History of the Central Intelligence Agency

See also: Director of Central Intelligence and Clandestine HUMINT and Covert Action
Main article: Central Intelligence Agency
The lives of 139 fallen CIA officers are represented by 139 stars on the CIA Memorial Wall in the Original Headquarters building.

The United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) dates from September 18, 1947, when President Harry S. Truman signed the National Security Act of 1947 into law. A major impetus that has been cited over the years[citation needed] for the creation of the CIA was the unforeseen attack on Pearl Harbor,[1] but whatever Pearl Harbor's role, at the close of World War II government circles identified a need for a group to coordinate government intelligence efforts, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the State Department, the War Department, and even the Post Office were all jockeying for that new power.

General William "Wild Bill" Donovan, head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), wrote to President Franklin D. Roosevelt on November 18, 1944, stating the need for a peacetime "Central Intelligence Service ... which will procure intelligence both by overt and covert methods and will at the same time provide intelligence guidance, determine national intelligence objectives, and correlate the intelligence material collected by all government agencies",[2] and have authority to conduct "subversive operations abroad", but "no police or law enforcement functions, either at home or abroad".[3][4][5] Donovan's letter was prompted by a query from General Dwight Eisenhower's Chief of Staff about the nature of the role of the OSS in the military establishment.[6] Following this, Roosevelt ordered his chief military aide to conduct a secret investigation of the OSS's World War II operations. Around this time, stories about the OSS began circulating in major papers, including references to this OSS follow-on being an "American Gestapo".[6]: 5 [7] The report, heavily influenced by an FBI that saw itself as the future of American foreign intelligence, was starkly and vividly negative, only praising a few rescues of downed airmen, sabotage operations, and its deskbound research- and analysis-staff; the pronouncement of the report was that any "use [of the OSS] as a secret intelligence agency in the postwar world [would be] inconceivable", but even before the report was finished the President - presumably under pressure from the press articles - had ordered the Joint Chiefs to shelve their plans for a Central Intelligence Service even before the April release of the report.[6]

On September 20, 1945, as part of Truman's dismantling of the World War II war machine, the OSS, at one time numbering almost 13,000 staff, was eliminated over the span of ten days. A reprieve, though, was granted six days later by the Assistant Secretary of War, reducing it to a skeleton crew of roughly 15% of its peak force level, forcing it to close many of its foreign offices; at the same time the name of the service was changed from the OSS to the Strategic Services Unit.

  1. ^ Riebling, Mark (15 June 2010) [1994]. Wedge: From Pearl Harbor to 9/11: How the Secret War between the FBI and CIA Has Endangered National Security. New York: Simon and Schuster. ISBN 9781451603859. Retrieved 20 February 2023.
  2. ^ Factbook on Intelligence. Central Intelligence Agency. December 1992. pp. 4–5.
  3. ^ Troy, Thomas F. (September 22, 1993). "Truman on CIA". CIA Historical Review Program. Central Intelligence Agency. Archived from the original on March 24, 2010. Retrieved February 28, 2014.
  4. ^ Kinzer, Stephen (2008). All the Shah's men. Wiley. ISBN 978-0-471-26517-7.
  5. ^ "Office of Policy Coordination 1948–1952" (PDF). 1952. Retrieved August 10, 2010.
  6. ^ a b c Weiner, Tim (2007). Legacy of ashes : the history of the CIA (1st ed.). New York: Doubleday. pp. 702. ISBN 978-0-385-51445-3.
  7. ^ Weiner 2007, p. 5.