as the Chopawamsic Recreational Demonstration Area in the 1930s. The World War II role of the park is visually represented through a number of artifacts—radios, codebooks photographs, and some mortar shell fragments —as well as a plaque provided by the OSS Communications Branch Veterans to commemorate the OSS communications school at Area C. All of this helps to inform visitors of the park’s role as a site for training of OSS special operations personnel, secret intelligence agents, and radio operators during the war. For as this study has indicated, the wartime use of Prince William Forest Park in Virginia—by the OSS and by the Marine Corps—had important impacts on the park itself as well as on the American victory in World War II.

Returning Catoctin Mountain Park to the NPS

OSS Training Area B, which had provided Basic Special Operations courses in 1942 and 1943 and advanced Operational Group courses in 1943-1944, had been abandoned as a training camp by the OSS on 20 February 1944.¹⁶⁵ But other wartime users replaced the OSS at Catoctin Mountain Park. A new Special Use Permit was issued by Acting Secretary of the Interior Abe Fortas on 31 May 1944 authorizing the use “for war purposes” of the two cabin camps (Camps Nos.1 and 2) and the old CCC work camp, as well as 1,800 acres in the undeveloped northwest portion of the park. The undeveloped area would be used by Army trainees at Military Intelligence Training Center at Camp Ritchie as well as the Marines who remained at Cabin Camp No. 1 (Misty Mount) to provide security for the Presidential Retreat. Camp Ritchie was overcrowded, and the initial idea was for some of its trainees to be accommodated at Camp No. 2 (Greentop), but that never occurred as Ritchie’s housing problem had ended.¹⁶⁶ Neither Cabin Camp No. 2 nor the CCC Camp buildings (Round Meadow) were occupied by the Army after 31 May 1944 except by two or three soldiers assigned as a fire guar. Occasionally in 1944 and 1945, small continents of intelligence trainees from Ritchie conducted day or night maneuvers in the undeveloped northwest section of the park, but that stopped in the summer of 1945. Catoctin Park Manager Garland B. (“Mike”) Williams reported that in August 1945, that the Army said it had no further use for the park and intended to declare it surplus property and return it to the National Park Service.¹⁶⁷

With the end of the war and the end of the OSS in October 1952, Mike Williams moved quickly to have the park restored to its normal condition under the lease agreement. Unlike Ira Lykes or John Gum at Prince William Forest Park, Mike Williams had remained a civilian in the National Park Service throughout the war. At 55 in 1945, Williams had served as fulltime custodian of the park throughout the war.¹⁶⁸ At the end of the war, he resumed management of the property. That meant deciding what wartime changes to keep and which to eliminate, and to get the Army and the Marines to fix up or otherwise restore the facilities they had used. Even as Williams began this task, however, he suffered a setback. His residence, the Park Manager’s House originally built in 1939, burned to the ground on 21 October 1945, the result of a chimney fire.¹⁶⁹ Williams, his wife, Grace, and their three sons moved temporarily to a house on east Main Street in nearby Thurmont.¹⁷⁰ The Park Manager’s Residence, now called Quarters 1, was rebuilt and reoccupied by the Williams family in 1947. It still exists today behind the Visitor Center.¹⁷¹

Wartime occupation of the park by the OSS had an important impact on Catoctin Mountain Park. For security purposes, the Army had added obtained 288 additional acres to the park’s original 9,832 acres.¹⁷² Mike Williams reported favorably in October 1945 on a number of improvements the OSS had made. It had winterized Cabin Camp No. 2 (Greentop), the buildings being sealed overhead and along the side walls with plaster board. It had installed a large forced-air heater for the central wash house. But, there were also changes that Williams said were of no use, or even dangerous, in regard to the civilian use of the park. The Army Engineers would have to eliminate these and restore the sites to their prewar conditions. A demolition area with bulldozed surface and its protective embankment and observation pits was one of these, so were the obstacle course, and the outdoor pistol and rifle ranges. A number of military-related wooden structures would have to be removed, including the “trainazium” resembling a giant “jungle gym” and “Dan” Fairbairn’s “House of Horrors.” As a result of OSS demonstrations of heavy explosives in one section of the park, a vacant, old house had collapsed, and wreckage needed to be taken away.¹⁷³

Condition of the park roads, mostly gritty dirt roads, had long concerned Mike Williams. They were susceptible to serious erosion, even washouts from sustained heavy rains, and they suffered even more under the heavy vehicular traffic of the military, both the OSS and the Marines. Williams emphasized the need for improvements, particularly on the narrow, twisting graveled road between Thurmont and Hagerstown. When he could not get help from the military, he worked with local, state, and federal authorities to convert it into a modern highway. Through a federal-state program, Williams was able to get construction started in the spring of 1944 on what would become State Route 77.¹⁷⁴

Army Engineers had the responsibility for restoring the area to the condition at the time the War Department had it taken over in 1942, or to the satisfaction of the National Park Service. The first thing that Williams wanted when the war ended was to make sure that park was safe. That meant ensuring that all remaining booby-traps, mines and unexploded munitions, most of them in the undeveloped northwestern quadrant, were eliminated. By the end of September 1945, the Post Engineer at Camp Ritchie, certified the area as “decontaminated.”¹⁷⁵ To ensure safety of the civilians who would use the park, Williams insisted on personally inspecting the area, which he did in February 1946, accompanied by a Bomb and Shell Disposal Team. No unexploded munitions were found, and the area was deemed safe for public recreational use.¹⁷⁶ In 2000, however, a mortar round was found in the undeveloped northwest area, and as a result, the Corps of Engineers began a new series of field studies.¹⁷⁷

At the end of World War II, the Army classified Cactoctin Mountain Park as “surplus to the War Department needs,” effective 31 October 1945. Withdrawing the handful of fire guards, the Army officially abandoned Catoctin Mountain Park. Mike Williams accompanied Army Engineers as they covered the area and inspected all buildings and other structures used by the OSS. The Engineers prepared estimates for removing the military structures that Williams deemed were unsuitable and for clearing and grading the demolition areas, magazine, pistol and rifle range ‘trainazium,” “House of Horrors,” taking away the wreckage of the destroyed vacant house, and for general cleanup of the area. The cost was estimated at nearly $41,000, almost as much as their original construction.¹⁷⁸ Williams asked the Corps of Engineers what the Army intended to do with the buildings and equipment in the old CCC work camp, and he was delighted to learn that the Army Engineers considered it to be the property of the National Park Service. Although it was not suitable for a group camp, the CCC camp could benefit the NPS management of the park in a number of ways.¹⁷⁹

A Restoration Survey of the “Catoctin Training Center” by the Army Engineers in October 1945 listed the changes that had OSS had made at the park and what the Engineers, in consultation with Park Manager Mike Williams, estimated needed to be done to restore the area while keeping the changes that the NPS would accept.¹⁸⁰ Williams accepted a number of the new buildings and improvements at Camp No. 2 (Greentop) as well as the CCC work camp, particularly the winterizing, and improvements in the mess hall and kitchen facilities. He also accepted the replacement of chemical toilets with flush toilets in several barrack as well as the construction of a 25,000-gallon concrete water reservoir with wooden roof, a pumping station and water lines, additions to the waste disposal facilities, including an 8’ by 18’ by 10’ concrete septic tank, a pump house and 7,500 feet of sewer lines.¹⁸¹ The Army Engineers noted that in regard to eliminations Williams wanted made to Camp No. 2 (Greentop), since the Army’s use of that facility had been terminated in October 1945 so that it could be reassigned, at least temporarily to the Marines, it was not clear whether the Army or the Marines should be required to make that restoration.¹⁸²

Marines Move Up to Greentop

With NPS’s permission, the Marine Corps’ security detail for the Presidential Retreat had moved up the hill in January 1946 from Cabin Camp No. 1 (Misty Mount) to Cabin Camp No. 2 (Greentop), which the War Department had declared surplus. The move to Greentop was a result of the Corps’ need for places of rest and rehabilitation for survivors of the bloody fighting on Iwo Jima and Okinawa. The Marine Corps said the “cool, quiet, and healthy environment” of Catoctin Mountain Park seemed ideal.¹⁸³ Williams heartily approved the idea, particularly because since the OSS had stopped using Camp No. 2 in early 1944, the condition of the facilities without any maintenance or rehabilitation by the Army was “rapidly deteriorating.” Since they moved into the park in June 1942, the Marines had kept Cabin Camp No. 1 (Misty Mount) in excellent condition and made many improvements there, winterizing the camp, constructing a repair garage and a combination recreation hall and movie theater, and keeping all the buildings maintained and in excellent repair.¹⁸⁴

Both the Secret Service and the White House were agreeable to the Marines occupying Camp No. 2 (Greentop). Consequently, in mid-September 1945, representatives of NPS and the Marine Corps met and agreed on terms of a new use permit. Signed on 4 October 1945 by Acting Secretary of the Interior Abe Fortas, the agreement revoked the May 1944 “war purposes” permit and granted a Special Use Permit authorizing the Marine Corps to use Cabin Camp No. 2 (Greentop) for “rehabilitation and security purposes.” The new permit for the Marines extended through 1 May 1947, subsequently revocable by the Secretary of the Interior.¹⁸⁵

On a cold January 5th in 1946, the Marines vacated Camp No. 1 (Misty Mount) and moved up the hill to Camp No. 2 (Greentop). During the previous six weeks, Marines had come up to Camp No. 2, re-stained the buildings, repaired windows and doors, replaced worn-out plumbing, installed a new power line, and cleared the camp area and vicinity of dead and downed timber resulting from two severe sleet storms the previous winter. The Marines planned to spend $25,000 to improve Camp No. 2, and over subsequent months, they erected a service garage and a portable building which served as a combination movie house, recreation hall and post exchange.¹⁸⁶ With NPS approval, the Marines kept many of the improvements made by the OSS at Camp No. 2 (Greentop), such as the winterization of the buildings, the heating apparatus in the central washhouse, and the improved mess hall and kitchen.

The Marines concurred with NPS that the purely military remnants of the OSS should be removed. They did not need the ones at Greentop: the “trainazium,” the “House of Horrors” pistol house, and the rifle range. In other areas of the park, the military remnants included a demolition observation area, grenade range, munitions magazine, obstacle course, and guard houses. Mike Williams and the Associate Director of NPS, Arthur Demaray, insisted that the Army remove all of these, as well as the wreckage of an old house destroyed during OSS demolitions exercises, and restore all those sites to their original condition.¹⁸⁷

Initially, however, the Corps of Engineers, contended that the Army no longer had responsibility, at least for the area of Camp. No. 2 (Greentop). That responsibility, the Engineers asserted had ended when the War Department’s permit occupancy was terminated in September 1945, the area declared surplus and the Marine Corps subsequently occupied it. By March 1946, the OSS field exercises areas of the park in its northwest quadrant had been declared free of unexploded shells, but Williams and the National Park Service were still trying to get the Army Engineers to raze the purely military buildings, rifle range, obstacle course, and demolition observation area in the park.¹⁸⁸ On another subject, however, the question of ownership of the old CCC work camp was finally resolved when the War Department formally transferred it to the Department of the Interior, as part of the Army’s official return of the park to the National Park Service on 14 May 1946.¹⁸⁹

Moving the Marine Corps Out of Catoctin

The Marine Corps remained in Camp No. 2 until their permit expired in May 1947. Although the Marines made improvements at Greentop, as they had at Misty Mount, and kept it in good condition, Williams had his share of difficulties with the Marines, combat veterans and the security detail, which moved into Camp No. 2 in 1946. The Park Manager held off making formal complaints for some time due to the work the Corps had done in restoring the camp. But violations of the use permit continued to mount and confronted the Park Service’s responsibility for preserving the natural and historical resources of the park.

In the Use Permit issued to the Marines, the Secretary of the Interior had outlined methods of proper disposal of garbage and other materials, but the Marines, despite warnings, had not burned their rubbish nor buried their garbage since a garbage disposal field was established for them in October 1943. Instead, they had simply dumped their garbage and trash in the open, and the growing amounts attracted buzzards, crows, vermin and stray dogs and disrupted the area. Worse was an episode in September 1946. While, Mike Williams was absent for several weeks on an NPS assignment, the Marines, without Williams knowledge or approval, built a parking lot and two roads through the park to their camp at Camp No. 2 (Greentop). The Use Permit provided that trees in the park would be protected, but in this project, the Marines cut down nearly two dozen trees, including half a dozen large red oaks. The venerable stone fences in the park, some of them more than a century old, were also part of the area’s protected heritage. Williams had previously warned Marine officers against their men cutting trees and destroying stone fences, particularly historic ones and those marking boundaries. But while he was away, the Marines not only cut down the trees to make way for the new roads, but to provide gravel for the roads and parking areas, they appropriated stone from NPS stockpiles, and when that was not sufficient, they tore down several historic stone walls and ground them into gravel. Greatly irritated by what he found when he returned, Williams filed a formal complaint with the Marine major in command, holding him responsible for seeing that there be no more such violations.¹⁹⁰

Expiration of the Marines’ Use Permit was coming up in May 1947, so Mike Williams began negotiations with the Marine Corps in January for an early return of Cabin Camp No. 2 (Greentop) to the National Park Service. In March, they came to an agreement that the Marine Corps would accept the cancellation of the use permit and turn over some its trucks, a tractor, and several water heaters and gas ranges, and NPS would accept the condition of Cabin Camp No. 2 as it was. That meant that NPS would be responsible for eliminating the OSS rifle range and the Marines’ recreation hall/movie theater and rehabilitating Greentop. By letter of 28 March 1947, the Department of the Interior accepted Camp No. 2 (Greentop) in its existing condition from the Marines and cancelled the Corps’ Special Use Permit.¹⁹¹

Consequently, the Marines left Catoctin Mountain Park at the end of March 1947. After that the Marine contingent guarding the President was to be transported from the Marine Barracks in Washington D.C. to Catoctin as needed.¹⁹² Upon the Marines’ departure, the newly created Department of Defense removed from Camp No. 2 the 300- foot rifle range and play field that the OSS had established and the combination recreation hall, movie theater, and post exchange building that the Marines had constructed.¹⁹³ Thus in the spring of 1947, the final occupation and use of Catoctin Mountain Park by the military as a result of World War II came to an end.

Returning Catoctin Mountain Park to Civilian Use

Following the end of the war, the National Park Service sought to expedite the reopening of Catoctin Mountain Park to the public. In January 1946, when the Marines moved up the mountain to Greentop, Mike Williams hoped to have Misty Mount ready for youth from the Salvation Army to camp there that summer.¹⁹⁴ But there would be no camping at Misty Mount until the summer of 1947. In regard to Greentop, the Maryland League for Crippled Children, unhappy with their temporary wartime summer camps in Pennsylvania, started pressing in early 1946 to be allowed to return to the facilities that had been customized for their disabled youths. When the Maryland League met resistance, its officials enlisted Secretary of Agriculture Clinton Anderson, who wrote an endorsement to the White House, adding there was a rumor that the Marines were not planning to leave but were instead augmenting Greentop as a regular summer retreat for the Marine Corps Commandant. Secretary of the Interior Julius A. Krug rejected the rumor but acknowledged that accommodations had been improved for the commandant’s visits.¹⁹⁵

Like the National Park Service, the Truman White House also wanted Greentop reopened for the crippled children.¹⁹⁶ The public learned about the Presidential Retreat at Catoctin as soon as wartime censorship was removed.¹⁹⁷ President Harry Truman, however, seldom used Shangri-La, preferring the Presidential Yacht Williamsburg or the warmer weather and deep-sea fishing off the U.S. Navy base on Key West, Florida. It was not until President Dwight D. Eisenhower that a Chief Executive resumed regular use of the Presidential Retreat, which Eisenhower renamed “Camp David,” after his grandson.¹⁹⁸ In the summer of 1947, after the Marines had left, the Maryland League for Crippled Children and the Salvation Army resumed their summer camp programs at Greentop and Misty Mount for the first time since OSS and the Marine Corps had occupied the cabin camps in 1942.

In response to an invitation from the Maryland League for Crippled Children, President Truman visited the handicapped young campers in August 1947 on their first return to Greentop.¹⁹⁹ Some residents in nearby Thurmont remember him during such occasional visits to Catoctin slipping away from the Secret Service and driving around behind the wheel of a convertible with the top down on a hot summer day.²⁰⁰

Postwar Division of Catoctin between the Federal and State Governments

The federal government had originally built the Recreational Demonstration Areas, including Catoctin and Chopawamic RDAs, with the expressed intention of eventually turning them over to the states for state or local parks. In 1943, the Roosevelt Administration announced that this would be done in all except half a dozen RDAs, which would be included in the National Park System. Both Catoctin RDA (later Catoctin Mountain Park) Chopawamsic RDA (later Prince William Forest Park) were among the half dozen included in the National Park System. It was not their OSS usage, however, but rather accessibility from the nation’s capital as well as other neighboring cities that may have been the determining factor in their case. Plus at Catoctin, the establishment of the Presidential Retreat there mandated federal jurisdiction.²⁰¹

When Maryland hunters, fishers, and other area sportsmen learned that the federal government intended to retain Catoctin Mountain as a permanent part of the National Park System, they began to mobilize to try to reverse that decision and persuade Washington to transfer the land to Maryland as a state park. Some were opposed to the no-hunting policy on the federal RDAs, and local gamesmen had long considered Mike Williams unduly committed to preservation over expanded public usage. Emphasizing the need for “healthful outdoor enjoyment,” the League of Maryland Sportsmen adopted a resolution in July 1944 calling for the Park Service to transfer Catoctin RDA to the Maryland Department of Forests and Parks. In June 1945, the Maryland State Forester, supported by U.S. Senator Millard E. Tydings (Dem. Md.), began pressing NPS to transfer the land to the state at the end of the war.²⁰²

President Truman announced in December 1945, however, that the park would be permanently retained by the federal government and continued as part of the National Park System because, as he put it, of “the historical events of national and international interest now associated with the Catoctin Recreational Area,” presumably the wartime meetings there between Roosevelt and Churchill. Truman said this was in accord with “the position expressed by the late President Roosevelt before his death.”²⁰³

The legislative process proved extremely slow in the formal designation of Catoctin’s new status, in large part because of continued opposition by many sportsmen and Maryland officials, including Joseph F. Kaylor, Director of the Maryland Department of Parks and Forestry. Blocked in 1947 and 1948, the legislation finally passed in 1949 with the support of social service agencies in Washington, Baltimore, and around the region, and with major emphasis on providing general public access to expanded recreational facilities in the park, fishing, swimming, boating, hiking, picnicking, as well as camping.²⁰⁴ Nevertheless, pressure from Marylander hunting and fishing enthusiasts and others continued, and the National Park Service sought to way to accommodate the needs and desires of the regional public with the Park Service’s legislative mandate for natural preservation of the area as well as of the Presidential Retreat.²⁰⁵

To resolve the continuing tensions with Maryland, NPS Director Conrad Wirth proposed having the southern half of the park—the area south of State Route 77— transferred to the state of Maryland. On 11 June 1954, the National Park Service, turned that 5,000-acre area, containing Cunningham Falls, the historic Catoctin Iron Furnace, and a considerable part of Big Hunting Creek, over to the State of Maryland. With that division, the northern part of Catoctin Recreational Demonstration Area was designated Catoctin Mountain Park on 12 July 1954, and the area south of Route 77, now managed by the Maryland Department of Natural Resources was opened on 4 July 1954 as Cunningham Falls State Park.²⁰⁶

Garland B. (“Mike”) Williams, who had been part of the federal development of the park at Catoctin since 1935 and served as custodian of the property while it was taken over by the military during World War II, remained as manager of Catoctin Mountain Park when it became part of the National Park System. He continued in that position in charge of Catoctin Mountain Park until his retirement at the age of 63 in 1957.²⁰⁷

Catoctin Mountain Park Today

After World War II, Catoctin Mountain Park continued to follow its conservation and recreation mandates. Day use recreation emerged with the establishment of the Chestnut and Owens Creek Picnic Areas in 1966. Emphasis has continued to shift towards day use with the increasing suburbanization of both the Washington and Baltimore metropolitan areas. In 2007, more than 500,000 recreation visitors went to Catoctin Mountain Park, less than 8 percent staying overnight in tents or cabins. The former Blue Blazes Visitor Center Contact Station, now the Catoctin Mountain Park Visitor Center, also served as Park Headquarters in the 1950s, until Headquarters moved in the 1960s to its current location as Camp Peniel, the former Church site, which was under lease to the Army during World War II. The Visitor Center still provides information as well as housing artifacts from all periods of the park’s existence.²⁰⁸

Most of the original structures built at Greentop by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s for the National Park Service, and which were also part of the OSS’s Area B-2, remain in use today. However, the Dining Hall burned and was rebuilt with a Recreation Hall added to it. The Maryland League for Crippled Children, renamed the League for the Disabled of Baltimore, continues to use the camp each summer. The Frederick County Public School System hosted a residential Outdoor School at Greentop from 1957 to 1996. Budget cuts reduced the weeklong residential environmental program to a day use activity for fifth and sixth graders.

Misty Mount, where the Marines had stayed from 1942 to 1946, was used for years after the war by the Girl Scouts. The Washington County Public Schools ran an environmental education camp at Misty Mount until moving into their own camp at Clear Spring, Maryland, in 1979. After being closed for four years, Misty Mount reopened in 1983 with the aid of a friends group called CAMPER. The cabin camp is now used by a variety of small to medium-sized camping groups.

After serving as a Civilian Conservation Corps work camp in the late 1930s and then as OSS Area B-1, Camp Round Meadow hosted the first Job Corps Camp in the United States from 1965 to 1968 and a Youth Conservation Corps residential camp from 1971 to 1978, as Catoctin Mountain Park continued its tradition of youth conservation programs. In the 1960s, The District of Columbia Public Schools began to use Round Meadow for their Summer Nature Camp, and that program has continued to the present.

Mel Poole became superintendent of Catoctin Mountain Park in 1997. A native of Norfolk, Virginia, he joined the National Park Service in 1978 and served in numerous assignments around the country, from fighting forest fires in California to battling oil spills in Alaska. Eventually, he was posted at the National Capital Region as a Natural Resources specialist. From 1990 to 1997, he was Park Manager for the Presidents’ Parks, responsible for the parks immediately adjacent to the White House and to the NPS’s duties in the Executive Mansion itself. Since 1997, he has been responsible for Catoctin Mountain Park and the NPS’s relations with the Presidential Retreat there.²⁰⁹ Camp David, of course, continues as the Presidential Retreat with increasing visits from foreign heads of state and media presence for each such visit. It remains a place of rest and relaxation for the President of the United States.²¹⁰

Return of Area F to the Congressional Country Club

Use of the Congressional Country Club by OSS and its successor ended in February 1946. Negotiations for return of the club to its civilian owners had begun when the war and the OSS ended. Despite the damages caused by the OSS’s paramilitary training on the club’s golf courses and other grounds and facilities, the club’s board of governors had learned in November 1945 that the War Department had paid the club rent amounting to $120,400 during the war. With that income, the club, which had been hurting at the end of the Great Depression, had paid all its bills, including interest on the mortgage, and still had $46,000 remaining. The President of the club was a tough negotiator and got the government to agree to provide and additional $187,000 to restore the clubhouse and the golf course, both of which had been badly damaged. During the OSS occupation, trees had been downed, the fairways were criss-crossed with barbed wire obstacles and roads, the refreshment stand on the 13th tee had been blasted, and more than fifty cabin tents and a few Quonset huts dotted the grounds and tennis courts. The club sold the cabin tents and Quonset huts and launched into a major repair operation. The clubhouse needed much work, including repair of the front marble steps where an OSS Santa Claus had driven his jeep right up into the main ballroom on Christmas 1945. The clubhouse reopened with a grand ball in April and the golf course the following month. Membership in May 1946 had already grown past 500. The Congressional Country Club emerged quite successfully from its wartime occupation by the OSS.²¹¹

Postwar Careers of OSS Veterans

“You know it was an amazing organization,” recalled John W. Brunner, a China Communications veteran, about the OSS. “The people I served with later became lawyers, judges, Ph.D.s, all very prestigious.”²¹² Indeed, the OSS did include extraordinarily talented, self-motivated, and accomplished men and women. Not surprisingly, many of them went on to distinguished postwar careers. After earning a doctorate at Columbia University, Brunner himself served as a professor and chair of the German Department at Muhlenberg College for more than thirty years in addition to becoming a published authority on OSS weaponry.²¹³ Captain Bernard M.W. (“Bernie”) Knox, who led Jedburgh Team “Giles” and French maquis in attacks on German paratrooper positions in France and then led Italian partisans in northern Italy, earned at Ph.D. in classics at Yale under the GI Bill after the war. He taught at Yale and subsequently became Director of Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies. A renowned scholar and translator of classical Greek drama and literature, Knox wrote or edited nearly two dozen books and provided the introduction and notes to Robert Fagles’ prizewinning translations of Homer’s The Illiad and The Odyssey in the 1990s.²¹⁴ Lieutenant Henry Deane McIntosh, SO, who jumped into France as a Jedburgh, received a Silver Star Medal, and then served behind Japanese lines in China, returned to resume studying medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Becoming a distinguished cardiologist, he taught at the medical schools of Duke, Baylor, and the University of Florida, was President of the American College of Cardiology, founded an organization to make cardiac pacemakers available to needy patients around the world. For his achievements, he received the Presidential Citation at the White House in 1986.²¹⁵

Nearly two dozen men who served in Donovan’s organization later capped their postwar careers as U.S. ambassadors, including David K.E. Bruce, wealth and socially prominent head of OSS Secret Intelligence in Europe, later U.S. Ambassador to England, France, and Germany; William B. Macomber, Jedburgh in France and Special Operations (SO) officer in Burma and China, ambassador to Jordan and Turkey; and Richard Helms, Secret Intelligence (SI) agent in Europe, ambassador to Iran. Donovan himself was appointed ambassador to Thailand in the early 1950s. Arthur Goldberg, first chief of the OSS Labor Branch in Europe subsequently served in the 1960s as Secretary of Labor, Supreme Court Justice, and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.²¹⁶ A number of OSS veterans later served as Presidential advisers, among them Roger Hilsman, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Walt Rostow, Carl Kaysen, Douglass Cater, Clark McGregor, Arthur Goldberg, C. Douglas Dillon, and a host of others.

There were many lawyers or future lawyers in the OSS, a number of whom later pursued successful careers as attorneys or members of the judiciary. Walter R. Mansfield, SO, who parachuted into Yugoslavia and later “Muskrat” Team behind Japanese lines in south China, became a federal appeals court judge in New York.²¹⁷ Edgar Pritchard, SO, became a prominent attorney in Arlington, Virginia; Jedburgh William Dreux resumed his law practice in New Orleans and litigated cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. Howard Manning, the last commanding officer of Area C, returned to North Carolina to resume his law practice, first in Chapel Hill and then Raleigh.²¹⁸ Turner McBaine, SO, who worked out of Cairo, later became counsel to Standard Oil Company of California.²¹⁹ J. Evelle Younger, a former FBI section chief recruited by OSS’s counterintelligence branch (X-2) for the Far East later became District Attorney for Los Angeles in the 1960s and Attorney General of California in the 1970s.

Of the two most famous OSS close combat instructors, William E. (“Dan”) Fairbairn and Rex Applegate, the former, already a legendary figure among close combat enthusiasts, returned to Great Britain after the war. He retired from the British military shortly thereafter and reportedly started a martial arts school with George de Rewelisko, another SOE instructor in Britain and Canada in unarmed combat.²²⁰ In retirement, Fairbairn frequently gave demonstrations and received numerous honors. He died in 1960 at the age of 75. Rex Applegate stayed with the U.S. Army in the military police, eventually retiring as a lieutenant colonel. In 1976, Applegate updated his 1943 book, Kill or Get Killed, for use as a close combat manual for the Marine Corps as well as for popular sales.²²¹ Applegate became a founding member of the International Close Combat Instructors Association., marketed books and films on the subject and also designed a line of knives. He spent much of his time promoting his pistol shooting method to police departments and pistol enthusiasts. He died in 1988 at 74 years of age.²²²

A number of OSS Special Operations officers had careers with the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Lieutenant Colonel Garland H. Williams, SO, who had helped Donovan and Preston Goodfellow establish the Special Operations training camps in Maryland and Virginia, returned in 1945 to the Federal Narcotics Bureau, where he headed its Intelligence Division until his retirement in 1954. He subsequently advised intelligence operations in the Army and the State Department.²²³ George H. White, another undercover federal narcotics agent, who had served as an SO instructor at Areas B and A in 1942 before being transferred to the OSS Counter-Intelligence Branch (X-2), returned to the Federal Bureau of Narcotics in 1945. He served as district supervisor in several of the major cities in the United States. In addition, beginning in 1952, he worked part-time for the CIA in its secret experimental drug program, using the synthetic hallucinogen, LSD, in a search for a “truth serum,” a program that White and the CIA continued, without success through the mid-1960s. White retired from the Federal Bureau of Narcotics in 1965 after a thirty-year career.²²⁴ Both Williams and White had been with the Federal Narcotics Bureau before the war; after the war, they were joined by a young recruit, Major Howard W. Chappell, SO, 27, who after training at Areas F and B, had won acclaim for the “Tacoma” Mission behind German lines in the Italian Alps. After returning home and running his own business for a year, he joined the Federal Narcotics Bureau in 1947, and was given undercover assignments infiltrating organized crime, drug syndicates in New York City, Washington, D.C, and Chicago. His successes led to his appointment as agent in charge in Los Angeles. Chappell thrived on danger, and in addition to his administrative duties, he continued to do undercover work, this time in Mexico. Chappell left the bureau in 1961 and spent the next decade as executive officer and President of the Board of Public Works for the City of Los Angeles.²²⁵

Colonel Carl Eifler, SO, the boisterous, barrel-chested, first commander of Detachment 101 in Burma, had come to Special Operations from the Army Reserve and a law enforcement career with the U.S. Customs Service. Eifler remained in the Army until 1947. The new CIA tried to recruit him, but its doctors turned him down, as his 1943 head injury led him to suffer massive headaches and some erratic behavior, and he would be vulnerable to seizures and strokes for the rest of his life. Nevertheless, after retiring from the Army, he returned to the U.S. Customs Service in Hawaii, this time as Deputy Collector of Customs. In 1952, he went back to college and earned degrees in psychology and divinity from Jackson College in Hawaii. Retiring from the Customs Service and returning to the mainland, he went on to obtain a doctorate in psychology from Illinois Institute of Technology in 1963. Settling with his family in Monterey County, California, he opened a practice in clinical psychology there.²²⁶ He was inducted into the Military Intelligence Hall of Fame in 1988, and in 1997 a new sports complex was named after him at the Military Intelligence School at Fort Huachua, Arizona. Eifler died in 2002 at the age of 95.²²⁷

Among Hollywood celebrities in the OSS, John Ford, Field Film Unit, and Sterling Hayden, SO, went back to the studios in Los Angeles. So did Peter Ortiz, SO. Ford soon turned to directing a series of heroic cowboy and cavalry pictures, starring John Wayne or Henry Fonda, which came to personify the legendary western genre.²²⁸ Sterling Hayden (aka Marine Captain John Hamilton), even more solid, weathered, and fatalistic than before, wandered from studio to studio in a series of dark, film noir movies in the 1950s.²²⁹ He was forced to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, where he revealed his sympathies with Tito’s communist partisans in Yugoslavia and his brief postwar affiliation with some American communists. Abandoning those friends and publicly naming them to the committee, intensified Hayden’s cynicism and self-contempt, and except for his role as Gen. Jack D. Ripper in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1963), Hayden spent most of the 1960s sailing his schooner, fighting a child custody battle in court, and writing his autobiography, Wanderer. He staged a come back in the 1970s, and died at the age of 70 in 1986. Peter J. Ortiz, whose medals for Special Operations exploits behind German lines in North Africa and France made him one of the most decorated Marine officers of World War II, returned to Los Angeles after the war and became involved in the film industry, advising on films about the OSS and playing small parts in more than a dozen films between 1949 and 1957. Ortiz died in 1988 at the age of 75 and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery.²³⁰

Some of the other celebrities who had worked for the OSS faded into relatively obscurity not too long after the war. Joseph (“Jumping Joe”) Savoldi, SO, the Notre Dame football star and professional wrestler, who was part of the “MacGregor” Mission in Italy, returned to the wrestling circuit. But arthritis soon ended his career in the ring, and he became primarily a manager and promoter. While a promoter in Chicago, Savoldi discovered, trained, and gave a start in professional wresting to an able, young American black man, Houston (“Bobo Brazil”) Harris, who would later become the first successful African-American professional wrestler, winning the World Heavyweight Wrestling Championship in 1962, integrating the sport and becoming known as “the Jackie Robinson of professional wrestling.”²³¹ From 1952-1961, Savoldi refereed a few wrestling matches, made a few guest appearances on TV programs, had his own sports radio show for awhile, and worked in the insurance business. In 1962, at 54, he returned to college, earned his teaching credentials and then mentored troubled boys and worked as a high school science teacher in Henderson, Kentucky until his death there in 1974 at the age of 65.²³²

Moe Berg, the professional baseball player and linguistic genius, who as a civilian spy helped OSS ferret out information on the status of German development of an atomic bomb, returned to the United States and resigned from the OSS. In 1945, he was only 43, but he apparently declined any regular employment for the rest of his life. President Truman awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, but for an unexplained reason, Berg declined to accept it. A lifelong bachelor, he subsequently lived with different family members and seems to have become increasingly idiosyncratic. He continually implied that he was still a spy, doing work too secret to reveal. After his brother forced him to leave, Berg moved in with his sister in Belleville, New Jersey, where he remained until his death in 1972 at the age of 70, still living on the legendary accomplishments of the first forty years of his extraordinary life.²³³

Back to Business

Many of the former OSSers went into private enterprise. Lieutenant Colonel Ainsworth Blogg, SO, first commanding officer of Training Area B and, for most of the war, deputy director of the OSS Schools and Training Branch, returned to the insurance business in Seattle. Rafael D. Hirtz, SO, born in Argentina, raised in Europe and California, who had served behind the lines in France and China, moved to Washington, D.C. and became a grain exporter.²³⁴ OSS’s key spy in Rome, Peter Tompkins, SI, remained an expatriate in Europe, writing magazine articles, screenplays, and controversial books, not only his spy memoirs but most notoriously, his assertion that his mother had had a passionate affair with George Bernard Shaw.²³⁵ Reginald (“Reg”) Spear, SO/SI, a young California inventor with a British and Canadian family background, who had trained at Area B and then gone on special missions in the Pacific and Far East for President Roosevelt, returned to civilian life and California after the war. He continued his schooling and also his inventing. His first invention was when he was 12 years old and created a retractable dog leash. Since World War II, he has been credited with more than 40 inventions. Some involving naval ordnance such as 7.2-inch HVAR multiple rocket launchers and the Sidewinder Missile were invented jointly with William B. McLean. But most were invented independently or with a variety of others. Those inventions included the solar cell, the Spear 360 movie camera used by high-flying spy planes, the U-2 and the SR-71, a dock-loading gantry for loading and unloading seagoing tankers, and a processing for liquefying natural gas for ease in transporting and storing it. In his 80s, Spear continued to do consulting and to work on a memoir of his experiences with the OSS in World War II.²³⁶

Serge Obolensky, SO, former Russian nobleman and New York socialite who had married and divorced Mary Astor daughter of real estate tycoon, John Jacob Astor IV, and who had led Special Operations teams into Sardinia and France, returned to high society in Manhattan. Hotelier Conrad Hilton offered the 55-year-old socialite a position directing public relations and promotion for the Plaza Hotel. It was similar to Obolensky’s prewar position at the St. Regis Hotel across the street, and he took it. Obolensky remained there, a fixture of high society and socializing with glamorous women including Ginger Rogers, Marilyn Monroe, and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. He died at 87 in 1978.²³⁷

M. Preston Goodfellow, the former New York newspaper publisher, who had established the SO training camps and served as an OSS Deputy Director of Operations for the rest of the war, subsequently engaged in politics, diplomacy and business. Through his wartime friendship with Korean nationalist Syngman Rhee, Goodfellow after the war helped play a political kingmaker role in South Korea and in the process built a lasting personal and commercial relationship.²³⁸ During the American-Soviet military occupation of Korea immediately after the war, Goodfellow was an economic and political advisor to the U.S. military governor in 1946, supporting a separate South Korea and Rhee, who became its first President.²³⁹ After leaving the War Department, Goodfellow, retained an interest in newspapers as publisher of the Pocatello [Idaho] Tribune, and he helped for over forty years with the Boy’s Clubs of America, but his main activity was as President of Overseas Reconstruction, Inc., a Washington based firm offering personal contacts and providing advice for American investment overseas and foreign investment in the United States²⁴⁰ A successful entrepreneur, Goodfellow died in 1973 at the age of 81.²⁴¹

A number of other SO/OG members went into business. Elmer (“Pinky”) Harris, Washington State University alumni who, taught at Areas B and A, and then served in Italy and China, returned to his native Alaska after the war and helped pioneer tourism to the Alaskan wilderness as a part of a group of business people involved local aircraft companies.²⁴² Ellsworth (“Al”) Johnson, medic with OG units in France and China, returned to western Michigan, went to a community college on the GI Bill, married, raised a family of a boy and a girl, and went to work for a company handling wholesale beauty supplies and rose from salesman to general manager. After retirement, he made and sold doll houses and their furnishings, and at 85 was working as a starter on a golf course.²⁴³ Arne Herstad, a member of the OSS Norwegian OG, who parachuted into France and helped train OSS OG Chinese commandos in the Far East, returned home to Tacoma, Washington. He had married, Andi Kindem, his sweetheart whom he had met in Michigan, and they raised a family. He worked as head sawyer with a lumber company for a decade before teaming up with his brothers to form a construction company that built quality homes on what is now called the Herstad Addition in Tacoma. He died in 1981.²⁴⁴

Albert (“Al”) Materazzi, OG, one of the leaders of the Italian Operational Groups both in their training in Areas A, B, and F, and as operations officer for their amphibious raids from Corsica, returned to the United States in 1945 and was immediately transferred back to the U.S. Army Map Service and put in charge of reproduction research. In August 1945, he testified at the war crimes trial of German General Anton Dostler, who had ordered the summary execution of fifteen members of the OSS “Ginny” mission in Italy. Dostler was convicted and executed. After leaving the service, Materazzi returned to his prewar research in graphic arts, spending twenty years with a firm that manufactured chemicals for the lithographic industry and later managing quality control at the U.S. Government Printing Office. Retiring at 65, he continued to work until he was 75 as a consultant on quality control on the lithographic and photographic reproduction processes. In a long and distinguished career in that field, he was founding member and President of four of the industry’s technical associations. Even in his 90s, he continued to write about the OSS in Italy and the German atrocities committed.²⁴⁵ Richard W. Breck, Jr., SO, who had left Harvard, trained at Area B, and gone on three missions behind enemy lines in Italy, spent 1946, as a baseball pitcher with the Pawtucket, Rhode Island, Slaters, a farm team for the Boston Braves. “Bobo Breck,” pitched until 1947 when he broke his leg. Later he took night courses at MIT and worked for a series of defense contractors including the Little Company with its contracts for the hydrogen bomb, and Raytheon on new radar systems and the Hawk and Sparrow missiles.²⁴⁶

Many members of the OSS Communications Branch (CB) went back to or into the communications industry after the war. Lawrence Lowman, head of the Communications Branch, returned to his prewar position as a vice President of the Columbia Broadcasting System in 1945. Owner William S. Paley, put him in charge of preparing CBS Television.²⁴⁷ Peter G.S. Mero, one of the leading recruiters of radio operators and other “commo” people, returned from heading OSS communications in Italy, to head the Communications Branch in the new Strategic Services Unit.²⁴⁸ Subsequently, Mero went back to Chicago, married Sarah (“Sally”) Sabow, a former OSS cipher clerk who had served in Algeria and Italy. He became an executive in the Pioneer Electric Corporation, invented a successful teleprinter, and later worked with the American Red Cross and with Radio Free Europe.²⁴⁹ According to CB veteran Allen C. Richter, “He had many hats in many closets.”²⁵⁰ Richter, a key member of the communications team with Detachment 101 in Burma, ended the war in Washington as assistant chief of CB’s Plant and Engineering Division. After the war, Richter worked for a communications equipment manufacturing firm as foreign sales manager, selling transmitters and receivers to the Chinese. At one point soon after the war, he formed a consulting company. One of its aspects was to help independent radio stations prepare for television. “I ran into Larry [Lowman] in Grand Central Station one day,” Richter recalled. “….Larry asked me if I wanted to come to work for him at CBS-TV, as anything I wanted. But I said no. T.V. was kind of shaky then. In hindsight, it was not a good decision.”²⁵¹ Instead of CBS, Richter joined the American Red Cross in Washington and helped run their telecommunications system for fifteen years. After that he ran the Washington offices first of Robert Shaw Controls, which tested instruments, and then the Singer Sewing Machine Company. He retired in 1971.²⁵²

Some of the communications instructors at Area C returned to the burgeoning telecommunications industry. Captain James F. Ranney, had taught International Morse Code at Area C before serving in the Mediterranean and China theaters. After the war, he went back to Ohio, his home state, and worked as an engineer at various radio stations, ending up as chief engineer at a radio station in Cincinnati. Subsequently highly active in the Communications Branch’s alumni group, Ranney edited, together with his son, a collection of recollections by OSS “Commo” veterans, the OSS CommVets Papers.²⁵³ Timothy Marsh, had been a civilian instructor at the Communications School. By the end of 1944, when the number of trainees declined, most of the civilian instructors left. Some enlisted as civilian radio operators in the Merchant Marine, and several of them lost their lives on torpedoed vessels. But Marsh had a wife and infant daughter, and instead of the Merchant Marine, he went to Chicago and found jobs with a radio manufacturer and then a radio station. But after a few years, however, the condition of his young daughter’s health, led Marsh to return to his native Tennessee. Initially, chief engineer at a radio station in Jackson, he later was employed by the Motorola field office for thirteen counties, subsequently taking ownership of the dealership until his retirement in 1979. During much of the next two decades, in Shelbyville, Timothy Marsh and his wife, Helen, served as the historians/archivists for Bedford County, Tennessee.²⁵⁴

Countless OSS radio operators who underwent training at Area C returned to the private sector. Roger L. Belanger, who had returned from CB’s London base station to become part of the cadre at Area C, went home to Maine and worked first as a salesman and then designing marine instruments and finally for an engineering company building ships. He then turned a hobby into a business by building scale model ships. He has constructed more than 150 hand-made wooden ship models for private collectors and museums.²⁵⁵ Joseph J. Tully, who remained a lifelong friend of Roger Belanger, used the benefits of the GI Bill to learn tool making. Joining a company in Palmyra, New Jersey, that did rotogravure printing—high speed rotary press printing used for long print runs of colored material such as stamps and magazines—he advanced over the years from toolmaker to tool machine designer, plant engineer, and wound up as sales manager before his retirement in 1988.²⁵⁶ David Kenney, a radio operator who had trained at Areas A and C and served in England and China, returned home to a ranch in Wyoming owned by his two brothers. “I learned to fly under the G.I. Bill,” he said. “Later I got my degree in aeronautical engineering from Northrop’s university in Los Angeles County.” He worked as an aircraft engineer for Northrop and later Rockwell aerospace companies in Los Angeles until his retirement in 1983.²⁵⁷

After the war, Spiro Cappony, the naval seaman and OSS radio operator, who trained with actor Sterling Hayden and then helped blow up bridges in Greece in the “Chicago” Mission, went to college at night under the GI Bill, while working at the Pentagon as a naval reservist called to active duty. The new CIA offered him a position in 1947, but he declined. Instead, he returned to Gary, Indiana, his hometown, married, and, like his family before him, ran a restaurant. He also spent much of his postwar career in the construction industry working for Pangere Construction Company, which he continued to advise even after his retirement.²⁵⁸

Marvin S. (“Mark”) Flisser, the Brooklyn College graduate, who as a trainee at Area C was soon transmitting 40 words a minute, double the normal rate for operators, had not continued in the Communications Branch. Instead, the assessment staff at Station S identified him as having leadership qualities and an IQ of 140, he was sent to Officer’s Candidate School. Returning a second lieutenant, OSS headquarters assigned him to help research Nazi war crimes. Mustered out of the Army at the age of 24, he returned to New York City, joined a stock brokerage firm as a trainee, and ultimately wound up as a partner in a firm that included H. Ross Perot. After thirty years on Wall Street, he retired, went to California and earned a doctorate in nutritional science. Then, he founded, and for fifteen years managed, a nutrition company based in Stamford, Connecticut. He retired once again, first to Scarsdale and then at age 78 to a retirement community in Monroe, New Jersey. From there, he audited courses at nearby Rutgers and Princeton Universities.²⁵⁹

A young soldier named Jack S. Kilby, from Jefferson City, Missoui, who served in radio repair shops with the OSS Communications Branch for Detachment 101 in northeast India and then Detachment 202 in western China, returned home and with the help of the GI Bill graduated from the University of Illinois and then with a Masters Degree in electrical engineering from the University of Wisconsin. He went to work for Globe Union and then in 1958 for Texas Instruments as a research engineer. Continuing the OSS philosophy of thinking outside the box, he invented that year a working integrated circuit, which formed the basis for the microchip industry. For that discovery, he was eventually awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics.²⁶⁰

Continuing to Serve in Uniform

A lot of the men in Special Operations and Operational Groups remained with the Army after the war. At least two of them became generals. William R. (“Ray”) Peers, who had trained at Area B and spent the war with Detachment 101 in Burma, made a career in the Army, although he was several times assigned on detached service to the CIA, after its founding, helping to establish its paramilitary training program and directing covert operations in southern China from secret bases in Burma and Taiwan during the Korean War. Returning to the Army, he held several intelligence and other staff positions. When the Vietnam War began, he advised the Joint Chiefs of Staff on counterinsurgency special operations. In 1967, he commanded the 4th Infantry Division, and in 1968, as a lieutenant general, he was in charge of 50,000 U.S. troops in the corpslevel I Field Force plus South Vietnamese and South Korean troops. In 1969, Peers was selected to investigate the My Lai Massacre. His conclusion, the “Peers Report,” was condemnatory of the action and highly critical of the cover up, and he recommended the court-martial of two enlisted men and thirty officers from lieutenant to major general. Peers died in 1984 at age 69.²⁶¹ John K. Singlaub, who trained at Areas F and B, was a Jedburgh in France and the leader of an SO rescue mission in China, also made the Army his career as a combat infantry and special operations officer. During the Korean War, he served first on detached duty with the CIA and then as an infantry battalion commander with the 3rd Infantry Division. With his emphasis on special operations, Singlaub commanded the Joint Unconventional Warfare Task Group (MACSOG) in Vietnam. He was instrumental in establishing the Army Rangers training center at Fort Benning. While chief of staff of the U.N. Command and the 8th U.S. Army in South Korea, Singlaub publicly challenged President Jimmy Carter’s 1977 decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Korea, and Carter relieved him of command. Singlaub retired that year as a major general.²⁶²

Instructors Joseph H. Collart, Charles M. Parkin, Jr. Leopold (“Leo”) Karwaski, and Frank A. Gleason, Jr., who served abroad after being instructors at Areas B or A, all remained in the Army and spent the next two decades with the Corps of Engineers. Joseph H. Collart, who had been one of the instructors at Area B in 1942, had left the OSS in early 1943 and joined the Airborne Engineers, serving in Europe. By the end of the war, Collart was a lieutenant colonel and commanded a battalion.²⁶³ Twenty years later, Collart was a full colonel and from his headquarters in Hawaii in charge of Army Engineers in the Pacific. In 1965 with the announcement of the buildup of U.S. ground forces in South Vietnam, Collart and his staff were called upon to go to Vietnam and then prepare estimates for the financial costs of constructing the bases for the combat units being scheduled to arrive. Because of quick and detailed estimates and budget requests, the Army’s 18th Engineer Brigade was able to get the facilities built in time.²⁶⁴ After returning from China, Charles Parkin did graduate work at Cornell and held a variety of positions with the Army Engineers. He retired as a lieutenant colonel and then spent in various positions in the business sector as a production control engineer in Chicago, a manager of copra and citrus plantations in the Caribbean, and running his own carpet business in Florida. Following his third retirement, Parkin turned to writing books, one of rockets and another on an 18th century nautical explorer, and founding a maritime museum in Oregon.²⁶⁵ Leo Karwaski, one of the “three ski’s” instructors at Area B, had served in China. After the war, his primary career with the Army Corps of Engineers, but he reportedly worked periodically on detached duty for the CIA inThailand in the early 1950s and in Vietnam in the late 1960s. Karwaski retired a colonel and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.²⁶⁶

Frank Gleason earned a Master’s Degree at Harvard after the war and served in various civil and military positions with the Engineers, concluding his career as chief engineer at the big U.S. Army base at Cam Ranh Bay in South Vietnam. After retiring as a full colonel in 1971, Gleason spent fifteen years at Georgia Tech University in various business and financial administrative positions. Following his second retirement in 1985, he worked buying and selling companies and doing insurance work, and after his final retirement in his mid-80s, he lectured on history to senior citizens and tutored children in elementary school. Still lively and engaging, he declared gleefully in December 2007, “I’m 87 years old. I’ve been all over the world and had a lifetime of experiences. I tell people that `I’ve seen the monkey and heard the owl!’”²⁶⁷

Arden W. (“Art”) Dow, an instructor at Areas B and A, who then served in China, moved, after the war, from the Army infantry to the airborne forces, and was stationed in Korea, Taiwan, and Panama. His wife, Dorothea (“Dodie”) Dow, gave birth to their second daughter in 1952, while they lived in Panama. Dow retired as a full colonel in 1963, and he became business administrator for the College of Business of the University of Georgia. He died in 1982; Mrs. Dow continues to live in Georgia; she has ten grandchildren.²⁶⁸ John Hooker, who trained at Areas F and A, before serving in Maritime Unit raiding parties along the Burmese coast and then with the OSS Chinese OG commandoes in China, spent a postwar career in the Army, with Military Intelligence in Japan and Germany and commanding an infantry battalion in Germany. Retiring as a full colonel in 1963, he worked for the National Security Agency in Vietnam for five years. Subsequently, he managed commercial radio stations, owned and outdoor advertising company, and worked in a variety of capacities for a Florida police department. He also taught Civil War history.²⁶⁹

A number of OSS SO and OG personnel stayed with the Army and eventually worked with the Special Forces. Several were pioneers in the Special Forces when it was secretly created in 1952, among them Aaron Bank, Jack Shannon, Caesar Civitella, Herbert Brucker, and James Goodwin. Jerry Sage, Washington State University alumnus, instructor at Areas B and D, who had been captured in North Africa and spent the next two years trying to escape from German POW camps, finally successfully in early 1945. After the war, he served on the headquarters staff of the U.S. European Command in Germany and became an expert on the detainment, repatriation, and immigration of Displaced Persons, testifying before congressional committees on the subject. He was an instructor at West Point for three years and, except for the dissertation, completed a doctorate at Columbia University. After a year as a battalion commander during the Korean War, he taught at the Army’s advanced schools, and in the early 1960s, he was assigned to the Special Forces, first in Vietnam and then in Europe. Working out of the Bavarian Alps, his unit was prepared to parachute behind Soviet lines and lead resistance forces in case of a Russian invasion of Western Europe. After retiring as a full colonel in 1972, Sage did graduate work in education and taught civics instruction at high schools in Columbia, South Carolina, while enrolled in a doctoral program (his second), this time in education, being voted the outstanding teacher for the entire state. In 1980, he moved to Alabama, where he raised money to help the needy and handicapped through schools and training centers, worked for the Special Olympics, and continued to give “enrichment lectures” in schools, civic, youth, and church groups. Arguing against peer pressure and gangs and what he called the “sheep complex” that herded young people into bad habits. “I try to stress the importance of having the courage to choose the harder right over the easier wrong,” Sage said, “and to lift others up rather than tear them down.”²⁷⁰

Paul Cyr, as a young Army captain from Vermont, had been one of the stars of the OSS. Trained in Special Operations, he had won the Distinguished Service Cross on Jedburgh Team George which harassed the Nazis behind their lines in France. He then went to China where his Team Jackal blew up the mile-long bridge across the Yellow River. Settling in Indiana, this war hero ran for Congress in 1950, but lost. Later he went to Washington as an assistant to Senator Homer E. Capehart, a Republican from Indiana. In 1963, he became an important civilian employee of the new Army Matérial Command, acting as a liaison with Congress for one of the Pentagon’s largest supply agencies. He later worked for the Federal Energy Administration. He retired in the 1980s and died in 1994.²⁷¹

Working for the CIA

Four subsequent Directors of Central Intelligence had been with the OSS. Allen W. Dulles, SI in Switzerland, was appointed by President Eisenhower and served as DCI from 1953 to1961. Richard M. Helms, SI in Europe, worked his way up in CIA and was appointed DCI by President Lyndon Johnson, serving from 1966 to 1973. William E. Colby, who had trained at Areas F and B, had been a Jedburgh in France and then SO in Norway. After a few years as a lawyer, Colby joined the CIA in 1950 and was appointed director by President Richard Nixon, serving as DCI from 1973 to 1976. He died in a canoeing mishap at 76 in 1996. William J. Casey, had broken his jaw in a training accident at Area B, but went on to a top position in SI London. After the war, he became a leading New York tax attorney, a wealthy investor, and a major figure in the Republican Party. President Ronald Reagan appointed him DCI, and he served from 1981 to 1987.

The CIA naturally recruited a number of former OSS personnel to serve careers with the new agency. Helms and Colby were two of them. Peter M.F. Sichel, SI with the 7 th Army, worked for the CIA for a dozen years, serving as base chief in Berlin, chief of European Operations in Washington, D.C., and then station chief in Hong Kong. He resigned in 1959, in a disagreement over policy, and joined the family wine business, in the process building “Blue Nun,” into a major international brand. Joseph Lazarsky, SO, former Area B instructor who served overseas in Burma and China, finished college under the GI bill after the war and then spent twenty-five years in the Far East with the CIA, beginning with duty in Taiwan, India, and Indonesia. After being Deputy Station Chief in Saigon in the early 1970s, Lazarsky served as Station Chief in Seoul, Jakarta, and Manila, retiring in 1978.²⁷² Oliver M. Silsby, Jr., from Detroit, who had original trained as a radio operator but then taken SO training and parachuted into Yugoslavia and with Howard Chappell into northern Italy, where he was eventually captured by the Nazis, returned home after the war and graduated from the University of Michigan under the GI Bill. He also attended the Institute for Political Studies in Paris. He spent nearly thirty years with the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, serving in France, Belgium, and Luxembourg, before being sent to Laos from 1968 to 1970. He helped establish an guide the CIA’s terrorism bureau in the 1970s, before his retirement in 1979.²⁷³ Caesar Civitella, who trained at Areas F and B with the OSS Italian OGs and then served in France and Italy, was a pioneer with Army Special Forces from 1952 until his retirement as a major in 1964. He then worked for the CIA until 1983. In 2008, he was honored with a special award from the U.S. Special Operations Command.²⁷⁴ Lucien Conein, who trained at Areas F and B, was a Jedburgh in France and also was infiltrated into Vietnam, technically remained in the Army and rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel, but he was on detached service with the CIA almost continually from 1947 to 1968. His assignments carried him from Eastern Europe to Iran to South Vietnam, where he wound up as liaison in the coup that overthrew President Ngo Dinh Diem. In 1972, he rejected an offer from E. Howard Hunt, another ex-OSSer and retired CIA officer, to join the “plumbers,” a secret team that bungled the Watergate burglary. From 1973 to 1984, Conein ran secret operations for the Drug Enforcement Administration. When he died in 1998, the New York Times called Conein, “the last of the great wartime spies.”²⁷⁵

A lot of OSS people continued to work in the intelligence field after the war, even if not always with the CIA. Erasmus (“Ras’) Kloman, SO, who had trained at Areas A, B, C, D, and F, and served in the Mediterranean Theater, pursued careers in government, academia, and private business after the war. He earned an M.A. from Harvard and a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, served sequentially with the CIA, the Department of State, and the Foreign Policy Research Institute at the University of Pennsylvania, and subsequently with several corporations as a public affairs officer and executive. After retiring in the mid-1980s, he painted and wrote travel books as well as a memoir of his service in the OSS, Assignment Algiers.²⁷⁶ Like scores of others, who had been with the Research and Analysis Branch, Louis J. (“Luz”) Gonzalez, who as an Army sergeant trained briefly at Area A, before being sent to Italy, wound up after the war with the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. The Mexican-born Gonzalez, who knew both Spanish and Italian and became a U.S. citizen when he joined the Army in 1942, worked at the State Department until his retirement.²⁷⁷ Jacques F. Snyder, the French-speaking, Saxophone-playing American GI who was recruited by OSS, given OG training at Areas F and A, and later parachuted back to France where he successfully carried out a combination special operations and intelligence mission, remained in the Army with Military Intelligence after the war. He served in France and Cambodia, part of the former French Indochina, until a hard parachute landing and some compressed vertebrae ended his active military career in the 1960s. Subsequently as a civilian employed by the Defense Intelligence Agency, he worked in Vietnam and then mainly in Europe. He retired from the Defense Intelligence Agency in 1991. His son recalled that “All the time [I was] growing up, I never knew what my father did for employment. When we would ask what he did for a living (for school paperwork, applications, etc.), he would say ‘government employee.’”²⁷⁸

Women of the OSS

More than a few of the OSS women later worked for the CIA. Virginia Hall, the “limping lady” the spy and resistance leader, who so infuriated and successfully evaded the Gestapo in France, came back to the United States after the war and was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross. She was the only civilian American woman to receive that award in World War II. Later, she joined the CIA in 1951 and was assigned to the fledgling covert action office as an intelligence analyst. The following year, Hall became one of the first female operations officers. She interviewed refugees and exiles from communist countries, prepared political-action projects, and planned resistance and sabotage activities to be carried out behind Red Army lines in case of war with the Soviet Union. Several of her assignments as an operations officer were overseas. In 1966, having reached 60, she retired, spending the rest of her life at her Maryland home until her death at 76 in 1982.

When Elizabeth (“Betty”) Peet MacDonald left the Morale Operations unit at OSS headquarters in Kunming, China in 1945, her husband, Commander Alexander MacDonald, decided to remain in the Far East and establish an English-language newspaper in Thailand. She returned to the United States, and they later divorced amicably. She resumed her career in journalism, writing for Glamour magazine, and producing a memoir of her service in the OSS.²⁷⁹ Subsequently, she married Richard P. Heppner, former head of OSS in China and a partner in Donovan’s law firm. She did some work for Voice of America and the State Department. Then in 1958, Dick Heppner died of a heart attack at 49 after completing a world tour as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security. A year later, Allen Dulles hired Betty Heppner for the CIA. In 1959, most of the women at CIA, she reported, were assigned to office work. Only a few did research and analysis, and even fewer, like Virginia Hall, were assigned to operations and then mainly at lower levels. Betty Heppner saw the agency gradually transformed as times and the culture changed and bright, college-trained, computer-smart women arrived and moved into positions formerly held only by men. Betty Heppner moved up too and eventually she also ran agents. She cited William E. Colby, former OSSer and DCI from 1973-1976, as an outspoken champion of equal opportunity for women. By 1994, the professional employees at CIA were chose to equal in number, 59 per cent male, 41 per cent female. Betty Heppner (Betty MacIntosh after she married Frederick MacIntosh a World War II fighter pilot) retired from the CIA in 1973, and subsequently wrote an account of women in the OSS and CIA, A Sisterhood of Spies.²⁸⁰

Aline Griffith, the beautiful, young Hattie Carnegie model from Pearl River, New York, who had worked in OSS Counter-Intelligence (X-2) in Madrid gathering information from social circles and running her own net of spies, stayed in Spain after the war. In 1948, she married a Spanish nobleman and became Aline, Countess of Romanones.²⁸¹ From her homes in Spain and with her social contacts and sharp insights, she continued to work for American intelligence, the CIA, for nearly the next twenty years, and then wrote two memoirs about it.²⁸²

Several other OSS women worked for the CIA, according to Betty MacIntosh, but among the most successful was Eloise Randolph Page, who had been an executive secretary to Donovan. Toward the end of the war, OSS headquarters sent her to Brussels to head the counter-intelligence (X-2) office there. Later, she had a career with the CIA, eventually becoming a top executive and the first woman chief of station in Athens. As Page told MacIntosh, “historically, I suppose you could say that the women of the OSS prepared the groundwork for their sisters who came after them in CIA.”²⁸³

Aside from the CIA, numerous other OSS women had various postwar careers. Hélène Deschamps Adams, who as a French teenager had spied for the French Resistance and for the OSS, married an American Army officer and came to the United States as a war bride in 1946. They had one daughter. Forest E. Adams died of a heart attack in 1951. Mrs. Adams never remarried, but taught French and wrote two memoirs of her wartime experiences. She died in New York in 2006 at 85.²⁸⁴ Barbara Lauwers Podoski, a native Czech who had joined the U.S. Women’s Army Corps, and, as a German linguist, served with the OSS’s Morale Operations Branch distributing effective propaganda to German soldiers in Italy, returned to the United States. After the war, she sold hats, worked as a dental assistant, did broadcasts for Voice of America, and finally found a permanent job she liked with the Library of Congress.²⁸⁵ Maria Gulovich, the young Czech schoolteacher, partisan, and guide, who led two American survivors of the ill-fated OSS mission to Slovakia to safety, in 1945 was brought to the United States at Donovan’s request and enrolled at Vassar College, from which she graduated in 1948. She later moved to southern California, married an American businessman, worked had two children, and worked in a real estate business. She was awarded the Bronze Star for her heroism in World War II.²⁸⁶

One female OSS member, unknown to the public during the war, would become a celebrity chef. Her name was Julia Child, and through her books and then her television program, she became the best known chef in America. Julia McWilliams, a big, bright, happy, young woman from California, met her future husband, Paul Child, while both were working at OSS China headquarters in Chungking. They married in Washington right after the war. He took her to Paris where he was assigned by the State Department, and there she spent a decade studying French cuisine. Beginning in 1961 with her book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and subsequently with her own television show and later on Good Morning America, Julia Child demystified French Cooking for the American public. She went further than that. Child taught Americans not just how to cook but how to think deeply about food, a quality missing from many of the glitzy TV chefs who have followed her.²⁸⁷

OSS "Commo" people in the CIA

Quite a few of the people from OSS Communications Branch later worked for the CIA. Bob Kehoe from New Jersey, the radioman on Jeburgh Team Frederick in France, who won the Distinguished Service Cross, returned to Rutgers University to finish his degree under the GI Bill and then earned a Masters Degree in International Relations at Columbia. He spent thirty-five years at the CIA in the training and in management. He earned a Ph.D. in Far Eastern Studies from American University in 1970.²⁸⁸ Gail F. Donnalley, an OSS code clerk, trained in Area C as well as downtown Washington, served in Egypt and Italy, and had a small part in the German surrender in Italy. After being mustered out, he returned to Ohio Wesleyan University, earned his degree, and worked for the U.S. Bureau of the Budget for ten years. Then in 1955, he was recruited by the CIA where he worked in the agency’s communications section until his retirement in 1980. Subsequently, he worked for Apple Computer Company until his second retirement. Even after that, he kept working, serving in the ombudsman program for the State of Virginia.²⁸⁹

Art Reinhardt, who trained at Area C and spent fourteen months as a radio operator in China, became a HAM radio operator and continued communications work after the war. For five years, he also struggled with recurring high fevers and diseases he had caught in China, until they were finally successfully diagnosed and cured in 1950. Reinhardt continued his role in developing communications for America’s secret intelligence organizations. He pioneered in establishing the Diplomatic Telecommunications Service for the Department of State, and he subsequently worked for communications in the Central Intelligence Agency, retiring from the Agency in 1976. “I’m very grateful to the OSS,” he said later, “because it turned out that it gave me a career. That was totally unexpected, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything. And it made me forget I was ever in regular military service!”²⁹⁰

Donovan Preserves the Legend

William J. Donovan, the dynamic chief of the OSS, had been only 62 in 1945 when the war and the OSS ended. He lived another 14 years. During the postwar period, in addition to resuming work at his law firm on Wall Street, he remained keenly interested in the gathering and analysis of foreign intelligence.²⁹¹ He kept up his own sources of information through trips abroad and contacts within the American intelligence community. A vigorous Cold Warrior, he warned repeatedly of the dangers the Soviet Union posed to the interests and values of the United States.²⁹² Recognizing the importance of global economic development for the United States and other nations both for material purposes and to counter communist subversion, Donovan helped form a corporation to encourage economic regeneration of countries devastated by war and vulnerable to Soviet influence. The World Commerce Corporation had representatives in nearly 50 countries and became heavily invested in manufacturing, exporting and importing, and may also have been involved in gathering intelligence.²⁹³ Donovan vigorously supported the Marshall Plan to stimulate economic recovery in Western Europe, and he championed European unification to block Soviet influence.²⁹⁴

Donovan still had political ambitions. He launched a campaign for U.S. Senator from New York in 1946, but it was blocked by Republican Governor Thomas E. Dewey.²⁹⁵ There was speculation in1947 when the CIA was created that Donovan might be its first director, but there was little chance of that. Truman had never liked Donovan, and the feeling was mutual.²⁹⁶ The President appointed the current head of the Central Intelligence Group, Rear Adm. Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, who served until 1950. In the 1952 election, Donovan vigorously supported Eisenhower, and the former OSS chief was disappointed at not being appointed Secretary of Defense or Director of Central Intelligence (DCI). Named DCI was former OSS bureau chief in Switzerland, Allen Dulles, the brother of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles.²⁹⁷

Instead, Eisenhower appointed Donovan as U.S. ambassador to Thailand.²⁹⁸ The OSS had been influential in Thailand during the war, and Donovan had been celebrated by that country, as well as many others.²⁹⁹ At 70 years of age, the former head of the OSS served as Ambassador to Thailand from 1953 to 1954. “They’re scraping the bottom of the barrel to send out an old guy like me,” he told one former member of Detachment 101 when he was appointed. But he was just joking. “It’s good to have one more challenge to meet,” he had added.³⁰⁰ In fact, with the communists in control in China and with the French capitulating to the communist Viet Minh in Vietnam, Donovan’s main role was to help prevent communist infiltration into Thailand and to integrate Thailand into a regional defense system, the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), led by the United States.³⁰¹ Donovan had gone beyond Foster Dulles’s diplomatic arrangement and recommended that SEATO should have a unified, military-political command structure, like NATO, for which Donovan hoped he would be the first theater commander. But his idea was rejected, and at 71, frustrated, tired, ailing, and with public service straining his income, Donovan resigned. Back home, he continued to tout his idea for SEATO, but he also took a larger view toward the struggle against Ho Chi Minh and the communist regime in North Vietnam. “It is not essentially a military matter,” he told a meeting of former OSS alumni in 1954. “It is a political struggle which must be won in the stomachs of the hungry and in the minds of the people. In Washington, they think that American military might is the solution to the problem, but any intelligence man knows this is not true.”³⁰²

Two years later, at 73 and suffering from increasing arteriosclerotic impairment of blood supply to and atrophy of the brain, Donovan had a stroke. In 1957, he suffered a massive stroke and lost control of his mental faculties. Learning of Donovan’s rapidly deteriorating health, President Eisenhower awarded him the National Security Medal, the highest civilian award, to go with his military Medal of Honor, Distinguished Service Cross with Oak Leaf Cluster, and Distinguished Service Medal. Donovan had yet another stroke, and, at the President’s insistence, he was transferred from New York to the Pershing Suite at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, D.C. It was there that Donovan died on Sunday, 8 February 1959, at the age of 76.³⁰³ Hearing of Donovan’s death, Eisenhower lamented: “What a man! We have lost the last hero.”³⁰⁴

Notes

¹ Michael Warner, The Office of Strategic Services: America’s First Intelligence Agency (Washington, D.C.: Central Intelligence Agency, 2002), 42; Anthony Cave Brown, The Last Hero: Wild Bill Donovan (New York: Times Books, 1982), 508-515; R. Harris Smith, OSS: The Secret History of America’s First Central Intelligence Agency (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 5; Corey Ford, Donovan of OSS (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), 239.

² Edwin J. Putzell, deputy and subsequent successor to Otto C. Doering, Jr., executive officer of the OSS, recalled an office rebellion by a group of four or five of the OSS’s top administrators who sent a bluntly worded memo to Donovan in early 1944 “suggesting that he was a poor administrator and that the agency needed better top leadership in its day-to-day operation” and calling for major reorganization. Donovan felt betrayed and rejected their proposal. Edwin Putzell, interviewed by Tim Naftali, 11 April 1997, pp. 2, 15, OSS Oral History Transcripts, CIA Records (RG 263), Box 3, National Archives II, College Park, Md.

³ William J. Donovan quoted in Robert Alcorn, No Banners, No Bands (New York: Donald McKay, 1965), 182; Tom Moon, This Grim and Savage Game: OSS and the Beginning of U.S. Covert Operations in World War II (New York: Da Capo press, 2000), 249.

⁴ On Donovan’s 18 November 1944 plan for a permanent central intelligence agency, see Richard Dunlop, Donovan: America’s Master Spy (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1982), 458-459; Smith, OSS: The Secret History, 363, both of whom claim Roosevelt had requested it. But the much more detailed account in Thomas F. Troy, Donovan and the CIA: A History of the Establishment of the Central Intelligence Agency (Frederick, Md.: University Publications of America, 1981), 218-222, indicates that the impetus came from Donovan rather than the President. Donovan’s first recorded statement of his goal of a permanent OSS is in a question and answer period following a talk to an audience of Army officers in Washington in May 1943; he later put such a recommendation in a memorandum to General Eisenhower on 17 September 1943.

⁵ William J. Donovan, Memorandum for the President, 18 November 1944, and draft Executive Order for “Substantive Authority Necessary in Establishment of a Central Intelligence Service,” Donovan Papers, “OSS Reports to the White House, Nov.-Dec. 1944,” reprinted as Appendix M in Troy, Donovan and the CIA, 445-47.

⁶ Ibid., plus Troy, Donovan and the CIA, 231-34. The only restrictions Donovan put on his proposed intelligence organization were that it would be prohibited from any police or law enforcement functions at home or abroad and that in wartime, the agency and its members would be coordinated or controlled by Joint Chiefs of Staff or by the military Theater Commander where they operated.

⁷ William J. Donovan, Memorandum for the President, 18 November 1944, Donovan Papers, “OSS Reports to the White House, Nov.-Dec. 1944,” reprinted as Appendix M in Troy, Donovan and the CIA, 445-47.

⁸ Walter Trohan, “Donovan Proposes Super-spy System for Postwar New Deal: Would Take over FBI, Secret Service, ONI and G-2 to Watch Home, Abroad,” Washington Times-Herald, 9 February 1945, 1.

⁹ “Roosevelt Plans Post-War Global Secret Service; Donovan Maps New Agency to Keep U.S. Alert to Threat of a New War,” New York Herald-Tribune, 10 February 1945; see also New York Times, 12 February 1945; Chicago Sun, 15 February 1945, and Washington Post, 16 February 1945, in Troy, Donovan and the CIA, 256-57.

¹⁰ Donovan was furious with the leak and slanderous attack. The OSS traced the leak of one of the “secret” numbered copies of the memorandum to the Office of Naval Intelligence and the FBI. Troy, Donovan and the CIA, 258. OSS executive officer, Otto C. Doering, told Donovan that “J. Edgar Hoover had personally handed the memorandum to Trohan.” Dunlop, Donovan: America’s Master Spy, 464, who received the story from Doering himself. Dunlop added that other sources implicated Army G-2 in the leak. This was the traditional interpretation when CIA historian Thomas F. Troy originally completed his classified, manuscript history of Donovan, the OSS, and the origins of the CIA in 1975, but afterwards, when Troy finally was able to get in touch with Walter Trohan in the late 1970s, Trohan told me that the documents had been leaked to him by none other than Steve early, Roosevelt’s executive secretary, who told Trohan, that “FDR wanted the story out.” The truth of such an allegation and the purposes that Roosevelt would have had if true remain matters of speculation. Troy, Donovan and the CIA, vi, 255-60.

¹¹ “F.D.R.” to Major General Donovan, Memorandum, 5 April 1945; Donovan immediately did so, see William J. Donovan to Secretary of War, et al., Memorandum, 6 April 1945, both in CIA Records (RG 263), Thomas Troy Files, Box 6, Folder 46, National Archives II.

¹² Harry S Truman had no middle name. His parents simply gave him a middle initial; thus there is no period after it.

¹³ Harry S Truman, Memoirs, 2 vols. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1955 ), 1:58; see also Troy, Donovan and the CIA, 266-267.

¹⁴ Ibid., 270-271.

¹⁵ Margaret Truman, Harry S. Truman (New York; William Morrow, 1973), 250, quoting from her father’s appointment book.

¹⁶ Dunlop, Donovan, 468.

¹⁷ Edwin J. Putzell, executive officer of the OSS, interviewed by Tim Naftali, 11 April 1997, p. 74, 76; OSS Oral History Transcripts, CIA Records (RG 263), Box 3, National Archives II.

¹⁸ Richard Dunlop, a former OSS officer selected and aided by Donovan in writing the general’s biography, contended, in what may have been Donovan’s own view, that “as for Truman, it was not at all definite that he wanted a central intelligence agency, and certainly not one with Bill Donovan as director. Donovan was among other things a Republican, and a dangerous one at that, who might still become a candidate for the presidency.” Dunlop, Donovan, 467. Anthony Cave Brown, The Last Hero, 790-92, cited another possible personal reason for Truman’s antipathy toward Donovan, claiming that in World War I, Lt. Col. Donovan complained about Capt. Harry S Truman’s Missouri National Guard artillery battery for alleged inadequate support of the attack by Donovan’s unit. A similar story circulated within the OSS. Rafael Hirtz, OSS SO officer in France and China, interview posted 12 February 2004, on the website of the Library of Congress, Veterans History Project, accessed 10 January 2007.

¹⁹ On the Park report, see Troy, Donovan and the CIA, 282; Christopher Andrew, For the President’s Eyes Only: Secret Intelligence and the American Presidency from Washington to Bush (New York: Harper/Collins, 1995), 156; and Michael Warner, “The Creation of the Central Intelligence Group,” Studies in Intelligence: Journal of the American Intelligence Professional, 39/5 (Fall 1995), unclassified and published in expanded form in1996, and reprinted in Studies in Intelligence, Office of Strategic Services, 60th Anniversary, Special Edition (Spring 2002): 170-71.

²⁰ Col. Richard Park, Jr., GSC, Memorandum for the President, n.d., “Top Secret,” in the files of President Harry S. Truman’s secretary, Rose A. Conway, Box 15, “OSS/Donovan” folder, Harry S. Truman Papers, Truman Library, Independence, Mo. There is a copy of the Park Report in CIA Records (RG 263), Thomas Troy Files, Box 6, Folder 44, National Archives II. The present author consulted the copy in the National Archives II. Although the report is undated, Park apparently completed it in mid-March 1945, before Roosevelt’s death, because he showed it to Maj. Gen. Clayton Bissell, GSC, Acting Chief of Staff of Army G-2, on 12 March 1945. Maj. Gen. Clayton Bissell, Memorandum for the Record, 12 March 1945, subject: Colonel Park’s Comments on OSS, Military Intelligence Division Records (RG 165), WFRC, Folder 334, Officer of Strategic Services, copy attached to the Park Report in the Thomas Troy Files, cited above.

²¹ Col. Richard Park, Jr., GSC, Memorandum for the President, n.d., “Top Secret,” Part II, p. 1, CIA Records (RG 263), Thomas Troy Files, Box 6, Folder 44, National Archives II.

²² On the communists and OSS issue, see, for example, Patrick K. O’Donnell, Operatives, Spies, and Saboteurs: The Unknown Story of the Men and Women of World War II’s OSS (New York: Free Press, 2004), 310-11; Robin W. Winks, Cloak & Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939-1961, 2nd ed. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987), 356-59; Charles T. Pinck, President, OSS Society, “Communists at the OSS,” letter to the editor, Washington Post, 8 January 2008, rejoinder to column by Robert D. Novak, Subverting Bush at Langley,” in ibid., 24 December 2007, and dismissing Novak’s assertion that the OSS was “infiltrated by communists.”

²³ Bickham Sweet-Escott, Baker Street Irregular [SOE headquarters in London was on Baker Street] (London: Methuen, 1965), 155.

²⁴ Col. Richard Park, Jr., GSC, Memorandum for the President, n.d., “Top Secret,” Part II, p. 2, CIA Records (RG 263), Thomas Troy Files, Box 6, Folder 44, National Archives II. Park, of course, was working fast and loose with figures as well as innuendos. OSS records show that regular funds were closely monitored, but the unvouchered funds posed a more difficult problem, particularly as they were distributed to gain information and cooperation from anonymous indigenous informants and guerrillas. Edwin J. Putzell, executive officer of the OSS, recalled in speaking of W. Lane Rehm, former financier and OSS chief financial officer, “Well, you know, the use of money and gold was one of the big problems, always, when you are in this kind of operation. Rehm, being a conservative type and fiscally oriented and here we were using funds for which we didn’t have to make an accounting bothered him a good bit. So there was pulling and hauling as to how much and whether to do it.” Putzell interviewed by Tim Naftali, 11 April 1997, p. 74, 76; OSS Oral History Transcripts, CIA Records (RG 263), Box 3, National Archives II.

²⁵ To identify just a few of the inaccuracies in the Park Report: Park reported (Appendix I, p. 15) that in China “it is generally known that a tie-up has been made by the O.S.S. with Chiang Kai-shek’s own intelligence and are integrated with them as they are with the British.” In fact, OSS and Chiang’s intelligence service under Dai-Li were rivals and highly suspicious of each other, and their cooperative arrangement, forced upon them by the U.S. Navy mission in China, was evaded by each. Park asserted that “Donovan tries to control completely every activity” (ibid., p. 20). In fact, Donovan was anything but a micromanager. Park sought to discredit Donovan and the OSS by indicating that many appointments came from the Social Register. “The social director of the St. Regis Hotel, where General Donovan resides when in New York, attained the rank of Lt. Colonel in the O.S.S.” (ibid., p. 31). This half-truth avoids mentioning that Serge Obolensky had been an officer in the Czarist Army and fought guerrilla war against the Red Army, had training at a British commando school, was an officer in the New York National Guard, attended OSS training camps, helped write the OSS manual for Operational Groups, and conducted daring and successful OSS missions into Sardinia and France. Park contended (ibid., p. 39), that “A completely reliable source stated that O.S.S. intends to represent to the American public that it sends its own members across the lines into European enemy territory although this is not actually the case since, due to many blunders committed by that service, SHAEF, about May 1944, instructed the O.S.S. Espionage Section to refrain from dispatching any more agents into enemy territory. The exclusive right to dispatch such agents was given to the British.” Virtually nothing in that assertion was true. OSS had been praised by General Eisenhower, the head of SHAEF, and it continued to send espionage agents behind enemy lines in Western Europe and in Germany itself until the spring of 1945.

²⁶ Col. Richard Park, Jr., GSC, Memorandum for the President, n.d., “Top Secret,” Part II, p. 2; Appendix I, pp. 36-38, CIA Records (RG 263), Thomas Troy Files, Box 6, Folder 44, National Archives II.

²⁷ Ibid., Part II, p. 2; Appendix I, pp. 27-28. Park also made the extraordinary claim that an unnamed businessman said he was told by a member of the OSS at a dinner party in June 1943, “that the O.S.S. planned to enter the field of domestic investigation and would be sort of a U.S. Gestapo with power to penetrate every government agency, trade union, large corporation, etc.” Again, untrue.

²⁸ Troy Donovan and the CIA, 282 lines up similar sections of the Trohan and Park accounts side by side to confirm their virtually identical nature.

²⁹ Col. Richard Park, Jr., GSC, Memorandum for the President, n.d., “Top Secret,” Part III, p. 1; Appendix III, pp. 1-2; CIA Records (RG 263), Thomas Troy Files, Box 6, Folder 44, National Archives II.

³⁰ See, for example, Bradley F. Smith, The Ultra-Magic Deals and the Most Secret Special Relationship [between the United States and Great Britain] (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1993).

³¹ Troy, Donovan and the CIA, 283-284. The OSS request for FY 1946 for $45 million was cut to $24 million; in contrast the FBI request for $49 million was only slightly reduced to $43 million.

³² Troy, Donovan and the CIA, 284.

³³ Brig. Gen. John Magruder to William J. Donovan, memorandum, 2 May 1945, and Donovan to Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, 16 May 1945, both cited in Troy, Donovan and the CIA, 270-71.

³⁴ William J. Donovan to Samuel I. Rosenman, accompanying a copy of Donovan to Budget Director Harold Smith, 25 August 1945, quoted in OSS, War Report of the OSS, 119. This impolitic letter seems to have been ignored by Donovan’s sympathetic biographers.

³⁵ Roger Hall, You’re Stepping on My Cloak and Dagger (New York: Norton, 1957), 216-217; Hall, who had been a Special Operations instructor at Areas F and B and later parachuted into France and Norway, returned to the United States in summer 1945 and worked on this project under John M. (“Deadline Johnny”) Shaheen, a former publicity man from Chicago, who headed the new Reports Declassification Section.

³⁶ Troy, Donovan and the CIA, 284, 291-292. Although the OSS publicity office ceased to exist after 1945, some celebratory stories and films about the exploits of Donovan’s organization continued to appear for several years. With the active cooperation of former OSS personnel, Hollywood produced three major feature films involving the OSS between 1946 and 1947. Paramount’s 1946 thriller, O.S.S., starred Alan Ladd. Republic’s Cloak and Dagger, directed the same year by Fritz Lang, featured Gary Cooper. In 1947, James Cagney starred in 20th Century Fox’s 13 Rue Madeleine, a film about an OSS agent sacrificing his own life to avoid revealing the identities of other Allied agents or leaders of the French Resistance.

³⁷ The key decision, apparently on 27 or 28 August 1945, was made by Truman or his main advisory committee on demobilization and reconversion, a committee composed of Budget Director Harold D. Smith, Special Counsel Samuel Rosenman, and Director of War Mobilization John W. Snyder. OSS learned about the decision on 29 August 1945. Warner, “Creation of the Central Intelligence Group,” 171.

³⁸ Harold Smith, Diary entry, 13 September 1945, quoted in Troy, Donovan and the CIA, 296.

³⁹ Executive Order 9621, 20 September 1945, “Termination of the Office of Strategic Services and Disposition of Its Functions,” is reprinted in Troy, Donovan and the CIA, Appendix S, 461-62.

⁴⁰ Harry S. Truman to William J. Donovan, 20 September 1945, in U.S. President, Papers of the Presidents of the United States. Harry S. Truman. 1945 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1961), 330. Neither President Truman nor Budget Director Smith wanted to confront Donovan directly with the news that would be so disappointing to him. Truman told Smith to do it, but Smith sent his assistant, Donald Stone, to deliver the document to Donovan at OSS headquarters. Stone later reported that “when I delivered the document, Donovan took it with a kind of stoic grace. He knew it was coming, but he gave no outward indication of the personal hurt he felt by the manner in which he was informed.” Richard Dunlop, Donovan: America’s Master Spy (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1982), 473.

⁴¹ Harold Smith, Diary Entry, 20 September 1945, Smith Papers, “Conferences with President Truman, 1945,” in Troy, Donovan and the CIA, 302.

⁴² In an apparent oversight, the original termination date of 1 October 1945, which had been inserted in a earlier draft of the Executive Order, was not altered when the final version of the Executive Order was prepared for the President’s signature.

⁴³ Donovan, his secretary, and a handful of people, with the help of Ray Kellogg from the Photographic Unit, microfilmed the records of the director’s office to preserve them. Edwin J. Putzell, deputy and subsequent successor to Otto C. Doering, Jr., executive officer of the OSS, interviewed by Tim Naftali, 11 April 1997, pp. 72-73; OSS Oral History Transcripts, CIA Records (RG 263), Box 3, National Archives II.

⁴⁴ An abbreviated text of Donovan’s farewell speech of 28 September 1945 is reprinted in Ford, Donovan of OSS, 344, Appendix F. A fuller version is in Dunlop, Donovan, 473-474.

⁴⁵ “General Donovan Welcomes Holdees, Sends a Message,” Attention Please [Area F newspaper, 1944- 1945] 9 April 1945, 1; OSS Records (RG 226), Entry 85, Box 27, Folder 449, National Archives II.

⁴⁶ Donovan’s directive is cited in A. van Buren, Security Officer, to Deputy Director, Schools and Training Branch, 23 December 1944, subject: Security Policy at Area F [under the director’s new mission for Area F], OSS Records (RG 226), Entry 146, Box 223, Folder 3105, National Archives II.

⁴⁷ Roger L. Belanger, letter to the author, 4 February 2005, and telephone interview with the author, 11 April 2005.

⁴⁸ A. van Beuren, chief of security branch, to Charles S. Cheston, Assistant Director, 1 June 1945, subject: Area Recreation, OSS Records (RG 226), Entry 146, Box 223, Folder 3104, National Archives II.

⁴⁹ Staff Sergeant E.D., “Overseas Veterans Amazed at Transformation of Area F,” “Meet the Staff,” “Dance Tomorrow in Main Lounge,” Attention Please, 19 February 1944, 1, 4; OSS Records (RG 226), Entry 85, Box 27, Folder 449, National Archives II.

⁵⁰ “Softball Season Starts; Area Team Sensational in League,” Attention Please, 31 May 1944; “Defeat Area `C’ 4-2,” Attention Please, 9 July 1945, 3; “Holdees Win Ball Game; Beat Sta. Complement; Area F Victor in League,” Attention Please, 19 July 1945, 1; “Area F Team Lags in OSS Softball League,” Attention Please, 31 August 1945, 1, 3; OSS Records (RG 226), Entry 85, Box 27, Folder 449, National Archives II.

⁵¹ Pfc. Vernon Taylor, “New Program Set Up at Area; Tours and Postwar Info Stressed,” Attention Please, 31 August 1945, 1; OSS Records (RG 226), Entry 85, Box 27, Folder 449, National Archives II.

⁵² David Kenney, telephone interview with the author, 11 April 2005.

⁵³ Spiro (“Gus”) Cappony, telephone interview with the author, 16 September 2006.

⁵⁴ Arthur (“Art”) Reinhardt, interview with the author following a tour arranged by the author of Prince William Forest Park, Triangle, Va., 22 February 2007.

⁵⁵ Smith, OSS, 238-39. The prosecution team also included former OSS General Counsel James B. Donovan (no relation to “Wild Bill” Donovan); James Donovan, Challenges (New York: Atheneum, 1967).

⁵⁶ Dunlop, Donovan, 483.

⁵⁷ Telford Taylor, The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials: A Personal Memoir (New York: Knopf, 1992), 148.

⁵⁸ Dunlop, Donovan, 484.

⁵⁹ Troy, Donovan and the CIA, 303.

⁶⁰ Kai Bird, The Chairman: John J. McCloy, the Making of the American Establishment (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 129-30.

⁶¹ William W. Quinn, Buffalo Bill Remembers: Truth and Courage (Fowlerville, Mich.: Wilderness Adventure Books, 1991), 240.

⁶² Richard Helms with William Hood, A Look Over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency (New York: Random House, 2003), 72.

⁶³ Dunlop, Donovan, 485.

⁶⁴ Michael Warner, “The Creation of the Central Intelligence Group,” Studies in Intelligence: Journal of the American Intelligence Professional,, 39/5 (Fall 1995), unclassified and published in expanded form in1996, and reprinted in Studies in Intelligence, Office of Strategic Services, 60th Anniversary, Special Edition (Spring 2002): 169-78.

⁶⁵ Dunlop, Donovan, 486.

⁶⁶ Warner, “The Creation of the Central Intelligence Group,” 174-78.

⁶⁷ Troy, Donovan and the CIA, 377, 382-384, 402-410; Dunlop, Donovan, 491.

⁶⁸ Troy, Donovan and the CIA, 277-410, and Appendices W, X, Y, 467-72; Arthur Darling, The Central Intelligence Agency: An Instrument of Government to 1950 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990).

⁶⁹ Peter M.F. Sichel, telephone interview with the author, 9 July 2008.

⁷⁰ For histories of CIA’s covert operations and the controversies they entailed, see, for example, Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, Cloak and Dollar: A History of American Secret Intelligence, 2d ed. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003), 255-88; Charles D. Ameringer, U.S. Foreign Intelligence: The Secret Side of American History (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath, 1990), 201-405; and the report of a Senate committee chaired by Senator Frank Church (Dem.-Idaho), U.S. Congress, Senate Select Committee to Study Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Final Report, 94th Cong. 2nd Sess., Senate Report No. 94-755, 6 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Govt. Printing Office, 1976).

⁷¹ Ibid., 130-131; Evan Thomas, The Very Best Men: Four Who Dared: The Early Years of the CIA (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 28-30; Wiener, Legacy of Ashes, 32-34.

⁷² Caesar J. Civitella, telephone interview with the author, 25 April 2008.

⁷³ Robert Harris Smith, O.S.S.: The Secret History of America’s First Central Intelligence Agency (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 361-62.

⁷⁴ A point made by many commentators, but in regard to the CIA leadership, see in particular, Evan Thomas, The Very Best Men: Four Who Dared: The Early Years of the CIA (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 10-12, 340-341, and passim. The four officials in the CIA’s Directorate of Plans, its operational arm, who Thomas wrote about were Frank Wisner, Desmond FitzGerald, Tracy Barnes, and Richard Bissell. Thomas notes that Bissell, who was in no small measure responsible for the Marshall Plan and the U-2 spy plane, was also responsible in large part for the assassination plots against Fidel Castro and the abortive invasion at the Bay of Pigs.

⁷⁵ As evident by comments from some OSS veterans (other OSS veterans disagree) on contemporary actions and issues in the OSS Society’s electronic bulletin board and chat room on the internet, [e-mail]. This site is open to OSS veterans, their families and descendants and to other persons interested in the OSS, but applicants must be cleared to have access. The author has had access since he began his research on this subject in 2005. See also the public writings of some former OSSers, for example, John K. Singlaub with Malcolm McConnell, Hazardous Duty: An American Soldier in the Twentieth Century (New York: Summit/Simon & Schuster, 1991), 445-46, 525-26.

⁷⁶ Smith, O.S.S., 363, 375, 381-383.

⁷⁷ Rafael D. Hitz, Transcript of Interview, n.d. [1980s], Rafael Hirtz Collection (AFC/2001/001/94), Veterans History Project, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, http://lcweb2.loc.gov/diglib/vhp/bib/loc.natlib.afc2001001.00094, accessed 10 January 2007.

⁷⁸ Peter M.F. Sichel, telephone interview with the author, 9 July 2008.

⁷⁹ As evident by comments by some OSS veterans on contemporary actions and issues in the OSS Society’s electronic bulletin board and chat room on the internet, [e-mail].

⁸⁰ Smith, O.S.S., 381-383. After what he called “a very brief, uneventful, and undistinguished association with the most misunderstood bureaucracy of the American government,” Smith left the CIA in May 1968 and wrote this history of the OSS primarily with the cooperation of some 200 OSS and State Department veterans who provided recollections and recent observations.

⁸¹ Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 513-514. In 2007, as a result of the terrorist attacks on the United States on 11 September 2001, Congress gave oversight over all 15 agencies in the U.S. intelligence community to a newly-created position, the Director of National Intelligence, who would report directly to the President. Ibid., 504-12.

⁸² The U.S. Army’s official lineage for the Special Forces omits the OSS as a direct predecessor because it was a civilian organization and, therefore, outside of the official chain of command. Officially recognized as predecessor units are Airborne Divisions, Ranger Units, and Joint U.S.-Canadian 1st Special Services Unit (the “Devil’s Brigade”). The issue of lineage of the Army’s Special Forces has been made more complicated and confused by the various reorganizations and designations in the U.S. Army as well as the decision, unjustified in the opinion of many Special Forces veterans, by the Army’s Center of Military History to designate the U.S.-Canadian 1st Special Force (the “Devil’s Brigade”), which served in Italy and southern France, as the forerunner of Army Special Forces. www.Army.mil/cmh//lineage/branches/sf. A number of authoritative sources disagree and cite OSS SO and OG as direct ancestor of the Army’s Special Forces, for example, Alfred H. Paddock, Jr., US Army Special Warfare: Its Origins: Psychological and Unconventional Warfare, 1941-1952 (Washington, D.C.: National Defense University Press, 1982; rev. ed., University Press of Kansas, 2005), 23-25; Aaron Bank, From OSS to Green Berets: The Birth of the Special Forces (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1986), 205-206; Gordon L. Rottman, The U.S. Army Special Forces, 1952-1984 (Osprey, 1985); Charles Simpson, Inside the Green Berets: The First Thirty Years: A History of the U.S. Army’s Special Forces (Presidio Press, 1983); and Mike Yard, “OGs Get to Tell Their Story,” OSS Society Digest, Number 1317, 30 March 2006, accessed 30 March 2006. Paddock and Bank credit OSS as more representative than most of those units of the range of actions conducted by today’s Special Forces. Furthermore, the Special Forces themselves have informally adopted OSS and its units such as Special Operations, Operational Groups, and Detachment 101 in Burma, as among the predecessors of today’s Special Forces. See, for example, the websites of the U.S. Army’s John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Museum at Fort Bragg, Fayetteville, North Carolina at www.soc.mil/swcs/museum, and the Airborne and Special Operations Museum, Fayetteville, North Carolina at www.asomf.org/museum. On some of the OSS insignia being incorporated, see story on the opening of an OSS Exhibit at the latter in January 2008, reported in “Retired General [John K. Singlaub] to Speak on Career,” Fayetteville Observer, 24 January 2008, reprinted in OSS Society Digest Number 1962, 26 January 2008, accessed 26 January 2008. For example, the Army has authorized the wearing of the Army Special Forces arc on the upper left sleeve by those who have served in World War II at least 120 consecutive days in OSS Detachment 101, OSS Jedburgh Detachments, OSS Operational Groups, and the OSS Maritime Unit. http://www.tioh.hquda.pentagon.mil/Tab/SpecialForcesTab.htm, accessed 11 August 2008; and see also the various issues of Veritas: Journal of Army Special Operations History.

⁸³ Alfred H. Paddock, Jr., U.S. Army Special Warfare, Its Origins: Psychological and Unconventional Warfare, 1941-1952 (Washington, D.C.: National Defense University Press, 1982), 156. The semi-official Airborne and Special Operations Museum in Fayetteville, North Carolina agrees. It credits Donovan’s OSS, along with the airborne divisions, Rangers, and the Joint US-Canadian 1st Special Services Unit, as the predecessors of the Army’s Special Forces. http://www.asopf.org/museum_exhibits_wwii.htm, accessed 2 January 2008.

⁸⁴ Paddock, U.S. Army Special Warfare, 69-70. This despite the advice of Army Colonel William R. (“Ray”) Peers, former head of Detachment 101

⁸⁵ Ibid., 130-32.

⁸⁶ Brig. Gen. Robert A. McClure, 55, had been U.S. military attaché in London before being appointed by Eisenhower as chief of intelligence for the European Theater of Operations in 1942. In 1944, he was appointed head of the newly created Psychological Warfare Division of SHAEF. Since Special Forces work was classified they originally received much less publicity than the Psychological Warfare department in the new center.⁸⁶ Paddock, U.S. Army Special Warfare. ,142-146. The location was “Smoke Bomb Hill,” a collection of old wooden barracks just across the street from where the current Special Forces Center is located. Caesar J. Civitella, telephone conversation with the author, 29 April 2008.

⁸⁷ Aaron Bank, From OSS to Green Berets: The Birth of Special Forces (Novato, Calif.; Presidio Press, 1986), 131, 139-67; Paddock., U.S. Army Special Warfare, 158; Obituary, “Col. Aaron Bank, Who Was `Father of Special Forces,’ Dies at 101,” New York Times, 6 April 2004; “Col. Aaron Bank, U.S. Special Forces Founder, Dies,” OSS Society Newsletter, Summer 2004, 13.

⁸⁸ Caesar J. Civitella, “U.S. Army Special Forces Originals,” The Drop [magazine of the U.S. Army Special Forces Association], Summer 1998, 55; I am indebted to Major Civitella for sending me a copy of this article and the OG pamphlet, OSS, Operational Group Command (OSS: December 1944), Caesar J. Civitella, to the author, 25 April 2008. See also “Orientation Material for Use in Connection with Selection of Volunteers for Special Forces,” 24 September 1952, quoted in Paddock, U.S. Army Special Warfare, 148; and Bank, From OSS to Green Berets, 186-87.

⁸⁹ Troy J. Sacquety, U.S. Army Special Operations Command History Office, Fort Bragg, N.C., email to the author, 8 August 2008; see also Peers and Brelis, Behind the Burma Road, 230.

⁹⁰ Caesar J. Civitella, telephone interview with the author, 18 April 2008

⁹¹ Ibid., 25 April 2008; and Charles H. Briscoe, “Major (R) Herbert R. Brucker, DSC, Special Forces Pioneer,” Veritas: Journal of the U.S. Army Special Forces, 2:2 (2006): 34-35.

⁹² Jack Hemingway, Misadventures of a Fly Fisherman: My Life With and Without Papa (Dallas, Tex.: Taylor Pub. Co., 1986), 257.

⁹³ Caesar J. Civitella, telephone interview with the author, 25 and 29 April 2008; and Civitella, “U.S. Army Special Forces Originals,” The Drop [magazine of the U.S. Army Special Forces Association], Summer 1998, 55.

⁹⁴ Bank, From OSS to Green Berets, 175-176. Caesar J. Civitella, telephone interview with the author, 25 April 2008

⁹⁵ Maj. Gen. John K. Singlaub quoted in “SWCS Dedicates Bank Hall: Building Named for ‘Father of Special Forces,’” Special Warfare 19:1 (January-February 2006): 7.

⁹⁶ Camp Mackall is located in the North Carolina sand hills, 40 miles southwest of Fort Bragg. Several airborne divisions trained there in World War II. Robert W. Jones, Jr., “Camp Mackall: A History of Training,” Veritas: Journal of Army Special Operations History, 3:4 (2007): 26-27; and http://www.bragg.Armymil/18abn/CampMackall.htm.

⁹⁷ Bank, From OSS to Green Berets, 179-185; Paddock, U.S. Army Special Warfare, 150-51.

⁹⁸ Bank, From OSS to Green Berets, 186-187; see also Dunlop, Donovan, 499-500.

⁹⁹ Bank, From OSS to Green Berets, 187-188; Paddock, U.S. Army Special Warfare, 149-150.

¹⁰⁰ Caesar J. Civitella, telephone interviews with the author, 25 and 29 April 2008. Among other things, Bank took the organization and statement of mission of Special Forces in1952 verbatim from the organization and statement of mission in the OSS Operational Group Command in World War II.

¹⁰¹ Susan L. Marquis, Unconventional Warfare: Rebuilding U.S. Special Forces (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 1997).

¹⁰² “Col. Aaron Bank, U.S. Special Forces Founder, Dies,” OSS Society Newsletter, Summer 2004, 13.

¹⁰³ Aaron Bank quoted in Dunlop, Donovan, 500.

¹⁰⁴ Col. H.L. Robinson to Director [Brig. Gen. John Magruder], Strategic Services Unit, War Department , 4 October 1945, subject: Report of Schools & Training Activities as of 1 October 1945, OSS Records (RG 226), Records of the Director’s Office, Microfilm 1642, Roll 102, Frames 561-64, National Archives II.

¹⁰⁵ On the West Coast, the OSS S&T schools on Catalina Island and the Headquarters Detachment at Newport Beach, California were in the process of being moved to the East Coast for installation in the camps of Area A at Prince William Forest Park, Virginia, when V-J Day occurred on 14 August 1945. Ibid.

¹⁰⁶ Capt. James M., Rodgers to Liaison Officer, Schools and Training Branch, OSS, 9 January 1945, subject: Authorization to Destroy Training Property, and authorization from Lt. Leonard Karsakov, 9 January 1945, OSS Records (RG 226), Entry 136, Box 153, Folder 1658, National Archives II.

¹⁰⁷ On the role of John Gum, as wartime superintendent of the CCC camps at Chopawamsic, see Susan Carey Strickland, Prince William Forest Park: An Administrative History (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 1986), 17, although she misspells Gum’s name as Gun.

¹⁰⁸ Capt. Stanley H. Lyson, S-4, Schools and Training, to Lt. Warner, undated [February 1945], subject: Data on Detachment A, OSS Records (RG 226), Entry 136, Box 153, Folder 1658, National Archives II.

¹⁰⁹ Ibid.

¹¹⁰ Estimate #3, Estimated Prices Prepared by T. Sgt. John E. [sic] Gum, attachment to Col. W.L. Rehm, Acting Assistant Director for Services, Strategic Services Unit (SSU), for the Director, to Commanding General, Army Service Forces, Mobilization Division, 19 October 1945, subject: Chopwamsic National Recreational Demonstration Area, in OSS Records (RG 226), Entry 146, Box 8, Folder 199, National Archives II.

¹¹¹ Capt. Stanley H. Lyson, S-4, Schools and Training, to Lt. Warner, undated [February 1945], subject: Data on Detachment A, OSS Records (RG 226), Entry 136, Box 153, Folder 1658; and Estimate #3, Estimated Prices Prepared by T. Sgt. John E. [sic] Gum, both attachments to Col. W.L. Rehm, Acting Assistant Director for Services, Strategic Services Unit (SSU), for the Director, to Commanding General, Army Service Forces, Mobilization Division, 19 October 1945, subject: Chopawamsic National Recreational Demonstration Area, Attachments #1, #2, and #3 in OSS Records (RG 226), Entry 146, Box 8, Folder 199, National Archives II.

¹¹² The location of the Boat House is given variously as at A-2 and at A-5, but A-5 seems the most probable. Strickland, Prince William Forest Park, 36, states that the Army Corps of Engineers relocated the Boat House from Camp 5 to Camp 2. The Boat House location at A-2 and its dimensions are given in Capt. Stanley H. Lyson, S-4 [Supply], Schools and Training, to Lt. Warner, undated [February 1945], subject: Data on Detachment A, OSS Records (RG 226), Entry 136, Box 153, Folder 1658, National Archives II. But it is cited at A-5 and its construction cost of $300 is given in Estimate #1, Estimated Prices Prepared by Quartermaster Depot Office, Ft. Belvoir, Va., and again at A-5 in Estimate #3, Estimated Prices Prepared by T. Sgt. John E. [sic] Gum, both attachments to Col. W.L. Rehm, Acting Assistant Director for Services, Strategic Services Unit (SSU), for the Director, to Commanding General, Army Service Forces, Mobilization Division, 19 October 1945, subject: Chopawamsic National Recreational Demonstration Area, Attachments #1, #2, and #3 in OSS Records (RG 226), Entry 146, Box 8, Folder 199, National Archives II.

¹¹³ Capt. Stanley H. Lyson, S-4, Schools and Training, to Lt. Warner, undated [February 1945], subject: Data on Detachment A, OSS Records (RG 226), Entry 136, Box 153, Folder 1658, National Archives II.

¹¹⁴ Estimate #3, Estimated Prices Prepared by T. Sgt. John E. [sic] Gum, attachment to Col. W.L. Rehm, Acting Assistant Director for Services, Strategic Services Unit (SSU), for the Director, to Commanding General, Army Service Forces, Mobilization Division, 19 October 1945, subject: Chopawamsic National Recreational Demonstration Area, OSS Records (RG 226), Entry 146, Box 8, Folder 199, National Archives II.

¹¹⁵ Col. H.L. Robinson to Director, Strategic Services Unit, War Department [Brig. Gen. John Magruder], 4 October 1945, subject: Report of Schools & Training Activities as of 1 October 1945, OSS Records (RG 226), Records of the Director’s Office, Microfilm 1642, Roll 102, Frames 561-64, National Archives II.

¹¹⁶ Joseph J. Tully, telephone interview with the author, 29 December 2007.

¹¹⁷ Col. W.L. Rehm, Acting Assistant Director for Services, Strategic Services Unit (SSU), for the Director, to Commanding General, Army Service Forces, Mobilization Division, 19 October 1945, subject: Chopawamsic National Recreational Demonstration Area, Estimates #1, #2 and #3, in OSS Records (RG 226), Entry 146, Box 8, Folder 199, National Archives II.

¹¹⁸ Lt. Col. Ainsworth Blogg to General Counsel Office, SSU, 16 October 1945, subject: Liquidation of Areas “A” and “C,” OSS Records (RG 226), Entry 136, Wash S&T OP89, Box 174, Folder 1841, National Archives II. Blogg noted that the labor involved in removing the equipment as well as restoring the buildings and property to prewar condition would offset the limited salvage value of the equipment itself.

¹¹⁹ Col. W.L. Rehm, Acting Assistant Director for Services, Strategic Services Unit (SSU), for the Director, to Commanding General, Army Service Forces, Mobilization Division, 19 October 1945, subject: Chopawamsic National Recreational Demonstration Area, OSS Records (RG 226), Entry 146, Box 8, Folder 199, National Archives II.

¹²⁰ Lt. Col. Ainsworth Blogg to General Counsel Office, SSU, 16 October 1945, subject: Liquidation of Areas “A” and “C,” OSS Records (RG 226), Entry 136, Box 174, Folder 1841, National Archives II.

¹²¹ Capt. James E. Rogers, commander, Detachment A, to Commanding General, Fort Belvoir, 19 October 1944, subject: Range Clearance; and Lt. Stanley H. Lyson, to Commanding Officer, HQ Detachment, OSS, 22 December 1944, subject: Request for Clearance of Dud [Mortar Shell] Field, Detachment “A” Mortar Range; and Lyson to Col. H.L. Robinson, 6 January 1945, subject: Dud Field Mortar Range Detachment A; and Maj. Robert C. Wright, memorandum, 29 January 1945; all in OSS Records (RG 226), Entry 136, Box 153, Folder 1658, National Archives II.

¹²² Col. H.L. Robinson to Capt. Howard J. Preston, 10 January 1946, subject: Chopawamsic National Recreational Demonstration Area, OSS Records (RG 226), Entry 146 General Counsel’s Office, Box 8, Folder 199, National Archives II.

¹²³ Colonel Blair to Frank T. Gartside, Superintendent, National Capital Parks, 21 August 1946, National Park Service Records (RG 79), File Number 1460/5, cited in Strickland, Prince William Forest Park, 29, as being in the Federal Records Center, Suitland, Md., but which seems to be no longer there.

¹²⁴ In the summer of 1985, for example, James Fugate, Chief of Maintenance at Prince William Forest Park, found a dead launching grenade in the roof of one of the cabins in Camp 3, Strickland, Prince William Forest Park, 30. In 2002, the empty propellant tip of an anti-tank missile, probably a bazooka rocket, was found on a ridge in the root mound of a recently fallen tree near Parking Lot “I.” Prince William Forest Park Archives, Cultural Resources, Catalog item number PRWI 13462.

¹²⁵ Robert A. Noile, Triangle, Virginia, telephone interview with the author, 27 April 2007. His name is pronounced “No-LEE.”

¹²⁶ National Park Service, “Fort Hunt—the Forgotten Story,” http://www.nps.gov/archive/gwump/fohu/fortgotten.thm, accessed 15 August 2007; Petula Dvorak, “Fort Hunt’s Quiet Men Break Silence on WWII,” Washington Post, 6 October 2007, A1. I am indebted to Vincent Santucci, chief ranger at the NPS’s George Washington Memorial Parkway, for informing me of the material he and his rangers have uncovered concerning this long secret operation. Vincent Santucci, Arlington, Va,, telephone interview with the author, 22 August 2007.

¹²⁷ Ira B. Lykes, oral history interview with S. Herbert Evison, 23 November 1973, page 45, transcript in the National Park Service’s Harpers Ferry Center Library, Harpers Ferry, W.Va. I am indebted to David Nathanson of the library for responding to my request for a copy of this transcript.

¹²⁸ Ibid., 45-50. In this 1973 interview, Lykes stated that original appropriation was $35,000. A decade later on 4 September 1985, in an interview with Susan Cary Strickland, an historian, Lykes remembered the amount as $25,000. Strickland, Prince William Forest Park, 34, 35.

¹²⁹ Ira Lykes to Irving Root, 20 February 1948, in Strickland, Prince William Forest Park, 36.

¹³⁰ Ira B. Lykes, oral history interview with S. Herbert Evison, 23 November 1973, pages 51-52, transcript in the National Park Service’s Harpers Ferry Center Library, Harpers Ferry, W. Va. In this 1973 interview, Lykes stated that he had calculated it one day and the National Park Service had gotten “over a million dollars worth of development” in the cooperative project with the Corps of Engineers. A decade later, on 4 September 1985, in an interview with Susan Cary Strickland, an historian, Lykes remembered the amount as $2 million. Strickland, Prince William Forest Park, 35. An official commendation in 1965, states that over a two year period, the cooperation with the Corps of Engineers, “saved the Government almost $500,000.” Ira B. Lykes, Citation for Distinguished Service, signed by Secretary of the Interior Stewart L. Udall, 15 July 1965, copy in Ira B. Lykes, Personnel File, National Personnel Records Center, St. Louis, Mo., obtained by the author, 26 April 2007.

¹³¹ Ira B. Lykes, oral history interview with S. Herbert Evison, 23 November 1973, pages 53-54, transcript in the National Park Service’s Harpers Ferry Center Library, Harpers Ferry, W.Va.

¹³² Strickland, Prince William Forest Park, 47.

¹³³ Ibid., 100, note 110.

¹³⁴ Allan R. Millett, Semper Fidelis: The History of the United States Marine Corps, rev. ed. (New York: Free Press, 1991), 284, 291,323-24.

¹³⁵ Lt. Col. Keller E. Rockey, USMC, to Charles H. Gerner, Assistant Superintendent, National Park Service, 24 June 1935, NPS Records (RG 79), National Archives II, copy in Prince William Forest Park archive. In World War II, Major General Rockey commanded the 5th Marine Division at Iwo Jima.

¹³⁶ Strickland, Prince William Forest Park, 53-54.

¹³⁷ Millett, Semper Fidelis, 344.

¹³⁸ Arthur Demaray to Lt. Col. R. Valliant, 31 August 1938, NPS Records (RG 79), Box 121, National Archives II.

¹³⁹ Ira Lykes, Monthly Report, May 1942, quoted in Strickland, Prince William Forest Park: An Administrative History (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 1986), 25.

¹⁴⁰ Ira Lykes, Monthly Report, 1941, cited in Strickland, Prince William Forest Park, 26.

¹⁴¹ Ira Lykes, Monthly Report, November 1942, cited in Strickland, Prince William Forest Park, 25-26.

¹⁴² Ira B. Lykes, oral history interview with S. Herbert Evison [one of his former supervisors], 23 November 1973, pages 42-43, transcript in the National Park Service’s Harpers Ferry Center Library, Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. Lykes apparently misremembered the number of acres south of Joplin Road, it was approximately 5,000 acres. Bob Hickman, Superintendent, Prince William Forest Park, telephone conversation with the author, 11 August 2008.

¹⁴³ Robert A. Noile, Triangle, Va., telephone interview with the author, 27 April 2008. Born in 1939, Noile grew up in a house on old Joplin Road 300 yards from the park.

¹⁴⁴ Frank Gartside, Assistant Superintendent, National Capital Parks, National Park Service, to Ira B. Lykes, 13 September 1943, subject: Furlough (military duty), copy in Ira B. Lykes, Personnel File, obtained by the author 26 April 2007 from the National Personnel Records Center, St. Louis, Mo.

¹⁴⁵ Ira B. Lykes to Susan C. Strickland, 8 September 1985, quoted in Strickland, Prince William Forest Park, 26.

¹⁴⁶ Susan C. Strickland interview with Thelma Williams Hebda, 15 Juy 1985, and Ira B. Lykes to Frank Gartside, 31 May 1943, both cited in Strickland, Prince William Forest Park, 26-27. Thelma Williams later married a park employee, Joseph Hebda.

¹⁴⁷ Irving C. Root, Superintendent, National Capital Parks, National Park Service, to Ira B. Lykes, 6 December 1945, copy in Ira B. Lykes, Personnel File, obtained by the author 26 April 2007 from the National Personnel Records Center, St. Louis, Mo.

¹⁴⁸ “Marine Corps Base Quantico,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_Corps_Base_Quantico. Accessed 5 January 2008.

¹⁴⁹ Strickland, Prince William Forest Park, 55-54.

¹⁵⁰ Acting Secretary of the Interior E.K. Burlew to Secretary of the Navy, 27 May 1941, copy in the Prince William Forest Park archives, Triangle, Va..

¹⁵¹ Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal to Acting Secretary of the Interior Abe Fortas, 12 June 1943, cited in Strickland, Prince William Forest Park, 57.

¹⁵² Strickland, Prince William Forest Park, 58-59.

¹⁵³ Public Law 736, June 11, 1948, 80th Congress, 2nd Session. It originated as H.R. 6246 sponsored by Rep. Howard Smith. Copy of the act as well as well as House and Senate Reports and interdepartmental correspondence relating to it from White House Bill File, Harry S Truman Papers, Harry S Truman Presidential Library, Independence, Mo. I am indebted to Robert Hickman, superintendent at Prince William Forest Park, for sending me copies of these documents, 11 January 2008.

¹⁵⁴ Strickland, Prince William Forest Park, 60-61.

¹⁵⁵ Documents including, A.E. Damaray, director NPS, to Ira B. Lykes, 27 July 1951, subject: Promotion and Transfer [to Shiloh National Military Park] and [name unclear] Acting Personnel Director to Ira B. Lykes, 8 August 1968, subject: Resignation, copies in Ira B. Lykes, Personnel File, obtained by the author 26 April 2007 from the National Personnel Records Center, St. Louis, Mo.

¹⁵⁶ George B. Hartzog, Jr., Battling for the National Parks (Mt. Kisco, N.Y.: Moyer Bell Ltd., 1988), 134- 137.

¹⁵⁷ Robert Hickman, biographical sketch, copy in Prince William Forest Park archives. I am indebted to George Liffert, Assistant Superintendent of the park, for providing me with this information. George Liffert email to the author, 7 January 2008.

¹⁵⁸ Robert Hickman, Superintendent of Prince William Forest Park, telephone interview with the author, 24 January 2008, and email to the author, 25 January 2008. for a photograph of the signing by Hickman and Wilson in Lejeune Hall on the Marine Corps base, see “Coming to an Understanding,” Quantico Sentry, 13 March 1998, clipping in the Archives of Prince William Forest Park, Triangle, Va.

¹⁵⁹ “Memorandum of Understanding: A Memorandum of Understanding between Prince William Forest Park and Marine Corps Base, Quantico,” 10 March 1998, reprinted in “Prince William Forest Park, General Management Plan, February 1999,” pp. 37-40, copy in the Archives of Prince William Forest Park, Triangle, Va.

¹⁶⁰ Robert Hickman, Superintendent of Prince William Forest Park, Triangle, Va., telephone interview with the author, 24 January 2008, and email to the author, 25 January 2008.

¹⁶¹ Public Law 107-314 (H.R. 4546), Section 2835, signed into law by President George W. Bush, Dec. 2, 2002.

¹⁶² “Agreement to Transfer Administrative Jurisdiction of Land,” effective 22 September 2003, signed on 18 August 2003 by Robert S. Hickman and Terry R. Carlstrom for the NPS and on 22 August 2003 by Brig. Gen. Joseph Composto for the Marine Corps. Signed copies of the agreement included with Col. J.M. Lowe, USMC, to Robert Hickman, NPS, 21 November 2003, copy in the Archives of Prince William Forest Park, Triangle, Va. In effect, the final agreement provided for the Marine base to transfer jurisdiction to the park of 352 acres of land that the Marines had purchased from private owners but would now be in the park area. The park transferred jurisdiction to the Marine base of 3,398 acres south and west of the park that the Marines had been using for decades. The special use permit for the Marines to operate on park land was nullified, and 1,346 acres of the park south of old Joplin Road, which the Marines had occupied since World War II, were relinquished by the Marines and recognized to be part of the park.

¹⁶³ Robert Hickman, superintendent of Prince William Forest Park, Triangle, Va., telephone interview with the author, 24 January 2008, and email to the author, 25 January 2008. Hickman added that throughout the negotiations that led to the final transfer, he had the active support of the directors NPS’s National Capital Region, sequentially, Bob Stanton, Terry Carlstrom, and Joe Lawler, and they had worked with several commanding officers at the Marine Base, including not simply Generals Martin R. Steele, Edwin Kelley, and Frances Wilson but also Brig. Gen. Leif Hendrickson and Brig. Gen. Joseph Composto. Providing continuity and cooperation throughout from the Marine Corps were attorney, Penny Clark, and base community relations officer, Ken Oliver.

¹⁶⁴ Strickland, Prince William Forest Park, 83-92.

¹⁶⁵ Acting Secretary of the Interior Abe Fortas to Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, 31 May 1944; and to Secretary of War Robert L. Patterson, 4 October 1945, in “World War II Correspondence,” Catoctin Mountain Park Archives, Catoctin Mountain Park Headquarters, Thurmont, Md.

¹⁶⁶ Acting Secretary of the Interior Abe Fortas, Special Use Permit Authorizing Use of Land in the Catoctin Recreational Demonstration Area, Maryland, by the War Department, for war purposes, 31 May 1944; accepted by Acting Secretary of War Robert P. Patterson, 15 July 1944, Special Use Permits Folder, Catoctin Mountain Park Archives, World War II, located at Catoctin Mountain Park Headquarters, Thurmont, Md.

¹⁶⁷ G.B. Williams, custodian, Catoctin RDA, to Director, NPS Region One, memorandum, 19 October 1945, “World War II Correspondence,” Catoctin Mountain Park Archives, Catoctin Mountain Park Headquarters, Thurmont, Md.

¹⁶⁸ Garland B. Williams was born December 17, 1893, photostatic copy of birth certificate, plus other documents related to Willliams’ continuing role as custodian of Catoctin Recreational Demonstration Area during the war, all in Garland B. Williams Personnel File, National Personnel Records Center, St. Louis, Mo., obtained by the author, 8 February 2005. 169 Handwritten note [by historian Barbara Kirkconnell?], “21 Oct. ’45” located in World War II Records, Correspondence Folder, Catoctin Mountain Park Archives, Catoctin Mountain Park Headquarters, Thurmont, Md.

¹⁷⁰ James H. Mackley, Thurmont, Md., telephone interview with the author, 13 June 2006. Mackley, a lifelong resident of Thurmont, was born there in 1929.

¹⁷¹ The Visitor Center was originally built in 1941.

¹⁷² U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Real Estate Branch, map 26 May 1942, “Government Property, Catoctin Area,” National Park Service Records (RG 79), Office of the Chief Counsel, Legislative Files, 1932-1950, Box 76, National Archives II. This report indicated that the War Department had acquired 275 acres, perhaps not including the acreage leased from the Church of the Brethren.

¹⁷³ G.B. Williams, custodian, Catoctin RDA, to Director, NPS Region One, memorandum, 19 October 1945, and 7 March 1946 memo from Williams to Director Region One, both located in World War II Records, Correspondence Folder, Catoctin Mountain Park Archives, Catoctin Mountain Park Headquarters, Thurmont, Md.

¹⁷⁴ Catoctin Enterprise, 28 January 1944, and 2 June 1944, cited in Edmund F. Wehrle, Catoctin Mountain Park: A Historic Resource Study (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 2000), 209-210.

¹⁷⁵ Post Engineer’s report of 25 September 1945, in Lt. Col. F.B. Grider, Army Services Forces, Third Service Command, to Division Engineer, Middle Atlantic Division, 11 October 1945, subject: Excess OffPort Facility: Catoctin Recreational Demonstration Area, located in World War II Records, General Information Folder, Catoctin Mountain Park Archives, Catoctin Mountain Park Headquarters, Thurmont, Md.

¹⁷⁶ Lt. Charles E. Spears, Detachment 6 of the 9800th TSU-CE Bomb & Shell Disposal Team, Blue Ridge Summit, Pa., to Real Estate Officer, Middle Atlantic Division, Corps of Engineers, 4 March 1946 and G.B. Williams to NPS Regional Director, 5 March 1946, both in World War II File, General Information Folder, Catoctin Mountain Park Archives, Catoctin Mountain Park Headquarters, Thurmont, Md.

¹⁷⁷ Mel Poole, Superintendent, Catoctin Mountain Park, to the author, February 2008.

¹⁷⁸ War Department, [name of bureau unclear in photocopy, United States Remainder Office?], “Restoration Survey Catoctin Training Center, Thurmont, Maryland,” 31 October 1945, located in World War II Records, General Information Folder, Catoctin Mountain Park Archives, Catoctin Mountain Park Headquarters, Thurmont, Md.

¹⁷⁹ G.B. Williams, custodian, Catoctin RDA, to Director, NPS Region One, memorandum, 19 October 1945, located in World War II Records, Correspondence Folder, Catoctin Mountain Park Archives, Catoctin Mountain Park Headquarters, Thurmont, Md.

¹⁸⁰ War Department, [name of bureau unclear in photocopy, United States Remainder Office?], “Restoration Survey Catoctin Training Center, Thurmont, Maryland,” 31 October 1945, located in World War II Records, General Information Folder, Catoctin Mountain Park Archives, Catoctin Mountain Park Headquarters, Thurmont, Md.

¹⁸¹ Ibid.

¹⁸² Ibid.

¹⁸³ The Marines suffered 45,000 casualties on the two islands. Allan R. Millett, Semper Fidelis: The History of the United States Marine Corps, rev. ed. (New York: Free Press, 1991), 431, 438. Quotation from the request of Col. Donald J. Kendall, USMC, to Garland B. Williams, NPS, 3 July 1945; and G.B. Williams to Director NPS Region One, 6 July 1945, memorandum; in Correspondence Folder, Catoctin Mountain Park Archives, World War II, located at Catoctin Mountain Park Headquarters, Thurmont, Md.

¹⁸⁴ G.B. Williams, custodian, Catoctin RDA, to Director, NPS Region One, memorandum, 19 October 1945, located in World War II Records, Correspondence Folder, Catoctin Mountain Park Archives, Catoctin Mountain Park Headquarters, Thurmont, Md; A.E. Demaray, associate director, NPS to Abe Fortas, Acting Secretary of the Interior, 20 September 1945; Acting Secretary of the Interior Abe Fortas to Secretary of War Robert L. Patterson, 4 October 1945; NPS Records (RG 79), Entry 7, Central Classified File, 1933-1949, General, 201 National Defense, C [Catoctin], Box 79, Folder 201, National Archives II.

¹⁸⁵ Fortas, Special Use Permit Authorizing Use of Land in the Catoctin Recreational Demonstration Area, Maryland, by the Commandant, U.S. Marine Corps, for rehabilitation and security purposes, 4 October 1945; accepted by Maj. Gen. W.P.T. Hill, Quartermaster General, USMC, 19 October 1945; World War II Records, Special Use Permits Folder, Catoctin Mountain Park Archives, located at Catoctin Mountain Park Headquarters, Thurmont, Md.

¹⁸⁶ G.B. Williams to NPS Region One Director, 7 January 1946, memorandum, handwritten draft and typed final version, located in World War II Records, Correspondence Folder, Catoctin Mountain Park Archives, Catoctin Mountain Park Headquarters, Thurmont, Md. The is some discrepancy between the handwritten draft of the 7 January 1946 memorandum, which states clearly that it was the Amy that renovated the buildings before the Marines moved into Camp No. 2 and the typed version of the memo which indicates that the renovation between November and January may have been done by the Marine Corps, an assertion reinforced in Williams to Harry T. Thompson, Asst. Supt., National Capital Parks, 8 February 1946, in ibid. Thus it would appear that Kirkconnell, Catoctin Mountain Park, 88, may have erred in attributing this winter renovation to the Army instead of the Marines.

¹⁸⁷ G.B. Williams to Director, National Park Service, Region One, 7 March 1946; in World War II Records, Correspondence Folder, Catoctin Mountain Park Archives, Catoctin Mountain Park Headquarters, Thurmont, Md.; Lt. Col. C.J. Blair, Jr., chief, Real Estate Division, Middle Atlantic Division, Corps of Engineers, to Department of the Interior, 3 December 1945, World War II, Correspondence Folder, Catoctin Mountain Park Archives, Catoctin Mountain Park Headquarters, Thurmont, Md.; G.B. Williams, custodian, to Regional Director, 7 January 1946; and A.E. Demaray, associate director NPS, to Lt. Col. C.J. Blair, Jr., chief, real estate division, Corps of Engineers, Office of the Division Engineer, War Department, Baltimore, MD, 23 January 1946, all in NPS Records (RG 79), Entry 7, Central Classified File, 1933-1949, General, 201 National Defense, C [Catoctin], Box 79, Folder 201, National Archives II.

¹⁸⁸ Lt. Charles E. Spears, Detachment 6 of the 9800th TSU-CE Bomb & Shell Disposal Team, Blue Ridge Summit, Pa., to Real Estate Officer, Middle Atlantic Division, Corps of Engineers, 4 March 1946 and G.B. Williams to NPS Regional Director, 5 March 1946, both in World War II File, General Information Folder, Catoctin Mountain Park Archives; Lt. Col. William C. Ready, Asst. Division Engineer, Middle Atlantic Division, Corps of Engineers, to A. E. Demaray, National Park Service, 30 January 1946; Demaray to Director, NPS Region One, 15 February 1946; and G.B. Williams to Director NPS Region One, 7 March 1946; all in World War II Records, Correspondence Folder, Catoctin Mountain Park Archives, Catoctin Mountain Park Headquarters, Thurmont, Md.

¹⁸⁹ Transfer of Surplus Property Agreement, Catoctin Recreational Demonstration Area, 14 May 1946, signed by representatives of the Corps of Engineers Washington District and the U.S. Department of the Interior; G.B. Williams to Harry T. Thompson, Acting Supt., National Capital Parks, 17 May 1946, both in World War II Records, Correspondence Folder, Catoctin Mountain Park Archives, Catoctin Mountain Park Headquarters, Thurmont, Md.

¹⁹⁰ G.B. Williams to Maj. W.J. Dickinson, 2 October 1946, in World War II Records, Correspondence Folder, Catoctin Mountain Park Archives, Catoctin Mountain Park Headquarters, Thurmont, Md.

¹⁹¹ Irving C. Root, Supt. NPS National Capital Parks, to Commandant U.S. Marine Corps, memorandum, 17 February 1947; and G.B. Williams, park custodian, memorandum certifying receipt of equipment from USMC, 18 March 1947. both in World War II Records, Correspondence Folder, Catoctin Mountain Park Archives, Catoctin Mountain Park Headquarters, Thurmont, Md.

¹⁹² Kirkconnell, Catoctin Mountain Park, 92, n. 82, citing her telephone interview with Garland Williams, Jr., 1 March 1987; see also W. Dale Nelson, The President Is at Camp David (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1995), 26.

¹⁹³ “Site Survey Summary Sheet for DERP-FUDS Site No. CO3MDO346,” Catoctin Recreational Demonstration Area, 11 September 1995, pp. 4-5, in World War II Records, General Information Folder, Catoctin Mountain Park Archives, Catoctin Mountain Park Headquarters, Thurmont, Md.

¹⁹⁴ G.B. Williams to Director, NPS Region One, memorandum, 7 January 1946; Elbert Cox, Acting Director, NPS Region One, to Arthur A. Demaray, NPS Associate Director, 21 January 1946, in World War II Records, Correspondence Folder, Catoctin Mountain Park Archives, Catoctin Mountain Park Headquarters, Thurmont, Md.

¹⁹⁵ Since the Marines had abandoned the Misty Mount cabin camp to move to Greentop, the National Park Service offered Cabin Camp No. 1 (Misty Mount) as an alternative to the Maryland League for Crippled Children, but the League rejected that site as too rugged and steep for its handicapped youngsters. Secretary of Agriculture Clinton Anderson to Matthew J. Connelly, 20 April 1946; Secretary of the Interior Julius A. Krug to Matthew J. Connelly, 15 May 1946, memorandum, both in the Papers of Presidential naval aide William M. Rigdon at the Truman Presidential Library and cited in Nelson, The President is at Camp David, 22-25; E. M. Lisle, asst. regional director, NPS Region One, Memorandum to the Director, 21 August 1946, NPS Records (RG 79), Entry 54, Box 60, National Archives II.

¹⁹⁶ When the Marines had vacated Misty Mount to move to Greentop, the National Park Service, at Williams recommendation, granted the Salvation Army a permit to use Cabin Camp No. 1 during the summer of 1946 as it had before the war. But the permit was subsequently cancelled, and Misty Mount remained unoccupied until 1947. E.M. Lisle, assistant regional director, Region One, to Director, NPS, 21 August 1946, memorandum, and Arthur E. Demaray, Associate Director of NPS, 25 November 1946, “Confidential” memorandum, both in NPS Records (RG 79), RDA Program Files, Entry 54, Box 60, National Archives II.

¹⁹⁷ “Shangri-La Revealed,” Baltimore Sun, 16 September 1945; “Mountain Top White House: F.D. and Winnie Met at Maryland Hideout,” Washington, D.C. Times-Herald, 18 September 1942, p. 12; clippings, and Newton B. Drury to International News Photos, Inc., 17 September 1945; all in National Park Service Records (NG 79), Entry 19, Records of Newton B. Drury, 1940-1951, Box 4, Folder, “Catoctin,” National Archives II. As the late President had predicted, his critics accused him of extravagance. The McCormickowned, isolationist, anti-New Deal Chicago Tribune complained that the costs had run over $100,000, which was true, but also incorrectly that the swimming pool had been constructed especially for the President and that the whole facility was quite pretentious. Chicago Tribune, 21 September 1945, p. 1. Two weeks later, reporters and photographers were allowed inside the camp and the media presented illustrated accounts of the late President’s mountain hideaway. “Shangri-La,” Baltimore Sun, 7 October 1945, Photographic Section, 1; “Roosevelt Hideaway: The Late President Had a Secret Retreat in Maryland’s Mountains,” Life, 15 October 1945, 101-104, clippings in Vertical File, “Shangri-La,” Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, NY.

¹⁹⁸ Nelson, The President Is at Camp David, 22-50.

¹⁹⁹ Maryland League for Crippled Children to President Truman, 1 August 1947, Truman Presidential Library, cited in Nelson, The President is at Camp David, 22-23, 25. For the Presidential visit with the crippled children, see also the account in the Catoctin Enterprise, 8 August 1947.

²⁰⁰ James H. Mackley, Thurmont, Md., telephone interview with the author, 13 June 2006.

²⁰¹ Federal responsibility within the park was divided by agreement in 1948. Although the land at the Presidential camp remained within the jurisdiction of the National Park Service, which also maintained the access roads, the Department of the Navy accepted responsibility for administration, protection, operation and improvements at the Presidential Retreat. Agreement between the National Park Service and the Department of the Navy’s Bureau of Yards and Docks, 1 November 1948, Catoctin Mountain Park Archives, Catoctin Mountain Park Headquarters, Thurmont, Md. The agreement was subsequently modified to provide concurrent protection by the two agencies. See Kirkconnell, Administrative History of Catoctin Mountain Park, 214-217; and Edmund F. Wehrle, Catoctin Mountain Park: An Historic Resource Study (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 2000), 211-12.

²⁰² League of Maryland Sportsmen, “A Resolution Calling upon the Federal Government to Return the Catoctin National Recreation Area to the State of Maryland,” attached to Sen. Millard E. Tydings to Newton B. Drury, director of NPS, 1 July 1944; Joseph F. Kaylor, Maryland State Forester, to Hillory A. Tolson, NPS, 1 June 1945; Records of NPS (RG 79), RDA Program Files, Box 60, National Archives II.

²⁰³ Harry S Truman to Herbert R. O’Connor, Governor of Maryland, December 1945, letter in the Harry S Truman Papers, Truman Presidential Library, Independence, Mo. Executive Order 7496 of 12 November 1936 had made Catoctin RDA part of the National Park System, but the federal status of the RDA’s was generally considered temporary, with the original goal being federal acquisition and development and then transfer to the states. However, in the summer of 1942 when President Roosevelt had signed legislation which would turn the RDAs over to the states, under certain conditions, he explicitly excluded Catoctin RDA, where he had established his Presidential Retreat, as well as half a dozen other RDAs. The legislation being pursued immediately after the war was to make the park, or at least part of it, a permanent part of the National Park System. Werhle, Catoctin Mountain Park, 211-212, 214.

²⁰⁴ Werhle, Catoctin Mountain Park, 211-17; Kirkconnell, Administrative History of Catoctin Mountain Park, 92-99.

²⁰⁵ The property of the Presidential Retreat at Shangri-La/Camp David, like the White House, is the responsibility of the National Park Service.

²⁰⁶ Kirkconnell, Administrative History of Catoctin Mountain Park, 101-102; Werhle, Catoctin Mountain Park, 217; see also Maryland Department of Natural Resources, Cunningham Falls State Park website, http://www.dnr.state.md.us/publiclands/western/cunninghamfalls.html. 30 September 2006.

²⁰⁷ Garland B. (“Mike”) Williams retired on 31 August 1957. Garland B. Williams, Sr., “Citation for Commendable Service” signed by Conrad L. Wirth; “Personnel History Record to Accompany Honor Award Nominations;” and G.B. Williams, Application for Retirement, 12 August 1957; Garland B. Williams, “Notice of Personnel Action, Retirement—Optional,” signed by Maurice K. Green, personnel officer, 16 September 1957, Garland B. Williams Personnel File, National Personnel Records Center, St. Louis, Mo., obtained by the author, 8 February 2005.

²⁰⁸ The following summary of recent and current uses of Catoctin Mountain Park was provided by Superintendent Mel Poole and his staff at the park to the author in January 2008.

²⁰⁹ Mel Poole, Superintendent, Catoctin Mountain Park, telephone interview with the author, 13 August 2008.

²¹⁰ The above summary of recent and current uses of Catoctin Mountain Park was provided by Superintendent Mel Poole and his staff at the park to the author in February 2008.

²¹¹ Congressional Country Club, 1923-1984 (Baltimore, Md.: Wolk Press, n.d.), 33-35. I am indebted to Maxine D. Harvey, director of member services at the Congressional Country Club, for providing me with a copy of this volume, 1 October 2007.

²¹² John W. Brunner, telephone interview with the author, 21 March 2005.

²¹³ Ibid. Brunner, who had trained as a cipher clerk in the Communications Branch at OSS headquarters and Area C, arrived in China in early 1945. He spent more than a year there, first in Kunming, and then, after the Japanese surrender, he was dispatched to Shanghai and Tientsin. There he did code work, but because he had learned Chinese, he was subsequently used as an interpreter for X-2, the Counterintelligence Branch. OSS’s successor, the Strategic Services Unit, kept him on in its Secret Intelligence Branch, until he was mustered out of the Army in March 1946. Returning to Ursinus College in Pennsylvania under the GI Bill, Brunner graduated with proficiency in Greek, Latin, German and Chinese. Subsequently, he earned a doctorate in German at Columbia University, and beginning in 1954 taught that language and later served as head of the German department at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania, until his retirement in 1989. In addition to dozens of scholarly articles in his field, he published several books on OSS weaponry, including, all of them published by Phillips Publishing of Williamstown, New Jersey. They include The OSS Crossbows (1990), The Colt Glock Pocket Hammerless Automatic Pistols (1996), The OSS Weapons (1994, 2nd edition, 2005), and with Francis B. Mills, OSS Special Operations in China (2002).

²¹⁴ Will Irwin, The Jedburghs (New York: Public Affairs Press, 2005), 225, 262-63; Homer, The Illiad, Robert Fagles, trans., introduction and notes by Bernard Knox (New York: Viking, 1990); and similarly, Homer, The Odyssey (Viking 1996), and Virgil, The Aeneid (Viking 2006); see also Bernard Knox, Essays: Ancient and Modern (Baltimore, Md.; The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), xxxii-xxxiii.

²¹⁵ Irwin, The Jedburghs, 231-32.

²¹⁶ Others among the U.S. ambassadors to more than twenty countries, who had served in the OSS include George Garrett, ambassador to Ireland, 1947-53; Edwin Martin, ambassador to Argentina, 1964-68, and Thomas Beale, ambassador to Jamaica, 1965-68. Smith, OSS, 22.

²¹⁷ Francis B. Mills and John W. Brunner, OSS Special Operations in China (Williamstown, N.J.: Phillips Publications, 2002), 321.

²¹⁸ Betty Bullard Manning (Mrs. Howard Manning), telephone interview with the author, 4 March 2005.

²¹⁹ Smith, OSS, 23-24.

²²⁰ Lynn Philip Hodgson, author of Inside Camp-X, email to the author, 5 March 2008.

²²¹ Fleet Marine Force Reference Publication (FMFRP) 12-80, Kill or Get Killed (1976).

²²² “Rex Applegate,” International Close Combat Instructors Association, www.clscbtassc.com; tribute in www.americancombatives.com/applegate.php; and www.paladin-press.com, for Paladin Press, which published many of Applegate’s books and videos.

²²³ John C. McWilliams, “Covert Connections: The FBN, the OSS, and the CIA,” The Historian, 53, no. 4 (June 1991): 663-665.

²²⁴ Ibid., 665-671; Kathryn Meyer and Terry Parssinen, Webs of Smoke: Smugglers, Warlords, Spies and the History of the International Drug Trade (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), 246-247.

²²⁵ Howard W. Chappell, resumé; letter, Garland Williams, Head, Intelligence Division, [Federal Bureau of Narcotics], to Howard Chappell, 23 March 1953; both from the papers of Howard Chappell. I am indebted to Howard Chappell’s son, Jack Chappell, letter to the author 17 October 2007, for providing me with copies of this and other documents from his late father’s files.

²²⁶ Thomas N. Moon and Carl F. Eifler, The Deadliest Colonel (New York: Vantage, 1975), 247-266.

²²⁷ “`Deadliest Colonel,’ dies at age 95,” U.S. Customs Today, August 2002, www.cbp.gov/ xp/CustomsToday/200/August/other/colonel.xml, accessed 30 December 2007.

²²⁸ These films included My Darling Clementine (1947), Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1950), and later and with greater complexity, The Searchers (1957).

²²⁹ His film noir movies of the 1950s, included most memorably The Asphalt Jungle (1950), Johnny Guitar (1953), and The Killing (1956).

²³⁰ The films about the OSS were 13 Rue Madeleine (1946) starring James Cagney, and Operating Secret (1952) starring Cornel Wilde. Ortiz played small parts most famously in Twelve O’Clock High (1949), What Price Glory (1952), Retreat Hell! (1952), and Wings of Eagles (1957).

²³¹ Entries on “Joe Savoldi,” and “Houston Harris” in Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wik; and “Bobo Brazil dies at age 74,” Slam! Sports Wrestling, 23 January 1998, http://slam.canoe.ca/SlamWrestlingArchive/jan23_for.html; each accessed 30 December 2007.

²³² “Joe Savoldi,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikpedia.org/wik; and James Gregory Savoldi, a grandson of “Jumping Joe” Savoldi, email to the author, 29 December 2007. I am indebted to J.G. Savoldi for providing me with photographs and other materials about his grandfather.

²³³ One account indicates that Berg worked as a contract employee for the CIA in 1951, advising and consulting, and that “several years later, he served on the staff of NATO’s Advisory Group for Aeronautical Research and Development.” “Morris (‘Moe’) Berg,” G.J.A. O’Toole, The Encyclopedia of American Intelligence and Espionage (New York: Facts on File, 1988), 65.

²³⁴ “In Memoriam,” OSS Society Newsletter, Spring 2004, 9.

²³⁵ “London Times Obituary: Peter Tompkins,” OSS Society Digest Number 1575, 25 February 2007, [e-mail], accessed 25 February 2007.

²³⁶ Reginald Spear, telephone interview with the author 15 August 2008.

²³⁷ Serge Obolensky, One Man in His Time: The Memoirs of Serge Obolensky (New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1958), 395-396; K. Michell Moran, “The Prince and Princess of the Pointes: Estate Auction Recalls Colorful Lives of Late Russian Prince and his Wife, a Grosse Pointe Native,” unidentified newspaper article reprinted in OSS Society Digest Number 1954, 18 January 2008, [e-mail], accessed 18 January 2008.

²³⁸ Smith, OSS, 26. See also, correspondence between Goodfellow and Rhee, 1944-45, in M. Preston Goodfellow Papers, Box 4, Subject File: Syngman Rhee, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford, Calif.

²³⁹ Biographical information and unidentified newspaper clipping, “Name Goodfellow Adviser in Korea,” all in Goodfellow Papers, Box 2, Folder: Biographical Materials, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford, Calif.

²⁴⁰ Dun & Bradstreet Report on Overseas Reconstruction Corporation, 19 September 1960, p. 1, copy in Goodfellow Papers, Box 2, Folder: Biographical Material, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford, Calif.

²⁴¹ Obituary, “M. Preston Goodfellow”, New York Times, 6 September 1973, 40; “M.P. Goodfellow, 81, Publisher, Dies,” Washington Post, 7 September 1973, C4.

²⁴² Robert E. Mattingly, Herringbone Cloak—GI Dagger: Marines of the OSS (Washington, D.C.: History and Museums Division, Headquarters, U.S. Marine Corps, 1989), 182.

²⁴³ Ellsworth (“Al”) Johnson, telephone interview with the author, 27 June 2008.

²⁴⁴ Rolf Herstad, email to the author, 7 August 2008. I am indebted to Rolf Herstad for supplying me with much information and illustrative material about his father’s service in the OSS.

²⁴⁵ Albert (“Al”) Materazzi, telephone interviews with the author, 26 January 2005, 23 September 2005, “Biography,” sent to the author, 31 January 2005; Al Materazzi, “Remembering 109 [William J. Donovan]—Recollections of OSSers,” OSS Society Newsletter, Winter 2004-05, p. 7; email to the author, 6 March 2007.

²⁴⁶ Obituary, Richard W. Breck, Quincy, Mass. Patriot-Ledger, 17 March 2005, reprinted in OSS Society Digest Number 984, 18 March 2005, [e-mail], accessed 18 March 2005.

²⁴⁷ Allen R. Richter, telephone interview with the author, 16 March 2007.

²⁴⁸ Arthur Reinhardt, email to the author, 25 July 2007, attributing this information to John W. Coffey.

²⁴⁹ Arthur Reinhardt, email to the author, 23 September 2005; Brenda Warner Rotzoll, obituary “Sarah M. Mero: Handled Secret WWII Transmissions,” Chicago Sun-Times, 25 November 2003.

²⁵⁰ Allen R. Richter, telephone interview with the author, 16 March 2007.

²⁵¹ Ibid.

²⁵² Ibid., 25 March 2005.

²⁵³ James F. Ranney, telephone interview with the author, 8 January 2005; James F. Ranney and Arthur L. Ranney, eds., The OSS CommVets Papers, 2nd ed. (Covington, Ky.: James F. Ranney, 2002).

²⁵⁴ Timothy R. Marsh, telephone interview with the author, 18 January 2006.

²⁵⁵ Roger L. Belanger, telephone interview with the author, 11 April 2005.

²⁵⁶ Joseph J. Tully, telephone interview with the author, 29 December 2007.

²⁵⁷ David Kenney, telephone interview with the author, 11 April 2005.

²⁵⁸ Spiro Cappony, telephone conversation with the author, 16 September 2006, and David Hendrix, “Under Deep Cover,” Times, pp. C-1, C-2, unidentified, undated clipping of a news story about him sent to the author by Spiro Cappony, 31 October 2006.

²⁵⁹ Marvin Flisser, telephone interview with the author, 27 January 2005.

²⁶⁰ “In Memoriam: Jack Kilby, “OSS Society Newsletter, Summer 2005, 16, and Spring 2006, 17; John Markoff, “Jack S. Kilby, an Inventor of the Microchip, Is Dead at 81,” New York Times, 22 June 2005; T.R. Reid, “Jack Kilby, Touch Lives on Micro and Macro Scales,” Washington Post, 22 June 2005, C1.

²⁶¹ “Peers, William Raymond,” W. Thomas Smith, Jr., Encyclopedia of the Central Intelligence Agency (New York: Facts on File, 2003), 184; William R. Peers and Dean Brelis, Behind the Burma Road: The Story of America’s Most Successful Guerrilla Force (Boston: Little, Brown, 1963); William R. Peers, The Peers Report (1970); “Army Values: Integrity: Ray Peers,” Special Warfare, 13:2 (Spring 2000): 21.

²⁶² “Gen. John K. Singlaub New Society Chairman,” OSS Society Newsletter, Spring 2005, 1; John K. Singlaub, with Malcom McConnell, Hazardous Duty: An American Soldier in the Twentieth Century (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991).

²⁶³ It was the 878th Airborne Engineer Battalion, Lt. Col. Joseph H. Collart, http://www.ixengineer command.com/listmen.php. Accessed 3 January 2008.

²⁶⁴ Maj. Gen. Robert R. Ploger, Vietnam Studies: U.S. Army Engineers, 1965-1970 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Army, Center of Military History, 1974), 63-64, 72.

²⁶⁵ Frank A. Gleason, telephone interview with the author, 26 December 2007; Charles M. Parkin, ed., The Rocket Handbook for Amateurs (New York: John Day, 1959); and Francis E. Cross and Charles M. Parkin, Captain Gray in the Pacific Northwest (Bend, Oregon: Maverick Publications, 1987). Located in the coastal fishing town of Garibaldi, in Tillamook County, the Garibaldi Maritime Museum opened to the public in 2004. Judy Fleagle, “Captain Gray Takes a Stand,” Oregon Coast magazine, May/June 2005, 10.

²⁶⁶ Frank A. Gleason, telephone interview with the author, 26 December 2007. Joseph Lazarsky, who was with the CIA in the Far East in those years, doubts whether Leo Kawarski “spent more than 1% of his time” with the CIA. Joseph Lazarsky, telephone interview with the author, 27 December 2007.

²⁶⁷ Frank A. Gleason, email to the author, 28 January 2005; and telephone interviews with the author, 31 January 2005, and 26 December 2007.

²⁶⁸ Dorothea (“Dodie”) Dow (Mrs. Arden W. Dow), telephone interview with the author, 15 May 2005.

²⁶⁹ John C. Hooker, resumé, John C. Hooker, email to the author, 27 June 2008.

²⁷⁰ Jerry Sage, Sage (Wayne, Pa.: Miles Standish Press, 1985), 467-470.

²⁷¹ Irwin, The Jedburghs, 228; some of Cyr’s postwar problems are recounted in Joseph C. Goulden with Alexander W. Raffio, The Death Merchant: The Rise and Fall of Edwin P. Wilson (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), 69-72, 237-38, 313, 433.

²⁷² Joseph Lazarsky, telephone interviews with the author, 14 March 2005, 11 February and 27 December 2007.

²⁷³ Obituary, “Oliver Mowrer Silsby, Jr., CIA Agent,” Washington Post, 29 May, 2006.

²⁷⁴ The Col. Arthur D. (“Bull”) Simons Award presented to Caesar Civitella at the USSOCOM HQ, MacDill AFB, Tampa, Fla. Troy J. Sacquety, “Caesar J. Civitella: Bull Simons Award 2008,” Veritas: Journal of Army Special Operations History, 4:1 (2008): 77.

²⁷⁵ Tim Weiner, “Lucien Conein, 79, Legendary Cold War Spy,” New York Times, 7 June 1998.

²⁷⁶ Erasmus H. Kloman, Assignment Algiers: With the OSS in the Mediterranean Theater (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2005), 127.

²⁷⁷ “Louis Joseph Gonzalez,” biographical statement, provided by his son, Ronald Gonzalez, San Mateo, to the author, 22 January 2008. I am indebted to Ronald Gonzalez for the material about his father.

²⁷⁸ Information from , James Snyder, son of Jacques F. Snyder, email to the author, 8 August 2008. I am indebted to James Snyder for the information and material about his father.

²⁷⁹ Elizabeth P. MacIntosh, Undercover Girl (New York: Macmillan, 1947, reprinted 1995); she also wrote two books for children.

²⁸⁰ Elizabeth P. MacIntosh, Sisterhood of Spies (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1998), 242, for the statistics on CIA employment by gender.

²⁸¹ Ibid., 169. Aline, Countess of Romanones, The Spy Wore Red: My Adventures as an Undercover Agent in World War II (New York: Random House, 1987).

²⁸² Aline, Countess of Romanones, The Spy Wore Red; and The Spy Went Dancing (New York: G.Putnam’s Sons, 1990), 11-14, and passim.

²⁸³ Ibid., 244.

²⁸⁴ Douglas Martin, “Hélène Deschamps Adams, Wartime Hero, Dies at 85,” New York Times, 24 September 2006, A4. Her books were The Secret War (New York: W.H. Allen, 1980) and Spyglass: An Autobiography (New York: Henry Holt, 1995).

²⁸⁵ MacIntosh, Sisterhood of Spies, 68-69; and Interview with Barbara Lauwers Podoski conducted by Christof Mauch, 4 September 1996, OSS Oral History Transcripts, CIA Records (RG 263), Box 3, National Archives II.

²⁸⁶ MacIntosh, Sisterhood of Spies, 167; Jim Downs, WWII OSS Tragedy in Slovakia (Oceanside, Calif.: Liefrinck Pub., 2002), 314, 324.

²⁸⁷ Laura Shapiro, Julia Child (New York: Viking, 2007).

²⁸⁸ Irwin, The Jedburghs, 226.

²⁸⁹ Gail F. Donnalley, telephone interview with the author, 30 April 2005.

²⁹⁰ Arthur (“Art’) Reinhardt, interview with the author and Judy Volonoski, museum technician, following a tour at Prince William Forest Park, Triangle, Va., 22 February 2007.

²⁹¹ William J. Donovan, “American Foreign Policy Must Be Based on Facts,” Vital Speeches, 1 May 1946, 446-48; Donovan, “Intelligence: Key to Defense,” Life, 30 September 1946, 108-10.

²⁹² For example, “Donovan Points to Russians in Defense Appeal,” New York Herald Tribune, 10 January 1947.

²⁹³ Anthony Cave Brown, The Last Hero: Wild Bill Donovan (New York: Times Books, 1982), 795-800. Brown indicates that Donovan, who was not a stockholder, did not receive much income from the company; his main income was his salary from his law firm.

²⁹⁴ Dunlop, Donovan, 486-488, 490-491, 495, 497, 499.

²⁹⁵ Ibid., 488.

²⁹⁶ Anthony Cave Brown cites several possible reasons for Truman’s antipathy toward Donovan. In World War I, Donovan’s units, attacking the Hindenburg Line in 1918 were deprived of artillery support and suffered major casualties. Donovan complained and Capt. Harry S Truman’s artillery battery, which had been directed to provide support for that section of the line the night before Donovan’s mission, was withdrawn from that mission soon after Donovan’s complaint. Later as a U.S. Senator, Truman became close friends with Democratic Senator Burton K. Wheeler of Montana, who had been prosecuted by Donovan as assistant U.S. attorney general for crimes related to the Teapot Dome scandal, but who had been found innocent at his trial; subsequently, Wheeler formed an anti-Donovan clique in the Senate. Cave Brown, The Last Hero, 790-792.

²⁹⁷ Dunlop, Donovan, 491, 499. Donovan did not think Allen Dulles was the best choice to manage a large intelligence organization. At the end of World War II, despite Allen Dulles’s achievements in the Bern office of the OSS and recommendations by a number of OSSers, Donovan had refused to appoint him to succeed David Bruce as chief of OSS European operations. Instead, he put Dulles in charge of OSS in a particular country: Germany. “I thought Allen was a fine operative, but I did not think he had the organizational skill to handle all of Europe,” Donovan said after the war. Some thought it was because of Dulles’s supposed mishandling of the German bid for a separate peace in Italy, Operation Sunrise, but Donovan denied that. Donovan’s friends thought that Donovan’s bid for DCI was undermined by his old nemesis, J. Edgar Hoover. Cave Brown, The Last Hero), 821.

²⁹⁸ This was at the urging of Gen. Walter Bedell Smith. Smith had been Eisenhower’s wartime chief of staff, and served as Director of Central Intelligence from October 1952 to February 1953. As DCI, he frequently consulted with Donovan. In May 1953, as Deputy Secretary of State, he summoned Donovan to accept the post in Thailand as a frontline in the fight against communist expansion. Ibid., 822.

²⁹⁹ Dunlop, Donovan, 488.

³⁰⁰ Ibid., 500.

³⁰¹ Dunlop, Donovan, 502. During Donovan’s travels around Thailand, the men trailing him turned out to be not Soviet KGB agents, as he had first suspected, but members of the CIA sent to report his activities to the suspicious CIA chief Allen Dulles. The SEATO nations included Australia, Great Britain, France, New Zealand, Pakistan, the Philippines, Thailand, and the United States. In a separate protocol, SEATO protection was extended to Cambodia, Laos, and South Vietnam, which had been barred by the Geneva Agreements of 1954 from joining any military alliance.

³⁰² Dunlop, Donovan, 504-505.

³⁰³ Cave Brown, The Last Hero, 830-833.

³⁰⁴ Otto C. Doering, New York City, interview with Anthony Cave Brown, 1 November 1977, quoted in Cave Brown, The Last Hero, 833.