Park Report: Alleged OSS Incompetence
The Park Report resides in the Rose A. Conway Files at the Harry S. Truman Library, ‘OSS/Donovan’ folder.
A Top Secret Report only declassified after the Cold War.
It was commissioned by Roosevelt.
When FDR died, Colonel Richard Park’s report was suddenly on the desk of Harry Truman, who was oblivious as to the workings of the OSS.
It was a “political murder weapon,” according to Tim Weiner in Legacy of Ashes:
[H]oned by the military and sharpened by J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI director since 1924; Hoover despised Donovan and harbored his own ambitions to run a worldwide intelligence service. Park’s work destroyed the possibility of the OSS continuing as part of the American government, punctured the romantic myths that Donovan created to protect his spies, and instilled in Harry Truman a deep and abiding distrust of secret intelligence operations. The OSS had done “serious harm to the citizens, business interests, and national interests of the United States,” the report said.
The report depicted the OSS as a bunch of bumbling fools. One hundred and twenty items “accusing O.S.S. or its personnel of incompetence, insecurity, corruption, ‘orgies,’ nepotism, black marketing, and almost anything else one could name.”
The full report can be downloaded here.
