Spies of past gather to mark Strategic Services anniversary

McLEAN, Va. -- Secrets can get so old they don't matter any more. Try telling that to veterans of the OSS, some of whom have never answered the question: Dad, mom, what did you do in the war?

In World War II, members of the Office of Strategic Services were spies, saboteurs, commandos, propagandists, weird inventors, translators, typists.

They ran audacious operations and tried absurd things, like bombs on fluttering bats. Anything to trip the enemy.

This weekend they were at CIA headquarters in suburban Washington, inheritor of their espionage legacy, marking the 60th anniversary of their path-breaking intelligence outfit, founded June 13, 1942.

Officials tell them it's OK now to talk about the past.

But some of these derring-doers don't.

"It was really implanted in them that they were not to discuss it," said Carole Minor, a CIA official who helped organize the gathering and encourages veterans to open up. "Some still think they can't say anything."

Many families accompanied OSS veterans to the sprawling CIA compound for three days of activities, including a wreath-laying in honor of the 116 known OSS agents killed in war service.

The relatives still crave details of the vets' service that they never heard at home, Minor said. There is an air of finality surrounding the 60th anniversary assembly, too, with so many veterans gone.

"There's a sense that there probably won't be a 70th," she said. "Or a 75th."

They were an odd bunch in 1942.

OSS specialists in unconventional warfare -- and just plain risk-takers -- parachuted into France to make trouble for the German occupiers. They sabotaged Japanese installations in Burma and recruited tribesmen to fight.

"We were improvisers," said Dan Pinck of Boston, a veteran of the OSS Secret Intelligence unit who roamed Japanese-occupied China calling in bombing targets.

Engineers joined, too.

They designed pistol silencers, pen-shaped firearms, tiny cameras and a forklike device that could be inserted through a slit in an envelope, roll up the letter like a window shade, unroll it again after it had been read and put back in the envelope.

The bomb-laden bats, however, were a bust. In stateside tests, they avoided the nooks of targeted buildings and just hung around and went to sleep.

Then there were the scholars, 900 of them who signed up to lend their knowledge of economic principles, political science and human behavior.

So many well-regarded members of academia and the establishment served with the OSS that it was nicknamed Oh So Social. Historian and John Kennedy aide Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. was one.

Pinck, whose OSS memoirs written decades ago are soon to be published, believes many veterans have shed their reticence in recent years.

He said it was a long time before he felt he could talk freely about one aspect of his China service.

He said he began to avoid telling superiors about targets that, if bombed, would have killed a lot of civilians, starting with a school where the Japanese were storing fuel. His reports began drying up.

"I'm sure if the war had lasted another two months I would have been court-martialed," Pinck said.