Story of OSS has been told better elsewhere
"Operatives, Spies, and Saboteurs: The Unknown Story of the Men and Women of World War II's OSS," by Patrick K. O'Donnell, Free Press, $27, 384 pages.
With World War II looming on the horizon, FDR needed an organization that could spy on the enemy and perform dirty work that conventional military units were not trained to do.
He turned to a Wall Street lawyer who had won the Medal of Honor and Distinguished Service Medal in World War I.
William "Wild Bill" Donovan was FDR's man.
Donovan founded the OSS, the Office of Strategic Service, a combination intelligence and paramilitary organization that infiltrated agents into Nazi-occupied Europe during World War II.
Before creating the OSS, Donovan had been a troubleshooter for FDR and served as the Coordinator of Information, which eventually became the OSS.
He collected an eclectic crew of graduates from Ivy League schools, law firms, corporations as well as thieves and safecrackers.
O'Donnell tells a good yarn but the OSS story has been told better in other works such as in Joseph Persico's "Penetrating the Reich," and "Bodyguard of Lies," and "The Last Hero: Wild Bill Donovan," by Anthony Cave Brown, his critical biography of the spymaster. Robin Wink's "Clock and Gown" is a history of the Ivy League in the OSS.
The OSS began by performing "black bag" jobs for FDR, breaking into foreign embassies, cracking safes and stealing code books and other documents.
Elizabeth Pack, code name Cynthia, was an OSS spy who used sex to obtain information.
When Pack learned that Polish intelligence had gotten its hands on Enigma, the Nazi code machine, she was able to penetrate the Vichy Embassy and helped steal the cipher that aided the invasion of North Africa.
O'Donnell also recounts the story told elsewhere of major league baseball player Moe Berg, a graduate of Princeton and a member of the Brooklyn Dodgers and Chicago White Sox, who also was a lawyer and linguist.
The OSS sent Berg to Switzerland to listen to a lecture by German scientist Werner Heisenberg and determine how close the Nazis had come to developing an atomic bomb.
If Berg deduced that the Germans were close to a breakthrough, his task was to kill Heisenberg. But after listening to Heisenberg's lecture, he realized the Germans were not close.
The OSS also helped prepare for the invasions of Sicily and France and infiltrated agents into the Balkans and Greece.
Agents were parachuted into France to work with the resistance movement. Three-man paramilitary teams were dropped into France prior to D-Day to conduct sabotage and set up a radio network.
Another example of the use of women involved the "Limping Lady" as she was known to the Gestapo.
Virginia Hall limped because she had a wooden leg. Using the cover as a journalist, she worked in France and later set up a sabotage network.
The work may have been adventurous but it was fraught with danger.
Capture usually meant torture and death.
OSS agent Walter Lanz was captured by the Gestapo who beat him and broke his teeth before he was sent to the concentration camp at Dachau. Then he was transferred to Mauthausen where prisoners literally were worked to death.
Miraculously, Lanz survived the camps.
As the Allies neared Germany, the OSS began preparing agents to penetrate the Reich. The historical record shows the OSS had little success in establishing networks inside Germany where the people's fear of the SS and Gestapo made it difficult to rely on them for help.
Picking operatives from the ranks of anti-fascists, socialists and Germans, these agents were infiltrated into Germany to gather intelligence and recruit other dissatisfied Germans.
The OSS also operated in neutral Sweden. One of its greatest operations involved an American citizen who held dual citizenship, Eric Erickson, who became one of the organization's most successful agents.
Blacklisted for doing business with the Nazis, Erickson was blackmailed into working for the OSS. By making frequent trips to Germany, he mapped out its oil industry for the Allies, who used his information to bomb German oil production facilities.
Erickson's life later was made into a movie, "Counterfeit Traitor," starring William Holden.
The OSS was disbanded on Sept. 30, 1945. Parts of the organization were transferred to newly formed outfit known as the Strategic Services Unit, the actual forerunner of the CIA.
One OSS agent during the war came up with Operation Faust in which he used German-speaking Communist exiles to collect intelligence on troop movements inside Germany.
The 31-year-old agent later would become CIA director under President Ronald Reagan.
His name was William Casey.
