Secret Heroes: The Men Who Built the CIA and the Green Berets
Episode 4: The Reckoning - Bill Colby ran the CIA. Aaron Bank founded the Green Berets. John Singlaub fought every war from France to Afghanistan. They all started with a radio and a parachute.
Missed the earlier posts? Part 1: The Secret Program Churchill Buried for 50 Years | Part 2: Selection, Training, and the Teams | Part 3: The Man in the Kilt Who Stopped a Panzer Division
In September 1945, one month after Japan’s surrender, President Harry Truman signed an executive order dissolving the Office of Strategic Services. The OSS—the organization that had created, trained, funded, and directed the Jedburgh program—ceased to exist.
The men who had parachuted into France came home to a country that didn’t know they existed, to an organization that no longer did, and to a government that had classified everything they’d done for the next fifty years.
They went back to their lives. Most of them told their families almost nothing.
What they couldn’t know—what none of them could have predicted—was that the world they were returning to would need everything they had learned in those ninety days in occupied France. And that some of them would spend the next four decades putting it to use.
The Dissolution
The OSS was killed not by failure but by politics.
J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI had fought Donovan’s organization since its creation, viewing it as a rival for intelligence authority. The State Department wanted no part of a permanent covert operations arm. Military traditionalists had never trusted the OSS’s unconventional methods. And Truman himself was suspicious of what he called a potential “American Gestapo.”
So the OSS was disbanded. Its research and analysis functions went to the State Department. Its intelligence operations were absorbed into a temporary organization called the Strategic Services Unit, which limped along for eighteen months before being reorganized into the Central Intelligence Group, which became the Central Intelligence Agency in 1947.
The Jedburgh program had no official successor. The teams scattered. Some stayed in the military, some went to law school, some went home to farms. The war was over. The world was supposed to be at peace.
It wasn’t.
The Men Who Stayed
A handful of Jedburgh veterans understood immediately that the Cold War would require exactly the skills they had spent the war developing. They stayed—and they built what came next.
William Colby had commanded Jedburgh Team BRUCE, parachuting into France in August 1944 and operating with the Maquis until Allied forces linked up with his position. A year later he led Operation RYPE into Norway, blowing railway lines to keep German forces from reinforcing the homeland defense. He came home, went to Columbia Law School, spent three weeks practicing law, and decided it wasn’t for him.
An OSS friend called with a job offer. Colby joined the new CIA.
Over the next thirty years he ran covert operations in Italy, served as chief of station in Saigon, oversaw the controversial Phoenix Program in Vietnam, and eventually became Director of Central Intelligence under Nixon and Ford. He was confirmed as DCI in 1973—the same year the Jedburgh files were still officially classified.
Colby became famous, or infamous depending on your perspective, for his cooperation with congressional investigations into CIA abuses. He testified openly. He declassified operations that his predecessors had kept buried. He believed the agency served the public and owed the public accountability.
His Jedburgh colleagues, at reunions in later years, would sometimes start counting in double-digit numbers if a speaker made claims that seemed to lack credibility: *”46, 47, 48, 49, 50, bullshit.”* It was a Milton Hall tradition, carried forward fifty years.
Colby died in a canoeing accident in Maryland in 1996. He was 76.
Aaron Bank had a different mission in mind. He’d been assigned by Donovan himself to Operation IRON CROSS—a plan to parachute a team disguised as SS officers into the German heartland, link up with anti-Nazi Wehrmacht soldiers recruited from POW camps, and capture or kill Adolf Hitler. The operation was canceled days before execution when intelligence showed Hitler had remained in Berlin rather than retreating to the Alpine redoubt as expected. Hitler killed himself on April 30, 1945.
Bank spent the final weeks of the war in Indochina, where he worked alongside Ho Chi Minh—at that point fighting the Japanese rather than anyone else—and reported to the OSS that Ho commanded overwhelming popular support and would win any free election. His recommendation that Ho be allowed to form a coalition government was ignored. American policy backed the French instead. Bank watched the seeds of Vietnam being planted and could do nothing about it.
Back home, Bank had one consuming ambition: to build a permanent American unconventional warfare capability so that the next time the country needed Jedburgh-style teams, they wouldn’t have to improvise one from scratch in eighteen months.
It took him until 1952. On June 19th of that year, Bank activated the 10th Special Forces Group at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, with eight soldiers, a warrant officer, and himself as commanding officer. The structure, training, doctrine, and mission of the Green Berets flowed directly from what he had learned as a Jedburgh in France: small teams, indigenous forces, unconventional warfare, foreign language capability, cultural immersion.
Bank died in 2004 at the age of 101. The Green Berets he founded are still active today.
John Singlaub had been twenty-two years old when he jumped into France as part of Jedburgh Team JAMES in August 1944, armed and directed Maquis groups in the Massif Central, then pivoted to the Pacific theater and parachuted onto the Chinese island of Hainan just before Japan’s formal surrender to rescue hundreds of Dutch and Australian prisoners of war.
He never really stopped.
Korea, CIA operations against the Chinese Communists, Vietnam—where he commanded MACV-SOG, the military’s most classified special operations unit, running cross-border missions into Laos and Cambodia that technically didn’t exist. He was eventually relieved of his last command in 1977 after publicly criticizing President Carter’s plan to withdraw troops from South Korea. He retired, started several controversial organizations, and lived to be 100 years old.
The U.S. Army Special Operations Command named an award after him: the MG John K. Singlaub/Jedburgh Award, given to exceptional members of the special operations community. A Jedburgh name, attached to a Jedburgh tradition, carried forward to the present day.
Singlaub died in January 2022.
The Doctrine That Survived
The OSS was dissolved. The Jedburgh program was classified. The men went home.
But the ideas refused to die.
Aaron Bank’s 10th Special Forces Group was the direct institutional heir. The first Special Forces A-teams—twelve men, experts in weapons, communications, medicine, and demolitions, designed to infiltrate enemy territory and organize indigenous resistance—were Milton Hall translated into permanent doctrine. The mission statement Bank wrote in 1952 could have been lifted verbatim from the Jedburgh operational orders of 1944.
The lineage runs forward without interruption. The Green Berets. Delta Force. The CIA’s Special Activities Division. MACV-SOG in Vietnam. The teams that went into Afghanistan in 2001 within weeks of 9/11, linking up with Northern Alliance fighters and directing air strikes from horseback. The unconventional warfare operations that have been a constant feature of American military strategy for eighty years.
All of it traces back to Milton Hall. To three men and a radio and a drop into darkness.
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What Was Lost
It would be tidy to end there. The legacy preserved, the doctrine vindicated, the sacrifice honored.
But the Jedburgh story has a shadow that follows it.
The men who organized the Maquis, armed them, pointed them at the Germans, and then left—they left behind a France still sorting out what had happened in those four years of occupation. The Resistance was not the unified force of legend. It was fractured, political, sometimes brutal. Collaborators were executed in the streets after Liberation. Some of the executions were justice. Some were score-settling dressed as justice. The Jedburgh teams had helped arm and organize the force that conducted both.
In Indochina, Bank and others watched the French reassert colonial control over a country where the population had just spent four years fighting occupiers. The tools the Jedburghs had perfected for liberating France would be turned, in the decades ahead, against populations the United States would sometimes support and sometimes abandon—with consequences that are still unfolding.
The men who built the Green Berets, the CIA’s covert operations capability, MACV-SOG—they were not naive. They had parachuted into occupied France at twenty-two and twenty-three years old and learned things about war and human nature that took other men a lifetime to understand. Most of them spent the rest of their careers trying to apply those lessons wisely.
How well they succeeded is a question history is still answering.
The Last Reunion
In the 1990s, Bill Colby attended a gathering at CIA headquarters where the curator of the agency’s historical collection addressed a room full of surviving Jedburghs—French, British, and American, old men by then, half a century removed from the fields of the Massif Central and the roads of Normandy.
Colby warned the curator quietly before he began: if you hear any of the Americans start counting in double-digit numbers, pay attention.
The curator gave his address. No one counted.
The Jedburghs had been real heroes, the curator said. They had done something that mattered. They had operated in a way that changed warfare permanently.
The old men in the room knew this was true. They also knew something the curator didn’t: that the most important thing about what they had done wasn’t the missions, or the doctrine, or the famous alumni who came after. It was simpler than that.
You take three men. You give them a radio. You drop them into darkness. And you trust them to figure it out.
Everything else followed from that.
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*Thank you for following the Secret Heroes series on the Jedburghs. If you have a topic you’d like to see covered in future episodes, let me know in the comments.*
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By the Numbers
The final accounting of what the Jedburgh program produced:
The program: 93 three-man teams deployed into France; 8 additional teams into the Netherlands
Personnel: 83 Americans, 90 British, 103 French, 5 Belgian, 5 Dutch
Operations (D-Day to Liberation of Paris): 164 rail lines destroyed; 1,820 vehicle ambushes conducted or coordinated; 1,000+ telephone and telegraph line cuts; 130,000+ resistance fighters armed and organized
Cost: Classified for 50 years. The human cost was never fully tabulated — some teams were captured and executed, others lost to combat, illness, or accidents. The records remain incomplete.
Alumni who shaped the postwar world: William Colby (CIA Director, 1973–76); Aaron Bank (founder, U.S. Army Special Forces, 1952); John Singlaub (commander, MACV-SOG, Vietnam; founding CIA member)
Their institutional descendants: U.S. Army Special Forces (Green Berets); U.S. Army Rangers (lineage); CIA Special Activities Division; MACV-SOG; Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC)
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Secret Heroes is brought to you by my Paris thriller series featuring Eddie Grant, a former Special Forces officer living in Paris. The world the Jedburghs built — clandestine operations, Resistance networks, the moral weight of wartime choices — is the same world Eddie navigates, just 80 years later. Start with Treasure of Saint-Lazare.