The members of the choir of Saint Luke’s Episcopal Church on Fifteenth Street in Washington, D.C., referred to him as “the man in brown.” Even after two years of singing with them the Sundays he was in town, few knew his full name of Alistair Renault, and no member could claim to know him at all. Dressed in his drab brown attire, he appeared on Wednesday evenings for choir rehearsal just as the body of thirty gathered in the church chancel and did not linger for coffee and cookies and fellowship afterward. The choir director considered Alistair’s the most magnificent singing voice ever to come under his baton and would have appointed Alistair lead tenor if only he could have relied upon him to be present every Sunday, but he understood that the man had a government position of a hush-hush nature that precluded his regular attendance.

On this particular day, this same man of mystery slid a sheet of paper listing names, addresses, and personal details of each across a large mahogany desk. The recipient was Colonel William J. Donovan, known as Wild Bill Donovan to friends and foes. The desk belonged to the director of the Office of Strategic Services, better known as the OSS, the country’s first national spy agency, whose conception had been discussed in the White House in 1940. The office had become official the following year, before Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and Germany’s subsequent declaration of war against the United States. The paralyzing global uncertainties of that spring had confirmed America’s need for a centralized intelligence system set up to collect and analyze timely and accurate information as a means to plan military strategy against the enemy should the U.S. be drawn into a worldwide conflict. This aim was to be achieved primarily by the insertion of agents trained for covert operations into hostile territory. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed it into existence by executive order and chose as its head Wild Bill Donovan, the most decorated officer of World War I, in civilian life a prominent Wall Street lawyer before being recalled to active military duty in 1942 with the rank of colonel.

The organization had since grown to become a full-fledged agency and had moved from its crowded temporary quarters to a more spacious home atop historical Navy Hill in northwest Washington. Colonel Bill Donovan now directed his bustling and burgeoning outfit from a high-ceilinged corner office on the first floor of an establishment that, because of its secrecy, had come to be nicknamed “the Kremlin.” His deputy and second-in-command waited for his boss’s reaction to the list while he enjoyed the cool mid-May breeze flowing through the tall, open window with its bird’s-eye view of the Potomac River.

“I see you’ve circled five names,” Donovan said to the man in brown. “Why these five?”