WWII Museum podcast explores legacy of America’s first intel agency

The museum’s senior historian and host, Bradley W. Hart, recently sat down with Military Times to discuss his latest project and how Pearl Harbor “changed the way that Americans s[aw] intelligence.” The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

The podcast is a five-part series on espionage, code-breaking and covert operations that shaped WWII. How has the oral history collection from the museum played a part in shaping the series?

The oral history collection is absolutely essential. It’s really, in some ways, the crown jewel of our collections. Here at the museum we have thousands of them that have been gathered over the decades, and so when I was conceiving this project, I went through a number of oral histories from that collection and really used them to shape the podcast from the experience of the people who were there.

A lot of people involved with the OSS go on to careers in the intelligence community, so there’s not really that many of them, but the ones that we have are really powerful, and listeners will hear them sort of scattered throughout the series.

The other part of it that I find interesting is the episode on Detachment 101, which is kind of a precursor to the Green Berets and Special Forces. There’s some really powerful oral histories in there about what these men saw in the jungles in places like Burma. The collections that we have here are really important to the mission of telling the World War II story holistically.

When one thinks of the OSS, one thinks of Bill Donovan. But what caught my attention was what came before — in World War I and the Secret Service being loaned out for such purposes. How did WWII precipitate the need for an intelligence arm of the military?

Up until World War II, there was this perception that intelligence was something that the U.S. only needed to do in wartime. This was a necessity, perhaps, of war, but it was seen as morally and politically undesirable.

Americans saw intelligence — even sometimes today — as something that nefarious other powers do. This was associated with European colonial powers, associated with non-democratic regimes. It’s something that a lot of Americans have a real visceral reaction to, certainly up until World War II.

Right after World War I, we kind of retreat from the world again, we retreat from intelligence gathering. After World War II, we don’t do that. There’s this necessity of the U.S. staying engaged with the world because of the emerging threat from the Soviet Union.

So intelligence, as the U.S. expands its role in the world post 1945, has to expand alongside it … WWII fundamentally changes the American perception, and the American perception of the need for these types of things.

Something that really stuck out to me in the first episode is the mind-boggling bureaucratic strategy regarding diplomatic code-breaking — the odd-even day agreement — which saw the Army and Navy switching off days. What occurred after Pearl Harbor that helped to streamline the process of gathering intelligence?

I think we have to remember just how shocking Pearl Harbor is. The U.S. has never suffered a surprise attack like this. There’s very much the perception that the two gigantic oceans, the Atlantic and the Pacific, will just protect us from this. Pearl Harbor shows that’s not true.

After Pearl Harbor, there’s this perception that if you want to avoid this in the future you need to keep a permanent intelligence apparatus. You need to be constantly breaking the adversaries’ codes, trying to understand their intentions. And that becomes a key facet of the Cold War.

But in the interwar period — 1918 through 1941 — for the U.S., code-breaking falls to the side. To me, the Japanese are the obvious potential adversary, and because they’re a naval power, if they are going to attack, it’s going to be with the navy.

But what’s really interesting about Pearl Harbor is there’s this sort of message that is sent to the Japanese Embassy in D.C., cutting off diplomatic ties. This is decoded, but it’s not decoded in time. So there’s always been this allegation of, ‘Could the U.S. have known about Pearl Harbor … had this been broken more quickly and been taken to the relevant decision makers?’

The problem is that the message doesn’t say anything about war, right? Doesn’t say anything about an attack. It just says, ‘We’re breaking up diplomatic ties.’ This is in the midst of some pretty tough negotiations already. So I think that the diplomatic codes are a useful window, but in terms of military preparedness, the diplomatic codes only get you so far.

Pearl Harbor changes the way that Americans see intelligence as something that not only can be used offensively or used on the battlefield, but something that’s an essential piece of protecting the United States itself.

This is the breaking of the JN-25 naval code, and this really gives the U.S. a decisive advantage. It’s not just breaking the codes; it’s being able to break them quickly enough to actually use this intelligence in a relevant way. It’s not an academic exercise anymore, or in the case of Midway, to even know the enemy’s intentions.

The Japanese are never really are able to overcome the fact that the U.S. is reading these naval codes, and throughout the course of the war, as you say, we never really see the Japanese launching an offensive of that scale, partially because the losses that they take in the Midway, but also they lose the strategic imperative after this. This is a decisive blow at sea. The fact that war goes on so long is remarkable in that sense. I mean, the Japanese are essentially on the defensive after 1942 — code-breaking is a key part.

Was it deemed as risky for Nimitz to trust this intelligence and basically say, ‘No, we’re going to Midway,’? Was it seen as a break with traditional fighting at that time?

It’s new technology. It’s something that no one’s ever really done before. And within intelligence, there’s always dissenting voices. There’s always this idea of, ‘Is this being planted for us? Do the Japanese know that we’ve broken this code and are they giving us disinformation?’ So absolutely, there’s a risk in it.

We will talk about this throughout the remaining episodes of the podcast, but anytime you’re relying on intelligence, there’s implicit risk there. I think Nimitz deserves a lot of credit for acting on and for trusting intelligence and convincing Washington that this is the course of action to take.

Did the British SOE influence the OSS in anyway? Winston Churchill was very much in the muck and mud of planning and intelligence. How influential was President Franklin D. Roosevelt in regards to intelligence?

The OSS organizational chart, which actually does exist, is sort of a jumbled mess that kind of defies anyone — it’s like a plane they’re building when it’s already in flight. The OSS is only formally created after we’ve been at war. So they don’t have time to sit down and plan this thing out, and Bill Donovan is not exactly the planning type. He’s a man of action. He’s going to leave things like how the org chart is structured to others … And they just never get around to it during the war.

But there are a couple new divisions. You’ve got the RNA division, which is research and analysis, which is exactly what it sounds like. Then you’ve got the special operations side of it. You’ve got the detachments that are largely out in Asia — not in MacArthur’s sphere of Asia — but they are allowed to operate in places like China and Burma, places seen as secondary theaters.

And then you have the sort of research and development division, the James Bond-types who are building poison pills, explosives and those sorts of things. This is really what makes OSS somewhat unique, right? Is that you’ve got intelligence-gathering, and you’ve got covert action all under one umbrella.

The British have MI-6, which is more or less the equivalent to the research and analysis section. The SOE is more of the assassinating officers and blowing up trains kind of thing.

This feeds into discussions post-war about what the U.S. intelligence community should look like. There’s a report at the end of the war that helps condemn the OSS — although it probably would have happened anyway because of President Harry Truman’s personal animosity towards Donovan — but it concludes that the research analysis division is the part of the OSS that you should keep. You should dump the covert action side of it. That influences the early CIA.

Can you give a little preview for what’s to come in the fourth and fifth episodes?

We’re going to try to talk about agents in places like China, places we don’t often think about as being areas of World War II for a lot of Americans. And we’re going to talk about the legacy of OSS in 1945. So, we have a lot of great material to cover and a super exciting story to share.