Office of Strategic Services The Office of Strategic Services ( Or OSS ) was the intelligence service of USA during WWII . It is considered the precursor to the Central Intelligence or CIA . Creation . Before the creation of the OSS ( the equivalent of " British Secret Intelligence Service " ) , The affairs of the intelligence service were distributed among the different departments of government United States without any coordination . Thus , for example , the Army and Navy used different codes to decipher the secret messages . President Franklin Delano Roosevelt concerned about the shortcomings of the intelligence service of the United States , and advised by the Canadian military and spy William Stephenson instructed his friend William Joseph Donovan , A veteran of the World War I the creation of an intelligence service . His work was compiled in the " Memorandum of Establishment of Service of Strategic Information " , then Donovan was named Coordinator of Information " in July 1941 . Thus was established the Office of Strategic Services , due to an order issued by Roosevelt in June 13 of 1942 , Thinking at first to collect and analyze information of the General Staff of the United States , and conduct special operations not assigned to other agencies . Action During the War . During WWII , the OSS has undertaken several actions . On the one hand , was responsible for all intelligence , but always on the domestic front , because outside the U . S . had no jurisdiction in the world ( the FBI acted , for example , be made on the Latin America ) . But that did not stop the OSS articulate , train and supply resistance movements , including in other countries that were strategically favorable to the U . S in the war , as the army of Mao Tse - tung and the Viet Minh . The OSS also recruited one of the most important spies of World War II , the German Fritz Kolbe . In this sense , propaganda and subversion were constant activities of the organization . The OSS purchased encoderd soviet material coming from the Finland , Sold by the military of Finland 1944 . The Secretary of State Edward Stettinius Jr , protested that this violated a guideline of Roosevelt , who agreed with the Soviet Union not to investigate codes encoded in both countries . One of the greatest achievements of the OSS during the war was its penetration of Germany . The organization was responsible for training German and Austrian spies in that country . Some of these agents were exiled communists and socialists , or simply anti - Nazi forces . Managed to train no less than 12 , 000 agents . OSS to CIA . A month and a half after winning the war , around September 20 of 1945 the OSS was disbanded by President Harry S . Truman . Thus , during the months following , the functions of OSS were the Departments of State and War . The State Department took issue with the section " Research and Analysis " , Which was renamed " Internal Services Research and Intelligence " ( " Interim Research and Intelligence Service and " , IRIS ) directed by Alfred McCormack . The War Department took over the " Secret Intelligence " ( " Secret Intelligence " , SI ) and X - 2 , for which were created a special agency , the Strategic Services Unit or SSU . Secretary of War appointed Brigadier General John Magruder as supervisor of the dissolution of OSS , to preserve the secrecy of their actions . Already in January 1946 , president Truman created the Central Intelligence Group ( CIG ) , which is the direct precursor to the CIA . The activities and functions of the SSU were transferred to the IGC , which renamed it the Office of Special Operations ( OSO ) . In 1947 , A National Security Act established America ' s first intelligence agency in times of peace , CIA , Which assumed all the functions of the OSS . Facilities . Prince William Forest Park , then known as Chopawamsic Recreational Demonstration Area , was the training camp of the OSS betwee 1942 and 1945 . It was divided into two areas : " Area C " of 24 square kilometers , which was used for training of media groups and the " Area A " which was used by the Operations Group . Moreover , the Catoctin Mountain Park , the current location of Camp David was the " Area B " of training . There were other areas of training of the OSS . For example , installations of Catalina Island Marine Institute at Santa Catalina Island were formed in part by former OSS training facilities .