A New Office of Strategic Services?

In the past six months, two different opinion pieces, here and here, have raised the possibility of reviving the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). These recommendations are by no means new. Over the past 80 years, there have been multiple efforts to revive the OSS or, at the very least, to revive the ethos of this special operations organization that served in World War II from 1942–1945. The most obvious legacy units following the OSS tradition are the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), U.S. Army Special Forces Regiment (SF), and the U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM). The question that the more recent opinion pieces pose is whether these legacy organizations offer the necessary capability for the current strategic environment or what is more easily understood as Cold War v2.0. Critics of current U.S. military and intelligence capabilities argue that these organizations do not serve well in this new environment. In this paper, I argue that these organizations offer precisely the capabilities necessary. Reviving the OSS would add additional bureaucracy without any additional capability and could easily risk intelligence fratricide at a time when the United States needs more focus rather than more capability.

At the recommendation of his Secretary of the Navy, William Franklin Knox, Roosevelt began using a World War I hero to create a formal intelligence service that would work for the White House. While William J. Donovan might have preferred to return to serve as a combat commander in the field, he focused on the president’s request. In June 1941, the president created through executive authority the Office of the Coordinator of Information (COI) under Donovan. That executive order empowered Donovan to build an organization that acquired information through clandestine means, analyzed intelligence using academic experts in various fields, and provided that intelligence directly to the president through memos delivered to the White House. In that same executive order, Roosevelt used a turn of phrase that has been used ever since by presidents who wished to conduct deniable (aka covert) action. The executive order states the COI was authorized

“…to carry out, when requested by the President, such supplementary activities as may facilitate the securing of information important for national security not now available to the Government.^[2]

Donovan had already made two fact-finding trips to Europe at the president’s direction and he recognized this new conflict was nothing like the war in the trenches in 1917–1918. Instead, it was a war fought both through conventional military forces as well as unconventional lines of effort including propaganda, subversion, and terror. He realized that British intelligence and special operations communities were divided into various camps, spending as much time fighting each other as fighting the Nazis. Using the president’s vague guidance and access to presidential “unvouchered funds,” Donovan created a centralized organization from COI, which on June 13, 1942 would become the Office of Strategic Services. Donovan’s team provided the president with what we now call the intelligence cycle where he provided intelligence and then received requirements for future collection. Donovan also created a small irregular warfare capability focusing on sabotage and subversion. To minimize the hostility within Washington, the executive order creating Donovan’s OSS also placed it directly under the command of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS).

The OSS had few allies outside of the White House. Donovan’s creation was, at best, tolerated by the JCS and regularly attacked by the FBI, the Office of Naval Intelligence, and the Army’s Military Intelligence Department. These bureaucracies simply did not understand how an “unprofessional” organization could provide any legitimate assistance to commanders in the field much less to the president of the United States. The bureaucratic knife fights started with the creation of the COI and only ended when President Harry Truman disbanded the OSS in September 1945.[3] While OSS operations in the field gained significant praise from U.S. commanders, including General Dwight Eisenhower, that praise rarely prevented Washington-based military and Justice Department seniors from attacking Donovan and his team. It was only through careful political actions on the part of Donovan that OSS survived until the defeat of Japan. Donovan expected his creation, which was created during wartime, would be disbanded at the end of the war. What he did not expect was that the White House would wish to return to a pre-war status where the president had no independent intelligence organization responsible to his needs. 

By January 1946, Truman realized that by disbanding the OSS, he no longer had an organization dedicated to delivering strategic intelligence. His first effort to solve this problem, the Central Intelligence Group, had very little success in corralling or analyzing the intelligence products from the established collectors — State, Navy, Army, and Justice. The National Security Act of 1947 created both a Department of Defense and a Central Intelligence Agency, which simplified the problem by creating a single focal point — the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) — and began the process to once again offer a single organization that would serve the requirements of the president and his senior cabinet officials.[4] 

That said, intelligence collection and analysis was necessary but not sufficient along in battling the new adversaries in what became known as the “Cold War.” The Soviet Union, the communist regimes of the Warsaw Pact, and the People’s Republic of China became implacable adversaries with expansionist views. After George Kennan wrote a policy planning staff memorandum titled The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare in 1948, the White House turned to State, CIA, and the Department of Defense to engage in both overt and covert “political warfare” designed to support a policy of containment and, possibly, a “roll-back” of communism. In response, the DCI instructed CIA’s foreign intelligence arm, the Office of Special Operations (OSO), to create a Special Procedures Group to conduct covert psychological operations.

Eventually, that group would become a separate office in CIA known as the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), which worked directly with State Department and the White House on covert action programs that included psychological and information operations (such as Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, and Radio Asia), political influence operations (such as Operation Ajax in Iran and Operation Success in Guatemala), and unconventional warfare operations (such as Operation Fiend in Albania). OPC nominally received guidance from the Policy Planning Staff at the State Department and crafted covert programs designed to combat the Soviet Union and communist China both inside and outside the Iron Curtain.

While OPC had some spectacular successes, it also had its failures. More importantly, in the field it ran the risk of intelligence fratricide as agent handlers from the intelligence arm of the CIA, OSO, crashed into OPC agent handlers. Secrecy between the two offices as well as with U.S. embassies made it difficult to run clandestine operations. By 1952, the challenges in the field became too great and the two organizations were merged into the Directorate of Plans. Finally, a single focal point in each country, the Chief of Station, would be held responsible for both intelligence collection and covert action. As a result, the American ambassador, the president’s personal representative in a country, would be able to better manage the challenging relationship necessary for a whole-of-government effort in that Cold War setting.

Inside the U.S. Army, the 1950s was a time of experimentation in reviving OSS capabilities. In May 1952, the U.S. Army authorized the creation of a Special Forces unit formed in part from former members of OSS Special Operations Groups and soldiers who had been attached to OPC unconventional warfare programs. The focus of this new unit was unconventional warfare, primarily in Europe. The Lodge Act had been passed in 1950, which allowed foreign nationals who enlisted in the U.S. military and served for five years to become American citizens. This filled the ranks of Special Forces with men who were fluent in the languages of central and eastern Europe and provided the cornerstone for operational capability for units like the 10th Special Forces Group based in Bad Tolz, West Germany and Special Forces Detachment A based in Berlin.

From the 1960s to the present, CIA and U.S. Special Forces units have worked together throughout Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. That partnership grew more profound with the introduction of the U.S. Navy Special Warfare Command, the U.S. Air Force Special Operations Command, and especially after the creation of USSOCOM and the special mission units associated with the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). While there have been challenges related to mission authorities (Title 10 versus Title 50 of the U.S. Code) as well as design and implementation, these challenges have been resolved over time through relationships in headquarters and the field among common-sense civilian and uniformed leaders working together to accomplish those missions. Following the attack on the homeland on September 11, 2001, that relationship between the Special Operations Community and the Intelligence Community has improved and grown even stronger.  

This partnership has far exceeded the design or capabilities of the OSS. USSOCOM offers the president and the National Command Authority (NCA) an exquisite, sophisticated warfighting capability that includes today far more than the basic unconventional warfare capability that existed in 1952. The Intelligence Community as a whole, offers the president and the NCA insights based on all-source intelligence backed by a community of analytic experts. In the field, the CIA has deployed Human Intelligence (HUMINT) case officers throughout the world in locations where current policymakers have little interest, but in the future may be the next hot spot that focuses Washington’s attention. Moreover, CIA officers bring years of experience in a locale and deep relationships with liaison partners that far exceed the useful but only periodic visits by USSOCOM forces in their Joint Combined Exchange Training (JCET) exercises. The CIA offers a level of persistent presence in the field that USSOCOM forces simply do not have. On the other hand, CIA stations in the field are small and have little (and sometimes no) combat capability.

Creating an organization that would attempt to build both a combat capability and an intelligence collection capability under a single Department of Defense umbrella would be difficult (at best) and time consuming. Resources currently in place at USSOCOM and the CIA would have to be reassigned and two very different operational cultures would have to be blended. While not impossible, such an experiment would only come at the cost of current capability. Our adversaries in this new Cold War are working to undermine our influence around the globe using both overt and covert means. Taking U.S. resources currently involved in this conflict in an effort to create a new OSS would only give our adversaries even greater opportunities for mischief. Assuming no USSOCOM or CIA resources would be taken to create a new OSS, it would be important to revisit the lesson of the conflict between OSO and OPC in the 1950s. Intelligence collection fratricide as well as confusion among our allies would further advance our adversaries’ gains.

There are many lessons from OSS that national security professionals should learn. First and foremost, the OSS taught that a unified intelligence organization where collection, analysis, and covert action were combined was the best solution set to provide capability to the president. Second, the OSS Operation SUSSEX where HUMINT and Counterintelligence (CI) teams were imbedded into corps- and Army-level commands were critical to providing combatant commanders with real time, on-the-ground intelligence. These were high-risk operations, but the Army was willing to take that risk to gain operational intelligence. These same types of operations were conducted during the Cold War, usually by a blend of CIA and U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF), where the CIA element offered regional/cultural experience and the SOF team offered military and technical experience. Finally, the OSS designed and conducted a sophisticated CI and psychological warfare (psywar) capability against Axis adversaries. The CI program included running double agents critical to deception operations. The psywar program (called “morale operations” in the OSS) focused on undermining enemy morale and reinforcing the same deception operations. These three capabilities could be expanded using the resources of both USSOCOM and the CIA as well as specialized units within the Department of Defense. It would not take a “new” organization, but simply a focused effort to use the resources already in place.

Finally, it is important to consider the strategic nature of the current challenge. In World War II and in the early Cold War v1.0, the United States conducted operations as a “whole of government” effort. Overt diplomacy, U.S. military combat power and covert operations were all tuned to specific strategic goals — defeat of the enemy. If the United States is going to win in this new Cold War v2.0, the NCA must offer a unified plan similar to Kennan’s memorandum on political warfare that serves to guide all of the resources in its government. Once established, the various overt, clandestine, and covert resources will be available to win the fight.

J.R. Seeger has been an archeologist, paratrooper, CIA intelligence officer and instructor for several special operations units. Seeger led multiple, small unit teams during his service including leading one of the CIA teams that infiltrated into Afghanistan after 9/11. Seeger’s CIA awards include the Intelligence Star, the Distinguished Career Intelligence Medal, and the George H.W. Bush Award for Counterterrorism Excellence.

This article appeared originally at Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI).

[1] Joseph E. Persico, Roosevelt’s Secret War: FDR and World War II Espionage (Random House, 2001).

[2] Historical Intelligence Documents: From COI to CIG in Studies in Intelligence, 37, No. 4, 111-113.

[3] For greater detail on the bureaucratic infighting, see these two excellent books:

Thomas Troy, Donovan and the CIA (University Publications of America, 2004); and Nicholas Reynolds, Need to Know: World War II and the Rise of American Intelligence (Mariner Books, 2023).

[4] Michael Warner (ed), The CIA Under Harry Truman (University Press of the Pacific, 2005).