OSS recruiters were always on the lookout for anyone with a special connection that might be useful, so many people with no special ambitions to be a spy—like George Vujnovich—found themselves approached with a unique offer. If you had spent significant time in a European country, or if you spoke a language that was in demand—like George Musulin—the OSS might come looking for you. The military ranks were often screened for those with needed skills, particularly languages spoken in Europe. Sometimes the recruit’s value was less obvious but could prove vital in wartime. The OSS recruited a former Paris bartender from the Yale Club, a former German sergeant who could help forge military passes, a Swiss mountain climber who knew the high passes of the Apennines, and a Catholic missionary who had lived with the Kachin tribesmen in northern Burma. When the OSS spotted someone who could add to the agency’s skill set, one or two men approached without warning and explained that his country needed his services. Questions were met with cryptic responses that provided little detail, not even the name of the outfit that wanted him to join. The men emphasized that he would be making a great contribution to his country, but they also were clear that he would be participating in extremely dangerous missions with a good chance that he would never return. In the patriotic fervor of the early war years, few of those approached by the OSS refused.
Donovan’s whole approach to the OSS mission was to employ real people in real situations. He had no patience for those who thought the spy game was nothing but shooting and knifing the enemy or conducting explosive raids, or for the dilettante diplomats and amateur detectives. Donovan knew that in wartime, advances were often made not by the dramatic charge of a thousand troops but by one lightweight, bespectacled former accountant asking the right question of a bored farmer driving his sheep down a country road. While the work of OSS agents was often extremely dangerous, until the agents got caught their work encompassed the pedestrian more than the exotic. After the war, Donovan explained: “Our experience showed us that a half hour spent with the brakeman of a freight train running into occupied France would produce more useful information than a Mata Hari could learn in a year. We did not rely on the seductive blonde or the phony mustache. The major part of our intelligence was the result of good old-fashioned intellectual sweat.” In addition to their particular skills, field agents were selected for their idealism. Most were under thirty years old, and they had a clear conception that the Allies were right and the Axis was wrong. When they parachuted into villages in Europe and lived with the people fighting bare-handed against the Nazis, they developed immense respect for the plight of those people.
The OSS would employ some thirty thousand people by the end of the war, and its zeal for assembling a broad collection of resources meant that the particular skill or knowledge possessed by the recruit could overshadow nearly anything else that might make the person undesirable for an intelligence post. If a dishwasher in Chicago spoke fluent Italian and had worked on the railway in his home country, he might be recruited for the OSS even if he spent every Tuesday night at a meeting of the Communist Party USA. Donovan had no love for Communists, but he also did not hate them so much that he let their politics get in the way of a larger goal. After all, this was the 1940s, before Westerners recognized that Communism was more than just an extreme political movement and the very word “Communist” became synonymous with evil. Largely because of the number of upper-class Ivy League graduates in the ranks, OSS agents at desks in Washington and in the field around the world tended to share a social idealism, the same unwavering faith in the common man espoused by Donovan. This idealistic view of the working man was more common among those who had spent time at Yale and on yachts in Bar Harbor than the recruits from the regular military, but the blue-blood idealism often meshed with the thinking of the Italian immigrant who had fled Fascists in his homeland and was recruited while waiting tables in New York. It was not uncommon for OSS agents serving in Europe to be immigrants who had fled the Nazi onslaught and joined the Communist movement mostly because it was staunchly anti-Fascist. The result was an OSS that was not nearly as inhospitable to Communists as other branches of the military or the government, especially Hoover’s FBI, where any Communist trying to infiltrate had to keep a very low profile.
Donovan regularly confirmed that Communists were found throughout his organization. When the OSS sent a group of four confirmed Communists into Italy to send back information, an American congressman investigated and angrily informed Donovan that one of the group was said to be on the honor roll of the Young Communist League. Donovan didn’t deny the charge but made it clear that he didn’t care as long as the men continued sending back useful intelligence from Italy. “I don’t know if he’s on the Communist honor roll, but for the job he’s doing in Italy, he’s on the honor roll of OSS.” Donovan’s attitude was, again, pragmatic above all else. When the FBI presented him with dossiers proving that three OSS employees were Communists and demanded their firing, Donovan scoffed and replied, “I know they’re Communists. That’s why I hired them.” The agents in question had fought for the Republican Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39, in a brigade sponsored by the American Communist Party. As far as Donovan was concerned, they were good fighters with a healthy hatred for Nazis, and that was good enough for him.
That attitude permeated the OSS, with all involved adopting the idea that they could and should do whatever was necessary to achieve the end goal and not worry about meaningless details along the way. This approach grew out of the very freedom that the OSS was founded on, the idea that its reason for existing was to get things done creatively, without the usual restrictions that hindered other military units. To some extent that was an effective way to cut through the bureaucracy that could bog down such important work, but some critics said the OSS took it too far and became a rogue outfit, too undisciplined for its own good. Though the majority of OSS operatives held military rank, they ignored most military protocol, rarely saluting and by necessity eschewing military uniforms. Most agents in the field, and even those working desks in foreign posts, were allowed to dress however they wanted, growing beards and long hair if they felt like it. Insubordination was a way of life in the OSS. The same instruction that would have been considered a direct order in the army might be considered a mere suggestion in the OSS. If a superior annoyed a junior officer, a request for information might be “lost.” This was not the regular army, in more ways than one.
The OSS favored results over
drama, but there was no denying that OSS agents had the opportunity for more romantic roles in the war than most soldiers. Rather than fighting on the front lines with a rifle or in a tank, the OSS agent lived inconspicuously behind enemy lines, blending into the often exotic locales and charming his or her way into the lives of people who could provide important information. Instead of a foxhole in Belgium, the OSS agent might be living in an apartment in occupied Paris. Plenty of agents, however, like Musulin, spent their time out in the countryside with local people who were just barely getting by. OSS agents went where they were needed and blended in wherever they were.
The OSS was designed to be creative, and it led the way in developing some of the most ingenious devices and methodologies used in World War II. Propaganda was a major focus, with the OSS facilitating radio broadcasts into enemy territory, leaflet drops to lower the morale of Axis soldiers, and even some strategies aimed at convincing the people of Germany that the war was lost. Intelligence gathering was perhaps the primary activity for an agent, but sabotage also occupied OSS agents to a great extent, sometimes with the aim of softening up an area before conventional forces moved in, sometimes with the goal of harassing and slowing down enemy forces in a given area. Donovan thought that his men had to be clever and devious because the Germans were the eight-hundred-pound gorilla of international warfare. There was no denying that Hitler had the arms, the soldiers, and the ruthless attitude necessary to take what he wanted, so Donovan’s theory was that his men would take the other tack, slipping in behind enemy lines to create mayhem. They could nip at the heels of the Nazis, slowing them down as they ravaged another country and distracting them until the big guns of American firepower could come in for the kill.
In addition to extensive training in hand-to-hand combat and conventional weapons, the OSS provided agents with an astonishing array of clever gadgets and innovative ways to kill. Most of them were developed by Stanley Lovell, handpicked by Donovan to head the agency’s research-and-development branch. He was given free rein to be as devious and underhanded as he wanted, with a premium placed on unusual, creative tools that the enemy would never suspect. Lovell did not disappoint, equipping agents with special weapons like Aunt Jemima, an explosive that looked remarkably like regular flour and could even be used to bake muffins and bread. The surprise came when you stuck a fuse in the muffin and threw it at some Germans. There was also the Casey Jones, a device that could be attached to the bottom of a railroad car. It had an electronic eye that sensed the sudden decrease in light when the train entered a tunnel, which set off an explosive charge that filled the tunnel with a mangled mess of metal. The train was destroyed, the tunnel was blocked, and it took days to remove the wreckage by hand. As a final touch in case the device was discovered, the OSS added a sticker to the Casey Jones that played into the Nazi soldier’s seeming inability to challenge authority. In German, the sticker said,
This is a car movement-control device. Removal or tampering is strictly forbidden under heaviest penalties by the Third Reich Railroad Consortium. Heil Hitler
.
Other weapons included miniature guns disguised as pens, tobacco pipes, and umbrellas, and bombs disguised as everyday objects. A favorite was the lump of coal that Felman had seen used against a train in Yugoslavia. Another was a candle that a female agent could light while spending time with a German officer, making sure she left the room before it burned down to a preset mark and exploded. Shoes had hidden cavities and corsets had stilettos hidden in the fabric. Anything that a person might normally carry without suspicion was reworked in the OSS laboratories to make it a weapon, a hiding place, or a way to collect information. OSS scientists also produced huge volumes of forged documents, everything from identity papers to supply requisitions and Gestapo badges.
Some of the weapons that Lovell and his team designed were so dangerous that the OSS lost agents while trying to demonstrate them. One was the Beano grenade, designed to be much more deadly than the typical grenade, which was plenty deadly already. A key difference was that the Beano had a small butterfly-shaped fitting on it that caught wind as the grenade was thrown. The butterfly turned in the wind, which activated the grenade, causing it to explode the instant it landed on the ground or contacted anything else. This design meant that, unlike when using regular grenades that worked on a timer after pulling the pin and throwing it, the enemy did not have a second or two to run away—or to pick up the grenade and throw it back at you—before it exploded. The Beano carried twice the explosive power of a regular grenade and one of its first victims was an instructor who was making the point that the round Beano could be thrown just like a baseball. Without thinking, he tossed the grenade up in the air as he would a baseball to demonstrate. The Beano activated and exploded when he caught it on the way down.
OSS agents knew that they were risking their lives every single day they were in the field. If caught by the enemy, spies and saboteurs could be killed on the spot without even violating the conventions of civilized warfare. Not that the enemy gave a whit about following the rules, of course. OSS agents knew that once they were caught, a quick execution might be the best they could hope for. In reality, they were far more likely to be tortured for days or weeks as the Nazis tried to squeeze information out of them or “turn” them, forcing them to work as double agents to feed misinformation to the Allies and draw out useful intelligence. The smallest slip of the tongue or a careless moment of inattention could result in an OSS agent dying slowly and painfully in a Gestapo torture chamber. Every person the OSS trusted was a link in the chain, a link that could be broken and lead the Germans to you.
Of the 831 members of the OSS decorated for gallantry during World War II, a significant number received their medals posthumously. Many disappeared without warning, never making another radio call to Cairo. When the radio remained silent for weeks, their contacts knew what must have happened. And on occasion, the agent would radio but provide a subtle signal, perhaps a slightly different code word, to let his superiors know that he was contacting them under duress. When that happened, the Allies would continue providing instructions and information to the agent, making sure that the transmissions were plausible enough to keep the agent alive but not actually useful to the enemy holding the gun to his head.
The brutality of the Nazis knew no bounds. The cruelty unleashed on captured agents was unspeakable, including every type of beating imaginable and the liberal use of instruments of torture. The treatment of captured agents was surpassed perhaps only by the punishment exacted on members of the local resistance, like the villagers helping hide the Allied airmen in Pranjane. If caught helping the Allies, these hapless local people felt the worst of the German military. The Germans were great believers in the public spectacle and the power of heinous acts to cow anyone who witnessed them inflicted on others. The Nazi SS often castrated members of the resistance and gouged their eyes out, and a favorite method of terrorizing the local populace was to impale members of the resistance on meat hooks in the public square. The prisoner’s hands were tied and soldiers lifted him off the ground, positioning him so that the meat hooks penetrated the underside of his jaw. Then the SS would force the entire village to file past the man and see him writhing in agony. The prisoner could hang for more than a day before the jawbone finally snapped and the hooks were driven deep into his brain.