Source: Politics and Prose by Annie Jacobsen
The origins of the Special Activities Division, including its Ground Branch, lie in the CIA’s precursor agency, the Office of Strategic Services, and specifically its Special Operations (SO) Branch, a guerrilla warfare corps whose goal was to kill Nazis—to sabotage and subvert the Third Reich. The motto of one unit, the OSS Jedburghs, was “Surprise, Kill, Vanish.”