By January 1946, the bond between Harry Truman and William Leahy strengthened to the point of friendship. It was not nearly as intense or emotionally reliant as the admiral’s relationship with Franklin Roosevelt, but it was real. Truman had begun to routinely include Leahy in his leisurely outings with friends, and two weeks into the new year, the president reiterated his desire that Leahy remain his chief of staff “indefinitely.”1
Yet one doubt about Truman still lingered in Leahy’s mind. At times, the president could act in ways the admiral considered undignified, even silly.2 On January 24, Truman hosted an Oval Office ceremony to award Samuel Rosenman a medal of merit. Afterward, the White House staff decamped for lunch in the president’s study. During the meal, Truman stood, beaming with pride, and produced a flowing false mustache, a black cloak, and a wooden dagger. He thrust these props on a startled William Leahy. Then the president brought out a large black hat and another cloak and dagger, which were given to Adm. Sidney Souers, who was serving as the deputy director of naval intelligence.3 Suitably pleased with himself, the president read aloud an announcement—perfectly calibrated for a local Moose Lodge gathering.
To My Brethren and Fellow Dog House Denizens:
By virtue of the authority vested in me as Top Dog, I require and charge that Front Admiral William D. Leahy and Rear Admiral Sidney W. Souers, receive and accept the vestments and appurtenances of their respective positions, namely as Personal Snooper and Director of Centralized Snooping. In accepting these symbols of trust and confidence, I charge each of you not only to seek to better our foreign relations through more intensive snooping but also to keep me informed constantly of the movements and actions of the other, for without such coordination there can be no order and no era of mutual trust.4
One can imagine Leahy in that moment, wearing the false mustache, the ridiculous black cape draped around his shoulders, clutching the childish wooden dagger, fondly remembering the patrician dignity of Franklin Roosevelt. Though the ceremony itself was juvenile, Truman was marking something quite serious. He was naming Leahy his personal representative to, and Souers as the first director of, the newly formed Central Intelligence Group, the founding organization of what would become the CIA.*
Leahy was an obvious choice for Truman, as the admiral had been the president’s original purveyor of intelligence since he had assumed office. During the final months of his administration, Truman recounted to a group of CIA officers how the agency was born, saying, “I had a conversation with Admiral Leahy, and suggested to him that there should be a Central Intelligence Agency, for the benefit of the whole government as well as for the benefit of the President, so he could be informed. And the Admiral and I proceeded to try and work out a program. It has worked very successfully.”5
Leahy’s influence over the early CIA was pervasive, from determining its structure to selecting its leadership. He was responsible for the selection of its first three directors, Souers, Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg, and Adm. Roscoe Hillenkoetter, the first and last of whom had served under Leahy in Vichy France, and he did his best to guide its operations. One of the earliest officers assigned to the Central Intelligence Group was Adm. Arthur McCollum, a naval intelligence specialist who described Leahy as the “father-confessor” of the early CIA, admitting that Leahy, more than Souers, controlled events. “The moving force behind it was Admiral Leahy,” McCollum recalled, “who was still acting as Chief of Staff to the President and was very much interested in a thorough-going intelligence organization being set-up and functioning. As I mentioned before, the general feeling in Washington, and I don’t know why, was that the OSS had outlived its usefulness.”6
McCollum’s ignorance about the circumstances behind the elimination of the OSS—the Office of Strategic Services, America’s wartime intelligence service—was another example of Leahy’s discretion. The admiral was more responsible than anyone else for the downfall of the OSS, run by its famous director William “Wild Bill” Donovan. Leahy’s hostility had everything to do with his views of what an intelligence agency should do and what it should avoid. In his view, the purpose of an intelligence service was to provide information to allow the political and military leadership to plan wisely in its quest to keep the country safe. He was skeptical of the value of covert operations or interfering in the actions of other states. In his experience, covert operations were expensive and rarely productive.
His time in Vichy only confirmed these prejudices. The intelligence collected from a wide range of sources within the Pétain government had been helpful, yet he saw little merit in the different schemes proposed by the OSS. In 1944, when asked to vet an internal State Department report on US-Vichy relations between 1940 and 1942, Leahy thought the report accurate except for its “undue stress” on the OSS’s “subversive activities.”7
Leahy was particularly damning of the OSS during the war. Donovan either met with Leahy or sent representatives to him on a regular basis, trying to demonstrate what a useful job his spooks were doing. Leahy was unmoved. In January 1944, he recorded, “Brigadier Magruder and Colonel Buxton of the O.S.S. called to acquaint me with some information collected by secret agents in Europe, all of which is interesting and most of which is of doubtful authenticity.”8
Leahy’s doubts drove him to limit OSS influence, cutting the organization entirely out of the loop at important times. In March 1944, he forbade the OSS from playing any role in the peace negotiations that were going on with eastern European governments desperately trying to abandon their Nazi allies.9 A few months later, on behalf of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Leahy used his influence with Roosevelt to keep the OSS from developing its own industrial espionage arm.10 Roosevelt, at the same time, started using Leahy and the Joint Chiefs for many major intelligence jobs. In March 1944, in a personal letter to Leahy, Roosevelt handed over all power to control US cryptanalysis operations—code breaking—to the chiefs.11 One of the last memoranda the president would ever send Leahy was a request for the admiral’s views on the future setup of the American intelligence service.12
Part of the problem for Leahy was Donovan himself, about whom he harbored personal doubts. In Wild Bill, Leahy saw a self-important fantasist. Right before the Torch landings, Donovan had assured him that if the OSS were given $2 million, it would be able to convince fourteen French divisions to come over to the American side.13 By March 1945, Leahy was writing about Donovan as if he were a charlatan: “Received information today . . . that General Donovan of OSS recently told the Polish Ambassador in Washington that he should not worry about the Russians in Poland because we will straighten out all of the problem at the San Francisco Conference next month.”14 Considering the reality of Poland’s fate, Leahy must have thought Donovan had lost his senses.
Some savvier members of the OSS realized Leahy’s power and attempted to cultivate the admiral. Allen Dulles, an OSS officer who would later be instrumental in pushing the CIA down the road of covert operations, began lobbying Leahy in September 1944 to be kept as part of any new intelligence agency, coming by the admiral’s office to plead his case.15 This did not keep Dulles from later incurring Leahy’s wrath. When he heard that Dulles was leading the OSS’s attempts to make contacts within the Japanese government and start negotiations to end the Pacific war, Leahy slapped him down.16
The changeover to the Truman administration made Leahy even more aggressive in his attacks on Donovan, as Truman, unlike Roosevelt, had no preexisting relationship with Wild Bill. In August 1945, Leahy ridiculed Donovan’s attempts to insert the OSS into Korean politics.17 Donovan tried to get Truman to recognize a provisional Korean government led by Mr. Kim Ku, whom Wild Bill was supporting. Leahy, witheringly, wrote a letter to Truman telling him to stay away from Ku and advising the president to send Donovan an official note saying it was not “proper for any agents of Donovan’s office to transmit to the President messages from officials of self-styled governments that are not recognized by the Government of the United States.”18
Leahy’s mockery helps explain why Truman, from the beginning of his presidency, was so negative about both Donovan and the OSS.19 With the war ending, different plans were being discussed for the new American intelligence service. Donovan proposed an agency just like the OSS, with a director who reported directly to the president and which had no oversight from the rest of the Cabinet or Congress, the perfect setup for the self-styled, swashbuckling rule breaker, but Truman killed it instantly. On September 20, 1945, the president terminated the OSS with an executive order and cut Donovan out of his professional life.20
Two options for replacing the service were being discussed, respective plans from the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the State Department.21 The plan from the Joint Chiefs of Staff was William Leahy’s. Shortly before Truman killed off the OSS, Leahy wrote to the president, Forrestal, and Stimson, enclosing a detailed Joint Chiefs memo on a new intelligence bureau.22 It attacked Donovan’s plan as one that would lead to a CIA able to operate outside of the law with little oversight. Leahy knew that Donovan’s plan was dead in the water, as, in a particularly sensitive touch, he put forward the Joint Chiefs’ plan as one that should be followed upon the “liquidation” of the OSS.23
Leahy’s plan called for a controlled intelligence service with strong oversight. The new agency would be overseen by what he called the National Intelligence Authority (NIA), composed of the secretaries of state, war, and the navy, with a Joint Chiefs representative—in other words, Leahy himself. The NIA would establish and oversee the Central Intelligence Agency, where their different resources would be pooled. The president would select the director of the CIA, who could be either a military officer or a civilian and who would be in charge of the day-to-day operations. The director would sit on the NIA, but only as a non-voting member.
The director’s initial responsibility would be to come up with an efficient way to coordinate information collection and distribution from the existing sources within the US government, chiefly the intelligence divisions of the Navy, War, and State Departments and the remnants of the OSS. The NIA would have oversight of any such plans. As it was, there were to be strict limits on what the director could suggest. The CIA could under no circumstances ask for any law-enforcement or police powers. Covert operations, if they were to happen at all, were a tiny part of the new CIA’s remit.
The State Department, in response, wanted to house any new intelligence agency in Foggy Bottom. It would become the controlling agency, and the preexisting Navy and War Department intelligence bureaus would be compelled to hand over their information to them.24 This plan would have made the secretary of state considerably more powerful than any other cabinet officer, almost a co-president, having concentrated in his or her hands both the diplomatic and intelligence resources of the American government.25 Byrnes loved the plan. Leahy killed it.
In fact, Leahy was determined that neither Byrnes nor the State Department be given control of America’s intelligence apparatus, for the simple fact that he had doubts about the ability of both to be an effective guardian of America’s secrets. These doubts emerged because of Leahy’s unparalleled access to highly confidential information. By late 1945 Leahy had received reports from a range of credible sources that the Soviet Union had placed a large number of agents inside the US government. The first of these reports occurred in May 1945, when Julius Holmes, assistant secretary of state for administrative affairs, made a special appointment to speak with the admiral.26 He informed Leahy that personnel in both the State Department and the Naval Intelligence branch had recently been caught spying for the Soviets, and Leahy quickly passed that information to Truman.
In the coming months things would get much worse. The two most important developments were the cases of Igor Gouzenko and Elizabeth Bentley. A young cipher clerk in the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, Gouzenko defected to Canada in September 1945.27 He told stories of many Soviet spies in both the Canadian and American governments. Canadian prime minister Mackenzie King, a favorite of Leahy’s, personally handed a dossier of Gouzenko’s information to Truman on September 30.28 On November 7, Elizabeth Bentley, an American Communist who had become a Soviet agent acting both as an informant and as a courier for information from other Soviet agents in the US government, turned herself in to the FBI. The day after her surrender, J. Edgar Hoover sent a handwritten letter to President Truman saying that there was a new source of information about Soviet penetration of the US government, and a month later the FBI sent a detailed report on the subject to the White House.
Much of the historical discussion of the Gouzenko and Bentley cases has focused on whether they provided clear evidence for the guilt of two accused Soviet agents from within the American government, Harry Dexter White and Alger Hiss. For Leahy, the point was not guilt or innocence but the fact that the US government had been infiltrated by a significant number of Communist spies. At the end of November 1945, in a rather jarring diary entry about Byrnes, Leahy wrote of his worries that the secretary of state was being influenced by “communistically-inclined” advisers.29
Weeks later, when Leahy surveyed the world at the start of the new year, he showed similar concern. He believed there was little chance for war in the coming year, placing his hopes on the new United Nations and the possibility it would outlaw the use of atomic weapons. Yet he feared that the State Department was sowing the seeds of a future conflict. He accused it of adopting a “policy of appeasement of the Soviet Government that is reminiscent of Mr. Chamberlain at Munich” and admitted that he started “the new year in the bad graces of the State Department which does not come out into the open with its opposition.”30
“Bad graces” was an understatement. A few days prior, Leahy’s anger at the secretary of state had finally boiled over, and he exploded at the man—in front of President Truman, no less. For months, Leahy had been losing faith in James Byrnes, finding his enormous ego off-putting, especially when compared to what he considered the secretary’s lack of meaningful achievements.31 Byrnes, in return, was jealous of Leahy’s power, boasting after his appointment that he would take the admiral down a peg, that he would make Leahy stop acting like he was secretary of state.32
Things between the two men deteriorated markedly during the last few months of 1945. Byrnes spent much of the fall of 1945 in London and Moscow, as part of the foreign secretaries’ conferences held to settle outstanding issues left over from Potsdam.33 He often refused to provide important updates to the White House, surprising seasoned diplomats with his amateurishness.34 Leahy believed that Byrnes’s performance showed he was not up to the job. At first Byrnes was unnecessarily aggressive, and Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet foreign secretary, threatened to walk out of the negotiations. Over a secure teletype line, Byrnes had to turn to Leahy, pleading with him to telegram the Soviets asking them to stay.35 Leahy, who could not reach Truman, acted decisively and sent a soothing message to the Russians, which kept Molotov from leaving.
After this blunder, Leahy believed that Byrnes overcompensated, agreeing to meaningless declarations with the Soviets in an effort to keep them happy.36 In December, when Byrnes paid a visit to Washington, he made things worse in Leahy’s eyes by arguing that the Chinese Nationalists should be forced into a coalition with the Communists.37 Leahy concluded that Byrnes, who had been dripping with braggadocio six months earlier, had been seduced by “pink” elements in the State Department. Truman privately told the admiral that he was also surprised by Byrnes’s weakness on China.38 Whereas Byrnes was still putting a positive spin on things, Leahy—or the “tough old Admiral,” as Truman called him at the time—was pushing the president down a more skeptical path.39
Leahy’s temper finally flared aboard the president’s yacht, the USS Williamsburg, during a holiday cruise on the Potomac. When Truman learned that Byrnes was planning to deliver a radio address to the country outlining his great achievements with the Russians—and did not intend to clear his speech with the White House—the president ordered the secretary to report to the Williamsburg at once. Both Truman and Leahy believed Byrnes’s claims of success were nonsense, considering what few agreements the secretary had reached to be unnecessarily supine.
What happened when Byrnes arrived on board ship is the subject of some disagreement. Byrnes claimed that Truman expressed “wholehearted approval” of his work, while Leahy voiced only moderate disappointment with the agreements on Romania and Bulgaria.40 Truman claimed that he ripped into Byrnes, putting the arrogant secretary in his place.41 Yet witnesses reported that it was William Leahy who humiliated Byrnes.42 Truman’s press secretary, Matthew Connelly, recalled that “when Byrnes arrived we were having dinner and Admiral Leahy sat directly across from Byrnes at the dinner table, then Leahy took him apart to a fare-the-well [sic]. He never let him off the hook.”43 John Snyder, who would later become treasury secretary, and Harry Vaughan, Truman’s close friend, both remembered Leahy being the aggressor, with Vaughan reflecting that the admiral gave Byrnes “a hell of a chewing out.”44
In Leahy’s diary, he described criticizing the Moscow agreements Byrnes had negotiated, saying that both he and Truman believed that they were in opposition to the president’s own statements (and that meant Leahy’s Navy Day address). Leahy “repeatedly” asked the secretary of state “for information as to what benefits accrue to the United States and was unable to get a satisfactory reply.”45
Leahy was the only person in the United States, other than Truman himself, who could have ripped into Byrnes and emerged with an enhanced reputation. His aggression in defense of presidential supremacy, but also in defense of his own foreign-policy vision, cemented the personal bond between himself and Truman. It helps explain why Truman decided to concentrate so much power in Leahy’s hands when it came to the establishment of America’s new intelligence service. He even used him as the highest-ranking intelligence courier in the history of the United States.
In February 1946, the president sent Leahy to Canada for what was officially to be a routine diplomatic mission in which the admiral would represent Truman at the retirement dinner of the governor-general to Canada, the Earl of Athlone.46 In reality, the president had sent his chief of staff to collect the most up-to-date information from Prime Minister Mackenzie King regarding the Gouzenko case. What he learned made a huge impression on the admiral. He was shocked by how much intelligence the Soviets had been able to extract from their Canadian sources, including details about the Manhattan Project.47
Meanwhile, the new National Intelligence Authority had started operating. Truman had formally approved a structure for the NIA and the CIA along the exact lines laid out in Leahy’s plan, with one change. Instead of there being a specific Joint Chiefs representative on the NIA, the president decided that he wanted a personal representative, and he chose Leahy. That meant that when the NIA met, Leahy spoke for Truman, which allowed him to control much of the CIA’s development until the middle of 1947.
The board’s first meeting, on February 5, focused on how the CIA would operate under the NIA.48 Byrnes, chairing the meeting, demanded the right to summarize the NIA’s decisions to the president. It was a clear power grab from the secretary of state, and Leahy, already accustomed to humiliating James Byrnes, let him know that this would not happen. Even in the sanitized minutes of the meeting, Leahy clearly slapped Byrnes down.
SECRETARY BYRNES stressed the fact that it was his function to furnish the President with information on which to base his conclusions.
ADMIRAL LEAHY expressed his understanding that the President wanted the information from all three departments (State, War and Navy) summarized in order to keep him currently informed. Admiral Leahy pointed out that Secretary Byrnes presents the viewpoint of the Department of State while the President would like to receive significant information available in all three department[s] in a single summary.49
Unsurprisingly, Leahy ended up being one of two people who supplied Truman with information on the NIA and the CIA. The other was the director of the CIA himself, and this did represent a change in Truman and Leahy’s morning routine. Now the director could join the president and the admiral for at least part of every morning briefing, passing on the CIA’s newest intelligence summary.
All of this is indicative that William Leahy had reached a new and unexpected high point in his career. Instead of being eased into an honorable and lucrative retirement at the end of the war, he had carved out a central if different role in the new administration. His relationship with Truman, which he knew to be the bedrock of his influence, had strengthened since April 1945, as he had shown himself to be committed to the person and the office. He had used that influence to rhetorically shape the coming Cold War through both the Navy Day address and the soon-to-be-delivered “Iron Curtain” speech. He had triumphed over William Donovan and James Byrnes in the struggle to establish a new intelligence structure for the United States, and he had transformed himself into the most important conduit of intelligence information within the White House. The real question was not how powerful Leahy was; it was for how long his influence would last.