Charles Pinck is passionate about commemorating the OSS, the agency that led to the CIA.
“I’m head of a very dangerous group of senior citizens,” says OSS Society president Charles Pinck, slouched across from me at a table in Le Pain Quotidien’s Georgetown outpost. The 54-year-old is dressed in khakis and a plaid shirt, and perched atop his tousled silver-blond hair is a black cap emblazoned with the initials of the organization his life revolves around.
As we chat, Pinck rattles off OSS trivia that may be of interest to me, the journalist granddaughter of an OSS pilot: Of the personnel in the service’s 11 branches, one-third were women. Recruits came from college campuses, Wall Street, professional sports teams and the military. The Research and Analysis Branch worked out of Washington’s Navy Hill and New York, breaking enemy code, psychoanalyzing Hitler and mapping invasion trajectories for the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Dan Pinck was supposed to destroy the memorabilia from his OSS stint. Instead, he kept Chinese nationalist money, maps and a gun disguised as a pen in his Boston home. Eventually, he told his four children about the most thrilling chapter of his life. In the 1980s, as the government began declassifying OSS files, he attended a reunion. Charles, his youngest, soon joined him at these gatherings.