William J. Donovan - American Spymaster

On July ll, 1941, President Roosevelt (Number 2) issued an executive order creating the Office of Coordinator of Information. Its purposes were defined as follows: to collect and analyze all information and data which bear upon national security; to correlate such information and data and to make it available to such departments and officials of the Government as the President may determine.... [and to carry out] such supplementary activities as may facilitate the securing of information, important for national security.

The official description may have sounded akin to the duties of a bunch of scholars locked up in a library. The tip-off was the man chosen for the job: not the Librarian of Congress, but “Wild Bill” Donovan.

Donovan won his nickname on the Columbia University gridiron and on the battlefields of France during World War I. For his valor in combat, Donovan was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, the Distinguished Service Cross, and three Purple Hearts. In short, he was not about to take charge of a new research library in Washington. Donovan was in the process of becoming America’s first chief spymaster.

Donovan appears here as the father of the Office of Strategic Services (O.S.S.) and, in effect, the grandfather of the Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A.), which succeeded the O.S.S.

The Beginnings of a Spymaster

William J. Donovan was born in 1883 in Buffalo, New York. He graduated from Columbia Law School and had a successful law practice. During World War I, he was the highly decorated colonel in command of New York’s “Fighting 69th” infantry regiment.

After the war, he founded a law firm, dabbled in Republican politics, and served as assistant attorney general in the Coolidge administration. In 1932, he was the Republican candidate for governor of New York, but he lost out in the landslide that brought Roosevelt into the White House and gave the Democrats control of Congress.

The year 1940 was a critical year for Roosevelt. France had fallen, but Roosevelt faced a country still strongly isolationist. He looked for Republicans who shared his views on the danger of Hitler (Number 1) and the need for a strong national defense. In June of that year, he had chosen Republicans Stimson (Number 21) as secretary of war and Knox (Number 60) as secretary of the navy. In July, Roosevelt turned to Donovan for an extraordinary assignment: Donovan was to act as a confidential agent for the president, visiting areas of Europe and the Middle East and reporting back his findings directly to Roosevelt.

The president was apparently satisfied with the job Donovan had done, because a year later, in July 1941, “Wild Bill” was named coordinator of information, a post just created by the executive order previously mentioned.The attack on Pearl Harbor was still five months away; the United States was not yet in the war and therefore not yet ready to establish a spy network—at least not officially. But Donovan was in communication with William Stephenson (Number 23), a top British intelligence officer.

The O.S.S. Is Created

In June 1942, the spy agency—the Office of Strategic Services—was officially established. It replaced the Office of Coordinator of Information; Donovan was appointed director.

The O.S.S. was unlike anything the United States had ever operated before. As far back as the American Revolution, spies had been used to gather information on enemy troop movements, reinforcements, and installations. But this was the first official organization set up by the U.S. government for purposes of intelligence-gathering and espionage.

Although most of the work of the O.S.S. is still shrouded in secrecy, it sent thou-sands of agents behind enemy lines—not just for ordinary espionage, but also to work with underground groups fighting the Nazis, supplying them with arms, carrying out sabotage, assassinations, and generally undermining enemy control of occupied areas. “Wild Bill” was running it all. 

The media have painted a romanticized picture of the O.S.S. during the war. As with any secret government agency of this size and scope, its triumphs are better known to the world than its failures. The latter are usually buried—sometimes liter-ally. This much is certain: O.S.S. agents paved the way for the invasions of French North Africa, Italy, and France. Most of those agents are anonymous.

Perhaps the least anonymous O.S.S. agent was Allen Dulles, who ran an office in Switzerland. He wrote numerous books on secret operations, including his work with the German underground and arranging the surrender of Italy.

A New “War” and a New Spy Agency 

Under Donovan, the O.S.S. established a secret intelligence agency for use in time of war. Several weeks after the Japanese surrender, the O.S.S. was dismantled.But the Cold War made a similar organization necessary in peacetime, and the C.I.A. was established in 1947 by President Truman (Number 14). Many O.S.S. operatives moved into the new agency; Dulles, for example, became its first deputy director. He then served as director of the C.I.A. from 1953 to 196l, throughout the Eisenhower administration.

Donovan returned to his law practice after the war. He served for two years as Eisenhower’s ambassador to Thailand.

William J. Donovan, America’s first spymaster, died in 1959.