STARTING FROM SCRATCH William J. Donovan and the Office of Strategic Services
BY DWIGHT JON ZIMMERMAN
“Strategy, without information upon which it can rely, is helpless. Likewise, information is useless unless it is intelligently directed to the strategic purpose.” – June 10, 1941 memo from William J. Donovan to President Franklin D. Roosevelt
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
1941, with a world aflame in war and America´s neutrality y Inbecoming increasingly tenuous, the thing President Franklin D. Roosevelt needed the most was the one thing he was getting the least: intelligence about the Axis’ capabilities, intents, and actions. The existing agencies responsible within the Army (G-2), Navy (Office of Naval Intelligence, or ONI), the State Department, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had proved so inadequate and parochial that he had secretly created his own informal network in an attempt to keep himself abreast of the situation abroad. It wasn’t enough. He knew it, and he confessed that fact to his friend William J. Donovan, a member of that informal network, hoping the World War I veteran and lawyer’s vast experience might hold the answer. A few days later, Donovan handed the president his response. The memo was bold – breathtakingly so – and unprecedented. Donovan proposed that America, for the first time in the nation’s history, should have nothing less than an independent, fully functioning espionage agency like those in place with the combatants in Europe and Asia. Roosevelt agreed, but asked Donovan to take the job of establishing it. Donovan´s challenge was enormous. Not only would he have to start from scratch, it was arguable who would be his greater foe: the Axis or turf-guarding bureaucrats from America´s other intelligencegathering agencies. But, as he so often was able to do, in William Donovan, President Roosevelt found the right man. Roosevelt’s executive order dated July 11, 1941, created the office of the “Coordinator of Information” (COI), responsible for military
OSS Jedburghs prepare to be dropped into occupied Europe.
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