A Gestapo dragnet was closing in on the abandoned farmhouse in northern France where agent René Joyeuse was busy on his radio. He was feverishly reporting the exact location of an underground V-1 rocket factory and a German oil refinery when his last sentence was cut short by the glare of a very powerful flashlight. "The house was surrounded. So I told the resistance fighters with me, 'We're surrounded, let's get out of here fast!' I was picking up my Colt .45 lying on the table when four German hand grenades were thrown into the room.

"The blasts from the grenades violently threw me on the ground twice. Miraculously, I wasn't wounded.

"We dashed into the alley and reached a small service staircase in the back of the house. We succeeded in leaving the house at the moment that the Germans entered through the garden gate.

"We were continuously attacked from 10 meters behind by grenades and submachine-gun fire, and blazing torches lit up the night. I attempted to cover our retreat with my Colt but it jammed on the fourth shot. With Colt in hand I arrived in front of a big wall separating the Secours National Park from a neighboring property next to the railroad tracks by a freight station. We all tried to scale this wall. I made two unsuccessful attempts and told the FFIs [Resistance fighters] that I wasn't going to make it and would try the wall further down. They kept trying and I never saw them again.

"I was able to scale the wall about 20 meters down. At this moment the Germans, who were posted on both sides of the block near the tracks, fired at me at a distance of 10 meters and missed me. I came upon a patrol. Seeing a running man passing them, they fired on me with their machine guns at point-blank range. They still missed me. I crossed all the tracks and came to another gate leading to a street on the side of the station. I climbed over. At this moment, two other Germans with machine guns woke up to what was going on and fired. Luckily, in climbing over the gate, I had fallen flat on my face behind a small cement parapet which caused all the bullets to ricochet. When their magazines were empty, I got up again and ran off in the direction of nearby houses. After about 200 or 300 meters of painful progress, since I was wounded in the right foot and hand, the left kneecap, and had suffered numerous contusions, I got into a house where the gate was half open and met a women who, seeing that I was going to bring her a lot of grief, told me, 'Don't come in here! Beat it! Get out of here!' I threatened her with my pistol, begging her to 'shut up!', and went up to the fourth floor by a back staircase. I dropped down to a door to another apartment, which seemed to belong to a woman who was an informer for the Gestapo! I stayed there, near the door, the whole time holding in one hand my Colt and in the other my potassium cyanide pill [L-pill, or lethal pill]. I decided to use one or the other on myself if I were surrounded. The dragnet continued for me all night, all the nearby houses were searched, with the exception of the one I was in."

Joyeuse, leader of a two-man spy team, narrowly escaped with his life. The resistance men were captured and summarily executed. Despite the disaster, Joyeuse continued to gather valuable intelligence on German troop movements. Additionally, the oil refinery and German rocket plant were destroyed by Allied bombers.

Joyeuse's mission was part of the "shadow war," one of the few remaining aspects of World War II that has not been fully appreciated. While the most visible part of World War II was fought by armies, navies, and air forces, a largely invisible and covert war was also raging around the globe. Saboteurs were demolishing railroad tunnels, spies were stealing secrets, and "operatives" -- uniformed soldiers trained to fight behind enemy lines -- were parachuting into occupied countries to organize and lead resistance fighters. Mathematicians were breaking codes. Radio propagandists were demoralizing German soldiers and civilians, while academics were analyzing the German economy to determine which were the crucial industries that should be targeted by Allied strategic bombers in order to cripple the German war effort.

Before World War II, America's use of covert, or shadow, warfare was limited. There had been spies in the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, among others, but American intelligence services were so much inferior to those of the world's other great powers that one senior Foreign Service officer observed: "Our Intelligence organization in 1940 was primitive and inadequate... operating strictly in the tradition of the Spanish-American War."

Perhaps this was to be expected in a nation that seemed to have an innate aversion to spying. A navy intelligence officer complained that to Americans, "Espionage is by its very nature not to be considered as 'honorable' or 'clean' or 'fair' or 'decent.'... The United States has always prided itself on the fact that no spies were used and its intelligence officers accredited overseas have always kept their hands immaculately clean." When deciphered Japanese messages landed on his desk in 1929, Hoover administration Secretary of State Henry Stimson infamously remarked, "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail." Appalled by what he perceived to be underhanded techniques, Stimson shut down the "Black Chamber," a cryptographic service cracking Japanese codes. Fortunately, the military pressed on with code-breaking efforts.

In the prewar years, the vital task of gathering foreign intelligence fell on the shoulders of four departments within the federal government: the State Department; the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI); the War Department's Military Intelligence Division (MID), better known as G-2; and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). While the FBI had no mandate to gather foreign intelligence until 1940, it indirectly gathered intelligence in conjunction with the investigation of crimes in the United States. In 1940, the bureau set up a Special Intelligence Service to conduct operations in Latin America.

State Department diplomats obtained intelligence through the course of official business or covertly in secret meetings with contacts they established. State's Division of Information was little more than a press office that distributed news releases to the press, governments, and universities.

The military intelligence departments of ONI and G-2 were understaffed and underfunded. Most of ONI's intelligence was gathered by attachés serving overseas who openly visited shipyards; in peacetime the attachés were instructed to refrain from cloak and dagger activity. By 1939, ONI had only 17 attaché posts, 9 in Europe and the remainder in South America. G-2 was equally diminutive: in 1940, G-2 numbered only 80 staffers.

Analysis and dissemination of intelligence were also problems. The departments arbitrarily sent reports up the chain of command, hoping that the most critical information would find its way to the White House, but no clearinghouse existed to ensure that information was shared among the departments. While the departments were all focusing on countering sabotage and espionage within the United States, they seemed more concerned about jealously guarding their turf than about coordinating their efforts. In 1939, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt urged better cooperation between the groups, but little progress had been made by 1940. ONI candidly summed up the situation: "A real undercover foreign intelligence service, equipped and able to carry on espionage, counter-intelligence, etc. does not exist."

Under pressure from the British to improve intelligence matters, Roosevelt took decisive action. On July 11, 1941, the president ordered the establishment of a new White House agency, the Coordinator of Information (COI), effectively creating America's first peacetime national intelligence organization. The COI received a powerful mandate, the "authority to collect and analyze all information and data, which may bear upon the national security; to correlate such information and data, and to make such information and data available to the President and to such departments and officials of the Government as the President may determine...."

The president could not have chosen a more dynamic or better qualified man to lead COI: war hero, former assistant U.S. attorney general, Wall Street lawyer, and executive William J. Donovan. During WWI, Donovan commanded a battalion in the 165th Infantry Regiment, more commonly known as the "Fighting 69th" from its Civil War heritage. Donovan personally led his command in combat. During one battle, the battalion was pinned down when "Wild Bill," pistol in hand, leaped from the trenches, yelling, "They can't hit me, and they won't hit you." The men surged forward and "were dropping all over," as Donovan recalled. "Beside me three men were blown up, and I was showered with the remnants of their bodies." Donovan took a machine-gun bullet to the knee. Bleeding profusely, he refused to be evacuated and continued to command his battalion, leading it to victory. His actions that day won him the Congressional Medal of Honor. By the end of the war he had earned the Distinguished Service Cross, Distinguished Service Medal, and two Purple Hearts. A number of foreign governments also recognized him for his valor, making him one of the most decorated veterans of the American Expeditionary Force.

After the war, Donovan traveled extensively and resumed his legal practice. He also served as assistant attorney general under Calvin Coolidge.

In 1940, Donovan traveled overseas as an official emissary for President Roosevelt to report on Britain's staying power in the war. Hoping to win American support, Prime Minster Winston Churchill granted him unprecedented access to Britain's greatest intelligence and defense secrets. The president, impressed by Donovan's reports, sent him on a second tour to the Mediterranean and the Balkans. The trips provided Donovan with ideas on how to improve America's intelligence operations and develop shadow-war capabilities.

In Washington, Donovan's fledgling COI came under assault by the government agencies responsible for gathering intelligence, who viewed him as an intruder in their territory. The very agencies the COI was attempting to coordinate, FBI, ONI, G-2, and State, formed a loose anti-COI alliance that would continue throughout the war. The four departments took steps to curb the new agency's scope and influence. For example, the military put code-breaking off limits, and ONI and FBI excluded COI from operating in the Western Hemisphere.

COI nevertheless expanded into research and analysis and propaganda, collaborating closely with the British intelligence services. Special operations and secret intelligence lagged behind other divisions, as spies and saboteurs took so long to train.

December 7th marked America's entry into WWII. COI, still in its infancy and mostly focused on the threat of Nazi Germany, did not play a role in one of America's worst intelligence failures of the war. Hawaii lay within the territory of ONI and G-2, and it was they who failed to detect the attack on Pearl Harbor.

The advent of war would transform COI's relationship with the newly formed Joint Chiefs of Staff, who largely sided with their own intelligence organizations and distrusted Donovan. In order to solve this perception problem and gain access to military support and greater resources, Donovan proposed bringing COI under the control of the Joint Chiefs.

On June 13, 1942, the president officially endorsed the idea. COI's name was changed to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), and the organization was placed under the authority of the Joint Chiefs. Part of the change also included the loss of COI's Foreign Information Service (FIS). FIS conducted America's "white propaganda" campaign, which consisted of truthful information publicly acknowledged to be of American origin. Nearly half of COI's staff was placed into a separate, newly created organization, the Office of War Information (OWI).

The realignment and name change did not placate OSS's intelligence rivals at FBI, State, G-2, and ONI. When Donovan proposed creating a special code-breaking facility known as the COILs project, a presidential decree inspired by OSS's intelligence rivals effectively blocked the project. The FBI continued to prevent OSS counterespionage operations in the Western Hemisphere.

While under the tutelage of the British, OSS developed many of its own independent concepts practically overnight, emphasizing an integrated "combined arms" of shadow-war techniques. Wild Bill Donovan's vision held that "persuasion, penetration and intimidation... are the modern counterparts of sapping and mining in the siege warfare of former days." Propaganda represented the "arrow of initial penetration," followed up by espionage. Sabotage and guerrilla operations would then soften up an area before conventional forces invaded. The integration of all shadow-war techniques was a groundbreaking approach to covert warfare. The British secret services were not integrated, but operated in separate divisions.

A central element of the shadow war was special operations, a new concept that OSS would develop during the war. At the end of March 1941, Donovan urged the president to permit him to develop special operations forces, which would take the war to the Germans in an unexpected, irregular way. Teams of operatives would penetrate behind enemy lines to sow mayhem in rear areas. Donovan considered the Germans "big league professionals" of warfare, and America the "bush league club." He explained to the president that the only way to get America up to speed quickly against Germany was to "play a bush league game, stealing the ball and killing the umpire." He would succeed remarkably well, as the stories in this book suggest.

Major departments of OSS under Donovan included:

Research & Analysis (R&A) for intelligence analysis.

Research and Development (R&D) for weapons and equipment development.

Morale Operations (MO) for subversive, disguised, "black" propaganda.

Maritime Units (MU) for transporting agents and supplies to resistance groups. MU frogmen also conducted naval sabotage and reconnaissance.

X-2 for Counterespionage.

Secret Intelligence (SI) covered agents in the field who covertly gathered intelligence.

Special Operations (SO) for sabotage, subversion, fifth-column movements, and guerrilla warfare.

Operational Groups (OG) also for sabotage and guerrilla warfare, made up of highly trained foreign-language-speaking commando teams.

Donovan used his vast array of personal contacts to recruit the best and the brightest. OSS tapped Ivy League schools, law firms, and major corporations for their talent. Innovativeness and youth were common denominators among the new recruits. OSS wanted "out-of-the-box" thinkers, and fostered an organizational culture of creativity. OSS was unorthodox, brilliant, and at times bizarre. One proposed mission would have dropped pornography on Hitler's HQ, in a farcical attempt to addict the Führer. Nevertheless, it was a dynamic and groundbreaking organization that, as OSS psychologists concluded after the war, "Undertook and carried out more different types of enterprises calling for more varied skills than any other single organization of its size in the history of our country."

OSS's shadow war required a wide range of skills. Safecrackers were sprung from prison, and Ivy League professors were recruited to analyze what was stolen from the safes. U.S. Army paratroopers and other elite troops were recruited to serve as operatives. Communists who fought against Franco in the Spanish Civil War were recruited for operations in Spain or potentially to work with Communist resistance networks. Americans and foreigners alike were trained as citizen spies. Very few professional spies existed, and, because of language differences, most Americans were not ideally suited for certain aspects of secret intelligence work. Therefore, foreigners, including some Axis prisoners of war, were trained to collect information and sometimes fight in occupied countries, even in Germany herself. After Italy's surrender, for example, elite Italian maritime commandos joined up to work against the Germans. Tragically, countless foreign agents were killed in the line of duty with little recognition after the war by OSS or CIA.

This book focuses on the main operational arms of the OSS: Special Operations (SO), along with its Operational Groups (OG) off-shoot, and Secret Intelligence (SI), particularly in the European theater. Due to the sheer number of missions, OSS operations in Asia require separate treatment. Operatives, Spies, and Saboteurs, just as its title suggests, is the first substantial "agent-level" history of OSS. It is not an analysis or traditional history, but the story of the main operational units in their own words. The book is arranged in rough chronological and campaign order. Branches that provided more of a supporting role, such as MU, X-2, MO, R&D, and R&A, are highlighted in separate chapters.

Over the past several years I have felt like a detective tracking down the surviving men and women of OSS. Over 300 oral history interviews were conducted with these remarkable individuals around the country. Many told me their stories for the first time, breaking vows of silence and revealing secrets held for nearly 60 years. Both male and female agents were interviewed; however, only a tiny percentage of women actually operated behind the lines. The interviews provide the heart of this book. Their stories were carefully cross-checked with supporting documentation.

The oral histories were supplemented by over two years of research in the massive documentary OSS archival collection housed at the National Archives. Nearly all of the documents of this entire intelligence organization are on file (in comparison, most of the British and Soviet records still remain sealed). Tens of thousands of documents have only recently been declassified, having previously been held back as top secret "sources and methods" by the CIA.

This agent-level history touches on the heart of OSS's story. OSS had to overcome many obstacles. The new agency had to build an organization and develop techniques from the ground up in a short period of time. Then it had to "sell" its services to traditional military commanders who understood neither its role nor how it functioned. Despite resistance from American rivals and from British intelligence, which viewed OSS as a junior partner rather than an equal, OSS expanded and was engaged in nearly every theater of the war. Historians have tended to relegate OSS to a sideshow, suggesting that it made little difference in the war's outcome. Now that the records are open, and the veterans are telling their stories, however, it can be shown that OSS played a key role in the Allied victory.

Copyright © 2004 by Patrick K. O'Donnell