I learned this today. The CIA was formed on September 18th, 1947.
The idea behind some kind of agency to manage intelligence seems to have started after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. America was caught unawares by the attack and a lot of people said that they should have had some idea. At the time, foreign intelligence was gathered and analyzed by the State Department, the FBI, and all of the branches of the military. They didn’t coordinate with each other. Intelligence of the attack on Pearl Harbor had been discovered. The US Navy had cracked the Japanese codes and the FBI had observed Japanese diplomats in Hawaii acting suspiciously. However, these, and other pieces of information, were never put together. A central hub of intelligence could have taken all of that information, analyzed it, and perhaps made the conclusion that there was going to be an attack.
On July 11th, 1941, President Roosevelt realized that he really needed an organization to consolidate all of the foreign intelligence and offer informed recommendations. He took advice from the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) and formed the Office of the Coordinator of Information. It was headed by a World War 1 hero called General William “Wild Bill” Donovan, who is known as the father of the intelligence service.
They quickly realized that this wouldn’t be enough to coordinate the masses of information that were coming in. On June 13th, 1942, Roosevelt formed the Office of Strategic Services. This was the direct forerunner to the CIA.
During the war, General Donovan built the OSS up to a staff of close to 15,000 people. They went behind enemy lines to saboteur, collect information, spread disinformation, and recruit resistance fighters.
By the end of the war, President Truman, who had replaced Roosevelt when he died, decided that there was no need for the OSS in peace times and he disbanded it. The work that the OSS had done was split between different organizations. However, the rise of the Soviet Union shortly after the end of the Second World War persuaded Truman that he might need an intelligence agency after all.
On January 22nd, 1946, President Truman created the Central Intelligence Group. It was responsible for intelligence, but it was held back by the Department of State and the armed forces. They didn’t want to give up and share intelligence.
Truman realized that this wasn’t working and, against opposition from the Department of State and the military, he signed the National Security Act of 1947. This created the Central Intelligence Agency which came into being on September 18th, 1947.
The act that created the CIA, also called for a Director of the CIA. The person who fills the seat is the president’s advisor on all intelligence matters. The first director was Roscoe H Hillenkoetter. He was a rear admiral and didn’t want the job at the CIA. After several public failures (more the CIA’s than his) he was relieved of his post. The first failure was predicting the Soviet Union wouldn’t be able to make a nuclear weapon until the mid 1950s. When the USSR tested a nuclear weapon in 1949, the CIA not only didn’t expect it, they didn’t even detect it. The second failure was assuring Truman they would be aware of any invasion by the North Koreans before it happened. In the end, North Korea invaded South Korea without the CIA having any knowledge of it.
Since then, the CIA has had a mixed bag of successes and failures. They have also, I’m sure, had a lot of other successes and failures that we have never heard about. Since 1948, the CIA has been involved in 27 separate attempts to effect regime change in different countries. And these are only the ones that are listed on Wikipedia. I’m sure there are others that aren’t listed.
In 1949, Truman signed the Central Intelligence Agency Act, which allowed the CIA to covertly fund intelligence operations. To allow this, the agency was given access to a secret budget. This is known as the “black budget” and is always secret, being kept off the balance sheets for the US government. Nobody knows what is in it. Except, in 2013, Edward Snowden leaked the budget to the Washington Post. The budget for that year was $52.6 billion and the CIA controlled 16 spy agencies and over 107,000 employees spread across the world. That is quite an increase from the small start at the start of World War 2.
The CIA’s homepage describes the agency as “the Nation’s eyes, ears, and sometimes, its hidden hand.” And their motto is “And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.” (John 8:32). I’m not sure if the irony is intentional.
So, the CIA started as a need to consolidate intelligence during World War 2. The agency might have been done away with if the USSR hadn’t risen and the Cold War started. And this is what I learned today.
Photo By United States Federal government – http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/50/403m.html
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Intelligence_Agency
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Central_Intelligence_Agency
https://www.history.com/topics/us-government/history-of-the-cia