OFFICE OF STRATEGIC SERVICES• 397Special Operations Executive’s RF Section during World War II
and later joined theSecret Intelligence Service. In August 1944 he
parachuted into France as leader of thejedburghteam codenamed
benjamin. After the war, O’Bryan returned to Cambridge to study
Russian and then was posted to Germany. Later he was head of sta-
tion in Moscow, Stockholm, Aden, and the Far East before retiring
to Switzerland, where he died in November 1993 at age 74.ODIOUS.Code name for Max Brandli, adouble agentactive in the
Middle East during World War II and run by Security Intelligence
Middle East. Brandli was a Swiss watch salesman recruited by the
Secret Intelligence Service(SIS) in Istanbul in 1942 after he volun-
teered the fact that he had been approached by theAbwehrin Vienna
to spy in Syria. With SIS’s consent, he returned to Vienna to accept
his mission and was back in March 1943. He was allowed to travel to
Syria the following month but Security Intelligence Middle East
(SIME) interrogated him, aware that he had undergone undisclosed
training by the Abwehr in 1940. He was arrested by SIME on a sec-
ond mission to Syria in October and admitted that he had been spying
for the Abwehr in Spain, Tangier, and Vienna since 1941.
OFFICE OF STRATEGIC SERVICES (OSS).In 1942 General
‘‘Wild Bill’’ Donovan persuaded President Franklin D. Roosevelt to
authorize the establishment of an intelligence agency in theUnited
States. The OSS was divided into two branches, Secret Intelligence
and Special Operations, which mirrored the differing responsibilities
of theSecret Intelligence ServiceandSpecial Operations Execu-
tive. Liaison personnel were attached to both British organizations,
and a small team ofcounterintelligencespecialists, led by Professor
Norman Holmes Pearson, from SI’s X-2 section, was posted toMI5.
The relationships established during World War II between OSS
personnel and their British counterparts lasted long after the OSS was
disbanded and replaced by the Central Intelligence Group and in
1947 by theCentral Intelligence Agency(CIA). Many CIA officers
began their intelligence careers liaising with British Intelligence,
among them James Angleton, later chief of the CIA’s Counterintelli-
gence Staff and the founder of CAZAB (Canadian, American, New
Zealand, Australian, and British counterintelligence liaison), and Bill