This was largely due to the foresight of General Donovan. At an early date he had directed President Roosevelt’s attention to the importance of preserving the OSS assets and providing for the carrying on of certain of the intelligence functions which had devolved upon the OSS during World War II.
As early as October, 1944, Donovan had discussed this whole problem with the President, and in response to his request had sent him a memorandum outlining his ideas of what an intelligence service should be equipped to do in the postwar period. In this memorandum he stressed that while intelligence operations during the war were mainly in support of the military and hence had been placed under the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in the postwar period he felt they should be placed under the direct supervision of the President. He further proposed that a central intelligence authority, to include the Secretaries of State and Defense, as well as a representative of the President himself, should be created to supervise and coordinate intelligence work. In concluding his memorandum, General Donovan stated: “We have now in government the trained and specialized personnel needed for the task. This talent should not be dispersed.”
Under the pressure of events during the last months of the war, it was not until April 5, 1945, that President Roosevelt, as one of his last acts, answered General Donovan’s memorandum. The President instructed him to call together “the chiefs of foreign intelligence and internal security units in the various Executive agencies so that a consensus of opinion can be secured” as “to the proposed centralized Intelligence service.”
President Truman took the oath of office on April 12, 1945, and was of course immediately involved in all of the intricate questions arising out of the end of the war in Europe, the prosecution of the war against Japan and the preparation for the Potsdam Conference of July, 1945. But on April 26 he had a chance to discuss intelligence with the Director of the Bureau of the Budget, Harold D. Smith. He had got into the act in connection with the preparation of the new budget and had his own ideas about how intelligence should be organized. He had already sent President Roosevelt a memorandum, in which he pointed out, as President Truman reports,3 “that a tug of war was going on among the FBI, the Office of Strategic Services, the Army and Navy Intelligence, and the State Department.” President Truman added in his memoirs:
3Harry S. Truman, Years of Decision (New York: Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1955), p. 98.
I considered it very important to this country to have a sound, well-organized intelligence system, both in the present and in the future. Properly developed, such a service would require new concepts as well as better-trained and more competent personnel. Smith suggested, and I agreed, that studies should be undertaken at once by his specially trained experts in this field. Plans needed to be made, but it was imperative that we refrain from rushing into something that would produce harmful and unnecessary rivalries among the various intelligence agencies. I told Smith that one thing was certain—this country wanted no Gestapo under any guise or for any reason.
For the next few months the issue was hotly debated, with the Joint Chiefs of Staff playing an important role. They instructed their Joint Intelligence Committee, on which all the military and civilian foreign Intelligence agencies, including OSS, were represented, to study the proposals Donovan had earlier submitted to President Roosevelt, as well as those of other interested agencies.
Meanwhile the Bureau of the Budget continued its own activities and prepared an Executive Order for President Truman’s signature putting the Office of Strategic Services into liquidation. When the Joint Chiefs heard of this, they urged the President to defer action until their views could be presented. However, this word reached the White House too late. The President, on the 20th of September, 1945, issued an Executive Order providing for the termination of the OSS and placing its research unit in the Department of State and the other remaining units under the Secretary of War. These latter were put together in an organization known as the Strategic Services Unit (SSU). SSU was not combined with G-2 but was put under the Under Secretary of War, and it is only fair to say that throughout the ensuing struggle for control and until SSU was taken over by the Central Intelligence Group (CIG), SSU was left largely autonomous in its operations and received complete administrative support from the Army.
The tug of war had continued between the Department of State, which desired to take over the postwar leadership of foreign intelligence, and the military services, including the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which wished to continue the domination they had exercised during the war.
To help resolve these conflicts of interest, the President called on an old friend, Sidney W. Souers, who had been serving the Navy Department in an intelligence capacity. He had been promoted to flag rank in 1945 and made Deputy Chief of Naval Intelligence. Souers worked closely with Admiral Leahy and James S. Lay, Jr., who had been secretary of the JIC and later became Executive Secretary of the National Security Council.
Of the many studies and proposals, probably the most influential was that of the so-called Lovett Committee, headed by Robert A. Lovett, Assistant Secretary of War for Air. This contemplated a Central Intelligence Agency supported by an independent budget which would be responsible only to a National Intelligence Authority composed of the Secretaries of State, War and Navy and a representative of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Finally, on January 22, 1946, President Truman reached his own decision and acted. In a directive to the Secretaries of State, War and Navy, he ordered that they, together with a personal representative of the President (Admiral William Leahy became the President’s designee), should constitute themselves as the National Intelligence Authority. This was to supervise the new intelligence organization which was placed under a director of central intelligence. Admiral Souers was appointed the first head of the new agency, known as the Central Intelligence Group (CIG). He resigned six months later, but continued as an adviser to his successor, General Hoyt Vandenberg.
Later, President Truman, using his directive of January 22 and the experience gained through the operations of the CIG, approved the legislation creating the Central Intelligence Agency and included it in the National Security Act of 1947.
Under the Act, the Central Intelligence Agency was placed under the direction of the National Security Council, which is composed of the President, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense and other primary Presidential advisers in the field of foreign affairs. Interestingly enough, CIA is the sole agency of government which as a matter of law is under the National Security Council, whose function is solely to advise the President. Thus there was firmly established the principle of control of intelligence at the White House level, which President Truman had developed in creating the National Intelligence Authority.
The CIA was not patterned wholly either on the OSS or on the structural plan of earlier or contemporary intelligence organizations of other countries. Its broad scheme was in a sense unique in that it combined under one leadership the overt task of intelligence analysis and coordination with the work of secret intelligence operations of the various types I shall describe. Also, the new organization was intended to fill the gaps in our existing intelligence structure without displacing or interfering with other existing U.S. intelligence units in the Departments of State and Defense. At the same time, it was recognized that the State Department, heretofore largely dependent for its information on the reports from diplomatic establishments abroad, and the components of the Defense Department, relying mainly on attachés and other military personnel abroad, could not be expected to collect intelligence on all those parts of the world that were becoming increasingly difficult of access nor to groom a standing force of trained intelligence officers. For this reason, CIA was given the mandate to develop its own secret collection arm, which was to be quite distinct from that part of the organization that had been set up to assemble and evaluate intelligence from all parts of the government
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One of the unique features of CIA was that its evaluation and coordinating side was to treat the intelligence produced by its clandestine arm in the same fashion that information from other government agencies was treated. Another feature of the CIA’s structure, which did not come about all at once but was the result of gradual mergers which experience showed to be practical and efficient, was the incorporation of all clandestine activities under one roof and one management. Traditionally, intelligence services have kept espionage and counterespionage in separate compartments and all activities belonging in the category of political of psychological warfare in still another compartment. CIA abandoned this kind of compartmentalization, which so often leads to neither the right hand nor the left knowing what the other is doing.
The most recent development in American intelligence has been a unification of the management of the various intelligence branches of the armed forces. In August, 1961, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) was established under a directive issued by the Department of Defense. An outstanding Air Force officer, Lieutenant General Joseph F. Carroll, was named as its first director. His first deputy director, Lieutenant General William W. Quinn, and I worked closely together when Quinn was the very able G-2 to General Alexander M. Patch of the Seventh Army during the invasion of Southern France and Germany. In those days, in the summer and autumn of 1944, I used to meet secretly with Quinn at points in liberated France near the northern Swiss border and supply him with all the military intelligence I could gather on Nazi troop movements and plans as Hitler’s forces retreated toward the mountain “redoubt” of Southern Germany and Austria. Rear Admiral Samuel B. Frankel, the Chief of Staff, likewise an experienced intelligence officer, made a special contribution to the work of the United States Intelligence Board (USIB) during the years when I served it as chairman. DIA was not a merger of the intelligence branches of the armed services, but primarily an attempt to achieve maximum coordination and efficiency in the intelligence processes of the three services. On February 1, 1964, the Department of Defense issued a comprehensive directive establishing intelligence career programs to create a broad professional base of trained and experienced intelligence officers.
Thus, in contrast to our custom in the past of letting the intelligence function die when the war was over, it has been allowed to grow to meet the ever-widening and more complex responsibilities of the time. The formation of such agencies as the DIA, like the earlier creation of CIA itself, is the result of studied effort to give intelligence its proper stature in our national security structure. There is, of course, always the possibility that two such powerful and well-financed agencies as CIA and DIA will become rivals and competitors. There is obviously also room here for an expansion of traditional Army ambitions to run a full-fledged and independent covert collection service of its own, which is hardly justifiable under present circumstances. It could also be both expensive and dangerous. A clear definition of functions is always a requisite. In broad outlines, this already exists. Furthermore, the high caliber of the officers, military and civilian, directing the two agencies, if maintained, should guarantee effective performance, but it is vital to protect the authority of the Director of Central Intelligence to coordinate the work of foreign intelligence, under the President, and to see to the preparation of our National Intelligence estimates, which I shall describe in detail later.
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America’s Intelligence Requirements
Intelligence is probably the least understood and the most misrepresented of the professions. One reason for this was well expressed by President Kennedy when, on November 28, 1961, he came out to inaugurate the new CIA Headquarters Building and to say good-bye to me as Director. He then remarked: “Your successes are unheralded, your failures are trumpeted.” For obviously you cannot tell of operations that go along well. Those that go badly generally speak for themselves.
The President then added a word of encouragement to the several thousand men and women of CIA:
. . . but I am sure you realize how important is your work, how essential it is—and in the long sweep of history how significant your efforts will be judged. So I do want to express my appreciation to you now, and I am confident that in the future you will continue to merit the appreciation of our country, as you have in the past.
It is hardly reasonable to expect proper understanding and support for intelligence work in this country if it is only the insiders, a few people within the executive and legislative branches, who know anything whatever about the CIA. Others continue to draw their knowledge from the so-called inside stories by writers who have never been on the inside.
There are, of course, sound reasons for not divulging intelligence secrets. It is well to remember that what is told to the public also gets to the enemy. However, the discipline and techniques—what we call the tradecraft of intelligence—are widely known in the profession, whatever the nationality of the service may be. What must not be disclosed, and will not be disclosed here, is where and how and when the tradecraft has been or will be employed in particular operations unless this has already been disclosed elsewhere, as in the case of the U-2, for example.
CIA is not an underground operation. All one needs to do is to read the law—the National Security Act of 1947—to get a general idea of what it is set up to do. It has, of course, a secret side, and the law permits the National Security Council, which in effect means the President, to assign to the CIA certain duties and functions in the intelligence field in addition to those specifically enumerated in the law. These functions are not disclosed. But CIA is not the only government agency where secrecy is important. The Departments of State and of Defense also guard with great care the security of much that they do.
One of my own guiding principles in intelligence work when I was Director of Central Intelligence was to use every human means to preserve the secrecy and security of those activities, but only those where this was essential, and not to make a mystery of what is a matter of common knowledge or obvious to friend and foe alike.
Shortly after I became Director, I had a good illustration of the futility of certain kinds of secrecy. Dr. Milton Eisenhower, brother of the President, had an appointment to see me. The President volunteered to drop him by at my office. They started out (I gather without forewarning to the Secret Service), but could not find the office until a telephone call was put through to me for precise directions. This led me to investigate why all this futile secrecy. At that time the CIA Headquarters bore at the gate the sign “Government Printing Office.” However, Washington sightseeing bus drivers made it a practice to stop outside our front gate. The guide would then harangue the occupants of the bus with information to the effect that behind the barbed wire they saw was the most secret, the most concealed place in Washington, the headquarters of the American spy organization, the Central Intelligence Agency. I also found out that practically every taxicab driver in Washington knew the location. As soon as I put up a proper sign at the door, the glamour and mystery disappeared. We were no longer either sinister or mysterious to visitors to the Capital; we became just another government office. Too much secrecy can be self-defeating just as too much talking can be dangerous.
An instance where a certain amount of publicity was helpful in the collection of intelligence occurred during World War II when I was sent to Switzerland for General Donovan and the OSS in November of 1942. I had a position in the American Legation as an assistant to the Minister. One of the leading Swiss journals produced the story that I was coming there as a secret and special envoy of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Offhand one might have thought that this unsought advertisement would have hampered my work. Quite the contrary was the case. Despite my modest but truthful denials of the story, it was generally believed. As a result, to my network flocked a host of informants, some cranks, it is true, but also some exceedingly valuable individuals. If I could not separate the whe
at from the chaff with only a reasonable degree of error, then I was not qualified for my job, because the ability to judge people is one of the prime qualities of an intelligence officer.
When we try to make a mystery out of everything relating to intelligence, we tend to dissipate our effort to maintain the security of operations where secrecy is essential to success. Each situation has to be considered according to the facts, keeping in mind the principle of withholding from a potential enemy all useful information about secret intelligence operations or personnel engaged in them. The injunction that George Washington wrote to Colonel Elias Dayton on July 26, 1777, is still applicable to intelligence operations today:
The necessity of procuring good Intelligence is apparent and need not be further urged. All that remains for me to add, is, that you keep the whole matter as secret as possible. For upon Secrecy, Success depends in most Enterprizes of the kind, and for want of it, they are generally defeated, however well planned and promising a favourable issue.1
1Pforzheimer Collection.
On the whole, Americans are inclined to talk too much about matters which should be classified. I feel that we hand out too many of our secrets, particularly in the field of military “hardware” and weaponry, and that we often fail to make the vital distinction between the types of operation that should be secret and those which, by their very nature, are not and cannot be kept secret. There are times when our press is overzealous in seeking “scoops” with regard to future diplomatic, political and military moves. We have learned the importance of secrecy in time of war, although even then there have been serious indiscretions at times. But it is well to recognize that in the Cold War our adversary takes every advantage of what we divulge or make publicly available.
The Craft of Intelligence Page 6