On 1 October 1945, the OSS was officially disbanded. Some of its vestige components, such as the Research and Analysis (R&) Branch and Secret Intelligence (SI) were reassigned to the State Department and the Department of War's newly created Strategic Services Unit (SSU). Others, like the FPU officers at Nuremberg, were left to finish their special assignments. But for all intents and purposes, America's first experiment with a centralised intelligence and special operations agency was over. It was a necessary wartime evil, rendered unnecessary by the coming of peace. Or so, for the time being, it seemed.

Just over two weeks later, General Donovan established a ‘Motion Pictures Committee’, to provide technical assistance to Hollywood filmmakers seeking to portray the OSS's wartime activities. Thus began in earnest his public relations campaign for the establishment of a permanent peacetime central intelligence agency. Although waged across several mediums, Hollywood cinema was vital to Donovan's campaign. ‘In the battle for mass opinion in the Cold War,’ writes Tony Shaw, ‘few weapons were more powerful than the cinema.’ Moreover, few were more effective in glamourising the traditionally disreputable profession of spying and espionage to a suspicious American public than the filmmakers and stars who had already managed to significantly elevate the public's opinion of one American intelligence agency, the FBI, in the previous decade. In the two intervening years between the dissolution of the OSS and the establishment of the CIA from October 1945 to September 1947, three major Hollywood motion pictures were released that celebrated the OSS's wartime achievements and made the case for a permanent peacetime CIA. These were, consecutively, Paramount's O.S.S. (1946), Warner Brothers’/United States Pictures’ Cloak and Dagger (1946), and Twentieth Century-Fox's 13 Rue Madeleine (1947). If, as intelligence historian Bradley F. Smith writes, the ‘O.S.S. was more influential in its impact on people's ideas and imagination than its practical wartime achievements’, then it was Hollywood's post-war commemoration of those achievements in these films that helped animate, perhaps more than any other medium, the public imagination in favour of the establishment of the CIA in the National Security Act of 1947.