Foreign Relations of the United States, 1950–1955, The Intelligence Community, 1950–1955

87. Report on the Office of Special Operations of the Central Intelligence Agency by the Deputy Assistant Director of Special Operations (Kirkpatrick)¹

Washington, August 31, 1951.

I. Introduction

History of the Organization. The Office of Special Operations is a direct carry-over from the Office of Strategic Services. When that organization was disbanded at the end of the war, the Secret Intelligence Branch and the X–2 Branch (Counterespionage) were retained as the Strategic Services Unit under the Office of the Assistant Secretary of War. When the President created the Central Intelligence Group in January 1946, the Strategic Services Unit was transferred to that organization and became the Office of Special Operations.

Principal assets brought forward from OSS days included some experienced personnel; the nucleus of organizations operating principally in Germany and China; the counterespionage files of OSS; and established liaisons with certain foreign intelligence services. While the organization in China has been largely destroyed by the Communists, the organization in Germany has been developed and expanded. Inherited after the conclusion of World War II was the responsibility for coverage of Latin America, previously held by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Today the Office of Special Operations is organized into seven foreign divisions operating 131 fixed field stations, three principal staffs and six subordinate staffs. [3 lines not declassified]

II. Findings—General

1. There is a high degree of professional competence among the Division and Staff Chiefs in OSO, although it is apparent that this professional competence has not always been utilized to its fullest extent in the development of an espionage service directed at the principal targets of intelligence.

2. No particular emphasis is being placed by OSO on espionage against the USSR.²

3. There is an extreme shortage of personnel in all classes, ranging from the Branch Chief level to the clerical level. Further, it is obvious that a considerable amount of valuable OSO effort is lost as a result of a shortage of clerical personnel to handle the paper work.

4. Considerable OSO effort is being dissipated from the major mission of establishing a long-term clandestine espionage organization. Particular examples of the dissipation of effort is the emphasis on supporting the 8th Army in Korea with an intelligence detachment. Actually OSO does not have the trained personnel to do this job at the present time, and the net gains for CIA will be minor in contrast with the gains by use of the same personnel on long-term espionage operations.

5. There is not sufficient emphasis in OSO on counterespionage operations.

6. OSO rules and regulations should be reviewed, to allow greater initiative and judgment by responsible branch, division, staff, and station chiefs.

7. The tremendous support-load that OSO performs for other offices of CIA and other agencies of the Government, should be lessened.

8. There is too great concentration on collection of short-range, tactical information, and not sufficient attention to collection of high-level political and strategic information.

9. The policy of shifting personnel between areas, and of a two-year tour of duty overseas, should be reviewed.

10. [3 lines not declassified]

11. There has been insufficient liaison between OSO headquarters and the field.

12. There is no standard system for checking on the activity of field stations. In one instance, the only report received from a field representative was a request for supplies—no intelligence has yet been received from this station.

13. There is no standard divisional organization.

14. The delay between collection of information and its dissemination to consumer intelligence agencies is in the nature of two to three months except for cabled reports. Two major bottlenecks are responsible for this: official pouches are extremely slow; and reports control has been allowed to take three to six weeks as an average to produce reports (this is after the reports are prepared for publication by the foreign divisions).

15. [2 lines not declassified]

[Omitted here is the body of the report.]

1. Source: Central Intelligence Agency, Directorate of Operations, Job 80–B01795R, Box 6. Top Secret. In an August 31 covering memorandum to Deputy Director of Central Intelligence Jackson, Kirkpatrick wrote in part: “The attached report on the Office of Special Operations is based upon my participation in certain parts of your survey of OSO during July and August 1951, plus independent conversations which I have held with Staff, Division and Branch Chiefs, reports which I have had prepared, and research into various OSO files.” He also noted certain discrepancies in personnel figures which were attributable, he said, to personnel in transit from headquarters to the field and vice versa. The body of the report includes sections on the Staffs, the Foreign Divisions, Miscellaneous, and Recommendations, followed by charts showing OSO Organization, Staffing, Field Stations, Distribution of CIA/OSO Intelligence Material, Reports Disseminated by OSO, and Estimated Personnel Strength of the British Secret Services.
2. In June 1951, CIA formalized the Redcap program to monitor Soviet officials abroad and encourage them to defect. See Robert L. Benson and Michael Warner, eds., Venona: Soviet Espionage and the American Response, 1939–1957, p. xxxii. This required considerable liaison with foreign intelligence services. Attempts were also made to infiltrate agents into the Soviet Union, but, given stringent Soviet controls, these attempts, codenamed Redsox, enjoyed very limited success. This was recognized by 1954 and a program using legal travelers for short term observation of the Soviet Union was set up under the codename Redskin.