Office of Strategic Services

Office of Strategic Services
To be an effective spy one must have all of the fancy gadgets there are, right? Well, no. But the spies from the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) did. They included a uniform button that was really a compass, a 16mm camera shaped like a matchbox, and a deck of playing cards that concealed a map which would be revealed when the top layer was soaked off.
"As another European war loomed in the late 1930s, fears of fascist and Communist "Fifth Columns" in America prompted President Franklin D. Roosevelt to ask for greater coordination by the departmental intel…