Ike's Spies (27 page)

There were many obvious reasons to fear the Russians, not the least of which was the Red Army in Eastern Europe. Capable of mobilizing hundreds of divisions along the Elbe River, the dividing line in Germany between East and West, the Red Army could—according to estimates by the U. S. Army G-2—overrun all of Western Europe in two weeks. That was an exaggeration, Ike thought—he wrote on the margin of this 1948 estimate, “I don't believe it. My God, we needed two months just to overrun Sicily”
⁵
—but the general point was certainly valid.

Most frightening was what seemed most likely, a surprise attack. Pearl Harbor had burned itself into the minds of every American leader of the day. To a man they were determined that it would never happen again. A Russian-launched “Pearl Harbor” would involve a ground offensive by the Red Army in Europe
and/or an atomic assault on the United States, and unlike the original Pearl Harbor, it would almost surely be decisive, at least in Europe. The Red Army, once entrenched in France, would be almost impossible to dislodge.

Ike's perception of these threats was keener than that of most leaders, partly because it was his business, mainly because he knew better than anyone else how close World War II had been.

The dangers America faced in the Cold War were even greater because Stalin and the Russians were better than Hitler and the Germans, better in the sense that they had more spies, more troops, and a similar lack of scruples. In short, as Ike saw it, the life and death struggle that began with Hitler's invasion of Poland in 1939 did not come to an end in 1945 with Hitler's death. Far from it—the struggle was now even more intense.

Eisenhower expressed his private thoughts on the subject from time to time in his diary. On January 27, 1949, he recorded, “Jim. F. [James Forrestal, Secretary of Defense] and I have agreed to try to keep the minds of all centered on the main facts of our present existence.

(a) The free world is under threat by the monolithic mass of Communistic Imperialism.

(b) The U.S. must wake up to prepare a position of strength from which it can speak serenely and confidently.”
⁶

And on June 11, 1949, shortly after Forrestal's tragic death, he wrote, “There is no use trying to decide exactly what I thought of Jim Forrestal. But one thing I shall always remember. He was the one man who, in the very midst of the war, always counselled caution and alertness in dealing with Soviets. He visited me in '44 and in '45 and I listened carefully to his thesis—I never had cause to doubt the accuracy of his judgments on this point. He said ‘Be courteous and friendly in the effort to develop a satisfactory modus vivendi—but never believe we have changed their basic purpose, which is to destroy representative government.' ”
⁷

DONOVAN'S PROPOSAL WAS SIMPLE
, straightforward, logical. He hoped it would be implemented directly upon the defeat of the Nazis, with Donovan in command. But the gestation period was years, not months, and by the time the
CIA
emerged, Donovan was long since gone.

He had been done in by America's most imposing bureaucrat, possibly the most feared man in Washington, the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover, ponderous, single-minded, and pugnacious, was a builder of empires. He wanted the
FBI
to be the most powerful agency in Washington, and he knew that the key to achieving his goal was by monopolizing intelligence. He who had the inside information had everything. At the beginning of the war, Hoover had tried to obtain for the
FBI
the exclusive right to collect and analyze intelligence on a worldwide basis. Donovan protested that domestic and foreign clandestine activities
had to be handled by separate agencies. Roosevelt, in his usual fashion, decided to split the difference; he gave Donovan Europe and Asia while reserving South America for the
FBI
.

Donovan's partial victory strengthened Hoover's distrust of the
OSS
. Representatives of the British Secret Service in Washington were amazed to find that “Hoover keenly resented Donovan's organization from the moment it was established.” The feud continued. Richard Harris Smith, author of an excellent history of the
OSS
, records that in 1942 Donovan's agents secretly broke into the Spanish Embassy in Washington and began photographing the code books. Hoover, furious at this invasion of his operational territory, waited until Donovan's men made another nocturnal entry into the embassy. While they were taking photographs, two
FBI
squad cars pulled up outside the embassy and turned on their sirens. Donovan's agents fled. Donovan protested to FDR, but rather than reprimand Hoover for his action, Roosevelt ordered the embassy infiltration project turned over to the
FBI
.
²

Jabbing and sparring between the
OSS
and the
FBI
continued through the war. Late in 1944, Hoover saw a chance to rid himself of the
OSS
and Donovan for good. He seized the opportunity. He somehow acquired a copy of Donovan's recommendations for a postwar intelligence service and, in a flagrant breach of security, leaked the top-secret document to the bitterly anti-Roosevelt Chicago
Tribune
. The
Tribune
's Walter Trohan then wrote a series of sensational articles, under even more sensational headlines, about Donovan's plans for a “super-spy system” in the “postwar New Deal.” Trohan charged that Donovan wanted to create an “all-powerful intelligence service to spy on the postwar world and to pry into the lives of citizens at home.… The unit would operate under an independent budget and presumably have secret funds for spy work.”
³

A predictable congressional uproar resulted. One conservative congressman declared, “This is another indication that the New Deal will not halt in its quest for power. Like Simon Legree it wants to own us body and soul.” Roosevelt decided it would be expedient to back off; the White House had Donovan's proposal put on the table. In April 1945, FDR decided to revive it, but a week later he was dead.

Roosevelt's successor, Harry Truman, was, unlike Roosevelt, no friend of Donovan's, and at the beginning of his administration
Truman was hardly strong enough to take on the redoubtable Hoover. In addition, Truman was determined to reduce the federal budget, which meant eliminating wartime agencies. When his venerable and conservative Director of the Budget, Harold Smith, indicated that a great deal of money could be saved by abolishing the
OSS
and putting its agents and activities into the hands of the older, established departments of the Navy, War, and State, Truman acted. Boldly declaring that America had no need for a peacetime “Gestapo,” on September 20, 1945, Truman issued an executive order disbanding the Office of Strategic Services.
⁴

The older departments were all delighted to have the
OSS
functions assigned to them, naturally enough, although they were resentful of the freewheeling Donovan agents who came along with the assignment. The covert and espionage side of
OSS
went to the War Department as a so-called Strategic Services Unit, but this was nothing more than a caretaker body to preside over the liquidation of the
OSS
espionage net. The Research and Analysis Branch of
OSS
went to State, where it was quickly decimated by congressional and presidential budget cutting, coupled with the hostility of older State Department hands. Assistant Secretary of State Spruille Braden told a congressional committee, “We resisted this invasion of all these swarms of people … mostly collectivists and ‘do-gooders' and what-nots.”
⁵

The conservative reaction that dominates Washington after all of America's wars (best summed up by Warren Harding's classic call for a “return to normalcy”) represented a hope for, rather than a realistic appreciation of, the future. Truman, like millions of his fellow citizens, yearned for “normalcy,” which meant a return to isolationism. An isolationist America would not need huge military budgets or secret spy agencies.

Almost immediately, however, Truman realized that he was wrong. America could not escape the world, and to be effective in dealing with other countries, the United States had to have a centralized intelligence service, just as it had to have a more centralized military establishment, the Truman Doctrine, and the Marshall Plan, The attack at Pearl Harbor was a surprise because the Army and Navy frequently acted as if they were at war with each other, and because a fragmented intelligence apparatus, dominated by the military, had been unable to distinguish “signals” from
“noise,” let alone make its assessments available to senior officers in time for them to act.

In January 1946, therefore, Truman issued a presidential directive establishing the Central Intelligence Group. The
CIG
had a director of Central Intelligence, selected by the President, and was responsible for coordination, planning, evaluation, and dissemination of intelligence. It sounded impressive, but in fact the
CIG'S
budget and personnel were drawn from War, Navy, and State, which meant that the old departments retained their autonomy over their own intelligence operations and thus had control over the
CIG
.
⁶

This was an obviously unsatisfactory situation. The military intelligence services jealously guarded their sources while continuing to insist on their right to provide policy guidance to the President. In the words of a later Senate committee, the military thereby made the “
CIG'S
primary mission an exercise in futility.”
⁷
Not only would the armed services not provide information on overseas events, they would not even tell the
CIG
what American capabilities and intentions were. The State Department was equally unwilling to cooperate with the
CIG
. From the White House point of view, by 1947 America's intelligence organizations were no better coordinated, nor more professional, than they had been in 1941. It was as if there were no lessons to be learned from Pearl Harbor.

Change was clearly needed. It came in July 1947 with the passage of the National Security Act, a broadly based piece of legislation that established the basic defense organization for the United States for the Cold War. The act separated the Air Force from the Army, gave the Joint Chiefs of Staff a statutory basis, made an attempt to integrate the services by creating the office of Secretary of Defense, and provided the President with a committee responsible directly to him, the National Security Council (
NSC
).

One part of the act changed the name of
CIG
to Central Intelligence Agency (
CIA
) and, more important, made it an independent department, responsible to the
NSC
(and thus directly to the President), not to the Secretary of Defense. The act assigned five general tasks to the
CIA
: (1) to advise the
NSC
on matters related to national security; (2) to make recommendations to the
NSC
regarding the coordination of intelligence activities of the departments; (3) to correlate and evaluate intelligence and provide for its appropriate
dissemination; (4) to carry out “service of common concern,” and (5) “to perform such other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security as the
NSC
will from time to time direct.”
⁸

The last function was decisive in giving the
CIA
a major and controversial role in the Cold War. It had been hotly debated and was deliberately worded vaguely because neither the Executive nor the Legislative branch of government could bring themselves to forthrightly advocate or authorize covert actions by the
CIA
. As George Kennan of the State Department later recalled, “We were alarmed at the inroads of the Russian influence in Western Europe beyond the point where the Russian troops had reached. And we were alarmed particularly over the situation in France and Italy. We felt that the Communists were using the very extensive funds that they then had in hand to gain control of key elements of life in France and Italy, particularly the publishing companies, the press, the labor unions, student organizations, women's organizations, and all sort of organizations of that sort, to gain control of them and use them as front organizations.…

“That was just one example that I recall of why we thought that we ought to have some facility for covert operations.”
⁹

Combining intelligence gathering and covert actions in one agency represented a victory for the Donovan heritage, as Edmond Taylor, an
OSS
veteran, pointed out in 1969. The
OSS
, Taylor wrote, established “a precedent, or a pattern, for United States intervention in the revolutionary struggles of the postwar age. The Donovan influence on U.S. foreign and military policy has continued to be felt ever since his death; for good or ill he left a lasting mark on the nation's power elite. However indirectly, many of our latter-day Cold War successes, disasters, and entrapments can ultimately be traced back to him.”
¹⁰
Another
OSS
veteran, Francis Miller, agreed. “The
CIA
,” he wrote in 1971, “inherited from Donovan his lopsided and mischievous preoccupation with action and the Bay of Pigs was one of the results of that legacy.”
¹¹