The Craft of Intelligence (5 page)

By the time the war was over, the basic framework had been established for the various military and naval intelligence branches which continued to exist, even though in skeleton form, until the outbreak of the Second World War—G-2, CIC (Counter Intelligence Corps, which until 1942 was called the Corps of Intelligence Police) and ONI (Office of Naval Intelligence). Of equal importance was our initial experience during World War I in the field of cryptography, of which I shall have more to say in a later chapter. In this area, too, a skeleton force working during the interim years of peace succeeded in developing the most vital instrument of intelligence which we possessed when we were finally swept into war again in 1941—the ability to break the Japanese diplomatic and naval codes.

It was only in World War II, and particularly after the Pearl Harbor attack, that we began to develop, side by side with our military intelligence organizations, an agency for secret intelligence collection and operations. As I mentioned earlier, the origin of this agency was a summons by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to William J. Donovan in 1941 to come down to Washington and work on this problem.

Donovan was eminently qualified for the job. A distinguished lawyer, a veteran of World War I who had won the Medal of Honor, he had divided his busy life in peacetime between the law, government service and politics. He knew the world, having traveled widely. He understood people. He had a flair for the unusual and for the dangerous, tempered with judgment. In short, he had the qualities to be desired in an intelligence officer.

The Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor and our entry into the war naturally stimulated the rapid growth of the OSS and its intelligence operations.

It had begun, overtly, as a research and analysis organization, manned by a hand-picked group of some of the best historians and other scholars available in this country. By June, 1942, the COI (Coordinator of Information), as Donovan’s organization had been called at first, was renamed the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and told “to collect and analyze strategic information and to plan and operate special services.”

By this time the OSS was already deep in the task of “special services,” a cover designation for secret intelligence and secret operations of every conceivable character among which the support of various anti-Nazi underground groups behind the enemy lines and covert preparations for the invasion of North Africa were perhaps most significant.

During 1943, elements of the OSS were at work on a world-wide basis, except for Latin America, where the FBI was operating, and parts of the Far Eastern Command, which General MacArthur had already pre-empted.

Its guerilla and resistance branch, modeled on the now well-publicized British Special Operations Executive (SOE) and working closely with the latter in the European Theater, had already begun to drop teams of men and women into France, Italy and Yugoslavia and in the China-Burma-India Theater of war. The key idea behind these operations was to support, train and supply already existing resistance movements or, where there were none, to organize willing partisans into effective guerilla units. The Jedburghs, as they were called, who dropped into France, and Detachment 101, the unit in Burma, were among the most famous of these groups. Later the OSS developed special units for the creation and dissemination of black propaganda, for counterespionage, and for certain sabotage and resistance tasks that required unusual talents, such as underwater demolitions or technical functions in support of regular intelligence tasks. In conjunction with all these undertakings, it had to develop its own training schools.

Toward the end of the war, as our armies swept over Germany, it created special units for the apprehension of war criminals and the recovery of looted art treasures as well as for tracking down the movements of funds which, it was thought, the Nazi leaders would take into hiding in order to make a comeback at a later date. There was little that it did not attempt to do at some time or place between 1942 and the war’s end.

For a short time after V-J Day, it looked as though the U.S. would gradually withdraw its troops from Europe and the Far East. This would probably have included the disbanding of intelligence operations. In fact, it seemed likely at the end of 1945 that we would do what we did after World War I—fold our tents and go back to business-as-usual. But this time, in contrast to 1919 when we repudiated the League of Nations, we became a charter member of the United Nations and gave it our support in hopes that it would grow up to be the keeper of world peace.

If the Communists had not overreached themselves, our government might well have been disposed to leave the responsibility for keeping the peace more and more to the United Nations. In fact, at Yalta Stalin asked President Roosevelt how long we expected to keep our troops in Europe. The President answered, not more than two years. In view of the events that took place in rapid succession during the postwar years, it is clear that in the period between 1945 and 1950 Premier Stalin and Mao Tse-tung decided that they would not wait for us to retire gracefully from Europe and Asia; they would kick us out.

Moscow installed Communist regimes in Poland, Rumania and Bulgaria before the ink was dry on the agreements signed at Yalta and Potsdam. The Kremlin threatened Iran in 1946, and followed this in rapid succession by imposing a Communist regime on Hungary, activating the civil war in Greece, staging the takeover of Czechoslovakia and instituting the Berlin blockade. Later, in 1950, Mao joined Stalin to mastermind the attack on South Korea. Meanwhile, Mao had been consolidating his position on the mainland of China. These blows in different parts of the world aroused our leaders to the need for a world-wide intelligence system. We were, without fully realizing it, witnessing the first stages of a master plan to shatter the societies of Europe and Asia and isolate the United States, and eventually to take over the entire world. What we were coming to realize, however, was the need to learn a great deal more than we knew about the secret plans of the Kremlin to advance the frontiers of Communism.

In his address to Congress on March 12, 1947, President Truman declared that the security of the country was threatened by Communist actions and stated that it would be our policy “to help free peoples to maintain their free institutions and their national integrity against aggressive movements seeking to impose on them totalitarian regimes.” He added that we could not allow changes in the status quo brought about by “coercion or by such subterfuges as political infiltration,” in violation of the United Nations Charter.

It was by then obvious that the United Nations, shackled by the Soviet veto, could not play the role of policeman. It was also clear that we had a long period of crisis ahead of us. Under these conditions, a series of measures were taken by the government to transform our words into action. One of the earliest was the reorganization of our national defense structure, which provided for the unification of the military services under a Secretary of Defense and the creation of the National Security Council.

At that time President Truman recommended that a central intelligence agency be created as a permanent agency of government. A Republican Congress agreed and, with complete bipartisan approval, the CIA was established in the National Security Act of 1947. It was an openly acknowledged arm of the executive branch of government, although, of course, it had many duties of a secret nature. President Truman saw to it that the new agency was equipped to support our government’s effort to meet Communist tactics of “coercion, subterfuge, and political infiltration.” Much of the knowhow and some of the personnel of the OSS were taken over by the Central Intelligence Agency.

The two years between the end of World War II when the OSS was dissolved and the creation of CIA in the fall of 1947 had been a period of interdepartmental infighting as to what to do with intelligence. Fortunately, many experienced officers of the OSS remained on during this period in the various intelligence units which functioned under the aegis of the State and War Departments in the postwar period.

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,
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“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:

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.