Word: oss
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...Ambassador to Thailand: Major General (ret.) William J. ("Wild Bill") Donovan, 70, Medal-of-Honor-winning commander of the Fighting 69th in World War I and head of the OSS in World War II. In Thailand, Donovan's OSS performed some of its greatest feats. Working with Japanese-appointed Regent Pridi Banomyong in what has been called "the greatest doublecross in history." OSS operatives built up a resistance movement under the conquerors' noses...
...huge-estimates run from 8,000 to 30,000-and it includes a greater proportion of "super-grade" civil servants ($12,000-$14,000 a year) than any other agency of the U.S. Government. It occupies at least 30 buildings in Washington alone; its headquarters is the wartime OSS building off E Street. CIA's budget, which goes to Congress concealed within the budget requests of other agencies, is never rnade public, but reasonable guesses run as high as $500 million a year...
...Conspirators. In Bern, which was teeming with spies, counterspies, exiles and dissidents from a dozen regimes, Dulles set up OSS headquarters for Europe. Often sick with the gout, Dulles worked late into the night, meeting agents under the cover of darkness. In time, his office became a center of the European Resistance, and one of the biggest and most effective intelligence-gathering units in the Allied world...
...German underground's plot to assassinate Hitler. Dulles was never able to persuade the Allied powers to support the conspirators, but when the plot failed, he did succeed in saving Gisevius, who fled Germany with forged Gestapo papers and a Gestapo identification ring-all supplied by OSS...
...World War II, the OSS, brain child of General "Wild Bill" Donovan, tried to win acceptance as the main agency of strategic intelligence. Jealousy on the part of military intelligence agencies, and the fact that OSS had to be organized hastily, kept it from fulfilling this important role. The main contribution of OSS was a number of specific intelligence operations, some of them brilliantly performed, rather than as a central strategic intelligence service. It did leave with the Government a hard core of first-rate intelligence...