History Of Formation Of The Cia

In September of 1947 the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was realised and hatched, the eventuality of the intelligence reformation in the United States occurring after the Second World War. Less than a year before this date a Joint

Congressional Investigation had come to the inevitable conclusion that the Pearl Harbour attack illustrated America’s need for a unified command structure and a more efficient centralised intelligence system. In an attempt to bring these conclusions into realisation, Congress, in September 1947 passed the National Security Act of 1947 (NSA47) that brought into existence an intelligence infrastructure comprising of the National Security Council (NSC), a Secretary of Defense, a statutory Joint Chiefs of Staff and a Central Intelligence Agency.

CIA began its statutory existence in September 1947 with its creation validating, in a sense, a series of decisions taken soon after the end of the Second World War in regard to centralising intelligence services. The conflict surrounding this ended in the summer of 1945 with Washington decision-makers in broad agreement that the United States needed to reform the intelligence establishment that had grown so rapidly and haphazardly during the national emergency that was World War II. When President Truman dispersed the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in September 1945 he had no clear plan for constructing the peacetime intelligence structure that he and his advisers believed they needed in an atomic age. President Truman wanted the reforms to be part and parcel of the “unification” of the armed services, but the overhaul of the military that the President wanted would take time to push through Congress. In the intermediary period, he created a Central Intelligence Group (CIG) to screen his incoming cables and supervise activities left over from the former OSS. The CIG was the direct forerunner of the CIA and provided the CIA a framework for its structure.

In early 1946, the White House authorised CIG to evaluate intelligence from all parts of the government, and to absorb the remnants of OSS’s espionage and counterintelligence operations. Initially these distinct components of the new CIG shared little in common except an interest in foreign secrets and a sense that both strategic warning and clandestine activities abroad required “central” coordination.

Indeed, these two missions came together in CIG almost by accident. Under the first two Directors of Central Intelligence, however, CIG and the Truman administration came to realise how strategic warning and clandestine activities complemented one another.

The first DCI, Sidney Souers, recalled in 1954 that he had been part of the collective effort (leading to CIG’s establishment) to create “a central intelligence agency” that would ensure that national security policymakers “all would get the same intelligenceвЂ"in contrast to the system that had prevailed, where the OSS would give one bit of intelligence to the President and not any to the secretaries of the military departments and the State Department, who had some responsibility to advise the President.”

Intelligence reforms however were not the main concern in Congress or the White House, with the military “unification” issue overshadowing intelligence reform in deliberations. In the middle of 1946 the President again called on Congress to unify the Armed Services. In April of 1946 the Senate’s Military Affairs committee had passed a unification bill that contained a central intelligence agency but the draft had been held up in the hostile Naval Affairs committee. In May the Secretary of War Robert Patterson and Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal agreed that a defence reorganisation bill should include a role for a central intelligence agency. In June President Truman sent Congress the result of the two Secretaries’ accord (with modifications of his own), repeating his call for lawmakers to pass a unification bill that he could sign.

The next major movement towards the CIA was the National Intelligence Authority Directive 5 (NIAD-5) issued on 8 July 1946 that provided the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) the basic implementation plan to bring about the broad scope of powers envisaged in the President’s charter for the CIG. NIAD-5 was the directive of the National Intelligence Authority that was comprised of the Secretaries of State, War, and Navy, joined by the President’s chief military adviser, Admiral William Leahy.

NIAD-5 represented perhaps the most expansive charter ever granted to a Director of Central Intelligence. It enabled CIG to “centralise” research and analysis in “fields of national security intelligence that are not being presently performed or are not being adequately performed.” NIAD-5 also directed the DCI to coordinate all US foreign intelligence activities “to ensure that the over-all policies and objectives established by this Authority are properly implemented and executed.”

Congress initially paid scant attention to the new Central Intelligence Group. CIG had been created with no appropriations and authority of its own precisely to keep it beneath congressional scrutiny. As CIG gained new authority in 1946 through NIAD-5, and the White House gained confidence in its potential, a consensus emerged in Congress that post-war military reforms would not be complete without a simultaneous modernisation of American intelligence capabilities.

With the President’s goal of military modernisation suddenly in sight, the White House firmly told DCI Vandenberg that enabling legislation for CIG would remain a small part of the defence reform bill then being re-drafted by the President’s aides, and that the intelligence section would be kept as brief as possible in order to ensure that none of its details hampered the prospects for unification. This tactic however had the opposite affect upon Congress where the succinctness of the bills intelligence provisions had the affect of drawing Congresses attention rather than avoiding it. This resulted in every word of the intelligence section being debated upon and several amendments being made. The bill Congress passed however was essentially the White House’s draft with important sections clarified from President Truman’s 22 January 1946 directive establishing CIG. This meant the Central Intelligence Agency would be an independent agency under the supervision of the NSC, that it would conduct both analysis and clandestine activities,