Chapter 10 

 

Postwar Period: End of the OSS and Return to the Park Service 

OSS may have won its battles in the field, but it lost its final campaign—in 

Washington. It was better prepared to fight armed enemies overseas than bureaucratic 

enemies in the nation’s capital. The OSS was terminated within a month after the end of 

World War II. 

To a great extent, this was due to Donovan himself. Always the romantic 

adventurer, he spent much of his time away from Washington in the war zones. Unlike 

desk-bound, bureaucratic spymasters, Donovan, a World War I hero, enjoyed being on or 

near the front lines. His restless energy, dynamism, and personal attention inspired the 

men and women of the OSS. An inspiring and visionary leader, he conceived of 

America’s first centralized intelligence and special operations agency, forerunner of the 

Central Intelligence Agency and Army Special Forces. 

Yet, Donovan was inattentive as an administrator and uncompromising as a 

bureaucrat.1

 Fascinated with strategic visions and actual field operations, he was bored by 

organizational detail. He personally disdained office work and left the daily running of 

his agency to others, as he had done at his law firm. Consequently, the administration of 

his rapidly burgeoning, worldwide organization was often chaotic. Because the OSS 

recruited imaginative, free-wheeling, assertive individuals, the organization was probably 

inherently difficult to manage, but Donovan’s absences and inattention made it more so. 

While that management style contributed to individual and local initiative, it also left the 

organization vulnerable to its critics. Indeed, significant discontent existed even within 

the top echelon of the OSS itself.2 

One of Donovan’s dictums was that because he was dealing with a new form of 

warfare, he would rather see OSS people think imaginatively and fail than be constrained 

to narrow, traditional, routine responses out of fear of failure. “I’d rather have a young 

lieutenant with guts enough to disobey an order than a colonel too regimented to think 

 

1

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

D.C.: Central Intelligence Agency, 2002), 42; Anthony Cave Brown, The Last Hero: Wild Bill Donovan

(New York: Times Books, 1982), 508-515; R. Harris Smith, OSS: The Secret History of America’s First 

Central Intelligence Agency (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 5; Corey Ford, Donovan of 

OSS (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), 239. 

2

 Edwin J. Putzell, deputy and subsequent successor to Otto C. Doering, Jr., executive officer of the OSS, 

recalled an office rebellion by a group of four or five of the OSS’s top administrators who sent a bluntly 

worded memo to Donovan in early 1944 “suggesting that he was a poor administrator and that the agency 

needed better top leadership in its day-to-day operation” and calling for major reorganization. Donovan felt 

betrayed and rejected their proposal. Edwin Putzell, interviewed by Tim Naftali, 11 April 1997, pp. 2, 15, 

OSS Oral History Transcripts, CIA Records (RG 263), Box 3, National Archives II, College Park, Md. 
478 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 

and act for himself,” Donovan often said.3 But while this endeared him to many OSSers 

and produced results, it also produced some mistakes, which helped to make the 

organization vulnerable to its enemies in Washington. And Donovan certainly had his 

enemies in the nation’s capital. In the ongoing bureaucratic turf battles, the OSS 

threatened a number of powerful old line, congressionally mandated agencies, including 

the War and Navy Departments, the State Department, and the Federal Bureau of 

Investigation. In contrast, the OSS was a temporary, wartime agency, created under the 

President’s executive authority as commander-in-chief. Its main assets, the support of 

President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the unrestricted funds he unilaterally authorized, 

were a distinct advantage to the new and temporary agency and a stimulant to the 

jealousy and opposition of its powerful competitors. 

Battle in Washington over the OSS 

Donovan believed the OSS would serve as a model for a permanent central 

intelligence agency in the postwar period. But his organization, composed primarily of 

wartime civilian volunteers rather than professional soldiers or spies, lost the immediate 

battle for permanence in the bureaucratic arena in Washington, which in the immediate 

aftermath of the war saw little need for such a permanent, centralized clandestine agency 

as the OSS. The predominant mood in America was for demobilization and the 

enjoyment of peace. Donovan had made too many enemies and in the end proved 

incapable of achieving his goal of maintaining the OSS as a permanent central 

intelligence agency with himself as its head. 

By the fall of 1944, it was evident that the Allies would be victorious and the war 

was reaching its final phases. The White House’s Bureau of the Budget began making 

plans for liquidation of the temporary wartime agencies and for reduction of the federal 

government to peacetime conditions. The Army and Navy began serious planning for the 

postwar missions, size and structure, including military intelligence. The State 

Department sought responsibility for foreign political and diplomatic intelligence, and the 

FBI claimed authority in the area of domestic intelligence and counterintelligence 

operations. In such a contentious climate, Donovan made a major bid for a permanent 

central intelligence agency.4

 

3

 William J. Donovan quoted in Robert Alcorn, No Banners, No Bands (New York: Donald McKay, 1965), 

182; Tom Moon, This Grim and Savage Game: OSS and the Beginning of U.S. Covert Operations in World 

War II (New York: Da Capo press, 2000), 249. 

4

 On Donovan’s 18 November 1944 plan for a permanent central intelligence agency, see Richard Dunlop, 

Donovan: America’s Master Spy (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1982), 458-459; Smith, OSS: The Secret 

History, 363, both of whom claim Roosevelt had requested it. But the much more detailed account in 

Thomas F. Troy, Donovan and the CIA: A History of the Establishment of the Central Intelligence Agency

(Frederick, Md.: University Publications of America, 1981), 218-222, indicates that the impetus came from 

Donovan rather than the President. Donovan’s first recorded statement of his goal of a permanent OSS is in 

a question and answer period following a talk to an audience of Army officers in Washington in May 1943; 

he later put such a recommendation in a memorandum to General Eisenhower on 17 September 1943. 
 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 479

“When our enemies are defeated,” Donovan wrote to President Roosevelt on 18 

November 1944, “the demand will be equally pressing for information that will aid us in 

solving the problems of peace.”5

 Fissures were already emerging in the wartime alliance 

of the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union, and Donovan was beginning to 

envision intelligence networks to deal with the rivalries and differing power relationships 

and goals of the former Allies in the postwar world. Donovan’s proposal was for a 

“Central Intelligence Service.” While departmental intelligence bureaus would continue 

to collect and analyze the tactical intelligence directly related to the duties of their 

agencies, the new organization would focus on strategic intelligence, coordinating, 

collecting, and producing intelligence and reporting directly to the President. It would 

provide the Chief Executive with the foreign intelligence necessary to plan and execute 

national policy and strategy. From the beginning, Donovan believed not only that the new 

agency should produce intelligence from various means, including espionage, 

counterespionage, and the kind of investigations conducted by the OSS’s highly 

successful Research and Analysis Branch, but that it should, like the Special Operations 

and Morale Operations branches, have the authority to conduct “subversive operations 

abroad” and perform “such other functions and duties reliant to intelligence” as the 

President might direct.6

 

This new, permanent, and independent Central Intelligence Service would have its 

own budget and authority for “procurement, training, and supervision of its intelligence 

personnel.” In the OSS, Donovan noted, there existed personnel already trained and 

experienced in the missions of the new organization. Warning that these assets should not 

be lost, Donovan suggested that the President not wait for the end of the war to establish 

the new agency. “There are common sense reasons,” he wrote to Roosevelt in November 

1944, “why you may desire to lay the keel of the ship at once.”7 

The fight against the launching of a new central intelligence service began 

immediately. When Roosevelt circulated Donovan’s proposal to established government 

agencies with intelligence functions, they sought to block it through memos, lobbying 

and delay, but some went further and started a smear campaign in the press. On the 

morning of 9 February 1945, Donovan opened the front door of his Georgetown home, 

picked up the morning newspapers and was appalled to read the front-page headline on 

the Washington Times-Herald: “Donovan Proposes Super-spy System for Postwar New 

Deal: Would Take over FBI, Secret Service, ONI and G-2 to Watch Home, Abroad.” 

Washington correspondent Walter Trohan’s story ran on the front page of this and other 

newspapers of the isolationist, anti-Roosevelt, McCormick-Patterson chain, including the 

 

5

 William J. Donovan, Memorandum for the President, 18 November 1944, and draft Executive Order for 

“Substantive Authority Necessary in Establishment of a Central Intelligence Service,” Donovan Papers, 

“OSS Reports to the White House, Nov.-Dec. 1944,” reprinted as Appendix M in Troy, Donovan and the 

CIA, 445-47. 

6

 Ibid., plus Troy, Donovan and the CIA, 231-34. The only restrictions Donovan put on his proposed 

intelligence organization were that it would be prohibited from any police or law enforcement functions at 

home or abroad and that in wartime, the agency and its members would be coordinated or controlled by 

Joint Chiefs of Staff or by the military Theater Commander where they operated. 

7

 William J. Donovan, Memorandum for the President, 18 November 1944, Donovan Papers, “OSS Reports 

to the White House, Nov.-Dec. 1944,” reprinted as Appendix M in Troy, Donovan and the CIA, 445-47. 
480 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 

Chicago Tribune, and New York Daily News. Announcing that the President was 

considering a plan from Donovan for a central intelligence service, the newspaper 

account then launched into a sensationalist diatribe against the OSS, Donovan, and his 

proposal. Trohan inaccurately claimed that the proposed agency would “supersede all 

existing Federal police and intelligence units” and he predicted that it would create “an 

all-powerful intelligence service to spy on the postwar world and to pry into the lives of 

citizens at home.” Likening the proposed agency to the Nazis’ dreaded secret police, 

Trohan warned that it could become an “American Gestapo.”8

Donovan’s plan for a postwar, worldwide intelligence service received balanced 

coverage from much of the press and even favorable editorial comment from 

internationalist newspapers such as the Washington Post, New York Herald-Tribune, and 

New York Times.

9

 But the Trohan story and its accusations caused a sensation and, as 

intended by the FBI and military intelligence agencies that leaked it to the press, 

prevented any chance of the President immediately supporting Donovan’s proposal.10

 

Roosevelt had made no promises to Donovan about a postwar agency. He had 

accepted the need, at least in wartime, for effective and centralized intelligence, although 

he had limited some of Donovan’s wartime proposals in response to appeals from 

competing agencies. In regard to Donovan’s proposal for a permanent OSS type 

organization, the President was willing in November 1944 to circulate the idea, but he 

certainly kept his options open. On 5 April 1945, two months after the furor caused by 

the original Trohan article, Roosevelt resumed consideration of the issue of postwar 

intelligence. Just before leaving for a vacation at Warm Springs, Georgia, the tired and 

ailing President asked Donovan to assemble the heads of the ten dozen federal units 

concerned with foreign intelligence and internal security to “contribute their suggestions 

to the proposed centralized intelligence service....so that a consensus of opinion can be 

secured.”11 Roosevelt’s managerial style was to solicit various opinions, even allowing 

 

8

 Walter Trohan, “Donovan Proposes Super-spy System for Postwar New Deal: Would Take over FBI, 

Secret Service, ONI and G-2 to Watch Home, Abroad,” Washington Times-Herald, 9 February 1945, 1. 

9

 “Roosevelt Plans Post-War Global Secret Service; Donovan Maps New Agency to Keep U.S. Alert to 

Threat of a New War,” New York Herald-Tribune, 10 February 1945; see also New York Times, 12 

February 1945; Chicago Sun, 15 February 1945, and Washington Post, 16 February 1945, in Troy, 

Donovan and the CIA, 256-57. 

10 Donovan was furious with the leak and slanderous attack. The OSS traced the leak of one of the “secret” 

numbered copies of the memorandum to the Office of Naval Intelligence and the FBI. Troy, Donovan and 

the CIA, 258. OSS executive officer, Otto C. Doering, told Donovan that “J. Edgar Hoover had personally 

handed the memorandum to Trohan.” Dunlop, Donovan: America’s Master Spy, 464, who received the 

story from Doering himself. Dunlop added that other sources implicated Army G-2 in the leak. This was 

the traditional interpretation when CIA historian Thomas F. Troy originally completed his classified, 

manuscript history of Donovan, the OSS, and the origins of the CIA in 1975, but afterwards, when Troy 

finally was able to get in touch with Walter Trohan in the late 1970s, Trohan told me that the documents 

had been leaked to him by none other than Steve early, Roosevelt’s executive secretary, who told Trohan, 

that “FDR wanted the story out.” The truth of such an allegation and the purposes that Roosevelt would

have had if true remain matters of speculation. Troy, Donovan and the CIA, vi, 255-60. 

11 “F.D.R.” to Major General Donovan, Memorandum, 5 April 1945; Donovan immediately did so, see 

William J. Donovan to Secretary of War, et al., Memorandum, 6 April 1945, both in CIA Records (RG 

263), Thomas Troy Files, Box 6, Folder 46, National Archives II. 
 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 481

people with opposing views to think they had his support, all the while keeping his own 

counsel and deferring his own decision, and certainly not disclosing it, until he had to do 

so. Clearly he was listening to the other agencies as well as to Donovan on the subject. It 

is unclear what Roosevelt would have done about the proposal if he had lived. But while 

at Warm Springs, Roosevelt suddenly died from a cerebral hemorrhage on 12 April 1945. 

 

President Harry S Truman and the OSS 

With his death, Donovan and the OSS lost their most important patron. The new 

President, Harry S Truman,12 was no friend of Donovan or his organization. Indeed, 

Truman felt no obligation to sustain Donovan and the OSS beyond the end of the war. A 

pro-New Deal, but fiscally conservative Democrat from Missouri, Truman was 

suspicious of Donovan and his free-wheeling, expensive wartime agency from the 

beginning. That skepticism was reinforced by Bureau of the Budget Director Harold B. 

Smith, whom Truman considered an efficient and honest public servant opposed to 

empire building and increased government spending. In several meetings in late April 

1945, Smith cautioned Truman about taking hasty action approving any of the plans for a 

postwar intelligence system and suggested that the President allow the Budget Bureau to 

assess the situation and recommend a sound and well-organized strategic intelligence 

system. Truman agreed.13

 

The new President was thus already suspicious of Donovan when he first met the 

OSS director on 14 May 1945, and increasingly, he came to dislike him.14 In a brief entry 

in his appointment book, Truman noted snidely that Donovan had come in to “tell how 

important the Secret Service [sic] is and how much he would do to run the government on 

an even basis.”15 Donovan’s own recollection of that meeting was that Truman told him 

that “the OSS has been a credit to America. You and all your men are to be congratulated 

on doing a remarkable job for our country, but the OSS belongs to a nation at war. It can 

have no place in an America at peace.” When Donovan argued that the OSS would be 

even more important in the troubled peace, Truman declared, in words similar to the 

Walter Trohan newspaper story, “I am completely opposed to international spying on the 

part of the United States. It is un-American. I cannot be certain in my mind that a 

formidable and clandestine organization such as the OSS designed to spy abroad will not 

 

12 Harry S Truman had no middle name. His parents simply gave him a middle initial; thus there is no 

period after it. 

13 Harry S Truman, Memoirs, 2 vols. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1955 ), 1:58; see also Troy, Donovan 

and the CIA, 266-267. 

14 Ibid., 270-271. 

15 Margaret Truman, Harry S. Truman (New York; William Morrow, 1973), 250, quoting from her father’s 

appointment book. 
482 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 

in time spy upon the American people themselves. The OSS represents a threat to the 

liberties of the American people.”16

Truman’s hostility toward Donovan and his organization may have come from a 

variety of sources. Some of them may have been matters of policy, such as the concerns 

of Truman and Smith about the costs and dangers of a permanent central intelligence 

agency. Donovan later blamed Truman and the Army and Navy for blocking his plan.17

Other reasons for the new President’s hostility may have been more personal, including 

Truman’s attitudes toward Donovan himself.18 From Truman’s alleged remarks to 

Donovan at their first meeting in May 1945, it appears that he may also have been 

influenced by the articles in the McCormick-Patterson newspaper chain and a key, antiOSS source Trohan had used. Shortly after taking office, President Truman had been 

informed of a secret, scathing internal report on the OSS authored by Colonel Richard 

Park, Jr. of Army Intelligence (G-2). Park, who had served briefly as a military aide to 

President Roosevelt, may have mentioned his report when he met with Truman on 13 

April 1945, the day after Roosevelt’s death. Certainly, he soon sent the new President a 

copy of his hostile report.19

Classified ‘Top Secret,” the Park Report on the OSS ran 56 doubled-spaced 

pages.20 According to Park, President Roosevelt had asked him to make an informal 

 

16 Dunlop, Donovan, 468. 

17 Edwin J. Putzell, executive officer of the OSS, interviewed by Tim Naftali, 11 April 1997, p. 74, 76; OSS 

Oral History Transcripts, CIA Records (RG 263), Box 3, National Archives II. 

18 Richard Dunlop, a former OSS officer selected and aided by Donovan in writing the general’s biography, 

contended, in what may have been Donovan’s own view, that “as for Truman, it was not at all definite that 

he wanted a central intelligence agency, and certainly not one with Bill Donovan as director. Donovan was 

among other things a Republican, and a dangerous one at that, who might still become a candidate for the 

presidency.” Dunlop, Donovan, 467. Anthony Cave Brown, The Last Hero, 790-92, cited another possible 

personal reason for Truman’s antipathy toward Donovan, claiming that in World War I, Lt. Col. Donovan 

complained about Capt. Harry S Truman’s Missouri National Guard artillery battery for alleged inadequate 

support of the attack by Donovan’s unit. A similar story circulated within the OSS. Rafael Hirtz, OSS SO 

officer in France and China, interview posted 12 February 2004, on the website of the Library of Congress, 

Veterans History Project, accessed 10 January 2007.

19 On the Park report, see Troy, Donovan and the CIA, 282; Christopher Andrew, For the President’s Eyes 

Only: Secret Intelligence and the American Presidency from Washington to Bush (New York: 

Harper/Collins, 1995), 156; and Michael Warner, “The Creation of the Central Intelligence Group,” Studies 

in Intelligence: Journal of the American Intelligence Professional, 39/5 (Fall 1995), unclassified and 

published in expanded form in1996, and reprinted in Studies in Intelligence, Office of Strategic Services, 

60th Anniversary, Special Edition (Spring 2002): 170-71. 

20 Col. Richard Park, Jr., GSC, Memorandum for the President, n.d., “Top Secret,” in the files of President 

Harry S. Truman’s secretary, Rose A. Conway, Box 15, “OSS/Donovan” folder, Harry S. Truman Papers, 

Truman Library, Independence, Mo. There is a copy of the Park Report in CIA Records (RG 263), Thomas 

Troy Files, Box 6, Folder 44, National Archives II. The present author consulted the copy in the National 

Archives II. Although the report is undated, Park apparently completed it in mid-March 1945, before 

Roosevelt’s death, because he showed it to Maj. Gen. Clayton Bissell, GSC, Acting Chief of Staff of Army 

G-2, on 12 March 1945. Maj. Gen. Clayton Bissell, Memorandum for the Record, 12 March 1945, subject: 

Colonel Park’s Comments on OSS, Military Intelligence Division Records (RG 165), WFRC, Folder 334, 

Officer of Strategic Services, copy attached to the Park Report in the Thomas Troy Files, cited above.
 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 483

investigation of the OSS and report on his findings and conclusions. His report, Park said, 

was gathered “in an informal manner and from personal impressions gained on a tour of 

the Italian and Western Fronts.” It was almost entirely a compilation of denunciations of 

the OSS, most of the accusations being based on second-hand information, suspicions or 

rumors, and most were from unnamed sources. The report’s overriding theme was that 

the OSS was a body of amateurs in contrast to established intelligence professionals and 

consequently had made major mistakes in recruitment, training, and security procedures 

as well as in the handling of its funds. All of these alleged errors, Park concluded, had 

embarrassed the United States, especially its professional agencies, wasted enormous 

sums of money, and resulted in “badly conceived, overlapping, and unauthorized 

activities,” including the capture and execution of its agents. Park cited accusations from 

unnamed sources in Army and Navy Intelligence, the State Department, and the FBI, and 

he declared as further evidence of OSS’s unworthiness that General Douglas MacArthur 

and Admiral Chester Nimitz had banned it from their theaters. Finally, Park concluded, 

drawing on accusations from a number of unnamed critics that “many improper persons 

have penetrated into the O.S.S” As he put it, “the Communist element in the O.S.S. is 

believed to be of dangerously large proportions,” and at the same time, “the O.S.S. is 

hopelessly compromised to foreign governments, particularly the British, rendering it 

useless as a prospective independent, postwar espionage agency.”21 

Park’s accusations obviously reflected the views of OSS’s critics, particularly its 

rivals in the old line intelligence services. Donovan apparently never saw Park’s report, 

although he knew many of its assertions through the Trohan article, which had drawn 

upon it. While the OSS certainly did make mistakes, Park’s “report” was hardly an 

independent assessment; instead, it was filled with rumor, half-truths, innuendo, and 

other distortions. For example, Donovan had recruited a few communists or communist 

sympathizers because they had been in particular regions, such as Spain, or because they 

could organize and work with anti-Nazi communist partisans in occupied countries, but 

they were never more than a handful. Duncan Lee, a Yale graduate, formerly of 

Donovan’s law firm who was Donovan’s executive assistant at OSS and later head of the 

China section of SI, was the only communist in or near the leadership. Communists 

certainly were not in the organization in “dangerously large proportions” as Park put it, 

and congressional hearings following the Trohan articles left the OSS relatively 

unblemished. But conservatives’ suspicions remained.

22 In fact, the OSS leadership was 

in fact dominated by business-oriented lawyers and businessmen. As for the British 

influence, while it had been substantial in the founding and initial development of 

Donovan’s organization, the OSS and British SOE and SIS soon became rivals, diverging 

 

21 Col. Richard Park, Jr., GSC, Memorandum for the President, n.d., “Top Secret,” Part II, p. 1, CIA 

Records (RG 263), Thomas Troy Files, Box 6, Folder 44, National Archives II. 

22 On the communists and OSS issue, see, for example, Patrick K. O’Donnell, Operatives, Spies, and 

Saboteurs: The Unknown Story of the Men and Women of World War II’s OSS (New York: Free Press, 

2004), 310-11; Robin W. Winks, Cloak & Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939-1961, 2nd ed. (New 

Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987), 356-59; Charles T. Pinck, President, OSS Society, 

“Communists at the OSS,” letter to the editor, Washington Post, 8 January 2008, rejoinder to column by 

Robert D. Novak, Subverting Bush at Langley,” in ibid., 24 December 2007, and dismissing Novak’s 

assertion that the OSS was “infiltrated by communists.” 
484 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 

in many of their goals and methods. B the winter of 1944-1945, OSS had clearly 

established an aggressive independence along with a skeptical attitude and sometimes 

hostile relationship toward the British Ally and its postwar goals.23

 

One example of Park’s use of innuendo is his suggestion of massive waste by the 

OSS. As he put it, “If the O.S.S. is investigated after the war it may easily prove to have 

been relatively the most expensive and wasteful agency of the government. With a 

$57,000,000 budget, $37,000,000 of which may be expended without provision of law 

governing use of public funds for material and personnel, the possibilities of waste are 

apparent. There are indications that some official investigation of O.S.S. may be forced 

after the war. It is believed the organization would have a difficult time justifying the 

expenditure of extremely large sums of money by results accomplished.”24 In fact, no 

such massive irregularities were ever discovered by the media or the government. 

Although OSS, like other wartime agencies, surely had made errors and wasted funds, 

most of Park’s indictment of overall incompetence, mismanagement, and waste, is simply 

incorrect.25

 

23 Bickham Sweet-Escott, Baker Street Irregular [SOE headquarters in London was on Baker Street] 

(London: Methuen, 1965), 155. 

24 Col. Richard Park, Jr., GSC, Memorandum for the President, n.d., “Top Secret,” Part II, p. 2, CIA 

Records (RG 263), Thomas Troy Files, Box 6, Folder 44, National Archives II. Park, of course, was 

working fast and loose with figures as well as innuendos. OSS records show that regular funds were closely 

monitored, but the unvouchered funds posed a more difficult problem, particularly as they were distributed 

to gain information and cooperation from anonymous indigenous informants and guerrillas. Edwin J. 

Putzell, executive officer of the OSS, recalled in speaking of W. Lane Rehm, former financier and OSS 

chief financial officer, “Well, you know, the use of money and gold was one of the big problems, always, 

when you are in this kind of operation. Rehm, being a conservative type and fiscally oriented and here we 

were using funds for which we didn’t have to make an accounting bothered him a good bit. So there was 

pulling and hauling as to how much and whether to do it.” Putzell interviewed by Tim Naftali, 11 April

1997, p. 74, 76; OSS Oral History Transcripts, CIA Records (RG 263), Box 3, National Archives II. 

25 To identify just a few of the inaccuracies in the Park Report: Park reported (Appendix I, p. 15) that in 

China “it is generally known that a tie-up has been made by the O.S.S. with Chiang Kai-shek’s own 

intelligence and are integrated with them as they are with the British.” In fact, OSS and Chiang’s 

intelligence service under Dai-Li were rivals and highly suspicious of each other, and their cooperative 

arrangement, forced upon them by the U.S. Navy mission in China, was evaded by each. Park asserted that 

“Donovan tries to control completely every activity” (ibid., p. 20). In fact, Donovan was anything but a 

micromanager. Park sought to discredit Donovan and the OSS by indicating that many appointments came 

from the Social Register. “The social director of the St. Regis Hotel, where General Donovan resides when 

in New York, attained the rank of Lt. Colonel in the O.S.S.” (ibid., p. 31). This half-truth avoids 

mentioning that Serge Obolensky had been an officer in the Czarist Army and fought guerrilla war against 

the Red Army, had training at a British commando school, was an officer in the New York National Guard, 

attended OSS training camps, helped write the OSS manual for Operational Groups, and conducted daring 

and successful OSS missions into Sardinia and France. Park contended (ibid., p. 39), that “A completely 

reliable source stated that O.S.S. intends to represent to the American public that it sends its own members 

across the lines into European enemy territory although this is not actually the case since, due to many 

blunders committed by that service, SHAEF, about May 1944, instructed the O.S.S. Espionage Section to 

refrain from dispatching any more agents into enemy territory. The exclusive right to dispatch such agents 

was given to the British.” Virtually nothing in that assertion was true. OSS had been praised by General 

Eisenhower, the head of SHAEF, and it continued to send espionage agents behind enemy lines in Western

Europe and in Germany itself until the spring of 1945. 
 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 485

 Within the 56-page diatribe against Donovan’s organization, Park devoted three 

pages to kind words about two OSS branches. Special Operations, he said, had 

“performed some excellent sabotage and rescue work.” Research and Analysis Branch 

“has done an outstanding job.” Both had been “the subject of commendatory letters from 

theater commanders and others.”26 SO and R&A, Park said, had elements and personnel 

that “can and should be salvaged” by the War Department and the Department of State. 

This brief exception did little to offset the overall thrust of Park’s harangue, which also 

included the danger of a “new secret, world-wide intelligence agency which would 

control all other U.S. intelligence agencies.” Park said Donovan’s proposal had “all the 

earmarks of a Gestapo system.” Indeed, he warned that both Congress and the press 

“may be interested in exposing what many claim to be an American Gestapo.”27 

The “Gestapo” quote and other hostile sections of Park’s report had been lifted 

almost verbatim by Walter Trohan in his denunciatory newspaper article in the 

McCormick-Patterson press.28 Not surprisingly, Park’s recommendations matched those 

of the traditional intelligence agencies. The OSS should be terminated, Donovan 

replaced, and those components and personnel determined to be worthy should be 

transferred to appropriate agencies such as the War Department and State Department. 

The postwar intelligence/ counter-intelligence operation should be a cooperative 

arrangement modeled on the collaborative structure established by the Army G-2, ONI, 

the State Department, and the FBI for use in the Western Hemisphere during the war.29

Donovan’s Dilemmas 

As Donovan recognized, the long-term future of OSS was in jeopardy by the 

summer of 1945 even as the role of the OSS expanded dramatically in China. Informed 

by the military chiefs, Truman now knew that the primary intelligence successes of the 

war had been through cryptology –the deciphering of enemy codes through MAGIC and 

ULTRA. This had been the result of signals intelligence breakthroughs achieved by the 

intelligence sections of the U.S. Army and Navy in the case of MAGIC, the reading of 

the Japanese codes, and the Poles and the British in the case of the German codes.30 It 

 

26 Col. Richard Park, Jr., GSC, Memorandum for the President, n.d., “Top Secret,” Part II, p. 2; Appendix I, 

pp. 36-38, CIA Records (RG 263), Thomas Troy Files, Box 6, Folder 44, National Archives II. 

27 Ibid., Part II, p. 2; Appendix I, pp. 27-28. Park also made the extraordinary claim that an unnamed 

businessman said he was told by a member of the OSS at a dinner party in June 1943, “that the O.S.S. 

planned to enter the field of domestic investigation and would be sort of a U.S. Gestapo with power to

penetrate every government agency, trade union, large corporation, etc.” Again, untrue. 

28 Troy Donovan and the CIA, 282 lines up similar sections of the Trohan and Park accounts side by side to 

confirm their virtually identical nature. 

29 Col. Richard Park, Jr., GSC, Memorandum for the President, n.d., “Top Secret,” Part III, p. 1; Appendix 

III, pp. 1-2; CIA Records (RG 263), Thomas Troy Files, Box 6, Folder 44, National Archives II. 

30 See, for example, Bradley F. Smith, The Ultra-Magic Deals and the Most Secret Special Relationship

[between the United States and Great Britain] (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1993). 
486 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 

had not been due to espionage or research and analysis which were the focus of OSS’s 

secret intelligence efforts. Furthermore, unlike its rivals, the OSS was, after all, a 

temporary war agency created by executive order with no underlying foundation in 

congressional statute. Unlike the departments and bureaus that opposed it, OSS had no 

long traditions, no influential alumni, no established personal and economic connections 

with Congress. Because it had been a secret organization, the American public knew little 

about it. The first burst of publicity, the Trohan series about the threats to Americans 

posed by Donovan’s plan for a postwar super-spy agency, had cast it in a bad light at a 

time when the emphasis was on forthcoming demobilization and the reduction of the 

expanded and costly wartime governmental bureaucracy. 

Economizers in government led by Senator Harry Byrd, a powerful Virginia 

Democrat, pressed for reduction of agencies and personnel and cut backs in expenditures 

and taxes. The OSS’s rivals and the McCormick-Patterson press resumed their attacks on 

Donovan’s organization. Its proposed budget for the next fiscal year was cut almost in 

half.31 OSS was in an extremely precarious position. As Thomas Troy, a CIA historian, 

has written, in mid-1945, Donovan “had been stymied by the big four [State, War, Navy 

and the FBI], ignored by the President, and was unsupported in the Congress. He had 

been smeared by the press—he [allegedly] harbored Communists, was controlled by the 

British, was rebuffed by heroes MacArthur and Nimitz, traveled with self-seeking 

bankers, financiers, industrialists and socialites, had squandered money, and was marked 

for sensational exposé.”32

Once again Donovan hurt his own cause by refusing to accept a compromise. 

Given the formidable opposition, his deputy, Brigadier General John Magruder, had 

advised Donovan in May to concede temporarily on both the independence of the director 

and the timing of the creation of a peacetime central intelligence agency. But Donovan 

refused.33 He took a hard line. In a letter several months later to Samuel Rosenman, one 

of Truman’s key advisers on postwar reorganization, Donovan declared bluntly: “I 

understand that there has been talk of attempting to allocate different segments of the 

[OSS] organization to different departments. This would be an absurd and unsatisfactory 

thing to do. The organization was set up as an entity, every function supporting and 

supplementing the other. It’s time for us to grow up, Sam, and realize that the new 

responsibilities we have assumed require an adequate intelligence system.”34

Instead of negotiating within the bureaucracy, Donovan launched a publicity 

campaign to build political support by informing the public of the OSS’s contributions to 

winning the war. This presented somewhat of a paradox: publicity for a super secret 

 

31 Troy, Donovan and the CIA, 283-284. The OSS request for FY 1946 for $45 million was cut to $24 

million; in contrast the FBI request for $49 million was only slightly reduced to $43 million. 

32 Troy, Donovan and the CIA, 284. 

33 Brig. Gen. John Magruder to William J. Donovan, memorandum, 2 May 1945, and Donovan to Secretary 

of War Henry L. Stimson, 16 May 1945, both cited in Troy, Donovan and the CIA, 270-71. 

34 William J. Donovan to Samuel I. Rosenman, accompanying a copy of Donovan to Budget Director 

Harold Smith, 25 August 1945, quoted in OSS, War Report of the OSS, 119. This impolitic letter seems to 

have been ignored by Donovan’s sympathetic biographers. 
 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 487

organization. When recruited, OSS personnel had been sworn to secrecy, taking an oath 

sometimes reinforced by threats of imprisonment for violation on the grounds of national 

security. They could not even tell their families what they had done during the war. Most 

of the former OSS men and women maintained that secrecy for decades—until the 

declassification of the records of the OSS by the CIA beginning in the 1980s. Some 

remain unwilling to talk fully about their wartime secret service even to the present day. 

But beginning in August 1945, Donovan and a group of writers and publicity persons on 

his staff began a media blitz, declassifying reports and providing interviews with OSS 

heroes to obtain credit and public recognition for the difficult and sometimes highly 

dangerous work of an organization about which the public knew virtually nothing.35 By 

early September, sympathetic magazines and newspapers, including the Washington Post, 

Chicago Daily News, New York Times, Life and the Saturday Evening Post, supported the 

OSS with news stories of its heroic exploits, including the recent rescues from Japanese 

prison camps of General Jonathan Wainwright, aviators from the Doolittle Raid, and 

thousands of other American POWs, and editorials supporting its “Daring Exploits” and 

what one of them called “Our Priceless Spy System.”36 

It was already too late. Initially, the Budget Bureau had assumed that the 

liquidation of OSS would take place over several months so that its most valuable assets 

could be saved and distributed to other agencies. Donovan too had assumed even in midAugust that OSS had at least several more months to continue achievements and 

publicize its part in the Allied victory. But in the third week of August 1945, the White 

House, having already ordered the immediate end of the Office of War Information 

(OWI), the government’s unpopular wartime propaganda agency, suddenly directed that 

OSS too be terminated as quickly as possible.37 Based on previous discussions, the 

Budget Bureau agreed that OSS’s Research and Analysis Branch would go to the State 

Department. The newly-imposed time constraint led the Bureau to recommend that the 

rest of the OSS be turned over to the War Department “for salvage and liquidation.” On 4 

September 1945, Budget Director Smith submitted a general intelligence reorganization 

plan to President Truman. Predictably, Donovan fumed when he heard about it, and he 

protested vigorously. But Truman ignored him, and on 13 September, the President 

 

35 Roger Hall, You’re Stepping on My Cloak and Dagger (New York: Norton, 1957), 216-217; Hall, who 

had been a Special Operations instructor at Areas F and B and later parachuted into France and Norway,

returned to the United States in summer 1945 and worked on this project under John M. (“Deadline 

Johnny”) Shaheen, a former publicity man from Chicago, who headed the new Reports Declassification 

Section. 

36 Troy, Donovan and the CIA, 284, 291-292. Although the OSS publicity office ceased to exist after 1945, 

some celebratory stories and films about the exploits of Donovan’s organization continued to appear for 

several years. With the active cooperation of former OSS personnel, Hollywood produced three major 

feature films involving the OSS between 1946 and 1947. Paramount’s 1946 thriller, O.S.S., starred Alan 

Ladd. Republic’s Cloak and Dagger, directed the same year by Fritz Lang, featured Gary Cooper. In 1947, 

James Cagney starred in 20th Century Fox’s 13 Rue Madeleine, a film about an OSS agent sacrificing his 

own life to avoid revealing the identities of other Allied agents or leaders of the French Resistance.

37 The key decision, apparently on 27 or 28 August 1945, was made by Truman or his main advisory 

committee on demobilization and reconversion, a committee composed of Budget Director Harold D. 

Smith, Special Counsel Samuel Rosenman, and Director of War Mobilization John W. Snyder. OSS 

learned about the decision on 29 August 1945. Warner, “Creation of the Central Intelligence Group,” 171. 
488 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 

authorized the Budget Bureau to draft an Executive Order terminating the OSS. 

According to Smith’s diary entry that day, “The President again commented that he has 

in mind a broad intelligence service attached to the President’s office. He stated that we 

would recommend the dissolution of Donovan’s outfit even if Donovan did not like it.”38

Although Truman may have been thinking of a broad agency attached to the Executive 

Office, the Bureau of the Budget and the old line departments were thinking of 

departmental units coordinated by an advisory group. There was deliberately no place for 

Donovan. Indeed, since some of the OSS assets would continue by being transferred to 

other agencies, and since Truman did want some kind of postwar strategic intelligence 

coordination in order, as he said many times, to prevent another Pearl Harbor surprise 

attack, the decision to dissolve the OSS may well have been based at least in part to force 

out Donovan. 

Sudden End of the OSS 

On 20 September 1945, Truman signed Executive Order 9621, dissolving the 

OSS effective 1 October 1945. The functions, properties and personnel of the Research 

and Analysis Branch and Presentation Branch were transferred to the State Department. 

All of the other functions and properties and most of the nearly ten thousand persons in 

the OSS were transferred to the War Department, which was interested mainly only in 

those with military experience in Secret Intelligence (SI) and Counter-Intelligence (X-2). 

Most of the OSS personnel would be discharged, including Donovan himself. The 

functions of the OSS Director were transferred to the Secretary of War, who “shall 

whenever he deems it compatible with the national interest, discontinue any [OSS] 

activity transferred by this paragraph and wind up all affairs relating thereto.” 39 

In a separate and rather chilly letter of appreciation to “My dear General 

Donovan,” written for the President by the Budget Bureau staff, Truman acknowledged 

Donovan’s “capable leadership” in “a vital wartime activity.” The letter assured Donovan 

that “the peacetime intelligence services of the Government are being erected on the 

foundation of the facilities and resources mobilized through the [Office of Strategic 

Services] during the war.” Rubbing salt in the wound, Truman’s letter stated that that 

transfer of the OSS Research and Analysis Branch to the State Department marked “the 

beginning of the development of a coordinated system of foreign intelligence within the 

permanent framework of the Government.”40 

 

38 Harold Smith, Diary entry, 13 September 1945, quoted in Troy, Donovan and the CIA, 296. 

39 Executive Order 9621, 20 September 1945, “Termination of the Office of Strategic Services and 

Disposition of Its Functions,” is reprinted in Troy, Donovan and the CIA, Appendix S, 461-62. 

40 Harry S. Truman to William J. Donovan, 20 September 1945, in U.S. President, Papers of the Presidents 

of the United States. Harry S. Truman. 1945 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1961), 330. 

Neither President Truman nor Budget Director Smith wanted to confront Donovan directly with the news 

that would be so disappointing to him. Truman told Smith to do it, but Smith sent his assistant, Donald 

Stone, to deliver the document to Donovan at OSS headquarters. Stone later reported that “when I delivered 

the document, Donovan took it with a kind of stoic grace. He knew it was coming, but he gave no outward 

indication of the personal hurt he felt by the manner in which he was informed.” Richard Dunlop, 

Donovan: America’s Master Spy (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1982), 473. 
 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 489

The historic episode that occurred in the Oval Office at 3 o’clock, 20 September 

1945, was recorded by Budget Director Harold Smith in his diary: “When I gave the 

President the Order on OSS for his signature, I told him that this was the best disposition 

we could make of the matter and that General Donovan . . . would not like it. I showed 

the President our communication with [Secretary of State] Byrnes and indicated that the 

State Department was willing to accept certain of the OSS functions while the rest would 

go to the War Department. The President glanced over the documents and signed the 

Order. He commented, as he has done before, that he has in mind a different kind of 

intelligence service from what this country has had in the past.”41

It was an abrupt end to the OSS. As a result of an oversight in the wording of the 

Executive Order, the agency had to be dismantled within only ten days.42 Donovan and 

his key assistants spent those few days microfilming the files of the director’s office from 

the previous four years in order to preserve that record.43 On 28 September 1945, 

Donovan bade farewell to the OSS staff in Washington. The sad ceremony was held in 

large building at the foot of the hill below the OSS buildings, in the Riverside Skating 

Rink on Rock Creek Drive. Closing out the wartime experience of America’s first 

national intelligence agency, the 62-year-old Donovan reassured the faithful crowd of 

about 2,000 men and women: 

We have come to the end of an unusual experiment. This experiment was 

to determine whether a group of Americans constituting a cross-section of racial 

[ethnic] origins, of abilities, temperaments and talents, could risk an encounter 

with the long-established and well-trained enemy organizations. 

How well that experiment has succeeded is measured by your 

accomplishments and by the recognition of your achievements. You should feel 

deeply gratified by President Truman’s expression of the purpose of basing a 

coordinated intelligence service upon the techniques and resources that you have 

initiated and developed. . . . . 

When I speak of your achievements, that does not mean we did not make 

mistakes. We were not afraid to make mistakes because we were not afraid to try 

things that had not been tried before. All of us would like to think that we could 

have done a better job; but all of you must know that, whatever the errors or 

failures, the job you did was honest and self-respecting.... 

Within a few days each one of us will be going to new tasks, whether in 

civilian life or in government service. You can go with the assurance that you 

 

41 Harold Smith, Diary Entry, 20 September 1945, Smith Papers, “Conferences with President Truman, 

1945,” in Troy, Donovan and the CIA, 302. 

42 In an apparent oversight, the original termination date of 1 October 1945, which had been inserted in a 

earlier draft of the Executive Order, was not altered when the final version of the Executive Order was 

prepared for the President’s signature. 

43 Donovan, his secretary, and a handful of people, with the help of Ray Kellogg from the Photographic 

Unit, microfilmed the records of the director’s office to preserve them. Edwin J. Putzell, deputy and 

subsequent successor to Otto C. Doering, Jr., executive officer of the OSS, interviewed by Tim Naftali, 11 

April 1997, pp. 72-73; OSS Oral History Transcripts, CIA Records (RG 263), Box 3, National Archives II. 
490 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 

have made a beginning in showing the people of America that only by decisions 

of national policy based upon accurate information can we have the chance of a 

peace that will endure.44

Two days later on October 1, 1945 the OSS ceased to exist. Some of the civilian 

staffers had already left and returned to their prewar occupations or taken new positions, 

but for most of the OSS personnel, the change had been so sudden and unexpected that 

the majority simply waited to see what would happen to them as the State and War 

Departments made the crucial decisions. Meanwhile, most of the OSS military personnel 

returning from overseas were put up temporarily in holding areas, primarily at Area F, 

but some also at Area C, until they could be mustered out or accepted new assignments in 

the military. 

OSS Veterans Return to the Training Camps from Overseas 

 Some of the OSS training camps had been used as holding areas for returnees 

from overseas since late1944 when significant numbers of OSS veterans came back from 

Western Europe and North Africa. Although some of the returnees were housed at Areas 

A and C in Prince William Forest Park (Area B at Catoctin Mountain Park was being 

relinquished by OSS at that time), the majority were sent to Area F at the former 

Congressional Country Club in Bethesda, Maryland, because of its hotel-like facilities 

and its closeness to Washington.45

Hundreds of OSS veterans flocked back from Europe in 1944-1945 and spent 

time at the holding area at Area F or overflow areas at A and C before being reassigned to 

the Far East, or mustered out at the end of the war. In December 1944, Donovan ordered 

that Areas F, A, and C, be made available for the relaxation and recreation of OSS 

personnel returning from overseas.46 While military training was provided at the camps 

for those being sent to the Far East, other returning veterans enjoyed a period of rest and 

relaxation, particularly in the second half of 1945. Dances and other forms of 

entertainment were held at all three areas. Returning from England to Area C in late 

1944, radioman Roger Belanger from Portland, Maine, found a much different 

atmosphere then when he had left. “They had a couple of dances in the mess hall,” he 

recalled. “WAVES from Arlington Farm—a Navy communications station, where they 

also handled secret work—[came over] in buses blacked out so they could not see where 

 

44 An abbreviated text of Donovan’s farewell speech of 28 September 1945 is reprinted in Ford, Donovan 

of OSS, 344, Appendix F. A fuller version is in Dunlop, Donovan, 473-474. 

45 “General Donovan Welcomes Holdees, Sends a Message,” Attention Please [Area F newspaper, 1944-

1945] 9 April 1945, 1; OSS Records (RG 226), Entry 85, Box 27, Folder 449, National Archives II. 

46 Donovan’s directive is cited in A. van Buren, Security Officer, to Deputy Director, Schools and Training 

Branch, 23 December 1944, subject: Security Policy at Area F [under the director’s new mission for Area 

F], OSS Records (RG 226), Entry 146, Box 223, Folder 3105, National Archives II. 
 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 491

they were going. A bus load of them came in late 1944, came in their uniforms. We had a 

band. I think they were musicians from the group....We also went to a place in Manassas, 

the Social Circle, a dance hall, and they served local beers. They took us down in a bus 

on Friday or Saturday night. We had a Class A pass and could leave the base anytime we 

were not on duty. They would also take us in a truck to Washington, D.C. and pick us up 

Sunday night in front of Union Station there. We had a good time.”47 By the beginning of 

summer 1945, however, OSS headquarters became concerned, and the Communications 

Branch was asked “to discontinue dances at Areas ‘A’ and ‘C’ because of the serious 

embarrassment which might arise if [there was] an official investigation of such 

recreation at ‘Secret’ areas.”48 However, dances, movies, lectures, and sightseeing trips 

continued on a regular basis at Area F, now the official center for OSS returnees from the 

combat zones.49

An OSS softball league was organized that included games between teams from 

various OSS branches or between training areas. On 27 June 1945, a hotly-contested 

match between the undefeated teams of Area F and Area C was played at Prince William 

Forest Park. Pitching for Area F was Captain Joseph Lazarsky, former instructor at Area 

B and now recently returned from combat duty with Detachment 101 in Burma. As the 

sports reporter for the Area F newspaper reported, “The lead exchanged hands every 

inning until the final, when ‘Captain Joe’ pitching his first game in three years and 

facing the heaviest hitter of Area ‘C’ proved himself a real ‘money’ player and put out 

the side in one, two, three order. Area F beat Area C, 14 to 12. A week later the 

“Holdees” at Area F won the league championship for the first half of the season. But 

two months later, as the second half of the league season drew to a close, Area F had 

plummeted. On 14 August 1945, the team was playing the Reproduction Branch softball 

team in Potomac Park in Washington, D.C., when in the sixth inning, the city learned of 

the Japanese decision to surrender and “pandemonium broke loose—whistles, shrieks, 

horns blowing, etc., heralding the end of the war.” As the Area F newspaper reported, 

“the boys [were] fearful the game would run into extra innings and postpone their taking 

part in the general revelry and victory celebration.” “Captain Joe” Lazarsky kept 

“pitching steady ball,” but Reproduction Branch scored two home runs in the seventh, 

one on an error, and won the game. Area F fell to fifth place, and it was Area C, from 

Prince William Forest Park, with the only undefeated 5-0 record that won the 

championship.50 With the sudden end of the war, all military training at OSS camps was 

 

47 Roger L. Belanger, letter to the author, 4 February 2005, and telephone interview with the author, 11 

April 2005. 

48 A. van Beuren, chief of security branch, to Charles S. Cheston, Assistant Director, 1 June 1945, subject: 

Area Recreation, OSS Records (RG 226), Entry 146, Box 223, Folder 3104, National Archives II. 

49 Staff Sergeant E.D., “Overseas Veterans Amazed at Transformation of Area F,” “Meet the Staff,” 

“Dance Tomorrow in Main Lounge,” Attention Please, 19 February 1944, 1, 4; OSS Records (RG 226), 

Entry 85, Box 27, Folder 449, National Archives II.

50 “Softball Season Starts; Area Team Sensational in League,” Attention Please, 31 May 1944; “Defeat 

Area `C’ 4-2,” Attention Please, 9 July 1945, 3; “Holdees Win Ball Game; Beat Sta. Complement; Area F 

Victor in League,” Attention Please, 19 July 1945, 1; “Area F Team Lags in OSS Softball League,” 

Attention Please, 31 August 1945, 1, 3; OSS Records (RG 226), Entry 85, Box 27, Folder 449, National 

Archives II. 
492 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 

terminated and all except Area F were closed. At the former Congressional County Club, 

the focus shifted to informational programs to help with the transition from service to 

civilian life—speakers were brought in to describe job and educational opportunities, the 

G.I. Bill, and wartime insurance and pensions—as more and more OSS veterans returned 

from overseas and were mustered out.51

 OSS tried to take care of its veterans returning from the war zones. Private First 

Class David A. Kenney, a radio base station operator who had trained at Area A and C 

and served in Europe and the Far East was in Chichiang, China, on15 August 1945, the 

day Tokyo announced it would surrender. He was sent with an OSS team to Nanchang to 

investigate reports of Japanese atrocities for war crimes trials. In the middle of the 

investigation, he was suddenly summoned to Shanghai, where the OSS commanding 

officer handed him a telegram and told him that his mother had died a few days earlier. 

“He made me a courier, and they let me fly back to the States by plane instead of by 

boat,” Kennedy recalled, noting that air travel was highly restricted. “OSS had respect 

and compassion for its people.” Kennedy was mustered out of the service two days 

before Christmas in 1945.52

 Navy Seaman First Class Spiro (“Gus”) Cappony, a radio operator who trained at 

Areas C and B with actor Sterling Hayden and then was sent on a bridge-blowing OSS 

mission to German-occupied Greece, returned to Washington, D.C. Cappony, who had 

been wounded, was the first member of the mission to return to the States, and he said 

that Secretary of State Cordell Hull immediately summoned him to his office and 

questioned the 20-year-old Greek American about the political situation between 

contending partisan groups in northern Greece. After the interview, Cappony went to 

Area F. “I had not been paid. I didn’t have any money,” Cappony recalled. “Captain John 

Hamilton [Sterling Hayden], he was my buddy. I met him in the Congressional Country 

Club. He says, ‘Hey, Gus, What are you doing here?’ I said, ‘I can’t get out of here. I 

don’t have any money.’ He said, ‘Go out and get drunk.’ I said, `I’d love to get drunk.’ 

He said, ‘Here’s twenty bucks.’” He subsequently got paid and was granted a 30-day 

leave.53 

 “Commo” Branch radio operator Arthur (“Art”) Reinhardt came back to the 

Unites States from China at the end of 1945 with two dozen other OSS veterans and more 

than a thousand GIs jammed aboard the troopship, Marine Angel. Crossing the Pacific, he 

slept on deck in an Abercrombie and Fitch sleeping bag supplied by the OSS. He never 

forgot the scene when the vessel arrived back in the United States on 16 December 1945. 

 “As we were coming into port, into Tacoma, a big USO [United Service 

Organization] boat comes up with all the [USO] girls and the flashing lights and flags and 

everything, and the loud speaker says: ‘There are twenty-four OSS members aboard ship, 

and they will disembark immediately! We are going to pull the launch alongside, and you 

will get off!’ So, that’s what happened. They said, ‘We have a train waiting for you.’ 

 

 

51 Pfc. Vernon Taylor, “New Program Set Up at Area; Tours and Postwar Info Stressed,” Attention Please,

31 August 1945, 1; OSS Records (RG 226), Entry 85, Box 27, Folder 449, National Archives II. 

52 David Kenney, telephone interview with the author, 11 April 2005. 

53 Spiro (“Gus”) Cappony, telephone interview with the author, 16 September 2006. 
 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 493

Some of the GIs [on deck] remarked, ‘Who are these bastards?’ And we casually climbed 

down onto this launch, or this fairly large boat, which took us in to Fort Lewis, I guess. 

We had a big steak dinner. We were taken out to the train. It turns out that twenty-four of 

us had two Pullman cars [deluxe railroad cars], which were attached to a troop train....By 

the time we arrived in Washington [D.C.], there was probably only six of us left, because 

the other guys would peel off along the way, saying, ‘Well, you know, I’m only 200 

miles from home.’ We were coming across the country, and we had the time of our life. I 

can remember in Billings, Montana, 10 degrees below Zero, and we were running down 

the street in our shirt sleeves to buy some milk. We were happy troopers to get back.” 

After spending a couple of days at Area F, Reinhardt was granted leave to go home to the 

family farm outside of Buffalo and was mustered out a month later in January 1946. The 

former farm boy turned communications specialist, who had spent more than fourteen 

months in war-torn China, much of it behind enemy lines, was only 20 years old.54 

In the wake of the Allied victory in Europe in May 1945, Donovan, in addition to 

heading the OSS and battling for a permanent central intelligence agency, served from 

June to November 1945 as Deputy U.S. Prosecutor for the International War Crimes 

Tribunal at Nuremberg. The Chief U.S. Prosecutor Robert H. Jackson, an Associate 

Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, asked him to serve because of all the work that the 

OSS Research and Analysis Branch was doing after the German surrender in gathering 

written and visual evidence to document the Nazi war crimes.55 In the pre-trial period, 

Donovan, who spoke German, personally questioned Hermann Göring, the secondhighest ranking Nazi. But during the summer, Donovan and Jackson became deadlocked 

over best method of prosecuting leading Nazis. Jackson decided to rely solely on 

contemporary documentary evidence, which provided overwhelmingly convincing proof 

of guilt. Taking a larger view, Donovan contended that basing the case only on written 

documents, while legally convincing, would not have the impact that seeing and listening 

to witnesses of the war crimes—perpetrators, observers, surviving victims—would have 

upon public opinion both in Germany and in the world. As Donovan explained, he 

“wanted to make it clear to the German people that the trials were not a retribution but 

were because of the Nazis’ unprecedented outrage against humanity.”56 Donovan would 

not change his position, so just before the trials began in November 1945, Jackson 

dismissed him from the prosecutorial team. The OSS had been terminated the previous 

month, but Donovan remained technically on active duty as a Major General until 

January 1946.57 After watching the trials begin in Nuremberg, Donovan returned to the 

United States, to his horse farm in Berryville, Virginia and his apartment at 2 Sutton 

Place in Manhattan, and resumed his law practice on Wall Street. 

 

54 Arthur (“Art”) Reinhardt, interview with the author following a tour arranged by the author of Prince

William Forest Park, Triangle, Va., 22 February 2007. 

55 Smith, OSS, 238-39. The prosecution team also included former OSS General Counsel James B. 

Donovan (no relation to “Wild Bill” Donovan); James Donovan, Challenges (New York: Atheneum, 1967). 

56 Dunlop, Donovan, 483. 

57 Telford Taylor, The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials: A Personal Memoir (New York: Knopf, 1992), 

148. 
494 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 

President Truman invited Donovan to the White House in January 1946, to 

receive an Oak Leaf Cluster to the Distinguished Service Medal, he had won in the First 

World War. The President credited the former OSS chief with great service in “secret 

intelligence, research and analysis, and the conduct of unorthodox methods of warfare in 

support of military operations.”58

Transitions 

With the termination of OSS in October 1945, the remains of Donovan’s former 

agency were divided organizationally between the War and State Departments. The 

minority, 1,362 of the OSS civilian men and women in the Research and Analysis and 

Presentation Branches, were transferred to the State Department in a new unit called the 

Interim Research and Intelligence Service. The rest—9,028 other OSS civilian and 

military personnel—were transferred to the War Department. There a reluctant Brigadier 

General John Magruder, a former OSS deputy director, was put in charge of a remnant 

entitled the Strategic Services Unit (SSU). With the support of Secretary of War Robert 

Patterson and Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy, who was a friend of 

Donovan’s and a firm believer in central intelligence, SSU had been created to keep the 

OSS personnel, records, budget, and assets separate from the Military Intelligence 

Division (G-2) of the U.S. Army.59 McCloy ordered Magruder to disband the 

paramilitary units, Special Operations, Operational Groups, Detachment 101, and the 

Jedburghs, as well as Morale Operations and the rest, but to preserve the OSS’s 

intelligence assets, including their field stations and foreign agent networks concerned 

with fascism and communism in Europe, the Middle East, and the Far East, over to 

SSU.60 In anticipation of escalating tensions with the Soviet Union, Donovan’s 

organization had during 1945 been identifying or planting networks of foreign agents in 

areas of Eastern Europe and China and Korea occupied by the Red Army as well as in 

countries around the globe deemed to be of strategic interest to the United States. 

Over the following months, the size of SSU would shrink rapidly, as thousands of 

former OSSers were let go from civilian service or discharged from the armed forces. 

Magruder’s deputy and successor, Colonel William W. (“Buffalo Bill”) Quinn, was a 

career soldier, but as head of G-2 for the Seventh Army in southern France he had come 

to appreciate the value of the OSS. Years later, recalling the immediate post-war period, 

he wrote that “My initial business was primarily liquidation. The main problem was the 

discharge of literally thousands of people. Consequently, the intelligence effort more or 

less came to a standstill.”61 Five out of every six OSS men and women left, and numbers 

 

58 Dunlop, Donovan, 484. 

59 Troy, Donovan and the CIA, 303. 

60 Kai Bird, The Chairman: John J. McCloy, the Making of the American Establishment (New York: Simon 

and Schuster, 1992), 129-30. 

61 William W. Quinn, Buffalo Bill Remembers: Truth and Courage (Fowlerville, Mich.: Wilderness 

Adventure Books, 1991), 240. 
 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 495

of Donovan’s old organization plummeted in three months from some 10,000 down to 

just under 2,000 by the end of 1945.62The Strategic Services Unit was reduced to perhaps 

one-twentieth of the dimensions of the OSS, and the sources of U.S. foreign intelligence 

contracted accordingly. 

It was that situation—the immobilization of the OSS assets, the threat that 

Congress would reduce the intelligence budget and that the Army might absorb the SSU 

into the G-2 bureaucracy, as well as disagreement between State, War, and Navy on one 

hand and the Bureau of the Budget and the FBI on the other—that led to a new 

coordinated if not yet centralized intelligence agency, the Central Intelligence Group 

(CIG).63 The Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) submitted a plan that would save SSU and its 

assets and its espionage and liaison with friendly foreign intelligence services by putting 

SSU under a proposed National Intelligence Authority, a collaborative body drawing 

upon the intelligence units in several governmental departments. In December 1945, 

Truman had chosen the JCS plan over State’s attempt to dominate national intelligence, 

and on 22 January 1946, the President created the Central Intelligence Group.64 Two days 

later, he appointed as the first Director of Central Intelligence, Rear Admiral Sidney 

Souers, a former Missouri businessman and a reservist serving as Assistant Chief of 

Naval Intelligence. Donovan publicly criticized it as lacking centralization, 

independence, and civilian control.65 In June 1946, with the appointment of Lieutenant 

General Hoyt S. Vandenberg, a career officer in the Army Air Forces, the small CIG, 

previously an empty shell, began to absorb the much larger SSU and its clandestine 

foreign intelligence activities. For more than a year, the Central Intelligence Group 

served, under several different directors, as a coordinating intelligence body, until the 

establishment in1947 of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).66

OSS’s Legacy and the Central Intelligence Agency 

The emergence of a “Cold War” between the United States and the Soviet Union 

and the reorganization of the U.S. military and national security establishment led 

through the National Security Act of 26 July1947 to the creation of the truly independent, 

centralized, and congressionally mandated Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The 

 

62 Richard Helms with William Hood, A Look Over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency

(New York: Random House, 2003), 72. 

63 Dunlop, Donovan, 485. 

64 Michael Warner, “The Creation of the Central Intelligence Group,” Studies in Intelligence: Journal of the 

American Intelligence Professional,, 39/5 (Fall 1995), unclassified and published in expanded form in1996, 

and reprinted in Studies in Intelligence, Office of Strategic Services, 60th Anniversary, Special Edition

(Spring 2002): 169-78. 

65 Dunlop, Donovan, 486. 

66 Warner, “The Creation of the Central Intelligence Group,” 174-78. 
496 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 

Director of Central Intelligence reported directly to the President. Donovan, who had 

come out of the war with enhanced public prestige and as an authority on foreign 

intelligence, had, along with former OSSers like, attorney Lawrence R. Houston and exchief of the London station, David K.E. Bruce, helped shape the final bill, which was 

largely a reprise of his own proposal at the end of the war. Since it was largely a return to 

Donovan’s proposal in 1944-1945, the former head of the OSS was delighted with the 

intelligence sections of the National Security Act.67 In the Congressional debate, 

considerable concern was expressed about whether the new agency would become a 

“Gestapo,” spying on and arresting American citizens, and as a result Congress denied 

the CIA law enforcement or subpoena powers and prohibited it from any internal security 

role in the United States.68 All agreed that the primary mission of the CIA was to collect 

and analyze intelligence from other countries. The OSS headquarters in the old National 

Institute of Health buildings at 24th and E Streets NW in Washington, D.C., became the 

first headquarters of the CIA in 1947 until the new CIA campus complex was built in 

Langley, Virginia, in the 1950s. (The old OSS temporary structures, the “Q” and “M” 

Buildings, down the hill were later torn down as eyesores, and ultimately replaced by the 

Kennedy Center.) With many former OSSers employed by the new central intelligence 

agency, often via the transitional units of SSU and CIG, it used many of the OSS’s 

training methods and operational techniques regarding intelligence gathering and 

analysis. Peter Sichel, an SI agent with the U.S. Seventh Army in France and Germany in 

World War II, continued doing secret intelligence there for the next seven years. “I was 

in Berlin from 1945 to May 1952,” he recalled. “I did the same job, just different 

employers, OSS, SU, CIA.”69

Little attention was paid in the public discussion or congressional debate in 1947 

to a clause in the National Security Act authorizing the CIA to perform “other functions 

and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security.” But almost from the 

beginning that provision was used as the legal basis for “covert operations,” which soon 

became a major, if later highly controversial, part of the activities of the CIA.70 When in 

the summer of 1948, the National Security Council authorized the CIA to conduct 

“special operations” that agency quickly began to develop covert operations capability 

under Frank G. Wisner, head of its new Office of Policy Coordination. A former OSS 

Secret Intelligence officer in Istanbul and Bucharest, Wisner had been at the State 

 

67 Troy, Donovan and the CIA, 377, 382-384, 402-410; Dunlop, Donovan, 491. 

68 Troy, Donovan and the CIA, 277-410, and Appendices W, X, Y, 467-72; Arthur Darling, The Central 

Intelligence Agency: An Instrument of Government to 1950 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University 

Press, 1990). 

69 Peter M.F. Sichel, telephone interview with the author, 9 July 2008. 

70 For histories of CIA’s covert operations and the controversies they entailed, see, for example, Rhodri 

Jeffreys-Jones, Cloak and Dollar: A History of American Secret Intelligence, 2d ed. (New Haven, Conn.: 

Yale University Press, 2003), 255-88; Charles D. Ameringer, U.S. Foreign Intelligence: The Secret Side of 

American History (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath, 1990), 201-405; and the report of a Senate committee 

chaired by Senator Frank Church (Dem.-Idaho), U.S. Congress, Senate Select Committee to Study 

Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Final Report, 94th Cong. 2nd Sess., Senate 

Report No. 94-755, 6 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Govt. Printing Office, 1976). 
 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 497

Department since the OSS was terminated.71 The CIA’s operational branch employed 

then or soon afterwards a number of former OSS SO or OG personnel either directly, as 

in the case of William Colby, Al Cox, James Kellis, Joseph Lazarsky, Hans Tofte, and 

Lucien Conein, or indirectly on detached service from the Army such as William R. 

(“Ray”) Peers, Leopold (“Leo”) Karwaski, and others. “Basically, the Agency hired 

people who had already been trained. They hired from the OSS and from the military,” 

recalled Caesar J. Civitella, a former member of the OSS Italian OGs, who served with 

the Army’s Special Forces from 1952 until his retirement in 1964, and then worked for 

the CIA from 1964 to 1983. “When I was in the military, I did attend an ‘E and E’ course 

at ‘the Farm.’ The instructor was an old OSS guy. They did use former OSS training at 

‘the Farm.’”72 Civitella was referring to the CIA’s large, wooded, swampy training 

reservation in southeastern Virginia. Located outside of Williamsburg, it is much larger 

and quite distant from the country house training site, RTU-11, that OSS referred to 

informally as “the Farm.” 

Although the Central Intelligence Agency was institutionally the direct 

descendant of Donovan’s wartime organization, veterans of the Office of Strategic 

Services, like other Americans, divided over many of the policies pursued by the CIA 

since its creation in 1947. The greatest divisions came over the subversive role of 

political and military covert operations. Donovan, unlike his British counterparts, had 

united intelligence gathering and analysis and covert action in a single agency, and the 

CIA maintained his organizational model. As the Cold War mentality came to dominant 

Washington in response to the threat seen as posed by the Soviet empire and the 

challenges of communist movements around the globe, the clandestine operations branch 

of the CIA became an important instrument in U.S. foreign and national security policy. 

It was not just the agency itself, but many in the foreign policy and national security 

establishment who supported that concept that Donovan had celebrated as effective in 

World War II. In addition to the institutional and practical grounds for employing 

clandestine political, psychological, and guerrilla operations beyond its missions of 

intelligence collection and analysis, the CIA claimed also to inherit the OSS’s mantle of 

moral justification for such actions. During the global struggle against the evils of 

fascism in World War II there had been no questioning of the ethicality of the OSS’s 

foreign intervention and subversion in countries occupied by the ruthless forces of the 

Nazi and Japanese regimes. Many former OSSers in leadership positions in the CIA, 

including most prominently Allen Dulles, Frank Wisner, Richard Helms, William Colby, 

James Angleton, Thomas Braden, and much later, William Casey, took the Donovan 

model and applied it aggressively in the “Cold War” era. 73 But while the model and even 

some of the personnel remained the same, the world in which they operated had changed 

dramatically. 

 

71 Ibid., 130-131; Evan Thomas, The Very Best Men: Four Who Dared: The Early Years of the CIA (New 

York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 28-30; Wiener, Legacy of Ashes, 32-34. 

72 Caesar J. Civitella, telephone interview with the author, 25 April 2008. 

73 Robert Harris Smith, O.S.S.: The Secret History of America’s First Central Intelligence Agency 

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 361-62. 
498 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 

In World War II, OSS had actively encouraged and supported resistance 

movements against the foreign armies of occupation and Nazi or Japanese regimes that 

had seized and controlled their countries. But in subsequent decades, the CIA routinely 

encouraged and supported resistance movements to undermine national governments, 

some of them popularly elected, deemed too sympathetic to the Soviet Union and hostile 

to the United States. The justification was based on a “Cold War” mentality which 

stressed that any gain in influence by the totalitarian regimes in the Soviet Union and 

Communist China was a loss for the United States. To numbers of former OSSers, in or 

outside of the CIA, as to many other Americans, the ends seemed to justify the means, 

and they generally supported the actions of the agency.74 The CIA and its intelligence 

gathering and covert operations continue to enjoy endorsement by many surviving OSS 

veterans.75 

There has also been, however, considerable dissent by OSS veterans against what 

they see as misuse of the CIA and a betrayal of the legacy of the OSS. As strident anticommunism and vengeful McCarthyism in the 1950s pushed the agency to exercise its 

covert operations in support of regimes of political repression and right-wing 

dictatorships and to engage in heavy-handed intervention in the politics of 

underdeveloped nations, dissent was increasingly suppressed within the agency. But 

dissent continued to exist among some OSS and CIA veterans.76 “The CIA is an entirely 

different group than the OSS, although the early CIA was built on the bones of the OSS, 

so to speak,” explained Rafael D. Hirtz, a former OSS officer who had served with 

Operational Groups in France and China. “The unfortunate thing, what happened to the 

CIA, at least in my belief, is that it became too political,” Hirtz said in an interview in the 

1980s.”77 Peter Sichel, who served with the 7th Army OSS unit in France, and later 

worked for the CIA in Berlin, Washington, and Hong Kong, resigned from the CIA in 

1959. “I resigned because they were doing things I did not like,” he said. “They were 

sending people into nonexistent [resistance] groups in China. I did not like it when they 

 

74 A point made by many commentators, but in regard to the CIA leadership, see in particular, Evan 

Thomas, The Very Best Men: Four Who Dared: The Early Years of the CIA (New York: Simon & Schuster, 

1995), 10-12, 340-341, and passim. The four officials in the CIA’s Directorate of Plans, its operational arm, 

who Thomas wrote about were Frank Wisner, Desmond FitzGerald, Tracy Barnes, and Richard Bissell. 

Thomas notes that Bissell, who was in no small measure responsible for the Marshall Plan and the U-2 spy 

plane, was also responsible in large part for the assassination plots against Fidel Castro and the abortive 

invasion at the Bay of Pigs. 

75 As evident by comments from some OSS veterans (other OSS veterans disagree) on contemporary 

actions and issues in the OSS Society’s electronic bulletin board and chat room on the internet, 

osssociety@yahoogroups.com. This site is open to OSS veterans, their families and descendants and to 

other persons interested in the OSS, but applicants must be cleared to have access. The author has had

access since he began his research on this subject in 2005. See also the public writings of some former 

OSSers, for example, John K. Singlaub with Malcolm McConnell, Hazardous Duty: An American Soldier 

in the Twentieth Century (New York: Summit/Simon & Schuster, 1991), 445-46, 525-26. 

76 Smith, O.S.S., 363, 375, 381-383. 

77 Rafael D. Hitz, Transcript of Interview, n.d. [1980s], Rafael Hirtz Collection (AFC/2001/001/94), 

Veterans History Project, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, 

http://lcweb2.loc.gov/diglib/vhp/bib/loc.natlib.afc2001001.00094, accessed 10 January 2007. 
 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 499

did it in the Ukraine, but I accepted it then. Not the second time. They were sending them 

to their deaths or lifetime imprisonment. This was Cold War madness.”78 

Divisions among OSS veterans over polices of the CIA have continued to the 

present day.79 Former intelligence officer R. Harris Smith had decried the fact that the 

legacy of liberalism and dissent in the CIA became a forgotten part of its history, and he 

argued that it was important to understand that history in order to restore legitimacy to an 

institution under attack for its failures and for yielding to political pressures.80 This plea 

was somewhat echoed in 2007 by New York Times reporter Tim Weiner in his book, 

Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA. This latest attack argues that from the beginning

of the CIA in 1947, and despite efforts from Allen Dulles to William Casey to link its 

spirit to the old OSS, the CIA was essentially unable to fulfill its role as America’s 

central intelligence service. There were, according to Weiner, only a few halcyon 

moments: When Richard Helms, an OSS veteran and head of the CIA, confronted 

President Lyndon Johnson and then President Richard Nixon with the facts about the 

Vietnam War that they did not want to hear and when Robert Gates headed the CIA and 

“kept calm and carried on as the Soviet Union crumbled.” But as Weiner concluded, in 

the world the United States faced in 2007 and possibly for years to come, the country 

needs an effective espionage service against its enemies. “The CIA someday may serve 

as its founders intended,” he hoped, for in the long run, “we must depend upon it.”81

The Special Forces: Another OSS Legacy 

Like the CIA, the U.S. Army’s Special Forces are also a legacy of the OSS. 

Because Donovan’s wartime agency was technically a civilian rather than a military 

organization, the U.S. Army lineage organization does not officially acknowledge a direct 

heritage between the OSS and the Army’s Special Forces. However, the heritage owed by 

today’s Special Forces to Donovan’s Special Operations, Operational Groups, and 

Maritime Unit is widely recognized, even by the Special Forces themselves.82 OSS SO 

 

78 Peter M.F. Sichel, telephone interview with the author, 9 July 2008. 

79 As evident by comments by some OSS veterans on contemporary actions and issues in the OSS Society’s 

electronic bulletin board and chat room on the internet, osssociety@yahoogroups.com. 

80 Smith, O.S.S., 381-383. After what he called “a very brief, uneventful, and undistinguished association 

with the most misunderstood bureaucracy of the American government,” Smith left the CIA in May 1968 

and wrote this history of the OSS primarily with the cooperation of some 200 OSS and State Department 

veterans who provided recollections and recent observations. 

81 Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 513-514. In 2007, 

as a result of the terrorist attacks on the United States on 11 September 2001, Congress gave oversight over 

all 15 agencies in the U.S. intelligence community to a newly-created position, the Director of National 

Intelligence, who would report directly to the President. Ibid., 504-12. 

82 The U.S. Army’s official lineage for the Special Forces omits the OSS as a direct predecessor because it 

was a civilian organization and, therefore, outside of the official chain of command. Officially recognized 

as predecessor units are Airborne Divisions, Ranger Units, and Joint U.S.-Canadian 1st Special Services 

Unit (the “Devil’s Brigade”). The issue of lineage of the Army’s Special Forces has been made more 
500 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 

teams, and particularly the Operational Groups of the OSS, were designed, like today’s 

Special Forces, to have the ability to conduct lengthy, long-range penetration deep into 

enemy area in order to organize, train, equip, and direct indigenous guerrilla forces. 

Unhampered by official criteria, the U.S. Army’s main historical study of its Special 

Forces concludes that the OSS, while not a strictly military organization, left a legacy of 

knowledge, which together with the experience of a few officers in guerrilla warfare “was 

instrumental in the creation of the Special Forces in 1952. This gave the Army a formal, 

continuing capability for unconventional warfare for the first time in its history.”83

With the demise of the OSS in October 1945, although some of the intelligence 

and communications assets had been retained by the War Department and State 

Department, the Jedburghs, SO, and OGs, were demobilized. With the onset of the Cold 

War, the Army briefly considered creating special operations units in 1947; however, 

much of the Army leadership, still suspicious of the OSS’s achievements and focused 

primarily on big unit conventional warfare, quickly dismissed the idea.84 But by 1950 

with the war in Korea and the escalation of the Cold War around the globe, the United 

 

complicated and confused by the various reorganizations and designations in the U.S. Army as well as the 

decision, unjustified in the opinion of many Special Forces veterans, by the Army’s Center of Military

History to designate the U.S.-Canadian 1st Special Force (the “Devil’s Brigade”), which served in Italy and 

southern France, as the forerunner of Army Special Forces. www.Army.mil/cmh//lineage/branches/sf. A 

number of authoritative sources disagree and cite OSS SO and OG as direct ancestor of the Army’s Special 

Forces, for example, 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; Aaron Bank, From OSS to Green Berets: The Birth of the 

Special Forces (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1986), 205-206; Gordon L. Rottman, The U.S. Army Special 

Forces, 1952-1984 (Osprey, 1985); Charles Simpson, Inside the Green Berets: The First Thirty Years: A 

History of the U.S. Army’s Special Forces (Presidio Press, 1983); and Mike Yard, “OGs Get to Tell Their 

Story,” OSS Society Digest, Number 1317, 30 March 2006, accessed 30 March 2006. Paddock and Bank 

credit OSS as more representative than most of those units of the range of actions conducted by today’s 

Special Forces. Furthermore, the Special Forces themselves have informally adopted OSS and its units such 

as Special Operations, Operational Groups, and Detachment 101 in Burma, as among the predecessors of 

today’s Special Forces. See, for example, the websites of the U.S. Army’s John F. Kennedy Special 

Warfare Museum at Fort Bragg, Fayetteville, North Carolina at www.soc.mil/swcs/museum, and the 

Airborne and Special Operations Museum, Fayetteville, North Carolina at www.asomf.org/museum. On 

some of the OSS insignia being incorporated, see story on the opening of an OSS Exhibit at the latter in 

January 2008, reported in “Retired General [John K. Singlaub] to Speak on Career,” Fayetteville Observer, 

24 January 2008, reprinted in OSS Society Digest Number 1962, 26 January 2008, accessed 26 January 

2008. For example, the Army has authorized the wearing of the Army Special Forces arc on the upper left 

sleeve by those who have served in World War II at least 120 consecutive days in OSS Detachment 101, 

OSS Jedburgh Detachments, OSS Operational Groups, and the OSS Maritime Unit. 

http://www.tioh.hquda.pentagon.mil/Tab/SpecialForcesTab.htm, accessed 11 August 2008; and see also the 

various issues of Veritas: Journal of Army Special Operations History.

83 Alfred H. Paddock, Jr., U.S. Army Special Warfare, Its Origins: Psychological and Unconventional 

Warfare, 1941-1952 (Washington, D.C.: National Defense University Press, 1982), 156. The semi-official 

Airborne and Special Operations Museum in Fayetteville, North Carolina agrees. It credits Donovan’s 

OSS, along with the airborne divisions, Rangers, and the Joint US-Canadian 1st Special Services Unit, as 

the predecessors of the Army’s Special Forces. http://www.asopf.org/museum_exhibits_wwii.htm, 

accessed 2 January 2008. 

84 Paddock, U.S. Army Special Warfare, 69-70. This despite the advice of Army Colonel William R. 

(“Ray”) Peers, former head of Detachment 101 
 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 501

States Government sought to develop means for unconventional warfare—psychological 

as well as guerrilla operations—as well as dramatically increased conventional and 

nuclear war-making capabilities to confront the Soviet Empire and Communist China. 

The Army had initially supported and cooperated with the CIA’s office of covert 

operations, offering it assistance in the field of guerrilla warfare by setting up a training 

course at the Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia. When the Korean War broke out 

in 1950, the Army lent some of its personnel to the CIA engaged in guerrilla activities 

behind enemy lines in Korea and in mainland China. But by the spring of 1951, Army 

leaders began to express concerns about the secrecy and relative autonomy with which 

the CIA was operating and whether its covert operations were actually effective. The 

Army’s suspicion and hostility was reciprocated by the CIA. Both were also jockeying 

for primary responsibility for conducting the expanding unconventional warfare.85 

Brigadier General Robert A. McClure, chief of the Army’s Psychological Warfare 

Office, and especially his assistant, Colonel Aaron Bank, a former OSS Jedburgh, worked 

to convince senior managers of the Army and the Joint Chiefs of Staff that the military 

should explore the development of Special Forces capabilities for behind the lines 

guerrilla operations. On 14 April 1952, under control of the commanding general of the 

U.S. Third Army, McClure was able to establish the U.S. Army’s Psychological Warfare 

(PSYWAR) and Special Forces Center at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. This marked the 

unofficial beginning of the U.S. Army’s Special Forces.86

It was a small if significant beginning and it stemmed directly from the OSS. 

Aaron Bank, who later be celebrated as the “Founder of Special Forces,” had trained at 

OSS Areas F and B as well as SOE camps in Britain and served as a Jedburgh in France 

and an SO/SI rescue team leader in French Indochina. Remaining in the Army, he had 

been in the Counter-Intelligence Corps in Europe, and when the Korean War broke out, 

he had been sent to Korean with an Airborne Regimental Combat Team. In 1951, he had 

been brought back to Washington, as an assistant to General McClure as the Army 

resumed it study of unconventional warfare. Bank helped persuade the Army to include 

guerrilla warfare, and in the spring of 1952, he was appointed the head of the Special 

Forces Department in the new PSYWAR Center at Fort Bragg and commanding officer 

of the new 10th Special Forces Group, the first Special Forces unit, which was targeted 

for Europe.87

 

 

85 Ibid., 130-32. 

86 Brig. Gen. Robert A. McClure, 55, had been U.S. military attaché in London before being appointed by 

Eisenhower as chief of intelligence for the European Theater of Operations in 1942. In 1944, he was 

appointed head of the newly created Psychological Warfare Division of SHAEF. Since Special Forces work

was classified they originally received much less publicity than the Psychological Warfare department in 

the new center. 86 Paddock, U.S. Army Special Warfare. ,142-146. The location was “Smoke Bomb Hill,” a 

collection of old wooden barracks just across the street from where the current Special Forces Center is 

located. Caesar J. Civitella, telephone conversation with the author, 29 April 2008. 

87 Aaron Bank, From OSS to Green Berets: The Birth of Special Forces (Novato, Calif.; Presidio Press, 

1986), 131, 139-67; Paddock., U.S. Army Special Warfare, 158; Obituary, “Col. Aaron Bank, Who Was 

`Father of Special Forces,’ Dies at 101,” New York Times, 6 April 2004; “Col. Aaron Bank, U.S. Special 

Forces Founder, Dies,” OSS Society Newsletter, Summer 2004, 13. 
502 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 

Training, doctrine, and mission of Special Forces were based specifically on OSS 

concepts, especially the Operational Groups, rather than on those of the Airborne, the 

Rangers, or the First Special Service Group.88 To recruit a staff for the Special Forces 

Department at the PSYWAR Center at Fort Bragg and to help him lead the first Special 

Forces unit, Bank began with two other OSS veterans in the Army. Lieutenant Colonel 

Jack T. Shannon, originally from Iowa, had joined OSS, trained in SO, and jumped into 

France on a three-man, Inter-Allied Team “Bergamotte,” in July 1944, and subsequently 

fought behind Japanese lines with Detachment 101 in Burma in 1945.89 He was brought 

to Bragg as Bank’s deputy. Lieutenant Caesar J. Civitella from Philadelphia had trained 

at Areas F and B as an enlisted man in the OSS Italian OG and fought in southern France 

and northern Italy in World War II. Civitella had rejoined the Army in 1947 and served in 

the intelligence section of the 82th Airborne Division before being sent to Officers 

Candidate School in1951 and receiving his commission. Civitella was assigned as a 

recruiter and as an instructor teaching courses in guerrilla warfare and in air operations 

and support.90 The three-man cadre quickly recruited a staff. Among the first of their 

volunteers were three OSSers. Lieutenant Colonel James Goodwin, from upstate New 

York, had been a student and then instructor at Area B in1942, then served with OSS in 

Europe. Captain Herbert R. Brucker, Alsatian born U.S. citizen and OSS trained radio 

operator, had served on a three-man SOE mission in France in 1944 and then an SO team 

in China in1945. Brucker had been assigned to the Army’s Counter Intelligence Corps in 

occupied Germany after the war, then to the 82nd Airborne Division. Recruited for 

Special Forces, Brucker was made head of security. Subsequently, he taught clandestine 

operations and trade craft (dead letter drops, eliminations, etc.) in the 10th Special Forces 

Group He provided training not only for that group, but also developed the first “escape 

and evasion” training course for U.S. Navy aviators in case they were downed behind 

enemy lines.91 The staff also included other OSSers, like Lief Bangsboll and Jack 

Hemingway, plus Army veterans of World War II and the fighting in Korea.92

 The initial assignment was to develop an eight-week course on guerrilla warfare, 

escape and evasion, and subversion of a hostile state. The only existent Army Field 

Manual related to the topic, FM 31-21, Organization and Conduct of Guerrilla Warfare, 

 

88 Caesar J. Civitella, “U.S. Army Special Forces Originals,” The Drop [magazine of the U.S. Army Special 

Forces Association], Summer 1998, 55; I am indebted to Major Civitella for sending me a copy of this 

article and the OG pamphlet, OSS, Operational Group Command (OSS: December 1944), Caesar J. 

Civitella, to the author, 25 April 2008. See also “Orientation Material for Use in Connection with Selection 

of Volunteers for Special Forces,” 24 September 1952, quoted in Paddock, U.S. Army Special Warfare, 

148; and Bank, From OSS to Green Berets, 186-87. 

89 Troy J. Sacquety, U.S. Army Special Operations Command History Office, Fort Bragg, N.C., email to 

the author, 8 August 2008; see also Peers and Brelis, Behind the Burma Road, 230. 

90 Caesar J. Civitella, telephone interview with the author, 18 April 2008 

91 Ibid., 25 April 2008; and Charles H. Briscoe, “Major (R) Herbert R. Brucker, DSC, Special Forces 

Pioneer,” Veritas: Journal of the U.S. Army Special Forces, 2:2 (2006): 34-35. 

92 Jack Hemingway, Misadventures of a Fly Fisherman: My Life With and Without Papa (Dallas, Tex.: 

Taylor Pub. Co., 1986), 257. 
 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 503

had been prepared largely on the basis of the personal experiences of Army officers in the 

Philippines, like Lieutenant Colonels Wendell Fertig and Russell W. Volkmann, who had 

refused the order to surrender and, although untrained in unconventional warfare, had led 

Filipino resistance groups on Mindinao and Luzon throughout the Japanese occupation. 

Volckmann had worked with Bank to convince the Army about the value of special 

forces and was part of staff. The manual was used in the Special Forces curriculum, but, 

as Civitella recalled, “most of the stuff we used was from the OSS.” For constructing the 

curriculum, the cadre drew heavily upon OSS assessment techniques, lesson plans, and 

after action reports and interviews. Plus in their lectures, they drew on their own personal 

experiences. Bank had personally brought many classified OSS documents down from 

Washington in the trunk of his car. Civitella had put them in the safe from which they 

were used in building lesson plans, sometimes verbatim, as in the case of the description 

of the OG Command.93 

Similar to the OG sections, the basic Special Forces unit, an A Team, consisted of 

approximately a dozen men. Recruits had to volunteer for parachuting as well as 

hazardous duty. Many of them came from the Rangers, then being deactivated. The new 

unit was super secret, even within the Army. As in OSS, the early training of the Special 

Forces emphasized self-confidence and élan as well as individual skills: operations and 

intelligence, light and heavy weapons, demolitions, radio communications, and medical 

aid. Each enlisted man specialized in one area but also learned the rudiments of the 

others. There were also courses in organization of resistance movements and operation of 

their networks, agent training to include espionage and sabotage, guerrilla warfare, codes 

and radio communication, survival, the Fairbairn method of hand-to-hand combat, and 

Rex Applegate’s instinctive, point-and-shoot, pistol firing technique.94 Aaron Bank was 

fanatical about training, according to former Jedburgh, Major General John K. Singlaub, 

“He believed that Soldiers must have expert knowledge of their weapons systems—so 

much knowledge and firing the equipment should be ‘second nature.’ Then the Soldier 

could focus solely on the mission.”95

To provide adequate room for field exercises, Bank obtained the use of one of 

Fort Bragg’s satellite training areas, Camp Mackall.

96 There, as at Areas A and B in 

World War II, the trainees became adept at demolition work, guerrilla tactics, and 

ambushes. The swampy areas with abundance of snakes, frogs, and rodents proved useful 

in practicing survival strategies, living off of nature. But for a more practical exercise in 

 

93 Caesar J. Civitella, telephone interview with the author, 25 and 29 April 2008; and Civitella, “U.S. 

Army Special Forces Originals,” The Drop [magazine of the U.S. Army Special Forces Association], 

Summer 1998, 55. 

94 Bank, From OSS to Green Berets, 175-176. Caesar J. Civitella, telephone interview with the author, 25 

April 2008 

95 Maj. Gen. John K. Singlaub quoted in “SWCS Dedicates Bank Hall: Building Named for ‘Father of 

Special Forces,’” Special Warfare 19:1 (January-February 2006): 7. 

96 Camp Mackall is located in the North Carolina sand hills, 40 miles southwest of Fort Bragg. Several 

airborne divisions trained there in World War II. Robert W. Jones, Jr., “Camp Mackall: A History of 

Training,” Veritas: Journal of Army Special Operations History, 3:4 (2007): 26-27; and 

http://www.bragg.Armymil/18abn/CampMackall.htm. 
504 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 

clandestine activity, the training staff decided to take the more than 600 members of new 

10th Special Forces Group outside an Army base, and into a rural, forested civilian area 

which would include residents, barns and safe houses, places to meet, gather and train 

indigenous guerrillas, as well as targets for simulated sabotage such as bridges, railroad 

tracks, telephone and electrical lines and power stations. For the realistic operations for 

the Group’s A Teams, they chose Chattahoochee National Forest in the Appalachian 

Mountains of northern Georgia. Special Forces used the mountainous timberlands of the 

U.S. Forest Service in late 1952 the way OSS had used the woods of the National Park 

Service in World War II.97 In the summer of 1953, Donovan visited Fort Bragg to inspect 

the troops of the new 10th Special Forces Group. Impressed after a day of briefing and 

demonstrations, Donovan recognized that they had adopted the traditions, heritage, and 

legacy of OSS Special Operations. “You have revived precious memories,” he said as he 

left. “You are the offspring of the OSS.98

The emphasis on the training of the Army’s Special Forces in the early 1950s was 

on supporting guerrilla operations and that was because the mission that was envisioned 

was helping anti-communist, anti-Soviet resistance groups operate in non-Russian 

territories of Eastern and Central Europe occupied by an invading Red Army, just as OSS 

groups had aided anti-fascist resistance groups behind German and Japanese lines in 

World War II. Indeed, after rioting broke out in cities in East Germany in the summer of 

1953, Colonel Bank and the 10th Special Forces Group was sent to Bad Tölz, in the 

Bavarian Alps near Munich (a new unit, the 77th –later 7th--Special Forces Group was 

created under former OSS officer Jack Shannon, based in Fort Bragg; it was later sent to 

Korea). 

There was little or no attention given in these early years to counterinsurgency 

operations against guerrilla forces. That would come in the late 1950s and early 1960s 

and would initiate a doctrinal battle within the U.S. Army about the proper role of Special 

Forces.99

 

From Guerrilla to Counter-Guerrilla Warfare and the “Green Berets” 

“A lot of people think Special Forces came into existence in 1952, but we were 

not officially recognized [then]. We were a small, secret group. It was not until 1961 

when [President John F.] Kennedy recognized us that we came officially into existence,” 

said Caesar J. Civitella, a former OSSer and Special Forces member. “We existed in fact, 

and some of our people had been killed, but officially we didn’t exist before 1961.”100 As 

the Cold War shifted to the Third World and Communists sought to control independence 

 

97 Bank, From OSS to Green Berets, 179-185; Paddock, U.S. Army Special Warfare, 150-51. 

98 Bank, From OSS to Green Berets, 186-187; see also Dunlop, Donovan, 499-500. 

99 Bank, From OSS to Green Berets, 187-188; Paddock, U.S. Army Special Warfare, 149-150. 

100 Caesar J. Civitella, telephone interviews with the author, 25 and 29 April 2008. Among other things, 

Bank took the organization and statement of mission of Special Forces in1952 verbatim from the 

organization and statement of mission in the OSS Operational Group Command in World War II. 
 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 505

movements and anti-colonial guerrilla wars through “wars of national liberation,” 

President Kennedy saw the Special Forces as potentially effective agents of counterinsurgency. Kennedy provided the Special Forces with increased resources and status and 

allowed them to become the first American soldiers to wear berets, for which they 

became popularly known as “the Green Berets.” In the 1960s, Special Forces groups, 

now emphasizing counter-insurgency tactics, and the multiplier effect of having 12-man 

Special Forces teams that could assist or lead indigenous forces of up to 300 or 500 men, 

advised or actually fought against Communist-inspired guerrillas in Latin America and 

Southeast Asia. Although the Army’s Special Forces were cut back after the Vietnam 

War, they regained strength in the 1980s. The following decade, they were part of an allservice, quick-response command, the U.S. Special Operations Command created in 1997 

that included an expanded force of Army Rangers as well as Navy Seals, and special 

operations units in the Air Force and Marines.101 During the first decade of the twentyfirst century there was a major new emphasis placed on the use of Special Forces. 

Colonel Aaron Bank retired from the Army in 1958 but was named Honorary 

Colonel of the 1st Special Forces Regiment in 1986 and remained so until his death at the 

age of 101 in 2004.102 Like Shannon, Civitella, Brucker and others, Bank was a personal 

link between the OSS and the Special Forces, and he credited the OSS with being the 

predecessor of the Special Forces. “Although it occurred indirectly, there is no doubt that 

OSS gave birth not only to CIA but also the Green Berets in 1952,” Bank wrote. “All the 

Green Beret training programs, maneuvers, concepts, and conduct of operations were 

based on those of OSS. I feel that Donovan should have bestowed upon him the honor 

and credit for this continuity of the heritage and traditions established through his genius 

and foresight.”103

Return of the Parks: Prince William Forest Park 

 With the end of Donovan’s organization on 1 October 1945, its successor, the 

War Department’s Strategic Services Unit (SSU) began to liquidate the OSS’s facilities. 

The Schools and Training Branch under Colonel Henson L. Robinson had been shutting 

down training facilities for several months and quickened the pace since August.104 Area 

A, the Advanced Special Operations training camp, had been terminated as a training 

facility in early 1945. Sub-camps A-2, A-3, and A-4 were completely closed, all 

 

101 Susan L. Marquis, Unconventional Warfare: Rebuilding U.S. Special Forces (Washington, D.C.: 

Brookings, 1997). 

102 “Col. Aaron Bank, U.S. Special Forces Founder, Dies,” OSS Society Newsletter, Summer 2004, 13. 

103 Aaron Bank quoted in Dunlop, Donovan, 500. 

104 Col. H.L. Robinson to Director [Brig. Gen. John Magruder], Strategic Services Unit, War Department , 

4 October 1945, subject: Report of Schools & Training Activities as of 1 October 1945, OSS Records (RG

226), Records of the Director’s Office, Microfilm 1642, Roll 102, Frames 561-64, National Archives II.
506 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 

personnel had left, and in October the contents of the sub-camps were being inventoried 

for return to the National Park Service. At A-4, the headquarters for Area A, no trainees 

or instructors remained but there was a small staff of officers and enlisted men required 

to complete the closing of Area A. On 4 October, Colonel Henson L. Robins, chief of the 

Schools and Training Branch, estimated that the job would be completed by the middle of 

the month.105 

The process of shutting down Area A and evaluating and preparing the site for 

return to the National Park Service had been going on since January. After the end of 

training there, the staff had destroyed a number of instructional items directly related to 

the OSS’s sabotage and espionage operations, which would be of no use to the National 

Park Service. Among these were scaling ladders, firing mechanisms, door sets for lock 

pickers, and model girder bridges, railroad tracks, and radio towers, which had been used 

for teaching trainees where to place explosive charges.106

In February 1945, under the supervision of Captain James E. Rodgers, the last 

commanding office of Detachment A, Technical Sergeant John T. Gum, a longtime 

employee of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC ) at the site and subsequently liaison 

between NPS and the OSS at Area A, had prepared a relevant inventory107 Having been 

at the park since the late 1930s, Gum, in his multiple wartime roles as a representative of 

the CCC, the NPS, the Army, and the OSS, had supervised much of the OSS construction 

in Area A. When Area A finally shut down completely, Sergeant Gum was transferred to 

Area C, the OSS Communications Branch facility, in the eastern sector of the park. In 

addition, the NPS Park Manager, Captain Ira B. Lykes, U.S. Marine Corps, Reserves, 

who performed the dual role of forestry officer at the Quantico Marine Base during the 

weekdays and park manager on weekends, was directed by NPS headquarters to provide 

a final inspection of the sub-camps, when the OSS finally left. Lykes’ inspection would 

confirm whether the War Department had performed its responsibilities under the leasing 

agreement, which were to restore the grounds and facilities to their prewar condition 

except for changes that were acceptable to the National Park Service. In addition to those 

conditions, NPS wanted to make sure that the approximately 1,000 to 1,500 more acres 

purchased by the War Department for Area were included when the park was returned to 

the Department of the Interior. 108

 

Preparing the inventories in 1945, the Army distinguished in Area A between 

properties of the National Park Service under the Department of the Interior and of the 

 

105 On the West Coast, the OSS S&T schools on Catalina Island and the Headquarters Detachment at 

Newport Beach, California were in the process of being moved to the East Coast for installation in the

camps of Area A at Prince William Forest Park, Virginia, when V-J Day occurred on 14 August 1945. Ibid. 

106 Capt. James M., Rodgers to Liaison Officer, Schools and Training Branch, OSS, 9 January 1945, 

subject: Authorization to Destroy Training Property, and authorization from Lt. Leonard Karsakov, 9 

January 1945, OSS Records (RG 226), Entry 136, Box 153, Folder 1658, National Archives II. 

107 On the role of John Gum, as wartime superintendent of the CCC camps at Chopawamsic, see Susan 

Carey Strickland, Prince William Forest Park: An Administrative History (Washington, D.C.: National 

Park Service, 1986), 17, although she misspells Gum’s name as Gun. 

108 Capt. Stanley H. Lyson, S-4, Schools and Training, to Lt. Warner, undated [February 1945], subject: 

Data on Detachment A, OSS Records (RG 226), Entry 136, Box 153, Folder 1658, National Archives II. 
 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 507

Civilian Conservation Corps. Until the early 1940s when it was terminated, the CCC had 

operated under the War Department or temporary New Deal agencies. OSS sub-camp A4 was an old CCC work camp, and the Schools and Training Branch believed that 

National Park Service had in its words, “nothing to do with the buildings and equipment” 

there, so they were not covered by the leasing agreement. The OSS inventory listed 24 

buildings in the CCC camp that had been taken over by OSS and remained there. The 

inventory listed contrasting uses made of them by the CCC and the OSS. Often these 

were similar: the CCC headquarters building, for example, became the OSS headquarters; 

the CCC barracks, each holding 40 men, became the OSS barracks; and the CCC oil 

house became the OSS Motor Pool Office. But sometimes they were put to new uses: The 

CCC infirmary became the OSS Guard House; a CCC structure listed only as “Building,” 

became the OSS Post Exchange and Recreation Hall. The mess hall had been retained, 

but it was remodeled and its kitchen augmented with new equipment, including three gas 

ranges, two portable electric refrigerators, two steam tables, a deep fat fryer, an electric 

peeler, and a dishwashing machine. 

OSS had erected nearly a dozen new buildings in Area A-4, and they remained 

there at least at the time of the inventory in early 1945. Among them were a one-hundred 

man, standard Army latrine, actually a latrine/washroom that included toilets, 

washstands, showers and hot water heaters and that replaced the CCC’s two portable pit 

latrines. There was also an auto washing building, carpenter shop, storage house, 

commissary, small code room/storage building, a sentry box, and most expensive, a tenroom Bachelor Officers’ Quarters (BOQ) accommodation. At A-4, OSS had also 

constructed a rifle practice range with ten standard targets.109 A report on A-4 by 

Sergeant Gum in October 1945 indicated that the National Park Service would not ask 

that these new or remodeled buildings be returned to their previous condition, because 

“prior to our occupancy, the National Park Service had no definite plans for using this 

area [this former CCC facility] as a summer camp.”110

 Unlike the former CCC facility, the other OSS sub-camps at Area A had 

previously been built and used by the National Park Service as summer camps. The OSS 

had not removed or destroyed any of the NPS buildings, but it had made changes, which 

it considered necessary improvements. Most importantly, most of the buildings in all the 

sub-camps as well as the CCC facility had been winterized. Insulated wallboard had 

been installed inside and the outside creosoted. Wood or coal-burning heating stoves had 

been added. OSS installed 29 hot water tanks in the washroom/latrines, mess halls, and 

infirmaries, as well as the headquarters, guard house, instructors’ quarters, students’ 

quarters, and Bachelor Officers’ Quarters. Other improvements included a new sewer 

 

109 Ibid. 

110 Estimate #3, Estimated Prices Prepared by T. Sgt. John E. [sic] Gum, attachment to Col. W.L. Rehm, 

Acting Assistant Director for Services, Strategic Services Unit (SSU), for the Director, to Commanding

General, Army Service Forces, Mobilization Division, 19 October 1945, subject: Chopwamsic National 

Recreational Demonstration Area, in OSS Records (RG 226), Entry 146, Box 8, Folder 199, National 

Archives II. 
508 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 

field; porch enclosures for a few buildings, and upgrading of the kitchens and mess halls 

in each sub-camp.111 

A number of new structures had been built in Area A. At A-2, these included 

several wooden buildings: four 25-man latrine/washrooms, an enclosed 20 by 40 foot 

Pistol House; and an 8 by 8 foot guard house. At A-3, a latrine/washroom was the only 

new building, but a demolition area was constructed there for practice with explosives. At 

A-5, OSS had constructed a 12 by 16 foot Boat House on the little lake on the South Fork 

of Quantico Creek for practice in water crossings and boat landings.112

 

The OSS understood that it would have to “obliterate” the facilities it had 

constructed for use of weaponry and explosives. The Special Use Permit granted to the 

War Department stipulated that “structures of a purely military technical nature” would 

be removed by the War Department and “the site restored as nearly as possible to its 

condition at the time of issuance of this permit.” The dangerous facilities to be 

“obliterated” and restored to prior condition included the Demolition Area, where 

trainees had practiced with explosives, the two brick or cinderblock magazines for storing 

ammunition, and outdoor pistol, rifle, and hand grenade ranges and a mortar range.113

Other military structures in Area A to be demolished were a “Mystery House” or “House 

of Horrors,” and three “Problem Houses.” The Problem Houses may have been used to 

pose particular challenges for the trainees to solve or they may have represented a village 

in enemy territory. The Mystery House contained a number of pop-up targets, resembling 

armed enemy soldiers, to test the trainee’s nerves and skill in instinctive pistol firing in 

frightening conditions.114

 

 

111 Capt. Stanley H. Lyson, S-4, Schools and Training, to Lt. Warner, undated [February 1945], subject: 

Data on Detachment A, OSS Records (RG 226), Entry 136, Box 153, Folder 1658; and Estimate #3, 

Estimated Prices Prepared by T. Sgt. John E. [sic] Gum, both attachments to Col. W.L. Rehm, Acting 

Assistant Director for Services, Strategic Services Unit (SSU), for the Director, to Commanding General, 

Army Service Forces, Mobilization Division, 19 October 1945, subject: Chopawamsic National 

Recreational Demonstration Area, Attachments #1, #2, and #3 in OSS Records (RG 226), Entry 146, Box 

8, Folder 199, National Archives II. 

112 The location of the Boat House is given variously as at A-2 and at A-5, but A-5 seems the most 

probable. Strickland, Prince William Forest Park, 36, states that the Army Corps of Engineers relocated the 

Boat House from Camp 5 to Camp 2. The Boat House location at A-2 and its dimensions are given in 

Capt. Stanley H. Lyson, S-4 [Supply], Schools and Training, to Lt. Warner, undated [February 1945], 

subject: Data on Detachment A, OSS Records (RG 226), Entry 136, Box 153, Folder 1658, National 

Archives II. But it is cited at A-5 and its construction cost of $300 is given in Estimate #1, Estimated Prices 

Prepared by Quartermaster Depot Office, Ft. Belvoir, Va., and again at A-5 in Estimate #3, Estimated 

Prices Prepared by T. Sgt. John E. [sic] Gum, both attachments to Col. W.L. Rehm, Acting Assistant 

Director for Services, Strategic Services Unit (SSU), for the Director, to Commanding General, Army 

Service Forces, Mobilization Division, 19 October 1945, subject: Chopawamsic National Recreational 

Demonstration Area, Attachments #1, #2, and #3 in OSS Records (RG 226), Entry 146, Box 8, Folder 199,

National Archives II. 

113 Capt. Stanley H. Lyson, S-4, Schools and Training, to Lt. Warner, undated [February 1945], subject: 

Data on Detachment A, OSS Records (RG 226), Entry 136, Box 153, Folder 1658, National Archives II. 

114 Estimate #3, Estimated Prices Prepared by T. Sgt. John E. [sic] Gum, attachment to Col. W.L. Rehm, 

Acting Assistant Director for Services, Strategic Services Unit (SSU), for the Director, to Commanding

General, Army Service Forces, Mobilization Division, 19 October 1945, subject: Chopawamsic National 
 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 509

Area C in Prince William Forest Park 

At the two sub-camps, C-1 and C-4, in Area C, the OSS Communications 

Training School, located in the eastern sector of Prince William Forest Park, formal 

training of any sort stopped prior to 1 October 1945, and the staff was ordered to prepare 

the camps for closing. Colonel Robinson expected that would be completed by 1 

November, and the personnel involved then reassigned or transferred.115 Sergeant Joseph 

J. Tully had been part of the C-1 cadre since his return from the London base station in 

November 1944. Years later, he remembered that in September 1945, he and a couple of 

the other enlisted men at Area C were kept busy transferring the remaining ammunition 

and weaponry from the magazine and arsenal at the training camp to the Corps of 

Engineers post at nearby Fort Belvoir, Virginia. “We made a trip every other day. A 

couple of guys would load up a truck—a two and a half ton—and take it over. We took 

over all the excess ammunition—small arms stuff and grenades—and weapons too, 

mostly ‘Tommy guns,’ rifles, and .45s.”116

Donovan’s organization had maintained and even improved existing National 

Park Service buildings at the two sub-camps in Area C. The Army winterized the 

buildings, made some changes to various lodgehalls, and dramatically upgraded the 

equipment and facilities at the mess halls and kitchens. In addition, the OSS erected 

several new wooden structures. At C-1, these included most prominently a radio repair 

shop, but also a radio transmitter building, a 25-man latrine/washroom, a guard house, 

two 8-by-8 foot sentry boxes, and an undesignated, portable wooden structure, 16 by 16 

feet, labeled simply, “Plywood Building,” which may have been a classroom. C-4 was 

the primary training area for the Communications Branch. There, the main new 

construction, much more extensive than at C-1, included a Recreation Hall, originally 

called a “Multi-Purpose Building,” which cost $24,000, and a Bachelor Officers’ 

Quarters, which cost $12,000. Other new structures included a 100-man 

latrine/washroom, three 16-by-16 foot “Plywood Buildings,” possibly serving as 

classrooms, and an addition to the mess hall. The Army had also brought in a 

prefabricated, metal Quonset Hut. To house even more trainees, the OSS provided 25 

combination wood and canvas tents, each holding four men, creating a so-called “tent 

city” capable of housing 100 men, for a total cost of $5,000. The “tent city” was 

dismantled, but most of the new wooden buildings were retained by the National Park 

Service. For weapons practice in Area C, the OSS had constructed a outdoor pistol range, 

a rifle range, and a hand grenade range. Like the magazine and arsenal, these weapons 

 

Recreational Demonstration Area, OSS Records (RG 226), Entry 146, Box 8, Folder 199, National 

Archives II. 

115 Col. H.L. Robinson to Director, Strategic Services Unit, War Department [Brig. Gen. John Magruder], 4

October 1945, subject: Report of Schools & Training Activities as of 1 October 1945, OSS Records (RG 

226), Records of the Director’s Office, Microfilm 1642, Roll 102, Frames 561-64, National Archives II.

116 Joseph J. Tully, telephone interview with the author, 29 December 2007. 
510 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 

ranges were to be totally obliterated before the facility was returned to the National Park 

Service.117 

Wartime Hazards and Mysteries in the Park 

To return Prince William Forest Park to the National Park Service, official 

procedure required that the Army first certify that Training Areas A and C were “surplus” 

property, that is, no longer needed by the Army. That process began on 16 October, when 

Lieutenant Colonel Ainsworth Blogg, former commander of Area B who had spent most 

of the war as Executive Officer of the Schools and Training Branch, informed the SSU 

Counsel’s Office that Areas A and C were being closed by the Schools and Training 

Branch and would be considered surplus to the branch’s needs as of 1 November 1945. 

Referring to the terms of the lease, Blogg reported that the areas’ “present condition is 

equal to or better than the condition when received by OSS. Certain changes in 

landscaping have been made which may not be desirable from the standpoint of the 

National Park Service and certain buildings have been constructed, and certain changes 

made in existing buildings, but by and large the property is in excellent condition.”118

Although the War Department subsequently declared the property surplus as of 1 

November 1945, a hitch occurred in returning the area to the National Park Service 

because of unexploded shells and other hazards that remained from the OSS use of the 

park.119 Colonel Blogg had declared that portions of the area could be used without 

limitation by the National Park Service “except for one area which was used for a mortar 

range and which contains unexploded shells.” Schools and Training Branch had 

requested the Corps of Engineers at Fort Belvoir for assist in a “decontamination of this 

area.”120 There were actually three abandoned mortar target ranges in Area A, and the 

process of getting Army Engineers with metal detectors to locate and remove unexploded 

shells, “duds,” or other hazardous items from those and other areas in the park had begun 

 

117 Col. W.L. Rehm, Acting Assistant Director for Services, Strategic Services Unit (SSU), for the 

Director, to Commanding General, Army Service Forces, Mobilization Division, 19 October 1945, subject:

Chopawamsic National Recreational Demonstration Area, Estimates #1, #2 and #3, in OSS Records (RG 

226), Entry 146, Box 8, Folder 199, National Archives II. 

118 Lt. Col. Ainsworth Blogg to General Counsel Office, SSU, 16 October 1945, subject: Liquidation of 

Areas “A” and “C,” OSS Records (RG 226), Entry 136, Wash S&T OP89, Box 174, Folder 1841, National 

Archives II. Blogg noted that the labor involved in removing the equipment as well as restoring the 

buildings and property to prewar condition would offset the limited salvage value of the equipment itself. 

119 Col. W.L. Rehm, Acting Assistant Director for Services, Strategic Services Unit (SSU), for the 

Director, to Commanding General, Army Service Forces, Mobilization Division, 19 October 1945, subject:

Chopawamsic National Recreational Demonstration Area, OSS Records (RG 226), Entry 146, Box 8, 

Folder 199, National Archives II. 

120 Lt. Col. Ainsworth Blogg to General Counsel Office, SSU, 16 October 1945, subject: Liquidation of 

Areas “A” and “C,” OSS Records (RG 226), Entry 136, Box 174, Folder 1841, National Archives II. 
 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 511

a year earlier in October 1944. Sergeant John Gum tried throughout 1945 to get the Post 

Engineer’s Office at Fort Belvoir to check Area A for “unexploded booby traps, antipersonnel mines, and dud mortar shells.”121 Colonel Robinson pressed the Engineers 

again in January1946.122 But was not until August 1946, NPS was able to obtain written 

assurance from the Army Engineers’ Bomb and Shell Disposal unit at Fort Belvoir that 

Areas A and C were “long since cleared” of unexploded mortar shells, grenades, boobytraps and other explosives.123

 

The area was returned to the National Park Service in 1946. However, 

occasionally over the following years, a “dud” shell, fragment, or other remnant from the 

OSS training in World War II, would be found in the park. Long after the war, NPS 

rangers part of a rifle-launched grenade in a building roof, the tip of a bazooka round in a 

mound of each, and most mysteriously, a giant stone with an iron pipe that looked like a 

gun barrel, protruding from it.124 This last may have been a mock tank for trainees to 

practice using destroying with bazookas or improvised devices such as “Molotov 

cocktails,” bottles filled with gasoline and a flaming cloth wick. 

Perhaps the strangest remnant that remained, at least temporarily, from the War 

Department’s occupation of Prince William Forest Park was an odd barrack-like building 

in the southeastern part of the park. Robert A. Noile was six years old when the OSS left 

in 1945. He grew up across Old Joplin Road, only 300 yards away from the park. 

Together with other neighborhood youngsters, including the children of Ira Lykes and 

John Gum, he frequently played in the park immediately after the war and for several 

years afterwards. The youngsters simply crossed the street and entered the park to play in 

the woods and the abandoned buildings. On hot days, they would swim in a big, lidless 

wooden water tower or in the lake. But what still puzzles Noile, now a ranger in one of 

the nearby county parks, is a weird, barrack-like building that they discovered. What 

made this structure unusual was that the floor and the walls up to the windows were 

covered inside with sheet metal. Similarly intriguing, there were carvings in German on 

the wooden frameworks around the windows. “We played in those barracks,” Noile 

 

121 Capt. James E. Rogers, commander, Detachment A, to Commanding General, Fort Belvoir, 19 October 

1944, subject: Range Clearance; and Lt. Stanley H. Lyson, to Commanding Officer, HQ Detachment, OSS, 

22 December 1944, subject: Request for Clearance of Dud [Mortar Shell] Field, Detachment “A” Mortar 

Range; and Lyson to Col. H.L. Robinson, 6 January 1945, subject: Dud Field Mortar Range Detachment A; 

and Maj. Robert C. Wright, memorandum, 29 January 1945; all in OSS Records (RG 226), Entry 136, Box 

153, Folder 1658, National Archives II. 

122 Col. H.L. Robinson to Capt. Howard J. Preston, 10 January 1946, subject: Chopawamsic National 

Recreational Demonstration Area, OSS Records (RG 226), Entry 146 General Counsel’s Office, Box 8, 

Folder 199, National Archives II. 

123 Colonel Blair to Frank T. Gartside, Superintendent, National Capital Parks, 21 August 1946, National 

Park Service Records (RG 79), File Number 1460/5, cited in Strickland, Prince William Forest Park, 29, 

as being in the Federal Records Center, Suitland, Md., but which seems to be no longer there. 

124 In the summer of 1985, for example, James Fugate, Chief of Maintenance at Prince William Forest 

Park, found a dead launching grenade in the roof of one of the cabins in Camp 3, Strickland, Prince 

William Forest Park, 30. In 2002, the empty propellant tip of an anti-tank missile, probably a bazooka 

rocket, was found on a ridge in the root mound of a recently fallen tree near Parking Lot “I.” Prince 

William Forest Park Archives, Cultural Resources, Catalog item number PRWI 13462. 
512 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 

remembered, “and we had no idea what that [metal sheathing] meant. We kept seeing 

carvings on the wood, names. We didn’t know German. I understand now that it was 

German, but we didn’t know [then] what it was.”125

 

No written record of such a structure has appeared, but a couple of different 

explanations of the use of such a building are plausible. One is that it was a simulated 

Nazi interrogation cell used in training spies and saboteurs to resist or escape or to test 

their abilities to withstand interrogation by the Gestapo. Another explanation is that after 

the OSS abandoned Area A in January 1945, German POWs might have been brought 

and housed there temporarily. Recent disclosures have revealed that the Army and Navy 

ran a super secret POW holding and interrogation facility (known only by as “P.O. Box 

1142”) for special prisoners—submarine crews or high ranking officers or scientists—not 

far away at Fort Hunt in Fairfax County, Virginia, in what is today part of the George 

Washington Memorial Parkway.126 Until more evidence becomes available, the function 

of the metal-sheathed room, long since demolished, at Prince William Forest Park 

remains a mystery. 

 

Return of the Park to the National Park Service in 1946 

 “After I was mustered out [of the Marines] in January 1946, I immediately went 

back to the job,” former Park Manager Ira Lykes recalled. “Of course, OSS had closed up 

and left a lot of fine development in some of the campgrounds, [but] they left an awful 

mess in some other places.”127 One day shortly after he returned, he was walking over a 

meadow, and he found “one whole field had signs all around it, ‘Do Not Cross—Mine 

Area.’ Well, I, of course, wondered immediately what to do. OSS had been 

disbanded....” Lykes drove to Fort Belvoir to see a colonel named Hogg, who had 

worked on the Alcan Highway to Alaska in World War II. The Park Manager wanted 

Hogg to remove them if they were still there, and he also asked whether the Army 

Engineers could help restore and improve the property, specifically whether they could 

build a network of internal roads to connect the cabin camps, because at the time it was a 

nine mile ride over external state roads to get, for example, from cabin camps that were 

actually not far apart in the northeastern and southeastern parts of the part. Lykes had 

 

125 Robert A. Noile, Triangle, Virginia, telephone interview with the author, 27 April 2007. His name is 

pronounced “No-LEE.” 

126 National Park Service, “Fort Hunt—the Forgotten Story,” 

http://www.nps.gov/archive/gwump/fohu/fortgotten.thm, accessed 15 August 2007; Petula Dvorak, “Fort 

Hunt’s Quiet Men Break Silence on WWII,” Washington Post, 6 October 2007, A1. I am indebted to 

Vincent Santucci, chief ranger at the NPS’s George Washington Memorial Parkway, for informing me of 

the material he and his rangers have uncovered concerning this long secret operation. Vincent Santucci, 

Arlington, Va,, telephone interview with the author, 22 August 2007. 

127 Ira B. Lykes, oral history interview with S. Herbert Evison, 23 November 1973, page 45, transcript in

the National Park Service’s Harpers Ferry Center Library, Harpers Ferry, W.Va. I am indebted to David 

Nathanson of the library for responding to my request for a copy of this transcript. 
 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 513

hoped the OSS would do this, but they had not. Now, however, Hogg agreed that the 

Army Engineers could complete that construction if Lykes could provide the materials. 

As part of the postwar combat training exercises, units of combat engineers from Fort 

Belvoir were being sent to nearby Fort A.P. Hill to build roads and bridges and other 

facilties. But afterwards, they would demolish them, so a new unit could do the same 

thing. This was wasteful and bad for morale, Hogg said, but if Lykes could rename the 

projects he wanted and link them to military missions, the Army engineers could build 

them. So Lykes ordered military roads and bridges and asked for a landing strip that 

would become a play field. A dam for a swimming pool was called an impoundment, a 

riding stable was termed an advance post, a watch tower was as an observation post. 

Lykes obtained $35,000 for materials the first year from the National Park 

Service, and the Army Engineers arrived in September 1946 and immediately went to 

work building roads, bridges, and dams and other facilities. As they worked, Lykes was 

surprised to see small planes fly overhead and drop bags of flour simulating bombs and 

shells and combat conditions. The Army Engineers often worked as fast as Lykes could 

mark out the projects. Many of these engineer troops were African-American soldiers 

and Lykes said that when they learned that the cabin camps in the northeast end of the 

park were for underprivileged black children from the capital, “believe me they really put 

their heart and soul in it, because they felt they were helping their own people and, most 

importantly, they knew that what they were doing was not going to be torn up by the next 

troop that came down, that it was going to stay. It was something lasting and something 

of value.”128 

This innovative partnership continued from 1946 until the outbreak of the Korean 

War in 1950. By February 1948, the Army Engineers had completed 47 miles of internal 

roads, plus trails, two bridges, an earth filled dam and swimming area, an administration 

building and traffic circle, a central service area and two ranger stations. They had also 

demolished unusable portable and temporary buildings left by the OSS near Cabin Camp 

4 and relocated the OSS-constructed Boat House from Cabin Camp 5 to Cabin Camp 

2.129 More work was done over the next two years, including a new entrance road, this 

one about a quarter of a mile from U.S. Route One. Lykes estimated that over the nearly 

four-year period, the labor and equipment used by the Corps of Engineers in this 

“practice work” would otherwise have cost the National Park Service well over one 

million dollars.130

 

 

128 Ibid., 45-50. In this 1973 interview, Lykes stated that original appropriation was $35,000. A decade later 

on 4 September 1985, in an interview with Susan Cary Strickland, an historian, Lykes remembered the 

amount as $25,000. Strickland, Prince William Forest Park, 34, 35. 

129 Ira Lykes to Irving Root, 20 February 1948, in Strickland, Prince William Forest Park, 36. 

130 Ira B. Lykes, oral history interview with S. Herbert Evison, 23 November 1973, pages 51-52, transcript 

in the National Park Service’s Harpers Ferry Center Library, Harpers Ferry, W. Va. In this 1973 interview, 

Lykes stated that he had calculated it one day and the National Park Service had gotten “over a million 

dollars worth of development” in the cooperative project with the Corps of Engineers. A decade later, on 4 

September 1985, in an interview with Susan Cary Strickland, an historian, Lykes remembered the amount

as $2 million. Strickland, Prince William Forest Park, 35. An official commendation in 1965, states that

over a two year period, the cooperation with the Corps of Engineers, “saved the Government almost 

$500,000.” Ira B. Lykes, Citation for Distinguished Service, signed by Secretary of the Interior Stewart L. 
514 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 

With the return of the park to civilian usage in 1946, Lykes had begun 

immediately to restore it, resume camping, and to give it a new name. Chopawamsic 

Recreational Demonstration Area now seemed archaic, cumbersome, and inappropriate 

as it was no longer an RDA but a permanent part of the National Park System. National 

Park Service officials concurred with the idea of a new name, but instead of Lykes’ 

suggestion of “Old Dominion” to link the park to the entire State of Virginia, they 

recommended naming it in honor of the county. Local authorities concurred, and on 20 

August 1948, the facility was renamed Prince William Forest Park.131

Chopawamsic Recreational Demonstration Area and its successor, Prince William 

Forest Park, were originally designed only for organized and extended group cabin 

camping, not for casual day usage. Until 1951, when the Pine Grove Picnic Area was 

constructed, there were no day use facilities in the park. During World War II, the park 

had been, of course, closed to the public while the OSS was there, but even after it 

reopened, there was little if any day usage. The few roads within the park were unpaved 

and made of practical if uninviting, rough gravel. The memory among local residents of 

the forbidden access during the war and the armed sentries, also surely deterred 

prospective visitors. If these were not enough, signs posted around the perimeter of the 

park after the war warned: “Federal Reservation: Closed except to persons holding 

camping permits.”132

 

The relationship of the park with the military and national security did not end in 

1946 when the NPS resumed control. The Army Engineers had helped with 

improvements from 1946 to 1950. In the early 1950s, when the Central Intelligence 

Agency expanded its covert operations and abandoned its use of Army training facilities, 

it briefly considered using the old OSS training area. In the opening months of 1951, 

during the massive military build-up that accompanied the Korean War, the CIA 

informed the National Park Service that it intended to take over the entire park as a 

training area. Opposition led by local civic leaders including the editor of the 

Washington Star and the district’s influential member of Congress, Representative 

Howard W. Smith, turned back the CIA’s bid to resume the training of spies, saboteurs, 

and other covert operators in the park.133 Instead, the CIA built its own training facility 

for clandestine services on ten thousand acres at Camp Peary, near Williamsburg, 

Virginia. 

 

Udall, 15 July 1965, copy in Ira B. Lykes, Personnel File, National Personnel Records Center, St. Louis, 

Mo., obtained by the author, 26 April 2007. 

131 Ira B. Lykes, oral history interview with S. Herbert Evison, 23 November 1973, pages 53-54, transcript 

in the National Park Service’s Harpers Ferry Center Library, Harpers Ferry, W.Va. 

132 Strickland, Prince William Forest Park, 47. 

133 Ibid., 100, note 110. 
 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 515

Relations with the Marine Corps 

Given its proximity to the U.S. Marine Corps Base in Quantico, Virginia, Prince 

William Forest Park has had a continuing relationship with the Marine Corps and its 

parent organization, the Department of the Navy. In World War I, Congress had 

appropriated funds for the Navy to purchase a site for a Marine Barracks not far from 

Washington, D.C. The site chosen was in the Virginia woodlands at Quantico, some 35 

miles south of the capital. The barracks were built and thousands of Marines were trained 

there in the First World War. By 1920, the facility was expanded to included a 

centralized officer training program, at the new Marine Corps Schools, which eventually 

developed into today’s Marine Corps University.134 

The National Park Service arrived at what would become Prince William Forest 

Park in 1935, and from the beginning consulted with officials at the Marine Corps base in 

regard to plans for the recreational area, because the park and the base shared a common 

boundary for a considerable distance. NPS and the USMC also worked together to find 

what Marine officials had called “mutually advantageous” ways to utilize these 

“contiguous areas under Federal control.”135 In 1938, for example, the Department of the 

Interior granted the Department of the Navy permission to build a dam and reservoir on 

the Chopawamsic Creek in the park land to store water for the Marine base. For the next 

few years, until it became unnecessary after the United States entered the war in 

December 1941, the Park Service provided permits for military training exercises by 

Marines on park land.136 

In World War II, the Marine Corps expanded dramatically, growing from 25,000 

officers and men in 1939 to 143,000 by mid-1942 and nearly 500,000 by the end of the 

war in 1945.137 As early as 1938, the Marines began conducting military maneuvers in 

the adjacent, NPS wood lands.138 After the declaration of war in December 1941, and the 

rapid growth of the Marine Corps, field maneuvers on the park lands became so frequent 

in May 1942, Park Manager Ira Lykes complained that the Marines “have assumed the 

right to enter upon the area without advising or even consulting this office.”139 At the 

same time, Lykes continued to maintain a cooperative relationship with the personnel of 

 

134 Allan R. Millett, Semper Fidelis: The History of the United States Marine Corps, rev. ed. (New York: 

Free Press, 1991), 284, 291,323-24. 

135 Lt. Col. Keller E. Rockey, USMC, to Charles H. Gerner, Assistant Superintendent, National Park 

Service, 24 June 1935, NPS Records (RG 79), National Archives II, copy in Prince William Forest Park 

archive. In World War II, Major General Rockey commanded the 5th Marine Division at Iwo Jima. 

136 Strickland, Prince William Forest Park, 53-54. 

137 Millett, Semper Fidelis, 344. 

138 Arthur Demaray to Lt. Col. R. Valliant, 31 August 1938, NPS Records (RG 79), Box 121, National 

Archives II. 

139 Ira Lykes, Monthly Report, May 1942, quoted in Strickland, Prince William Forest Park: An 

Administrative History (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 1986), 25. 
516 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 

the Marine base. He emphasized the park’s recreational value to military personnel, 

including fishing in its well stocked streams and ponds.140 In the hot, dry summer of 

1942, Lykes voluntarily taught Marines the latest techniques in fighting forest fires so 

they could more effectively control fires when they began in the woodlands of their 

reservation.141 

During most of the war, Lykes actually served in the Marine Corps while 

continuing his now limited responsibilities at the park, which, since it was occupied by 

the OSS, was closed to the public for the duration. Maj. Gen. Philip H. Torrey, 

commanding officer at Quantico, obtained a commission for Lykes as a first lieutenant in 

the Marines and an appointment to serve at the Marine Base at Quantico as a provost 

marshal or security officer, particularly responsible for the forestry program, for the 

prevention or control of fire on some 94,000 wooded acres of the Marine base. That 

included approximately 5,000 acres of the park land south of Joplin Road that the 

Marines used as an extension of their base during the war and declined after the war to 

relinquish it to the park service. That was an area, Lykes later recalled, that the Marines 

called the “Guadalcanal Area” after the fierce jungle battles with the Japanese on the 

Pacific Island of Guadalcanal in the winter of 1942-43. The Marines had 13 firing ranges, 

mockup villages, and other installations for field exercises.142 The little village of Joplin, 

a hamlet with a general store and a schoolhouse, near the intersection of old Joplin Road 

and Breckinridge Road, was torn down by the Marine Corps. All that remained is a 

cement slab, the foundation for the old schoolhouse, and some of the big oak trees.143 

Assigned to active duty on 3 April 1943, Lykes reported directly to the Commanding 

General of the Marine Barracks, Quantico, for what was called Engineering duty. The 

National Park Service officially put Lykes on furlough due to military service.144 But 

because the base and the park were adjacent, Lykes, as he later recalled, could “serve two 

masters.”145

 

Lykes remained at his new duties with the Marines on weekdays during the war, 

but he would resume his responsibilities as manager of the park on weekends. As 

indicated in Chapter Seven, Lykes remained in the park manager’s house just south of 

 

140 Ira Lykes, Monthly Report, 1941, cited in Strickland, Prince William Forest Park, 26. 

141 Ira Lykes, Monthly Report, November 1942, cited in Strickland, Prince William Forest Park, 25-26. 

142 Ira B. Lykes, oral history interview with S. Herbert Evison [one of his former supervisors], 23 

November 1973, pages 42-43, transcript in the National Park Service’s Harpers Ferry Center Library, 

Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. Lykes apparently misremembered the number of acres south of Joplin Road,

it was approximately 5,000 acres. Bob Hickman, Superintendent, Prince William Forest Park, telephone 

conversation with the author, 11 August 2008. 

143 Robert A. Noile, Triangle, Va., telephone interview with the author, 27 April 2008. Born in 1939, Noile 

grew up in a house on old Joplin Road 300 yards from the park. 

144 Frank Gartside, Assistant Superintendent, National Capital Parks, National Park Service, to Ira B. 

Lykes, 13 September 1943, subject: Furlough (military duty), copy in Ira B. Lykes, Personnel File, 

obtained by the author 26 April 2007 from the National Personnel Records Center, St. Louis, Mo. 

145 Ira B. Lykes to Susan C. Strickland, 8 September 1985, quoted in Strickland, Prince William Forest 

Park, 26. 
 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 517

Joplin Road for the duration of the war, and he maintained social and professional 

relations with the commanding officers of the OSS training camps, such as Capt. Arden 

Dow at Area A and Maj. Albert Jenkins at area C, as well as the Marine Corps, Maj. Gen. 

Phillip Torrey. Lykes kept an eye on the park property, the area north of Joplin Road 

being occupied by the OSS and south of that road being used by the Marine Corps. 

During weekdays, the sole administrative employee of the park was Ms. Thelma 

Williams, Lykes’ secretary. She worked in a one-room temporary headquarters for the 

park off Joplin Road. Sharing the office with her was a clerical employee of the OSS, a 

secretive man, who Lykes reported was given to drink. Thelma Williams would fill 

Lykes in on the week’s developments when he returned to the office at the end of each 

week.146

At the end of the war, the Marine Corps relieved Captain Lykes from active duty 

and put him on terminal leave on 3 December 1945, and he returned to his former 

position as park manager with NPS on that date, more than a month before his terminal 

leave from the Marines ended and he received a Certificate of Honorable Discharge from 

the Marine Corps on 21 January 1946. In fact, by that time, he had already been back at 

work at the park fulltime since the beginning of December 1945.147

Expansion of the Marine Base into the Park 

The Marine Corps’ wartime expansion of a force of 500,000 was accompanied by 

major enlargement of the Marine base at Quantico. What had started out in 1917 as a 

base covering five miles of forest bordering the Potomac River, had grown during the 

next several decades to a vast military reservation and training area covering nearly 100 

square miles and a community of more than 12,000 military and civilian personnel, 

including families.148 That expansion led to a rather longstanding controversy about 

control over the southern area of the park. At issue were 4,862 acres south of Route 619, 

the old Joplin Road. As the Marine base expanded during World War II and acquired 

some 50,420 acres west of U.S. Route 1, it also sought utilization for training purposes of 

the 4,862-acre tract of adjoining park land south of Route 619. That part of the park had 

never been developed for recreation and had preserved as a wilderness by NPS with only 

a one-room temporary office and a small maintenance area in it.149 Talks between Marine 

Corps’ generals and National Park Service officials over the tract began as early as 1941, 

 

146 Susan C. Strickland interview with Thelma Williams Hebda, 15 Juy 1985, and Ira B. Lykes to Frank 

Gartside, 31 May 1943, both cited in Strickland, Prince William Forest Park, 26-27. Thelma Williams 

later married a park employee, Joseph Hebda. 

147 Irving C. Root, Superintendent, National Capital Parks, National Park Service, to Ira B. Lykes, 6 

December 1945, copy in Ira B. Lykes, Personnel File, obtained by the author 26 April 2007 from the 

National Personnel Records Center, St. Louis, Mo. 

148 “Marine Corps Base Quantico,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_Corps_Base_Quantico. Accessed 5 

January 2008. 

149 Strickland, Prince William Forest Park, 55-54. 
518 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 

and by 1943, when the park north of Route 619 was already being used by the OSS, the 

Marines were actively utilizing the park land south of Route 619. Park Manager Lykes 

had conversations with some Marine generals in which the possibility of the Marine 

Corps purchasing and adding to the park, approximately 1,900 acres of Quantico Creek 

watershed lands west of the park in exchange for a like amount in the wilderness tract on 

the Chopawamsic Creek watershed in the south part of the park being added to the 

Marine Corps Reservation.150 The National Park Service worked on a land transfer 

agreement. Due to wartime needs, and in anticipation of such an exchange and permanent 

agreement, the Marine Corps was issued a temporary permit in 1943 to use the entire 

4,862 acre-tract of park land south of Route 619 for the duration of the war plus six 

months.151 

During the war, the Marines used the Park Service tract south of Route 619 for 

military field exercises, lumbering, and other operations, but although the 1943 

agreement was technically terminated in 1946, the entire tract of nearly 5,000 acres 

appeared to be a fixture of the Marine Corps Schools. Negotiations began at the level of 

the Secretaries of the Interior and the Navy by their respective legal and real estate 

divisions, but the talks soon broke down.152 They resumed, however, and reached an 

agreement. Based on that agreement, Congress, on 22 June 1948, Congress adopted 

Public Law 736. The 1948 legislation authorized the transfer of nearly 5,000 acres of 

park land to the Navy to be used by the Marines; it also authorized up to $10,000 for the 

purchase of 1,500 acres of privately owned land in and around the park; and it provided 

for the transfer to the park of 1,139 acres that the War Department had purchased during 

the war.153 Although the War Department’s land was transferred to the park, the $10,000 

for the purchase of additional park lands was never appropriated, and consequently, the 

transfer agreement between the park and the Marine base was not carried through. Instead 

of resolving the issue, the law itself became the subject of continuing dispute between the 

Navy and Interior departments, which disagreed over questions of jurisdiction, funding, 

and the special use permit that had been granted to the Marine Corps during the war.154 

The dispute would continue long after Park Superintendent Ira Lykes left Prince 

William Forest Park in 1951. Lykes left to become superintendent of Shiloh National 

Military Park, at the site of the Civil War Battle of Shiloh, at Pittsburgh Landing, 

Tennessee. There in addition to managing the national park and cemetery he raised funds 

 

150 Acting Secretary of the Interior E.K. Burlew to Secretary of the Navy, 27 May 1941, copy in the Prince 

William Forest Park archives, Triangle, Va.. 

151 Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal to Acting Secretary of the Interior Abe Fortas, 12 June 1943, 

cited in Strickland, Prince William Forest Park, 57. 

152 Strickland, Prince William Forest Park, 58-59. 

153 Public Law 736, June 11, 1948, 80th Congress, 2nd Session. It originated as H.R. 6246 sponsored by Rep. 

Howard Smith. Copy of the act as well as well as House and Senate Reports and interdepartmental 

correspondence relating to it from White House Bill File, Harry S Truman Papers, Harry S Truman 

Presidential Library, Independence, Mo. I am indebted to Robert Hickman, superintendent at Prince 

William Forest Park, for sending me copies of these documents, 11 January 2008. 

154 Strickland, Prince William Forest Park, 60-61. 
 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 519

for and produced and directed an award winning documentary film, Shiloh—Portrait of a 

Battle. In 1956, he was assigned to NPS headquarters, where he served in the park 

planning office as chief of the Park Practice Program, established to expand aspects of 

the park and recreation program. He retired in1963, but was called back to continue that 

work. When his wife, Betty, died in 1968, Lykes sold their home in West Springfield, 

Virginia, and moved to Lake City, Florida, where he taught classes at the Forest Ranger 

School there and Lake City Junior College.155 

Resolving a Half Century Jurisdictional Dispute 

The dispute between the Marine Corps Base and Prince William Forest Park over 

the southern part of the park south of old Joplin Road continued for half a century. The 

Marine Corps continued to use the nearly 5,000 acre special use permit tract. But the 

National Park Service, claiming that the Navy Department had not fulfilled an obligation 

to purchase and transfer some 1,500 to 1,900 acres surrounding the park in exchange for 

the southern part it had occupied, declined to provide the Marine Corps with permanent 

legal jurisdiction over the contested tract of 4,862 acres south of old Joplin Road. There 

were several attempts at solutions, one a personal attempt at a compromise by NPS 

Director George B. Hartzog, Jr., but advocates of all or nothing on both sides defeated 

such attempts at a compromise solution.156 By the 1980s, after the new Interstate 95 had 

opened up the area to commercial development, it was clear that soaring property values 

had made prohibitively expensive any acquisition and donation of land by the Navy to the 

National Park Service. 

Robert (“Bob”) Hickman became superintendent at Prince William Forest Park in 

October 1994. He had been a member of the Park Service since 1973, and had been site 

manager of NPS section of the Baltimore-Washington Parkways from 1984 to 1992. In 

1987, he has served as acting Chief Ranger and Assistant Superintendent at Catoctin 

Mountain Park.157 At Prince William Forest Park, Hickman found that the contested 

jurisdiction issue took up more of his time than anything else. “We began to explore each 

option again,” he said. “We went to the Marine Corps to see if they would be interested 

in dividing the property in the spirit of the 1948 law—1,500 to 1,700 acres for the park, 

and the Marine Corps to get the rest,” Hickman recalled.” The Corps was interested. 

Negotiations started with Brigadier General Edwin C. Kelley, Jr. and concluded with his 

 

155 Documents including, A.E. Damaray, director NPS, to Ira B. Lykes, 27 July 1951, subject: Promotion 

and Transfer [to Shiloh National Military Park] and [name unclear] Acting Personnel Director to Ira B.

Lykes, 8 August 1968, subject: Resignation, copies in Ira B. Lykes, Personnel File, obtained by the author 

26 April 2007 from the National Personnel Records Center, St. Louis, Mo. 

156 George B. Hartzog, Jr., Battling for the National Parks (Mt. Kisco, N.Y.: Moyer Bell Ltd., 1988), 134-

137. 

157 Robert Hickman, biographical sketch, copy in Prince William Forest Park archives. I am indebted to 

George Liffert, Assistant Superintendent of the park, for providing me with this information. George Liffert 

email to the author, 7 January 2008. 
520 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 

successor, Brigadier General Frances C. Wilson. On 10 March 1998 in Lejeune Hall on 

the Marine Corps Base, she and Hickman signed a breakthrough Memorandum of 

Understanding.158

Emphasizing mutual goals of both the park and the base and providing a scenario 

of future actions to achieve these, the Memorandum of Understanding of 1998 sought to 

settle the land issue by fulfilling the 1948 legislation without any cost to the government 

and to resolve the longstanding dispute over boundary and jurisdictional issues. Shifting 

to cooperation, representatives of the park and the base agreed to develop the watersheds 

jointly, keep the clearing of forests to a minimum, and provide joint recreational use of 

Breckinridge Reservoir and along mutual border, including development of a “Green 

Corridor,” a strip extending 300 feet on either side of Route 619, which runs between the 

park and the base.159 In addition to jointly addressing common concerns, the parties 

understood that they would resolve the jurisdictional dispute by splitting the contested 

acreage. Park Service would regain complete public use of a sizable block of property 

south of old Joplin Road (Route 619), and the Marine Corps would receive permanent 

jurisdiction over lands to the east, south and west of that property.160 

With the two federal entities now in agreement, Congress authorized the transfer 

of jurisdiction over the land, and President George W. Bush signed the authorization into 

law in December 2002.161 Under the actual jurisdictional transfer agreement signed 

between the two federal entities in August 2003 and made effective 22 September 2003, 

the jurisdictional confusion perpetuated by the half-century old dispute was finally 

resolved. In effect, the park gained or regained full jurisdiction over about 1,700 acres 

south of old Joplin Road (Virginia Route 1619) that it had lost to the Marine base as a 

result of World War II. The Marines kept nearly 3,400 acres.162 “The Marines under 

 

158 Robert Hickman, Superintendent of Prince William Forest Park, telephone interview with the author, 24

January 2008, and email to the author, 25 January 2008. for a photograph of the signing by Hickman and 

Wilson in Lejeune Hall on the Marine Corps base, see “Coming to an Understanding,” Quantico Sentry, 13 

March 1998, clipping in the Archives of Prince William Forest Park, Triangle, Va. 

159 “Memorandum of Understanding: A Memorandum of Understanding between Prince William Forest 

Park and Marine Corps Base, Quantico,” 10 March 1998, reprinted in “Prince William Forest Park, General 

Management Plan, February 1999,” pp. 37-40, copy in the Archives of Prince William Forest Park, 

Triangle, Va. 

160 Robert Hickman, Superintendent of Prince William Forest Park, Triangle, Va., telephone interview with

the author, 24 January 2008, and email to the author, 25 January 2008. 

161 Public Law 107-314 (H.R. 4546), Section 2835, signed into law by President George W. Bush, Dec. 2, 

2002. 

162 “Agreement to Transfer Administrative Jurisdiction of Land,” effective 22 September 2003, signed on 

18 August 2003 by Robert S. Hickman and Terry R. Carlstrom for the NPS and on 22 August 2003 by 

Brig. Gen. Joseph Composto for the Marine Corps. Signed copies of the agreement included with Col. J.M. 

Lowe, USMC, to Robert Hickman, NPS, 21 November 2003, copy in the Archives of Prince William 

Forest Park, Triangle, Va. In effect, the final agreement provided for the Marine base to transfer 

jurisdiction to the park of 352 acres of land that the Marines had purchased from private owners but would 

now be in the park area. The park transferred jurisdiction to the Marine base of 3,398 acres south and west 

of the park that the Marines had been using for decades. The special use permit for the Marines to operate 

on park land was nullified, and 1,346 acres of the park south of old Joplin Road, which the Marines had 

occupied since World War II, were relinquished by the Marines and recognized to be part of the park. 
 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 521

the1948 legislation were to receive 5,000 acres,” Bob Hickman said in reflecting on the 

agreement. “Instead the park retained lands and gained their full use for the public, and 

gained some Marine Corps’ land, and the Marines received 3,398 acres that they could 

use exclusively for their purposes. And a confusing patchwork of jurisdictions was 

simplified to a point which each agency could pursue its mission more effectively.”163 

Prince William Forest Park Today 

Prince William Forest Park continued to evolve in the decades after the war. 

Especially since the 1960s, its mission had grown from preservation and group camping 

to include day use. Organized camping resumed immediately after the war, but the 

subsequent transformation into an increasingly suburban area and the large number of 

daily visitors, led to a new and equal emphasis on day-use facilities. Ira Lykes’s 

successors as park superintendent shifted the emphasis away from long term organized 

camping in permanent structures for a few character building organizations toward 

facilities for tent camping, hiking, motoring, picnicking, fishing, canoeing, and 

swimming for larger numbers of users. The result was the creation of an internal scenic 

driving looping through the park, picnic grounds, tent campgrounds, a nature center, and 

a Visitor Center.164

 

In 2007, nearly 250,000 visitors a year came to Prince William Forest Park, which 

under Park Superintendent Robert Hickman continued to offer day usage as well as 

overnight camping in the cabin camps and in a concession operated trailer park. In 

addition, the park has preserved one of the largest representative samples of Piedmont 

Forest in the National Park Service. It also acts as a sanctuary for many different kinds of 

plants, animals, birds and other forms of wildlife, and it protects most of the Quantico 

Creek watershed. 

More than 150 of the 250 structures in the park are listed on the National Register 

of Historic Places, some of them constructed by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 

1930s and some by the Office of Strategic Services in World War II. The Visitor Center 

includes information about the Prince William Forest Park for the tens of thousands of 

visitors who stop by each year. There is information about camping and recreational 

usage of the park, material about the resources of the park, its physical characteristics, its 

flora and fauna. There is also material about the history of the area from prehistoric times 

 

163 Robert Hickman, superintendent of Prince William Forest Park, Triangle, Va., telephone interview with

the author, 24 January 2008, and email to the author, 25 January 2008. Hickman added that throughout the 

negotiations that led to the final transfer, he had the active support of the directors NPS’s National Capital 

Region, sequentially, Bob Stanton, Terry Carlstrom, and Joe Lawler, and they had worked with several 

commanding officers at the Marine Base, including not simply Generals Martin R. Steele, Edwin Kelley, 

and Frances Wilson but also Brig. Gen. Leif Hendrickson and Brig. Gen. Joseph Composto. Providing 

continuity and cooperation throughout from the Marine Corps were attorney, Penny Clark, and base 

community relations officer, Ken Oliver. 

164 Strickland, Prince William Forest Park, 83-92. 
522 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 

when Native Americans used the natural resources in the park to the present day. The 

visitor’s center also contains materials and artifacts concerning the history of the park 

itself. It begins with its founding as the Chopawamsic Recreational Demonstration Area 

in the 1930s. The World War II role of the park is visually represented through a number 

of artifacts—radios, codebooks photographs, and some mortar shell fragments —as well 

as a plaque provided by the OSS Communications Branch Veterans to commemorate the 

OSS communications school at Area C. All of this helps to inform visitors of the park’s 

role as a site for training of OSS special operations personnel, secret intelligence agents, 

and radio operators during the war. For as this study has indicated, the wartime use of 

Prince William Forest Park in Virginia—by the OSS and by the Marine Corps—had 

important impacts on the park itself as well as on the American victory in World War II. 

Returning Catoctin Mountain Park to the NPS 

OSS Training Area B, which had provided Basic Special Operations courses in 

1942 and 1943 and advanced Operational Group courses in 1943-1944, had been 

abandoned as a training camp by the OSS on 20 February 1944.165 But other wartime 

users replaced the OSS at Catoctin Mountain Park. A new Special Use Permit was issued 

by Acting Secretary of the Interior Abe Fortas on 31 May 1944 authorizing the use “for 

war purposes” of the two cabin camps (Camps Nos.1 and 2) and the old CCC work 

camp, as well as 1,800 acres in the undeveloped northwest portion of the park. The 

undeveloped area would be used by Army trainees at Military Intelligence Training 

Center at Camp Ritchie as well as the Marines who remained at Cabin Camp No. 1 

(Misty Mount) to provide security for the Presidential Retreat. Camp Ritchie was 

overcrowded, and the initial idea was for some of its trainees to be accommodated at 

Camp No. 2 (Greentop), but that never occurred as Ritchie’s housing problem had 

ended.166 Neither Cabin Camp No. 2 nor the CCC Camp buildings (Round Meadow) 

were occupied by the Army after 31 May 1944 except by two or three soldiers assigned 

as a fire guar. Occasionally in 1944 and 1945, small continents of intelligence trainees 

from Ritchie conducted day or night maneuvers in the undeveloped northwest section of 

the park, but that stopped in the summer of 1945. Catoctin Park Manager Garland B. 

(“Mike”) Williams reported that in August 1945, that the Army said it had no further use 

 

165 Acting Secretary of the Interior Abe Fortas to Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, 31 May 1944; and to

Secretary of War Robert L. Patterson, 4 October 1945, in “World War II Correspondence,” Catoctin 

Mountain Park Archives, Catoctin Mountain Park Headquarters, Thurmont, Md. 

166 Acting Secretary of the Interior Abe Fortas, Special Use Permit Authorizing Use of Land in the Catoctin 

Recreational Demonstration Area, Maryland, by the War Department, for war purposes, 31 May 1944; 

accepted by Acting Secretary of War Robert P. Patterson, 15 July 1944, Special Use Permits Folder, 

Catoctin Mountain Park Archives, World War II, located at Catoctin Mountain Park Headquarters, 

Thurmont, Md. 
 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 523

for the park and intended to declare it surplus property and return it to the National Park 

Service.167

With the end of the war and the end of the OSS in October 1952, Mike Williams 

moved quickly to have the park restored to its normal condition under the lease 

agreement. Unlike Ira Lykes or John Gum at Prince William Forest Park, Mike Williams 

had remained a civilian in the National Park Service throughout the war. At 55 in 1945, 

Williams had served as fulltime custodian of the park throughout the war.168 At the end of 

the war, he resumed management of the property. That meant deciding what wartime 

changes to keep and which to eliminate, and to get the Army and the Marines to fix up or 

otherwise restore the facilities they had used. Even as Williams began this task, however, 

he suffered a setback. His residence, the Park Manager’s House originally built in 1939, 

burned to the ground on 21 October 1945, the result of a chimney fire.169 Williams, his 

wife, Grace, and their three sons moved temporarily to a house on east Main Street in 

nearby Thurmont.170 The Park Manager’s Residence, now called Quarters 1, was rebuilt 

and reoccupied by the Williams family in 1947. It still exists today behind the Visitor 

Center.171

Wartime occupation of the park by the OSS had an important impact on Catoctin 

Mountain Park. For security purposes, the Army had added obtained 288 additional acres 

to the park’s original 9,832 acres.172 Mike Williams reported favorably in October 1945 

on a number of improvements the OSS had made. It had winterized Cabin Camp No. 2 

(Greentop), the buildings being sealed overhead and along the side walls with plaster 

board. It had installed a large forced-air heater for the central wash house. But, there were 

also changes that Williams said were of no use, or even dangerous, in regard to the 

civilian use of the park. The Army Engineers would have to eliminate these and restore 

the sites to their prewar conditions. A demolition area with bulldozed surface and its 

protective embankment and observation pits was one of these, so were the obstacle 

 

167 G.B. Williams, custodian, Catoctin RDA, to Director, NPS Region One, memorandum, 19 October 

1945, “World War II Correspondence,” Catoctin Mountain Park Archives, Catoctin Mountain Park 

Headquarters, Thurmont, Md. 

168 Garland B. Williams was born December 17, 1893, photostatic copy of birth certificate, plus other 

documents related to Willliams’ continuing role as custodian of Catoctin Recreational Demonstration Area 

during the war, all in Garland B. Williams Personnel File, National Personnel Records Center, St. Louis, 

Mo., obtained by the author, 8 February 2005. 

169 Handwritten note [by historian Barbara Kirkconnell?], “21 Oct. ’45” located in World War II Records,

Correspondence Folder, Catoctin Mountain Park Archives, Catoctin Mountain Park Headquarters, 

Thurmont, Md. 

170 James H. Mackley, Thurmont, Md., telephone interview with the author, 13 June 2006. Mackley, a 

lifelong resident of Thurmont, was born there in 1929. 

171 The Visitor Center was originally built in 1941. 

172 U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Real Estate Branch, map 26 May 1942, “Government Property, Catoctin 

Area,” National Park Service Records (RG 79), Office of the Chief Counsel, Legislative Files, 1932-1950, 

Box 76, National Archives II. This report indicated that the War Department had acquired 275 acres, 

perhaps not including the acreage leased from the Church of the Brethren. 
524 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 

course, and the outdoor pistol and rifle ranges. A number of military-related wooden 

structures would have to be removed, including the “trainazium” resembling a giant 

“jungle gym” and “Dan” Fairbairn’s “House of Horrors.” As a result of OSS 

demonstrations of heavy explosives in one section of the park, a vacant, old house had 

collapsed, and wreckage needed to be taken away.173

Condition of the park roads, mostly gritty dirt roads, had long concerned Mike 

Williams. They were susceptible to serious erosion, even washouts from sustained heavy 

rains, and they suffered even more under the heavy vehicular traffic of the military, both 

the OSS and the Marines. Williams emphasized the need for improvements, particularly 

on the narrow, twisting graveled road between Thurmont and Hagerstown. When he 

could not get help from the military, he worked with local, state, and federal authorities to 

convert it into a modern highway. Through a federal-state program, Williams was able to 

get construction started in the spring of 1944 on what would become State Route 77. 174

Army Engineers had the responsibility for restoring the area to the condition at 

the time the War Department had it taken over in 1942, or to the satisfaction of the 

National Park Service. The first thing that Williams wanted when the war ended was to 

make sure that park was safe. That meant ensuring that all remaining booby-traps, mines 

and unexploded munitions, most of them in the undeveloped northwestern quadrant, were 

eliminated. By the end of September 1945, the Post Engineer at Camp Ritchie, certified 

the area as “decontaminated.”175 To ensure safety of the civilians who would use the 

park, Williams insisted on personally inspecting the area, which he did in February 1946, 

accompanied by a Bomb and Shell Disposal Team. No unexploded munitions were 

found, and the area was deemed safe for public recreational use.176 In 2000, however, a 

mortar round was found in the undeveloped northwest area, and as a result, the Corps of 

Engineers began a new series of field studies.177

At the end of World War II, the Army classified Cactoctin Mountain Park as 

“surplus to the War Department needs,” effective 31 October 1945. Withdrawing the 

handful of fire guards, the Army officially abandoned Catoctin Mountain Park. Mike 

 

173 G.B. Williams, custodian, Catoctin RDA, to Director, NPS Region One, memorandum, 19 October 

1945, and 7 March 1946 memo from Williams to Director Region One, both located in World War II 

Records, Correspondence Folder, Catoctin Mountain Park Archives, Catoctin Mountain Park 

Headquarters, Thurmont, Md. 

174 Catoctin Enterprise, 28 January 1944, and 2 June 1944, cited in Edmund F. Wehrle, Catoctin Mountain 

Park: A Historic Resource Study (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 2000), 209-210. 

175 Post Engineer’s report of 25 September 1945, in Lt. Col. F.B. Grider, Army Services Forces, Third 

Service Command, to Division Engineer, Middle Atlantic Division, 11 October 1945, subject: Excess OffPort Facility: Catoctin Recreational Demonstration Area, located in World War II Records, General 

Information Folder, Catoctin Mountain Park Archives, Catoctin Mountain Park Headquarters, Thurmont, 

Md. 

176 Lt. Charles E. Spears, Detachment 6 of the 9800th TSU-CE Bomb & Shell Disposal Team, Blue Ridge 

Summit, Pa., to Real Estate Officer, Middle Atlantic Division, Corps of Engineers, 4 March 1946 and G.B. 

Williams to NPS Regional Director, 5 March 1946, both in World War II File, General Information Folder, 

Catoctin Mountain Park Archives, Catoctin Mountain Park Headquarters, Thurmont, Md. 

177 Mel Poole, Superintendent, Catoctin Mountain Park, to the author, February 2008.
 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 525

Williams accompanied Army Engineers as they covered the area and inspected all 

buildings and other structures used by the OSS. The Engineers prepared estimates for 

removing the military structures that Williams deemed were unsuitable and for clearing 

and grading the demolition areas, magazine, pistol and rifle range ‘trainazium,” “House 

of Horrors,” taking away the wreckage of the destroyed vacant house, and for general 

cleanup of the area. The cost was estimated at nearly $41,000, almost as much as their 

original construction. 178 Williams asked the Corps of Engineers what the Army intended 

to do with the buildings and equipment in the old CCC work camp, and he was delighted 

to learn that the Army Engineers considered it to be the property of the National Park 

Service. Although it was not suitable for a group camp, the CCC camp could benefit the 

NPS management of the park in a number of ways.179

A Restoration Survey of the “Catoctin Training Center” by the Army Engineers in 

October 1945 listed the changes that had OSS had made at the park and what the 

Engineers, in consultation with Park Manager Mike Williams, estimated needed to be 

done to restore the area while keeping the changes that the NPS would accept.180

Williams accepted a number of the new buildings and improvements at Camp No. 2 

(Greentop) as well as the CCC work camp, particularly the winterizing, and 

improvements in the mess hall and kitchen facilities. He also accepted the replacement of 

chemical toilets with flush toilets in several barrack as well as the construction of a 

25,000-gallon concrete water reservoir with wooden roof, a pumping station and water 

lines, additions to the waste disposal facilities, including an 8’ by 18’ by 10’ concrete 

septic tank, a pump house and 7,500 feet of sewer lines.181 The Army Engineers noted 

that in regard to eliminations Williams wanted made to Camp No. 2 (Greentop), since the 

Army’s use of that facility had been terminated in October 1945 so that it could be 

reassigned, at least temporarily to the Marines, it was not clear whether the Army or the 

Marines should be required to make that restoration.

182

 

 

178 War Department, [name of bureau unclear in photocopy, United States Remainder Office?], 

“Restoration Survey Catoctin Training Center, Thurmont, Maryland,” 31 October 1945, located in World 

War II Records, General Information Folder, Catoctin Mountain Park Archives, Catoctin Mountain Park 

Headquarters, Thurmont, Md. 

179 G.B. Williams, custodian, Catoctin RDA, to Director, NPS Region One, memorandum, 19 October 

1945, located in World War II Records, Correspondence Folder, Catoctin Mountain Park Archives, 

Catoctin Mountain Park Headquarters, Thurmont, Md. 

180 War Department, [name of bureau unclear in photocopy, United States Remainder Office?], 

“Restoration Survey Catoctin Training Center, Thurmont, Maryland,” 31 October 1945, located in World 

War II Records, General Information Folder, Catoctin Mountain Park Archives, Catoctin Mountain Park 

Headquarters, Thurmont, Md. 

181 Ibid. 

182 Ibid. 
526 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 

Marines Move Up to Greentop 

With NPS’s permission, the Marine Corps’ security detail for the Presidential 

Retreat had moved up the hill in January 1946 from Cabin Camp No. 1 (Misty Mount) to 

Cabin Camp No. 2 (Greentop), which the War Department had declared surplus. The 

move to Greentop was a result of the Corps’ need for places of rest and rehabilitation for 

survivors of the bloody fighting on Iwo Jima and Okinawa. The Marine Corps said the 

“cool, quiet, and healthy environment” of Catoctin Mountain Park seemed ideal.183

Williams heartily approved the idea, particularly because since the OSS had stopped 

using Camp No. 2 in early 1944, the condition of the facilities without any maintenance 

or rehabilitation by the Army was “rapidly deteriorating.” Since they moved into the park 

in June 1942, the Marines had kept Cabin Camp No. 1 (Misty Mount) in excellent 

condition and made many improvements there, winterizing the camp, constructing a 

repair garage and a combination recreation hall and movie theater, and keeping all the 

buildings maintained and in excellent repair.184

 

Both the Secret Service and the White House were agreeable to the Marines 

occupying Camp No. 2 (Greentop). Consequently, in mid-September 1945, 

representatives of NPS and the Marine Corps met and agreed on terms of a new use 

permit. Signed on 4 October 1945 by Acting Secretary of the Interior Abe Fortas, the 

agreement revoked the May 1944 “war purposes” permit and granted a Special Use 

Permit authorizing the Marine Corps to use Cabin Camp No. 2 (Greentop) for 

“rehabilitation and security purposes.” The new permit for the Marines extended through 

1 May 1947, subsequently revocable by the Secretary of the Interior.185 

On a cold January 5th in 1946, the Marines vacated Camp No. 1 (Misty Mount) 

and moved up the hill to Camp No. 2 (Greentop). During the previous six weeks, Marines 

had come up to Camp No. 2, re-stained the buildings, repaired windows and doors, 

replaced worn-out plumbing, installed a new power line, and cleared the camp area and 

vicinity of dead and downed timber resulting from two severe sleet storms the previous 

 

183 The Marines suffered 45,000 casualties on the two islands. Allan R. Millett, Semper Fidelis: The History 

of the United States Marine Corps, rev. ed. (New York: Free Press, 1991), 431, 438. Quotation from the 

request of Col. Donald J. Kendall, USMC, to Garland B. Williams, NPS, 3 July 1945; and G.B. Williams

to Director NPS Region One, 6 July 1945, memorandum; in Correspondence Folder, Catoctin Mountain 

Park Archives, World War II, located at Catoctin Mountain Park Headquarters, Thurmont, Md. 

184 G.B. Williams, custodian, Catoctin RDA, to Director, NPS Region One, memorandum, 19 October 

1945, located in World War II Records, Correspondence Folder, Catoctin Mountain Park Archives, 

Catoctin Mountain Park Headquarters, Thurmont, Md; A.E. Demaray, associate director, NPS to Abe 

Fortas, Acting Secretary of the Interior, 20 September 1945; Acting Secretary of the Interior Abe Fortas to 

Secretary of War Robert L. Patterson, 4 October 1945; NPS Records (RG 79), Entry 7, Central Classified

File, 1933-1949, General, 201 National Defense, C [Catoctin], Box 79, Folder 201, National Archives II. 

185 Fortas, Special Use Permit Authorizing Use of Land in the Catoctin Recreational Demonstration Area, 

Maryland, by the Commandant, U.S. Marine Corps, for rehabilitation and security purposes, 4 October 

1945; accepted by Maj. Gen. W.P.T. Hill, Quartermaster General, USMC, 19 October 1945; World War II 

Records, Special Use Permits Folder, Catoctin Mountain Park Archives, located at Catoctin Mountain Park 

Headquarters, Thurmont, Md. 
 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 527

winter. The Marines planned to spend $25,000 to improve Camp No. 2, and over 

subsequent months, they erected a service garage and a portable building which served as 

a combination movie house, recreation hall and post exchange.186 With NPS approval, the 

Marines kept many of the improvements made by the OSS at Camp No. 2 (Greentop), 

such as the winterization of the buildings, the heating apparatus in the central washhouse, 

and the improved mess hall and kitchen. 

The Marines concurred with NPS that the purely military remnants of the OSS 

should be removed. They did not need the ones at Greentop: the “trainazium,” the “House 

of Horrors” pistol house, and the rifle range. In other areas of the park, the military 

remnants included a demolition observation area, grenade range, munitions magazine, 

obstacle course, and guard houses. Mike Williams and the Associate Director of NPS, 

Arthur Demaray, insisted that the Army remove all of these, as well as the wreckage of 

an old house destroyed during OSS demolitions exercises, and restore all those sites to 

their original condition.187

 

Initially, however, the Corps of Engineers, contended that the Army no longer had 

responsibility, at least for the area of Camp. No. 2 (Greentop). That responsibility, the 

Engineers asserted had ended when the War Department’s permit occupancy was 

terminated in September 1945, the area declared surplus and the Marine Corps 

subsequently occupied it. By March 1946, the OSS field exercises areas of the park in its 

northwest quadrant had been declared free of unexploded shells, but Williams and the 

National Park Service were still trying to get the Army Engineers to raze the purely 

military buildings, rifle range, obstacle course, and demolition observation area in the 

park.188 On another subject, however, the question of ownership of the old CCC work 

 

186 G.B. Williams to NPS Region One Director, 7 January 1946, memorandum, handwritten draft and typed 

final version, located in World War II Records, Correspondence Folder, Catoctin Mountain Park Archives, 

Catoctin Mountain Park Headquarters, Thurmont, Md. The is some discrepancy between the handwritten 

draft of the 7 January 1946 memorandum, which states clearly that it was the Amy that renovated the 

buildings before the Marines moved into Camp No. 2 and the typed version of the memo which indicates 

that the renovation between November and January may have been done by the Marine Corps, an assertion 

reinforced in Williams to Harry T. Thompson, Asst. Supt., National Capital Parks, 8 February 1946, in ibid. 

Thus it would appear that Kirkconnell, Catoctin Mountain Park, 88, may have erred in attributing this 

winter renovation to the Army instead of the Marines. 

187 G.B. Williams to Director, National Park Service, Region One, 7 March 1946; in World War II 

Records, Correspondence Folder, Catoctin Mountain Park Archives, Catoctin Mountain Park Headquarters, 

Thurmont, Md.; Lt. Col. C.J. Blair, Jr., chief, Real Estate Division, Middle Atlantic Division, Corps of 

Engineers, to Department of the Interior, 3 December 1945, World War II, Correspondence Folder, 

Catoctin Mountain Park Archives, Catoctin Mountain Park Headquarters, Thurmont, Md.; G.B. Williams, 

custodian, to Regional Director, 7 January 1946; and A.E. Demaray, associate director NPS, to Lt. Col. C.J. 

Blair, Jr., chief, real estate division, Corps of Engineers, Office of the Division Engineer, War Department, 

Baltimore, MD, 23 January 1946, all in NPS Records (RG 79), Entry 7, Central Classified File, 1933-1949, 

General, 201 National Defense, C [Catoctin], Box 79, Folder 201, National Archives II. 

188 Lt. Charles E. Spears, Detachment 6 of the 9800th TSU-CE Bomb & Shell Disposal Team, Blue Ridge 

Summit, Pa., to Real Estate Officer, Middle Atlantic Division, Corps of Engineers, 4 March 1946 and G.B. 

Williams to NPS Regional Director, 5 March 1946, both in World War II File, General Information Folder, 

Catoctin Mountain Park Archives; Lt. Col. William C. Ready, Asst. Division Engineer, Middle Atlantic 

Division, Corps of Engineers, to A. E. Demaray, National Park Service, 30 January 1946; Demaray to 

Director, NPS Region One, 15 February 1946; and G.B. Williams to Director NPS Region One, 7 March 
528 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 

camp was finally resolved when the War Department formally transferred it to the 

Department of the Interior, as part of the Army’s official return of the park to the 

National Park Service on 14 May 1946.189

Moving the Marine Corps Out of Catoctin 

The Marine Corps remained in Camp No. 2 until their permit expired in May 

1947. Although the Marines made improvements at Greentop, as they had at Misty 

Mount, and kept it in good condition, Williams had his share of difficulties with the 

Marines, combat veterans and the security detail, which moved into Camp No. 2 in 1946. 

The Park Manager held off making formal complaints for some time due to the work the 

Corps had done in restoring the camp. But violations of the use permit continued to 

mount and confronted the Park Service’s responsibility for preserving the natural and 

historical resources of the park. 

In the Use Permit issued to the Marines, the Secretary of the Interior had outlined 

methods of proper disposal of garbage and other materials, but the Marines, despite 

warnings, had not burned their rubbish nor buried their garbage since a garbage disposal 

field was established for them in October 1943. Instead, they had simply dumped their 

garbage and trash in the open, and the growing amounts attracted buzzards, crows, 

vermin and stray dogs and disrupted the area. Worse was an episode in September 1946. 

While, Mike Williams was absent for several weeks on an NPS assignment, the Marines, 

without Williams knowledge or approval, built a parking lot and two roads through the 

park to their camp at Camp No. 2 (Greentop). The Use Permit provided that trees in the 

park would be protected, but in this project, the Marines cut down nearly two dozen trees, 

including half a dozen large red oaks. The venerable stone fences in the park, some of 

them more than a century old, were also part of the area’s protected heritage. Williams 

had previously warned Marine officers against their men cutting trees and destroying 

stone fences, particularly historic ones and those marking boundaries. But while he was 

away, the Marines not only cut down the trees to make way for the new roads, but to 

provide gravel for the roads and parking areas, they appropriated stone from NPS 

stockpiles, and when that was not sufficient, they tore down several historic stone walls 

and ground them into gravel. Greatly irritated by what he found when he returned, 

Williams filed a formal complaint with the Marine major in command, holding him 

responsible for seeing that there be no more such violations.190

 

1946; all in World War II Records, Correspondence Folder, Catoctin Mountain Park Archives, Catoctin 

Mountain Park Headquarters, Thurmont, Md. 

189 Transfer of Surplus Property Agreement, Catoctin Recreational Demonstration Area, 14 May 1946, 

signed by representatives of the Corps of Engineers Washington District and the U.S. Department of the

Interior; G.B. Williams to Harry T. Thompson, Acting Supt., National Capital Parks, 17 May 1946, both in 

World War II Records, Correspondence Folder, Catoctin Mountain Park Archives, Catoctin Mountain Park 

Headquarters, Thurmont, Md. 

190 G.B. Williams to Maj. W.J. Dickinson, 2 October 1946, in World War II Records, Correspondence 

Folder, Catoctin Mountain Park Archives, Catoctin Mountain Park Headquarters, Thurmont, Md. 
 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 529

Expiration of the Marines’ Use Permit was coming up in May 1947, so Mike 

Williams began negotiations with the Marine Corps in January for an early return of 

Cabin Camp No. 2 (Greentop) to the National Park Service. In March, they came to an 

agreement that the Marine Corps would accept the cancellation of the use permit and turn 

over some its trucks, a tractor, and several water heaters and gas ranges, and NPS would 

accept the condition of Cabin Camp No. 2 as it was. That meant that NPS would be 

responsible for eliminating the OSS rifle range and the Marines’ recreation hall/movie 

theater and rehabilitating Greentop. By letter of 28 March 1947, the Department of the 

Interior accepted Camp No. 2 (Greentop) in its existing condition from the Marines and 

cancelled the Corps’ Special Use Permit. 191 

Consequently, the Marines left Catoctin Mountain Park at the end of March 1947. 

After that the Marine contingent guarding the President was to be transported from the 

Marine Barracks in Washington D.C. to Catoctin as needed.192 Upon the Marines’ 

departure, the newly created Department of Defense removed from Camp No. 2 the 300-

foot rifle range and play field that the OSS had established and the combination 

recreation hall, movie theater, and post exchange building that the Marines had 

constructed.193 Thus in the spring of 1947, the final occupation and use of Catoctin 

Mountain Park by the military as a result of World War II came to an end. 

Returning Catoctin Mountain Park to Civilian Use 

Following the end of the war, the National Park Service sought to expedite the 

reopening of Catoctin Mountain Park to the public. In January 1946, when the Marines 

moved up the mountain to Greentop, Mike Williams hoped to have Misty Mount ready 

for youth from the Salvation Army to camp there that summer.194 But there would be no 

camping at Misty Mount until the summer of 1947. In regard to Greentop, the Maryland 

League for Crippled Children, unhappy with their temporary wartime summer camps in 

Pennsylvania, started pressing in early 1946 to be allowed to return to the facilities that 

 

191 Irving C. Root, Supt. NPS National Capital Parks, to Commandant U.S. Marine Corps, memorandum, 

17 February 1947; and G.B. Williams, park custodian, memorandum certifying receipt of equipment from 

USMC, 18 March 1947. both in World War II Records, Correspondence Folder, Catoctin Mountain Park 

Archives, Catoctin Mountain Park Headquarters, Thurmont, Md. 

192 Kirkconnell, Catoctin Mountain Park, 92, n. 82, citing her telephone interview with Garland Williams, 

Jr., 1 March 1987; see also W. Dale Nelson, The President Is at Camp David (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse 

University Press, 1995), 26. 

193 “Site Survey Summary Sheet for DERP-FUDS Site No. CO3MDO346,” Catoctin Recreational 

Demonstration Area, 11 September 1995, pp. 4-5, in World War II Records, General Information Folder, 

Catoctin Mountain Park Archives, Catoctin Mountain Park Headquarters, Thurmont, Md. 

194 G.B. Williams to Director, NPS Region One, memorandum, 7 January 1946; Elbert Cox, Acting 

Director, NPS Region One, to Arthur A. Demaray, NPS Associate Director, 21 January 1946, in World 

War II Records, Correspondence Folder, Catoctin Mountain Park Archives, Catoctin Mountain Park 

Headquarters, Thurmont, Md. 
530 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 

had been customized for their disabled youths. When the Maryland League met 

resistance, its officials enlisted Secretary of Agriculture Clinton Anderson, who wrote an 

endorsement to the White House, adding there was a rumor that the Marines were not 

planning to leave but were instead augmenting Greentop as a regular summer retreat for 

the Marine Corps Commandant. Secretary of the Interior Julius A. Krug rejected the 

rumor but acknowledged that accommodations had been improved for the commandant’s 

visits.195 

Like the National Park Service, the Truman White House also wanted Greentop 

reopened for the crippled children.196 The public learned about the Presidential Retreat at 

Catoctin as soon as wartime censorship was removed.197 President Harry Truman, 

however, seldom used Shangri-La, preferring the Presidential Yacht Williamsburg or the 

warmer weather and deep-sea fishing off the U.S. Navy base on Key West, Florida. It 

was not until President Dwight D. Eisenhower that a Chief Executive resumed regular 

use of the Presidential Retreat, which Eisenhower renamed “Camp David,” after his 

grandson.198 In the summer of 1947, after the Marines had left, the Maryland League for 

Crippled Children and the Salvation Army resumed their summer camp programs at 

Greentop and Misty Mount for the first time since OSS and the Marine Corps had 

occupied the cabin camps in 1942. 

 

195 Since the Marines had abandoned the Misty Mount cabin camp to move to Greentop, the National Park 

Service offered Cabin Camp No. 1 (Misty Mount) as an alternative to the Maryland League for Crippled 

Children, but the League rejected that site as too rugged and steep for its handicapped youngsters. 

Secretary of Agriculture Clinton Anderson to Matthew J. Connelly, 20 April 1946; Secretary of the Interior 

Julius A. Krug to Matthew J. Connelly, 15 May 1946, memorandum, both in the Papers of Presidential 

naval aide William M. Rigdon at the Truman Presidential Library and cited in Nelson, The President is at 

Camp David, 22-25; E. M. Lisle, asst. regional director, NPS Region One, Memorandum to the Director, 

21 August 1946, NPS Records (RG 79), Entry 54, Box 60, National Archives II. 

196 When the Marines had vacated Misty Mount to move to Greentop, the National Park Service, at 

Williams recommendation, granted the Salvation Army a permit to use Cabin Camp No. 1 during the 

summer of 1946 as it had before the war. But the permit was subsequently cancelled, and Misty Mount 

remained unoccupied until 1947. E.M. Lisle, assistant regional director, Region One, to Director, NPS, 21 

August 1946, memorandum, and Arthur E. Demaray, Associate Director of NPS, 25 November 1946, 

“Confidential” memorandum, both in NPS Records (RG 79), RDA Program Files, Entry 54, Box 60, 

National Archives II. 

197 “Shangri-La Revealed,” Baltimore Sun, 16 September 1945; “Mountain Top White House: F.D. and 

Winnie Met at Maryland Hideout,” Washington, D.C. Times-Herald, 18 September 1942, p. 12; clippings, 

and Newton B. Drury to International News Photos, Inc., 17 September 1945; all in National Park Service 

Records (NG 79), Entry 19, Records of Newton B. Drury, 1940-1951, Box 4, Folder, “Catoctin,” National 

Archives II. As the late President had predicted, his critics accused him of extravagance. The McCormickowned, isolationist, anti-New Deal Chicago Tribune complained that the costs had run over $100,000, 

which was true, but also incorrectly that the swimming pool had been constructed especially for the 

President and that the whole facility was quite pretentious. Chicago Tribune, 21 September 1945, p. 1. Two 

weeks later, reporters and photographers were allowed inside the camp and the media presented illustrated 

accounts of the late President’s mountain hideaway. “Shangri-La,” Baltimore Sun, 7 October 1945, 

Photographic Section, 1; “Roosevelt Hideaway: The Late President Had a Secret Retreat in Maryland’s 

Mountains,” Life, 15 October 1945, 101-104, clippings in Vertical File, “Shangri-La,” Franklin D. 

Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, NY. 

198 Nelson, The President Is at Camp David, 22-50. 
 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 531

In response to an invitation from the Maryland League for Crippled Children, 

President Truman visited the handicapped young campers in August 1947 on their first 

return to Greentop.199 Some residents in nearby Thurmont remember him during such 

occasional visits to Catoctin slipping away from the Secret Service and driving around 

behind the wheel of a convertible with the top down on a hot summer day.200 

Postwar Division of Catoctin between the Federal and State Governments 

 The federal government had originally built the Recreational Demonstration 

Areas, including Catoctin and Chopawamic RDAs, with the expressed intention of 

eventually turning them over to the states for state or local parks. In 1943, the Roosevelt 

Administration announced that this would be done in all except half a dozen RDAs, 

which would be included in the National Park System. Both Catoctin RDA (later Catoctin 

Mountain Park) Chopawamsic RDA (later Prince William Forest Park) were among the 

half dozen included in the National Park System. It was not their OSS usage, however, 

but rather accessibility from the nation’s capital as well as other neighboring cities that 

may have been the determining factor in their case. Plus at Catoctin, the establishment of 

the Presidential Retreat there mandated federal jurisdiction.201

When Maryland hunters, fishers, and other area sportsmen learned that the federal 

government intended to retain Catoctin Mountain as a permanent part of the National 

Park System, they began to mobilize to try to reverse that decision and persuade 

Washington to transfer the land to Maryland as a state park. Some were opposed to the 

no-hunting policy on the federal RDAs, and local gamesmen had long considered Mike 

Williams unduly committed to preservation over expanded public usage. Emphasizing 

the need for “healthful outdoor enjoyment,” the League of Maryland Sportsmen adopted 

a resolution in July 1944 calling for the Park Service to transfer Catoctin RDA to the 

Maryland Department of Forests and Parks. In June 1945, the Maryland State Forester, 

supported by U.S. Senator Millard E. Tydings (Dem. Md.), began pressing NPS to 

transfer the land to the state at the end of the war. 202

 

 

199 Maryland League for Crippled Children to President Truman, 1 August 1947, Truman Presidential 

Library, cited in Nelson, The President is at Camp David, 22-23, 25. For the Presidential visit with the 

crippled children, see also the account in the Catoctin Enterprise, 8 August 1947. 

200 James H. Mackley, Thurmont, Md., telephone interview with the author, 13 June 2006. 

201 Federal responsibility within the park was divided by agreement in1948. Although the land at the 

Presidential camp remained within the jurisdiction of the National Park Service, which also maintained the 

access roads, the Department of the Navy accepted responsibility for administration, protection, operation 

and improvements at the Presidential Retreat. Agreement between the National Park Service and the 

Department of the Navy’s Bureau of Yards and Docks, 1 November 1948, Catoctin Mountain Park 

Archives, Catoctin Mountain Park Headquarters, Thurmont, Md. The agreement was subsequently 

modified to provide concurrent protection by the two agencies. See Kirkconnell, Administrative History of 

Catoctin Mountain Park, 214-217; and Edmund F. Wehrle, Catoctin Mountain Park: An Historic Resource 

Study (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 2000), 211-12. 

202 League of Maryland Sportsmen, “A Resolution Calling upon the Federal Government to Return the 

Catoctin National Recreation Area to the State of Maryland,” attached to Sen. Millard E. Tydings to 
532 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 

President Truman announced in December 1945, however, that the park would be 

permanently retained by the federal government and continued as part of the National 

Park System because, as he put it, of “the historical events of national and international 

interest now associated with the Catoctin Recreational Area,” presumably the wartime 

meetings there between Roosevelt and Churchill. Truman said this was in accord with 

“the position expressed by the late President Roosevelt before his death.”203 

The legislative process proved extremely slow in the formal designation of 

Catoctin’s new status, in large part because of continued opposition by many sportsmen 

and Maryland officials, including Joseph F. Kaylor, Director of the Maryland Department 

of Parks and Forestry. Blocked in 1947 and 1948, the legislation finally passed in 1949 

with the support of social service agencies in Washington, Baltimore, and around the 

region, and with major emphasis on providing general public access to expanded 

recreational facilities in the park, fishing, swimming, boating, hiking, picnicking, as well 

as camping.204 Nevertheless, pressure from Marylander hunting and fishing enthusiasts 

and others continued, and the National Park Service sought to way to accommodate the 

needs and desires of the regional public with the Park Service’s legislative mandate for 

natural preservation of the area as well as of the Presidential Retreat.205 

To resolve the continuing tensions with Maryland, NPS Director Conrad Wirth 

proposed having the southern half of the park—the area south of State Route 77—

transferred to the state of Maryland. On 11 June 1954, the National Park Service, turned 

that 5,000-acre area, containing Cunningham Falls, the historic Catoctin Iron Furnace, 

and a considerable part of Big Hunting Creek, over to the State of Maryland. With that 

division, the northern part of Catoctin Recreational Demonstration Area was designated 

Catoctin Mountain Park on 12 July 1954, and the area south of Route 77, now managed 

by the Maryland Department of Natural Resources was opened on 4 July 1954 as 

Cunningham Falls State Park.206

 

 

Newton B. Drury, director of NPS, 1 July 1944; Joseph F. Kaylor, Maryland State Forester, to Hillory A. 

Tolson, NPS, 1 June 1945; Records of NPS (RG 79), RDA Program Files, Box 60, National Archives II. 

203 Harry S Truman to Herbert R. O’Connor, Governor of Maryland, December 1945, letter in the Harry S 

Truman Papers, Truman Presidential Library, Independence, Mo. Executive Order 7496 of 12 November 

1936 had made Catoctin RDA part of the National Park System, but the federal status of the RDA’s was 

generally considered temporary, with the original goal being federal acquisition and development and then 

transfer to the states. However, in the summer of 1942 when President Roosevelt had signed legislation

which would turn the RDAs over to the states, under certain conditions, he explicitly excluded Catoctin 

RDA, where he had established his Presidential Retreat, as well as half a dozen other RDAs. The 

legislation being pursued immediately after the war was to make the park, or at least part of it, a permanent 

part of the National Park System. Werhle, Catoctin Mountain Park, 211-212, 214. 

204 Werhle, Catoctin Mountain Park, 211-17; Kirkconnell, Administrative History of Catoctin Mountain 

Park, 92-99. 

205 The property of the Presidential Retreat at Shangri-La/Camp David, like the White House, is the 

responsibility of the National Park Service. 

206 Kirkconnell, Administrative History of Catoctin Mountain Park, 101-102; Werhle, Catoctin Mountain 

Park, 217; see also Maryland Department of Natural Resources, Cunningham Falls State Park website, 

http://www.dnr.state.md.us/publiclands/western/cunninghamfalls.html. 30 September 2006. 
 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 533

Garland B. (“Mike”) Williams, who had been part of the federal development of 

the park at Catoctin since 1935 and served as custodian of the property while it was taken 

over by the military during World War II, remained as manager of Catoctin Mountain 

Park when it became part of the National Park System. He continued in that position in 

charge of Catoctin Mountain Park until his retirement at the age of 63 in 1957.207 

Catoctin Mountain Park Today 

 After World War II, Catoctin Mountain Park continued to follow its conservation 

and recreation mandates. Day use recreation emerged with the establishment of the 

Chestnut and Owens Creek Picnic Areas in 1966. Emphasis has continued to shift 

towards day use with the increasing suburbanization of both the Washington and 

Baltimore metropolitan areas. In 2007, more than 500,000 recreation visitors went to 

Catoctin Mountain Park, less than 8 percent staying overnight in tents or cabins. The 

former Blue Blazes Visitor Center Contact Station, now the Catoctin Mountain Park 

Visitor Center, also served as Park Headquarters in the 1950s, until Headquarters moved 

in the 1960s to its current location as Camp Peniel, the former Church site, which was 

under lease to the Army during World War II. The Visitor Center still provides 

information as well as housing artifacts from all periods of the park’s existence.208

 

 Most of the original structures built at Greentop by the Works Progress 

Administration in the 1930s for the National Park Service, and which were also part of 

the OSS’s Area B-2, remain in use today. However, the Dining Hall burned and was 

rebuilt with a Recreation Hall added to it. The Maryland League for Crippled Children, 

renamed the League for the Disabled of Baltimore, continues to use the camp each 

summer. The Frederick County Public School System hosted a residential Outdoor 

School at Greentop from 1957 to 1996. Budget cuts reduced the weeklong residential 

environmental program to a day use activity for fifth and sixth graders. 

Misty Mount, where the Marines had stayed from 1942 to 1946, was used for 

years after the war by the Girl Scouts. The Washington County Public Schools ran an 

environmental education camp at Misty Mount until moving into their own camp at Clear 

Spring, Maryland, in 1979. After being closed for four years, Misty Mount reopened in 

1983 with the aid of a friends group called CAMPER. The cabin camp is now used by a 

variety of small to medium-sized camping groups. 

 

207 Garland B. (“Mike”) Williams retired on 31 August 1957. Garland B. Williams, Sr., “Citation for 

Commendable Service” signed by Conrad L. Wirth; “Personnel History Record to Accompany Honor 

Award Nominations;” and G.B. Williams, Application for Retirement, 12 August 1957; Garland B. 

Williams, “Notice of Personnel Action, Retirement—Optional,” signed by Maurice K. Green, personnel 

officer, 16 September 1957, Garland B. Williams Personnel File, National Personnel Records Center, St.

Louis, Mo., obtained by the author, 8 February 2005. 

208 The following summary of recent and current uses of Catoctin Mountain Park was provided by 

Superintendent Mel Poole and his staff at the park to the author in January 2008. 
534 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 

 After serving as a Civilian Conservation Corps work camp in the late 1930s and 

then as OSS Area B-1, Camp Round Meadow hosted the first Job Corps Camp in the 

United States from 1965 to 1968 and a Youth Conservation Corps residential camp from 

1971 to 1978, as Catoctin Mountain Park continued its tradition of youth conservation 

programs. In the 1960s, The District of Columbia Public Schools began to use Round 

Meadow for their Summer Nature Camp, and that program has continued to the present. 

Mel Poole became superintendent of Catoctin Mountain Park in 1997. A native of 

Norfolk, Virginia, he joined the National Park Service in 1978 and served in numerous 

assignments around the country, from fighting forest fires in California to battling oil 

spills in Alaska. Eventually, he was posted at the National Capital Region as a Natural 

Resources specialist. From 1990 to 1997, he was Park Manager for the Presidents’ Parks, 

responsible for the parks immediately adjacent to the White House and to the NPS’s 

duties in the Executive Mansion itself. Since 1997, he has been responsible for Catoctin 

Mountain Park and the NPS’s relations with the Presidential Retreat there. 209 Camp 

David, of course, continues as the Presidential Retreat with increasing visits from foreign 

heads of state and media presence for each such visit. It remains a place of rest and 

relaxation for the President of the United States.210

Return of Area F to the Congressional Country Club 

Use of the Congressional Country Club by OSS and its successor ended in 

February 1946. Negotiations for return of the club to its civilian owners had begun when 

the war and the OSS ended. Despite the damages caused by the OSS’s paramilitary 

training on the club’s golf courses and other grounds and facilities, the club’s board of 

governors had learned in November 1945 that the War Department had paid the club rent 

amounting to $120,400 during the war. With that income, the club, which had been 

hurting at the end of the Great Depression, had paid all its bills, including interest on the 

mortgage, and still had $46,000 remaining. The President of the club was a tough 

negotiator and got the government to agree to provide and additional $187,000 to restore 

the clubhouse and the golf course, both of which had been badly damaged. During the 

OSS occupation, trees had been downed, the fairways were criss-crossed with barbed 

wire obstacles and roads, the refreshment stand on the 13th tee had been blasted, and more 

than fifty cabin tents and a few Quonset huts dotted the grounds and tennis courts. The 

club sold the cabin tents and Quonset huts and launched into a major repair operation. 

The clubhouse needed much work, including repair of the front marble steps where an 

OSS Santa Claus had driven his jeep right up into the main ballroom on Christmas 1945. 

The clubhouse reopened with a grand ball in April and the golf course the following 

 

209 Mel Poole, Superintendent, Catoctin Mountain Park, telephone interview with the author, 13 August 

2008. 

210 The above summary of recent and current uses of Catoctin Mountain Park was provided by 

Superintendent Mel Poole and his staff at the park to the author in February 2008. 
 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 535

month. Membership in May 1946 had already grown past 500. The Congressional 

Country Club emerged quite successfully from its wartime occupation by the OSS.211

Postwar Careers of OSS Veterans 

“You know it was an amazing organization,” recalled John W. Brunner, a China 

Communications veteran, about the OSS. “The people I served with later became 

lawyers, judges, Ph.D.s, all very prestigious.”212 Indeed, the OSS did include 

extraordinarily talented, self-motivated, and accomplished men and women. Not 

surprisingly, many of them went on to distinguished postwar careers. After earning a 

doctorate at Columbia University, Brunner himself served as a professor and chair of the 

German Department at Muhlenberg College for more than thirty years in addition to 

becoming a published authority on OSS weaponry.213 Captain Bernard M.W. (“Bernie”) 

Knox, who led Jedburgh Team “Giles” and French maquis in attacks on German 

paratrooper positions in France and then led Italian partisans in northern Italy, earned at 

Ph.D. in classics at Yale under the GI Bill after the war. He taught at Yale and 

subsequently became Director of Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies. A renowned 

scholar and translator of classical Greek drama and literature, Knox wrote or edited 

nearly two dozen books and provided the introduction and notes to Robert Fagles’ 

prizewinning translations of Homer’s The Illiad and The Odyssey in the 1990s.214

Lieutenant Henry Deane McIntosh, SO, who jumped into France as a Jedburgh, received 

a Silver Star Medal, and then served behind Japanese lines in China, returned to resume 

 

211 Congressional Country Club, 1923-1984 (Baltimore, Md.: Wolk Press, n.d.), 33-35. I am indebted to 

Maxine D. Harvey, director of member services at the Congressional Country Club, for providing me with

a copy of this volume, 1 October 2007. 

212 John W. Brunner, telephone interview with the author, 21 March 2005. 

213 Ibid. Brunner, who had trained as a cipher clerk in the Communications Branch at OSS headquarters and

Area C, arrived in China in early 1945. He spent more than a year there, first in Kunming, and then, after 

the Japanese surrender, he was dispatched to Shanghai and Tientsin. There he did code work, but because 

he had learned Chinese, he was subsequently used as an interpreter for X-2, the Counterintelligence 

Branch. OSS’s successor, the Strategic Services Unit, kept him on in its Secret Intelligence Branch, until he 

was mustered out of the Army in March 1946. Returning to Ursinus College in Pennsylvania under the GI 

Bill, Brunner graduated with proficiency in Greek, Latin, German and Chinese. Subsequently, he earned a 

doctorate in German at Columbia University, and beginning in 1954 taught that language and later served 

as head of the German department at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania, until his retirement 

in 1989. In addition to dozens of scholarly articles in his field, he published several books on OSS 

weaponry, including, all of them published by Phillips Publishing of Williamstown, New Jersey. They 

include The OSS Crossbows (1990), The Colt Glock Pocket Hammerless Automatic Pistols (1996), The 

OSS Weapons (1994, 2nd edition, 2005), and with Francis B. Mills, OSS Special Operations in China

(2002). 

214 Will Irwin, The Jedburghs (New York: Public Affairs Press, 2005), 225, 262-63; Homer, The Illiad,

Robert Fagles, trans., introduction and notes by Bernard Knox (New York: Viking, 1990); and similarly, 

Homer, The Odyssey (Viking 1996), and Virgil, The Aeneid (Viking 2006); see also Bernard Knox, Essays: 

Ancient and Modern (Baltimore, Md.; The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), xxxii-xxxiii. 
536 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 

studying medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Becoming a distinguished 

cardiologist, he taught at the medical schools of Duke, Baylor, and the University of 

Florida, was President of the American College of Cardiology, founded an organization 

to make cardiac pacemakers available to needy patients around the world. For his 

achievements, he received the Presidential Citation at the White House in 1986.215

 Nearly two dozen men who served in Donovan’s organization later capped their 

postwar careers as U.S. ambassadors, including David K.E. Bruce, wealth and socially 

prominent head of OSS Secret Intelligence in Europe, later U.S. Ambassador to England, 

France, and Germany; William B. Macomber, Jedburgh in France and Special Operations 

(SO) officer in Burma and China, ambassador to Jordan and Turkey; and Richard Helms, 

Secret Intelligence (SI) agent in Europe, ambassador to Iran. Donovan himself was 

appointed ambassador to Thailand in the early 1950s. Arthur Goldberg, first chief of the 

OSS Labor Branch in Europe subsequently served in the 1960s as Secretary of Labor, 

Supreme Court Justice, and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.216 A number of OSS 

veterans later served as Presidential advisers, among them Roger Hilsman, Arthur 

Schlesinger, Jr., Walt Rostow, Carl Kaysen, Douglass Cater, Clark McGregor, Arthur 

Goldberg, C. Douglas Dillon, and a host of others. 

There were many lawyers or future lawyers in the OSS, a number of whom later 

pursued successful careers as attorneys or members of the judiciary. Walter R. Mansfield, 

SO, who parachuted into Yugoslavia and later “Muskrat” Team behind Japanese lines in 

south China, became a federal appeals court judge in New York.217 Edgar Pritchard, SO, 

became a prominent attorney in Arlington, Virginia; Jedburgh William Dreux resumed 

his law practice in New Orleans and litigated cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. 

Howard Manning, the last commanding officer of Area C, returned to North Carolina to 

resume his law practice, first in Chapel Hill and then Raleigh.218 Turner McBaine, SO, 

who worked out of Cairo, later became counsel to Standard Oil Company of 

California.219 J. Evelle Younger, a former FBI section chief recruited by OSS’s counterintelligence branch (X-2) for the Far East later became District Attorney for Los Angeles 

in the 1960s and Attorney General of California in the 1970s. 

Of the two most famous OSS close combat instructors, William E. (“Dan”) 

Fairbairn and Rex Applegate, the former, already a legendary figure among close combat 

enthusiasts, returned to Great Britain after the war. He retired from the British military 

shortly thereafter and reportedly started a martial arts school with George de Rewelisko, 

another SOE instructor in Britain and Canada in unarmed combat.220 In retirement, 

 

215 Irwin, The Jedburghs, 231-32. 

216 Others among the U.S. ambassadors to more than twenty countries, who had served in the OSS include 

George Garrett, ambassador to Ireland, 1947-53; Edwin Martin, ambassador to Argentina, 1964-68, and 

Thomas Beale, ambassador to Jamaica, 1965-68. Smith, OSS, 22. 

217 Francis B. Mills and John W. Brunner, OSS Special Operations in China (Williamstown, N.J.: Phillips 

Publications, 2002), 321. 

218 Betty Bullard Manning (Mrs. Howard Manning), telephone interview with the author, 4 March 2005. 

219 Smith, OSS, 23-24. 

220 Lynn Philip Hodgson, author of Inside Camp-X, email to the author, 5 March 2008. 
 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 537

Fairbairn frequently gave demonstrations and received numerous honors. He died in 1960 

at the age of 75. Rex Applegate stayed with the U.S. Army in the military police, 

eventually retiring as a lieutenant colonel. In 1976, Applegate updated his 1943 book, 

Kill or Get Killed, for use as a close combat manual for the Marine Corps as well as for 

popular sales.221 Applegate became a founding member of the International Close 

Combat Instructors Association., marketed books and films on the subject and also 

designed a line of knives. He spent much of his time promoting his pistol shooting 

method to police departments and pistol enthusiasts. He died in 1988 at 74 years of 

age.

222

A number of OSS Special Operations officers had careers with the Federal Bureau 

of Narcotics. Lieutenant Colonel Garland H. Williams, SO, who had helped Donovan and 

Preston Goodfellow establish the Special Operations training camps in Maryland and 

Virginia, returned in 1945 to the Federal Narcotics Bureau, where he headed its 

Intelligence Division until his retirement in 1954. He subsequently advised intelligence 

operations in the Army and the State Department.223 George H. White, another 

undercover federal narcotics agent, who had served as an SO instructor at Areas B and A 

in 1942 before being transferred to the OSS Counter-Intelligence Branch (X-2), returned 

to the Federal Bureau of Narcotics in 1945. He served as district supervisor in several of 

the major cities in the United States. In addition, beginning in 1952, he worked part-time 

for the CIA in its secret experimental drug program, using the synthetic hallucinogen, 

LSD, in a search for a “truth serum,” a program that White and the CIA continued, 

without success through the mid-1960s. White retired from the Federal Bureau of 

Narcotics in 1965 after a thirty-year career.224 Both Williams and White had been with 

the Federal Narcotics Bureau before the war; after the war, they were joined by a young 

recruit, Major Howard W. Chappell, SO, 27, who after training at Areas F and B, had 

won acclaim for the “Tacoma” Mission behind German lines in the Italian Alps. After 

returning home and running his own business for a year, he joined the Federal Narcotics 

Bureau in 1947, and was given undercover assignments infiltrating organized crime, drug 

syndicates in New York City, Washington, D.C, and Chicago. His successes led to his 

appointment as agent in charge in Los Angeles. Chappell thrived on danger, and in 

addition to his administrative duties, he continued to do undercover work, this time in 

Mexico. Chappell left the bureau in 1961 and spent the next decade as executive officer 

and President of the Board of Public Works for the City of Los Angeles.225

 

221 Fleet Marine Force Reference Publication (FMFRP) 12-80, Kill or Get Killed (1976). 

222 “Rex Applegate,” International Close Combat Instructors Association, www.clscbtassc.com; tribute in 

www.americancombatives.com/applegate.php; and www.paladin-press.com, for Paladin Press, which 

published many of Applegate’s books and videos. 

 

223 John C. McWilliams, “Covert Connections: The FBN, the OSS, and the CIA,” The Historian, 53, no. 4 

(June 1991): 663-665. 

224 Ibid., 665-671; Kathryn Meyer and Terry Parssinen, Webs of Smoke: Smugglers, Warlords, Spies and 

the History of the International Drug Trade (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), 246-247. 

225 Howard W. Chappell, resumé; letter, Garland Williams, Head, Intelligence Division, [Federal Bureau of

Narcotics], to Howard Chappell, 23 March 1953; both from the papers of Howard Chappell. I am indebted 
538 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 

Colonel Carl Eifler, SO, the boisterous, barrel-chested, first commander of 

Detachment 101 in Burma, had come to Special Operations from the Army Reserve and a 

law enforcement career with the U.S. Customs Service. Eifler remained in the Army until 

1947. The new CIA tried to recruit him, but its doctors turned him down, as his 1943 

head injury led him to suffer massive headaches and some erratic behavior, and he would 

be vulnerable to seizures and strokes for the rest of his life. Nevertheless, after retiring 

from the Army, he returned to the U.S. Customs Service in Hawaii, this time as Deputy 

Collector of Customs. In 1952, he went back to college and earned degrees in psychology 

and divinity from Jackson College in Hawaii. Retiring from the Customs Service and 

returning to the mainland, he went on to obtain a doctorate in psychology from Illinois 

Institute of Technology in 1963. Settling with his family in Monterey County, California, 

he opened a practice in clinical psychology there.226 He was inducted into the Military 

Intelligence Hall of Fame in 1988, and in 1997 a new sports complex was named after 

him at the Military Intelligence School at Fort Huachua, Arizona. Eifler died in 2002 at 

the age of 95.227

 Among Hollywood celebrities in the OSS, John Ford, Field Film Unit, and 

Sterling Hayden, SO, went back to the studios in Los Angeles. So did Peter Ortiz, SO. 

Ford soon turned to directing a series of heroic cowboy and cavalry pictures, starring 

John Wayne or Henry Fonda, which came to personify the legendary western genre.228

Sterling Hayden (aka Marine Captain John Hamilton), even more solid, weathered, and 

fatalistic than before, wandered from studio to studio in a series of dark, film noir movies 

in the 1950s.229 He was forced to testify before the House Un-American Activities 

Committee, where he revealed his sympathies with Tito’s communist partisans in 

Yugoslavia and his brief postwar affiliation with some American communists. 

Abandoning those friends and publicly naming them to the committee, intensified 

Hayden’s cynicism and self-contempt, and except for his role as Gen. Jack D. Ripper in 

Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1963), Hayden spent most of the 1960s sailing his 

schooner, fighting a child custody battle in court, and writing his autobiography, 

Wanderer. He staged a come back in the 1970s, and died at the age of 70 in 1986. Peter J. 

Ortiz, whose medals for Special Operations exploits behind German lines in North Africa 

and France made him one of the most decorated Marine officers of World War II, 

returned to Los Angeles after the war and became involved in the film industry, advising 

on films about the OSS and playing small parts in more than a dozen films between 1949 

 

to Howard Chappell’s son, Jack Chappell, letter to the author 17 October 2007, for providing me with 

copies of this and other documents from his late father’s files. 

226 Thomas N. Moon and Carl F. Eifler, The Deadliest Colonel (New York: Vantage, 1975), 247-266. 

227 “`Deadliest Colonel,’ dies at age 95,” U.S. Customs Today, August 2002, www.cbp.gov/

xp/CustomsToday/200/August/other/colonel.xml, accessed 30 December 2007. 

228 These films included My Darling Clementine (1947), Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon

(1950), and later and with greater complexity, The Searchers (1957). 

229 His film noir movies of the 1950s, included most memorably The Asphalt Jungle (1950), Johnny Guitar

(1953), and The Killing (1956). 
 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 539

and 1957. Ortiz died in 1988 at the age of 75 and was buried in Arlington National 

Cemetery.230

 Some of the other celebrities who had worked for the OSS faded into relatively 

obscurity not too long after the war. Joseph (“Jumping Joe”) Savoldi, SO, the Notre 

Dame football star and professional wrestler, who was part of the “MacGregor” Mission 

in Italy, returned to the wrestling circuit. But arthritis soon ended his career in the ring, 

and he became primarily a manager and promoter. While a promoter in Chicago, Savoldi 

discovered, trained, and gave a start in professional wresting to an able, young American 

black man, Houston (“Bobo Brazil”) Harris, who would later become the first successful 

African-American professional wrestler, winning the World Heavyweight Wrestling 

Championship in 1962, integrating the sport and becoming known as “the Jackie 

Robinson of professional wrestling.”231 From 1952-1961, Savoldi refereed a few 

wrestling matches, made a few guest appearances on TV programs, had his own sports 

radio show for awhile, and worked in the insurance business. In 1962, at 54, he returned 

to college, earned his teaching credentials and then mentored troubled boys and worked 

as a high school science teacher in Henderson, Kentucky until his death there in 1974 at 

the age of 65.232

 Moe Berg, the professional baseball player and linguistic genius, who as a civilian 

spy helped OSS ferret out information on the status of German development of an atomic 

bomb, returned to the United States and resigned from the OSS. In 1945, he was only 43, 

but he apparently declined any regular employment for the rest of his life. President 

Truman awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, but for an unexplained reason, 

Berg declined to accept it. A lifelong bachelor, he subsequently lived with different 

family members and seems to have become increasingly idiosyncratic. He continually 

implied that he was still a spy, doing work too secret to reveal. After his brother forced 

him to leave, Berg moved in with his sister in Belleville, New Jersey, where he remained 

until his death in 1972 at the age of 70, still living on the legendary accomplishments of 

the first forty years of his extraordinary life.233

 

 

230 The films about the OSS were 13 Rue Madeleine (1946) starring James Cagney, and Operating Secret

(1952) starring Cornel Wilde. Ortiz played small parts most famously in Twelve O’Clock High (1949), 

What Price Glory (1952), Retreat Hell! (1952), and Wings of Eagles (1957). 

231 Entries on “Joe Savoldi,” and “Houston Harris” in Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wik; and “Bobo 

Brazil dies at age 74,” Slam! Sports Wrestling, 23 January 1998, 

http://slam.canoe.ca/SlamWrestlingArchive/jan23_for.html; each accessed 30 December 2007. 

232 “Joe Savoldi,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikpedia.org/wik; and James Gregory Savoldi, a grandson of 

“Jumping Joe” Savoldi, email to the author, 29 December 2007. I am indebted to J.G. Savoldi for providing 

me with photographs and other materials about his grandfather. 

233 One account indicates that Berg worked as a contract employee for the CIA in 1951, advising and 

consulting, and that “several years later, he served on the staff of NATO’s Advisory Group for 

Aeronautical Research and Development.” “Morris (‘Moe’) Berg,” G.J.A. O’Toole, The Encyclopedia of 

American Intelligence and Espionage (New York: Facts on File, 1988), 65. 
540 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 

Back to Business 

Many of the former OSSers went into private enterprise. Lieutenant Colonel 

Ainsworth Blogg, SO, first commanding officer of Training Area B and, for most of the 

war, deputy director of the OSS Schools and Training Branch, returned to the insurance 

business in Seattle. Rafael D. Hirtz, SO, born in Argentina, raised in Europe and 

California, who had served behind the lines in France and China, moved to Washington, 

D.C. and became a grain exporter.234 OSS’s key spy in Rome, Peter Tompkins, SI, 

remained an expatriate in Europe, writing magazine articles, screenplays, and 

controversial books, not only his spy memoirs but most notoriously, his assertion that his 

mother had had a passionate affair with George Bernard Shaw.235 Reginald (“Reg”) 

Spear, SO/SI, a young California inventor with a British and Canadian family 

background, who had trained at Area B and then gone on special missions in the Pacific 

and Far East for President Roosevelt, returned to civilian life and California after the war. 

He continued his schooling and also his inventing. His first invention was when he was 

12 years old and created a retractable dog leash. Since World War II, he has been credited 

with more than 40 inventions. Some involving naval ordnance such as 7.2-inch HVAR 

multiple rocket launchers and the Sidewinder Missile were invented jointly with William 

B. McLean. But most were invented independently or with a variety of others. Those 

inventions included the solar cell, the Spear 360 movie camera used by high-flying spy 

planes, the U-2 and the SR-71, a dock-loading gantry for loading and unloading seagoing 

tankers, and a processing for liquefying natural gas for ease in transporting and storing it. 

In his 80s, Spear continued to do consulting and to work on a memoir of his experiences 

with the OSS in World War II.236 

Serge Obolensky, SO, former Russian nobleman and New York socialite who had 

married and divorced Mary Astor daughter of real estate tycoon, John Jacob Astor IV, 

and who had led Special Operations teams into Sardinia and France, returned to high 

society in Manhattan. Hotelier Conrad Hilton offered the 55-year-old socialite a position 

directing public relations and promotion for the Plaza Hotel. It was similar to 

Obolensky’s prewar position at the St. Regis Hotel across the street, and he took it. 

Obolensky remained there, a fixture of high society and socializing with glamorous 

women including Ginger Rogers, Marilyn Monroe, and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. He 

died at 87 in 1978.237

 

234 “In Memoriam,” OSS Society Newsletter, Spring 2004, 9. 

235 “London Times Obituary: Peter Tompkins,” OSS Society Digest Number 1575, 25 February 2007, 

osssociety@yahoogroups.com, accessed 25 February 2007. 

236 Reginald Spear, telephone interview with the author 15 August 2008. 

237 Serge Obolensky, One Man in His Time: The Memoirs of Serge Obolensky (New York: McDowell, 

Obolensky, 1958), 395-396; K. Michell Moran, “The Prince and Princess of the Pointes: Estate Auction 

Recalls Colorful Lives of Late Russian Prince and his Wife, a Grosse Pointe Native,” unidentified 

newspaper article reprinted in OSS Society Digest Number 1954, 18 January 2008, 

osssociety@yahoogroups.com, accessed 18 January 2008. 
 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 541

M. Preston Goodfellow, the former New York newspaper publisher, who had 

established the SO training camps and served as an OSS Deputy Director of Operations 

for the rest of the war, subsequently engaged in politics, diplomacy and business. 

Through his wartime friendship with Korean nationalist Syngman Rhee, Goodfellow 

after the war helped play a political kingmaker role in South Korea and in the process 

built a lasting personal and commercial relationship.238 During the American-Soviet 

military occupation of Korea immediately after the war, Goodfellow was an economic 

and political advisor to the U.S. military governor in 1946, supporting a separate South 

Korea and Rhee, who became its first President. 239 After leaving the War Department, 

Goodfellow, retained an interest in newspapers as publisher of the Pocatello [Idaho] 

Tribune, and he helped for over forty years with the Boy’s Clubs of America, but his 

main activity was as President of Overseas Reconstruction, Inc., a Washington based firm 

offering personal contacts and providing advice for American investment overseas and 

foreign investment in the United States240 A successful entrepreneur, Goodfellow died in 

1973 at the age of 81.241

A number of other SO/OG members went into business. Elmer (“Pinky”) Harris, 

Washington State University alumni who, taught at Areas B and A, and then served in 

Italy and China, returned to his native Alaska after the war and helped pioneer tourism to 

the Alaskan wilderness as a part of a group of business people involved local aircraft 

companies.242 Ellsworth (“Al”) Johnson, medic with OG units in France and China, 

returned to western Michigan, went to a community college on the GI Bill, married, 

raised a family of a boy and a girl, and went to work for a company handling wholesale 

beauty supplies and rose from salesman to general manager. After retirement, he made 

and sold doll houses and their furnishings, and at 85 was working as a starter on a golf 

course.243 Arne Herstad, a member of the OSS Norwegian OG, who parachuted into 

France and helped train OSS OG Chinese commandos in the Far East, returned home to 

Tacoma, Washington. He had married, Andi Kindem, his sweetheart whom he had met in 

Michigan, and they raised a family. He worked as head sawyer with a lumber company 

for a decade before teaming up with his brothers to form a construction company that 

 

238 Smith, OSS, 26. See also, correspondence between Goodfellow and Rhee, 1944-45, in M. Preston 

Goodfellow Papers, Box 4, Subject File: Syngman Rhee, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford, Calif. 

239 Biographical information and unidentified newspaper clipping, “Name Goodfellow Adviser in Korea,” 

all in Goodfellow Papers, Box 2, Folder: Biographical Materials, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford, 

Calif. 

240 Dun & Bradstreet Report on Overseas Reconstruction Corporation, 19 September 1960, p. 1, copy in 

Goodfellow Papers, Box 2, Folder: Biographical Material, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford, Calif. 

241 Obituary, “M. Preston Goodfellow”, New York Times, 6 September 1973, 40; “M.P. Goodfellow, 81, 

Publisher, Dies,” Washington Post, 7 September 1973, C4. 

242 Robert E. Mattingly, Herringbone Cloak—GI Dagger: Marines of the OSS (Washington, D.C.: History 

and Museums Division, Headquarters, U.S. Marine Corps, 1989), 182. 

243 Ellsworth (“Al”) Johnson, telephone interview with the author, 27 June 2008. 
542 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 

built quality homes on what is now called the Herstad Addition in Tacoma. He died in 

1981.244

Albert (“Al”) Materazzi, OG, one of the leaders of the Italian Operational Groups 

both in their training in Areas A, B, and F, and as operations officer for their amphibious 

raids from Corsica, returned to the United States in 1945 and was immediately transferred 

back to the U.S. Army Map Service and put in charge of reproduction research. In August 

1945, he testified at the war crimes trial of German General Anton Dostler, who had 

ordered the summary execution of fifteen members of the OSS “Ginny” mission in Italy. 

Dostler was convicted and executed. After leaving the service, Materazzi returned to his 

prewar research in graphic arts, spending twenty years with a firm that manufactured 

chemicals for the lithographic industry and later managing quality control at the U.S. 

Government Printing Office. Retiring at 65, he continued to work until he was 75 as a 

consultant on quality control on the lithographic and photographic reproduction 

processes. In a long and distinguished career in that field, he was founding member and 

President of four of the industry’s technical associations. Even in his 90s, he continued to 

write about the OSS in Italy and the German atrocities committed.245 Richard W. Breck, 

Jr., SO, who had left Harvard, trained at Area B, and gone on three missions behind 

enemy lines in Italy, spent 1946, as a baseball pitcher with the Pawtucket, Rhode Island, 

Slaters, a farm team for the Boston Braves. “Bobo Breck,” pitched until 1947 when he 

broke his leg. Later he took night courses at MIT and worked for a series of defense 

contractors including the Little Company with its contracts for the hydrogen bomb, and 

Raytheon on new radar systems and the Hawk and Sparrow missiles.246

 Many members of the OSS Communications Branch (CB) went back to or into 

the communications industry after the war. Lawrence Lowman, head of the 

Communications Branch, returned to his prewar position as a vice President of the 

Columbia Broadcasting System in 1945. Owner William S. Paley, put him in charge of 

preparing CBS Television.247 Peter G.S. Mero, one of the leading recruiters of radio 

operators and other “commo” people, returned from heading OSS communications in 

Italy, to head the Communications Branch in the new Strategic Services Unit.248

Subsequently, Mero went back to Chicago, married Sarah (“Sally”) Sabow, a former OSS 

cipher clerk who had served in Algeria and Italy. He became an executive in the Pioneer 

Electric Corporation, invented a successful teleprinter, and later worked with the 

 

244 Rolf Herstad, email to the author, 7 August 2008. I am indebted to Rolf Herstad for supplying me with 

much information and illustrative material about his father’s service in the OSS. 

245 Albert (“Al”) Materazzi, telephone interviews with the author, 26 January 2005, 23 September 2005, 

“Biography,” sent to the author, 31 January 2005; Al Materazzi, “Remembering 109 [William J. 

Donovan]—Recollections of OSSers,” OSS Society Newsletter, Winter 2004-05, p. 7; email to the author, 6 

March 2007. 

246 Obituary, Richard W. Breck, Quincy, Mass. Patriot-Ledger, 17 March 2005, reprinted in OSS Society 

Digest Number 984, 18 March 2005, osssociety@yahoo.groups.com, accessed 18 March 2005. 

247 Allen R. Richter, telephone interview with the author, 16 March 2007. 

248 Arthur Reinhardt, email to the author, 25 July 2007, attributing this information to John W. Coffey. 
 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 543

American Red Cross and with Radio Free Europe.249 According to CB veteran Allen C. 

Richter, “He had many hats in many closets.” 250 Richter, a key member of the 

communications team with Detachment 101 in Burma, ended the war in Washington as 

assistant chief of CB’s Plant and Engineering Division. After the war, Richter worked for 

a communications equipment manufacturing firm as foreign sales manager, selling 

transmitters and receivers to the Chinese. At one point soon after the war, he formed a 

consulting company. One of its aspects was to help independent radio stations prepare for 

television. “I ran into Larry [Lowman] in Grand Central Station one day,” Richter 

recalled. “....Larry asked me if I wanted to come to work for him at CBS-TV, as 

anything I wanted. But I said no. T.V. was kind of shaky then. In hindsight, it was not a 

good decision.”251 Instead of CBS, Richter joined the American Red Cross in Washington 

and helped run their telecommunications system for fifteen years. After that he ran the 

Washington offices first of Robert Shaw Controls, which tested instruments, and then the 

Singer Sewing Machine Company. He retired in 1971.252 

Some of the communications instructors at Area C returned to the burgeoning 

telecommunications industry. Captain James F. Ranney, had taught International Morse 

Code at Area C before serving in the Mediterranean and China theaters. After the war, he 

went back to Ohio, his home state, and worked as an engineer at various radio stations, 

ending up as chief engineer at a radio station in Cincinnati. Subsequently highly active in 

the Communications Branch’s alumni group, Ranney edited, together with his son, a 

collection of recollections by OSS “Commo” veterans, the OSS CommVets Papers.

253

Timothy Marsh, had been a civilian instructor at the Communications School. By the end 

of 1944, when the number of trainees declined, most of the civilian instructors left. Some 

enlisted as civilian radio operators in the Merchant Marine, and several of them lost their 

lives on torpedoed vessels. But Marsh had a wife and infant daughter, and instead of the 

Merchant Marine, he went to Chicago and found jobs with a radio manufacturer and then 

a radio station. But after a few years, however, the condition of his young daughter’s 

health, led Marsh to return to his native Tennessee. Initially, chief engineer at a radio 

station in Jackson, he later was employed by the Motorola field office for thirteen 

counties, subsequently taking ownership of the dealership until his retirement in 1979. 

During much of the next two decades, in Shelbyville, Timothy Marsh and his wife, 

Helen, served as the historians/archivists for Bedford County, Tennessee.254

Countless OSS radio operators who underwent training at Area C returned to the 

private sector. Roger L. Belanger, who had returned from CB’s London base station to 

 

249 Arthur Reinhardt, email to the author, 23 September 2005; Brenda Warner Rotzoll, obituary “Sarah M. 

Mero: Handled Secret WWII Transmissions,” Chicago Sun-Times, 25 November 2003. 

250 Allen R. Richter, telephone interview with the author, 16 March 2007. 

251 Ibid. 

252 Ibid., 25 March 2005. 

253 James F. Ranney, telephone interview with the author, 8 January 2005; James F. Ranney and Arthur L. 

Ranney, eds., The OSS CommVets Papers, 2nd ed. (Covington, Ky.: James F. Ranney, 2002). 

254 Timothy R. Marsh, telephone interview with the author, 18 January 2006. 
544 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 

become part of the cadre at Area C, went home to Maine and worked first as a salesman 

and then designing marine instruments and finally for an engineering company building 

ships. He then turned a hobby into a business by building scale model ships. He has 

constructed more than 150 hand-made wooden ship models for private collectors and 

museums.255 Joseph J. Tully, who remained a lifelong friend of Roger Belanger, used the 

benefits of the GI Bill to learn tool making. Joining a company in Palmyra, New Jersey, 

that did rotogravure printing—high speed rotary press printing used for long print runs of 

colored material such as stamps and magazines—he advanced over the years from 

toolmaker to tool machine designer, plant engineer, and wound up as sales manager 

before his retirement in 1988.256 David Kenney, a radio operator who had trained at Areas 

A and C and served in England and China, returned home to a ranch in Wyoming owned 

by his two brothers. “I learned to fly under the G.I. Bill,” he said. “Later I got my degree 

in aeronautical engineering from Northrop’s university in Los Angeles County.” He 

worked as an aircraft engineer for Northrop and later Rockwell aerospace companies in 

Los Angeles until his retirement in 1983.257

After the war, Spiro Cappony, the naval seaman and OSS radio operator, who 

trained with actor Sterling Hayden and then helped blow up bridges in Greece in the 

“Chicago” Mission, went to college at night under the GI Bill, while working at the 

Pentagon as a naval reservist called to active duty. The new CIA offered him a position in 

1947, but he declined. Instead, he returned to Gary, Indiana, his hometown, married, and, 

like his family before him, ran a restaurant. He also spent much of his postwar career in 

the construction industry working for Pangere Construction Company, which he 

continued to advise even after his retirement.258

Marvin S. (“Mark”) Flisser, the Brooklyn College graduate, who as a trainee at 

Area C was soon transmitting 40 words a minute, double the normal rate for operators, 

had not continued in the Communications Branch. Instead, the assessment staff at Station 

S identified him as having leadership qualities and an IQ of 140, he was sent to Officer’s 

Candidate School. Returning a second lieutenant, OSS headquarters assigned him to help 

research Nazi war crimes. Mustered out of the Army at the age of 24, he returned to New 

York City, joined a stock brokerage firm as a trainee, and ultimately wound up as a 

partner in a firm that included H. Ross Perot. After thirty years on Wall Street, he retired, 

went to California and earned a doctorate in nutritional science. Then, he founded, and 

for fifteen years managed, a nutrition company based in Stamford, Connecticut. He 

retired once again, first to Scarsdale and then at age 78 to a retirement community in 

Monroe, New Jersey. From there, he audited courses at nearby Rutgers and Princeton 

Universities.259

 

 

255 Roger L. Belanger, telephone interview with the author, 11 April 2005. 

256 Joseph J. Tully, telephone interview with the author, 29 December 2007. 

257 David Kenney, telephone interview with the author, 11 April 2005. 

258 Spiro Cappony, telephone conversation with the author, 16 September 2006, and David Hendrix, 

“Under Deep Cover,” Times, pp. C-1, C-2, unidentified, undated clipping of a news story about him sent to 

the author by Spiro Cappony, 31 October 2006. 

259 Marvin Flisser, telephone interview with the author, 27 January 2005. 
 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 545

A young soldier named Jack S. Kilby, from Jefferson City, Missoui, who served 

in radio repair shops with the OSS Communications Branch for Detachment 101 in 

northeast India and then Detachment 202 in western China, returned home and with the 

help of the GI Bill graduated from the University of Illinois and then with a Masters 

Degree in electrical engineering from the University of Wisconsin. He went to work for 

Globe Union and then in 1958 for Texas Instruments as a research engineer. Continuing 

the OSS philosophy of thinking outside the box, he invented that year a working 

integrated circuit, which formed the basis for the microchip industry. For that discovery, 

he was eventually awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics.

260

 

 

Continuing to Serve in Uniform 

A lot of the men in Special Operations and Operational Groups remained with the 

Army after the war. At least two of them became generals. William R. (“Ray”) Peers, 

who had trained at Area B and spent the war with Detachment 101 in Burma, made a 

career in the Army, although he was several times assigned on detached service to the 

CIA, after its founding, helping to establish its paramilitary training program and 

directing covert operations in southern China from secret bases in Burma and Taiwan 

during the Korean War. Returning to the Army, he held several intelligence and other 

staff positions. When the Vietnam War began, he advised the Joint Chiefs of Staff on 

counterinsurgency special operations. In 1967, he commanded the 4th Infantry Division, 

and in 1968, as a lieutenant general, he was in charge of 50,000 U.S. troops in the corpslevel I Field Force plus South Vietnamese and South Korean troops. In 1969, Peers was 

selected to investigate the My Lai Massacre. His conclusion, the “Peers Report,” was 

condemnatory of the action and highly critical of the cover up, and he recommended the 

court-martial of two enlisted men and thirty officers from lieutenant to major general. 

Peers died in 1984 at age 69.261 John K. Singlaub, who trained at Areas F and B, was a 

Jedburgh in France and the leader of an SO rescue mission in China, also made the Army 

his career as a combat infantry and special operations officer. During the Korean War, he 

served first on detached duty with the CIA and then as an infantry battalion commander 

with the 3rd Infantry Division. With his emphasis on special operations, Singlaub 

commanded the Joint Unconventional Warfare Task Group (MACSOG) in Vietnam. He 

was instrumental in establishing the Army Rangers training center at Fort Benning. While 

chief of staff of the U.N. Command and the 8th U.S. Army in South Korea, Singlaub 

publicly challenged President Jimmy Carter’s 1977 decision to withdraw U.S. troops 

 

260 “In Memoriam: Jack Kilby, “OSS Society Newsletter, Summer 2005, 16, and Spring 2006, 17; John 

Markoff, “Jack S. Kilby, an Inventor of the Microchip, Is Dead at 81,” New York Times, 22 June 2005; T.R. 

Reid, “Jack Kilby, Touch Lives on Micro and Macro Scales,” Washington Post, 22 June 2005, C1. 

261 “Peers, William Raymond,” W. Thomas Smith, Jr., Encyclopedia of the Central Intelligence Agency

(New York: Facts on File, 2003), 184; William R. Peers and Dean Brelis, Behind the Burma Road: The 

Story of America’s Most Successful Guerrilla Force (Boston: Little, Brown, 1963); William R. Peers, The 

Peers Report (1970); “Army Values: Integrity: Ray Peers,” Special Warfare, 13:2 (Spring 2000): 21. 
546 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 

from Korea, and Carter relieved him of command. Singlaub retired that year as a major 

general.262

Instructors Joseph H. Collart, Charles M. Parkin, Jr. Leopold (“Leo”) Karwaski, 

and Frank A. Gleason, Jr., who served abroad after being instructors at Areas B or A, all 

remained in the Army and spent the next two decades with the Corps of Engineers. 

Joseph H. Collart, who had been one of the instructors at Area B in 1942, had left the 

OSS in early 1943 and joined the Airborne Engineers, serving in Europe. By the end of 

the war, Collart was a lieutenant colonel and commanded a battalion.263 Twenty years 

later, Collart was a full colonel and from his headquarters in Hawaii in charge of Army 

Engineers in the Pacific. In 1965 with the announcement of the buildup of U.S. ground 

forces in South Vietnam, Collart and his staff were called upon to go to Vietnam and then 

prepare estimates for the financial costs of constructing the bases for the combat units 

being scheduled to arrive. Because of quick and detailed estimates and budget requests, 

the Army’s 18th Engineer Brigade was able to get the facilities built in time.264 After 

returning from China, Charles Parkin did graduate work at Cornell and held a variety of 

positions with the Army Engineers. He retired as a lieutenant colonel and then spent in 

various positions in the business sector as a production control engineer in Chicago, a 

manager of copra and citrus plantations in the Caribbean, and running his own carpet 

business in Florida. Following his third retirement, Parkin turned to writing books, one 

of rockets and another on an 18th century nautical explorer, and founding a maritime

museum in Oregon.265 Leo Karwaski, one of the “three ski’s” instructors at Area B, had 

served in China. After the war, his primary career with the Army Corps of Engineers, but 

he reportedly worked periodically on detached duty for the CIA inThailand in the early 

1950s and in Vietnam in the late 1960s. Karwaski retired a colonel and is buried in 

Arlington National Cemetery.266 

Frank Gleason earned a Master’s Degree at Harvard after the war and served in 

various civil and military positions with the Engineers, concluding his career as chief 

engineer at the big U.S. Army base at Cam Ranh Bay in South Vietnam. After retiring as 

a full colonel in 1971, Gleason spent fifteen years at Georgia Tech University in various 

 

262 “Gen. John K. Singlaub New Society Chairman,” OSS Society Newsletter, Spring 2005, 1; John K. 

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

York: Simon and Schuster, 1991). 

263 It was the 878th Airborne Engineer Battalion, Lt. Col. Joseph H. Collart, http://www.ixengineer 

command.com/listmen.php. Accessed 3 January 2008. 

264 Maj. Gen. Robert R. Ploger, Vietnam Studies: U.S. Army Engineers, 1965-1970 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. 

Army, Center of Military History, 1974), 63-64, 72.

265 Frank A. Gleason, telephone interview with the author, 26 December 2007; Charles M. Parkin, ed., The 

Rocket Handbook for Amateurs (New York: John Day, 1959); and Francis E. Cross and Charles M. Parkin, 

Captain Gray in the Pacific Northwest (Bend, Oregon: Maverick Publications, 1987). Located in the 

coastal fishing town of Garibaldi, in Tillamook County, the Garibaldi Maritime Museum opened to the 

public in 2004. Judy Fleagle, “Captain Gray Takes a Stand,” Oregon Coast magazine, May/June 2005, 10. 

266 Frank A. Gleason, telephone interview with the author, 26 December 2007. Joseph Lazarsky, who was 

with the CIA in the Far East in those years, doubts whether Leo Kawarski “spent more than 1% of his time” 

with the CIA. Joseph Lazarsky, telephone interview with the author, 27 December 2007. 
 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 547

business and financial administrative positions. Following his second retirement in 1985, 

he worked buying and selling companies and doing insurance work, and after his final 

retirement in his mid-80s, he lectured on history to senior citizens and tutored children in 

elementary school. Still lively and engaging, he declared gleefully in December 2007, 

“I’m 87 years old. I’ve been all over the world and had a lifetime of experiences. I tell 

people that `I’ve seen the monkey and heard the owl!’”267 

Arden W. (“Art”) Dow, an instructor at Areas B and A, who then served in China, 

moved, after the war, from the Army infantry to the airborne forces, and was stationed in 

Korea, Taiwan, and Panama. His wife, Dorothea (“Dodie”) Dow, gave birth to their 

second daughter in 1952, while they lived in Panama. Dow retired as a full colonel in 

1963, and he became business administrator for the College of Business of the University 

of Georgia. He died in 1982; Mrs. Dow continues to live in Georgia; she has ten 

grandchildren.268 John Hooker, who trained at Areas F and A, before serving in Maritime 

Unit raiding parties along the Burmese coast and then with the OSS Chinese OG 

commandoes in China, spent a postwar career in the Army, with Military Intelligence in 

Japan and Germany and commanding an infantry battalion in Germany. Retiring as a full 

colonel in 1963, he worked for the National Security Agency in Vietnam for five years. 

Subsequently, he managed commercial radio stations, owned and outdoor advertising 

company, and worked in a variety of capacities for a Florida police department. He also 

taught Civil War history.269

 

A number of OSS SO and OG personnel stayed with the Army and eventually 

worked with the Special Forces. Several were pioneers in the Special Forces when it was 

secretly created in 1952, among them Aaron Bank, Jack Shannon, Caesar Civitella, 

Herbert Brucker, and James Goodwin. Jerry Sage, Washington State University alumnus, 

instructor at Areas B and D, who had been captured in North Africa and spent the next 

two years trying to escape from German POW camps, finally successfully in early 1945. 

After the war, he served on the headquarters staff of the U.S. European Command in 

Germany and became an expert on the detainment, repatriation, and immigration of 

Displaced Persons, testifying before congressional committees on the subject. He was an 

instructor at West Point for three years and, except for the dissertation, completed a 

doctorate at Columbia University. After a year as a battalion commander during the 

Korean War, he taught at the Army’s advanced schools, and in the early 1960s, he was 

assigned to the Special Forces, first in Vietnam and then in Europe. Working out of the 

Bavarian Alps, his unit was prepared to parachute behind Soviet lines and lead resistance 

forces in case of a Russian invasion of Western Europe. After retiring as a full colonel in 

1972, Sage did graduate work in education and taught civics instruction at high schools in 

Columbia, South Carolina, while enrolled in a doctoral program (his second), this time in 

education, being voted the outstanding teacher for the entire state. In 1980, he moved to 

Alabama, where he raised money to help the needy and handicapped through schools and 

training centers, worked for the Special Olympics, and continued to give “enrichment 

 

267 Frank A. Gleason, email to the author, 28 January 2005; and telephone interviews with the author, 31 

January 2005, and 26 December 2007. 

268 Dorothea (“Dodie”) Dow (Mrs. Arden W. Dow), telephone interview with the author, 15 May 2005. 

269 John C. Hooker, resumé, John C. Hooker, email to the author, 27 June 2008. 
548 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 

lectures” in schools, civic, youth, and church groups. Arguing against peer pressure and 

gangs and what he called the “sheep complex” that herded young people into bad habits. 

“I try to stress the importance of having the courage to choose the harder right over the 

easier wrong,” Sage said, “and to lift others up rather than tear them down.”270

Paul Cyr, as a young Army captain from Vermont, had been one of the stars of the 

OSS. Trained in Special Operations, he had won the Distinguished Service Cross on 

Jedburgh Team George which harassed the Nazis behind their lines in France. He then 

went to China where his Team Jackal blew up the mile-long bridge across the Yellow 

River. Settling in Indiana, this war hero ran for Congress in 1950, but lost. Later he went 

to Washington as an assistant to Senator Homer E. Capehart, a Republican from Indiana. 

In 1963, he became an important civilian employee of the new Army Matérial Command, 

acting as a liaison with Congress for one of the Pentagon’s largest supply agencies. He 

later worked for the Federal Energy Administration. He retired in the 1980s and died in 

1994.271 

 

 

Working for the CIA 

Four subsequent Directors of Central Intelligence had been with the OSS. Allen 

W. Dulles, SI in Switzerland, was appointed by President Eisenhower and served as DCI 

from 1953 to1961. Richard M. Helms, SI in Europe, worked his way up in CIA and was 

appointed DCI by President Lyndon Johnson, serving from 1966 to 1973. William E. 

Colby, who had trained at Areas F and B, had been a Jedburgh in France and then SO in 

Norway. After a few years as a lawyer, Colby joined the CIA in 1950 and was appointed 

director by President Richard Nixon, serving as DCI from 1973 to 1976. He died in a 

canoeing mishap at 76 in 1996. William J. Casey, had broken his jaw in a training 

accident at Area B, but went on to a top position in SI London. After the war, he became 

a leading New York tax attorney, a wealthy investor, and a major figure in the 

Republican Party. President Ronald Reagan appointed him DCI, and he served from 1981 

to 1987. 

The CIA naturally recruited a number of former OSS personnel to serve careers 

with the new agency. Helms and Colby were two of them. Peter M.F. Sichel, SI with the 

7

th Army, worked for the CIA for a dozen years, serving as base chief in Berlin, chief of 

European Operations in Washington, D.C., and then station chief in Hong Kong. He 

resigned in 1959, in a disagreement over policy, and joined the family wine business, in 

the process building “Blue Nun,” into a major international brand. Joseph Lazarsky, SO, 

former Area B instructor who served overseas in Burma and China, finished college 

under the GI bill after the war and then spent twenty-five years in the Far East with the 

 

270 Jerry Sage, Sage (Wayne, Pa.: Miles Standish Press, 1985), 467-470.

271 Irwin, The Jedburghs, 228; some of Cyr’s postwar problems are recounted in Joseph C. Goulden with 

Alexander W. Raffio, The Death Merchant: The Rise and Fall of Edwin P. Wilson (New York: Simon and 

Schuster, 1984), 69-72, 237-38, 313, 433. 
 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 549

CIA, beginning with duty in Taiwan, India, and Indonesia. After being Deputy Station 

Chief in Saigon in the early 1970s, Lazarsky served as Station Chief in Seoul, Jakarta, 

and Manila, retiring in 1978.272 Oliver M. Silsby, Jr., from Detroit, who had original 

trained as a radio operator but then taken SO training and parachuted into Yugoslavia and 

with Howard Chappell into northern Italy, where he was eventually captured by the 

Nazis, returned home after the war and graduated from the University of Michigan under 

the GI Bill. He also attended the Institute for Political Studies in Paris. He spent nearly 

thirty years with the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, serving in France, Belgium, and 

Luxembourg, before being sent to Laos from 1968 to 1970. He helped establish an guide 

the CIA’s terrorism bureau in the 1970s, before his retirement in 1979.273 Caesar 

Civitella, who trained at Areas F and B with the OSS Italian OGs and then served in 

France and Italy, was a pioneer with Army Special Forces from 1952 until his retirement 

as a major in 1964. He then worked for the CIA until 1983. In 2008, he was honored with 

a special award from the U.S. Special Operations Command.274 Lucien Conein, who 

trained at Areas F and B, was a Jedburgh in France and also was infiltrated into Vietnam, 

technically remained in the Army and rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel, but he was 

on detached service with the CIA almost continually from 1947 to 1968. His assignments 

carried him from Eastern Europe to Iran to South Vietnam, where he wound up as liaison 

in the coup that overthrew President Ngo Dinh Diem. In 1972, he rejected an offer from 

E. Howard Hunt, another ex-OSSer and retired CIA officer, to join the “plumbers,” a 

secret team that bungled the Watergate burglary. From 1973 to 1984, Conein ran secret 

operations for the Drug Enforcement Administration. When he died in 1998, the New 

York Times called Conein, “the last of the great wartime spies.”275

A lot of OSS people continued to work in the intelligence field after the war, even 

if not always with the CIA. Erasmus (“Ras’) Kloman, SO, who had trained at Areas A, B, 

C, D, and F, and served in the Mediterranean Theater, pursued careers in government, 

academia, and private business after the war. He earned an M.A. from Harvard and a 

Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, served sequentially with the CIA, the 

Department of State, and the Foreign Policy Research Institute at the University of 

Pennsylvania, and subsequently with several corporations as a public affairs officer and 

executive. After retiring in the mid-1980s, he painted and wrote travel books as well as a 

memoir of his service in the OSS, Assignment Algiers.

276 Like scores of others, who had 

been with the Research and Analysis Branch, Louis J. (“Luz”) Gonzalez, who as an 

Army sergeant trained briefly at Area A, before being sent to Italy, wound up after the 

 

272 Joseph Lazarsky, telephone interviews with the author, 14 March 2005, 11 February and 27 December 

2007. 

273 Obituary, “Oliver Mowrer Silsby, Jr., CIA Agent,” Washington Post, 29 May, 2006. 

274 The Col. Arthur D. (“Bull”) Simons Award presented to Caesar Civitella at the USSOCOM HQ, 

MacDill AFB, Tampa, Fla. Troy J. Sacquety, “Caesar J. Civitella: Bull Simons Award 2008,” Veritas: 

Journal of Army Special Operations History, 4:1 (2008): 77. 

275 Tim Weiner, “Lucien Conein, 79, Legendary Cold War Spy,” New York Times, 7 June 1998. 

276 Erasmus H. Kloman, Assignment Algiers: With the OSS in the Mediterranean Theater (Annapolis, Md.: 

Naval Institute Press, 2005), 127. 
550 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 

war with the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. The Mexican-born 

Gonzalez, who knew both Spanish and Italian and became a U.S. citizen when he joined 

the Army in 1942, worked at the State Department until his retirement.277 Jacques F. 

Snyder, the French-speaking, Saxophone-playing American GI who was recruited by 

OSS, given OG training at Areas F and A, and later parachuted back to France where he 

successfully carried out a combination special operations and intelligence mission, 

remained in the Army with Military Intelligence after the war. He served in France and 

Cambodia, part of the former French Indochina, until a hard parachute landing and some 

compressed vertebrae ended his active military career in the 1960s. Subsequently as a 

civilian employed by the Defense Intelligence Agency, he worked in Vietnam and then 

mainly in Europe. He retired from the Defense Intelligence Agency in 1991. His son 

recalled that “All the time [I was] growing up, I never knew what my father did for 

employment. When we would ask what he did for a living (for school paperwork, 

applications, etc.), he would say ‘government employee.’”278

 

Women of the OSS 

 More than a few of the OSS women later worked for the CIA. Virginia Hall, the 

“limping lady” the spy and resistance leader, who so infuriated and successfully evaded 

the Gestapo in France, came back to the United States after the war and was awarded the 

Distinguished Service Cross. She was the only civilian American woman to receive that 

award in World War II. Later, she joined the CIA in 1951 and was assigned to the 

fledgling covert action office as an intelligence analyst. The following year, Hall became 

one of the first female operations officers. She interviewed refugees and exiles from 

communist countries, prepared political-action projects, and planned resistance and 

sabotage activities to be carried out behind Red Army lines in case of war with the Soviet 

Union. Several of her assignments as an operations officer were overseas. In 1966, 

having reached 60, she retired, spending the rest of her life at her Maryland home until 

her death at 76 in 1982. 

 When Elizabeth (“Betty”) Peet MacDonald left the Morale Operations unit at 

OSS headquarters in Kunming, China in 1945, her husband, Commander Alexander 

MacDonald, decided to remain in the Far East and establish an English-language 

newspaper in Thailand. She returned to the United States, and they later divorced 

amicably. She resumed her career in journalism, writing for Glamour magazine, and 

producing a memoir of her service in the OSS.279 Subsequently, she married Richard P. 

Heppner, former head of OSS in China and a partner in Donovan’s law firm. She did 

 

277 “Louis Joseph Gonzalez,” biographical statement, provided by his son, Ronald Gonzalez, San Mateo, to 

the author, 22 January 2008. I am indebted to Ronald Gonzalez for the material about his father. 

278 Information from , James Snyder, son of Jacques F. Snyder, email to the author, 8 August 2008. I am 

indebted to James Snyder for the information and material about his father. 

279 Elizabeth P. MacIntosh, Undercover Girl (New York: Macmillan, 1947, reprinted 1995); she also wrote 

two books for children. 
 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 551

some work for Voice of America and the State Department. Then in 1958, Dick Heppner 

died of a heart attack at 49 after completing a world tour as Deputy Assistant Secretary of 

Defense for International Security. A year later, Allen Dulles hired Betty Heppner for the 

CIA. In 1959, most of the women at CIA, she reported, were assigned to office work. 

Only a few did research and analysis, and even fewer, like Virginia Hall, were assigned 

to operations and then mainly at lower levels. Betty Heppner saw the agency gradually 

transformed as times and the culture changed and bright, college-trained, computer-smart 

women arrived and moved into positions formerly held only by men. Betty Heppner 

moved up too and eventually she also ran agents. She cited William E. Colby, former 

OSSer and DCI from 1973-1976, as an outspoken champion of equal opportunity for 

women. By 1994, the professional employees at CIA were chose to equal in number, 59 

per cent male, 41 per cent female. Betty Heppner (Betty MacIntosh after she married 

Frederick MacIntosh a World War II fighter pilot) retired from the CIA in 1973, and 

subsequently wrote an account of women in the OSS and CIA, A Sisterhood of Spies.

280

Aline Griffith, the beautiful, young Hattie Carnegie model from Pearl River, New 

York, who had worked in OSS Counter-Intelligence (X-2) in Madrid gathering 

information from social circles and running her own net of spies, stayed in Spain after the 

war. In 1948, she married a Spanish nobleman and became Aline, Countess of 

Romanones.281 From her homes in Spain and with her social contacts and sharp insights, 

she continued to work for American intelligence, the CIA, for nearly the next twenty 

years, and then wrote two memoirs about it.282

 Several other OSS women worked for the CIA, according to Betty MacIntosh, but 

among the most successful was Eloise Randolph Page, who had been an executive 

secretary to Donovan. Toward the end of the war, OSS headquarters sent her to Brussels 

to head the counter-intelligence (X-2) office there. Later, she had a career with the CIA, 

eventually becoming a top executive and the first woman chief of station in Athens. As 

Page told MacIntosh, “historically, I suppose you could say that the women of the OSS 

prepared the groundwork for their sisters who came after them in CIA.”283

 Aside from the CIA, numerous other OSS women had various postwar careers. 

Hélène Deschamps Adams, who as a French teenager had spied for the French Resistance 

and for the OSS, married an American Army officer and came to the United States as a 

war bride in 1946. They had one daughter. Forest E. Adams died of a heart attack in 

1951. Mrs. Adams never remarried, but taught French and wrote two memoirs of her 

wartime experiences. She died in New York in 2006 at 85.284 Barbara Lauwers Podoski, a 

 

280 Elizabeth P. MacIntosh, Sisterhood of Spies (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1998), 242, for the 

statistics on CIA employment by gender. 

281 Ibid., 169. Aline, Countess of Romanones, The Spy Wore Red: My Adventures as an Undercover Agent 

in World War II (New York: Random House, 1987). 

282 Aline, Countess of Romanones, The Spy Wore Red; and The Spy Went Dancing (New York: 

G.Putnam’s Sons, 1990), 11-14, and passim. 

283 Ibid., 244. 

284 Douglas Martin, “Hélène Deschamps Adams, Wartime Hero, Dies at 85,” New York Times, 24 

September 2006, A4. Her books were The Secret War (New York: W.H. Allen, 1980) and Spyglass: An 

Autobiography (New York: Henry Holt, 1995). 
552 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 

native Czech who had joined the U.S. Women’s Army Corps, and, as a German linguist, 

served with the OSS’s Morale Operations Branch distributing effective propaganda to 

German soldiers in Italy, returned to the United States. After the war, she sold hats, 

worked as a dental assistant, did broadcasts for Voice of America, and finally found a 

permanent job she liked with the Library of Congress.

285 Maria Gulovich, the young 

Czech schoolteacher, partisan, and guide, who led two American survivors of the ill-fated 

OSS mission to Slovakia to safety, in 1945 was brought to the United States at 

Donovan’s request and enrolled at Vassar College, from which she graduated in 1948. 

She later moved to southern California, married an American businessman, worked had 

two children, and worked in a real estate business. She was awarded the Bronze Star for 

her heroism in World War II.286 

One female OSS member, unknown to the public during the war, would become a 

celebrity chef. Her name was Julia Child, and through her books and then her television 

program, she became the best known chef in America. Julia McWilliams, a big, bright, 

happy, young woman from California, met her future husband, Paul Child, while both 

were working at OSS China headquarters in Chungking. They married in Washington 

right after the war. He took her to Paris where he was assigned by the State Department, 

and there she spent a decade studying French cuisine. Beginning in 1961 with her book, 

Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and subsequently with her own television show 

and later on Good Morning America, Julia Child demystified French Cooking for the 

American public. She went further than that. Child taught Americans not just how to 

cook but how to think deeply about food, a quality missing from many of the glitzy TV 

chefs who have followed her.287

OSS “Commo” people in the CIA 

Quite a few of the people from OSS Communications Branch later worked for the 

CIA. Bob Kehoe from New Jersey, the radioman on Jeburgh Team Frederick in France, 

who won the Distinguished Service Cross, returned to Rutgers University to finish his 

degree under the GI Bill and then earned a Masters Degree in International Relations at 

Columbia. He spent thirty-five years at the CIA in the training and in management. He 

earned a Ph.D. in Far Eastern Studies from American University in 1970.288 Gail F. 

 

285 MacIntosh, Sisterhood of Spies, 68-69; and Interview with Barbara Lauwers Podoski conducted by 

Christof Mauch, 4 September 1996, OSS Oral History Transcripts, CIA Records (RG 263), Box 3, National 

Archives II.

286 MacIntosh, Sisterhood of Spies, 167; Jim Downs, WWII OSS Tragedy in Slovakia (Oceanside, Calif.: 

Liefrinck Pub., 2002), 314, 324. 

287 Laura Shapiro, Julia Child (New York: Viking, 2007). 

288 Irwin, The Jedburghs, 226. 
 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 553

Donnalley, an OSS code clerk, trained in Area C as well as downtown Washington, 

served in Egypt and Italy, and had a small part in the German surrender in Italy. After 

being mustered out, he returned to Ohio Wesleyan University, earned his degree, and 

worked for the U.S. Bureau of the Budget for ten years. Then in 1955, he was recruited 

by the CIA where he worked in the agency’s communications section until his retirement 

in 1980. Subsequently, he worked for Apple Computer Company until his second 

retirement. Even after that, he kept working, serving in the ombudsman program for the 

State of Virginia.289 

Art Reinhardt, who trained at Area C and spent fourteen months as a radio 

operator in China, became a HAM radio operator and continued communications work 

after the war. For five years, he also struggled with recurring high fevers and diseases he 

had caught in China, until they were finally successfully diagnosed and cured in 1950. 

Reinhardt continued his role in developing communications for America’s secret 

intelligence organizations. He pioneered in establishing the Diplomatic 

Telecommunications Service for the Department of State, and he subsequently worked 

for communications in the Central Intelligence Agency, retiring from the Agency in 

1976. “I’m very grateful to the OSS,” he said later, “because it turned out that it gave me 

a career. That was totally unexpected, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything. And it made 

me forget I was ever in regular military service!”290

Donovan Preserves the Legend 

 William J. Donovan, the dynamic chief of the OSS, had been only 62 in 1945 

when the war and the OSS ended. He lived another 14 years. During the postwar period, 

in addition to resuming work at his law firm on Wall Street, he remained keenly 

interested in the gathering and analysis of foreign intelligence.291 He kept up his own 

sources of information through trips abroad and contacts within the American 

intelligence community. A vigorous Cold Warrior, he warned repeatedly of the dangers 

the Soviet Union posed to the interests and values of the United States.292 Recognizing 

the importance of global economic development for the United States and other nations 

both for material purposes and to counter communist subversion, Donovan helped form a 

corporation to encourage economic regeneration of countries devastated by war and 

vulnerable to Soviet influence. The World Commerce Corporation had representatives in 

nearly 50 countries and became heavily invested in manufacturing, exporting and 

 

289 Gail F. Donnalley, telephone interview with the author, 30 April 2005. 

290 Arthur (“Art’) Reinhardt, interview with the author and Judy Volonoski, museum technician, following 

a tour at Prince William Forest Park, Triangle, Va., 22 February 2007. 

291 William J. Donovan, “American Foreign Policy Must Be Based on Facts,” Vital Speeches, 1 May 1946, 

446-48; Donovan, “Intelligence: Key to Defense,” Life, 30 September 1946, 108-10. 

292 For example, “Donovan Points to Russians in Defense Appeal,” New York Herald Tribune, 10 January 

1947. 
554 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 

importing, and may also have been involved in gathering intelligence.293 Donovan 

vigorously supported the Marshall Plan to stimulate economic recovery in Western 

Europe, and he championed European unification to block Soviet influence.294

 

Donovan still had political ambitions. He launched a campaign for U.S. Senator 

from New York in 1946, but it was blocked by Republican Governor Thomas E. 

Dewey.295 There was speculation in1947 when the CIA was created that Donovan might 

be its first director, but there was little chance of that. Truman had never liked Donovan, 

and the feeling was mutual.296 The President appointed the current head of the Central 

Intelligence Group, Rear Adm. Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, who served until 1950. In the 

1952 election, Donovan vigorously supported Eisenhower, and the former OSS chief was 

disappointed at not being appointed Secretary of Defense or Director of Central 

Intelligence (DCI). Named DCI was former OSS bureau chief in Switzerland, Allen 

Dulles, the brother of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles.297

 Instead, Eisenhower appointed Donovan as U.S. ambassador to Thailand.298 The 

OSS had been influential in Thailand during the war, and Donovan had been celebrated 

by that country, as well as many others.299 At 70 years of age, the former head of the OSS 

 

293 Anthony Cave Brown, The Last Hero: Wild Bill Donovan (New York: Times Books, 1982), 795-800. 

Brown indicates that Donovan, who was not a stockholder, did not receive much income from the 

company; his main income was his salary from his law firm. 

294 Dunlop, Donovan, 486-488, 490-491, 495, 497, 499. 

295 Ibid., 488. 

296 Anthony Cave Brown cites several possible reasons for Truman’s antipathy toward Donovan. In World 

War I, Donovan’s units, attacking the Hindenburg Line in 1918 were deprived of artillery support and 

suffered major casualties. Donovan complained and Capt. Harry S Truman’s artillery battery, which had 

been directed to provide support for that section of the line the night before Donovan’s mission, was 

withdrawn from that mission soon after Donovan’s complaint. Later as a U.S. Senator, Truman became 

close friends with Democratic Senator Burton K. Wheeler of Montana, who had been prosecuted by 

Donovan as assistant U.S. attorney general for crimes related to the Teapot Dome scandal, but who had 

been found innocent at his trial; subsequently, Wheeler formed an anti-Donovan clique in the Senate. Cave 

Brown, The Last Hero, 790-792. 

297 Dunlop, Donovan, 491, 499. Donovan did not think Allen Dulles was the best choice to manage a large 

intelligence organization. At the end of World War II, despite Allen Dulles’s achievements in the Bern

office of the OSS and recommendations by a number of OSSers, Donovan had refused to appoint him to 

succeed David Bruce as chief of OSS European operations. Instead, he put Dulles in charge of OSS in a 

particular country: Germany. “I thought Allen was a fine operative, but I did not think he had the 

organizational skill to handle all of Europe,” Donovan said after the war. Some thought it was because of 

Dulles’s supposed mishandling of the German bid for a separate peace in Italy, Operation Sunrise, but 

Donovan denied that. Donovan’s friends thought that Donovan’s bid for DCI was undermined by his old 

nemesis, J. Edgar Hoover. Cave Brown, The Last Hero), 821. 

298 This was at the urging of Gen. Walter Bedell Smith. Smith had been Eisenhower’s wartime chief of 

staff, and served as Director of Central Intelligence from October 1952 to February 1953. As DCI, he 

frequently consulted with Donovan. In May 1953, as Deputy Secretary of State, he summoned Donovan to 

accept the post in Thailand as a frontline in the fight against communist expansion. Ibid., 822. 

299 Dunlop, Donovan, 488. 
 Chapter 10 Postwar Period 555

served as Ambassador to Thailand from 1953 to 1954. “They’re scraping the bottom of 

the barrel to send out an old guy like me,” he told one former member of Detachment 101 

when he was appointed. But he was just joking. “It’s good to have one more challenge to 

meet,” he had added.300 In fact, with the communists in control in China and with the 

French capitulating to the communist Viet Minh in Vietnam, Donovan’s main role was to 

help prevent communist infiltration into Thailand and to integrate Thailand into a 

regional defense system, the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), led by the 

United States.301 Donovan had gone beyond Foster Dulles’s diplomatic arrangement and 

recommended that SEATO should have a unified, military-political command structure, 

like NATO, for which Donovan hoped he would be the first theater commander. But his 

idea was rejected, and at 71, frustrated, tired, ailing, and with public service straining his 

income, Donovan resigned. Back home, he continued to tout his idea for SEATO, but he 

also took a larger view toward the struggle against Ho Chi Minh and the communist 

regime in North Vietnam. “It is not essentially a military matter,” he told a meeting of 

former OSS alumni in 1954. “It is a political struggle which must be won in the stomachs 

of the hungry and in the minds of the people. In Washington, they think that American 

military might is the solution to the problem, but any intelligence man knows this is not 

true.”302

 Two years later, at 73 and suffering from increasing arteriosclerotic impairment of 

blood supply to and atrophy of the brain, Donovan had a stroke. In 1957, he suffered a 

massive stroke and lost control of his mental faculties. Learning of Donovan’s rapidly 

deteriorating health, President Eisenhower awarded him the National Security Medal, the 

highest civilian award, to go with his military Medal of Honor, Distinguished Service 

Cross with Oak Leaf Cluster, and Distinguished Service Medal. Donovan had yet another 

stroke, and, at the President’s insistence, he was transferred from New York to the 

Pershing Suite at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, D.C. It was there that Donovan 

died on Sunday, 8 February 1959, at the age of 76.303 Hearing of Donovan’s death, 

Eisenhower lamented: “What a man! We have lost the last hero.”304

 

300 Ibid., 500. 

301 Dunlop, Donovan, 502. During Donovan’s travels around Thailand, the men trailing him turned out to 

be not Soviet KGB agents, as he had first suspected, but members of the CIA sent to report his activities to 

the suspicious CIA chief Allen Dulles. The SEATO nations included Australia, Great Britain, France, New 

Zealand, Pakistan, the Philippines, Thailand, and the United States. In a separate protocol, SEATO 

protection was extended to Cambodia, Laos, and South Vietnam, which had been barred by the Geneva 

Agreements of 1954 from joining any military alliance. 

302 Dunlop, Donovan, 504-505. 

303 Cave Brown, The Last Hero, 830-833. 

304 Otto C. Doering, New York City, interview with Anthony Cave Brown, 1 November 1977, quoted in 

Cave Brown, The Last Hero, 833. 
556 Chapter 10 Postwar Period