Tracking Intelligence Information: The Office of Strategic Services

Created during World War II, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was the United States' first centralized intelligence agency, comprising research and analysis as well as various clandestine operations. The new agency accumulated massive amounts of information from open and secret sources and maintained such information in the form of reports, maps, charts, memos, photographs, and other kinds of documentation. A unit within the OSS Research and Analysis Branch, the Central Information Division, collected most of these documents and managed their use for intelligence analysis with the creation of an intricate card indexing system. The Central Information Division's careful tracking of information made possible present-day archival use of the cards and the records they index.