Clandestine HUMINT and Covert Action - Separate Functions During Peacetime? - US Postwar Change

US Postwar Change

Immediately after World War II, a number of groups were broken up, and bureaucratically housed in an assortment of interim organizations. The OSS was broken up shortly after World War II, on September 20, 1945, with functions scattering into a series of interim organizations:

  • OSS X-2 (counterintelligence) and Secret Intelligence (i.e., clandestine HUMINT) went into the Strategic Services Unit (SSU) of the (then) War Department. The covert action and black propaganda functions, however, split off in 1948.
  • Paramilitary direct action (DA) and psychological operations were in a series of interim organizations, becoming the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) in 1948.
  • Research and Analysis went to the Department of State.

Even before the OPC split, the SSU was an organizational anomaly, since it reported to the Office of the Assistant Secretary of War, rather than G-2, the Intelligence Directorate of the Army Staff.

In January 1946, President Truman, who was concerned with "building up a Gestapo" and distrusted William Donovan, head of the OSS, created the Central Intelligence Group (CIG) which was the direct precursor to the CIA. The assets of the SSU, which now constituted a streamlined "nucleus" of clandestine intelligence was transferred to the CIG in mid-1946 and reconstituted as the Office of Special Operations (OSO).

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