Ortiz was captured in August 1944 during his second Jedburgh mission. With the remnants of his six-man team surrounded in the village of Centron by a far larger German unit, and knowing the village would be destroyed and its citizens killed in reprisal if the house to house fighting continued, Ortiz negotiated a surrender with the German commander. He remained a POW for the rest of the war. Discharged in 1946, he served in the Marine Corps Reserve until 1955, promoted to colonel on the retired list.

After the war, Ortiz returned to Hollywood and acted in several movies, including some directed by fellow OSS member John Ford. Two movies loosely based on his life were released: 13 Rue Madeline (1947) starring James Cagney, and Operation Secret (1952) starring Cornel Wilde. He died on May 16, 1988, aged 74, and was buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery.

Instructors were just as colorful, none more so than Capt. (later  Lt. Col.) William Ewart Fairbairn of the British Army. A self-taught expert in unconventional hand-to-hand combat that he learned while a police officer in Shanghai fighting organized crime and street thugs, it was there he invented, with Eric Anthony Sykes, the Fairbairn-Sykes stiletto used by British commandos, the OSS, and other special operations units to this day.

For armed combat training, Fairbairn created a “house of horrors,” a building with darkened rooms that contained confusing sounds, flashing lights, and pop-up targets. A trainee had to race through the course firing at the targets. Trainees were graded on their firing accuracy.

Donovan tapped the chemist and inventor Stanley P. Lovell, whom he called his ¨Professor Moriarity,¨ to make the countless tricks of the trade his operators would need. Everything from exotic firearms to cameras, radios, and explosives – you name it – came from the fertile minds of he and his geniuses in his Office of Scientific Research and Development.

They included such things as “Aunt Jemima,” an explosive “flour” that could be shaped and cooked to resemble baked goods, “mule turds,” explosives that resembled the ubiquitous droppings that littered the roads and landscape of North Africa, and the “Stinger,” a 3-inch pen that was a single-shot .22-caliber firearm. On the non-deadly, psychological warfare side was an embarrassing weapon called “Who? Me?” It was a toothpaste-sized tube filled with a chemical that smelled like a particularly odious bowel movement. Distributed to children in Japanese-occupied China, Lovell later said, ¨When a Japanese officer, preferably of high rank, came walking down a crowded sidewalk, little Chinese boys and girls would slip up behind him and squirt a shot of ´Who? Me?´ at his trouser seat … it cost the Japanese a world of face.¨

Christian Lambertsen came to OSS attention thanks to his groundbreaking experiments with underwater breathing devices. In April 1942, while still in medical school, he gave a demonstration of his Lambertsen Amphibious Respiratory Unit II to representatives from the Navy, SOE, and the OSS. The Navy passed on it, but SOE and OSS liked what they saw. Upon graduation in 1943, the OSS commissioned him a first lieutenant in the Army Medical Corps and assigned him to its Maritime Unit to refine his prototype and create doctrine.

Teams using his respirator were deployed in all the theaters where the OSS operated, with Lambertsen going to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to oversee use of his device and refine doctrine. Discharged in 1946 with the rank of major, Lambertsen would go on to have a distinguished medical career. In 2000, the U.S. Navy SEALs honored him with the accolade “Father of U.S. Combat Swimming.” In 2009, he received the OSS Society´s Distinguished Service Award. He died on Feb. 11, 2011, at the age of 93.

Of all the operations conducted by the OSS, none was as spectacular, or more politically fraught, than the one codenamed Operation Sunrise, the surrender of all German forces in Italy.

Allen Dulles was OSS station chief in Switzerland, based in its capital, Bern. Switzerland had become a magnet for international espionage on both sides thanks to its strategic location; a situation tolerated by Swiss authorities so long as activity remained covert.

From his arrival in Switzerland in late 1942, Dulles would periodically receive peace feelers regarding German surrender. These feelers increased after the Allied landings in France in 1944. In almost every case, Dulles discounted them for one reason or another. But shortly after the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944, he received a feeler reportedly from a member of senior military leadership in Germany regarding an offer to surrender all German forces in Italy. Cautiously convinced it was bona fide, Dulles knew he had to proceed with extreme caution because of Soviet Union suspicions of its Western allies.

After months of delicate negotiations almost derailed by the Soviet Union, whose leadership bitterly accused the United States and Great Britain of seeking a separate peace with Germany amongst other charges, the surrender document was signed on April 29, 1945, effective on May 2; it ended the war in Italy five days before Germany´s capitulation.