What OSS documents can I see in the National Archives?
The 750,000 documents published by the National Archives are part of a massive archive on the wartime intelligence unit, the Office of Strategic Services. In the collection, you can see “initial applications to join the OSS; preliminary training and subsequent work assignments; pay, leave and travel documents; evaluations, basic medical information; and awards, decorations and discharge papers”. There are 35,000 top-secret personnel files in the collection. What makes the collection really interesting is the number of American “celebrities” that were OSS agents, including chef Julia Child. She was hired in the summer of 1942 for clerical work. Other celebrities who were OSS officers include historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr, the film actor Sterling Hayden, and the baseball player Moe Berg, along with John Hemingway, son of author Ernest Hemingway; Quentin and Kermit Roosevelt, sons of President Theodore Roosevelt, and Miles Copeland, father of Stewart Copeland, drummer for the band The P
