Introduction 

 Because of the secrecy that enveloped the U.S. Office of Strategic Services in 

World War II, it surprises most people, including nearby residents, to learn that spies 

were trained in some of the National Parks—not just spies but guerrilla leaders, 

saboteurs, clandestine radio operators and others who would be infiltrated behind enemy 

lines. What are today known as Catoctin Mountain Park in Maryland and Prince William 

Forest Park in Virginia played a vital role in the training of the operatives of the U.S. 

Office of Strategic Services. Known by its initials, the OSS was a specially created 

wartime military agency that fought a largely invisible and covert war against the Axis 

powers between 1942 and 1945. America’s first national centralized intelligence agency 

with thousands of clandestine operatives, spies, and intelligence analysts, the OSS is 

acknowledged as the predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency.1

 With its Special 

Operations troops and Operational Group commandos, the OSS is also widely considered 

a forerunner of today's Special Forces.2 

 From 1941 to 1945, the men and women of the OSS were part of a "shadow war," 

a war largely behind the scenes and often behind enemy lines around the world. Highly 

secret during the war and in many instances for years thereafter, that effort was designed 

to help undermine the conquests of Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, and militaristic Japan. 

The “shadow warriors” sought to supply and guide local resistance movements, 

demoralize the enemy through “black propaganda,” and to gather intelligence and 

commit sabotage in enemy occupied territory to contribute to the victory of the Allies’ 

armed forces as they overcame the totalitarian, Axis aggressors. 

 

1

 Michael Warner, The Office of Strategic Services: America's First Intelligence Agency (Washington, 

D.C.: Central Intelligence Agency, 2000), 1; the CIA website (www.cia.gov); and Thomas F. Troy, 

Donovan and the CIA: A History of the Establishment of the Central Intelligence Agency (Frederick, Md.: 

University Publications of America, 1981), vii, 409-410. 

2

 Alfred H. Paddock, Jr., US Army Special Warfare: Its Origins: Psychological and Unconventional 

Warfare, 1941-1952 (Washington, D.C.: National Defense University Press, 1982; rev. ed., University 

Press of Kansas, 2005), 23-25; and Aaron Bank, From OSS to Green Berets: The Birth of the Special 

Forces (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1986), 205-206. Because OSS was a civilian organization with 

military personnel merely assigned to it, the official lineage of the Army’s Special Forces, specified by the 

U.S. Army’s Center of Military History (www.army.mil/cmh/lineage/branch/sf), does not credit the OSS 

as a predecessor. But Special Forces veterans see OSS’s combat units in Special Operation, Maritime Unit, 

and Operational Group Branches as their predecessors and so do many Special Forces organizations. See,

for example, the websites of the U.S. Army’s John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Museum at Fort Bragg, at

www.soc.mil/swcs/museum; and Airborne and Special Operations Museum at www.asomf.org/museum, 

both in Fayetteville, N.C.; and Troy J. Sacquety, “The OSS,” Veritas: Journal of Army Special Operations 

History, 3.4 (2007): 34-51. The Pentagon allows veterans of those OSS combat units to wear the distinctive 

Special Forces shoulder tab; www.tioh.hquda.pentagon.mil/Tab/SpecialForcesTab.htm, 
2 Introduction 

 The OSS was a civilian wartime organization with many military personnel 

assigned to it. It reported to the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), although its director, William 

J. (“Wild Bill”) Donovan, had direct, personal access to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. 

The actual number of men and women recruited and trained by the super secret 

organization may never be known. Traditionally it was generally believed that the OSS 

had 13,000 members.3 But this figure seems to have been based on the number of 

American personnel employed by the OSS at its peak in late 1944.4 In August 2008, just 

as the present study was completed, the CIA released 750,000 newly declassified OSS 

documents, including personnel files that seemed to indicate that there may have been 

24,000 people employed by the OSS at one time or another during the war.5 But the 

status of these 24,000, whether permanent or temporary, member or consultant, American 

or foreigner, remained to be determined. 

OSSers worked in half a dozen different branches of the organization and in a 

variety of missions, some of which were highly dangerous. Half of the OSSers served 

overseas, and perhaps as much as one-third of the OSS recruits were trained as agents.6

OSS Special Operations agents in small teams or commandos in larger Operational 

Groups infiltrated behind enemy lines in nighttime parachute drops, small plane landings 

or submarine or swift boat embarkations in Axis occupied countries in North Africa, 

Europe, and the Far East to help organize, arm, and help lead local guerrilla resistance 

fighters. Some of these OSS agents and commandos also engaged in sabotage-- blowing 

up railroads, bridges, and tunnels as well as power plants, communications centers, and 

weapons and munitions depots. Accompanying them were radio operators, members of 

the OSS Communications Branch, who kept the field operatives and headquarters 

informed through encoded messages via short-wave radios and temporarily strung 

antennas. In the field, they had to be on the move to avoid detection by enemy directionfinding and surveillance units. OSS Secret Intelligence operatives engaged in "cloak and 

 

3

 Warner, Office of Strategic Services, 9. 

4

 On the peak figure of 13,000 OSS personnel in December 1944 (with 5,500 in the USA and 7,500 

overseas), see War Report of the OSS (Office of Strategic Services), 2 vols. (New York: Walker and Co., 

1976), I, 116; hereinafter, War Report of the OSS. This is a declassified published version of the original 

institutional history of the OSS, "War Report, Office of Strategic Services," that was completed on 5 

September 1947, by former OSS personnel working for its successor, the Strategic Services Unit. The 

executive officer of the History Project was Serge Peter Karlow; the chief of the History Project was 

Kermit Roosevelt, a former OSS officer and a grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt. An OSS 

document from May 1945 signed by General Donovan gives the following breakdown: “OSS has a total 

personnel of 12,816, of which 6,939 are members of the Armed Forces. Of a total of 2,593 officers and 

6,346 enlisted service personnel, 2,192 are Army officers and 5,817 Army enlisted men.” Maj. Gen. 

William J. Donovan to the Adjutant General, 15 May 1945, subject: Recommendation for Promotion [of 

Col. M. Preston Goodfellow], p. 3, in Millard Preston Goodfellow Papers, Box 2, Biographical Material 

Folder, Hoover Institution, Stanford, Calif. 

5

 Brett J. Blackledge and Randy Herschaft, Associated Press, “Newly Release Files Detail Early US Spy 

Network,” 14 August 2008, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/14/August; 

Spy Files Include a Justice, a Baker, and a Filmmaker,” Newark (N.J.) Star-Ledger, 15 August 2008, A4. 

 

6

 Warner, Office of Strategic Services, 9; the figure of perhaps one third of the 13,000 being trained as 

agents is from Erasmus H. Kloman, Assignment Algiers: With the OSS in the Mediterranean Theater

(Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2005), 10. 
 Introduction 3

dagger" espionage, ferreting out and relaying information about industrial and military 

production, transportation, war plans, deployment of enemy units, and the status of 

supplies and morale. 

Donovan’s organization also employed thousands of men and women engaged in 

equally important but less hazardous work in regional stations overseas and especially at 

the OSS’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. Among these were scholars in the Research 

and Analysis Branch (R&A) pouring through evidence of political and economic 

developments in enemy and enemy occupied countries; scientists in the Research and 

Development laboratories, developing new weapons and means of communications; 

members of the Counter-Intelligence Branch, who sought to apprehend enemy agents 

sent or left behind Allied lines; and the men and women of the Morale Operations Branch 

MO), who specialized in foreign-language radio broadcasting and leafleting sought 

actively to undermine enemy military and civilian morale. 

Among the many highly talented, ambitious and often well-connected members of 

the OSS, a number later achieved national prominence. Among them were subsequent 

CIA directors Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, William Colby and William J. Casey; 

Supreme Court Justice Arthur J. Goldberg; Ambassador David Bruce and two dozen 

other U.S. ambassadors; presidential advisers such as political scientist Roger Hilsman, 

economist Walt Rostow, and historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.; ornithologist and 

wildlife specialist S. Dillon Ripley II, and Treasury Secretary C. Douglas Dillon. The 

glamorous aura, independence and social standing of the OSS brought in representatives 

of some of the wealthiest families in America—DuPonts, Mellons, Morgans, and 

Vanderbilts—a fact that led some critics to suggest that the agency's initials, OSS, 

actually meant "Oh, So, Social!"7

 Despite the socialites, however, in sheer numbers, the 

vast majority of OSS personnel came from middle-class backgrounds. Most of them had 

never heard of OSS, and were selected mainly on merit. They did the bulk of the work in 

the new organization and did it well. Little wonder that so many of the OSS members 

proved so successful in their postwar careers as well. 

Thousands of men and women served in the OSS, but it has been mainly those of 

the operational branches, especially those engaged clandestinely behind enemy lines, that 

have been the most heralded. Their work remained largely secret during the war, but 

almost immediately afterwards, through published accounts and fictionalized Hollywood 

films starring Alan Ladd, Gary Cooper, and James Cagney, they achieved a celebrated 

place in the public imagination.8

 Americans thrilled to the daring exploits and cocky, 

 

7

 Other colloquialisms, such as "Oh- So- Secret" and "Oh-Shush- Shush," parodied the pervasive wartime 

secrecy of the OSS. Junius Morgan dispensed clandestine funds at the London office; Paul Mellon was an

administrative officer in Special Operations Branch; his brother-in-law, David Bruce, also a millionaire, 

was chief of the London Office. At OSS headquarters in Washington, D.C., Henry Morgan (Junius’s 

brother and also a son of J.P. Morgan) headed the Censorship and Documents Branch.; William Vanderbilt

served as an executive officer in Special Operations; and Alfred DuPont headed a section for espionage

projects in France. Smith, OSS, 15-16. 

8

 John Chamberlain, "OSS," Life, 19 November 1945, 119-24; Corey Ford and Alistair McBain, Cloak and 

Dagger (New York: Random House, 1945); Arthur Goldberg, "Top Secret," Nation, 23 March 1946, 348-

50; Paul Cyr, "We Blew the Yellow River Bridge," Saturday Evening Post, 23 March 1946; Stewart Alsop 

and Thomas Braden, Sub Rosa: The O.S.S. and American Espionage (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 

1946); Elizabeth MacDonald [later Elizabeth MacDonald McIntosh], Undercover Girl (New York: 

Macmillan, 1947). Among the Hollywood feature films about the OSS, the most notable were Cloak and 
4 Introduction 

devil-may-care attitudes of the OSS spies and commandos as they fought with courage, 

skill and initiative against the Nazis and the Japanese. Working in the shadow of 

enormous, depersonalized armies, navies, and air forces, the solo OSS agents, fighting 

behind enemy lines, surviving through their courage and wit, seemed to exemplify a 

continuing role for the daring and able individual even in an age of industrialized mass 

warfare. 

The story of the OSS and its charismatic director, Wild Bill Donovan, has been 

told many times.9 But in the past two decades, there has been an outpouring of books 

about other aspects of the OSS. This resulted from the extensive declassification of OSS 

organizational records at the National Archives.10 It also stemmed from the willingness of 

many OSS Veterans, sworn to secrecy during the war, to tell about their exploits as part 

of what was being hailed in the 1990s, fifty years after the war, as the "Greatest 

Generation."11 The publishing avalanche has gone beyond autobiographies of OSS 

operatives who subsequently achieved notable careers.

12 As part of the new social history 

“from the bottom up,” many former operatives, without prior claim to public attention, 

 

Dagger (Republic, 1946); O.S.S. (Paramount, 1946); and 13 rue Madeleine (20th Century Fox, 1947). See 

also James I. Deutsch, "Representations of O.S.S. Espionage in Hollywood Films of 1946," paper presented 

at the annual meeting of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, Georgetown University, 

Washington, D.C., June 22, 1997. 

9

 Corey Ford, Donovan of OSS (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970); Smith, OSS; Edward Hymoff, The OSS in 

WWII (New York: Ballantine, 1972); Joseph E. Persico, Piercing the Reich: The Penetration of Nazi 

Germany by American Secret Agents During World War II (New York: Viking, 1979); Anthony Cave 

Brown, The Last Hero: Wild Bill Donovan (New York: Times Books, 1982); Richard Dunlop, Donovan: 

America's Master Spy (New York: Rand McNally, 1982); Smith, Shadow Warriors; Thomas F. Troy, Wild 

Bill and Intrepid: Donovan, Stevenson and the Origin of the CIA (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University 

Press, 1996). 

10 The Central Intelligence Agency began declassifying the OSS records and transferring them to the 

National Archives in the 1980s. By the 1991, some 5,000 cubic feet of OSS documents from the CIA and 

the U.S. State Department's intelligence office had been opened for scholarly investigation. See Lawrence 

H. McDonald, "The OSS and Its Records," The Secrets War: The Office of Strategic Services in World War 

II, George C. Chalou, ed., (Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration, 1992), 78. By 

1997, declassification by the CIA had brought to collection to some 7,000 cubic feet, with another 300

cubic feet of records received from CIA in 2000. Interviews by the author in 2005 with John E. Taylor and 

Lawrence H. McDonald, archivists, Modern Military Records Branch, National Archives II, College Park, 

Md. As indicated above, in August 2008, CIA declassification resulted in the release of another 750,000 

documents. 

11 Tom Brokaw, The Greatest Generation (New York: Random House, 1998). 

12 A sampling of such prominent autobiographies would include, General William R. Peers and Dean 

Brelis, Behind the Burma Road: The Story of America's Most Successful Guerrilla Forces (Boston: Little, 

Brown, 1963); Allen W. Dulles, The Secret Surrender (New York: Harper and Row, 1966); William Colby 

and Peter Forbath, Honorable Men: My Life in the CIA (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978); William J. 

Casey, The Secret War Against Hitler (Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, 1988); Major General John K. 

Singlaub with Malcom McConnell , Hazardous Duty: An American Soldier in the Twentieth Century (New 

York: Summit Books, 1991); and Richard Helms with William Hood, Look Over My Shoulder: A Life in 

the CIA (New York: Random House, 2003). 
 Introduction 5

have been publishing their memoirs.13 Historians and biographers, some of them OSS 

veterans, are also mining the OSS records, examining virtually every aspect of the 

organization -- its leaders, its exotic weapons, its female members, its relationships with 

the Allies, and its secret operations in countries around the world.14 The Central 

Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the U.S. Special Forces Command (USSOCOM) have 

celebrated their connections with the OSS.15

One largely neglected subject in this outpouring, however, has been the training 

of the OSS agents. Historical accounts or memoirs of the OSS generally ignore this or 

dispense with it in only a few paragraphs or a couple of pages. Consequently, there has 

been no adequate study of the recruitment and preparation of the men and women of the 

OSS for what were demanding and often dangerous activities.16

Seeking to help rectify this omission, the present study provides a detailed 

account of OSS training, particularly of the Special Operations, Operational Group, and 

 

13 For example, Franklin A. Lindsay, Beacons in the Night: With the OSS and Tito's Partisans in Wartime 

Yugoslavia (Stanford. CA: Stanford University Press, 1995); Dan C. Pinck, Journey to Peking: A Secret 

Agent in Wartime China (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2003); Charles Fenn, At the Dragon's 

Gate: With the OSS in the Far East (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2004); Richard W. Cutler, 

Counterspy: Memoirs of a Counterintelligence Office in World War II and the Cold War (Washington, 

D.C.: Brassey's, 2004); Erasmus H. Kloman, Assignment Algiers: With the OSS in the Mediterranean 

Theater (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2005). 

14 Peter Grosse, Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994); John W. 

Brunner, OSS Weapons, 2nd ed. (Williamstown, N.J.: Phillips Publications, 2005); Elizabeth P. McIntosh, 

Sisterhood of Spies: The Women of the OSS (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1998); Robin Winks, 

Cloak and Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939-1961 (New York: William Morrow, 1987); Barry M. 

Katz, Foreign Intelligence: Research and Analysis in the Office of Strategic Services, 1940-1945 (New 

York: St. Martin's, 1999); Maochun Yu, OSS in China: Prelude to the Cold War (New Haven, Conn.: Yale 

University Press, 1996); Christof Mauch, The Shadow War against Hitler: The Covert Operations of 

America's Wartime Secret Intelligence Service (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003); Will Irwin, 

The Jedburghs: The Secret History of the Allied Special Forces, France 1944 (New York: Public 

Affairs/Perseus, 2005). For general overall accounts of the OSS in World War II, R. Harris Smith, OSS: 

the Secret History of America's First Central Intelligence Agency (Berkeley: University of California Press, 

1972) and the meticulously researched, Thomas F. Troy, Donovan and the CIA: A History of the 

Establishment of the Central Intelligence Agency (Frederick, Md.: University Publications of America, 

1981) are still the most detailed scholarly studies. But the most readable popular treatment of the OSS (at 

least in the European and Mediterranean Theaters) at the present writing is Patrick K. O'Donnell, 

Operatives, Spies, and Saboteurs: The Unknown Men and Women of World War II's OSS (New York: Free 

Press/ Simon & Schuster, 2004). 

15 “OSS: 60th Anniversary Issue,” Studies in Intelligence: Journal of the American Intelligence 

Professional (June 2002): 1-196, published by the CIA’s Center for the Study of Intelligence; CIA 

Museum, Langley, Va.; U. S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) Award to Caesar J. Civitella, 

OSS Italian Operational Group, May 19, 2008, USSOCOM HQ, MacDill AFB, Tampa, Florida. The 

USSOCOM also adopted the OSS emblem, the spear point as its own emblem (www.ussocom.mil). 

16 The sole study available is a history of the OSS's Schools and Training Branch (S&T) prepared by that

branch itself in August 1945, probably by Major Keith P. Miller. Nearly forty years later the typescript was 

declassified under the Freedom of Information Act and published as William L. Cassidy, editor, History of 

the Schools and Training Branch of the OSS (San Francisco: Kingfisher Press, 1983). Although helpful as 

a guide, Cassidy's volume, based on a single source, is of limited value as a history of training in the Office 

of Strategic Services. 
6 Introduction 

Communications Branches but also including when relevant, the training of personnel of 

Secret Intelligence, Morale Operations, and the Maritime Unit. The geographical focus is 

on three of the main OSS training facilities, the ones located in two forested areas of the 

National Park Service. The three camps were OSS Training Areas A and C in what is 

today named Prince William Forest Park, some 15,000 forested acres on the watershed of 

the Quantico Creek in northern Virginia, and OSS Training Area B in Catoctin Mountain 

Park, some 5,800 acres of wooded mountain terrain in northern Maryland. These 

National Park Service areas were the sites of OSS training camps during most of World 

War II. 

In the following account of the OSS training in the two National Parks and 

subsequent service overseas, this historical study addresses a number of questions. Why 

did Donovan’s organization choose these parks as training sites? What were the OSS’s 

training aims and methods? Did they change over time? Who ran the camps, and who 

was trained there? What were typical experiences at the camps and in OSS overseas 

missions How effective was the training? What relationship did the National Park Service 

have with the OSS and the military during the war? How did military leasing and use 

affect the parks, their operation, and their relationship with their surrounding areas during 

and after the war? What roles and responsibilities did NPS’s park managers have at the 

two parks during the war, and how did they manage their relationship with the military? 

After the end of the war, how did the military and the National Park Service handle the 

return of the parks to civilian control and use? Finally, what has been the legacy of the 

wartime training in the parks—to the parks, to the National Park Service, to the veterans 

who trained there, to the OSS, and to the institutional heirs of Donovan’s organization, 

the CIA and the Special Forces? 

 The present study attempts to answer these and other questions as it addresses the 

significant roles that the National Park Service's Catoctin Mountain Park, Maryland, and 

Prince William Forest Park, Virginia, played in connection with the Office of Strategic 

Services during the Second World War.