US Intelligence

AIC (1915-1945)[]

The American International Corporation (AIC) was organized in New York on November 22, 1915.

It was orgaised by J.P. Morgan interests, with major participation by Stillman's National City Bank and the Rockefeller interests.

The general office of AIC was at 120 Broadway.

The company's charter authorized it to engage in any kind of business, except banking and public utilities, in any country in the world. The stated purpose of the corporation was to develop domestic and foreign enterprises, to extend American activities abroad, and to promote the interests of American and foreign bankers, business and engineering.

AIC could be seen as an early CIA. Altought it was shut down it was possibly replaced by AIG

Kennedy was killed November 22, 1963, on the 48th anniversay of the founding of AIC.

Office of the Coordinator of Information (1941-1942)[]

The Office of the Coordinator of Information was an intelligence and propaganda agency of the United States Government, founded on July 11, 1941 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Roosevelt was persuaded to create the office several months before the United States entered the war by prominent New York lawyer William J. Donovan and by American playwright Robert Sherwood, who served as Roosevelt's primary speechwriter on foreign affairs. British officials, including John Godfrey of the British Naval Intelligence Division and William Stephenson, head of British Security Coordination in New York, also encouraged Roosevelt to create the agency

Donovan's primary interests were military intelligence and covert operations. Sherwood handled the dissemination of domestic information and foreign propaganda. He recruited the noted radio producer John Houseman, who because of his Romanian birth at the time was technically an enemy alien, to develop an overseas radio program for broadcast to the Axis powers and the populations of the territories they had conquered, which became known as the Voice of America.

On June 13, 1942, Roosevelt split the functions and created two new agencies: the Office of Strategic Services, a predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Office of War Information, a predecessor of the United States Information Agency.

The COI's headquarters was Room 3603 of Rockefeller Center. The offices had been the location of the operations of Britain's MI6. Allan Dulles was put in charge.

OSS Tranistion (1942-1947)[]

The OSS had an outstanding record in its secret war. It was so successful that four months after end of the war and six months after Roosevelt's death, the generals and admirals, the State and War Departments, and the FBI conspired to persuade President Truman to disband the organization, which he did, on October 1, 1945.

Consequently, the US did not have an effective intelligence agency during the start of the Cold War. Two years later, Truman realized that he needed the peacetime intelligence agency that Donovan had proposed in 1944 and had, in fact, named the Central Intelligence Agency. On September 18, 1947, Truman signed the National Security Act, creating the CIA. (SOCOM, the US Special Operations Command, also traces its lineage to the OSS.)

The Office of Strategic Services was established by a Presidential military order issued by President Roosevelt on June 13, 1942

The creation of the OSS was itself a small miracle made possible only by the strong support of President Roosevelt and his close personal relationship with General Donovan. Their bipartisan relationship should serve as a role model for today's leaders. (After witnessing Donovan fire a silenced .22 caliber pistol designed by the OSS, Roosevelt famously quipped that Donovan was the only Republican he would allow in the Oval Office with a gun. Bipartisanship has its limits.)

The most striking attributes of the OSS were its leadership, the background of its members, and the fact that the organization reported directly to President Roosevelt. In July 1941, before the US entered World War II, Roosevelt accepted Donovan's plan for a new intelligence organization called the Coordinator of Information (COI), which actually was the name of our first peacetime intelligence organization. The COI was a civilian group that reported to the President. After we entered the war, Roosevelt signed a military order on June 13, 1942 establishing the OSS and appointing Donovan as its director. On paper, the OSS was placed under the direction of the Joint Chiefs, but it still had President Roosevelt's ear. A new OSS would need the same independence and presidential support in order to succeed.

One of the greatest accomplishments of the OSS during World War II was its penetration of Nazi Germany by OSS operatives. The OSS was responsible for training German and Austrian individuals for missions inside Germany.

The names of all OSS personnel and documents of their OSS service, previously a closely guarded secret, were released by the US National Archives on August 14, 2008. Charles Pinck, president of the OSS Society created by former OSS agents and their relatives, said the nearly 24,000 employees included in the archives far exceeds previous estimates of 13,000.

At least 300 faculty members from leading universities joined the OSS and made significant contributions to the organization's Research and Analysis (R&A) unit.

Major League Baseball player Moe Berg, a graduate of Princeton University and Columbia Law School, was recruited by Nelson Rockefeller (the coordinator of the U.S. Office of Inter-American Affairs) and then by the OSS.

Truman Library Oral History, Edward S Mason:

I didn't go down to Washington on a permanent basis until 1941, as I remember it, when I joined the Office of Strategic Services. The OSS was divided, really, into three main sections; a research section, a secret intelligence section, and a section of "dirty tricks" or whatever you want to call it. And I was the deputy director of the Research and Analysis Branch, the Director of which was William Langer a Professor of History at Harvard.

MCKINZIE: Did he convince you to join the OSS or did you volunteer for that service?

MASON: No, he convinced me to join the OSS, and by the end of the war the Research and Analysis Branch was quite a sizeable organization with six or seven hundred professional people, and the position I held might well be called the position of chief economist of the OSS. I also represented the OSS on the joint intelligence staff of the Army, Navy, Air Force, State Department, etc. I also represented the OSS on the Strategic Bombing Survey. So, those were my governmental connections before I moved to the State Department in December, 1944, to be deputy to Will Clayton, who was Assistant Secretary of State for Economic Affairs.

Elizabeth McIntosh, a OSS agent, was interviewed by Russell Miller for his book, Behind the Lines (2002)

It took about three weeks for the security checks, I guess, before I was told I was in. We were a very strange batch, because each one of us was going to do something different. I remember one was a doctor, he was always shaking his head at the things we had to do. There was a place where they would try to psychoanalyze you to figure out what you were capable of. One of the things they did was put you in a room and tell you someone lived there and we were supposed to figure out from the traces left behind who the person was, what did he do, what did he look like? It was a kind of a fun thing and everybody had a different idea. Another time we were told to go outside to where a group of men were building something or other and make them do it in a different way. I failed that completely, I couldn't persuade them. I was told later I should have picked up the pistol lying in the room where I was briefed and used it to make the men do what I wanted.

We learned how to handle weapons and throw hand grenades out on the golf course at the Congressional Country Club in Maryland. The members were furious because we ruined the greens. I don't remember the training being particularly rigorous. There was a lot of writing stuff and sometimes we had to trail people, so that we would not lose track of them when we were in cars. A lot of speakers would come down and talk to us. Margaret Mead, the anthropologist, came to talk to us about the pattern of life of people of the South Pacific and how we should approach them - a lot of it had to do with the Japanese, Indonesians and Burmese, the people we were going to be dealing with, and the Japanese mentality.

William J. Donovan in 1941 had not intended his new intelligence service to become a “spy” agency, running espionage operations in foreign capitals. He wanted COI to support military operations in the field by providing research, propaganda, and commando support, but he quickly became convinced of the value of clandestine human reporting. In 1942 OSS established the Secret Intelligence Branch (SI) to open field stations, train case officers, run agent operations, and process reports in Washington. Headed from 1943 on by international executive and lawyer Whitney H. Shepardson, SI by the end of the war had become a full-fledged foreign intelligence service, with stations in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, excellent liaison contacts with foreign services, and a growing body of operational doctrine.

In November 1942, the most famous SI station chief, Allen W. Dulles, set up shop on “Hitler’s doorstep” in the American legation in Bern, Switzerland. He found there a complicated and ever-shifting scene. Dulles quickly adopted a remnant of the fine prewar French military intelligence service, which gratefully provided him reports on German deployments in France that were prized by Allied invasion planners. He also found that Allied agents sent into Nazi Germany had scant hope of eluding the Gestapo, but that travel between the Reich and neutral Switzerland was free enough to bring a variety of Germans to him. Dulles established wide contacts with German émigrés, resistance figures, and anti-Nazi intelligence officers (who linked him, through Hans Bernd Gisevius, to the tiny but daring opposition to Hitler in Germany itself). Although Washington barred Dulles from making firm commitments to the plotters of the 20 July 1944 attempt to assassinate Hitler, the conspirators nonetheless gave him reports on developments in Germany, including sketchy but accurate warnings of plans for Hitler’s V-1 and V-2 missiles. In addition, Dulles was contacted by a German Foreign Ministry official, Fritz Kolbe, who volunteered to report from Berlin. Kolbe’s periodic packets illuminated German foreign policy and military matters, and helped the British spot the German spy “Cicero” working in the household of the British ambassador to Turkey.

Secret Intelligence Branch operations by 1945 had extended beyond the running of operations in foreign capitals to encompass the actual penetration of Nazi Germany. Donovan wanted to replicate the successes that the SI mission in Algiers had had in running the “Penny-Farthing” network in Southern France, but Germany, with no organized Resistance, was a much tougher objective. SI’s mission in London, led by William J. Casey, found a solution by adopting the methods of a successful OSS Morale Operations Branch project in Italy. Casey’s unit—knowing that no Americans could survive in Hitler’s Germany—learned how to find “volunteer” agents among the thousands of Axis prisoners-of-war in England. Casey’s London SI trained the agents, provided them with meticulously prepared clothing, documentation, and equipment, and dropped nearly 200 of them into the Third Reich to gather intelligence in the last months of the war. Agent teams established themselves in Bremen, Munich, Mainz, Dusseldorf, Essen, Stuttgart, and Vienna—and even in Berlin. They paid a high price in casualties—36 were killed, captured, or missing at war’s end—but the data they collected on industrial and military targets significantly aided the final Allied air and ground assaults on Germany.

Allen Dulles was born to high affairs of state. The nephew of one Secretary of State and the grandson of another, he was graduated from Princeton and joined the Foreign Service in World War I. As a junior diplomat, he acquired a taste for intelligence work while serving in Vienna and—after America declared war—in the American Legation in Bern, Switzerland. He gained valuable experiences, one of which stuck with him for the rest of his life. In Bern in 1917, Dulles kept a tennis date with a young lady one Sunday morning instead of meeting with an obscure Russian revolutionary named Lenin. Ever afterward he insisted that anyone who knocked on a case officer’s door deserved at least a hearing.

Dulles kept his career focused on foreign affairs after the war. Allen and his brother John Foster advised their uncle, Secretary of State Robert Lansing, at the Paris Peace negotiations at Versailles. More diplomatic postings followed in Berlin and Constantinople before Dulles returned to the State Department to head the Division of Near Eastern Affairs. He resigned from the government in 1926 to practice law and, for the next 15 years, he practiced with the firm of Sullivan & Cromwell in New York. Like his acquaintance William J. Donovan, Dulles traveled frequently abroad for business and pleasure in the 1930s, meeting Hitler and Mussolini and other European leaders in the course of his journeys. He joined the Council on Foreign Relations, ran as a Republican for Congress (and lost) in 1938, and advised former colleagues in the Department of State.

An early foe of Hitler, Dulles joined the fight against Nazi Germany well before Pearl Harbor. He had persuaded Sullivan & Cromwell to close its Berlin office in 1935. As head of COI’s New York office in the autumn of 1941, Dulles worked with William Stephenson (“Intrepid”) of British Security Coordination and gathered data on the Axis from refugees and from American businessmen and journalists with ties in Europe. His long institutional experience and wide contacts superbly equipped him to run wartime intelligence operations out of neutral Switzerland, and Dulles made the most of his many opportunities in Bern.

As defeat loomed for the Third Reich in the spring of 1945, Allen Dulles and SI made one of OSS’s greatest contributions to the war effort. German generals and officials as high-ranking as SS chief Heinrich Himmler began floating secret peace proposals to the British and the Americans. While some of these offers were genuine, the Allied “unconditional surrender” policy—and fear of provoking the suspicions of Joseph Stalin—constrained American diplomats and intelligence officers who might otherwise have been able to encourage these peace feelers. One important exception was made. Despite the unconditional surrender policy, higher authority in Washington allowed Allen Dulles to meet with SS general Karl Wolff, who had secretly offered to broker a surrender of German forces in Italy. The result of the meetings was Operation SUNRISE, a dangerous and devilishly complicated series of contacts over the next several weeks. Dulles had to manage the contacts and negotiations from Bern. Time after time the scheme came right to the edge of breakdown or disaster, but in the end SUNRISE succeeded, bringing about an early end to the Italian campaign in late April 1945—and saving hundreds if not thousands of lives.

We were always asked, ‘Would you like to get yourself killed?’ To which we always said ‘Yes.” - Carlton S Coon

OSS Agents

Wild Bill Donovan, head, said that his greatest enemies were in Washington, not Europe
Thomas Wardell Braden, "I often briefed David Rockefeller on what we were doing"
Whitney Hart Shepardson, Secret Intelligence Branch
James “Russ” Forgan
Russell Jack Smith
Nicholas L. Deak
John Kirk Singlaub
Beurt SerVaas
Moe Berg
John Hemingway, son of author Ernest Hemingway
Quentin and Kermit Roosevelt, sons of President Theodore Roosevelt
Miles Copeland, father of Stewart Copeland, drummer for the band The Police
Julia Child
Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg
Saul K. Padover
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
Bruce Sundlun
John Ford
Sterling Hayden, a film and television actor whose work included a role in "The Godfather
Thomas Braden, an author whose "Eight Is Enough" book inspired the 1970s television series.
Elizabeth McIntosh, "she conducted operations that affected actions in Siam, French Indochina, and Burma."
William Casey
Allan Dulles
Ralph Bunche
Walter Mess, "I was told to keep my mouth shut," said Mess
Virginia Hall, Jacques Chirac said she "contributed greatly to the liberation of France."
Arthur H. Robinson
Irving Brown
William B. Macomber, Jr.
Edward S Mason
William Langer
William Egan Colby
J. Evelle Younger
David K. E. Bruce
Myron Dubain
John Ringling North
Henry Ringling North, possible skull and bones
Mitchell WerBell
?Fred Crisman?
Cornelius Vander Starr
Duncan Lee
Paul Helliwell
E. Howard Hunt
Mitch Werbell
Lucien Conein
John Singlaub
Ray Cline
Carlton S. Coon
Gordon H Browne
Fisher Howe
Saul Steinberg
Norman Holmes Pearson
Stewart Alsop
Sterling Hayden
Paul Mellon
Col. Aaron Bank, founded Green Berets
Ralph Bunche
John Weitz
Edward Hunter, popularized the term "brainwashing"
Wilbur Crane Eveland
Richard McGarrah Helms
Kermir Roosovelt Jr.
Chadbourne Gilpatric
Frank Lindsay
Charles B. Fahs
Richard M. Bissell, Jr.
Thomas Hercules Karamessines
Desmond FitzGerald
Richard Ober
Henry Hecksher
Gerry Droller
Edward Lansdale
Jack Alston Crichton
Tracy Barnes
Desmond Fitzgerald
Charles Douglas Jackson, bought Zapruda film
S. Dillon Ripley

Strategic Services Unit 1945-[]

Gen. William Quinn, ran the Strategic Services Unit, an interim organization created after the dissolution of the O.S.S. in 1945

CIA (1947-)[]

National Security Act 1947

The CIAs objective was to steer the worlds political development. Nationalism in all its forms, exemplified by Adolph Hitler and Fascism was to be defined as (far) right wing and International Communism, exemplified by the Soviet Union, as (far) left wing. A path between the two would be steered so that a form of socialist internationalism would emerge in every country, The CIA worked to secretly change the political development of every country so that this political paradigm would be stablished in every country.

The presence of Communism was used to justify the CIA and all its activities. Communism was represented as a menacing threat to the world.

"We need powerful radio stations abroad operating without government restrictions to educate people...about the essential fairness of democracy"

The CIA set up the:

World Assembly of Youth
Coordinating Secretariat of National Unions of Students
International Confederation of Free Trade Unions
The CIA hired the Corsican Mafia to attack Communist groups.

SDS logo

Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was a student activist movement in the United States that was one of the main iconic representations of the country's New Left. SDS developed from the Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID), the youth branch of a socialist educational organization known as the League for Industrial Democracy (LID). LID descended from the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, started in 1905. The organization dissolved in 1969. A new incarnation of SDS was founded in 2006.

CIA has funded SDS inspired operations all over the world through Serbian Opfor and other channels.

CIA Agents:

Michael Anne Casey
Alfreda Frances Bikowsky
Richard Earl Blee
Thomas Wilshire
Cofer Black
David Edgar
George J Tenet
Porter Goss
Philip Agee
Miles Copeland - recruited Saddam Hussein

Pentagon (1941-)[]

The building was dedicated on January 15, 1943, after ground was broken for construction on September 11, 1941.

60 years later the World Trade Center complex was destroyed and the Pentagon attacked.

Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (1941-1946)[]

It was started in August 1940 as OCCCRBAR (Office for Coordination of Commercial and Cultural Relations between the American Republics) with Nelson Rockefeller as its head, appointed by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

By an Executive order of April 10, 1946, the Office was abolished and its remaining functions and responsibilities were transferred to the State Department.

Wild Bill Donovan[]

Donovan was a graduate of Columbia Law School and became an influential Wall Street lawyer.

From 1922 to 1924, he was US Attorney for the Western District of New York, famous for his energetic enforcement of Prohibition. President Calvin Coolidge named him to the United States Department of Justice's Antitrust Division. He ran unsuccessfully as a Republican for Lieutenant Governor of New York in 1922, and for Governor of New York in 1932.

During the interwar years, Donovan travelled extensively in Europe and met with foreign leaders including Mussolini of Italy. Donovan openly believed during this time that a second major European war was inevitable. His foreign experience and realism earned him the attention and friendship of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The two men were from opposing political parties, but were similar in personality. Because of this, Roosevelt came to highly value Donovan's insights.

On the recommendation of Donovan's friend United States Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, Roosevelt gave him a number of increasingly important assignments. In 1940 and 1941, Donovan travelled as an informal emissary to Britain. During these trips, Donovan met with key officials in the British war effort, including Winston Churchill and the directors of Britain's intelligence services. Donovan returned enamored with the possibility of founding an American intelligence service modeled on that of the British.

On July 11, 1941, Donovan was named Coordinator of Information (COI).

America's foreign intelligence organizations at the time were fragmented and isolated from each other. The Army, Navy, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), United States Department of State, and other interests each ran their own intelligence operations, the results of which they were reluctant to share with the other departments. Donovan was the nominal director of this unwieldy system.

Donovan began to lay the groundwork for a centralized intelligence program. It was he who organized the COI's New York headquarters in Room 3603 of Rockefeller Center in October, 1941 and asked Allen Dulles to head it; the offices Dulles took over had been the location of the operations of Britain's MI6.

In 1942, the COI became the Office of Strategic Services (OSS)

Donovan did not have an official role in the newly formed CIA but with his protégé Allen Dulles and others, he was instrumental in its formation.

After the war ended, Donovan reverted to his lifelong role as a lawyer to perform one last duty: he served as special assistant to chief prosecutor Telford Taylor at several trials following the main Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal in Germany.

At the conclusion of these trials, Donovan returned to Wall Street and his highly successful law firm, Donovan, Leisure, Newton & Irvine. He remained always available to postwar Presidents who requested his advice on intelligence matters. In 1949 he became chairman of the newly-founded American Committee on United Europe, which worked to counter the new Communist threat to Europe by promoting European political unity.