Donovan's Axis Assets and the 1990 CIA Purge
By Harlan Pryce ·
Kept under wraps and scrubbed by the CIA in 1990, these records mask how wartime tools were converted into Cold War weapons for the intelligence state.
High-ranking Axis officials walked away from the ruins of the Third Reich not into prison cells, but into the payroll of the American intelligence state. This transition bought the United States a window into the East, but it left a legacy of protected war criminals and scrubbed histories.
I am working here from the archival scope-and-content description of the Director's Office Files—a map of the record rather than the pages themselves—but the map reveals a deliberate effort to hide the destination. The record describes a chaotic layering of the files: ten different versions, ranging from the 2002 originals to a series of printouts redacted by the Central Intelligence Agency in 1990. Most telling is the "tenth version," which the record identifies as the documents that the CIA removed entirely from an unredacted set in 1990 to create the redacted version. In the trade, we don't call that editing; we call that a purge.
The Tenth Version
William J. Donovan, the lawyer and soldier who served as Director of the OSS and is now institutionalized as the founding father of the CIA, operated with a mandate that bordered on the absolute. He maintained a direct reporting line to President Franklin Roosevelt, who had personally established the Office of the Coordinator of Information—the COI, the first civilian non-departmental intelligence agency—before the United States officially entered World War II. Donovan provided the continuity of leadership from the COI to its successor, the OSS, which the public record establishes as an agency of the Joint Chiefs of Staff designed to coordinate espionage behind enemy lines.
The record lists the scope of these files as covering "agents, sources, and methods" in every theater of the war. This included a roster of sources that would make a war crimes prosecutor shudder: "former high-ranking German and Japanese officials."
The desk's reading is that the 1990 CIA redactions specifically target the transition of these Axis assets from wartime tactical tools to Cold War strategic sleepers. When the agency scrubbed the files decades after the war, they weren't protecting the ghosts of 1945; they were protecting the assets who were still on the payroll or whose descendants held the keys to the new empire. If the tenth version—the removed documents—is shaped the way it looks, it contains the institutional blueprints for the CIA's covert action capabilities, separating the raw tradecraft of asset recruitment from the administrative records meant for public consumption.
A Back-Channel in Spain
Donovan's ambition often outran the diplomatic sensibilities of the Foggy Bottom crowd. The record explicitly notes "Department of State disapproval of OSS activities in Spain." The State Department, the arm of the government responsible for foreign policy, viewed the OSS's freelance approach in the Iberian Peninsula as a liability.
To bypass the diplomats, the OSS worked with the Basques of Spain, an unrecognized intelligence organization representing a people fighting for autonomy from the Spanish state. They also engaged in high-stakes logistics, such as the plan to purchase the S.S. Olivia, a vessel the agency intended to transfer to a front company licensed to sail under the Portuguese flag to slip men and supplies into the Cape Verde Islands, a Portuguese colony in the Atlantic used as a strategic waypoint.
The pattern suggests that the recorded friction with the State Department served as an official cover for a clandestine, back-channel diplomatic track managed personally by Donovan. By creating a paper trail of "disapproval," Donovan could maintain a plausible distance between the official U.S. diplomatic line and the actual operations on the ground. It is a classic piece of tradecraft: make the bureaucracy look like it is fighting you so that no one notices you are already operating outside of it.
The Communist Filter
Internal security was never just about security. The record lists among its topics "the search for Communists within the OSS." This occurred while the agency was simultaneously recruiting people like Paul Scheffer, a former German newspaper editor and journalist who later became a professor of European studies at Tilburg University, to leverage his press contacts for intelligence.
The public record establishes that the OSS worked with foreign resistance groups in France and Yugoslavia, networks that were often heavily infiltrated by Communist partisans. This creates a paradox: an agency hunting Communists in its own hallways while funding them in the field.
The desk's reading is that the internal "search for Communists" was a dual-purpose operation. It was designed to identify security risks, yes, but also to identify potential deep-cover assets for future penetration of leftist movements. By flagging "sympathizers" and bringing them under the agency's thumb, the OSS was not purging its ranks so much as it was cataloging its future tools for the political warfare of the 1950s. The files omit the transition of these resistance contacts into "stay-behind" networks because those networks would constitute active Cold War methods rather than historical WWII records.
The Blueprint for Langley
By the end of the war, Donovan was already looking past the victory. The record notes that the files include discussions on "the need for some sort of a post-war central intelligence agency." This was not a theoretical exercise; it was a procurement request for a permanent state of secrecy.
The transition from the OSS to the CIA was not a clean break, but a migration. The agents recruited from the Vatican, the high-ranking political émigrés from Greece, and the disgraced officials of the Third Reich were not discarded. They were migrated. The 1990 redactions prove that the CIA still considered the details of these recruitments sensitive enough to warrant a total scrub nearly half a century later.
If the shape of this file is what it appears to be, the redactions are the most honest part of the record. They mark the exact points where the agency's origin story becomes inconvenient. The redacted pages protect the bridge between the wartime necessity of using monsters and the peacetime policy of employing them.
The desk's reading is that the CIA didn't just inherit the OSS's files; it inherited its habit of lying to its own government. The 1990 purge was a house-cleaning effort to ensure that the blueprint for the Cold War—built on the backs of Axis collaborators and coerced partisans—remained hidden in the tenth version of the truth. Those who paid for it were the victims of those same collaborators, whose names were likely blacked out long before the files ever reached an archivist's desk.