The OSS needed highly specialized equipment, including wireless radio transmitters, guns, knives, bombs, just to name a few. After the realization that this needed to be an operation on a grand scale, Donovan invited experts from around the country, and funded a branch that would become the OSS’ Research and Development section. A Boston chemist named Stanley Lovell would become its first head, whom Donovan dubbed “my Professor Moriarty,” after Sherlock Holmes’ famous archenemy.

Lovell would go on to design weapons and gadgets, the likes of which were never seen before: silenced pistols and machine guns, explosives (disguised as lumps of coal), pen guns, small cameras, and tasteless cyanide capsules, or Q pills, for a “quick death.”

Courtesy of Lynn Philip Hodgson, Camp X