Safe for democracy, p.10
Safe for Democracy, page 10
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 that signaled U.S. entry into World War II had a fundamental influence on U.S. intelligence after the war. The assault had surprised American commanders. Investigations revealed a number of items that might have alerted leaders, but no one had been responsible for gathering and interpreting data at the national level. Thus Washington drew the lesson that the United States needed some sort of organization for intelligence, and it fell to President Harry Truman to work out the new schema.
Competing plans for a peacetime intelligence agency existed even before Truman abolished the OSS. Important issues dividing proponents of the various plans included the specific functions and degree of autonomy to be accorded such an agency. Truman’s military advisers, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, favored an interagency group to supervise intelligence. The State Department proposed an arrangement that concerned only supervisory authority, which they wanted in the hands of the secretary of state. Members of the Office of Strategic Services proposed an independent agency but were not initially heeded.
Truman took part of the advice of his Joint Chiefs when on January 22, 1946, he issued a directive establishing a National Intelligence Authority (NIA) to oversee a Central Intelligence Group (CIG). The NIA, composed of the secretaries of state, war, and navy, plus Truman’s personal representative, would monitor a director of central intelligence in charge of a CIG. Truman selected trusted individuals for both the DCI and his representative to the NIA, and he humorously referred to them as “personal snooper” and “director of centralized snooping.” Truman’s first DCI was Sidney W. Souers, a St. Louis businessman and presidential crony, proud of his reserve commission and his wartime service with naval intelligence. But Souers served only five months as director of central intelligence, though Truman convinced him to return as representative on the NIA and then the first executive secretary of the National Security Council. Army Chief of Staff Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower recommended Charles H. Bonesteel, a top Pentagon planner, for the DCI job. Truman instead selected air force Lt. Gen. Hoyt S. Vandenberg. The president considered Vandenberg enough of a diplomat to get along with the State, War, and Navy departments.
Actually Vandenberg had been a combat commander, with minimal intelligence experience. But he was a good organizer and began to build the Central Intelligence Group. Under Souers, CIG had operated out of a suite of three rooms next door to the White House with fewer than 250 employees. Vandenberg soon established an office for research and evaluation plus administrative organs. In June 1946 he asked the National Intelligence Authority to give him responsibility for all U.S. foreign intelligence gathering, a preliminary to bringing the Strategic Services Unit back from the War Department. The proposal matched recommendations from an outside advisory group. Magruder’s unit thus became the Office of Special Operations (OSO). By the close of 1946 there were about 800 officers in OSO alone, out of more than 1,800 total personnel in CIG. Between January and April 1947 the last holdouts, FBI agents in Latin America, transferred to the new intelligence group. General Vandenberg had plans to expand to several thousand officers over six months.
The peacetime intelligence agency grew quickly but remained a creation of the executive branch of government. The CIG had no basis in law. Already several bills dealing with intelligence matters had been proposed in Congress, and in 1946 the White House held discussions with CIG lawyers. Clark M. Clifford of the president’s staff helped draft intelligence legislation. Vandenberg pushed for the bill and wanted Truman to announce creation of the agency in his 1947 State of the Union address. The president spoke to Clifford several times, expressing something close to outrage, though he went ahead with the initiative itself. Truman planned a reorganization of the entire military establishment, a proposal he sent to Congress in February 1947. Provision for the peacetime intelligence agency was included in the legislation, which became the National Security Act of 1947.
Through the 1947 law, Truman created a National Security Council to advise him on defense and foreign affairs. The separate War and Navy departments merged into a single Department of Defense, under which the air force also gained autonomy as an independent armed service. As for intelligence, the original proposal did no more than say that a Central Intelligence Agency would be formed. In the letter Truman sent to congressional leaders along with draft legislation, he did not even mention this aspect. Like the president, most congressmen concerned themselves mainly with parts of the bill unrelated to intelligence. Only late in congressional hearings did the intelligence initiative come up, and then attention centered on whether it would become some kind of secret police. Congressmen noted the lack of detail in the bill and amended it to prohibit the agency from possessing police powers.
Further amendments specified responsibilities for the new Central Intelligence Agency. Essentially Congress returned to Truman’s January 1946 directive, extracting from it almost the exact language the president had used to assign functions. Under the National Security Act, the CIA was directly answerable to the president through the NSC. The law gave the CIA five duties: advising the NSC on intelligence; making recommendations on related matters; producing intelligence estimates and reports; performing “additional services of common concern” for the government-wide intelligence community; and “such other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security as the National Security Council may from time to time direct.”
This last provision has been said to convey legal authority for the conduct of secret warfare by the CIA. It should be noted, therefore, that the terms covert operation, clandestine operation, paramilitary operation, secret operation, and special operation, all euphemisms for secret warfare, appear nowhere in the law. Nor do the terms political action, psychological warfare, propaganda, misinformation, or disinformation. The phrase “such other functions” that appears in the 1947 act sought to cover unforeseen circumstances, but even there the legislative history of the law makes clear that Congress had not contemplated international coercion. The White House privately held a more expansive view. The “other functions” were purposely not specified but were expected to include covert operations. Clark Clifford notes of the language: “I reviewed this sentence carefully at the time, but could never have imagined that forty years later I would still be asked to testify before Congress as to its meaning and intent.”
President Truman signed the legislation on July 26, 1947, and the National Security Act became law. Six weeks later, on September 8, the CIG became the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA, thanks to General Vandenberg, had already become an expanding organization in search of roles and missions. It was at precisely this time that American officers in Germany apprehended the band of Ukrainian partisans. The Ukrainians were looking for help.
Conflict between the superpowers may not have been inevitable, but avoiding it in 1945 required more wisdom than either Russia or America commanded. Soviet Generalissimo Joseph Stalin persisted in his obsession with defending Russian borders by means of a buffer zone of Soviet-dominated nations. In pursuit of this aim Stalin repeatedly broke agreements reached by the wartime allies concerning Eastern Europe. The West bristled. Soviet security concerns were regarded as a cloak for imperial conquest. Attitudes hardened on both sides. Crises over Soviet actions in taking over Romania and seeking egress through the Bosporus from Turkey seemed to confirm Russia’s aggressive intentions. Truman explained to his secretary of state, James Byrnes, “I’m tired of babying the Soviets.”
The succession of crises proved a watershed for public opinion in the United States. British wartime prime minister Sir Winston Churchill received a standing ovation at Westminster College, in Fulton, Missouri, when he declared in a speech, only a few days after one expired deadline:
From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of central and eastern Europe . . . all subject, in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and in some cases increasing measure of control from Moscow.
Early efforts at negotiation expired in the increasingly heated atmosphere. Within days of taking office in 1945, Truman spoke harshly to the Soviet foreign minister. Lend-Lease aid, which Americans had provided Russia since 1941, and the Soviets thought to extend, instead halted. In July 1945 Truman met with Stalin and British leaders at Potsdam, Germany. They talked of arrangements for Eastern Europe and the work of Allied Control Councils in the occupied countries, to be garrisoned until peace treaties were signed. After three top-level meetings—summit conferences if you will—over the years 1943–1945, no American president would again meet the Soviets at a summit for a decade.
In 1947 Soviet-American relations crossed another watershed. That February the British told American officials they would terminate foreign aid to Greece. Europe faced a cruel winter, the worst in decades, and the British government felt it could not continue supporting the Greeks, who had been receiving military and economic aid for more than two years. Meanwhile Greece had plunged into civil war—Communist insurgents threatened the right-wing royal government. President Truman approved a suggestion that the United States take over responsibility for Greece, adding aid to Turkey for good measure. In mid-March the State Department offered aid, which soon grew into substantial intervention in the Greek civil war.
This shift in Truman’s policy toward countering Soviet moves proved more important than the aid itself. Under the new concept Soviet power had to be contained within the areas it had previously achieved dominance; further Russian expansion would be resisted. George F. Kennan, a foreign service officer, coined the term “containment,” which was elevated to the status of the Truman Doctrine. In the containment enterprise the CIA became a key tool.
From the initial help to Greece and Turkey it would be but a short step to offering foreign aid more widely to European nations. Secretary of State George C. Marshall expanded the offer in a commencement address at Harvard University on June 5, 1947. The Marshall Plan aimed at furthering containment by helping rebuild Europe, eliminating social conditions hospitable to the growth of communism. As an added benefit, rebuilt European economies could purchase American goods and services. The Marshall Plan became the first sustained foreign assistance program ever adopted by the United States. At the CIA the Marshall Plan became a device to disguise the provenance of money spent for propaganda and political action purposes, an institution that could help the agency exchange U.S. for local currencies, a way to hide CIA officers and a source of recruits to the agency’s cause.
Soviet leaders were not wrong to view the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan as aimed at them. Stalin forbade occupied Eastern Europe to participate. The Czechs, whose political system the Russians had yet to subjugate, saw Marshall Plan aid as a counterweight to Soviet influence and initially responded to the American offer. Their maneuver led Stalin to consolidate Soviet control over Prague. Political pressures mounted until, in February 1948, a sort of constitutional coup took place. Non-Communist ministers in the Czech coalition government resigned, replaced by representatives of a minority party, the Czech Communist Party. Within a month a famous Czech patriot, Jan Masaryk, a prominent politician and official, died under highly suspicious circumstances.
These events in Czechoslovakia, plus the rising tide of hostility in America, now created a “war scare.” The American high commissioner in Germany, Gen. Lucius D. Clay, cabled a warning on March 5, 1948, that war “may come with dramatic suddenness.” Asked for its opinion, the CIA prepared a memorandum concluding that war was not in fact imminent, but it refused to predict beyond the following sixty days.
But in Germany matters came to a head. On the last day of March 1948 the Russians suddenly informed the West that they would impose travel restrictions on the three land corridors connecting the western sector of Berlin with the Allied occupation area of Bizonia. The restrictions went into effect at midnight, April 1. British and American trains en route to Berlin were halted at the Soviet zone boundary. The Allies shifted to aircraft for transport. On April 5 a British C-47 making its approach to the Berlin airfield at Gatow was destroyed when a Soviet fighter plane collided with it in midair. The Soviets apologized, but the Allies then ordered fighter escorts for their transport planes.
By July a full-scale blockade of Berlin had developed, lasting until May 12, 1949. During that time everything that arrived in West Berlin came by air in what would be called Operation Vittles: eighty tons the first day, within a month more than three thousand tons a day. During the blockade there were more than seven hundred incidents between Soviet and Allied aircraft; thirty-nine British, thirty-one American, and five German airmen were killed. The Cold War had begun in earnest.
The years 1945 to 1948 thus witnessed an accelerating cycle of misperception, provocation, and hostility on both sides. The wartime Big Four alliance became a thing of the past. Neither side saw much possibility for improving relations; Western leaders spoke of Soviet “aggression” and of the “captive nations” of Eastern Europe. President Truman looked to strike back at the Russians, and the CIA would be his instrument.
From its creation the CIA was caught in the shifting currents of the Cold War. In the fall of 1947 the first secretary of defense, James M. Forrestal, asked if the agency would be capable of undertaking secret political action and paramilitary campaigns on behalf of the United States. The CIA replied that it could complete any mission assigned it by the National Security Council and for which resources were made available.
At first the agency concentrated on building up capabilities. It occupied additional quarters in a complex of temporary buildings on northwest E Street in Washington, earlier the home of the Office of Strategic Services. Managed by a new director, Rear Adm. Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, in its first year the CIA increased its budget by 60 percent and added hundreds of personnel. Stalwarts who had remained with the Office of Special Operations throughout its evolution from SSU to CIG to CIA began to see many old faces from OSS. A new wave of secret warriors appeared as well, young men and women who believed the Cold War to be the most important challenge of the age.
But in truth the CIA had yet to attain readiness for covert operations, and in important ways it lacked authority to engage in them. Responding to the initial Pentagon inquiries, Admiral Hillenkoetter had asked the CIA’s legal counsel for an opinion as to whether the organization could conduct covert actions. General Counsel Lawrence R. Houston replied on September 25, 1947, arguing that the National Security Act failed to provide CIA the required legal authority. The famous language usually cited to justify covert operations was the provision that the CIA would fulfill such missions as the NSC might “from time to time” direct. But Houston noted that this provision was qualified by language that said the mission must be “related to intelligence.” Covert operations had only the most tenuous relation to intelligence. Furthermore, Houston noted, Congress had clearly directed that the agency’s chief mission was to coordinate intelligence reporting.
Houston did support one intelligence function related to covert operations already being performed. This was “acquisition of extensive indication on plans in Western Europe for [the] establishment of resistance elements in event of further extension of Communist control,” including information on the training of agents, groups, radio operators, and their outside contacts. For secret propaganda and paramilitary missions, Houston felt, new offices would have to be established, entailing the procurement of “huge quantities” of all kinds of materials and involving large sums for expenses. The memo then declared that “we believe this would be an unauthorized use of the funds made available to CIA.” If such operations were ordered by the NSC, Houston concluded, “it would, we feel, still be necessary to go to Congress for authority and funds.”
Thirty-five years later Houston recalled that Hillenkoetter expressed concern at his opinion. The admiral asked whether there were offsetting considerations in the matter, whereupon the lawyer provided a second memorandum. Here Houston stated that “if the President, with his constitutional responsibilities for the conduct of foreign policy, gave the agency appropriate instructions and if Congress gave it the funds to carry them out, the agency had the legal capability of carrying out the covert actions involved.”
Hillenkoetter took the problem to Truman. State Department policy planner George Kennan played a key role in pushing a proposal for secret propaganda. Kennan advised in December that Soviet covert operations threatened to defeat American foreign policy objectives absent this Cold War tool. He wanted a U.S. directorate for political warfare. At its very first meeting, on December 13, the National Security Council discussed a program for secret propaganda. The following day President Truman signed a directive, NSC-4/A, approving a secret propaganda program and assigning responsibility to the CIA. A week later Admiral Hillenkoetter ordered his OSO chief, Donald Galloway, to plan for a covert psychological campaign using existing CIA resources where possible. Galloway formed a Special Procedures Group within the Office of Special Operations in March 1948 to carry out the mission. Hillenkoetter instructed Galloway that the covert operations were intended to influence governments, groups, and individuals by all means short of physical, that they were to be kept distinct from all other U.S. government information activities, and that the program should move foreign public opinion so as to accomplish American objectives.
These decisions were made months before the Czech coup or the Berlin blockade. World developments only heightened American hostility and accelerated preparations for covert operations. While the United States talked about democracy, its policy goals were more immediate and often took other nations in a rather different direction. Italy became the first example.
Events in Italy crystallized all the talk of “political warfare.” Mussolini’s Italian fascist regime had been overthrown on the eve of surrender in World War II, and not long afterward the king abdicated. After the war came a republic, a parliamentary democracy. Going into elections scheduled for April 1948, the Italian radical left, in particular the Communist Party, were strong, with war recovery barely begun and massive unemployment benefiting their position. Truman sought to avoid a Communist victory at the Italian polls. In a report two months before the election, the CIA warned of a leftist bloc whose strength roughly equaled that of the centrist-moderate left government, but it held out the promise that interim U.S. aid could influence the electoral outcome. Truman’s administration went into high gear to make that happen, committing $200 million in aid and supporting moderate and anti-Communist parties, especially the reigning Christian Democrats of Alcide de Gasperi.
