THE MEN IN THE YARD carried submachine guns. But they didn’t threaten, just asked for food. The German farmer gave them some, and they left. No sooner were they gone than the farmer reported the incident to local authorities. The police at Wildenranna also received other reports of armed men in the woods along the Austrian border. Investigation quickly confirmed a band of some sort roaming the hills. Authorities at Wildenranna quickly asked central police headquarters at Passau to send reinforcements to help apprehend the intruders.
Thus began a dilemma for the Passau police command. The time was September 1947 in a Germany under occupation by the victorious Allied Powers. Passau lay in the American sector; police there reported to U.S. military officers. The news of an armed band north of the Inn River might signal some sort of aggressive move by the Russians. In any case German police were under standing orders: anything to do with foreign nationals belonged in the province of the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) of the U.S. Army. After a Passau police official telephoned American regional headquarters at Munich, the CIC decided to organize a man-hunt in the hills. Agents drove to Waldkirchen and then fanned out toward the border, joining with German police who had, by now, also equipped themselves with submachine guns.
At three o’clock in the morning on September 10, one of the CIC search parties heard the voices of men in the forest. Soon they found the band, indeed a large group—almost forty men, sitting around a campfire, most of them singing. They wore Russian uniforms. American security officers carefully surrounded their camp and moved in.
The intruders put up no resistance. In fact they relaxed considerably when they learned the men apprehending them were Americans. Investigators discovered the band to be organized in military fashion. In addition to submachine guns the intruders had light machine guns and hand grenades. Like their uniforms, the equipment had been manufactured in the Soviet Union, and the men spoke what sounded like Russian. The strangers were disarmed and taken to Passau, then to a CIC base at Oberursel, outside Frankfurt. There the CIC brought in Russian intelligence specialists to work with the men. Thirty-five soldiers had been captured at the campsite. Four others, picked up in different places over the next few days, turned out to be from the same band. The U.S. Army put the affair under tight security.
The press reported some facts and more rumors. Even at this time, with Europe inured to displaced persons and prisoner exchanges between East and West, armed bands in Bavaria were uncommon enough to merit notice. A United Press reporter went to Passau a few days after and got a garbled version of the truth: the prisoners had told the CIC they were anti-Soviet partisans from the Ukraine. But speculation abounded: the captured men were Russian deserters; Polish guerrillas; or simply well-armed bandits. Ukrainian activists in the West, such as the pseudonymous Roman Rakhmanny in Canada, also sought access and got somewhat better information as, for that matter, did the Counter Intelligence Corps.
The CIC debriefed the men for more than three weeks. Interrogators satisfied themselves that the new arrivals were in fact Ukrainian partisans, their war against Russian forces still in progress in the Ukraine, Czechoslovakia, and southern Poland. The rebels provided considerable information about their movement, not to mention conditions in Eastern Europe. This intelligence CIC officers in Frankfurt worked into a report they circulated on October 5, 1947.
Under a leader named Khrin, reputedly one of the finest Ukrainian commanders, that spring the band had ambushed an armed convoy of Polish troops fighting alongside the Russians, killing the Polish vice minister of defense, General Karol Swierczewski. Later the Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council had ordered Khrin’s unit to make its way to the West in order to get the attention of the Allied intelligence services. Commander Khrin, wounded in both arms, did not make the long exodus, but his band succeeded in its mission.
Detailed information on anti-Soviet partisan activities in Eastern Europe struck the Americans as an intelligence windfall. Washington, however, saw the data as more than merely an opportunity to update its political perceptions of the Soviet Union. Instead, to some U.S. officials, the advent of the Ukrainian partisans signaled a chance for secret military action against Russia. The Ukrainian movement offered the opening for an offensive move in the Cold War, a classic covert operation along lines made familiar during World War II. The United States was just then creating a capability to engage in secret missions of all kinds, including covert operations.
Since that day in 1947, American secret wars have been carried out on almost every continent. These covert operations have involved tens of thousands of dead and wounded, thousands of native fighters, significant numbers of American clandestine agents, and even regular U.S. military forces. U.S. involvement has run the gamut from advice to arms, from support for invasions of independent nations to secret bombing in clandestine military operations; to the subsidizing of political parties, associations, or individuals; to the planting of misinformation by clandestine means. The techniques for international coercion are not new, nor were they first developed by the United States. But American participation in World War II opened many eyes in Washington to the potential of special operations and provided a nucleus of personnel well versed in clandestine methods. The Cold War became the catalyst that brought methods and men together on missions that have been sometimes spectacular, often unfortunate, and occasionally surprising.
Early American intelligence officers benefited from the British example. During World War II the United States created an Office of Strategic Services (OSS) to perform all kinds of tasks. Under the irrepressible William J. “Wild Bill” Donovan, OSS functioned globally, with major commands in the Mediterranean, northern Europe, Burma, and China. OSS teams parachuted into France, Norway, the former Yugoslavia, and elsewhere; blew up bridges in the Balkans; worked with partisans in Italy; and led bands of tribesmen against the Japanese in Burma. The agency’s psychological warfare experts crafted messages for enemy populations. OSS officers spied out the land and supplied incisive intelligence analyses to American commanders.
The U.S. military also acquired experience with secret operations during the war. Most often the military assisted operations, for example by covertly landing additional agents or supplies. The navy did this using submarines and PT boats, the air force with planes. The army actually ran guerrilla forces fighting the Japanese in the Philippines. The army and the Marine Corps established elite units for commando missions. The army’s 5,307th Composite Unit, better known as Merrill’s Marauders, played an important part in the Burma campaign, working closely with the OSS there. American psychological warfare units aimed to erode the morale of the enemy military.
The Burma campaign illustrates standard procedures for later secret wars in embryonic form. An OSS formation called Service Unit Detachment 101, sent to establish a base in India, began burrowing into areas occupied by the Japanese Empire. Agents from Detachment 101 infiltrated the Burmese hill country beginning in 1944, forged links with local Kachin tribesmen, and created a guerrilla movement against the Japanese. Weapons, supplies, and OSS officers parachuted into the jungle or were flown in by the planes of the “air commando groups” formed by the army air force. Radio broadcasts by Allied propaganda experts tried to spark hatred for Japan and hope for liberation by Allied forces working in tandem with the OSS and its brethren Allied agencies.
The OSS slowly built up the Kachin from local spy networks to roving patrols of fighters to organized guerrilla units. By 1944 the Kachin were fighting in conjunction with Merrill’s Marauders and British Chindit brigades. More than ten thousand Kachin were fighting a year later, including a field force of seven battalions, each of almost five hundred fighters, led by the OSS. Legendary U.S. intelligence officers like Carl Eiffler and Joe Lazarsky got their starts in this very effort. Dozens of spies deep in the Japanese rear, plus about four hundred agents surveying nearby enemy positions, helped the Kachin units plan their missions. The Kachin in turn helped trap two powerful Japanese divisions during the final Allied offensives in Burma, a brilliant climax to a very energetic campaign, the product of the efforts of just a few hundred Americans.
This became a remarkable achievement. Detachment 101 mobilized a military force more than thirty times its size, and used that capability to execute highly successful operations. Awarded a Presidential Unit Citation by the United States, the only OSS element so honored, Detachment 101 entered the lists of wartime legends.
Several features of the OSS tribal program are worth noting. Among them are the creation of formal units within the overall guerrilla force; the clearing of zones within the operating area to serve as local bases; the use of espionage nets to shield guerrillas and to find targets for them later; the use of outside bases for specialized training and major support; and the use of clandestine air supply and communication between local and outside bases. These techniques became essential features of secret warfare tactics. This type of clandestine operation came to be called paramilitary.
OSS also participated in the European theater under the patrician David K. E. Bruce. Teams assisted the escape of Allied airmen downed over the Continent, carried out commando raids, and cooperated with resistance fighters. One of the biggest OSS operations of the war came with the Normandy invasion of 1944. There the intelligence portion of the invasion plan, under the code name Sussex, called for special teams to be parachuted into France to supplement the resistance. The OSS, British Special Operations Executive (SOE), and French intelligence each contributed agents to form three-man “Jedburgh” teams sent to specific resistance networks. The Jedburghs parachuted in uniform but carried civilian clothes. They were backed up by Operational Groups, thirty-two-man strike teams for commando missions. More than five hundred OSS people went to the Continent in this campaign, including two future directors of the Central Intelligence Agency. Bill Colby led one of the ninety Jedburgh teams in France and later an Operational Group in Norway. William J. Casey masterminded the overall OSS effort to infiltrate Germany. There were also spy networks that produced other future CIA chieftains. In Switzerland the OSS nets were under Allen W. Dulles. Richard M. Helms spearheaded work in the Balkans. In later years Dulles and Helms also led the Central Intelligence Agency.
The European operations proved highly successful. The OSS alone had five hundred French and almost four hundred American agents in France by the time of the invasion. More than half the Americans with Jedburgh teams received decorations. Resistance operations are credited with slowing the German response to the Normandy landings and furnishing the Allies with vital intelligence. Casey’s campaign got as many as two hundred agents directly into Germany, where they engaged almost entirely in espionage.
In addition to the OSS, the army’s CIC had a parallel program on enemy territory through a much smaller network. This CIC activity had been under way since 1942. These army agents proved especially useful in Italy, where they helped identify Nazi efforts to penetrate pro-Allied Italian partisan groups.
World War II not only provided experience for the Americans, it formed and reinforced a certain way of thinking. The issues were black and white—to fight Hitler and Tojo, or not. Not to fight would have been an abdication of responsibility in the face of foreign aggression. Democracy hung in the balance against totalitarian dictatorship; President Franklin Delano Roosevelt made America the Arsenal of Democracy. After the war it became easy to transfer that Manichean hostility—and, for the intelligence types, their clandestine methods—to a newly perceived adversary. The target became the Soviet Union, or more formally, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics—erstwhile ally recast as enemy due to ideological differences that had existed since the origins of that state in 1917.
This evolving hostility between the United States and the USSR did not matter at first. The surrender of Japan in August 1945 brought a scramble to demobilize the armies, one that extended to the intelligence service. The OSS had built up a strength of about thirteen thousand when President Harry Truman ordered its dissolution on September 20, 1945. Under the new arrangement, the parts of OSS that had dealt with analytical intelligence moved to the State Department. The detachments of clandestine officers went to the War Department as a new Strategic Services Unit (SSU) under Brig. Gen. John Magruder, the former OSS special warfare chief.
By early 1946 General Magruder’s mandate—not so much to preserve or enlarge the SSU but mainly to liquidate it—had largely been accomplished. Former OSS officers who had served with the Jedburghs, the Kachin, and elsewhere went back to their homes, to law practices, to school, to the army. But Magruder also was responsible for producing fresh intelligence data. He and his deputies virtually begged army senior commanders to make use of their capabilities but were largely ignored. When Col. William W. Quinn took over the SSU in 1946, it had been reduced to fewer than two hundred persons working out of seven field stations in foreign countries.
In addition to the SSU, the army’s Counter Intelligence Corps remained as a clandestine operations entity. Military Intelligence, or G-2, controlled the CIC. Given its role as the official intelligence branch of the army, G-2 was well situated to act in Eastern Europe and against the Soviet Union because of the army’s presence in Germany, Austria, and Japan as part of the military occupation of those countries. The first American links with anti-Soviet Russian emigrés were forged by G-2. In a climate in which OSS verged on being dismantled, G-2 substituted for it and the CIC assumed a steadily more active role in what it called “positive intelligence” operations.
The 430th CIC Detachment, stationed in Austria, noted the shift in early 1947 when it recorded a change in emphasis from “denazification” to positive intelligence. In Austria the CIC operated “rat lines,” clandestine transportation systems to spirit out of the country individuals of interest to U.S. intelligence. The CIC also had its own spy networks in Russian-occupied areas, including Austria, Czechoslovakia, and eastern Germany. It screened refugees, prepared cover stories to support its agents, and maintained relationships with other services. Al Ulmer, the SSU station chief for Vienna, had been with OSS. Once a new U.S. intelligence service emerged, the Central Intelligence Group, its first Vienna station chief, John H. Richardson, would be a former CIC man. Both were avid recruits for the Cold War crusade.
The same functions were carried out by the 970th (later the Sixty-sixth) CIC Detachment, with headquarters at Frankfurt in the American Occupation Zone of Germany. As agents this unit used certain notorious former Nazis in Germany such as Klaus Barbie. The shift in American priorities could be encapsulated in the life of netmaster Gordon Stewart, who headed the CIA station in 1948. A former OSS man, Stewart had come to Heidelberg to help in denazification but quickly began trolling Displaced Persons camps for sources to use against the Russians. He rode the rising wave of hostility to high office. A “Department of the Army Detachment,” formed to handle interagency activities, eventually furnished cover for Stewart and his officers, who took over Barbie. It was the 970th CIC that handled the band of Ukrainian partisans.
On one level the partisans were identical to the masses of refugees, Displaced Persons (DPs), throughout Europe. By the fall of 1945 as many as seven million people were on the move, fleeing Soviet domination or driven from their homes by war damage. An equal number could be found in the Soviet Union or Russian-occupied Eastern Europe, and smaller numbers in the Mediterranean countries. Millions of former German soldiers joined the flow as they emerged from prisoner-of-war camps. Most were simply looking to settle somewhere safe, but many had nowhere to go and a major task for the United Nations during its early years was to house these DPs. Like the Ukrainian partisans, significant numbers of them came from lands swept by war and occupation and had information important to intelligence services, not least those of the United States. Screening DPs really meant identifying who was worth debriefing and, equally important, finding angry men and women who could be harnessed for clandestine missions. The Ukrainian partisans were prime candidates.
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 that signaled U.S. entry into World War II had a fundamental influence on U.S. intelligence after the war. The assault had surprised American commanders. Investigations revealed a number of items that might have alerted leaders, but no one had been responsible for gathering and interpreting data at the national level. Thus Washington drew the lesson that the United States needed some sort of organization for intelligence, and it fell to President Harry Truman to work out the new schema.
Competing plans for a peacetime intelligence agency existed even before Truman abolished the OSS. Important issues dividing proponents of the various plans included the specific functions and degree of autonomy to be accorded such an agency. Truman’s military advisers, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, favored an interagency group to supervise intelligence. The State Department proposed an arrangement that concerned only supervisory authority, which they wanted in the hands of the secretary of state. Members of the Office of Strategic Services proposed an independent agency but were not initially heeded.
Truman took part of the advice of his Joint Chiefs when on January 22, 1946, he issued a directive establishing a National Intelligence Authority (NIA) to oversee a Central Intelligence Group (CIG). The NIA, composed of the secretaries of state, war, and navy, plus Truman’s personal representative, would monitor a director of central intelligence in charge of a CIG. Truman selected trusted individuals for both the DCI and his representative to the NIA, and he humorously referred to them as “personal snooper” and “director of centralized snooping.” Truman’s first DCI was Sidney W. Souers, a St. Louis businessman and presidential crony, proud of his reserve commission and his wartime service with naval intelligence. But Souers served only five months as director of central intelligence, though Truman convinced him to return as representative on the NIA and then the first executive secretary of the National Security Council. Army Chief of Staff Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower recommended Charles H. Bonesteel, a top Pentagon planner, for the DCI job. Truman instead selected air force Lt. Gen. Hoyt S. Vandenberg. The president considered Vandenberg enough of a diplomat to get along with the State, War, and Navy departments.
Actually Vandenberg had been a combat commander, with minimal intelligence experience. But he was a good organizer and began to build the Central Intelligence Group. Under Souers, CIG had operated out of a suite of three rooms next door to the White House with fewer than 250 employees. Vandenberg soon established an office for research and evaluation plus administrative organs. In June 1946 he asked the National Intelligence Authority to give him responsibility for all U.S. foreign intelligence gathering, a preliminary to bringing the Strategic Services Unit back from the War Department. The proposal matched recommendations from an outside advisory group. Magruder’s unit thus became the Office of Special Operations (OSO). By the close of 1946 there were about 800 officers in OSO alone, out of more than 1,800 total personnel in CIG. Between January and April 1947 the last holdouts, FBI agents in Latin America, transferred to the new intelligence group. General Vandenberg had plans to expand to several thousand officers over six months.
The peacetime intelligence agency grew quickly but remained a creation of the executive branch of government. The CIG had no basis in law. Already several bills dealing with intelligence matters had been proposed in Congress, and in 1946 the White House held discussions with CIG lawyers. Clark M. Clifford of the president’s staff helped draft intelligence legislation. Vandenberg pushed for the bill and wanted Truman to announce creation of the agency in his 1947 State of the Union address. The president spoke to Clifford several times, expressing something close to outrage, though he went ahead with the initiative itself. Truman planned a reorganization of the entire military establishment, a proposal he sent to Congress in February 1947. Provision for the peacetime intelligence agency was included in the legislation, which became the National Security Act of 1947.
Through the 1947 law, Truman created a National Security Council to advise him on defense and foreign affairs. The separate War and Navy departments merged into a single Department of Defense, under which the air force also gained autonomy as an independent armed service. As for intelligence, the original proposal did no more than say that a Central Intelligence Agency would be formed. In the letter Truman sent to congressional leaders along with draft legislation, he did not even mention this aspect. Like the president, most congressmen concerned themselves mainly with parts of the bill unrelated to intelligence. Only late in congressional hearings did the intelligence initiative come up, and then attention centered on whether it would become some kind of secret police. Congressmen noted the lack of detail in the bill and amended it to prohibit the agency from possessing police powers.
Further amendments specified responsibilities for the new Central Intelligence Agency. Essentially Congress returned to Truman’s January 1946 directive, extracting from it almost the exact language the president had used to assign functions. Under the National Security Act, the CIA was directly answerable to the president through the NSC. The law gave the CIA five duties: advising the NSC on intelligence; making recommendations on related matters; producing intelligence estimates and reports; performing “additional services of common concern” for the government-wide intelligence community; and “such other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security as the National Security Council may from time to time direct.”
This last provision has been said to convey legal authority for the conduct of secret warfare by the CIA. It should be noted, therefore, that the terms covert operation, clandestine operation, paramilitary operation, secret operation, and special operation, all euphemisms for secret warfare, appear nowhere in the law. Nor do the terms political action, psychological warfare, propaganda, misinformation, or disinformation. The phrase “such other functions” that appears in the 1947 act sought to cover unforeseen circumstances, but even there the legislative history of the law makes clear that Congress had not contemplated international coercion. The White House privately held a more expansive view. The “other functions” were purposely not specified but were expected to include covert operations. Clark Clifford notes of the language: “I reviewed this sentence carefully at the time, but could never have imagined that forty years later I would still be asked to testify before Congress as to its meaning and intent.”
President Truman signed the legislation on July 26, 1947, and the National Security Act became law. Six weeks later, on September 8, the CIG became the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA, thanks to General Vandenberg, had already become an expanding organization in search of roles and missions. It was at precisely this time that American officers in Germany apprehended the band of Ukrainian partisans. The Ukrainians were looking for help.
Conflict between the superpowers may not have been inevitable, but avoiding it in 1945 required more wisdom than either Russia or America commanded. Soviet Generalissimo Joseph Stalin persisted in his obsession with defending Russian borders by means of a buffer zone of Soviet-dominated nations. In pursuit of this aim Stalin repeatedly broke agreements reached by the wartime allies concerning Eastern Europe. The West bristled. Soviet security concerns were regarded as a cloak for imperial conquest. Attitudes hardened on both sides. Crises over Soviet actions in taking over Romania and seeking egress through the Bosporus from Turkey seemed to confirm Russia’s aggressive intentions. Truman explained to his secretary of state, James Byrnes, “I’m tired of babying the Soviets.”
The succession of crises proved a watershed for public opinion in the United States. British wartime prime minister Sir Winston Churchill received a standing ovation at Westminster College, in Fulton, Missouri, when he declared in a speech, only a few days after one expired deadline:
From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of central and eastern Europe . . . all subject, in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and in some cases increasing measure of control from Moscow.
Early efforts at negotiation expired in the increasingly heated atmosphere. Within days of taking office in 1945, Truman spoke harshly to the Soviet foreign minister. Lend-Lease aid, which Americans had provided Russia since 1941, and the Soviets thought to extend, instead halted. In July 1945 Truman met with Stalin and British leaders at Potsdam, Germany. They talked of arrangements for Eastern Europe and the work of Allied Control Councils in the occupied countries, to be garrisoned until peace treaties were signed. After three top-level meetings—summit conferences if you will—over the years 1943–1945, no American president would again meet the Soviets at a summit for a decade.
In 1947 Soviet-American relations crossed another watershed. That February the British told American officials they would terminate foreign aid to Greece. Europe faced a cruel winter, the worst in decades, and the British government felt it could not continue supporting the Greeks, who had been receiving military and economic aid for more than two years. Meanwhile Greece had plunged into civil war—Communist insurgents threatened the right-wing royal government. President Truman approved a suggestion that the United States take over responsibility for Greece, adding aid to Turkey for good measure. In mid-March the State Department offered aid, which soon grew into substantial intervention in the Greek civil war.
This shift in Truman’s policy toward countering Soviet moves proved more important than the aid itself. Under the new concept Soviet power had to be contained within the areas it had previously achieved dominance; further Russian expansion would be resisted. George F. Kennan, a foreign service officer, coined the term “containment,” which was elevated to the status of the Truman Doctrine. In the containment enterprise the CIA became a key tool.
From the initial help to Greece and Turkey it would be but a short step to offering foreign aid more widely to European nations. Secretary of State George C. Marshall expanded the offer in a commencement address at Harvard University on June 5, 1947. The Marshall Plan aimed at furthering containment by helping rebuild Europe, eliminating social conditions hospitable to the growth of communism. As an added benefit, rebuilt European economies could purchase American goods and services. The Marshall Plan became the first sustained foreign assistance program ever adopted by the United States. At the CIA the Marshall Plan became a device to disguise the provenance of money spent for propaganda and political action purposes, an institution that could help the agency exchange U.S. for local currencies, a way to hide CIA officers and a source of recruits to the agency’s cause.
Soviet leaders were not wrong to view the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan as aimed at them. Stalin forbade occupied Eastern Europe to participate. The Czechs, whose political system the Russians had yet to subjugate, saw Marshall Plan aid as a counterweight to Soviet influence and initially responded to the American offer. Their maneuver led Stalin to consolidate Soviet control over Prague. Political pressures mounted until, in February 1948, a sort of constitutional coup took place. Non-Communist ministers in the Czech coalition government resigned, replaced by representatives of a minority party, the Czech Communist Party. Within a month a famous Czech patriot, Jan Masaryk, a prominent politician and official, died under highly suspicious circumstances.
These events in Czechoslovakia, plus the rising tide of hostility in America, now created a “war scare.” The American high commissioner in Germany, Gen. Lucius D. Clay, cabled a warning on March 5, 1948, that war “may come with dramatic suddenness.” Asked for its opinion, the CIA prepared a memorandum concluding that war was not in fact imminent, but it refused to predict beyond the following sixty days.
But in Germany matters came to a head. On the last day of March 1948 the Russians suddenly informed the West that they would impose travel restrictions on the three land corridors connecting the western sector of Berlin with the Allied occupation area of Bizonia. The restrictions went into effect at midnight, April 1. British and American trains en route to Berlin were halted at the Soviet zone boundary. The Allies shifted to aircraft for transport. On April 5 a British C-47 making its approach to the Berlin airfield at Gatow was destroyed when a Soviet fighter plane collided with it in midair. The Soviets apologized, but the Allies then ordered fighter escorts for their transport planes.
By July a full-scale blockade of Berlin had developed, lasting until May 12, 1949. During that time everything that arrived in West Berlin came by air in what would be called Operation Vittles: eighty tons the first day, within a month more than three thousand tons a day. During the blockade there were more than seven hundred incidents between Soviet and Allied aircraft; thirty-nine British, thirty-one American, and five German airmen were killed. The Cold War had begun in earnest.
The years 1945 to 1948 thus witnessed an accelerating cycle of misperception, provocation, and hostility on both sides. The wartime Big Four alliance became a thing of the past. Neither side saw much possibility for improving relations; Western leaders spoke of Soviet “aggression” and of the “captive nations” of Eastern Europe. President Truman looked to strike back at the Russians, and the CIA would be his instrument.
From its creation the CIA was caught in the shifting currents of the Cold War. In the fall of 1947 the first secretary of defense, James M. Forrestal, asked if the agency would be capable of undertaking secret political action and paramilitary campaigns on behalf of the United States. The CIA replied that it could complete any mission assigned it by the National Security Council and for which resources were made available.
At first the agency concentrated on building up capabilities. It occupied additional quarters in a complex of temporary buildings on northwest E Street in Washington, earlier the home of the Office of Strategic Services. Managed by a new director, Rear Adm. Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, in its first year the CIA increased its budget by 60 percent and added hundreds of personnel. Stalwarts who had remained with the Office of Special Operations throughout its evolution from SSU to CIG to CIA began to see many old faces from OSS. A new wave of secret warriors appeared as well, young men and women who believed the Cold War to be the most important challenge of the age.
But in truth the CIA had yet to attain readiness for covert operations, and in important ways it lacked authority to engage in them. Responding to the initial Pentagon inquiries, Admiral Hillenkoetter had asked the CIA’s legal counsel for an opinion as to whether the organization could conduct covert actions. General Counsel Lawrence R. Houston replied on September 25, 1947, arguing that the National Security Act failed to provide CIA the required legal authority. The famous language usually cited to justify covert operations was the provision that the CIA would fulfill such missions as the NSC might “from time to time” direct. But Houston noted that this provision was qualified by language that said the mission must be “related to intelligence.” Covert operations had only the most tenuous relation to intelligence. Furthermore, Houston noted, Congress had clearly directed that the agency’s chief mission was to coordinate intelligence reporting.
Houston did support one intelligence function related to covert operations already being performed. This was “acquisition of extensive indication on plans in Western Europe for [the] establishment of resistance elements in event of further extension of Communist control,” including information on the training of agents, groups, radio operators, and their outside contacts. For secret propaganda and paramilitary missions, Houston felt, new offices would have to be established, entailing the procurement of “huge quantities” of all kinds of materials and involving large sums for expenses. The memo then declared that “we believe this would be an unauthorized use of the funds made available to CIA.” If such operations were ordered by the NSC, Houston concluded, “it would, we feel, still be necessary to go to Congress for authority and funds.”
Thirty-five years later Houston recalled that Hillenkoetter expressed concern at his opinion. The admiral asked whether there were offsetting considerations in the matter, whereupon the lawyer provided a second memorandum. Here Houston stated that “if the President, with his constitutional responsibilities for the conduct of foreign policy, gave the agency appropriate instructions and if Congress gave it the funds to carry them out, the agency had the legal capability of carrying out the covert actions involved.”
Hillenkoetter took the problem to Truman. State Department policy planner George Kennan played a key role in pushing a proposal for secret propaganda. Kennan advised in December that Soviet covert operations threatened to defeat American foreign policy objectives absent this Cold War tool. He wanted a U.S. directorate for political warfare. At its very first meeting, on December 13, the National Security Council discussed a program for secret propaganda. The following day President Truman signed a directive, NSC-4/A, approving a secret propaganda program and assigning responsibility to the CIA. A week later Admiral Hillenkoetter ordered his OSO chief, Donald Galloway, to plan for a covert psychological campaign using existing CIA resources where possible. Galloway formed a Special Procedures Group within the Office of Special Operations in March 1948 to carry out the mission. Hillenkoetter instructed Galloway that the covert operations were intended to influence governments, groups, and individuals by all means short of physical, that they were to be kept distinct from all other U.S. government information activities, and that the program should move foreign public opinion so as to accomplish American objectives.
These decisions were made months before the Czech coup or the Berlin blockade. World developments only heightened American hostility and accelerated preparations for covert operations. While the United States talked about democracy, its policy goals were more immediate and often took other nations in a rather different direction. Italy became the first example.
Events in Italy crystallized all the talk of “political warfare.” Mussolini’s Italian fascist regime had been overthrown on the eve of surrender in World War II, and not long afterward the king abdicated. After the war came a republic, a parliamentary democracy. Going into elections scheduled for April 1948, the Italian radical left, in particular the Communist Party, were strong, with war recovery barely begun and massive unemployment benefiting their position. Truman sought to avoid a Communist victory at the Italian polls. In a report two months before the election, the CIA warned of a leftist bloc whose strength roughly equaled that of the centrist-moderate left government, but it held out the promise that interim U.S. aid could influence the electoral outcome. Truman’s administration went into high gear to make that happen, committing $200 million in aid and supporting moderate and anti-Communist parties, especially the reigning Christian Democrats of Alcide de Gasperi.
Spooks intervened in this electoral drive, the first initiative of the CIA’s Special Procedures Group. Some had worked with OSS in Italy and were reactivating old ties, others were neophytes, like F. Mark Wyatt, who had lived in Italy before the war. The country fascinated him. The CIA threw him right into the breach. The agency approached de Gasperi with offers of cash, but the Italian insisted the Americans work with non-Communist parties across the board—including the socialists—not just his own people. Wyatt and others delivered suitcases of money at Rome hotels, supposedly chance encounters on the road, anywhere they could. Funds went to anti-Communist labor unions, corporations, religious movements, the right-wing Catholic Action, and more. The CIA financed campaign posters, ads, leaflets, media plants, and rallies. Results exceeded expectations—de Gasperi obtained an overwhelming majority in parliament, gaining against both left and right. Italy would be safe. Success also confirmed the utility of CIA covert operations.
George Kennan continued to press for a “special studies group,” under State Department control, for things like the Italian operation. Admiral Hillenkoetter now advised the White House that the CIA could carry out covert activities with no change in the NSC-4/A directive. When State refused to go along with “this political warfare thing in any sane or sound manner,” the CIA director threw up his hands—early in June 1948 Hillenkoetter told a Truman aide that Kennan could have it all: let State run the apparatus and let it have no connection whatever with the CIA. History might have been very different had that happened.
Instead President Truman, impressed by CIA’s accomplishments in Italy, expanded not only the functions of the agency but those of the State and Defense departments plus the National Security Council. His policy directive, drafted primarily by Kennan, included both psychological warfare and paramilitary programs, here acknowledged for the first time. Truman signed the new directive, NSC-10/2, on June 18. Both kinds of missions would be carried out by a new organization taking operational orders from the CIA and its policy direction from a secret committee chaired by the director of central intelligence. Composed of representatives of the secretaries of state and defense along with the CIA’s director, the secret committee became a unit of the National Security Council and worked directly for the president. Under this “10/2 Panel,” soon also called the “Special Group,” funds for the new organization would be included in the CIA budget while its director would be named by the secretary of state and approved by the NSC. According to the 10/2 directive, “the overt foreign activities of the US Government must be supplemented by covert operations.”
Three features of the NSC-10/2 directive are crucial to the evolution of American covert operations. For the first time a presidential document specified a mechanism to approve and manage secret operations, making it responsible to the chief executive. Second, also for the first time, there appeared a definition of the genus. Finally, the CIA was again given the primary role, confirming the arrangement begun with NSC-4/A.
The covert missions were to involve more than psychological warfare, more even than secret wars. The new definition specified that covert operations included all activities sponsored or conducted by the United States either in support of friendly governments or against hostile ones, with the stipulation that they be “so planned and executed that any US Government responsibility for them is not evident to unauthorized persons and that if uncovered the US Government can plausibly disclaim any responsibility for them.” The core of the 10/2 definition explained that
such operations shall include any covert activities related to: propaganda, economic warfare; preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance movements, guerrillas and refugee liberation groups, and support of indigenous anti-communist elements in threatened countries of the free world.
Virtually the only thing left out is espionage. As far as intelligence is concerned, the scale ran to just short of “armed conflict by recognized military forces.”
The definition of covert operations contained in NSC-10/2 endured for more than three decades. An Office of Special Projects, the new organization created to carry them out, later merged into the CIA, but the mechanism for presidential control prescribed by NSC-10/2 endures to this day.
George Kennan, who would later sour on this entire enterprise, remained an enthusiastic supporter of covert operations at their inception. It was Kennan whom the secretary of state placed on the 10/2 panel as the first representative of his department, and Kennan again who assembled the short list of nominees from whom the director was selected. At the head of that list Kennan put Frank G. Wisner, whom he did not know but who came highly recommended by Chip Bohlen (the State Department’s other chief authority on the Soviet Union) and, reportedly, George C. Marshall. Frank Wisner, OSS veteran, was a man who favored aiding the “captive nations,” and that included partisans like the Ukrainian People’s Army. By some accounts Wisner had been a prominent advocate of creating the new covert action unit, though it remains a mystery how this could be true without his knowing Kennan. In any case, Wisner got the job and accepted it with alacrity. He met George Kennan soon enough. They spoke on the phone about whether balloons could be used to deliver propaganda leaflets over Eastern Europe. On August 6, 1948, they joined others to talk about making the NSC-10/2 mandate a reality. America’s secret war had begun.