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Spy Services & Espionage

OSS (Office Of Strategic Services)

Prior to World War II, America had no overall intelligence system beyond that operated by the armed forces. To coordinate secret information of all types at the start of U.S. involvement in World War II, President Roosevelt, on January 13, 1942, created the Central Office of Information and placed General William "Wild Bill" Donovan at its head. Donovan, a World War I hero, quickly organized a vast network of experts in all intelligence fields. The oranization's title was changed a short time later to the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS. The agency was responsible for espionage and sabotage in countries occupied by the Germans, Italians, and Japanese. It became legendary through the feats of its agents.

Donovan was a tolerant spymaster, allowing his agents a great deal of freedom in accomplishing their missions. He encouraged inventiveness, even recklessness. More than 13,000 men and women worked for the OSS during World War II. They parachuted or were smuggled into all the countries occupied by the enemy to work closely with underground units, the SOE, and the SIS, as well as other national intelligence agencies operated by Allied countries.

One of the most effective operations conducted by the OSS was its preparations for the Allied landings in North Africa in 1942. OSS agents deftly negotiated terms with Vichy French officials to make sure that no French warships in African ports would be given over to the Germans who then occupied most of France. Moreover, they were able to place scores of agents in North Africa, ostensibly as monitors of foodstuffs going to refugees. These agents spent most of their time recording the movements of German warships and aircraft through the Mediterranean, while placating indecisive French officials and military commanders in preparation for the Allied landings.

When American and British troops did storm the beaches, OSS agents were waiting for them to lead them through minefields and direct them to the strategic objectives. OSS agents performed the same kind of incredible feats in preparation of the 1944 Normandy landings. The agency's agents were also effective in China, 1943-1945, working with Chiang Kai-Shek in discovering weaknesses in the Japanese war machine.

In 1943, OSS agents, with Donovan's approval and without informing the Joint Chiefs of Staff, broke into the Japanese Embassy in Lisbon, Portugal, in search of documents and codebooks. They managed to obtain information that was, for the moment, valuable, but in the long run, this covert operation, which was quickly discerned by the Japanese, was devastating to U.S. military intelligence.

Though U.S. military intelligence had broken the Japanese "Ultra Code" in early 1942 and continued to monitor all important military and diplomatic messages throughout the war, the OSS break-in caused the Japanese to change its entire military attache code, or that used by its intelligence service.

General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander of South Pacific Operations, refused to allow the OSS to operate in his theater of war, preferring to rely upon the intelligence provided to him from the Army's G-2. The most truculent opponent facing the OSS was J. Edgar Hoover, chief of the FBI, who thought Donovan's OSS to be an upstart agency that might usurp his own power and the jurisdiction of the Bureau, even though FDR constantly assured Hoover that the OSS mandate was to operate outside the Western Hempishere, a regulation that later applied to the CIA, which succeeded the OSS.

British intelligence during World War II was, on the other hand, extremely cooperative with Donovan who visited SIS chiefs in 1940 to confer about his aims in establishing the OSS. He was shown the complete operations of the SOE (Special Operations Executive), which worked with the underground resistance fighters in occupied Europe. So impressed was Donovan that he modeled the OSS organization after the SOE. The British gave Donovan full cooperation, much more than might otherwise have been given in any other time, in that England was then desperate to draw the U.S. into the war against Germany.

At the end of World War II in 1945, President Harry Truman disbanded the OSS, believing that America had no more need of a super intelligence agency. This attitude quickly changed, however, when the Soviet Union was perceived to be a very real threat to the security of the U.S. and the world, causing the creation of another intelligence agency in 1947, the CIA.

Eric Erickson

Born to an impoverished family in Brooklyn, New York, Erickson decided early to be a self-made man. Hard-working, he worked at many jobs throughout his school years. He went to Texas and labored in the oil fields until he saved enough money to enter Cornell University in 1917. When America entered World War I, Erickson enlisted. Following the war, he went back to school, became a Cornell football star, and received a degree in engineering.

Working for Standard Oil and a number of other oil firms in the Far East during the 1920s, headquartered for some time in Shanghai, his business took him to Stockholm. He made friends there among the business community and soon moved his operations to Sweden. He renounced his American citizenship and became a naturalized Swedish subject in 1936.

In 1939, Laurence Steinhardt, the then American ambassador to Russia, arranged for a dinner with Erickson in Stockholm. Steinhardt knew that Erickson had done business with German firms and had solid relationships with oil industrialists, some of whom were members of the Nazi Party. He also knew that Erickson had often voiced his democratic views.

Steinhardt came directly to the point. He wanted Erickson to act as a spy for American intelligence, to learn and report everything he could about the German oil industry and its synthetic oil production which was vital to the war operations Hitler had been so long in planning. Erickson agreed and he was put in contact with OSS spymasters in Stockholm. He was given a short course in espionage. The minimum OSS training period was thirty-eight hours, at which time the student was taught the use of tiny cameras, codes, and ciphers. With this accomplished, Erickson was then instructed to publicly befriend the Nazis.

This Erickson knew would brand him a turncoat, even in his own neutral country of Sweden, which was mostly sympathetic to the Allied cause. Only Erickson's young, new bride, and his best friend, Prince Carl Bernadotte, the nephew of the Swedish King, knew of the deception. Bernadotte accompanied Erickson to Germany many times after that while the businessman began cementing his "Nazi friendships." So convincing was Erickson's pro-Nazi pose that his friends and relatives in Sweden shunned him as a collaborationist.

Working with a few German industrialists and businessmen who were part of the conspiracy, Erickson made scores of trips to Germany between 1941 and 1944. He gathered priceless information on Germany's oil refineries, which he turned over to his OSS contacts. The hazards were great. Gestapo agents tracked him on his visits to Germany. Though Erickson knew that he was under constant surveillance, he went about his oil business as well as the business of spying.

One of his closest confederates was a woman. While visiting her, Gestapo agents suddenly rushed in and arrested them both. Both were confined at Gestapo headquarters where both told a prearranged story, that the attractive woman was a high-priced prostitute and Erickson one of her clients.

The Gestapo accepted the story, or seemed to, especially when Erickson's background was checked and his close association with high-level Nazis was verified. The woman, however, had been under suspicion as being a spy. The Germans concluded that Erickson was simply a businessman seeking sexual gratification but the woman was a spy. While Erickson watched from a prison window, the woman was taken outside to a courtyard and summarily shot by a firing squad. The Nazis studied him at that moment and he appeared to be unperturbed at the horrific sight, although he was inwardly quaking with fear and anger. He was released.

The Allies stepped up their bombing of Germany and Nazi-occupied countries in 1943, but had difficulty in locating the oil refineries that kept Hitler's war machine moving. Erickson was told by his OSS spymasters that he had to locate the key refineries. He concocted a fantastic scheme and took it to the most fantastic Nazi of them all, Heinrich Himmler, head of the Gestapo and SS, the most feared man in Europe, a mass-murderer unparalleled in recorded history.

Himmler was also a practical bureaucrat who thought only to further Hitler's mad ends in any way possible. He was, by 1943, virtually in charge of everything and everyone inside the countries still dominated by the Nazis. When Erickson was given his audience with the cold-blooded little Deputy Fuhrer, he explained that he had an investment opportunity that should interest Germany.

Erickson and his wealthy German business friends, he said, planned to build a huge oil refinery in neutral Sweden, safe from Allied bombers. This plant, when running at peak capacity, could deliver all the oil Germany might need. If he went ahead with his plans, he explained, he would want an exclusive contract with the Germans.

Erickson then pointed out that he had few friends in Sweden because of his long association and loyalty to Nazi Germany. He also pointed out to the Gestapo chief that his name was on the Allied blacklist, a fact that Himmler already knew and one that endeared Erickson to his cold heart. As they talked, Himmler came quickly to believe that Erickson was an opportunist who had thrown in his lot with the Germans after they had scored lightning success through blitzkrieg invasions. He was also impressed in the detailed blueprints for the proposed Swedish oil refinery that Erickson had taken pains to prepare and submit for examination. Erickson then explained that, before he and his partners put up their millions to build the plant, he would have to inspect present oil refineries and receive from experts and technicians in the field, all important information on operations in order to better build a highly productive refinery.

In the end Himmler fully embraced Erickson's plan and gave him a top level Gestapo pass, waiving all security clearances and requirements. The pass authorized Erickson to travel anywhere in the Reich or occupied territories, to investigate any oil refinery operation he wanted to see, and to get from experts any information he desired in preparation of building the proposed refinery in Sweden. He was also given an order signed by Hitler that provided automobiles for Erickson and unlimited gas coupons.

Before leaving on his deluxe spy tour, Erickson was shocked to run into a man he thought long dead, a German oil executive he had known in the early 1930s, a rabid Nazi. The executive was shocked to see Erickson in Germany. Erickson asked him to have a drink and the two men went to a bar where the Nazi, with squinting, suspicious eyes, said: "I am very curious to hear how one day you're working hand in glove with the goddamned Jews and the next day you're hooked up with our side against your own people, the Americans!"

Erickson kept cool. He told the Nazi that it was simply good business to have joined the Germans, and that he was a businessman first and always. He told the man that he had been on the Allied blacklist for years after establishing friendships with German Nazis. He then played his trump card, showing him his newly-signed Gestapo papers, which bore the name of Heinrich Himmler This seemed to convince the Nazi that Erickson, was, indeed, to be trusted. He then explained that he was late for an appointment.

Erickson followed the man, or rather stalked him, knowing the Nazi was about to turn him in to the Gestapo. When the Nazi stopped at an outdoor phone booth, Erickson realized that he was calling the Gestapo. He moved next to the booth and heard the man about to report him At that moment, Erickson withdrew a large penknife he carried and got into the both behind the man, stabbing him to death. Then he fled.

In the months to follow, the intrepid spy toured almost every major oil refinery in Germany and the occupied countries. He obtained detailed plans of oil operations and these quickly wound up in the hands of the OSS, MI6, and, subsequently, the Allied air forces, which then bombed the refineries out of existence. The bombings caused a shortage of oil so accute that the German army and air force was nearly brought to a halt after the Normandy invasion. Lack of oil caused the surrender of more than 300,000 German troops in the Ruhr Valley, the last real threat in the West against the Allies. Following the war, General Dwight D. Eisenhower attributed the Allied victory to the destruction of the German oil industry and almost all of the credit for that destruction was due to one man, Eric Erickson.

It would be some time, however, before Erickson's tarnished image was cleaned up. The true nature of his work for the Allies was eventually revealed and he was hailed as a hero, rather than the traitor he was thought to be. A suspenseful and superlative film, The Counterfeit Traitor, with William Holden essaying the role of Erickson, proved to be an immense success.

Jay Robert Nash. Spies: A Narrative Encyclopedia of Dirty Tricks and Double Dealing from Biblical Times to Today.. M. Evans and Company, Inc., New York. 1997.

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