Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and the United States State Department, 1942-1947

The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was the approximate US counterpart of the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, and Special Operations Executive (SOE), with which it co-operated throughout World War Two and its immediate aftermath. The OSS was created by Presidential Military Order on 13 Jun 1942 and it functioned as the principal US intelligence organisation in all operational theatres. Its primary function was to obtain information about enemy nations and to sabotage their war potential and morale. From 1940-1942, the US had no central intelligence agency responsible for the collection, analysis, and dissemination of information bearing on national security, these services having been dispersed amongst the armed services and regional desks in the US State Department. In Jul 1941 Maj Gen William Joseph Donovan was appointed by US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to the civilian post of Co-ordinator of Information (COI) and was instructed to consolidate a regular channel of global strategic information. Under Donovan's leadership, the COI claimed the functions of information gathering, propaganda, espionage, subversion, and post-war planning. The overt propaganda functions of the COI were eventually severed and the COI was re-organised as the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in 1942. The OSS was instructed by the President to collect and analyse such strategic information as might be required to plan and operate special military services in theatres of operation directed by the US Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS). The first OSS presence in the Far East was in China, where units gathered intelligence from Chungking and the communist capital of Fushih. However, OSS operations in other Japanese occupied territories were often paralysed by differences amongst the Allies over European colonial interests in the post-war configuration of South-East Asia. Following the end of hostilities in Europe, a considerable number of OSS units were transferred from Europe to China and French Indo-China, where they established contacts with nationalist and communist partisan forces. Elsewhere in the South-East Asia theatre, the OSS trained nationals in intelligence collection, internal propaganda and unconventional warfare. The OSS was terminated by Executive Order 9620 on 20 Sep 1945, its functions later assumed by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The US State Department's primary function during World War Two was to provide the US President and the US Joint Chiefs of Staff with intelligence relating to the civil structure of foreign states. During the war, the US State Department relied on OSS intelligence to prepare summary research reports concerning the social structure, strategic interests, resources, government, and economic stability of Japan and its occupied territories.