Donovan, Hartshorne and the OSS Skeleton Files
By Vera Kessler ·
Kept secret for decades, the records of the Strategic Services Unit preserve the training and the personnel but excise the blood and the betrayal of the first American spy agency.
The price of an intelligence service is paid in the currency of burned lives and scrubbed files. For the men and women who operated under the shadow of the Office of Strategic Services, the cost was often a permanent erasure from the very history they helped write.
I am working here from the archival scope-and-content description of the series—the map of the graveyard, not the headstones themselves. The record for the Washington Personnel, Projects, and Research Records provides the list of what survives, and in that list, the gaps are as loud as the entries.
The Ghost of Richard Hartshorne
Among the names listed as having photographs in the file is Richard Hartshorne, a man the public record identifies as a suspected Soviet agent and a key figure in the early intelligence failures of the 1940s. The record lists him simply as part of a collection of "personality dossiers" and "personnel lists."
There is a cold irony in the way the record handles Hartshorne. He is grouped alongside General William Donovan, the head of the OSS and the founding father of the CIA, and Sherman Kent, the man the public record credits as the architect of modern intelligence analysis. To the archivist, they are all just photographs in a folder. To a man who spent two decades in the East, the grouping is a tell.
If this file is shaped the way it looks, the desk's reading is that the "personality dossiers" for men like Hartshorne are sanitized administrative shells. The real meat—the counter-intelligence findings, the interrogation transcripts, the moments of betrayal—does not live in a personnel file. It resides in a separate, non-archival security silo that the government has no intention of opening. The record gives us the man's face and his assignment, but it hides his sins. The pattern suggests that the agency kept the administrative record of the man while burying the operational reality of the mole.
Caviar and Pigeons
The record lists a dizzying array of operational footprints: "pigeon activities," "air cargo dropping devices," and the "Austria-Caviar Project." The public record establishes that the OSS conducted specialized intelligence operations in Austria, including the aforementioned Caviar project, to penetrate the crumbling remains of the Third Reich.
But look at what the record prioritizes. It lists "field and training manuals," "manpower studies," and "personnel requirements." It tells us how to drop a package from a plane and how to organize a detachment, but it is silent on the outcome of those drops. It mentions "German agents in Ireland" and "suspected agents in London," yet these appear as topics of research rather than reports of capture or liquidation.
This is the mark of an institutional scrub. The records document the infrastructure of intelligence rather than the intelligence itself. They provide the administrative skeleton of the OSS—the manuals and the rosters—while the actual history of the operations is missing. The desk's reading is that we are looking at a "how-to" guide for clandestine warfare, preserved for the next generation of spooks, while the "what-happened" has been bleached from the page.
The Kunming War Room
One of the most concrete remnants in the record is a photograph of the wall display of the OSS war room in Kunming, China. The public record confirms that the OSS maintained this physical outpost in China to manage operations in the Far East and track Russian emigrants.
This focus on the periphery—Russian emigrants in China, subversive activities in Brazil, communism in Chile and Uruguay—reveals a specific blindness. The record is rich with detail on "foreign nationalities groups" and the diaspora, but it is thin on the interior of the Soviet state. The public record identifies the OSS as the agency created to coordinate espionage behind enemy lines, yet the record shows the US treating the Soviet Union as a source of human contagion—agents and emigrants—rather than a sovereign subject of strategic penetration.
The line is clear: the US could watch the Russians in Kunming or track their influence in Brazil, but it could not get inside the Kremlin. The pattern suggests an early, systemic inability to penetrate the Soviet interior, a failure that was masked by obsessing over the fringes of the empire. The war room in Kunming was not a window into Moscow; it was a mirror reflecting the agency's own limitations.
A Skeleton in Washington
As the OSS dissolved and gave way to the Strategic Services Unit (SSU), the records were transferred. The public record identifies the SSU as the repository for the projects and personnel of its predecessor. This transition was not a simple filing exercise; it was a bridge to the nascent CIA.
The record shows that the SSU maintained everything from "censorship records" to "biographical sketches." But the desk's reading is that the SSU's role as a repository reflects a period of institutional hibernation. The United States intentionally preserved the technical apparatus of clandestine warfare—the devices, the manuals, the personnel lists—while scrubbing the operational failures of the war years. By keeping the "how-to" and burying the "what-happened," the SSU ensured that the CIA could inherit the tools of the trade without inheriting the ghosts of the OSS.
Furthermore, the file omits the private corporate and financial conduits used to fund and staff the Research and Analysis branch. The record presents the OSS as a purely governmental entity, a product of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But any man who has run assets knows that the state rarely pays for everything. The focus on "personnel assignments" without corresponding records of private sector funding streams suggests a deliberate erasure of the corporate partnerships that built the American intelligence state.
If the full release of these files ever occurs, it will not be the manpower studies that matter. It will be the gaps between the photographs of men like Donovan and Hartshorne. The still-withheld pages are protecting the transition from a wartime emergency agency to a permanent state of surveillance. The SSU did not just save the files; it curated them, deciding which parts of the American secret history were useful and which were liabilities.
The desk's reading is that this archive is a curated map of a lost war, designed to show the new establishment how to build a machine while hiding the names of the people the machine crushed. The cost of that curation was the truth about the first American spies, left to rot in the silos that the SSU carefully built around them.