20 and his appointment was as the special assistant for legal affairs to Ambassador Leland Harrison. His real role was as the head of the newly formed Special Intelligence branch of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS)—in effect, America’s master spy inside Nazi-occupied Europe. Within weeks, Swiss newspapers were declaring that Allen Dulles was “the personal representative of President Roosevelt, charged with special duties”—a thin veil of euphemism for espionage. [17] At the outbreak of war in September 1939, the United States had no central foreign intelligence service that reported directly to the executive office of the president in the White House. The original U.S. government code-breaking operation had been run by the MI-8 section of the State Department, but that had been shut down in 1929 by Secretary of State Henry Stimson with the comment that “gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.” [18] Each of the armed services had its own intelligence branch, as did the State Department, but coordination of information was almost nonexistent before the creation of the Joint Intelligence Committee on December 9, 1941, two days after Pearl Harbor. As a case in point, when American cryptanalysts unraveled the intricacies of the Japanese diplomatic cipher known as “Purple,” neither the U.S. Army’s G-2 Signals Intelligence Service nor the U.S. Navy’s Office of Naval Intelligence OP-20-G section was willing or capable of cooperating in the decryption of this vital intelligence source. [18a] Such was the interservice rivalry that the army exclusively decoded material on even days of the month and the navy on odd days. Similarly, the world itself was divided up into spheres of influence that were specific to a particular service. Thus the U.S. Navy was charged with intelligence-gathering in the Pacific region and Far East while the U.S. Army was entrusted with Europe, Africa, and the Panama Canal Zone. The whole of continental America, including Canada, the United States, Central America (except Panama), and South America, was the responsibility of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) under J. Edgar Hoover. On July 11, 1941, with war looming, [19] President Roosevelt created the first civilianrun agency tasked with gathering foreign diplomatic and military intelligence worldwide. The first director of this Office of the Coordinator of Information (COI) was one of Roosevelt’s old classmates from Columbia Law School, William J. Donovan. A recipient of the Medal of Honor in World War I, “Wild Bill” Donovan was a successful Wall Street lawyer who had traveled extensively in Europe during the interwar years, meeting several foreign leaders, including Adolf Hitler. On a mission from Roosevelt in July 1940, he had been given extraordinary access to Britain’s leaders and security agencies, including the secret code-breaking establishment at Bletchley Park. After America’s entry into World War II, there was a thorough reappraisal of the U.S. armed forces and particularly the intelligence services that had failed to forewarn of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Accordingly, the COI was split. Its propaganda wing, the Foreign Information
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