The Assessment of Men: How the OSS Built America's First System for Selecting Spies and Saboteurs

In late 1943, William Donovan's Office of Strategic Services was recruiting thousands of personnel for clandestine and irregular warfare work with no uniform screening process. The result was failures in the field that cost the organization time, money, blown operations, and in some cases the safety of entire networks. The Assessment of Men is the official 1948 report of the OSS Assessment Staff, the account of how a team of psychologists and psychiatrists under Henry A. Murray built the first systematic personnel selection program in American history designed around organismic, whole-person principles.

This episode works through the program as the study itself lays it out. The borrowing from the British War Office Selection Boards and the German military psychologists who came before them. The country-estate setting of Station S forty minutes outside Washington, where candidates lived together for three days under constant observation. The leaderless group situations, the stress tests, the construction of cover stories that candidates had to defend under pressure. The central problem the staff faced, captured in their own definition of the work: the assessment of men is the scientific art of arriving at sufficient conclusions from insufficient data.

We cover the conditions that made the OSS task unique among selection boards. The sheer variety and novelty of OSS missions, from saboteur to script writer to resistance leader to base operator. The absence of usable job descriptions when so many operations were still being planned or were unfolding behind enemy lines. The heterogeneity of the recruits, including foreigners and first-generation Americans recruited for the language and territory of their origin, and the cross-cultural judgment problems that followed. The impossibility of testing every special skill, from Morse code to demolitions to tropical medicine, and what the staff chose to measure instead.

This is a foundational text. The assessment-center methodology pioneered here became the basis for personnel selection across the postwar American intelligence community and now runs throughout government and industry. For anyone studying how clandestine and special operations organizations decide who is fit to serve, this is the source code.

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