ABSTRACT
Until World War II, there was no organization in the US government devoted solely to the covert influence of events abroad. The importance of the canal for US strategic control of the region had been demonstrated in 1898 during the Spanish-American War when the US battleship Oregon had raced around South America. Even before the war's end, General William Donovan, head of the OSS, argued for retaining a similar type of postwar intelligence agency with capabilities for psychological operations. But President Truman ordered the OSS entirely disbanded on October 1, 1945. The history of US covert action during the early part of the cold war was unusual. One critic of covert action operations in the halcyon days is Hugh Tovar, who was an operative with Office of Strategic Services (OSS), Strategic Services Unit (SSU), and Office of Special Operations (OSO) and a CIA station chief.
