Office of Strategic Services (OSS)
Before World War II, intelligence activities in the United States was carried out primarily by the Department of State, Office of Naval Intelligence, and the War Department’s Military Intelligence Division. Hoping for greater coordination of intelligence activities, as well as a more strategic approach to intelligence gathering and operations; on July 11, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed William J. Donovan to head a new office, the coordinator of information (COI), attached to the White House. The COI was charged with collecting and analyzing information which may have had a bearing upon national security, correlating such information and data, and making this information available to the President, authorized departments, and authorized officials of the government.
After the United States entered the war, Donovan proposed that the COI’s responsibility be expanded. As a result, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was created on June 13, 1942, and charged with gathering intelligence information about practically every country in existence with the exception of the Pacific Theater, which General Douglas MacArthur claimed as his own. The OSS answered directly to the military Joint Chiefs if Staff.
The OSS never played a major role in the Pacific. MacArthur and his staff intended to conduct their own brand of special operations in the theater without any interference from a semi-autonomous organization that had its own command channel to Washington. Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, the overall commander of the Central and South Pacific theaters, limited OSS activities to an intelligence and liaison office in Honolulu.
J. Edgar Hoover of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Nelson Rockefeller, the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, insisted that the OSS should not operate in the Western hemisphere.