Have We an Intelligence Service?

ANONYMOUS

1

THE American people are being led to believe that they now have an adequate peacetime intelligence service. No one can question the need for such a service, and it is the repeated contention of the Administration that it exists.

This reassuring statement, made in numerous official releases, does not square with the facts. A review of the public statements and official orders regarding intelligence since the end of the war shows that essential assets of the coördinated system which was built up at great expense during the fighting have been scattered to the winds, and that the present agencies operate under handicaps which may have dangerous consequences for this country.

It is not necessary to pry into state secrets to see what is wrong. The public record contains testimony enough that intelligence has been treated as a political football and that the United States again has inadequate sources of information from abroad and inadequate means of handling what it does receive. It begins to look as if events in Europe in the thirties and the shock of Pearl Harbor have taught us little. We are now lapsing into a muddled program which, for all the effort being expended on it, is not effectively better than that which prevailed before t he war.

In the late 1930’s Army and Navy Intelligence functioned as best they could on very limited budgets with very limited objectives. “Spying” was generally considered un-American. Neither service considered intelligence a career requiring special talents, and prestige and promotions did not accrue to those few cranks who took it seriously.

Similar indifference marked the attitude of the Foreign Service toward anything touching on strategic intelligence or any clandestine efforts to obtain it. Documents beginning “I have the honor to inform the Department ...” discreetly reported routine information but were not often designed to go beyond that.

The result of all this indifference and gentility was that by the time of Pearl Harbor the large gaps in our information about Japan were so glaring that the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) and Army Intelligence (G-2) were openly dismayed and embarrassed. Other equally large gaps had meanwhile become apparent to a few preparednessminded citizens, and it was as a preparedness measure—to fill these gaps — that a new agency, the Office of Coördinator of Information, was established in July, 1941, with the primary responsibility of collecting and correlating such information as already was at hand.

In this office the highly experimental efforts of a few men, bot h military and civilian, leaning heavily on British example, pioneered the beginnings of three distinct innovations for this country which have relevance to peacetime intelligence. These were: (1) the gathering of political as well as military information by unorthodox means; (2) the coordination and analysis of this material by experts on specific areas and subjects; and (3) the presentation of the strategic intelligence so obtained by certain new and highly graphic methods. As the war progressed, the office assumed a more active role in combined sabotage and intelligence-gathering operations. It also took on the job of initiating the first American overseas broadcasting under government auspices. Its assumption of a number of sidelines was questioned when they were undertaken, and the office has since been the target of much criticism, both for its excessive cost among the conspicuously costly efforts of the war and for its empire-building tendencies. Nevertheless, its original and effective function as a clearinghouse should be studied by those now charged with our national security.

The job of Coördinator was assigned to that perennially controversial and dynamic figure, William J. Donovan of New York; and with his appointment there began a struggle for control of the new system, which has not ended to this day. Donovan’s appointment seems to have come about through his long-time friend, Colonel Frank Knox, President Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Navy. Knox brought Donovan to Roosevelt’s attention during the winter of 1940-1941. Shortly afterward Donovan went on his famous tour of the Balkans and the Middle East for the President. It was from this trip, taken necessarily as the guest of the British, that Donovan gained his insight into British methods of intelligence and combined operations, including the newer types of psychological warfare then being waged while Britain forged heavier weapons.

Donovan visited the training schools for these operations, and his conviction grew that these methods of desperation being devised by the British would in time help the United States, then almost totally unprepared for war and unaware of the ordeal ahead. His reports to the President on his return convinced the latter that the beginnings of an up-to-date intelligence system could be made without endangering American “neutrality.” Quietly, for him, and with a purposely vague title, the new Coördinator set to work.

2

TAKINTG its cue from British Intelligence, COI set up shop in the State Department. The first job was to recruit men who, by pooling their knowledge of different areas and by analyzing such information as was already available in this country, could produce coördinated intelligence reports. This immense job of sifting and analyzing was given to what was shortly set up as the Research and Analysis Division of COI. President James Phinney Baxter of Williams College took on the organization of this branch and built up the original staff, including such outstanding scholars as Guy Stanton Ford, Edward Meade Earle, R. T. Crane, W. L. Langer, Douglas Miller, Charles F. Remer, Geroid T. Robinson, Richard Hartshorne, Joseph R. Hayden, Conyers Read, Crane Brinton, Edward S. Mason, Calvin B. Hoover, and Burton Fahs.

The professors volunteered for this work enthusiastically; they worked long hours, recruited their ablest students as assistants, and brought into being an organization dedicated to the idea that knowledge is power.

At the same time an inspired group of propagandists began working for COI under Robert Sherwood. They set up our first Foreign Information Service, forerunner of OWI’s Overseas Branch. In 1941-1942 this COI branch played an important part in shaping a new adjunct to the intelligence service. Men like Edmond Taylor, Wallace Deuel, Frederick Oeschsner, John Whitaker, James Warburg, Edd Johnson, and James Barnes were the moving spirits in this office. Their journalistic experience and firsthand knowledge of the psychological warfare then being directed against this country by the Nazi Ministry of Propaganda enabled COI to pioneer intelligently the first American attempt to keep the world informed as to the American position and American aims.

As was to be expected, there were differences of opinion among the members of this galaxy. The eventual split came in the spring of 1942. Sherwood wanted to broadcast only the literal truth and to emphasize only the positive aspects of the American attitude toward fascism. Donovan, and many of t he men around him, saw the possibility of using broadcasts based on foreign intelligence for propaganda of a subtler sort.

There were other points of difference. This was the essential one. The upshot of it all was that broadcasting was taken entirely out of COI in June, 1942, and put into the new Office of War Information. At the same time COI became the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and was placed under the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Many of its top men were then in uniform, and from this time on, it initiated the variety of paramilitary operations which gave it its cloak-and-dagger reputation. But it also began to develop a service which has been less generally understood. This was its fresh approach to the collection of political intelligence by tapping many new sources, and its increasingly expert integration of a mass of stray items into strategic studies in which their relevance and importance became clear. It is this undertaking, so vital even in peace, which has broken down under our system today.

For this situation there seem to be two reasons. One is that the task of analysis is at present assigned to two rival organizations; the other, that most of our war-trained specialists in the work have been allowed to get away and few as competent; have been recruited to take their places. These curable defects contrast sadly with the situation during the war, when, in spite of many acknowledged mistakes, our wartime service made a successful beginning in professional intelligence collection and processing. Its successes were possible because the problem had imaginative appeal and because an unorthodox and rather freewheeling agency could attract talent not likely to gravitate toward the military or old-line offices.

The personnel who assembled within the sprawling environs of Temporary Que Building were bizarre enough to become the object of ridicule and suspicion at awkward moments during the war. But they were to prove their worth. People with foreign backgrounds and languages were essential, and fortunately this country had many of them. Social scientists, anthropologists, geographers, psychologists, were needed to evaluate information in their fields which related to intelligence in a total war. It was also necessary to find recruits with talents for such diverse operations as pipe fitting, typesetting, watchmaking, camouflage design.

There began to be a series of recruiting trips to Army training centers, where the lists were combed for men who could, for example, speak fluent French, learn to operate radio transmitters, and be tough enough to drop behind enemy lines to help organize resistance groups and send out information. These volunteers appeared in Washington and thence were spirited away to special training schools. There they learned the various dark arts of their new trade. They were also put through an elaborate psychological screening process. Those who might break down under stress were sifted out in most cases; those with special aptitudes were directed to special work. Later, as the Far Eastern theaters called for more operators, an orientation course taught by experts on the area was developed.

The story of how intelligence operations were carried on has been told — in my opinion much too frankly — in the various reports of OSS missions in the films, the press, and books during the past two years. We have been presented with a series of thrillers on the screen attesting to the undeniable courage and enterprise of OSS agents abroad. The press was bombarded for a time with choice items from the files describing heroic feats of saboteurs, air rescue teams, and parachutists. Cloak and Dagger,, Into Siam, Undercover Girl, among other volumes, compete with the whodunits in conveying the sense of excitement and mystery surrounding OSS operations around the globe. But what it is important to recall today is not the thrill of successful bridge-blowing and lock-picking, but the fact that in such widely different spots as the Middle East, the Balkans, China, and the northern fastnesses of Assam and Burma, Sweden, and finally in Germany, American agents made their way, established their own chains of information, and were able to signal to their respective headquarters some of the most pertinent items of intelligence obtained during the war.

Their achievements are significant in the story of American Intelligence for several reasons. One is that amateurs could be turned into reliable and productive agents. Another is that imaginative methods often tapped sources not available to military or orthodox operators. A third is that for the first time in many areas our intelligence was obtained firsthand and communicated directly through American channels. In the Middle East, long considered a British preserve, OSS fought and won a long battle to establish the right to send its own signals to its own headquarters in Cairo and Italy. Similarly, in the Far East and Southeast Asia, Americans invaded what had heretofore been almost an exclusively British and Dutch area. The repercussions were rapid and loud. But there, also, the foundations of a wholly independent American intelligence system were laid.

In Washington the findings of all such outposts were the raw but indispensable ingredient of the daily and weekly reports compiled by the analysts and researchers for the war planners. However much might be gleaned and pieced together from library files, from the foreign press and foreign broadcasts, it was this fresh information which gave life and relevance to the strategic studies. By analyzing spot information in conjunction with known geographical, economic, and political facts, it became possible to make reliable evaluations and to develop a body of information on which the planners could rely and on which policy could be based.

3

THIS outline of some of the more obscure achievements of our wartime intelligence omits the spectacular successes of guerrilla and sabotage operations which accompanied it. It is perhaps time to point out that public emphasis on these essentially wartime activities has clouded the long-range value of much of the less sensational work which was accomplished. It seems clear, moreover, that in opening the books so long stamped “secret,” and revealing the more dramatic doings at the front, the wartime intelligence agency signed its own death warrant. It became in the public mind a sabotage organization for which no provision need be made in time of peace.

More serious still, the revelations “blew the cover” of everyone in the agency, to the intense embarrassment of many conscientious members. From the time of the first public releases on OSS exploits it was plain, to the uneasy dissenters from the publicity program, that those identified with the agency would lose their value in any similar service in the future, and that if public recognition of brave achievements must be given, it would be at the future cost of the service.

This is precisely what happened. It does not wholly explain the frantic dispersal of the OSS assets; yet there is no question that the promotional quality of the publicity which flooded the country in late 1945 heralded not only the organization’s successes but also its end. Beyond this there was and is the undeniable political factor which continues to dominate decisions affecting intelligence activity in this country. Traditional rivalries between the services, jealousy on the part of the FBI, entrenched conservatism in the Department of State, have all played a role during the post-war struggle for control of the sources and evaluation mechanism of our intelligence.

Now it is true that in a democracy such as ours public support for an integrated intelligence system is essential. But in spite of the rather regular output of news on the subject during the last two years, it is still not clear to many citizens what peacetime intelligence should attempt to include or which of several approaches to this coverage will best protect this country and possibly prevent a future war. From a perusal of press releases, one gets a picture of confusion reflecting much behindthe-scenes pressure to keep intelligence gathering and evaluation under military control, and a losing battle on the part of veterans of the war experience in this field to husband all the assets possible from the war agency. A calendar of a few important dates tells the story.

In November, 1944, General Donovan addressed to President Roosevelt a memorandum outlining a basic plan for post-war intelligence. In February, 1945, the Washington Times Herald published a verbatim copy of this top-secret document, of which only fifteen copies existed. The comments of the Times Herald were highly critical, charging Donovan with wanting to set up an American Gestapo.

The battle in the press was on. Roosevelt died. The war ended. Donovan, hoping to impress the importance of the cause on the public, let his publicity men go to work. But the handwriting was on the wall. The OSS high command had neglected to take important government officials into their confidence. And they had not built up support — or even an understanding of their primary functions — in Congress. An appropriation for the rest of 1945 hung in the balance. Donovan’s offer, on September 4, to liquidate the agency in orderly fashion and resign by January, 1946, was answered by an announcement on September 20 that the major functions of the organization would be transferred at once to the Department of State. President Truman’s statement said that he was doing this as a step toward setting up a “comprehensive and integrated” peacetime foreign intelligence program. Yet the order explicitly divided the existing integrated agency, putting Presentation and Research and Analysis, the two former processing divisions of OSS, under Secretary Byrnes, and the intelligencegathering units under the War Department. So much for the first move toward “integration.”

4

THE battle of the press continued, high-lighted in October by a reported statement from General Marshall before the Senate Military Affairs Committee. Marshall stressed the importance of intelligence to a unified military command, which he favored. Asserting that such information as could be picked up “by attachés over coffee cups” was not sufficient, he stated the essentials of a peacetime service very clearly: “We should know as much as possible about the intent, as well as the military capabilities of every country in the world. We must know the facts for our own defense.”

The General suggested a joint agency to get these facts, to include both the armed forces and the State Department. From his testimony it was plain that he envisioned a unified service made possible by the merging of military top commands.

A month later Secretary Byrnes appointed Colonel Alfred McCormack, a New York corporation lawyer credited with revitalizing G-2 during the war, to be Assistant Secretary of State in Charge of Research and Intelligence. Under him were the two branches of OSS assigned to State, which, however, were now cut off from their previous sources of information, since these had been put under the War Department. However, McCormack’s role was officially described as a crucial one in “unifying” our intelligence system, so it was legitimate to hope for the best.

It soon became apparent that his effort to establish a real intelligence arm within State was going to run into many snags. One evidence of his difficulties was the broadcast to which old OSS hands, drilled in strictest security, listened in amazed surprise on the evening of December 22, 1945. McCormack must have reached the conclusion that if he hoped to accomplish anything within the terms of his directive, he too must appeal to the public for backing and reassure the Department of State that no fancy cloak-and-dagger tactics were contemplated. There can be no other explanation for his disarming statement that our intelligence was to be conducted by no large and expensive agency at the top, but largely by interdepartmental working committees under a National Intelligence Authority. No explanation was made of the fact, known to every member of the government, that interdepartmental committees are the most unwieldy of all government structures.

It remained for the then Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs to put the finishing touch on this picture. He followed Colonel McCormack on the air to say that he believed the “intelligence we get about foreign countries should be shared generally with members of the American public . . . to help them understand other peoples”! The reactions of security-conscious military minds to this last can be readily imagined.

Nevertheless, in January, 1946, a National Intelligence Authority was set up by executive order, to be assisted by a Central Intelligence Group (CIG). The next day the President appointed Admiral Sidney W. Souers, a Missouri businessman who had served in this country with ONI during the war, to be Director of CIG. Admiral Souers was directed to “coordinate Army, Navy and State Department intelligence reports” and to present them “in usable form” to the President and top policy-makers. Yet the war-trained experts in analysis of reports were still assigned to the Department of State. Would they now revert to CIG?

No answer came from CIG’s new chief. But his appointment clearly spelled the end of Colonel McCormack’s coördinating functions. The latter continued, however, to fight for intelligence gathering in State. In this he was unalterably opposed by those veteran opposers in the Department whose faith in the reporting done by the Foreign Service remains untarnished. Their arguments won the day; and the Department’s disposition of its unwelcome stepchild, the Research and Analysis unit, was the classic one of dividing it further by distributing its various sections among the Geographic Offices. With the order for tin’s dispersal in April, 1946, Colonel McCormack resigned. And until the reversal of this order, nearly a year later, under Secretary of State Marshall, the analysts were left to cool their heels and derive what information they could from the time-honored channels of diplomacy and the daily press.

While all of this was going on in State, the splintered fragments of the intelligence-gathering branches, now designated as the Strategic Services Unit (SSU) of the War Department, were being liquidated as fast as possible under combined pressures from rival old-line services and lack of funds. The duties of liquidation fell to General John Magruder, who was that rare bird, a regular Army officer with long training in intelligence and a flair for it. In February, 1946, General Magruder resigned, exhausted by his efforts to hold together the remaining elements of what had been a coördinated service. The carefully built chains of information and communication, the expensively trained, handpicked personnel, and the integrated system of collection and analysis were a legacy which he felt it his duty to preserve, in so far as they were still usable, for the country. Instead the chains were broken (and often exposed) by hasty recall of key personnel, who frequently arrived in Washington to be dismissed without making full reports, since the Washington reports staffs were decimated and the analysts and specialists languishing in State were now barred from handling SSU reports.

It is at this point that the pretense of a coördinated intelligence system breaks down. And to date, in spite of some liaison efforts between the heads of intelligence in State and the chiefs of SSU’s successor offices, CIG and now CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), there remains this same fundamental cleavage. The barrier which still prevents the analysts in State from having access to all political intelligence from abroad creates a situation in which State — theoretically responsible for foreign policy — is by-passed by a rival agency’s analyses, which go directly to the White House. For CIA’s solution to the evaluation problem has been to set up a whole new staff of researchers and analysts, the product of whose efforts goes to the President each morning as the distillation of the previous day’s most important intelligence.

Basically this situation reflects the divergent points of view of the military men, who have continuously dominated CIG and CIA, and of the Department of State; and makes it clear that the Administration places increasing reliance on the military in all matters affecting intelligence, even including political intelligence. The continuing activity of G-2 in collecting and evaluating political material is significant.

An extremely important function of government is at stake here. For, even though they may have the best will in the world, military men, with rare exceptions, cannot help thinking in military terms. That is their job. The country’s safety and preparedness for emergencies must be their business. Military intelligence is their business. The question now is whether their judgment of political information is to take precedence over that of specialists normally charged with the important task of framing foreign policy for peace. Admitting that the alarm felt in Washington over national security is fully justified, and that a greater degree of preparedness than we have ever before acknowledged is necessary, the question still remains: Are we best protected by turning over the assessment of nonmilitary intelligence to the military and on untrained group of civilian assistants?

It must be realized that our present Central Intelligence Agency not only has undertaken to become a clearinghouse and evaluation service, but has continued to be an intelligence-gathering agency. It is therefore in a unique and powerful position for a peacetime agency, and the qualifications of its staff are a matter of prime importance. This is particularly true if CIA is to continue to fulfill functions heretofore assigned to the Department of State.

To carry on the many functions which it has assumed, CIA has drawn heavily on new personnel. Granting the inadvisability of retaining agents exposed by the OSS publicity spree, or of maintaining chains which had been infiltrated by foreign agents, it would seem of vital importance to try to hold those not so affected and to attract additions of the highest quality to the new staff. Instead many who remained after the war, hoping to be of service and keenly interested in this new profession, were encouraged to leave; and the quality of their replacements often seems doubtful.

The record as to leadership since the war’s end is not encouraging: in SSU, CIG, CIA, four chiefs, all military, in two years; in State, five heads of intelligence in the same period. Clearly something is wrong with this picture. For only seasoned specialists know how to fit seemingly unrelated items of information into a meaningful pattern. As G. S. Pettee remarks, in The Future of American Secret Intelligence, “Whatever personnel is available for . . . analytic work, it is of absolute importance that those who supervise ... be capable of understanding the structure of problems which extend across several fields of expert knowledge.” How many such persons are in our service today?