HERITAGE
TOP-SECRET SPYCRAFT
FLOURISHED IN VIRGINIA’S WOODLANDS How a national park was instrumental in the legacy of America’s intelligence community By Glenda C. Booth
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The mess hall used by the OSS trainees in the 1940s, open to visitors today Top: New recruits learned everything from how to shoot small arms to how to blow up a building.
| MARCH/APRIL 2017
bolster strategic intelligence, and after Japan’s 1942 attack on Hawaii’s Pearl Harbor, he established the OSS, installing General William J. Donovan as its leader to build up American intelligence operations. Historians are still trying to pin down a specific
COURTESY OF NATIONAL ARCHIVES AND RECORDS ADMINISTRATION (TOP); BY GLENDA BOOTH (BOTTOM)
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limy creepy crawlies lurk furtively under the moist leaf litter and rotting logs in the dense, hilly woods of Prince William Forest Park on the eastern edge of the Piedmont. Some of these critters have red backs; some have yellow spots; some have marbled patterns. They are masters at avoiding detection. They are salamanders. There was a time, day and night, when thousands of men crept surreptitiously through these woods, then called Chopawamsic Recreational Demonstration Area (RDA), treading carefully to dodge hidden booby traps and avoid detection. From 1942 to 1945, these top-secret spiesin-training were preparing for the World War II operations of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the predecessor of today’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The work was so hush-hush that some said OSS stood for “Oh, So Secret.” And most of OSS’s operations were top secret until declassified in the 1990s. As the country mobilized for war, President Franklin Roosevelt recognized the pressing need to