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A Look Back …Creating the CIA: A New Instrument of Government
At the beginning of the Cold War, looking back to the lessons of Pearl Harbor, Congress and President Harry S. Truman approved the creation of a peacetime intelligence service. This new organization, deliberately fashioned to be independent of all the Cabinet departments and military services, was to provide senior U.S. policymakers with comprehensive judgments on political and military issues and to coordinate clandestine activities overseas.
Washington thus created an agency dedicated to collecting and analyzing the secrets of actual or potential adversaries. Intelligence had become an essential permanent component of America’s national security structure.
America's Intelligence Makeover
The U.S. government did not easily
embrace worldwide intelligence activities after World War I. Washington had
never employed spy networks outside of wartime. But senior planners were
concerned and influenced by the global ambitions of the Soviet
Union. The recognition that America was facing powerful new
threats spurred efforts to maintain clandestine assets and actively seek out
enemy secrets.
America's intelligence makeover was more complicated than
simply recruiting agents.
The wartime Office
of Strategic Services (OSS),
headed by the dynamic William J. “Wild Bill” Donovan, provided one model for a
foreign intelligence organization. The OSS
conducted espionage, analysis, covert action and counterintelligence. But,
deemed unnecessary and unworkable at war’s end by President Truman, the OSS was disbanded in
October 1945. Many of its responsibilities were transferred to the Departments
of War and State.
Establishing the Central Intelligence Group
Convinced of the need for an independent intelligence organization,
Truman established the Central
Intelligence Group (CIG) in January 1946. The CIG, headed by a Director of
Central Intelligence (DCI), was responsible for “coordination, planning,
evaluation, and dissemination of intelligence,” as well as the provision of
“services of common concern.”
![](https://webarchive.library.unt.edu/eot2008/20090505235913im_/https://www.cia.gov/news-information/featured-story-archive/2008-featured-story-archive/Souers.jpg)
- Rear Adm. Sidney S. Souers
Funding and staff would come from existing
government organizations, which would continue to develop their own intelligence
products. The military and State Department maintained their independent
intelligence capabilities and access to the President and other senior
government leaders.
The new DCI, Rear Adm. Sidney
S. Souers, with no budget or personnel authority, was hardly in a position to
take control of U.S.
intelligence. Indeed, observed a 1976 Congressional report, “institutional
resistance made implementation virtually impossible. The military intelligence
services jealously guarded both their information and what they believed were
their prerogatives in providing policy guidance to the President, making CIG's
primary mission an exercise in futility.”
![](https://webarchive.library.unt.edu/eot2008/20090505235913im_/https://www.cia.gov/news-information/featured-story-archive/2008-featured-story-archive/Vandenberg.jpg)
- Lt. Gen. Hoyt S. Vandenberg
Lt. Gen. Hoyt S. Vandenberg, appointed DCI in June 1946, brought
greater rank, influence and bureaucratic savvy to CIG. Within months,
Vandenberg strengthened the analytical Office of Research and Evaluation (ORE)
and, flush with funding and personnel authorizations, increased CIG manning by
threefold to some 400 employees. At the same time, the CIG received authority to
establish a clandestine collection capability.
Building on the Strategic
Services Unit (SSU), a War Department organization with former OSS personnel and facilities, DCI Vandenberg
created the Office of Special Operations (OSO). By the end of 1946, CIG’s staff
topped 1,800. At the highest levels of government, however, the CIG continued
to lack influence.
National Security Act of 1947
The creation of a truly
independent and permanent central intelligence organization focused on
strategic issues required legislation. Specifically, the Administration made
use of the big military “unification” bill by which Truman sought to modernize
what he called America’s
“antiquated defense setup.” This bill—the National Security Act of 1947—established
a Secretary of Defense and an independent Air Force.
At Vandenberg’s urging,
the White House also agreed to include language founding the Central
Intelligence Agency. The authorization was brief and unspecific, but the CIA
was born.
Posted: Sep 18, 2008 01:43 PM
Last Updated: Sep 18, 2008 01:44 PM
Last Reviewed: Sep 18, 2008 01:43 PM