Charles Kindleberger Mapped Enemy Objectives for the OSS

By Desmond Okafor · August 18, 2026

A German prisoner's diary and the private notes of an economist remain in federal files, detailing the targeting of objectives that cost thousands of lives.

The people living beneath the targets identified by the Enemy Objectives Unit did not know their fate was being calculated in the quiet offices of the American Embassy in London. For them, the cost of "enemy objectives" was measured in ruins and corpses, not in the academic precision of a research branch.

The file's catalogue entry records the movements of Charles Kindleberger, a man who would later be known to the public as a master of financial crisis and a theorist of global stability. Before he was analyzing the dot-com bubble or the collapse of monetary systems, he was helping the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) decide what to destroy. Kindleberger is remembered in the public record for his development of hegemonic stability theory—the argument that a single dominant power is necessary to maintain a stable international monetary system. But the records in the US National Archives suggest that the "stability" he theorized in his later years was preceded by a career in the calculated destabilization of an enemy.

A German Prisoner

Among the records is a diary written by a German prisoner of war. The catalogue entry lists this alongside Kindleberger’s own files, suggesting that the intimate, desperate observations of a captive were fed directly into the machinery of the Enemy Objectives Unit. This is how the intelligence apparatus of the 1940s functioned: the lived experience of a prisoner was stripped of its humanity and converted into a data point to refine the coordinates of a bombing run.

When an economist views a prisoner’s diary, he is not looking for the soul of the writer, but for the location of a rail yard, a factory, or a bridge. The record does not tell us the name of the prisoner or the conditions of his captivity, only that his words became part of a subject subseries used to facilitate the violence of the state. The transition from the captive's pen to the bomber's sight was a short trip, mediated by the research and analysis of men like Kindleberger.

A War Diary

Kindleberger kept what the catalogue calls a "War Diary." This was not a personal journal of longing or fear, but a document that "explains the background, purpose and operations of the Enemy Objectives Unit." It is a manual of destruction written by a historian. While the public record remembers Kindleberger for his 1978 work Manias, Panics, and Crashes, the National Archives hold a different kind of record—one that documented the "purpose" of selecting targets for eradication.

There is a stark contrast between the historian who writes about the cycles of financial panic and the intelligence officer who maps the objectives of a war. One seeks to understand the crash; the other seeks to cause it. The "War Diary" represents the intersection of academic rigor and military necessity, where the skills of an economic historian were repurposed to identify the most efficient ways to cripple a nation's capacity to function.

London and Washington

The records are split between two worlds. The catalogue entry notes a few documents covering Kindleberger's work with the Research and Analysis Branch in Washington, D.C., and a "somewhat larger number" covering his service in London. This geographic split reflects the OSS's operational reach, stretching from the policy halls of the capital to the front lines of the European Theater of Operations.

The records are further divided into a "Chronological subseries," containing copies of documents, and a "Subject subseries," containing originals. In the Subject subseries, the catalogue entry notes that some documents bear Kindleberger's retrospective annotations. There is something chilling about the image of an aging academic returning to his own wartime records, adding notes to the files that once directed the violence of the state. These annotations represent a retrospective audit of destruction, a scholar reflecting on the objectives he helped identify decades prior.

Beyond these files, the National Archives and the UK National Archives hold a wider trail of Kindleberger's life, including State Department memoranda from 1947 and agreements regarding his publications on mariners and markets. But these later academic pursuits often obscure the earlier, more violent utility of his research. Whether the "War Diary" contains the names of those who suggested the targets, or the specific calculations used to justify the cost in human lives, remains a question for those who can access the pages themselves.