The OSS

COI Came First

Before World War II, the US Government traditionally left intelligence to the principal executors of American foreign policy, the Department of State and the armed services. Attachés and diplomats collected the bulk of America’s foreign intelligence, mostly in the course of official business but occasionally in clandestine meetings with secret contacts. In Washington, desk officers scrutinized their reports in the regional bureaus and the military intelligence services (the Office of Naval Intelligence [ONI] and the War Department’s Military Intelligence Division, better known as the G-2). Important and timely information went up the chain of command, perhaps even to the President, and might be shared across departmental lines, but no one short of the White House tried to collate and assess all the vital information acquired by the US government. State and the military developed their own security and counterintelligence procedures, and the Army and Navy created separate offices to decipher and read foreign communications. Senior diplomat Robert Murphy later reflected “it must be confessed that our Intelligence organization in 1940 was primitive and inadequate. It was timid, parochial, and operating strictly in the tradition of the Spanish-American War.”

As another European war loomed in the late 1930s, fears of fascist and Communist “Fifth Columns” in America prompted President Franklin D. Roosevelt to ask for greater coordination by the departmental intelligence arms. When little seemed to happen in response to his wish, he tried again in the spring of 1941, expressing his desire to make the traditional intelligence services take a strategic approach to the nation’s challenges—and to cooperate so that he did not have to arbitrate their squabbles. A few weeks later, Roosevelt in frustration resorted to a characteristic stratagem. With some subtle prompting from a pair of British officials—Admiral John H. Godfrey and William Stephenson (later Sir William)—FDR created a new organization to duplicate some of the functions of the existing agencies. The President on 11 July 1941 appointed William J. Donovan of New York to sort the mess as the Coordinator of Information (COI), the head of a new, civilian office attached to the White House.

The office of the Coordinator of Information constituted the nation’s first peacetime, nondepartmental intelligence organization. President Roosevelt authorized it to

collect and analyze all information and data, which may bear upon national security: to correlate such information and data, and to make such informa- tion and data available to the President and to such departments and officials of the Government as the President may determine; and to carry out, when requested by the President, such supplementary activities as may facilitate the securing of information important for national security not now available to the Government.

In selecting William J. Donovan as his Coordinator of Information in July 1941, President Roosevelt chose an energetic civilian who shared his desire to do whatever it took to resist Nazism and the danger it posed to America. “Wild Bill” Donovan owned a sterling résumé, with distinguished military service, executive and legal experience, an abiding interest in foreign affairs, and a vision of the importance of “strategic” intelligence that colleagues found inspiring.

Donovan was a Buffalo, New York, native who had earned his law degree at Columbia. He joined the 165th Infantry Regiment (also called the “Fighting 69th” from its Civil War days) and earned a Medal of Honor as a battalion commander charging German lines in World War I. After the war he visited Europe, Siberia, and Japan, served as assistant attorney general in the Coolidge administration (briefly supervising a young J. Edgar Hoover and his new Federal Bureau of Investigation [FBI]), practiced antitrust law in New York City, and lost the 1932 election as the Republican candidate for Governor of New York. His interest in world affairs never diminished. Nor did his zest for being where the action was; he even toured the Italian battlelines in Ethiopia in 1935. Donovan also made wide contacts in government and among public-spirited financial and legal figures in New York City: men like Frank Knox, David Bruce, and the Dulles brothers, Allen and John Foster.

When Frank Knox became FDR’s new Secretary of the Navy in 1940, he brought William Donovan to Roosevelt’s attention (FDR and Donovan had been classmates—although not companions—at Columbia Law School). That summer, Roosevelt confidentially asked Donovan to visit Britain and report on London’s resolve and its staying power against Hitler. Donovan’s British hosts understood his mission. Prime Minister Winston Churchill, hoping to win American support for Britain’s desperate war effort, ensured that Donovan saw everything he wanted, granting him extraordinary access to defense and intelligence secrets. Donovan also toured the Balkans and British outposts in the Mediterranean in early 1941. Roosevelt was impressed with Donovan’s reports and with his ideas on intelligence and its place in modern war. When the President decided to force the military and civilian services to cooperate on intelligence matters in the summer of 1941, Donovan was the man he tapped to perform this mission.

William J. Donovan happily accepted the challenge and set to work with typical charisma and zeal. When the war came to America at Pearl Harbor, however, Donovan wanted to command troops on the battlefield again and hoped to gain a commission in the US Army. His hopes were soon dashed. An automobile accident in the spring of 1942 aggravated an old war wound, and Donovan realized that he would never again hold a field command. Nevertheless, he eventually wore a general’s stars. As the Director of OSS and a representative of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Donovan commanded thousands of service personnel, and it was deemed helpful to recommission him for the duration of the war. He was placed on active duty and promoted to Brigadier General in March 1943 and won promotion to Major General in November 1944.

COI, said historian Thomas F. Troy, was “a novel attempt in American history to organize research, intelligence, propaganda, subversion, and commando operations as a unified and essential feature of modern warfare; a ‘Fourth Arm’ of the military services.” The office grew quickly in the autumn before Pearl Harbor, with Donovan cheerfully accumulating various offices and staffs orphaned in their home departments.

One of Donovan’s hand-me-down units brought to COI a mission unforeseen even by him: espionage. Donovan had intended the clandestine intelligence gathering of his office to serve its analytical and propaganda branches; he had not originally sought to duplicate the foreign intelligence missions of the armed services. Nevertheless, it was the armed services, uncomfortable with the peacetime espionage mission, that persuaded COI in September 1941 to accept the small “undercover” intelligence branches of ONI and the G-2. Along with this acquisition, COI won authority to utilize “unvouchered” funds from the President’s emergency fund. Unvouchered funds were the lifeblood of clandestine operations. They were granted by Congress to be spent at the personal responsibility of the President or one of his officers, and were not audited in detail—Donovan’s signature on a note attesting to their proper use sufficed for accounting purposes. These funds, combined with the espionage authority granted COI by the military, planted the seed of the modern CIA’s Directorate of Operations.

Donovan recruited Americans who traveled abroad or studied world affairs and, in that age, such people often represented “the best and the brightest” at East Coast universities, businesses, and law firms. As war against Hitler loomed, not a few of America’s leading citizens looked for opportunities to join the struggle against Nazism. (COI’s successor, OSS, eventually drew such a high proportion of socially prominent men and women that Washington wits dubbed it “Oh So Social.”) These recruits brought into COI the practices and disciplines of their academic and legal backgrounds.

Donovan himself had traveled widely since his Army service in World War I, and he had been a careful observer of social, political, and military conditions. Similarly, his legal briefs on behalf of corporate clients were patiently and voluminously documented. As Coordinator of Information, he saw an opportunity to make research a cornerstone of his new information agency. Donovan won cooperation from the Librarian of Congress (the poet Archibald MacLeish) for his plan to analyze Axis strengths and vulnerabilities. At roughly the same time, COI established its own Research and Analysis Branch (R&A) to test Donovan’s hypothesis that answers to many intelligence problems could be found in libraries, newspapers, and the filing cabinets of government and industry:

We have, scattered throughout the various departments of our government, documents and memoranda concerning military and naval and air and economic potentials of the Axis which, if gathered together and studied in detail by carefully selected trained minds, with a knowledge both of the related languages and technique, would yield valuable and often decisive results.

By autumn 1941, Donovan was proudly submitting the first of R&A’s meticulously prepared studies to President Roosevelt. The Branch was still small and focused on Europe at the time of Pearl Harbor, however, and it had no role in the operational and intelligence failures surrounding that disaster.

https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/books-and-monographs/oss/art02.htm

The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was a United States intelligence agency formed during World War II. It was the wartime intelligence agency, and it was the predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Prior to the formation of the OSS (the counterpart of the British Secret Intelligence Service and Special Operations Executive), American intelligence had been conducted on an ad-hoc basis by the various departments of the executive branch, including the State, Treasury, Navy, and War Departments. They had no overall direction, coordination, or control. The US Army and US Navy had separate code-breaking departments (Signals Intelligence Service and OP-20-G) that not only competed, but refused to share break-throughs. Also, the original code-breaking operation of the State Department, MI-8, run by Herbert Yardley, had been shut down in 1929 by Secretary of State Henry Stimson, deeming it an inappropriate function for the diplomatic arm, because "gentlemen don't read each other's mail".[1] President Franklin D. Roosevelt was concerned about American intelligence deficiencies. On the suggestion of Canadian spymaster William Stephenson, the senior representative of British intelligence in the western hemisphere, Roosevelt requested that William J. Donovan, a World War I veteran, Medal of Honor recipient, attorney, and former Republican candidate for Governor of New York, draft a plan for an intelligence service. Gen. Donovan was employed to evaluate the global military position in order to offer suggestions concerning American intelligence requirements because the US did not have a central intelligence agency. After submitting his work, "Memorandum of Establishment of Service of Strategic Information," Gen. Donovan was appointed as the "Co-ordinator of Information" in July 1941.

The Office of Strategic Services was established by a Presidential military order issued by President Roosevelt on 13 June 1942, to collect and analyze strategic information required by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and to conduct special operations not assigned to other agencies. During the War, the OSS supplied policy makers with facts and estimates, but the OSS never had jurisdiction over all foreign intelligence activities. The FBI was responsible for intelligence work in Latin America, and the Army and Navy guarded their areas of responsibility.

From 1943-1945, the OSS played a major role in training Nationalist Chinese troops in China and Burma, and recruited Kachin, and other indigenous irregular forces for sabotage as well as guides for Allied forces in Burma fighting the Japanese Army. Among other activities, the OSS helped arm, train and supply resistance movements, including Mao Zedong's Red Army in China and the Viet Minh in French Indochina, in areas occupied by the Axis powers during the Second World War. The OSS also recruited and ran one of the war's most important spies, the German diplomat Fritz Kolbe. Other functions of the OSS included the use of propaganda, espionage, subversion, and post-war planning.

The OSS purchased Soviet code and cipher material (or Finnish information on them) from the émigré Finnish army officers in late 1944. Secretary of State Edward Stettinius, Jr., protested that this violated an agreement President Roosevelt made with the Soviet Union not to interfere with Soviet cipher traffic from the USA. Gen. Donovan might have copied the papers before returning them the following January, but there is no record of Arlington Hall's receiving them, and CIA and NSA archives have no surviving copies. This codebook was in fact used as part of the Venona decryption effort, which helped uncover large-scale Soviet espionage in North America.[2]

One of the greatest accomplishments of the OSS during World War II was its penetration of Germany by OSS operatives. The OSS was responsible for training German and Austrian individuals for missions inside Germany. Some of these agents included exiled communists and Socialist party members, labor activists, anti-Nazi prisoners-of-war, and German and Jewish refugees. At the height of its influence during World War II, the OSS employed almost 24,000 people.[3]

In 1943, during the Second World War, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) set up operations in Istanbul.[4] Turkey, as a neutral country during the Second World War, was a place where both the Axis and Allied powers sought to set up networks of spies. The railroads connecting central Asia with the West as well as Turkey’s close proximity to the Balkan states placed it at a crossroads of intelligence gathering. The goal of the OSS Istanbul operation called Project Net-1 was to infiltrate and extenuate subversive action in the old Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires.[5]

Head of operations at OSS Istanbul was a banker from Chicago named Lanning “Packy” Macfarland who maintained the cover story as a banker for the American lend-lease program.[6] Macfarland hired Alfred Schwarz who was a Czechoslovakian engineer and businessman who came to be known as “Dogwood” and ended up establishing the notorious Dogwood information chain.[7] Dogwood in turn hired as a personal assistant named Walter Arndt and established himself as an employee of the Istanbul Western Electrik Kompani.[8] Through Schwartz and Arndt the OSS was able to infiltrate Anti-Nazi groups in Austria, Hungary and Germany. Schwartz was able to convince Romanian, Bulgarian, Hungarian and Swiss diplomatic couriers to smuggle American Intelligence Information into these territories and establish contact with elements antagonistic to the Nazi regime.[9] Couriers and agents memorized information and produced analytical reports; when they were not able to memorize effectively they recorded information on microfilm and hid it in their shoes or hollowed pencils.[10] Through this process information about the Nazi regime made its way to Macfarland and the OSS in Istanbul and eventually to Washington.

While the OSS “Dogwood-chain” produced a lot of information, its reliability was increasingly questioned by British Intelligence. Eventually by May 1944 through collaboration between OSS, British Intelligence, Cairo and Washington the entire “Dogwood-chain” was found to be unreliable and dangerous.[11] Planting phony information into the OSS was intended to misdirect the resources of the Allies. Schwartz’s “Dogwood - chain” which was the largest American intelligence gathering tool in occupied territory, was shortly thereafter shut down.[12]

Transformation into the CIA

One month after the war was won in the Pacific Theater of Operations, on September 20, 1945, the 33rd U.S. President Harry S Truman signed an Executive Order which came into effect as of October 1 of 1945. Thus in the following days from September 20th of 1945 the functions of the OSS were split between the Department of State and the Department of War.

The State Department received the Research and Analysis Branch of OSS which was renamed the Interim Research and Intelligence Service or (IRIS) and headed by U.S. Army Colonel Alfred McCormack.

The War Department took over the Secret Intelligence (SI) and Counter-espionage (X-2) Branches, which were then housed in a new office created for just this purpose - The Strategic Services Unit (SSU). The Secretary of War appointed Brigadier General John Magruder (formerly Donovan's Deputy Director for Intelligence in OSS) as the director to oversee the liquidation of the OSS, and more importantly, the preservation of the clandestine intelligence capability of the OSS.

Yet (??) transferred to the CIG in mid-1946 and reconstituted as the Office of Special Operations (OSO). Next, the National Security Act of 1947 established the United States's first permanent peacetime intelligence agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, which then took up the functions of the OSS. The direct descendant of the paramilitary component of the OSS is Special Activities Division of the CIA. [13]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Strategic_Services

America’s entry into the war in December 1941 provoked new thinking about the place and role of COI. Donovan and his new office—with its $10 million budget, 600 staffers, and its charismatic director—had provoked hostility from the FBI, the G-2, and various war agencies. The new Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) initially shared this distrust, regarding Donovan, a civilian, as an interloper—but one they might be able to control and utilize if COI could be placed under JCS control. Surprisingly, Donovan himself, by now, was inclined to agree. Working with the Secretary of the JCS, Brig. Gen. Walter B. Smith, Donovan devised a plan to bring COI under the JCS in a way that would preserve the office’s autonomy while winning it access to military support and resources.

President Roosevelt endorsed the idea of moving COI to the Joint Chiefs. The President, however, wanted to keep COI’s Foreign Information Service (which conducted radio broadcasting) out of military hands. Thus he split the “black” and “white” propaganda missions, giving FIS the officially attributable side of the business—and half of COI’s permanent staff—and sent it to the new Office of War Information. The remainder of COI then became the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) on 13 June 1942. The change of name to OSS marked the loss of the “white” propaganda mission, but it also fulfilled Donovan’s wish for a title that reflected his sense of the “strategic” importance of intelligence and clandestine operations in modern war.

A month later, OSS’s institutional rivals delivered another blow to Donovan’s aspirations for the new outfit. The Department of State and the armed services arranged a Presidential decree that effectively banned OSS and several other agencies from acquiring and decoding the war’s most important intelligence source: intercepted Axis communications. Donovan protested, but his complaints fell on deaf ears. The result was that OSS had no access to intercepts on Japan (codenamed MAGIC) and could read only certain types of German intercepts (called ULTRA by the Allies). Other edicts also limited OSS’s scope and effectiveness. The FBI, G-2 and ONI, for instance, stood together to protect their monopoly on domestic counterintelligence work. OSS eventually developed a capable counterintelligence apparatus of its own overseas—the X-2 Branch—but it had no authority to operate in the Western Hemisphere, which was reserved for the FBI and Nelson Rockefeller’s office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs.

OSS expanded in 1942 into full-fledged operations abroad. Donovan sent units to every theater of war that would have them. His can-do approach had already impressed the State Department, which in 1941 had desperately needed men to serve as intelligence officers in French North Africa. Donovan’s COI sent a dozen officers to work as "vice consuls" in several North African ports, where they established networks and acquired information to guide the Allied landings (Operation TORCH) in November 1942. The success of TORCH won OSS much needed praise and supporters in Washington. Unfortunately, General Douglas MacArthur in the South Pacific and Admiral Chester Nimitz in the Central Pacific saw little use for OSS, and the office was thus kept from contributing to the main American campaigns against Imperial Japan. Nonetheless, Donovan forged ahead and hoped for the best. Utilizing military cover for the most part, but with some officers under diplomatic and non-official cover, OSS began to build a world-wide clandestine capability.

This worldwide reach benefited from close OSS contacts with British intelligence services. The British had much to teach their American pupils when COI opened its London office in November 1941. Both sides gained from the partnership. OSS needed information, training, and experience, all of which the British organizations could provide. The British good-naturedly envied the relative wealth of resources seemingly at the command of OSS and other American agencies and hoped to share in that bounty to expand their own operations against the Axis. Despite a mutual desire to cooperate, however, relative harmony between OSS and its British counterparts took time to achieve.

The slow maturing of inter-Allied cooperation had several causes. British intelligence services had their own operations and plans to protect and feared that working too closely with the inexperienced Americans would jeopardize the safety of their operatives in occupied Europe. This British caution kept the Americans in the awkward status of junior partners for much of the war, particularly during the planning for covert action in support of the D-Day landings in Normandy in 1944. For their part, OSS officers worried about making their new agency dependent on even a friendly foreign intelligence service. Conflicting policy goals occasionally hampered liaison with the British services in Asia. American diplomacy quietly frowned on British imperialism, and some OSS officers informally opposed British moves they viewed as efforts to expand the Empire. Despite these obstacles, however, the liaison relationship gradually grew closer as shared sacrifices and common goals forced officers in the field and in their respective headquarters to resolve their differences.

At its peak in late 1944, OSS employed almost 13,000 men and women. In relative terms, it was a little smaller than a US Army infantry division or a war agency like the Office of Price Administration, which governed prices for many commodities and products in the civilian economy. General Donovan employed thousands of officers and enlisted men seconded from the armed services, and he also found military slots for many of the people who came to OSS as civilians. US Army (and Army Air Forces) personnel comprised about two-thirds of its strength, with civilians from all walks of life making up another quarter; the remainder were from the Navy, Marines, or Coast Guard. About 7,500 OSS employees served overseas, and about 4,500 were women (with 900 of them serving in overseas postings). In Fiscal Year 1945, the office spent $43 million, bringing its total spending over its four-year life to around $135 million (almost $1.1 billion in today’s dollars).



https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/books-and-monographs/oss/art03.htm

The Special Operations Branch (SO) of OSS ran guerrilla campaigns in Europe and Asia. As with many other facets of OSS’s work, the organization and doctrine of the Branch was guided by British experiences in the growing field of “psychological warfare.” British strategists in the year between the fall of France in 1940 and Germany’s invasion of the USSR in 1941 had wondered how Britain—which then lacked the strength to force a landing on the European continent—could weaken the Reich and ultimately defeat Hitler. London chose a three-part strategy to utilize the only means at hand: naval blockade, sustained aerial bombing, and “subversion” of Nazi rule in the occupied nations. A civilian body, the Special Operations Executive (SOE), took command of the latter mission and began planning to “set Europe ablaze.” This emphasis on guerrilla warfare and sabotage fit with William Donovan’s vision of an offensive in depth, in which saboteurs, guerrillas, commandos, and agents behind enemy lines would support the army’s advance. OSS thus seemed the natural point of contact and cooperation with SOE in combined planning and operations when the Anglo-American Combined Chiefs of Staff decided in 1942 that America would join Britain in the business of "subversion."

The Special Operations Branch served as SOE’s American partner. Together, SO and SOE created the famous “Jedburgh” teams parachuted into France in the summer of 1944 to support the Normandy landings. Jedburghs joined the French Resistance against the German occupiers. There were 93 three-man teams in all, each of them with two officers and an enlisted radio operator. Typically an OSS man would serve with a British officer and a radioman from the Free French forces loyal to General Charles de Gaulle. Trained as commandos at SOE’s Milton Hall in the English countryside, they were a colorful and capable lot that included adventurers and soldiers of fortune, as well as author Stewart Alsop and future Director of Central Intelligence William Colby. Officers trained alongside enlisted men in informal comraderie because, once inside France, rank would have to be secondary to courage and ability. After landing (hopefully into the arms of the Resistance) the teams coordinated airdrops of arms and supplies, guided the partisans on hit-and-run attacks and sabotage, and did their best to assist the advancing Allied armies.

https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/books-and-monographs/oss/art05.htm

William J. Donovan in 1941 had not intended his new intelligence service to become a “spy” agency, running espionage operations in foreign capitals. He wanted COI to support military operations in the field by providing research, propaganda, and commando support, but he quickly became convinced of the value of clandestine human reporting. In 1942 OSS established the Secret Intelligence Branch (SI) to open field stations, train case officers, run agent operations, and process reports in Washington. Headed from 1943 on by international executive and lawyer Whitney H. Shepardson, SI by the end of the war had become a full-fledged foreign intelligence service, with stations in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, excellent liaison contacts with foreign services, and a growing body of operational doctrine.

In November 1942, the most famous SI station chief, Allen W. Dulles, set up shop on “Hitler’s doorstep” in the American legation in Bern, Switzerland. He found there a complicated and ever-shifting scene. Dulles quickly adopted a remnant of the fine prewar French military intelligence service, which gratefully provided him reports on German deployments in France that were prized by Allied invasion planners. He also found that Allied agents sent into Nazi Germany had scant hope of eluding the Gestapo, but that travel between the Reich and neutral Switzerland was free enough to bring a variety of Germans to him. Dulles established wide contacts with German émigrés, resistance figures, and anti-Nazi intelligence officers (who linked him, through Hans Bernd Gisevius, to the tiny but daring opposition to Hitler in Germany itself). Although Washington barred Dulles from making firm commitments to the plotters of the 20 July 1944 attempt to assassinate Hitler, the conspirators nonetheless gave him reports on developments in Germany, including sketchy but accurate warnings of plans for Hitler’s V-1 and V-2 missiles. In addition, Dulles was contacted by a German Foreign Ministry official, Fritz Kolbe, who volunteered to report from Berlin. Kolbe’s periodic packets illuminated German foreign policy and military matters, and helped the British spot the German spy “Cicero” working in the household of the British ambassador to Turkey.

Secret Intelligence Branch operations by 1945 had extended beyond the running of operations in foreign capitals to encompass the actual penetration of Nazi Germany. Donovan wanted to replicate the successes that the SI mission in Algiers had had in running the “Penny-Farthing” network in Southern France, but Germany, with no organized Resistance, was a much tougher objective. SI’s mission in London, led by William J. Casey, found a solution by adopting the methods of a successful OSS Morale Operations Branch project in Italy. Casey’s unit—knowing that no Americans could survive in Hitler’s Germany—learned how to find “volunteer” agents among the thousands of Axis prisoners-of-war in England. Casey’s London SI trained the agents, provided them with meticulously prepared clothing, documentation, and equipment, and dropped nearly 200 of them into the Third Reich to gather intelligence in the last months of the war. Agent teams established themselves in Bremen, Munich, Mainz, Dusseldorf, Essen, Stuttgart, and Vienna—and even in Berlin. They paid a high price in casualties—36 were killed, captured, or missing at war’s end—but the data they collected on industrial and military targets significantly aided the final Allied air and ground assaults on Germany.

Allen Dulles was born to high affairs of state. The nephew of one Secretary of State and the grandson of another, he was graduated from Princeton and joined the Foreign Service in World War I. As a junior diplomat, he acquired a taste for intelligence work while serving in Vienna and—after America declared war—in the American Legation in Bern, Switzerland. He gained valuable experiences, one of which stuck with him for the rest of his life. In Bern in 1917, Dulles kept a tennis date with a young lady one Sunday morning instead of meeting with an obscure Russian revolutionary named Lenin. Ever afterward he insisted that anyone who knocked on a case officer’s door deserved at least a hearing.

Dulles kept his career focused on foreign affairs after the war. Allen and his brother John Foster advised their uncle, Secretary of State Robert Lansing, at the Paris Peace negotiations at Versailles. More diplomatic postings followed in Berlin and Constantinople before Dulles returned to the State Department to head the Division of Near Eastern Affairs. He resigned from the government in 1926 to practice law and, for the next 15 years, he practiced with the firm of Sullivan & Cromwell in New York. Like his acquaintance William J. Donovan, Dulles traveled frequently abroad for business and pleasure in the 1930s, meeting Hitler and Mussolini and other European leaders in the course of his journeys. He joined the Council on Foreign Relations, ran as a Republican for Congress (and lost) in 1938, and advised former colleagues in the Department of State.

An early foe of Hitler, Dulles joined the fight against Nazi Germany well before Pearl Harbor. He had persuaded Sullivan & Cromwell to close its Berlin office in 1935. As head of COI’s New York office in the autumn of 1941, Dulles worked with William Stephenson (“Intrepid”) of British Security Coordination and gathered data on the Axis from refugees and from American businessmen and journalists with ties in Europe. His long institutional experience and wide contacts superbly equipped him to run wartime intelligence operations out of neutral Switzerland, and Dulles made the most of his many opportunities in Bern.

As defeat loomed for the Third Reich in the spring of 1945, Allen Dulles and SI made one of OSS’s greatest contributions to the war effort. German generals and officials as high-ranking as SS chief Heinrich Himmler began floating secret peace proposals to the British and the Americans. While some of these offers were genuine, the Allied “unconditional surrender” policy—and fear of provoking the suspicions of Joseph Stalin—constrained American diplomats and intelligence officers who might otherwise have been able to encourage these peace feelers. One important exception was made. Despite the unconditional surrender policy, higher authority in Washington allowed Allen Dulles to meet with SS general Karl Wolff, who had secretly offered to broker a surrender of German forces in Italy. The result of the meetings was Operation SUNRISE, a dangerous and devilishly complicated series of contacts over the next several weeks. Dulles had to manage the contacts and negotiations from Bern. Time after time the scheme came right to the edge of breakdown or disaster, but in the end SUNRISE succeeded, bringing about an early end to the Italian campaign in late April 1945—and saving hundreds if not thousands of lives.

https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/books-and-monographs/oss/art06.htm

OSS trained many of the leaders and personnel who formed the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Their ranks included four future Directors of Central Intelligence: Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, William Colby, and William Casey. Ironically, however, the one OSS veteran who did the most to promote such an agency—William J. Donovan—did not make the transition to it. He had led from the front, visiting his troops and surveying the ground in England, France, Italy, Burma, China, and even Russia. General Donovan was a charismatic leader and empire builder who inspired his people, but he was also a mediocre administrator, enamored of operations but bored by procedural detail. Tales of OSS inefficiency and waste—some of them true—delighted Donovan’s critics. He had tirelessly battled bureaucratic rivals in Washington and London, but as the war drew to an end his enemies began to fear that he might actually win his campaign to create a peacetime intelligence service modeled on OSS. President Roosevelt made no promises, however, and after his death in April 1945, the incoming President, Harry S. Truman, felt no obligation to save OSS.

Victory in Europe in May 1945 allowed OSS to concentrate on Japan, but it also meant months of bureaucratic limbo for Washington headquarters. President Truman disliked Donovan. Truman mocked him in his diary, perhaps fearing that Donovan’s proposed intelligence establishment might one day be used against Americans. The mood in Congress, moreover, was running against "war agencies" like OSS. Once the victory was won, the nation and Congress wanted demobilization—fast. This obstacle alone might have blocked a presidential attempt to preserve OSS or to create a permanent peacetime intelligence agency along the lines of General Donovan’s plan.

The White House’s Bureau of the Budget drafted liquidation plans for OSS and other war agencies, but initially the Bureau assumed that the termination could be stretched over weeks or months so OSS could preserve its most valuable assets. OSS and the Budget Bureau were to have less time than they expected. In late August, the White House suddenly ordered that OSS be closed as soon as possible. Bureau staffers had already conceived the idea of giving the Research and Analysis Branch to the State Department as “a going concern.” The imminent dissolution of OSS meant that something now had to be done quickly about the rest of the office. In response, a Budget Bureau staffer decided that the War Department should receive the remainder of OSS “for salvage and liquidation.” The War Department, it was decided, might even continue to operate the SI and X-2 Branches (and their overseas networks) for another year or so.

The Budget Bureau’s plan for intelligence reorganization went to President Truman on 4 September 1945. Donovan protested the plan, but the President ignored him, telling the Bureau to proceed with “the dissolution of Donovan’s outfit even if Donovan did not like it.” Bureau staffers soon had the requisite papers ready for the President’s signature. Executive Order 9621 on 20 September dissolved OSS as of 1 October 1945, sending R&A to the Department of State and everything else to the War Department. The Executive Order also directed the Secretary of War to liquidate OSS activities “whenever he deems it compatible with the national interest.” That same day, President Truman sent a letter of appreciation to General Donovan. The transfer of R&A to State, wrote the President, marked “the beginning of the development of a coordinated system of foreign intelligence within the permanent framework of the Government.” The President also implicitly affirmed that the War Department would continue to operate certain OSS components providing “services of a military nature the need for which will continue for some time.”

Due to an oversight in the drafting of EO 9621, Donovan had just ten days to dismantle his sprawling agency. He was too busy to do much about saving the components of OSS bound for the War Department. Donovan microfilmed his office files and bade farewell to his troops at a 28 September rally in a converted skating rink down the hill from his headquarters at 2430 E Street, NW:

We have come to the end of an unusual experiment. This experiment was to determine whether a group of Americans constituting a cross section of racial origins, of abilities, temperaments and talents could meet and risk an encounter with the long-established and well- trained enemy organizations…. You can go with the assurance that you have made a beginning in showing the people of America that only by decisions of nation- al policy based upon accurate information can we have the chance of a peace that will endure.

OSS expired on 1 October 1945. Fortunately, Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy had saved the SI and X-2 Branches as the nucleus of a peacetime intelligence service. McCloy was a friend of Donovan’s, and he interpreted the President’s directive as broadly as possible in ordering OSS’s Deputy Director for Intelligence, Brig. Gen. John Magruder, to preserve SI and X-2 “as a going operation” in a new office that McCloy dubbed the “Strategic Services Unit” (SSU). Secretary of War Robert Patterson confirmed this directive and ordered Magruder to “preserve as a unit such of these functions and facilities as are valuable for permanent peacetime purposes.”

Within two years the President and the Congress found a new home for the personnel and assets saved in SSU under Col. William W. Quinn. They went to a new organization called the Central Intelligence Group (CIG) until the National Security Act of 1947 turned CIG into the Central Intelligence Agency, to perform many of the missions that General Donovan had advocated for his proposed peacetime intelligence service. Although CIA differed from OSS in important ways (which is why Truman endorsed it and not OSS), Donovan and his office deserve credit as forefathers of the Agency. Without Donovan’s tireless advocacy of a modern intelligence service—and the record built by OSS during the war—the Truman administration would have taken longer to create the new intelligence establishment that the President wanted and might not have done this task as well.

The US military in recent years has formally honored its own debt to OSS. In creating the US Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) in 1987, the Pentagon consciously looked back to the OSS model of inter-service cooperation and success in unconventional warfare. USSOCOM in a sense represented a fulfillment of Donovan’s original hope that all-arms special operations would become an integral part of US warfighting doctrine and a key supplement to regular combat planning and operations. Special Operations Command personnel, like their CIA counterparts, regard Donovan and OSS to be true ancestors in spirit and deed. They wear the insignia to prove this heritage; USSOCOM’s shoulder patch is a gold lance-head on a black field, and it was modeled on a patch worn unofficially in OSS.

In CIA and USSOCOM, the US Government fulfilled General Donovan’s vision. Central intelligence and unconventional warfare capabilities are now built into the nation’s command and security policies and ready at all times to protect America and its interests.

https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/books-and-monographs/oss/art10.htm

In 1938, Roosevelt executed a secret agreement with Churchill, which in effect ceded U.S. sovereignty to England, because it agreed to let Special Operations Executives control U.S. policies. To implement this agreement, Roosevelt sent General Donovan to London for indoctrination before setting up the OSS (which later became the CIA) under the aegis of SOE-SIS.

The OSS program (now known as the CIA), has always worked under "guidelines" set up by the Tavistock Institute.

The Tavistock Institute originated the mass civilian bombing raids carried out by both Roosevelt and Churchill as a "clinical experiment in mass terror" - keeping records of the results as they observed the "guinea pigs" reacting under *controlled laboratory conditions*!

All Tavistock and American foundation techniques have a single goal---to break down the psychological strength of the individual and render him helpless to oppose the dictators of the New World Order. Any technique which helps to break down the family unit and family inculcated principles of religion, honor, patriotism, and sexual behavior, is used by Tavistock scientists as weapons of crowd control. The methods of Freudian psychotherapy induce *permanent mental illness* in those who undergo this treatment, by de-stabilizing their character. The victim are then advised to "establish new rituals of personal interaction" - that is, to indulge in brief sexual encounters, which actually set the participants adrift, with no stable personal relationships in their lives, destroying their ability to establish or maintain a family.

Tavistock Institute has developed such power in the
U.S. that no one achieves prominence in any field
unless that person received training in "behavioral
science" at Tavistock, or one of its subsidiaries.

Henry Kissinger, whose meteoric rise to power is otherwise inexplicable, was a German refugee and student of Sir John Rawlings-Reese at SHAEF. Dr. Peter Bourne, a Tavistock Institute psychologist, picked Jimmy Carter for President of the U.S., solely because Carter had undergone an intensive brainwashing program administered by Admiral Hyman Rickover at Annapolis.

The "experiment" in compulsory racial integration in the U.S. was organized by Ronald Lippert of the OSS and the American Jewish Congress, and director of child training at the Commission on Community Relations. The program was designed to break down the individual's sense of personal knowledge in his identity, his racial heritage. *Through the Stanford Research Institute, Tavistock controls the National Education Association!* The Institute of Social Research at the National Training Lab brainwashes leading executives of business and government. Such is the power of Tavistock, that our entire space program was scrapped for nine years, just so that the Soviets could catch up!! The hiatus was demanded in an article written by Dr. Anatol Rapport and was promptly granted by the government, to the complete mystification of everyone connected with NASA. Another prominent Tavistock operation is the *Wharton School of Finance*, at the University of Pennsylvania.

A single common denominator identifies the common Tavistock strategy -- *the use of drugs*. The infamous MK Ultra program of the CIA, in which unsuspecting CIA officials were given LSD, and their reaction studied like "guinea pigs", resulted in several deaths. The U.S. Government had to pay millions in damages to the families of the victims, but the culprits were never indicted. The program originated when Sandoz AG, a Swiss drug firm, owned by S.G. Warburg Co. of London, developed Lysergic Acid. Roosevelt's advisor, James Paul Warburg, son of Paul Warburg who wrote the Federal Reserve Act, and nephew of Max Warburg, who had financed Hitler, set up the *Institute for Policy Studies* to "promote the drug". The result was the LSD "counter-culture" of the 1960s, the "student revolution", financed with $25 million dollars from the CIA! Still think "being a hippie" was cool?

One part of MK Ultra was the Human Ecology Fund. The CIA also paid Dr. Herbert Kelman of Harvard to carry out further experiments on mind control. In the 1950s, the CIA financed extensive LSD experiments in Canada. Dr. D. Ewen Cameron, president of the Canadian Psychological Association, and director of Royal Victorian Hospital, Montreal, received large payments from the CIA to give 53 patients large doses of LSD and record their reactions. The patients were drugged into weeks of sleep and then given electric shock treatments. One victim, the wife of a member of the Canadian Parliament, is now suing the U.S. companies who provided the drug for the CIA. All the records of the CIA's drug testing program were ordered destroyed by the head of MK Ultra.

Because *all efforts of the Tavistock Institute are directed toward producing cyclical collapse* , the effect of the CIA programs are tragically apparent. R. Emmett Tyrell Jr., writing in the Washington Post, August 20, 1984, cites the "squalid consequences of the 60s radicals in SDS", as resulting in "the growing rate of illegitimacy, petty lawlessness, drug addiction, welfare, VD, and mental illness" in this country and throughout the world.

This is the "legacy" of the Warburgs and the CIA. Their principal agency, the *Institute for Policy Studies*, was funded by James Paul Warburg; its co-founder was Marcus Raskin, protege of McGeorge Bundy, president of the Ford Foundation. Bundy had Raskin appointed to the post of President Kennedy's personal representative on the National Security Council, and in 1963, funded Students for Democratic Society, through which the CIA operated the drug culture.

The "tax exempt" Tavistock Institute currently operates a staggering $6 Billion Dollar a year network of foundations in the United States; ALL of it funded by US taxpayer money!

Ten major institutions are under its direct control, with 400 subsidiaries, and 3,000 other study groups and "think tanks" which originate many types of programs to increase the control of the New World Order over the American sheeple.

The Stanford Research Institute, which adjoins the Hoover Institution, is a $150 Million Dollar a year operation with 3,300 employees. It conducts program surveillance for Bechtel, Kaiser, and 400 other companies, and extensive intelligence operations for the CIA. SRI is the largest institution on the West Coast promoting "mind control" and the "behavioral" sciences.

One of the key agencies as a conduit for secret instructions from Tavistock is The Ditchley Foundation, founded in 1957. The American branch of the Ditchley Foundation is run by Cyrus Vance (former Secretary of State and director of the Rockefeller Foundation) and Winston Lord, president of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

http://hardtruth.navhost.com/tavistock.html



By Michael Howard

Since the time of Elizabeth I, British secret services have worked according to the principle of ‘the end justifies the means’. Money, bribery, blackmail – these are their recruitment methods...

– Nikolai Patrushev, head of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), October 2007
It is not really surprising that historically occultism and espionage have often been strange bedfellows. The black art of espionage is about obtaining secret information and witches, psychics and astrologers have always claimed to be able to predict the future and know about things hidden from ordinary people.

Gathering intelligence is carried out under a cloak of secrecy and occultists are adept at keeping their activities concealed from sight. Like secret agents they also use codes, symbols and cryptograms to hide information from outsiders. Occultists and intelligence officers are similar in many ways, as both inhabit a shadowy underworld of secrets, deception and disinformation. It is therefore not unusual that often these two professions have shared the same members.

The ‘father of the British Secret Service’ was the Elizabethan lawyer, politician, diplomat and spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham. He was a Protestant and as a young man during the bloody reign of the Catholic Queen Mary was forced to flee abroad to escape persecution. While in exile, Walsingham learnt Italian and French and became acquainted with the work of the famous Venetian Secret Service that used its spying skills for trade and commerce under the cloak of diplomacy.

When Queen Elizabeth I was crowned Francis Walsingham returned to England. He was appointed as a secretary to the English ambassador to the French court in Paris and also worked as a secret agent reporting back the intelligence he gleaned to Queen Elizabeth’s Secretary of State, Sir William Cecil, later Lord Burghley. Between 1568 and 1570 Walsingham, who had become a Member of Parliament, worked in England in domestic counter-espionage exposing Catholic plots against the monarchy.

In 1570 Walsingham was appointed as the new ambassador to France. He proceeded to set up his own network of undercover agents in France, Italy, Spain and the Low Countries. The late Cecil Williamson, who worked for British Intelligence during World War II and later ran a witchcraft museum, told this writer that Walsingham often used witches as spies.
The Mysterious Dr Dee

One of the famous occultists he is known to have recruited was Queen Elizabeth’s court astrologer and the magical architect of the British Empire, the Welsh magician Dr John Dee. Walsingham was involved in the machinations for the proposed marriage of the Duc d’Anjou and Elizabeth. At the spy master’s personal recommendation, the queen dispatched Dee to France with orders to report back on the progress of the marriage negotiations. The magus travelled to the Duchy of Lorraine and drew up the birth charts of both the Duc and his brother, who was also regarded as a possible husband for the English monarch. Dr Dee, probably influenced by Walsingham, diplomatically reported back to London that the stars suggested a political alliance would be far wiser than matrimony and the queen took his advice.

In 1573 Sir Francis returned to London and became a privy councillor. This placed him at the heart of government and he proceeded to set up what amounted to the first organised foreign espionage service to operate from England. In 1566 he had put in place a pan-European network of spies extending as far to the east as Turkey and Russia, where Dr Dee reported on the goings-on at the Tsar’s court. This network mostly gathered intelligence on the military activities of the Spanish, who were England’s primary enemies at this time. Walsingham was also responsible for foiling the Catholic plot whose exposure led to the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots. Using Dr Dee’s psychic powers, he was apparently able to discover that the plotters were passing secret messages to the imprisoned Scottish queen hidden in bottles of wine.

While travelling in Europe in 1562, Dr Dee had come across a book written by Abbot Trimethus of Spanhiem (1462-1516). This was a guide to writing ciphers and secret codes for magical purposes and Dee informed Sir William Cecil about his discovery. On his return to England Dr Dee adapted the abbot’s cryptography and gave it to Sir Francis Walsingham for use by his secret agents. He also passed on the political and military intelligence he had acquired during his travels across Europe. It has been alleged that Dee used the famous Enochian magical alphabet as a code to disguise this information. If he had been arrested his captors would not have understood it and dismissed it as nonsense.

In 1587 Dee even claimed he had received a spirit message from one of his angelic contacts concerning a threat to the English Fleet. The message said that a group of disguised Frenchmen working for the Spaniards was secretly visiting the Forest of Dean. The forest was the centre for English ship-building and the French agents planned to bribe disloyal foresters to burn it down. Dr Dee sent his supernatural intelligence to Walsingham and the saboteurs, who were masquerading as squatters, were arrested.

Information supplied to Sir Francis Walsingham from his European spy network convinced him that a Spanish armada would be launched against England in 1588. He asked Dee to use his knowledge of astrology to calculate the weather prospects for an invasion. The magus told him there would an impending disaster in Europe caused by a devastating storm. When news of this prophecy was leaked and reached Spain, naval recruitment fell and there were desertions of sailors from the Spanish Fleet. In Lisbon an astrologer who repeated the prediction was charged with spreading false information. In an act of psychological warfare, Dr Dee also informed Emperor Rudolf of Bohemia (the modern Czech Republic) and King Stephen of Poland that the predicted storm would “cause the fall of a mighty empire.” Rudolf, who was an occultist and Dee’s patron when he stayed in Bohemia, passed on the warning to the Spanish ambassador.

It is a fact that in 1588 a great storm did scatter the ships of the Spanish Armada in the English Channel and aided the English victory. This metrological event was popularly credited to a magical ritual performed by the buccaneer Sir Francis Drake on the cliffs at Plymouth. Superstitious people believed Drake was a wizard and sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for success over the Spanish. It is claimed that he also organised several covens of witches to work magically to raise the storm and prevent the invasion. Meanwhile, as a result of scrying in his shewstone or crystal, Dr Dee saw a symbolic vision of a castle with its drawbridge drawn up (England) and the image of the elemental king of fire. As a result he urged the Navy to employ fire-ships against the Armada and they did so with good results.

After Sir Francis Walsingham’s death in 1590, and the ascension to the English throne of the Scottish king James, Dr John Dee fell into royal disfavour. The new king had an unhealthy obsession with witchcraft and his early reign was dominated by this preoccupation. It led him to employ the Secret Service in his own personal vendetta against suspected witches. James I ordered its agents to hunt down alleged practitioners of witchcraft and expose their alleged plots against the monarchy. One of those involved was the Earl of Bothwell, accused of high treason for organising a coven of Scottish witches to work magic against the king in an attempt to seize the throne. To assist his secret agents in their new witch-hunting activities, King James persuaded Parliament in 1604 to pass a new and stronger Witchcraft Act to deal with the problem. The Bill was rushed through and it was made law within three months.
Dashwood & the Hellfire Club

In the 18th century the Secret Service became concerned at the activities of the so-called ‘Hellfire Club’ founded by Sir Francis Dashwood, later the Chancellor of the Exchequer and a close friend and political adviser of King George III. As a young man Dashwood went on the Grand Tour of Europe that was compulsory for aristocrats and he was initiated into a Masonic lodge in France. While visiting Italy he developed anti-Catholic views, violently broke up a celebration of the Mass and insulted the Pope. Even though he was an aristocrat, Dashwood was disgusted at the vast wealth of the Roman Church compared with the poverty of its devoted worshippers. He also became fascinated by classical mythology and decorated his country house at West Wycombe in Buckinghamshire with murals, paintings and statues of Greek and Roman gods and goddesses.

Sir Francis Dashwood founded a secret society called the Order of the Friars of St Francis of Medmenham (more popularly known as the Hellfire Club) named after the abbey he had purchased on the banks of the River Thames where its meetings were held. Rumours circulated in the coffee houses of London that the Friars practised sexual orgies featuring aristocratic ladies and prostitutes dressed up as nuns. There were also satanic rites such as Black Masses where the naked body of a noblewoman acted as an altar. However, according to one senior member of the Hellfire Club, this occult mummery was just an amusing diversion for the dandies. The inner circle of the Order was actually dedicated to the serious revival of the pagan Eleusian Mysteries and the worship of the Bona Dea or Great Mother Goddess. Dashwood’s present-day descendant, also called Sir Francis, confirmed this fact in a BBC radio interview some years ago,

It has been claimed secret agents infiltrated the Hellfire Club because of its many famous members. They included the Earl of Sandwich, John Montagu, who was the First Lord of the Admiralty, the Paymaster General Thomas Potter, several members of Parliament, the Lord Mayor of London, a son of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Earl of Bute, who was the prime minister, and it has been claimed even the Prince of Wales. At least four members of the group were known to be actively involved in espionage. They was a radical MP called John Wilkes, a transvestite French diplomat, Chevalier D’Eon de Beaumont, the American statesman and philosopher Benjamin Franklin, and Sir Francis Dashwood himself. Wilkes had allegedly recruited the chevalier into the British Secret Service.

During his stay in Russia on the Grand Tour Dashwood had spied on the court of the Tsar through his close friendship with the Grand Duchess Catherine. In Italy he gathered intelligence on the exiled Stuart dynasty and their supporters, although the head of the British Secret Service in Rome believed Dashwood was a Jacobite agent. In fact he was only pretending to support the Stuart cause and was passing on information about their activities directly back to London. In later years Sir Francis and Benjamin Franklin were involved in a clandestine plan to reconcile the American colonists and the British government to prevent the War of Independence.

Rudolf Hess & the British Occult Connection

During World War II British Intelligence invited many occultists into its ranks because it needed their specialist knowledge and skills. The assistant director of Naval Intelligence during the war was Lt. Commander Ian Fleming RN, best known later as a thriller writer and the creator of the famous fictional spy James Bond 007. Fleming was also interested in astrology and numerology and he was a friend of the notorious magician Aleister Crowley, who had worked for MI6 (the Secret Intelligence Service) during World War I and in the 1920s and 1930s spying on Germans with occult interests (see ‘The Magus Was A Spy’ by Dr Richard Spence in New Dawn No. 105, November-December 2007).

Ian Fleming conceived an audacious plan to lure a high-ranking member of the German government into defecting to Britain so as to provide a morale-boosting propaganda coup. This idea had been inspired by a novel written by Fleming’s brother, Peter, called Flying Visit (Jonathan Cape 1940). Peter Fleming was a journalist and also worked for both MI5 (the Security Service) and the propaganda section of the clandestine Special Operations Executive (SOE). The novel imagined that Hitler’s plane crash-landed in England and he was captured. The Reichminister and deputy fuehrer himself, Rudolf Hess, was chosen as a suitable candidate for the actual plot. This was because he was a supporter of peace with Britain and was also under the influence of astrologers and occultists. It was believed this could be used against him.

Commander Fleming recreated The Link, a defunct Anglo-German friendship society of the 1930s that had a wealthy membership of Nazi sympathisers drawn from the British Establishment. Ironically, or perhaps coincidentally, The Link had been founded by Admiral Sir Barry Domville, an ex-director of the Naval Intelligence Department (NID), after he retired in 1930. Domville was arrested and interned in May 1940 because MI5 believed he was plotting a fascist coup d’etat supported by aristocratic peacemongers. The admiral was a friend of Major-General J.F.C. ‘Boney’ Fuller CBE, a famous military analyst who designed the tactics for the first tank battle in World War I. Fuller also invented the concept of blitzkrieg used so successfully in World War II by the German Panzers. Fuller was an open admirer of Hitler (he attended the fuehrer’s 50th birthday party in 1939), a leading member of Sir Oswald Moseley’s British Union of Fascists (BUF), a friend of Ian Fleming and a leading disciple of Aleister Crowley. In the 1930s Fuller formed the extreme-right wing Nordic League (aka the White Knights of Britain), allegedly established by Nazi agents. However in the 1950s he was a member of a MI6 supported group of Russian émigrés engaged in anti-communist propaganda. It has been suggested that Fuller was not interned during the war with other leading fascists such as Mosley and Domville because he was a MI6 double-agent.

Ian Fleming’s idea was to persuade the German High Command in Berlin, and especially Rudolf Hess, that when war broke out The Link had not disbanded but had gone underground. It had allegedly regrouped and recruited even more prominent pro-Nazi members in the British Establishment including aristocrats and royalty. These were represented by the NID as influential people with the political muscle to overthrow prime minister Winston Churchill’s national wartime government, call a ceasefire and agree to a peace treaty with Germany. Under its terms Britain would keep control of its Empire and Germany would have free reign in occupied Europe. The Nazis also hoped that British troops would be sent to fight alongside the German Wehrmacht and the SS against the Soviet Union in a joint anti-communist crusade.

Hitler did not want to invade and occupy Britain. Instead he would have preferred to negotiate a treaty with a sympathetic new government in London. It has been suggested that the only reason the fuehrer abandoned Operation Sea Lion – the proposed invasion of Southern England – and instead invaded the Soviet Union was to force Churchill to accept peace terms. If the Red Army had been defeated Britain would truly have been standing alone, as Hitler did not believe the Americans had the political will to enter the war. Unfortunately he underestimated the ability and resolve of the Soviets to defend their motherland and also the clandestine support that the US was already offering Great Britain.

The NID plot to ensnare Rudolf Hess used bogus astrological predictions combined with political intelligence. Hess was persuaded that a Scottish aristocrat, the Duke of Hamilton, was willing to negotiate peace terms on behalf of the influential people at the top of British society who wanted to end the war. The duke had met Hess at the Berlin Olympics in 1936 and the deputy fuehrer for some reason thought he was a member of the surviving Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Ian Fleming commissioned an astrologer to produce a faked astrological forecast indicating that 10 May 1941 would be a propitious date for Rudolf Hess to fly to Scotland and meet secretly with the Duke of Hamilton and other members of the so-called British ‘peace party’. Hess’ occult advisors had also told him there would be an unusual planetary conjunction on 10 May. On that day six planets would be aligned in the zodiac sign of Taurus and conjoined to the full moon. At the same time Hitler’s chart showed ‘malefic’ astrological aspects. Hess saw himself in the role of a messianic hero saving Germany from possible future defeat by making peace with the British. All the (false) reports reaching the deputy fuehrer about the political situation in England and the astrological aspects convinced him that his mission would be a success.

Rudolf Hess flew to Scotland on 10 May 1941 in the firm belief that on landing he would be met by the Duke of Hamilton and the Duke of Kent and whisked off to London for a private audience with King George VI. He had been convinced by the misinformation fed to him by British Intelligence that these three men represented a genuine peace movement capable of removing the warmonger Churchill and agreeing to German terms. Hess had also previously met the Duke of Windsor when he had visited Berlin before the war. As a result Hess was persuaded that some members of the German-descended royal family were sympathetic to Nazism. Certainly the Duke of Saxo-Coburg, formerly Prince Charles Edward, a grandson of Queen Victoria and a close friend of the Duke of Windsor, had willingly embraced Nazism. In fact Hitler had appointed him as the head of the German branch of the Red Cross that was responsible for exterminating the mentally sick and physically disabled.

Unfortunately instead of meeting pro-Nazi aristocrats and royals when he landed, Hess was captured by a local farmer and a Home Guard unit. They handed him over to the police and he was transferred to London to be interrogated by MI5. Unfortunately the British government completely mishandled the capture of Hess. It has been suggested that Churchill believed the subterfuge by the NID and SIS suggesting leading members of the British Establishment might be pro-German may have been based on fact. For that reason the government did not capitalise on Hess’ ‘peace mission’. The German High Command had also disowned him and said that his flight had been unauthorised. They also suggested that Hess might be insane so his value for propaganda purposes was undermined and diminished.

Rudolf Hess’ apparent defection caused widespread panic in Berlin concerning the influence of occultism on the Nazi Party. The Gestapo immediately launched Operation Aktion Hess. On the direct orders of Hitler, they rounded up hundreds of occultists, psychics and astrologers, including Hess’s leading occult advisor Ernst Schulte-Strathaus. In June 1941 a decree was issued banning all public performances of clairvoyance, astrology, fortune-telling or telepathy. Anybody associated with Hess and his esoteric interests was thrown into concentration camps and occult secret societies were closed down. Because of staff shortages in the Gestapo, officers from the Naval Intelligence Service were drafted in to interrogate some of the arrested psychics. It has been claimed that they recruited some of them for secret operations using dowsing on maps with pendulums to hunt down British submarines.

It has also been claimed that Ian Fleming and the NID was involved in a plot to silence the Spiritualist medium Helen Duncan, the penultimate person to be charged under the old Witchcraft Act of 1736. She was arrested in 1944 after holding a séance during which allegedly the spirit of a dead sailor from the sinking of the HMS Bolham physically manifested. As the news of the loss had not been publicly released, and the Admiralty was keeping it secret for morale purposes, Duncan became a target for the security services. She and other psychics were regarded as a serious threat to national security and they became the object of a MI5/NID dirty tricks operation to silence leaks. This suggests that the Intelligence Services actually believed these mediums had genuine powers. Duncan’s arrest and subsequent trial, which in fact was condemned by Winston Churchill as a waste of public funds, was allegedly meant to deter other mediums. The War Office was paranoid that military secrets about the forthcoming D-Day landings in Normandy would be revealed at séances and become public knowledge or passed to the Germans.

Bibliography:

Derek Wilson, Sir Francis Walsingham (Constable 2007)
Richard Deacon, John Dee (Muller 1968)
Donald McCormack, The Hellfire Club (Jarrolds 1958)
P.Mannix, The Hellfire Club (Four Square 1961)
M.R.D. Foot, SOE: The Special Operations Executive 1940-46 (BBC publications 1984)
J.M. McKenzie The Secret History of the SOE 1940-1945 (St Ermins Press 2000)
Nigel West, The Secret War: The Story of SOE (Hodder & Stoughton 1992)
Richard Deacon, The History of British Secret Service (Frederick Muller 1979)
Donald McCormick, The Life of Ian Fleming (Peter Owen 1993)
MICHAEL HOWARD has had a lifelong interest in intelligence matters and the strange links between the occult and politics. Since 1976 he has edited The Cauldron newsletter (www.the-cauldron.fsnet.co.uk) featuring witchcraft, folklore and Earth Mysteries. He is the author of Secret Societies: Their Influence and Power from Antiquity to the Present Day, published by Destiny Books USA.

http://theuniversalseduction.com/featuring/the-british-occult-secret-servicethe-untold-story

http://www.newdawnmagazine.com/Article/The_British_Occult_Secret_Service.html

The United States has carried on foreign intelligence activities since the days of George Washington, but only since World War II have they been coordinated on a government-wide basis, but does the intelligence service have more than one master?

Over the past sixty years, a complex web of business dealings that seems to transcend international borders, politics and law and which is guided by an unseen hand has continuously shaped the world.

The World War II forerunner to the CIA was the O.S.S. (Office of Strategic Services), which was established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in June 1942 in response to Pearl Harbour. The OSS had a mandate to collect and analyze strategic information required by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and to conduct special operations not assigned to other agencies.

One of the OSS agents was Major General Clay Shaw, who acted as the OSS liaison officer to British Prime minister, Winston Churchill.

After his decommission at the end of the war, Shaw, a hard-line right winger, became a senior figure in an organisation called Permindex. Permindex was by all accounts a business with questionable objectives and anonymous directors from its inception. As a company, Permindex obviously had friends in high places though, because in the late 40’s it began securing government contracts. Investigators looking into the company’s dealings claim that it appears, through cross indexing of restricted banking papers from the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, to be funded by Halliburton, the oil industry conglomerate that today boasts republican vice president Dick Cheney as its former CEO.

The Role of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International

The CIA used B.C.C.I. (Bank of Credit and Commerce International), which was founded in Pakistan in 1972 by Agha Hasan Abedi, to cleanse funding from suspect sources, and to create a funding route for the Afghan Mujahideen and Saddam Hussein in Iraq, which at the time they were financing and indeed arming. Some intelligence figures add that the CIA set up the bank to watch who laundered their cash through it. After the bank’s collapse in 1994, regulators discovered the bank had been involved in money laundering, bribery, support of terrorism, arms trafficking, the sale of nuclear technologies, the commission and facilitation of tax evasion, smuggling, illegal immigration, and the illicit purchases of banks and real estate. An incredible $13 billion had simply vanished. One of thousands of findings that emerged from subsequent enquiries into the scandal was that the regulators report found that former US Defence Secretary Clark Clifford and his business partner Robert A. Altman had been closely involved with the bank.

Senator John Kerry who authored an in-depth investigation into the banks dealings stated

"BCCI was not an ordinary bank. It was set up deliberately to avoid centralized regulatory review, and operated extensively in bank secrecy jurisdictions. Its affairs are extraordinarily complex. Its offers were sophisticated international bankers whose apparent objective was to keep their affairs secret, to commit fraud on a massive scale, and to avoid detection."

The US administration ultimately decided not to prosecute Clark Clifford for his involvement with BCCI on the grounds of his age and health.

Permindex branches out

In 1956, Permindex, apparently representing a group of American business interests, decided to move into Europe and set up in Basle, Switzerland. Two private companies were created under the auspices of the Permindex mother company: Building Finance and Parkhof. Parkhof however went bankrupt following a massive scandal, following which Permindex left Basle and moved to Rome where it set itself up as the World Trade Centre, Centro Mondiale Comerciale or CMC as it was known, before relocating to South Africa. The move from Europe to South Africa was almost certainly prompted by the failed assassination of France’s president, General Charles De Gaulle.

De Gaulle’s intelligence staff traced the financing of his attempted assassination back to Permindex in Switzerland and from there to CMC in Rome. Furious, De Gaulle complained to both the Swiss and Italian governments who revoked Permindex’s charter.

There were also indications that Permindex had been a NATO intelligence front that had been created after the War from the remnants of Adolf Hitler's intelligence units. According to some, this refers to the Spider networks of Otto Skorzeny and of former SS intelligence Chief, Reinhard Gehlen. Both Skorzeny and Gehlen were in the employ of brothers and high ranking Republicans, Allen Welsh Dulles, Director of the CIA under Dwight D Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles who served as Secretary of State under Eisenhower. John Dulles of course famously went on the record as making the chilling admission "The United States of America does not have friends, it has interests".

Permindex and the Kennedy Assassination

Permindex seems to have had a number of dubious characters associated with it on many levels ranging from the highest levels of government to the criminal underworld. Amazingly, its link to the attempted assassination of De Gaulle was not the first assassination attempt that Permindex had been implicated in.

Recently discovered documentation also suggests that it was the same Permindex apparatus that had financed the attempt on De Gaulle’s life that successfully assassinated President John Kennedy. Kennedy wanted huge cuts in armaments purchases and also planned to restrict the tax free financial donations to Israel until they stopped their aggression against Palestine and the Middle East. Most damning of all Kennedy wanted to abolish the Federal Reserve; the private bank that effectively runs America. It was a three pronged attack that would strike at the heart of the financial overlords that had succeeded in infiltrating every corner of society.

Clay Shaw, the former OSS officer and right wing extremist who had been involved with Permindex since its beginnings was arrested and tried for conspiracy in the assassination of John F. Kennedy - Jurors found him innocent. Summing up Shaw’s trial, district attorney Jim Garrison made it clear that although it was Shaw he was prosecuting, he had no doubt that Shaw was simply a cog in a much bigger machine with a darker agenda:

“What I'm trying to tell you is that there are forces in America today, unfortunately, which are not in favor of the truth coming out about John Kennedy's assassination. As long as our government continues to be like this, as long as such forces can get away with such actions, then this is no longer the country in which we were born.”

Jim Garrison, closing speech at the trial of Clay Shaw (28th February, 1969)

Permindex had spun a complex web of shadowy associates since its creation. Swiss bank account details reveal that the senior mafia figure Joseph Bonanno was also linked to the company, as was the international banker and Jewish activist Hans Seligman, and Lee Harvey Oswald’s killer, Jack Ruby, variously described as a mobster, intelligence agent, and small-time Hustler. The strength of the Permindex web is that it is so intricate and so secretive, it is impossible to completely unravel.

The head of the National crime syndicate, a mafia organisation that covered the whole of America, was a Polish Jew named Maier Suchowljansky, better known as Mayer Lansky. Lansky was investigated by J. Edgar Hoover into allegations that he conspired with Jewish owned Hollywood film studios to criminally siphon off huge sums of money which was then used to make films with a communist slant.

According to some sources, Clay Shaw himself claimed that an alliance existed between the mafia and the CIA and which was partially funded by the Jewish banks, to wrest Cuba away from Castro. The aim was to then sell huge quantities of armaments to Cuba, which would be purchased with loans from the CIA. Having sold the weapons to Cuba, the powers that be would then later claim Cuba was a threat, instigating unrest and political instability. This is reminiscent of what Halliburton has done in the Middle East with Iraq.

The agenda of the Illuminati is both complex and varied. Intercepted US financial traffic to the collapsed Bank of Credit and Commerce International, suggests that many people are on the payroll of the multinational drug companies, and are employed to discredit herbal and vitamin supplements, thus protecting the multi billion dollar pharmaceutical industry. Legislation is being planned to restrict the sale and use of non allopathic medication; a certain well known bearded conjuror is alleged to be an agent, although this has never been proven of course.

British Interests

In Britain, Prime Minister Tony Blair has set up 320 ‘quangos’ which are often referred to as ‘task forces’ which supposedly monitor and reform their given areas of responsibility. Many of the ministers and other members of these so called task forces also sit on the boards of or are major shareholders in the very industries they are supposed to be monitoring and reforming. The linking of the international drug companies and weapons manufacturers (which are often connected to the same people) to British government ministers hardly makes these task forces impartial.

AstraZeneca, one of the world's leading pharmaceutical companies, I am told by a top secretary has given Government minister David Blunkett large kickbacks, if this is true, what for I ask?

Princess Diana told me she was in fear of her life. She was told if she went ahead with her proposed tour of the Middle East and continued to give publicity to the plight of the Palestinians in her campaign to ban land mines, she would be killed.

Swiss banking is notoriously secretive, but a leak from one bank’s office in Tel Aviv reveals huge monetary sums incoming from the USA which was tied into the munitions industry and would have ceased with the land mine and weapon ban. Tony Blair’s main fundraiser and handler Lord Levy, allegedly draws funding from these sources, which are then registered through surrogate donors to New Labour.

The same two dynasties, the Rothschild’s and the Rockefella’s control both the pharmaceutical industries and the weapons manufacturers; both have mafia connections.

A means to an end

War is good business, it makes for employment, investment and ultimately, profit. The powers that be work to a cold and clinical agenda whereby individuals and countries can change from being an asset to a liability in the blink of an eye. By using money and power to control a range of people from government officials to members of organised crime, they harness man’s deepest failing, greed, and use it to benefit their own ends, enabling them to consolidate powerbases and make more money. Halliburton are deeply entrenched in the business of war, war is money and money is power. The Bush family of course, are major Halliburton shareholders; wait for more wars this year 2007.

Adapted from an article submitted by Terrence Stokes.
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