A Look Over My Shoulder

by Richard Helms

  However much General Donovan and his senior staff might have known or suspected in Washington, those of us in Germany were taken completely by surprise on September 20, 1945, when President Harry Truman abruptly issued the executive order terminating the Office of Strategic Services ten days hence. The order, which was not coordinated with OSS, the service chiefs in the Pentagon, or the Department of State, was to become effective on the opening of business October 1, 1945. The precise reason for the abrupt termination was not clear to us in Berlin at the time. We were left to assume that in striving to bring the government back to a peacetime footing and size, President Truman had made the closing of the many offices that had sprung up in response to the war a priority. Still, it seemed more punitive than rational to expect an organization that stretched from Washington across Europe, with elements in the Near East, Africa, China, Burma, India, and Vietnam to fold its many tents, abandon its properties, and rid itself of some 11,500 employees in ten days.

  All that we in Germany knew was that for the moment we had been subsumed into a carryover organization known as the Strategic Services Unit (SSU), and that the OSS remains—personnel, property, and functions—had at least temporarily been divided between the War and State Departments. The SSU, nominally attached to the War Department, retained the operational remnants—intelligence collection and counterintelligence abroad. The Research and Analysis staff and responsibilities went to State. Brigadier General John Magruder, a regular Army officer and one of General Donovan’s senior staff officers, was named chief of the Strategic Services Unit.

  One of General Magruder’s early messages to SSU Germany was to ask that Dulles, Frank Wisner, and I remain in place for the present. The plan to establish the OSS headquarters in Berlin had proved unrealistic, and was abandoned as the organization of the occupation armies and civilian governments began to take shape. The SSU headquarters were first established near Wiesbaden but soon moved to Karlsruhe, then Heidelberg, eventually to settle in Frankfurt am Main.

  Dulles’s reputation as OSS’s most successful operative was already widely recognized. It was only later that I learned General Donovan was convinced that Dulles had too little interest in the administrative side of secret intelligence to be an effective chief of an organization as complex as the OSS German Mission was certain to become. It was not until Dulles came back to intelligence work in CIA that it became apparent to others of us that the talents he brought to his personal operational activity never quite equated with his reluctance to concern himself with the administrative burdens of secret intelligence. His skill in exploiting and expanding his range of personal relationships remained unsurpassed.

  We never discussed this at the time, but it was clear that the abrupt and essentially unplanned-for dissolution of OSS, and transfer to the transparently jerry-built and transient SSU organization, hastened a decision that AWD knew he had to make. It had been apparent for some weeks that his personal objectives went well beyond managing an organization scattered across occupied Germany, under the thumb, if not fist, of the military occupation authorities, and with a most uncertain line of command in Washington. There could be no question that Dulles felt most comfortable running things on his own with a minimum of supervision from above.

  Another fact bearing on AWD’s problem was his 1926 decision to resign from the State Department and abandon a promising diplomatic career. Without a personal fortune, he was not prepared to live on the then modest civil service pay scale. In 1945, with three children to support, and a well-honed taste for comfortable living, he faced the same problem. His older brother, John Foster Dulles, had remained with the Sullivan and Cromwell law firm throughout the war, and was now pocketing several times more than Allen could ever hope to earn in government.

  These personal considerations were only part of the problem. Allen Dulles had an intense interest in making sure that the United States would come out of the war with a national intelligence service that would serve it effectively in the future. Would the new service be an independent civilian outfit or merely another obscure unit soon to disappear among the various military intelligence organizations? Or was it possible that the Department of State might tuck secret intelligence away as a hidden component of its other responsibilities? One thing was certain: Allen Dulles wanted to be in on the decision making and doubted very much that his voice could be heard from as far away as Germany.

  I was disappointed but not surprised in October when with very short notice Allen turned the Berlin base over to me and left Berlin for Washington.

  Chapter 6

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  GETTING IN

  By December 1945 the postwar organization of the former OSS offices (Strategic Services Mission to Germany) had taken shape. The Berlin detachment was coming up to speed, and Peter Sichel was well prepared to act as chief of the operations component until my replacement arrived from Washington. I’d been away from my family for a year; there was my son to get to know and serious decisions to be made. It was time for me to leave Berlin.

  Transatlantic flights were long in those days, and as luck had it, Frank Wisner and I traveled together in a Navy aircraft. Frank was my boss, but his offices were in the mission headquarters in Biebrich, and we had spent little time together. The eighteen-hour flight gave me the opportunity to begin to know the man from Laurel, Mississippi. While an honor student at the University of Virginia, Frank had developed enough of a reputation as a runner to be invited to the Olympic track and field trials in 1936. This did not square with Frank’s father’s idea of how a young man should spend his summer vacation. Wisner senior thought that a job in a bottling works would do more for his son’s character than a few weeks of track competition. The family philosophy—that from those to whom much is given, much is expected—was not wasted on young Wisner.

  After law school, Frank joined the Carter Ledyard law firm in New York. Six months before Pearl Harbor, he volunteered for naval service. The outbreak of war and a stretch of naval intelligence office jobs prompted Frank to seek something more active. An introduction by a former professor paved the way for transfer to OSS. After assignments in Cairo and Istanbul, Frank arrived in Bucharest in August 1944 as the last Wehrmacht units were retreating from Romania. He was one of the first OSS officers to come face-to-face with the Russians, and the experience was to shape the rest of his life.

  We were an hour out over the Atlantic when I noticed a Time magazine review of The Age of Jackson by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. I nudged Frank, and asked if by any chance Schlesinger, the historian, might be related to the Corporal Schlesinger who worked with us in Wiesbaden. Frank grimaced, then laughed and said, “Damn it, if I’d had anything to do with it, he would have been promoted.” No doubt about it, OSS had talent to spare.

  Frank and I were convinced that an intelligence service along the lines of General Donovan’s OSS would be essential in the years to come, but neither of us had a clear picture of the progress being made in Washington, or even what the prospects for such a service might be. In the process of resigning my Navy commission as a lieutenant commander, I began to assemble the bits and pieces of what had transpired since September 1945, when President Truman had given OSS ten days to close shop.

  Like most landmark events, the impact of President Truman’s sudden directive had a light side. The morning the termination order was announced at General Donovan’s staff meeting, Rudyard Bolton, a soft-spoken, internationally known ornithologist specializing in Africa, shot up from his chair. Thrusting both arms toward Heaven, he shouted, “Jesus H. Christ, I suppose this means that it’s back to those goddamned birds,” and stumbled from the room. In those days Africa specialists were hard to come by and the professor was to remain with CIA until his retirement.

  When OSS was officially terminated, the White House staff, the Bureau of the Budget, and OSS had not completed any postwar liquidation plans. The resulting confusion triggered a fierce bureaucratic battle for the OSS remains and the eventual respon
sibility for a national intelligence service. The Department of State saw itself as the logical niche for a civilian intelligence function, while the War Department assumed it would run all military intelligence activity and report such political intelligence as it deemed worth collecting. The FBI was determined to cling to its intelligence responsibilities in Latin America and dreamed of extending its authority around the globe. In the White House a few staffers actually thought an intelligence czar might be able to direct, coordinate, and discipline all the existing intelligence components from a perch on the President’s shoulder.

  Scattered among these contesting entities was a handful of civilian and military personnel who could not forget that in the weeks before December 7, 1941, the United States had collected enough information to have shown that the Japanese were planning an attack that might most plausibly fall upon Pearl Harbor. Because there was no central office responsible for collecting and evaluating information, these bits and pieces of intelligence were strewn among codebreakers, the Department of State, War Department, Navy Department, and the White House. Coherent analysis and dissemination was impossible. This fired the determination of these men to create an independent, unified intelligence agency.

  One thing is certain. The notion that CIA was created in response to the Cold War is totally false. The need for a central intelligence authority was clearly perceived long before the postwar ambitions and hostility of the Soviet Union were recognized. Even before the Japanese surrender, the advent of the atomic bomb sharpened the insiders’ conviction that the United States could never again risk another Pearl Harbor.

  Two members of the Truman administration, Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy and Donald Stone of the Bureau of the Budget, cooperated quietly and with great foresight to preserve the most important functions of OSS. Stone transferred the vital OSS Research and Analysis (R & A) branch to the State Department. John McCloy contrived to place the intelligence collection (SI) and counterintelligence (X-2) components in the hastily assembled Strategic Services Unit (SSU), temporarily attached to the War Department, and commanded by Brigadier General John Magruder. Although the War Department would simply have merged the OSS personnel and files with the existing G-2 organizations, McCloy ordered General Magruder to preserve SI and X-2 as “a going operation.” However jerry-built a structure, SSU served to keep the OSS headquarters intact and the remaining OSS field stations in place, to serve as cornerstones of the nation’s first peacetime national intelligence service. American intelligence owes a considerable debt to John McCloy, Donald Stone, and General Magruder for putting the national interest above the parochial ambitions of their parent services.

  Tucked away in SSU, I was spared much of the bruising bureaucratic wear and tear of the struggle for primacy in the intelligence field. By late January 1946, when I resigned my commission as lieutenant commander and doffed the naval uniform I had worn throughout my OSS service, I knew I could no longer postpone a career decision.* Before my return to the United States, and as much as I hated to admit it, my longheld ambition to have my own newspaper had faded. Even the smallest dailies were now beyond any financial means I might be able to raise. The job offered me by the Indianapolis Times did not appeal. More to the point, I now realized that I was hooked on intelligence. The need for an effective intelligence service in the turbulent and anything but benign postwar world seemed obvious. The work was exciting; the prospect of participating in building a new and unique peacetime organization was at the least challenging. The fact that none of us really knew what the career prospects might be added a tingle to the decision. In its bureaucratic limbo, SSU scarcely qualified as a safe career bet, but it was the only game in town that appeared to encompass the best of the OSS legacy—an unmistakable élan, experienced personnel, files, liaison relationships, and an overseas establishment.

  Coincidentally with my as yet unspoken decision, Stephen Penrose, a civilian in charge of espionage and counterintelligence in SSU, and later president of the American University in Beirut, called me to his office. He came straight to the point. Responsibility for Central Europe would be mine for the taking.

  “Central Europe?” I asked.

  “Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary,” he said. Then, with a lingering glance at the map on the wall beside his desk, he added, “And a real handful it’s likely to be.”

  I agreed with his assessment and accepted the job.

  *The OSS personnel roster encompassed four categories. Officers and enlisted men and women from the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps were interspersed with civilians serving at various civil service grade and pay scales. In London, the enlisted personnel who bore responsibilities customarily reserved for commissioned officers were fitted out with civilian clothes. Although denied access to both officer and enlisted clubs and messes, these pseudo-civilians were provided per diem expenses which more than covered housing and subsistence on the economy. Most of those in this category considered it a good deal. They had considerable responsibility and ample compensation. As junior officers in rank-ridden London, they would have the same job, but with the added responsibility of shining their boots and saluting just about every passerby.

  Chapter 7

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  GETTING UNDER WAY

  By the time I had hung my hat in the bare-bones office on the second floor of Q building at the SSU headquarters in the former OSS complex at 2230 E Street, the search for war criminals, former intelligence officers, and hidden Nazi funds had wound down. By February 1946, the accounts with our wartime activists were settled, decorations had been awarded, and agent bonuses and pensions arranged. Most of the OSS training areas—ranging from the torn-up grounds of the Congressional Country Club in Washington to a chunk of Catalina Island in California—had been returned to their well-reimbursed owners. Various cover businesses were liquidated and safehouse rentals relinquished. In comparison with our other problems this had been the easy part.

  The expression “hit the ground running” came to mind when, an hour after I had mastered the combination to my office safe, Stephen Penrose summoned me for a more detailed briefing on my new responsibilities. Along with preserving the essential functions and assets of OSS in Central Europe, reducing personnel and building a cadre of well-qualified staff, reporting on Soviet activity and policies in the Soviet-occupied zones in Germany and Austria, monitoring and penetrating Soviet intelligence in the Allied-occupied areas of Germany and Austria, and reporting on Soviet policy and activity in Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, my branch was also to maintain liaison with Allied security and intelligence services throughout Central Europe. Penrose paused for a moment before adding softly that the Central European branch should also be prepared occasionally “to cope with other, more nearly ad hoc, requirements.”

  There were moments in the months to come when I felt like an apprentice juggler trying to keep an inflated beachball, an open milk bottle, and a loaded submachine gun in the air. The hours were long, but we were all younger in those years.

  A few days after my commitment to SSU, President Truman established the Central Intelligence Group (CIG). Under a director of Central Intelligence, a presidential appointee, the CIG would be responsible to the National Intelligence Authority (NIA), a committee consisting of the secretaries of state, war, and Navy, and chaired by Admiral William Leahy, chief of staff to President Truman. The CIG would correlate and evaluate foreign intelligence reports and prepare daily briefs of the most important material for the President. Rear Admiral Sidney Souers, a Missouri businessman and friend of President Truman’s, was named the first director of Central Intelligence on January 23, 1946. His staff consisted of some eighty officers and clerks on loan from the War and State Departments. With no funds of his own, and dependent upon money from the budgets of its foster parents, CIG appeared to be a disembodied headquarters completely dependent upon the kindness of others.

  Throughout Admiral Souers’s tenure as chief of
the Central Intelligence Group, SSU, with responsibility for espionage and counterintelligence abroad, remained lightly tethered to the War Department and under the direction of General John Magruder and his deputy, Colonel William Quinn.

  The reaction of those of us at the SSU work level, and far removed from the struggles between the contesting departments, was guarded. So far, so good—a national peacetime intelligence organization had been established and its director appointed. But how effectively, we wondered, could CIG function while reporting to a committee (NIA), each member of which was determined that his own agency be given primary responsibility for the future “independent” service? Not the least problem was J. Edgar Hoover—in the wings, but scarcely offstage, and still positioning himself to shanghai CIG and its functions.

  Because OSS was an executive agency, responsible to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, it had been possible to effect informal relationships with the entrenched line bureaucracies—the Bureau of the Budget, Department of State, the Pentagon, FBI, Treasury, and such. In the postwar period these well-established offices were under pressure to cut personnel and budgets, and to get back to handling the nation’s business as usual. Although cover and budget agreements with the Pentagon, State, and the Bureau of the Budget had to be effected, and formal liaison channels established with the FBI and the military intelligence agencies, there was little enthusiasm in the traditional bureaucracies for making ad hoc adjustments to the needs of an organization as nebulous as the Strategic Services Unit.

  An important problem, and not the least of our difficulties, was personnel. At peak strength OSS numbered a few more than 12,000 members, divided between some 9000 in the operational components, 1300 in the research and analysis field, and the remainder in administrative and security support work. These figures included civilian employees and assigned military personnel ranging from private soldiers to general officers. Most of the OSS personnel had no intention of staying in government service. The older members would return to established careers in civilian life; the younger people had college to finish and careers to undertake. Only a few saw the country’s need for our “peculiar service” and were hooked on the challenge it offered. Colonel Quinn referred to the precipitate loss of some 87 percent of our staff as “the mad exodus.” Six months after OSS closed shop, only some 1600 SSU employees remained.