Tag: oss

Bat-bombs, mind control and umbrella guns: This over-the-top spy agency was the forerunner of the CIA

As President Franklin Delano Roosevelt sat in his wheelchair in the Oval Office, dictating a letter to his secretary, in sneaked William Donovan, the head of the Office of Strategic Services, armed with a loaded pistol.

At Donovan’s feet was a bag of sand.

As the president continued working, oblivious to Donovan’s presence, the OSS chief quickly fired 10 bullets into the sand — and still Roosevelt knew nothing, only turning round when he could smell burnt gun powder in the air.

“He looked up with wide eyes and saw Donovan standing behind him with a smoking gun in his hand,” writes John Lisle in “The Dirty Tricks Department: Stanley Lovell, the OSS and the Masterminds of World War II Secret Warfare” (St. Martin’s Press).

Donovan wrapped the pistol in a handkerchief and gave it to the president, introducing it as the OSS’s new firearm, silent and flashless.

A forerunner to the Central Intelligence Agency, the OSS was formed in June 1942 to coordinate the espionage activities of the country’s armed forces during World War II.

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The Unsuccessful WWII Plot to Fight the Japanese With Radioactive Foxes

In the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, “Wild Bill” Donovan, the leader of the Office of Strategic Services—America’s wartime intelligence agency—told his scientists to find a way to “outfox” the Axis enemies. In response, the scientists produced a number of dirty tricks, including explosive pancake mix, incendiary bombs strapped to live bats, truth drugs for eliciting information from prisoners of war, and a foul-smelling spray that mimicked the repulsive odor of fecal matter. In other words, desperate times called for desperate measures. Among these outlandish strategies, Operation Fantasia was the most desperate—and peculiar—of them all.

Operation Fantasia was the brainchild of OSS psychological warfare strategist Ed Salinger, an eccentric businessman who had run an import/export business in Tokyo before the war. Salinger’s business dealings had given him a cursory introduction to Japanese culture; he learned the language, collected the art and studied the superstitions—which is why the OSS hired him. Operation Fantasia, he pitched the organization in 1943, would destroy Japanese morale by exposing soldiers and civilians to a Shinto portent of doom: kitsune, fox-shaped spirits with magical abilities. “The foundation for the proposal,” Salinger wrote in a memo outlining his idea, “rests upon the fact that the modern Japanese is subject to superstitions, beliefs in evil spirits and unnatural manifestations which can be provoked and stimulated.”

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Secret Report: US Military Approved Offensive Use of Biological Warfare on Enemy Agriculture in World War 2

In the closing days of World War 2, the Joint Chiefs of Staff approved the offensive use of germ warfare aimed at destroying enemy crops, placing final approval at the discretion its top commanders in the field, according to Office of Strategic Services (OSS) documents formerly classified “Secret” and “Top Secret” held in the National Archives.
Actual approval by U.S. authorities for the offensive use of any type of biological warfare has never been published before. As we shall see, it was the practice of the U.S. government to only pass on such orders orally. Most likely this was because the orders involved actions widely deemed to be illegal.

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