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X-2 Counter Espionage Branch
The head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), William Donovan, created the X-2 Counter Espionage Branch in 1943 to provide liaison with and assist the British in its exploitation of the Ultra program's intelligence during World War II. A few months before, Donovan had established a Counterintelligence Division within the Secret Intelligence Branch of the OSS but rescinded this order upon development of the X-2. The X-2 was led by James Murphy, whose branch would have the power to veto operations of the Special Operations and Secret Intelligence Branches without explanation. Donovan modeled the Counter Espionage Branch on British Counter Espionage. With the creation of the X-2 Branch, the British insisted that it follow British security procedures to maintain the secrecy of Ultra. The X-2 established separate lines of communication for itself as a self-contained unit. By the end of World War II, the X-2 had discovered around 3,000 Axis agents. Overview Background With the begi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Office Of Strategic Services
The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was the intelligence agency of the United States during World War II. The OSS was formed as an agency of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) to coordinate espionage activities behind enemy lines for all branches of the United States Armed Forces. Other OSS functions included the use of propaganda, subversion, and post-war planning. The OSS was dissolved a month after the end of the war. Intelligence tasks were shortly later resumed and carried over by its successors the Department of State's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), and the independent Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). On December 14, 2016, the organization was collectively honored with a Congressional Gold Medal. Origin Prior to the formation of the OSS, the various departments of the executive branch, including the State, Treasury, Navy, and War Departments conducted American intelligence activities on an ''ad hoc'' basis, with no overall direction, coordination, or ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Art Looting Investigation Unit
The Art Looting Investigation Unit (ALIU) was a special intelligence unit during World War II whose mission was to gather information and write reports about Nazi art looting networks. Composed of only a few handpicked men, the small unit conducted interrogations and investigations in Europe starting in 1944 and focusing mainly on Germany, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Italy, Spain and Portugal. Their mission was different from but related to that of the Monuments Men. After the war, the reports the ALIU wrote were marked secret and forgotten for many years until the late 1990s when they began to be declassified . The reports remain an important source for research into the history of the origin of works of art (provenance research) and for the restitution of looted art from the Nazi era. Creation of the ALIU Justice Owen J. Roberts, who was chairman of the American Commission for the Protection and Salvage of Artistic and Historic Monuments in War Areas-( The Roberts Commi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Christof Mauch
Christof Mauch (born 9 February 1960 in Sindelfingen, Germany) is a German historian, presently director of the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich, Germany, and since 2007 professor of American Cultural History and Transatlantic Relations at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. From 1999 to 2007 Christof Mauch was the director of the German Historical Institute in Washington D.C.. Mauch received his Dr. phil. in Modern German Literature from the University of Tübingen in 1990, and his Dr. phil. in Modern History in 1998 from the University of Cologne. He has published and edited many books in the fields of U.S. and German History and Environmental History. From 2009 to 2011 Christof Mauch was chair of the Board of Directors of the International Consortium of Environmental History Organizations (ICEHO) and from 2011 to 2013 President of the European Society for Environmental History. In May 2013 he was appointed Honorary Professor at Renmin University, Bei ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Allen Welsh Dulles
Allen Welsh Dulles (, ; April 7, 1893 – January 29, 1969) was the first civilian Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), and its longest-serving director to date. As head of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) during the early Cold War, he oversaw the 1953 Iranian coup d'état, the 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état, the Lockheed U-2 aircraft program, the Project MKUltra mind control program and the Bay of Pigs Invasion. He was fired by John F. Kennedy over the latter fiasco. Dulles was one of the members of the Warren Commission investigating the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Between his stints of government service, Dulles was a corporate lawyer and partner at Sullivan & Cromwell. His older brother, John Foster Dulles, was the Secretary of State during the Eisenhower Administration and is the namesake of Dulles International Airport. Early life and family Dulles was born on April 7, 1893, in Watertown, New York, one of five children of Presbyterian minister Allen ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Duncan Lee
Lt. Col. Duncan Chaplin Lee (1913–1988) was confidential assistant to Maj. Gen. William ("Wild Bill") Donovan, founder and director of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), World War II-era predecessor of the CIA, during 1942–46. Lee is identified in the Venona project as the Soviet double agent operating inside OSS under the cover name "Koch," making him the most senior alleged source the Soviet Union ever had inside American intelligence. Career OSS As an OSS officer, Lee served as head of the China section of SI, the Secret Intelligence Branch. While an officer, according to Soviet courier Elizabeth Bentley, Lee—reportedly a descendant of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee—covertly furnished her with information on "anti-Soviet work by OSS" and other topics of interest to Moscow, which was technically an ally (in Europe) following the collapse of the Nazi-Soviet pact. In November 1944, Anatoly Gorsky reported to Moscow that according to Elizabeth Bentley, Mary Price ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Strategic Services Unit
The Strategic Services Unit was an intelligence agency of the United States government that existed in the immediate post–World War II period. It was created from the Secret Intelligence and Counter-Espionage branches of the wartime Office of Strategic Services. Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy was instrumental in preserving the two branches of the OSS as a going-concern with a view to forming a permanent peace-time intelligence agency. The unit was established on October 1, 1945, through Executive Order 9621, which simultaneously abolished the OSS. The SSU was headed by General John Magruder.Thomas Powers, ''The Man who kept the Secrets. Richard Helms and the CIA'' (1979), p. 28 (Magruder at SSU). In January 1946, a new National Intelligence Authority was established along with a small Central Intelligence Group. On April 2, 1946, the Strategic Services Unit was transferred to the new group as the Office of Special Operations and a transfer of personnel began im ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
James Jesus Angleton
James Jesus Angleton (December 9, 1917 – May 11, 1987) was chief of CIA Counterintelligence, counterintelligence for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from 1954 to 1974. His official position within the organization was Associate Deputy Director of Operations for Counterintelligence (ADDOCI). Angleton was significantly involved in the US response to the purported KGB defectors Anatoliy Golitsyn and Yuri Nosenko. Angleton later became convinced the CIA harbored a high-ranking Mole (espionage), mole, and engaged in an intensive search. Whether this was a highly destructive witch hunt or appropriate caution vindicated by later moles remains a subject of intense historical debate. According to Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms: "In his day, Jim was recognized as the dominant counterintelligence figure in the non-communist world." Investigative journalist Edward Jay Epstein agrees with the high regard in which Angleton was held by his colleagues in the intelligence ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Norman Holmes Pearson
Norman Holmes Pearson (April 13, 1909 – November 5, 1975) was an American academic at Yale University, and a prominent counterintelligence agent during World War II. As a specialist on American literature and department chairman at Yale University he was active in establishing American studies, American Studies as an academic discipline. Career He was born in Gardner, Massachusetts, to a locally prominent family that owned a chain of department stores. Pearson attended Gardner schools and Phillips Andover Academy (1927-1928). He graduated Yale College in 1932 with a A.B. in English. After a scholarship at Oxford University he was awarded a second A.B. and later an M.A. from Oxford. In 1937, while still a Yale graduate student, he and William Rose Bénet published the two-volume ''Oxford Anthology of American Literature'' and later co-edited five volumes on ''Poets of the English Language'' with poet W.H. Auden. He became a Yale faculty member, Instructor of English, and eventua ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Normandy Landings
The Normandy landings were the landing operations and associated airborne operations on Tuesday, 6 June 1944 of the Allied invasion of Normandy in Operation Overlord during World War II. Codenamed Operation Neptune and often referred to as D-Day, it was the largest seaborne invasion in history. The operation began the liberation of France (and later western Europe) and laid the foundations of the Allied victory on the Western Front. Planning for the operation began in 1943. In the months leading up to the invasion, the Allies conducted a substantial military deception, codenamed Operation Bodyguard, to mislead the Germans as to the date and location of the main Allied landings. The weather on D-Day was far from ideal, and the operation had to be delayed 24 hours; a further postponement would have meant a delay of at least two weeks, as the invasion planners had requirements for the phase of the moon, the tides, and the time of day that meant only a few days each month were ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Operation Dragoon
Operation Dragoon (initially Operation Anvil) was the code name for the landing operation of the Allied invasion of Provence (Southern France) on 15August 1944. Despite initially designed to be executed in conjunction with Operation Overlord, the Allied landing in Normandy, the lack of available resources led to a cancellation of the second landing. By July 1944 the landing was reconsidered, as the clogged-up ports in Normandy did not have the capacity to adequately supply the Allied forces. Concurrently, the French High Command pushed for a revival of the operation that would include large numbers of French troops. As a result, the operation was finally approved in July to be executed in August. The invasion sought to secure the vital ports on the French Mediterranean coast and increase pressure on the German forces by opening another front. After preliminary commando operations, the US VI Corps landed on the beaches of the Côte d'Azur under the shield of a large naval task f ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Théodore Rousseau
Étienne Pierre Théodore Rousseau (April 15, 1812December 22, 1867) was a French painter of the Barbizon school. Life Youth He was born in Paris, France in a bourgeois family. At first he received a basic level of training, but soon displayed aptitude for painting. Although his father regretted the decision at first, he became reconciled to his son forsaking business, and throughout the artist's career (for he survived his son) was a sympathizer with him in all his conflicts with the Paris Salon authorities. Théodore Rousseau shared the difficulties of the romantic painters of 1830, in securing for their pictures a place in the annual Paris exhibition. The influence of classically trained artists was against them, and not until 1848 was Rousseau presented adequately to the public. He had exhibited six works in the Salons of 1831, 1833, 1834 and 1835, but in 1836 his great work ''Paysage du Jura'' 'La descente des vaches''was rejected by the Salon jury. He sent a total ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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