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Staying Behind in Bangkok:
The OSS and American Intelligence in Postwar Thailand

by E. BRUCE REYNOLDS

Abstract

The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) saw Thailand as its “land of opportunity” in Southeast Asia during World War II and envisioned its activities as laying groundwork for ongoing American intelligence presence there. Former OSS officers James H. W. “Jim” Thompson and Alexander MacDonald successively headed the Bangkok office of the Strategic Services Unit (SSU) in 1945-46, then stayed on to pursue business opportunities while continuing reporting for the new Central Intelligence Group (CIG) and its successor, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).  Political upheaval, however, soon soured the once close relations between these OSS veterans and Thai authority, and neither approved of the shift in U.S. policies in the region after the onset of the Cold War. Their experiences suggest that the presumed continuity between the OSS role in Thailand during World War II and the large-scale CIA operations there in the 1950s was more apparent than real.