Feels too hairsplitting. It was the same type of people doing largely the same activities with the same objectives, even if on paper there was a 2-year hiatus between OSS being dissolved and CIA created. People would understand if you wrote "OSS/CIA did X" when describing the 1940s/50s/60s.
Similar to how a branch of the US Public Health Service [0] originally tasked with malaria prevention became Communicable Disease Center (CDC) in 1946-67, subsequently renamed to "Center for Disease Control" and "Centers for Disease Control" (1980), "Centers for Disease Control and Prevention". It hasn't actually been called the "Center for Disease Control" since 1980, although many people (incl. journalists) still call it that.
Also, most countries' Department of Defense/Ministry of Defence were called
Ministry of War or Department of War during WWII (and some only controlled the army, not all branches of military). [1] And the White House War Room was renamed the Situation Room in 1961. (RIP George Carlin.)
Wild Bill Donovan’s admirers and critics still argue over his legacy, but on one point they agree: His World War II Office of Strategic Service (OSS) became the Petri dish for the spies who later ran the CIA as well as the special operators who conduct some of the most daring raids the world has ever seen.
Four CIA directors — Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, William Colby and William Casey — learned the craft of clandestine warfare as operatives for Donovan’s OSS. Indeed, the daring, the risk-taking, the unconventional thinking, and the élan and esprit de corps of the OSS permeated the new agency.
So would the OSS’s failings: the delusions that covert operations, like magic bullets, could produce spectacular results, or that legal or ethical corners could be cut for a higher cause.
