New York’s Survey of Foreign Experts and the 1946 SSU Purge
By Harlan Pryce ·
From Stockholm’s industrial maps to China's POW camps, the operational soul of the OSS was stripped away in a 1946 administrative purge before the birth of the CIG
Resistance fighters in the forests of France and American POWs in the jungles of China paid for the errors of men who viewed the war as a personnel problem. Their lives were the currency used to buy the administrative comfort of a clean file.
These ghosts haunt the records of the nine field stations that spanned the globe from the South Pacific to the Baltic. This story is told through archival scope-and-content descriptions, a catalog of what survived the transition from war to peace. What the record shows is a meticulous ledger of pay, promotions, and evaluations—the dry plumbing of espionage. What it hides is the actual blood and ink of the operations themselves.
Buxton’s Talent Search
In New York, the war was not fought with sabotage but with resumes. The New York field station, which functioned less as a spy outpost and more as a vetting clearinghouse, managed two critical instruments: the Buxton Committee and the Survey of Foreign Experts. The public record establishes the Buxton Committee as a mechanism for identifying specialized talent, while the Survey of Foreign Experts sought out the intellectual capital of displaced persons.
While other stations were mapping bridges, New York was mapping minds. The record notes the presence of "samples of Japanese propaganda" and files on these experts, turning the city into a filter through which the agency’s human assets passed before being deployed into the field. The desk's reading is that New York was the agency's primary talent-acquisition engine, a place where the government decided who was "reliable" enough to enter the clandestine service. By controlling the Survey of Foreign Experts, the agency didn't just gather intelligence; it curated the very people capable of producing it.
Stockholm’s Power Stations
Farther north, the OSS field station in Stockholm, Sweden—a neutral capital that served as a listening post for the entire Nordic region—focused its gaze on the physical skeleton of the enemy. The record lists photographs of "Scandinavian industrial plants, towns, and power stations." These were not tourist snapshots. They were target folders.
When the OSS combined propaganda operations with intelligence on industrial infrastructure in Stockholm, it created a feedback loop: they identified the power plants that kept the Nazi war machine breathing and then used propaganda to demoralize the men who operated them. This synergy extended to the East. In Kunming, China, a base for Special Operations (SO) in the CBI theater, the agency tracked "POW camps in China" and the "Doolittle flyers"—the pilots of the 1942 raid on Tokyo who had been scattered across the wilderness.
In Kandy, the Sri Lankan station handled the "Special Funds Branch," the euphemism for the black budget used to buy loyalty in the Indian Ocean. In Paris, the hub for the Morale Operations (MO) branch, the agency specialized in the psychological dismantling of the enemy. Even in Madrid, the administrative center for Iberian operations, the focus remained on the machinery of the office. These stations—London, the communications hub; Shanghai and Singapore, the skeletal administration posts in the Far East—were the nerves of a global organism. But in these files, the nerves have been severed from the brain.
Scrubbing the SSU
The lineage of these records is a study in institutional laundering. The files originated with the Office of the Coordinator of Information (COI), the first civilian non-departmental intelligence agency founded by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1941 to prepare the U.S. for a war it hadn't yet entered. By June 1942, they passed to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the agency of the Joint Chiefs of Staff that coordinated espionage and subversion behind enemy lines.
When the OSS was dismantled in September 1945, the records did not go straight to the permanent archives. They were handed to the Strategic Services Unit (SSU), the transitional body that managed wartime records until October 1946. Only then did they reach the Central Intelligence Group (CIG), the interdepartmental predecessor to the CIA that streamlined national security analysis.
The record lists the contents of these stations as "personnel dossiers," "pay," and "evaluations." Notably absent from the primary station lists for London, Paris, and New York is the X-2 branch—the counter-intelligence arm responsible for double agents and the most sensitive betrayals. While X-2 appears in separate files for Bern and Caserta, it is conspicuously missing here.
If the shape of this file is what it appears to be, the SSU period from 1945 to 1946 was not a mere administrative handover. It was a scrubbing phase. The pattern suggests that the SSU was tasked with sanitizing wartime irregularities before the CIG established the permanent, professionalized structure of the American intelligence community. The operational product—the actual cables, the source identities, the dirty laundry of the SO and SI branches—was stripped out and migrated to the Radio and Cable Files or simply burned.
The Janitor’s Ledger
What remains in the field station files is the janitor’s ledger. We have the cost of the equipment and the performance reviews of the officers, but the ghosts of the assets—the foreign nationals who risked the gallows to feed the SI Branch—have been erased. The record shows "lists of Americans and foreign persons recommended for awards and decorations," but the names are the only thing the bureaucracy deemed safe to keep.
The desk's reading is that the segregation of the X-2 records and the skeletal nature of the Shanghai and Singapore files were intentional acts of institutional forgetting. By isolating the operational data from the personnel files, the CIG ensured that the new intelligence establishment could claim a clean break from the improvised chaos of the OSS. They kept the experts and the infrastructure but discarded the evidence of how that infrastructure was actually built.
This is the standard tradecraft of any agency transitioning from a wartime footing to a permanent state of surveillance. The SSU didn't just maintain the records; it curated the legacy. A full release of the missing operational pages would likely show that the "foreign experts" vetted in New York and the "resistance groups" photographed in Paris were often handled with a recklessness that the CIG could not afford to have on its books.
The pattern of this archive proves that the most important part of any intelligence operation is not the gathering of the secret, but the subsequent decision of which parts of the record are allowed to survive. The SSU performed the surgery, and the CIG inherited the patient, sanitized and silent.