HARRY S. TRUMAN BECAME PRESIDENT in the final months of one great global war and was to lead the United States for the early years of a much longer global conflict. In many ways he took advantage of a strong team of wartime leaders, such as his military chief of staff, Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy, and wartime developments like the atomic bomb, but in other ways he broke dramatically from wartime institutions and policies. At the end of World War II, one of his most striking decisions was to dismiss the legendary Major General William “Wild Bill” Donovan and disband the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), America’s first national intelligence agency. To many Americans, secret intelligence organizations raised fears of Nazi Germany’s Gestapo (secret state police) or Communist Russia’s KGB (Committee of State Security). The new president said that he did not want the United States to have such an agency in peacetime.
Truman, who became president with almost no knowledge of the American national security structure or foreign affairs, soon recognized that the end of world war did not mean the beginning of world peace. He also recognized that beyond weapons, soldiers, and generals, the United States needed spies, researchers and analysts, and an experienced intelligence manager to coordinate and lead American intelligence efforts and advise the president on critical national security questions, potential enemies, and external threats to the United States. As a lifelong student of history, Truman, better than many of his contemporaries, appreciated the challenges faced by his predecessors all the way back to George Washington and the mistakes the country had often made in its national security and international affairs policies. As he later claimed, “I got a couple of admirals together and they formed” the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).1 One of those admirals was his own military chief of staff and the first American five-star flag officer, Iowa native Fleet Admiral Leahy. Another was a member of what Truman’s political enemies dubbed “the Missouri Gang” to suggest corrupt cronyism: Missouri businessman and wartime naval intelligence officer Rear Admiral Sidney W. Souers.2 He took responsibility for the fledgling Central Intelligence Group after Truman had dismissed Donovan and abolished the OSS, and to the end of the Truman presidency, Souers continued as executive secretary and later “special consultant” to his new National Security Council (NSC).
A third admiral, Saint Louis native Roscoe Hillenkoetter, became the first statutory director of the new CIA, as well as the president’s principal intelligence adviser. Even more than Souers, Hillenkoetter had extensive practical intelligence experience, as well as distinguished service as a sailor. After graduating with honors from the United States Naval Academy just after World War I, Hillenkoetter served in submarines, destroyers, and battleships. Interspersed with his sea duty was service as naval attaché to Paris, Madrid, and Lisbon in the 1930s and early 1940s. As a uniformed diplomatic “spy,” he observed the victory of General Francisco Franco’s Fascists with the help of the new Nazi German war machine in the Spanish Civil War. Shortly thereafter, he watched the defeat of France at the hands of the Germans in the spring of 1940. While in France, he earned the respect and admiration of Admiral Leahy, then ambassador to Vichy France and later senior military advisor to presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. Like fellow Missourian Commander Samuel Fuqua, who won the Medal of Honor as the senior surviving officer on Arizona, Hillenkoetter was the senior survivor on West Virginia during the surprise Japanese attack on the battlefleet at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
After experiencing firsthand at Pearl Harbor the deadly cost of America’s failure to create a real national intelligence service, Hillenkoetter became senior intelligence officer for the Pacific Fleet before returning to sea duty in the Pacific naval war. After World War II, Leahy remembered Hillenkoetter’s skills as an intelligence officer in Europe and recommended him as the first director of the new CIA. Together, Truman, Leahy, and the Missouri Gang of Souers, Hillenkoetter, and young White House lawyer Clark Clifford created the framework for what became the largest and most powerful intelligence structure in the world, doing so against fierce resistance from entrenched interests in the American military and U.S. Department of State. At the same time, they confronted staggering threats abroad from a suspicious, aggressive, and expansionist Soviet Union led by a paranoid dictator equipped with the world’s largest army and legions of highly skilled spies. As the Soviets and their Asian allies seized control of the newly liberated countries of Eastern Europe and such Asian countries as China and North Korea, and Soviet spies stole the secret of the atomic bomb, the CIA quickly became engaged in leading the West’s secret war against international communism, which did not end until forty years later, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union and its empire. This is the story of the first few years of that long struggle.