Ike's Spies

by Stephen E. Ambrose

Eisenhower expressed his private thoughts on the subject from time to time in his diary. On January 27, 1949, he recorded, “Jim. F. [James Forrestal, Secretary of Defense] and I have agreed to try to keep the minds of all centered on the main facts of our present existence.

  (a) The free world is under threat by the monolithic mass of Communistic Imperialism.

  (b) The U.S. must wake up to prepare a position of strength from which it can speak serenely and confidently.”6

  And on June 11, 1949, shortly after Forrestal’s tragic death, he wrote, “There is no use trying to decide exactly what I thought of Jim Forrestal. But one thing I shall always remember. He was the one man who, in the very midst of the war, always counselled caution and alertness in dealing with Soviets. He visited me in ’44 and in ’45 and I listened carefully to his thesis—I never had cause to doubt the accuracy of his judgments on this point. He said ‘Be courteous and friendly in the effort to develop a satisfactory modus vivendi—but never believe we have changed their basic purpose, which is to destroy representative government.’ ”7

  *

  * U.S. scientists had estimated that it would take the Russians about four years to develop the bomb. Thus, as far as the scientists were concerned, espionage played a small role. To the politicians, however, the spies’ role seemed crucial.4

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The Birth and Early Years of the CIA, 1945–53

  FALL, 1944. President Franklin Roosevelt asks General Donovan of the OSS to send him a secret memorandum on the subject of a postwar intelligence service. “When our enemies are defeated,” Donovan writes in response, “the demand will be equally pressing for information that will aid us in solving the problems of peace.” Accordingly, he proposes that FDR take immediate action to transform the OSS into a “central intelligence service” that will report directly to the President. The OSS, Donovan declares, has “the trained and specialized personnel needed for the task. This talent should not be dispersed.”1

  DONOVAN’S PROPOSAL WAS SIMPLE, straightforward, logical. He hoped it would be implemented directly upon the defeat of the Nazis, with Donovan in command. But the gestation period was years, not months, and by the time the CIA emerged, Donovan was long since gone.

  He had been done in by America’s most imposing bureaucrat, possibly the most feared man in Washington, the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover, ponderous, single-minded, and pugnacious, was a builder of empires. He wanted the FBI to be the most powerful agency in Washington, and he knew that the key to achieving his goal was by monopolizing intelligence. He who had the inside information had everything. At the beginning of the war, Hoover had tried to obtain for the FBI the exclusive right to collect and analyze intelligence on a worldwide basis. Donovan protested that domestic and foreign clandestine activities had to be handled by separate agencies. Roosevelt, in his usual fashion, decided to split the difference; he gave Donovan Europe and Asia while reserving South America for the FBI.

  Donovan’s partial victory strengthened Hoover’s distrust of the OSS. Representatives of the British Secret Service in Washington were amazed to find that “Hoover keenly resented Donovan’s organization from the moment it was established.” The feud continued. Richard Harris Smith, author of an excellent history of the OSS, records that in 1942 Donovan’s agents secretly broke into the Spanish Embassy in Washington and began photographing the code books. Hoover, furious at this invasion of his operational territory, waited until Donovan’s men made another nocturnal entry into the embassy. While they were taking photographs, two FBI squad cars pulled up outside the embassy and turned on their sirens. Donovan’s agents fled. Donovan protested to FDR, but rather than reprimand Hoover for his action, Roosevelt ordered the embassy infiltration project turned over to the FBI.2

  Jabbing and sparring between the OSS and the FBI continued through the war. Late in 1944, Hoover saw a chance to rid himself of the OSS and Donovan for good. He seized the opportunity. He somehow acquired a copy of Donovan’s recommendations for a postwar intelligence service and, in a flagrant breach of security, leaked the top-secret document to the bitterly anti-Roosevelt Chicago Tribune. The Tribune’s Walter Trohan then wrote a series of sensational articles, under even more sensational headlines, about Donovan’s plans for a “super-spy system” in the “postwar New Deal.” Trohan charged that Donovan wanted to create an “all-powerful intelligence service to spy on the postwar world and to pry into the lives of citizens at home.… The unit would operate under an independent budget and presumably have secret funds for spy work.”3

  A predictable congressional uproar resulted. One conservative congressman declared, “This is another indication that the New Deal will not halt in its quest for power. Like Simon Legree it wants to own us body and soul.” Roosevelt decided it would be expedient to back off; the White House had Donovan’s proposal put on the table. In April 1945, FDR decided to revive it, but a week later he was dead.

  Roosevelt’s successor, Harry Truman, was, unlike Roosevelt, no friend of Donovan’s, and at the beginning of his administration Truman was hardly strong enough to take on the redoubtable Hoover. In addition, Truman was determined to reduce the federal budget, which meant eliminating wartime agencies. When his venerable and conservative Director of the Budget, Harold Smith, indicated that a great deal of money could be saved by abolishing the OSS and putting its agents and activities into the hands of the older, established departments of the Navy, War, and State, Truman acted. Boldly declaring that America had no need for a peacetime “Gestapo,” on September 20, 1945, Truman issued an executive order disbanding the Office of Strategic Services.4

  The older departments were all delighted to have the OSS functions assigned to them, naturally enough, although they were resentful of the freewheeling Donovan agents who came along with the assignment. The covert and espionage side of OSS went to the War Department as a so-called Strategic Services Unit, but this was nothing more than a caretaker body to preside over the liquidation of the OSS espionage net. The Research and Analysis Branch of OSS went to State, where it was quickly decimated by congressional and presidential budget cutting, coupled with the hostility of older State Department hands. Assistant Secretary of State Spruille Braden told a congressional committee, “We resisted this invasion of all these swarms of people … mostly collectivists and ‘do-gooders’ and what-nots.”5

  The conservative reaction that dominates Washington after all of America’s wars (best summed up by Warren Harding’s classic call for a “return to normalcy”) represented a hope for, rather than a realistic appreciation of, the future. Truman, like millions of his fellow citizens, yearned for “normalcy,” which meant a return to isolationism. An isolationist America would not need huge military budgets or secret spy agencies.

  Almost immediately, however, Truman realized that he was wrong. America could not escape the world, and to be effective in dealing with other countries, the United States had to have a centralized intelligence service, just as it had to have a more centralized military establishment, the Truman Doctrine, and the Marshall Plan, The attack at Pearl Harbor was a surprise because the Army and Navy frequently acted as if they were at war with each other, and because a fragmented intelligence apparatus, dominated by the military, had been unable to distinguish “signals” from “noise,” let alone make its assessments available to senior officers in time for them to act.

  In January 1946, therefore, Truman issued a presidential directive establishing the Central Intelligence Group. The CIG had a director of Central Intelligence, selected by the President, and was responsible for coordination, planning, evaluation, and dissemination of intelligence. It sounded impressive, but in fact the CIG’S budget and personnel were drawn from War, Navy, and State, which meant that the old departments retained their autonomy over their own intelligence operations and thus had control over the CIG.6

  This was an obviously unsatisfactory situation. The military intelligence services je
alously guarded their sources while continuing to insist on their right to provide policy guidance to the President. In the words of a later Senate committee, the military thereby made the “CIG’S primary mission an exercise in futility.”7 Not only would the armed services not provide information on overseas events, they would not even tell the CIG what American capabilities and intentions were. The State Department was equally unwilling to cooperate with the CIG. From the White House point of view, by 1947 America’s intelligence organizations were no better coordinated, nor more professional, than they had been in 1941. It was as if there were no lessons to be learned from Pearl Harbor.

  Change was clearly needed. It came in July 1947 with the passage of the National Security Act, a broadly based piece of legislation that established the basic defense organization for the United States for the Cold War. The act separated the Air Force from the Army, gave the Joint Chiefs of Staff a statutory basis, made an attempt to integrate the services by creating the office of Secretary of Defense, and provided the President with a committee responsible directly to him, the National Security Council (NSC).

  One part of the act changed the name of CIG to Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and, more important, made it an independent department, responsible to the NSC (and thus directly to the President), not to the Secretary of Defense. The act assigned five general tasks to the CIA: (1) to advise the NSC on matters related to national security; (2) to make recommendations to the NSC regarding the coordination of intelligence activities of the departments; (3) to correlate and evaluate intelligence and provide for its appropriate dissemination; (4) to carry out “service of common concern,” and (5) “to perform such other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security as the NSC will from time to time direct.”8

  The last function was decisive in giving the CIA a major and controversial role in the Cold War. It had been hotly debated and was deliberately worded vaguely because neither the Executive nor the Legislative branch of government could bring themselves to forthrightly advocate or authorize covert actions by the CIA. As George Kennan of the State Department later recalled, “We were alarmed at the inroads of the Russian influence in Western Europe beyond the point where the Russian troops had reached. And we were alarmed particularly over the situation in France and Italy. We felt that the Communists were using the very extensive funds that they then had in hand to gain control of key elements of life in France and Italy, particularly the publishing companies, the press, the labor unions, student organizations, women’s organizations, and all sort of organizations of that sort, to gain control of them and use them as front organizations.…

  “That was just one example that I recall of why we thought that we ought to have some facility for covert operations.”9

  Combining intelligence gathering and covert actions in one agency represented a victory for the Donovan heritage, as Edmond Taylor, an OSS veteran, pointed out in 1969. The OSS, Taylor wrote, established “a precedent, or a pattern, for United States intervention in the revolutionary struggles of the postwar age. The Donovan influence on U.S. foreign and military policy has continued to be felt ever since his death; for good or ill he left a lasting mark on the nation’s power elite. However indirectly, many of our latter-day Cold War successes, disasters, and entrapments can ultimately be traced back to him.”10 Another OSS veteran, Francis Miller, agreed. “The CIA,” he wrote in 1971, “inherited from Donovan his lopsided and mischievous preoccupation with action and the Bay of Pigs was one of the results of that legacy.”11

  According to critics, assigning the CIA a covert action responsibility was a twofold mistake. First, it gave license to an agency of the U. S. Government to carry out operations that were clearly illegal and, more often than not, counterproductive. Sabotage and subversion were one thing in wartime, another altogether during a period of general peace.

  Truman himself spoke to this point in 1963, when he declared in a syndicated newspaper interview, “For some time I have been disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the government.…

  “I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak-and-dagger operations. Some of the complications and embarrassment that I think we have experienced are in part attributable to the fact that this quiet intelligence arm of the President has been removed from its intended role that it is being interpreted as a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue—and a subject for cold war enemy propaganda.”12

  Kennan echoed Truman’s complaint. “It ended up with the establishment within CIA of a branch, an office for activities of this nature, and one which employed a great many people,” he declared in 1975. “It did not work out at all the way I had conceived it.… ” Kennan said he had thought “that this would be a facility which could be used when and if an occasion arose when it might be needed. There might be years when we wouldn’t have to do anything like this. But if the occasion arose we wanted somebody in the Government who would have the funds, the experience, the expertise to do these things and to do them in a proper way.”13

  The second error in combining intelligence gathering and covert operations was that, inevitably, covert ops (as they came to be known) took precedence over intelligence collection, especially in the mind of the director of the CIA. The one was dull, scholarly, painstaking work; the other was exciting and dramatic, providing immediate and tangible benefits and giving its practitioners prestige and glamour. Thus, critics charge, the irresistible tendency in the CIA has been to concentrate on the sensational covert action rather than the practical, but far more important, task of collecting and analyzing information.

  In its first three years, under Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter as Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), the CIA engaged in a few selected covert activities. The first was an intervention into the Italian elections of April 1948. There was a great fear in Washington that Italy was on the verge of going Communist, by popular vote, which would have been an absolute disaster for American foreign policy, a policy based on Truman’s containment doctrine (announced in 1947) and the Marshall Plan for European recovery. Dominoes were not yet being used as an analogy, but Assistant Secretary of State Dean Acheson did speak about rotten apples infecting the whole barrel. If Italy went Communist, Acheson argued, then France would go, and then West Germany, and then the Low Countries, and then Britain. America would stand alone, an island in a Communist world.

  The Communist coup in Czechoslovakia in February 1948 was the event that shocked the free world into action. Nearly everyone remembered Hitler and Munich ten years earlier, and feared that the Red Army was about to march across Europe, as the Wehrmacht had done.

  With the stakes so high, no wonder the Truman administration decided to act, especially since this first action was benign (“benign” in the sense that it was done not to overthrow an existing government but to support it). The Russians were known to be pouring money into the treasury of the Italian Communist Party; what could be more natural than an effort to counter that program? The NSC recommended to Truman that the United States provide campaign funds for the pro-Western Christian Democratic Party. Truman accepted the recommendation and authorized the CIA to contribute about one million dollars to the Christian Democrats. When they won the election, the CIA naturally took credit for the victory.14

  What a bargain! For a paltry million dollars, Italy and Western Europe were saved. Or so at least the CIA could and did argue. It was a cautious, conservative venture into covert ops, but it was a start.

  The next year, 1949, Congress passed the Central Intelligence Agency Act, which exempted the CIA from all federal laws requiring the disclosure or the “functions, names, official titles, salaries, or numbers of personnel employed by the Agency,” and gave the DCI power to spend money “without regard to the provisions of law and regulations relating to the expenditure of government funds �
�� such expenditures to be accounted for solely on the certificate of the director.”15

  With unlimited funds available, and no accounting required, the CIA began secretly to subsidize democratic organizations throughout Western Europe—labor unions, political parties, magazines, newspapers, professional associations, and so forth. Overall, the assistance program was a great success, enthusiastically supported by those few congressmen who knew about it and by every President from Truman to Nixon.

  But the CIA’s main reason for existence was not to provide a funnel for pouring money into the hands of America’s European allies—it was, rather, to provide early warning of a Soviet attack. What came to seem absurd to later generations—that the Red Army would one day, without warning or provocation, cross the Elbe River and march into Western Europe—seemed in 1948 to be not only possible but even probable. That fateful year of 1948, the year of the Czech coup and the Italian elections and the Marshall Plan, also saw Stalin’s attempt to drive the West out of Berlin by imposing a blockade on the German capital. In a now famous telegram, General Lucius Clay, Ike’s successor as commander of American forces in Germany, declared, “Within the last few weeks, I have felt a subtle change in Soviet attitude which I cannot define but which now gives me a feeling that it [war] may come with dramatic suddenness.”16

  The 1948 war scare enhanced the CIA’S growing reputation. U. S. Army intelligence flatly predicted an imminent Soviet invasion, “imminent” meaning within a matter of weeks, if not days. The CIA dissented. In the agency’s view, based on its information, drawn mainly from agents behind the Iron Curtain, the Red Army was not ready to march. There was no need to panic. Time proved the CIA analysis correct.

  To get advance information on Soviet intentions, the CIA began a program of overflights of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Big, lumbering C-47s would parachute agents behind the enemy lines. The agents were political refugees from Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and elsewhere, men willing to risk their lives to fight communism. Their main function was to provide information on Soviet troop movements, mobilization activities, and other military intelligence. This program, according to the agent in charge, “was never cleared with the Department of State, though presumably it was with the President, and only in the early fifties was the Secretary of State informed.”17 Of course, the Russians knew about the illegal overflights, which were monitered by Soviet ground crews. Occasionally they shot at some, but the C-47s survived every flight.