ABSTRACT
Many OSS members believed unquestioningly in Britain’s intelligence preeminence, and this article of faith has long permeated OSS historiography. The Americans routinely attributed their successful indoctrination into the black arts of intelligence to their special relationship with British spy masters whose professional lineage stretched in an unbroken line from Elizabethan times.1 Their British counterparts no doubt encouraged such a myth; but while British experience indeed proved critical for the development of modern American intelligence, its worth was all the more impressive given the British services’ eccentric antecedents, their impoverishment, their uneven record, and their often hard-pressed operational fortunes. The highly personalized and stubbornly entrenched system of intelligence administration that emerged in wartime was also significant, since this resolutely unchanging arrangement served to mould the dominant structures and rivalries of the tightly knit Anglo-American intelligence bureaucracies. The British example thereby ensured that OSS evolved even more in the likeness of the British intelligence community than has been commonly understood.
