Makaveli's Prince

The Office of Co-ordination of Information, which was a relatively small agency, spawned the rather larger and more powerful wartime Office of Strategic Services known as the OSS.  It was this organisation, founded in 1941, which laid the groundwork and foundations for the later Central Intelligence Agency.  However, what came before any of these agencies was the Federal Bureau of Investigation, founded in 1908, which appeared to have assumed the task of an intelligence-gathering agency, due to its role, which involved acting on crimes committed against the United States of America.

As the USA became involved in World War Two the civilian nature of the FBI did not lend itself well to the role of intelligence gathering and thus the overlapping intelligence networks slipped further under the control of the wartime intelligence networks that were run by the armed forces.  Even in the peaceful western hemisphere the domain of Latin America, which had previously been exclusively that of the FBI, fell into the hands of other intelligence agencies and the FBI returned to operating within US national boundaries.  During the Second World War intelligence gathering was run largely by the armed forces.  However, there was a significant area where intelligence networks overlapped, as there were still a large number of agencies that were involved in gathering intelligence.  Not only did each armed service have its own intelligence operations, but also there were intelligence units of the US Department of State and the Treasury Bureau operating in the same field. [1]

According to Paine, the US at this time compared to Russia and Germany was ‘the nation with the least sophisticated and experienced Intelligence community, and the only one which had never maintained an adequate peacetime or wartime Intelligence service’.[2]  This is quite clear, especially after the disastrous events of Pearl Harbor, because the Pearl Harbor inquiries bear out the fact that there was no efficient collation of intelligence, which could then be analysed so as to warn of the impending Japanese attack.  According to the Hoover Commission in 1955, ‘The CIA may well attribute its existence to the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor and to the post war investigation into the part Intelligence or lack of Intelligence played in the failure of our military forces to receive adequate and prompt warning of the impending Japanese attack.’[3]

The CIA was not created until several years later.  Prior to the establishment of the CIA, General William J. Donovan helped with the conception and creation of the OSS, initially envisaged as a civilian agency.  However, it became apparent that this status would not serve to the advantage of the agency, as civilians in the time of war were not best suited to the job that would be undertaken.  This job was not to be like that of the FBI, although in some aspects the OSS would be modelled on the FBI, it was ‘created to abet conflict; clandestine, covert, secret war, but still war.’[4]  The militarisation of the agency was much better accepted with the advent of US involvement in World War Two.

The OSS was first recognised and made famous by operations that involved dropping parachutists behind enemy lines in a number of countries during the war.[5]  It became much more than an intelligence gathering organisation.  It also employed ‘a society of assassins, and an organisation of propagandists, demolitionists, terrorists, underground organizers, infiltrators, forgers, anarchists’.[6]  These were all employed in the war effort to inflict damage on the enemy and so help to win the war.  This combination of skills was something later followed and practiced by the CIA.[7]

This process of militarisation was only reversed after the end of the war.  The idea that there was no longer a need for uniforms stemmed from a greater feeling on the part of both the government and the public that there was no longer a need for a covert organisation.  Despite the USA not long having expanded their efforts in to the area of intelligence they still associated it more with the organisations of Hitler’s Third Reich, the Abwehr and Gestapo.  This did not lead many in the government and the public to be very sympathetic towards this sort of organisation.  The US government clung to the same view as the 1929 US Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson who noted that ‘Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.’[8]

These ideas were becoming outdated.  Intelligence had also grown beyond its original pre-World War Two role of simply gathering the intelligence, and thus was unlikely to return to that.[9]  General Vandenburg in the 1946 Senate hearings stated that ‘the pre-war feeling that there was something Un-American about espionage and even about intelligence in general no longer held true.’[10]

Despite the fact that intelligence and ideas about its morality had evolved, the OSS did not avoid the post World War Two reversions.  It did not have a pre-war form to which it could revert and President Truman felt there was no longer any need for it, and political reasons then led to its eventual dissolution.  This happened despite General Donovan arguing for ‘an independent agency, of civilian status, separate from army, navy, or air force control, to function in peacetime as an Intelligence organisation whose responsibility should be the accumulation of Intelligence.’[11]

In 1945 President Truman ordered that the OSS be disbanded.  Many members transferred to the State Department where they were absorbed into the Bureau of Intelligence and Research.[12]  Paine argues that the dissolution of the OSS was rapid after it was taken over by the war department and that when it was finally dead there was a return to ‘the same inefficiency, conflict, and monolithic confusion which General Donovan had predicted if the separate service arms were allowed to handle the Intelligence function.’[13]  President Truman later said at a CIA training session on November 21^st 1952 that when he had briefed General Eisenhower for take over of the Presidency, that Eisenhower had been shocked at all the information the President needed to be able to make a decision.  Truman then went on to remark how no central organisation for intelligence had existed when he came to the Presidency and this had led to him often having to read stacks of documents and having people dig for information.[14]  This inefficiency and confusion led President Truman to instruct Secretary of State James Byrnes, Secretary of War Robert Patterson, Secretary of the Navy James V. Forrestal, and Admiral William D. Leahy to form the National Intelligence Authority.  This authority was to effectively take charge of intelligence operations supported by the Central Intelligence Group.  President Truman appointed Rear Admiral Sidney W. Souers as Director of Central Intelligence and this was a first step forward in the creation of the CIA.[15]

General Vandenburg, who noted the lack of pre-war intelligence, supported this and pointed out the fact that since the attack at Pearl Harbor intelligence was much better understood.  What General Vandenburg said was revealed by Pearl Harbor, with regards to intelligence, was that there was a need ‘for centralisation, for allocation of responsibility, for dissemination, for evaluation, and for exploitation of all sources of information.’[16]  Senator Elbert D. Thomas was also a supporter of a new central system and argued for what he said should be ‘the most efficient intelligence system that can be devised.’  He was adamant that things should not return to the pre-war system.[17]

The USA was no longer an isolationist nation and had emerged from World War Two as the foremost nation in the West.  This alone made it inevitable that there should be some form of central intelligence organisation.[18]  As it began to become clearer that the Soviet Union was now set for ideological confrontation with the US, it also became clearer that there was going to be a need for a specialised and advanced group for the gathering of intelligence and many other sorts of related operations.[19]

In 1947 an act of Congress, the National Security Act, dissolved the Central Intelligence Group to replace it with the Central Intelligence Agency.  It also created the Department of Defence, and the National Security Council,[20] which was made up of the President, the Vice President, the Director of the Office of Civil and Defence Mobilisation, the Secretary of State, and the Secretary of Defence.  The CIA was to work closely with the National Security Council (NSC).  This had made the CIA almost independent of the military, except for the fact that the Director remained a member of military personnel until Allen Dulles replaced General Walter Bedell Smith in 1953.[21]

The CIA as an organisation therefore officially began its life on the 18^th of September 1947.  The National Security Act laid out the role of the CIA in five-functions. The CIA was:

‘to advise the National Security Council in matters concerning such intelligence activities of the government departments and agencies as relate to national security…to make recommendations to the National Security Council for the co-ordination of such intelligence activities…to correlate and evaluate intelligence relating to the national security, and provide for the appropriate dissemination of such intelligence within the government…Provided that the Agency shall have no police, subpena, [sic] law-enforcement powers, or internal-security functions…to perform, for the benefit of the existing intelligence agencies, such additional services of common concern as the National Security Council determines can be more efficiently accomplished centrally;…to perform such other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security as the National Security Council may from time to time direct.’[22]

This gives the CIA the right to co-ordinate, gather and analyse intelligence. However, it was the phrase ‘such other functions and duties’ that allowed it to expand its operations into clandestine, covert, secret wars.[23]