Until July 1941, America had never run a clandestine service. The U.S. government had
operated under the rule, famously articulated by former Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson:
“Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.”
1 But in early 1941, as President Franklin D.
Roosevelt confronted the possibility of U.S. entry into World War II, he saw the need to create
an agency that would bring U.S. foreign intelligence – then conducted on an ad hoc basis by
various federal departments – under one roof. On July 11, 1941, FDR appointed Colonel William
J. ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan – a decorated World War I hero and well-known Republican lawyer – as
the leader of this new civilian agency, dubbed the Office of the Coordinator of Information
(COI) and answerable only to the President. A little less than a year later, a presidential military
order transformed COI into the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) – an arm of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, charged with collecting and analyzing strategic information and performing covert
operations