William J. Morgan – Lieutenant Colonel, United States Army

William Morgan, 85, Part of Famed Child-Custody Case, Dies

5 March. 1996,

William J. Morgan, a psychologist who fought the Germans and Japanese behind enemy lines in World War II, outfoxed Soviet spies in World War II and later thwarted American courts by keeping his granddaughter away from a father whom her mother had accused of sexual abuse, died on Saturday, 2 March 1996.

Morgan (born Willie Mitrano) grew up poor in Rochester, New York; graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Rochester; worked his way through Yale graduate school; and suppressed his “unfit for overseas duty” classification (he was blind in one eye) to launch an Army career “testing and training spies for the Office of Strategic Services outside of London. He later parachuted into occupied France to organize guerrilla attacks on the German army and served behind enemy lines fighting the Japanese in China.

As an original member of the O.S.S.’s successor, the Central Intelligence Agency, after the war, Mr. Morgan specialized in selecting and training American spies.” He later served “as a psychological strategy specialist with the White House under Harry S. Truman and Dwight Eisenhower.


William J. Morgan (born William Mitrano, 1911-1996) was a Lieutenant Colonel in military intelligence, U.S. Army Reserve, who held a Ph.D. in psychology from Yale.

During World War II he served as director of the Psychological Text Bureau, worked with the British in selecting agents to operate in Nazi-occupied territories, and parachuted into France to organize and train guerillas.

He later published The O.S.S. and I (1957). From 1947 to 1957 he created tests to examine new recruits and employees for the CIA.

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