The Letter That Killed the OSS — And Planted the Seeds of the CIA
On September 20, 1945, President Harry S. Truman signed a letter that dissolved America's first modern spy agency with six weeks' notice. What followed was a bureaucratic scramble that would shape U.S. intelligence for the next eight decades.
Historical Context
When World War II ended, the Office of Strategic Services stood at a crossroads. General William "Wild Bill" Donovan had spent the war building the OSS into a formidable clandestine apparatus — running agents behind enemy lines, producing strategic analysis, and coordinating with Allied intelligence services across every theater. But Donovan's ambitions for a permanent, centralized peacetime intelligence agency had powerful enemies. J. Edgar Hoover fiercely guarded FBI turf. Military chiefs resisted civilian control over intelligence. And Truman himself was deeply skeptical of anything that smelled like a secret police force answerable only to the president.
The geopolitical landscape of late 1945 added urgency to the question. The wartime alliance with the Soviet Union was already fracturing. Soviet influence was expanding across Eastern Europe, and American policymakers were realizing, with some alarm, that the United States had no permanent machinery for collecting and analyzing foreign intelligence in peacetime. The ad hoc arrangements that had served the war effort would not survive the new world taking shape.
Truman's solution — at least initially — was to dismantle rather than transform. His September 20 letter to Donovan ordered the liquidation of OSS effective October 1, 1945, scattering its functions across the War and State Departments. The Research and Analysis Branch went to State; the remaining operational units formed the Strategic Services Unit (SSU) under War Department control. It was an institutional death sentence delivered in six paragraphs.
What This Document Reveals
This six-page file captures the precise moment the United States chose to tear down its intelligence infrastructure before deciding what to build in its place. Truman's letter is characteristically blunt — there is no sentimentality for Donovan's wartime achievement, no acknowledgment of the institutional knowledge being dispersed. The document makes clear that the OSS was being shut down on principle as much as practicality: Truman wanted no ambiguity about who controlled secret intelligence activities in a democracy at peace.
Equally significant is Assistant Secretary Robert Lovett's October 23 memorandum establishing the War Department committee to study foreign intelligence problems. The roster of signatories — including Brigadier General John Magruder of the SSU and G-2 representative Brigadier General C. W. Clarke — reveals the military's immediate move to fill the vacuum Truman had created. This was the planning committee that would help lay conceptual groundwork for the National Intelligence Authority and, ultimately, the Central Intelligence Agency, established by the National Security Act of 1947.
Why It Matters Today
The tension embedded in these pages — between centralized intelligence and institutional jealousy, between executive authority and bureaucratic resistance — never went away. Every debate about CIA independence, congressional oversight, or the role of the Director of National Intelligence traces a direct line back to the choices made in the fall of 1945. Reading Truman's letter today, one is struck by how provisional it all felt: a superpower improvising the architecture of its national security state in real time.
Read the full declassified document — all six pages — in the Intelligence Archive: intelarchive.com/documents/63d3406d-4563-49d9-bdd6-c25cd83024b6