Office of Strategic Services

Our guest today is author, historian, and former intelligence officer, David A. Foy, who has written a fascinating book called Super Spy, which highlights the remarkable career of Hans Toft.

a Danish resistance fighter who went on to run covert operations, escape and evasion missions, paramilitary and psychological activities for the OSS and CIA.

If Toft, known as the Dynamic Dane, isn't better known, it's because he wanted it that way.

He preferred to operate dynamically behind the scenes and is best known for his indefatigable support for Yugoslav partisans in 1943 to 1944, his involvement in regime change in Guatemala in 1954, and his most impressive accomplishment, which is likely the Korean War's Operation TP Stol.

But that runs afoul of some political complications.

The group is disassembled, and Tofta has to return to the United States.

When he returns to the United States, he runs across William Donovan, head of OSS, or

what will soon be OSS.

Yeah.

Before she was a chef, though, she worked directly for the OSS, which was a wartime spy, America's wartime spy agency.

And she was one of the few female OSS employees employed to Sri Lanka and China, where she tracked highly classified documents.

The OSS.

The

OSS.

Which was a precursor to what is now the, is this, what was the OSS standing for again?

I don't remember what it stands for.

I want to come back to the idea of the intelligence community and training at Georgetown.

I'm just curious about that influence on the attitude of the intelligence communities, the spies, towards Israel and Jews, because there is a documented history going back 100 years of opposition by MI6, the OSS, the CIA, the predecessor to the OSS, the intelligence community inside the State Department, in terms of attitudes towards Jews generally, and Israel specifically.

I would say a couple of things.

One, we show

But he unfolds a lot of information about their involvement in the intelligence community.

In fact...

the CIA, the modern CIA, goes back to World War II, as we talk about in the film, and the OSS that was founded by Wild Bill Donovan, William Donovan.

He's the founder of the OSS.

Benjamin Franklin praised propaganda articles hiding the Patriots' hand in France during the Revolutionary War.

Covert action was conducted during World War II by the CIA's predecessor organization, the Office of Strategic Services.

So the president in those instances, or even pre-presidential in the case of the Revolutionary War, but subject to the formation of the new country, the president had the authority to conduct covert action under Article 2 of the Constitution.

And Then after that, under the National Security Act of 1947, that act included the authority for the CIA and the director of the CIA in particular was given the authority to perform such other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security.

One thing after another that we see in today's modern world.

And it's no wonder that Donovan pens a letter to President Roosevelt that says that we need to go back to our older ways, our traditions of the scouts, rangers and the Secret Service, which is filled with lessons learned that the OSS eventually in 1942, when it's rebranded from the coordinator of information to the OSS, utilizes these tactics and techniques and we see them today in the U.S. Army Green Berets and later in the CIA as well.

Confederate Secret Service is this very nebulous organization that's opaque, and it's deliberately so.

It consists of men and women that were in different departments.

That was actually one of the early CIA test cases.

The CIA was only about five years old coming out of the Office of Strategic Services in World War II, the OSS.

And the CIA was busy in their different other different programs, Operation Paperclip.

helping bring Nazis into the U.S. military system, into the intelligence system.