The OSS and CIA: The History of America’s Intelligence Community during World War II and the Establishment of the Central Intelligence Agency

By Charles River Editors

The seal of the CIA

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Introduction

The CIA’s flag

The OSS and CIA

"The Work of a Nation. The Center of Intelligence."

When people think about the Second World War, they seldom think in terms of silence and small acts. This was a war in which the industry of entire nations was rearranged to feed fighting, and it was fought on a scale in which battles could include hundreds of thousands of combatants. Whole cities and populations were destroyed, with millions of casualties occurring at places like Leningrad.

But World War II was also a conflict in which modern covert operations first hit their stride. From the jungles of Burma to the streets of Paris, spies, saboteurs, and commandos carried out missions built on secrecy and cunning. Precise, self-contained operations could be as important to the outcome of the war as acts of massive destruction, whether it involved targeted assassinations, sabotaging key logistics, or counterintelligence to break up the enemy’s own rings. At the time, most of these operations were hidden from the public since that was the only way they could be successfully carried out, but in the years since, stories about various missions have emerged. They paint a picture of incredible courage and ingenuity, whether in war zones, enemy territory, or far from the front lines.

Though it might be hard to believe, the Americans did not have a covert operations organization when they joined the war, and like the British, it took them some time to realize it could be a powerful tool. As a result, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was not established until June 13, 1942, six months after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Voices within the Pentagon, State Department, and White House all opposed the establishment of this new and untested organization that would carry out activities normally considered unacceptable, so officials within the OSS had to fight for the very existence of the organization, battling through layers of bureaucracy to get the resources he needed and ensure its independence of action. They also worked hard to justify the use of covert tactics in warfare, to the extent that its leader, William “Wild Bill” Donovan, cited precedents that stretched back to the Bible.

In time, all the hard work led to the growth of the OSS into an organization with over 13,000 staff and 40 offices scattered across the world. Its purposes were initially similar to that of Britain’s Special Operations Executive, including espionage, sabotage, and intelligence assessments, but with time and experience, it expanded to include economic, psychological, and guerrilla warfare, as well as counter-intelligence work. And of course, it would all chart a path for the early days of America’s most famous intelligence agency, the CIA.

The OSS and CIA: The History of America’s Intelligence Community during World War II and the Establishment of the Central Intelligence Agency looks at the agencies’ organizational characteristics, historical inception, early Cold War growth, and its recent influence. Along with pictures and a bibliography, you will learn about the OSS and CIA like never before.

The OSS and CIA: The History of America’s Intelligence Community during World War II and the Establishment of the Central Intelligence Agency

About Charles River Editors

Introduction

American Intelligence Before World War II

The OSS during World War II

A Transition

The Birth of the CIA

The Eisenhower Years

Online Resources

Further Reading

Free Books by Charles River Editors

Discounted Books by Charles River Editors

American Intelligence Before World War II

In the summer of 1940, conditions looked bleak for Great Britain as German troops expanded across Europe in a tidal wave of destruction. In September 1939, they had invaded Poland, conquering the nation in mere weeks and triggering the Second World War. The following spring, they had invaded Belgium, France, and the Netherlands and decisively defeated the armies of Britain and France, two of the world's supposed superpowers. Britain was the only independent nation still standing against the menace of Nazism, a haven for fugitive soldiers and place where the armies of a free Europe regrouped to consider what desperate measures it would take to fight back.

By July, Hugh Dalton, the minister of economic warfare, was working on an idea for a new approach to the war. Building on the examples of Chinese guerrillas, Irish revolutionaries, and the Spanish peasant soldiers who had defied Napoleon, he wanted to create a movement in enemy-occupied territory that would use sabotage, propaganda, political agitation, and terrorism to weaken the enemy. A new organization would be needed to encourage and support this cause. Following a meeting between Dalton and Prime Minister Winston Churchill on the 16th of July, this organization was founded under Dalton's oversight and christened the Special Operations Executive (SOE).

Lord Dalton

Dalton wanted the SOE to be a civil rather than a military organization, but he knew he would need to find military men to lead many of its operations. He started by recruiting Brigadier Colin Gubbins, an expert in guerrilla combat, as director of operations and training.

Sir Gubbins

The SOE faced the enormous challenge of building an unprecedented network of covert operatives practically from scratch. This was made more difficult by resistance within the British government, where several senior men, including Sir Charles Portal, chief of the air staff, opposed the use of the tactics Dalton had proposed. Other branches of the military also resented the priority given to the SOE, which had received scarce resources such as plastic explosives.

Recruitment was a tricky business, as the organization could not be open about its purpose or the sort of people it needed. Recruiters started by seeking out those with language skills and seeing if they fit the bill in other ways. Even before joining the SOE, recruits experienced clandestine meetings in restaurants and anonymous offices. Women were recruited as well as men. The First-Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY), an all-female volunteer organization, provided some of the support staff and helped with recruitment by encouraging men to impress attractive young ladies by committing to the cause.

In the early days, the SOE staff had worked around the clock building up their new organization. Recruits were trained in unarmed combat, resisting interrogation, parachute landings, and a host of other specialist skills they would need. They were taught lock-breaking by a burglar, disguise by an actor, and had to undergo rigorous survival and fitness training. Their discretion was tested by approaches from attractive women. Within months, the SOE had its own training regimes, bases of operation, tests, and hierarchy. It had the men and women ready to go into action. Now it was time, as Churchill had put it, to set Europe ablaze.

Thanks to the ad hoc efforts of the British, there was a template of sorts in place when President Franklin D. Roosevelt tapped highly decorated World War I veteran and to that point unofficial intelligence asset William “Wild Bill” Donovan (1883-1959) to head a new, centralized intelligence program. This organization would be tasked with combining the heretofore disjointed and feeble intelligence gathering arms of the Department of State, Department of War, and the FBI. Roosevelt’s executive order on July 11, 1941 named Donovan the “Coordinator of Information” (COI), and in this role, Roosevelt hoped the massive amount of intelligence flooding the country could be streamlined, collated, and presented in an actionable manner. Though America wasn’t yet officially part of the war, it was aiding the British in various ways, and war with Japan was on the horizon.

Donovan

A picture of Donovan reviewing members of the group in 1945

Donovan was given a $10 million budget and 600 staffers, and he began his career in official intelligence by debriefing European war refugees who had freshly arrived in New York City. He aimed to learn about the capabilities of the European powers prior to a potential American entry into the war.[1]

Initially, as Donovan and his office’s role expanded to include overseas intelligence gathering and espionage, he sought to mirror Britain’s famous MI6 spy agency, but the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 provided the impetus for Donovan to expand his organization’s reach and responsibilities. In this regard, Donovan’s objectives would be helped by previous work done both by Americans and others in years past.

Just as the first steps towards cracking the German Enigma happened long before World War II, Western code-breakers began working on defeating Japanese naval encryption during the 1930s. The British, in fact, broke many of the codes used by the Empire of the Rising Sun years before the Americans, including the key naval code JN-25. Variants of JN-25 remained in use throughout World War II.

During the war years, the British concentrated most of their efforts on the Enigma machine and the Atlantic and European theaters. Though they passed on some information to the United States, they guarded much of their data closely, and they tended to look down on the Americans and somewhat suspicious upstarts (at the same time, of course, relying implicitly on the Americans to come to their rescue after the Wehrmacht forced the British Expeditionary Force to flee France and menaced England itself).

Accordingly, the Americans found themselves obliged to start over entirely with their own decryption program. American code-breakers broke the JN-25 cipher independently, giving their nation an invaluable tool for achieving military mastery in the Pacific Theater. Though threatened by various leaks and sometimes underfunded by a government initially dubious about the value of cryptanalysis, America's code-breakers ultimately achieved results as impressive as those coming from Bletchley Park. The British, in fact, offered some of their Enigma results in exchange for American help with Japanese wartime codes and the “Purple machine,” which baffled most British efforts to penetrate its secrets. Though both nations' agents and governments resented aspects of this agreement, it provided a sufficiently workable relationship to keep the overall Allied code-breaking effort functioning effectively.

British interest in Japanese codes began much earlier than the Americans' interest because of their possessions in the Far East. The British Empire still existed before World War II, and it included India, Singapore, and Australia among its colonies. While rivalry with the Russians for these possessions stretched back at least a century, the vigorous new empire of modernizing Japan represented a new and even more threatening competitor in the 1930s. The sheer ruthlessness and brutality of the Imperial Japanese Army, demonstrated in Manchuria and later China, where mass rape, massacres on a stunning scale, and extensive use of brutal torture to find hidden money and treasures occurred almost continuously during Japanese occupation, showed the high stakes involved. The British government therefore considered it imperative to break Japanese codes and thus learn the new empire’s intentions in advance.

The British soon encountered the first Japanese cipher machine – a relatively simple device dubbed the Orange machine. This two-wheel mechanism used one wheel for consonants and the other for vowels, making it relatively easy to solve each week's reset code. The Japanese frequently used the word “oyobi,” meaning “and,” which always allowed the British to quickly determine the vowel positions being used and from there infer the consonants. The breakthrough belonged mainly to the red-haired Hugh Foss.

The Americans, also interested in Japanese actions in the early 1930s, still lacked the experience to solve the Orange machine. Since the British chose not to share their information on the topic, the federal government solved the difficulty two years later, in 1936, by stealing an Orange machine from the Japanese naval attaché in Washington, D.C.

In 1934, the Japanese introduced their Type A code machine, better known by its American designation of the “Red machine.” This mechanism sought to rectify the weakness of its Orange predecessor by using two 26-position rotors rather than a separate rotor for consonants and another for vowels, which made vowel decryption almost painfully easy.

The Red's designers included a 47-pin gearwheel which moved the rotors forward a certain number of positions in between each keystroke on the device's typewriter keys. A five-digit code sent at the start of the message told the recipient what the starting position of the two rotors and the central gearwheel should be. Once the user positioned the rotors and gearwheel correctly, typing in the encrypted message produced a plain-text version of the original signal. In short, the Red machine used a slightly more complex version of a “substitution cipher” where a coded letter stood in for a specific plain-text letter.

The British quickly noticed several amateurish errors in the Japanese encryption system, however. Vowels still occurred far more frequently than individual consonants, permitting their easy identification. The Japanese also regularly changed the starting positions every 10 days, but, rather than using random starting positions, moved through a limited selection of predetermined starting positions in a regular order.

Armed with this information, the British built a decryption device they named the “J machine” in August 1935. This greatly sped up decipherment, enabling larger volumes of code-breaking even as the threat of Japanese aggression grew. The J machine arrived just in time, in fact, to decode traffic between Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan indicating the imminent possibility of an alliance between the two totalitarian nations. As a report from one of the code-breakers expressed it, “The Japanese and German nations have many traits in common. Both have strong leanings towards nationalism. In both the military caste have traditionally been – in Japan they still are – the real rulers of the country. Recent events have served to accentuate this resemblance. Both countries have left the League of Nations, for not dissimilar reasons.”

Britain's primacy in Pacific code-breaking drew rapidly to a close as the decade ended. The threat of invasion caused the English government to withdraw many of its Far Eastern cryptanalysis experts to safer locations. Meanwhile, the prospect of war with Nazi Germany and the immediate menace to the home island that entailed brought about a new focus on Third Reich codes, centered on the Enigma machine.

The final blow to British code-breaking in the Pacific arrived in the form of the “Purple” machine, a completely new encryption device paired with a fresh coding system given the designation JN-25. The Type B coding device, called the Alphabetical Typewriter 97 by the Japanese and, most memorably, the Purple machine by the Americans, first emerged in 1937. This explains its Japanese name, since the Japanese reckoning equates 1937 with the year 2597. The Purple machine saw no widespread use until February 1939, however, by which time Britain stepped down its Pacific decoding operations.

The Americans remained quite amateurish as code-breakers through the end of World War I, eschewing cryptanalysis through a widespread feeling in government circles that reading foreign correspondence represented “ungentlemanly” behavior. This attitude, risible to nearly every other nation with a major foreign policy, gave place to a more pragmatic approach as the 1930s dawned. A colorful cryptographic enthusiast and all-around scoundrel named Herbert Osborn Yardley helped create this transition with a mix of salesmanship and brazen profiteering that ended the United States' period of code-breaking “innocence.” He managed to persuade the government to extend the wartime MI-8 (Military Intelligence 8) into a peacetime codebreaking and espionage section he dubbed “the Black Chamber,” with Yardley at its head, which set about breaking Japanese codes in the late 1920s.

Herbert Yardley

Yardley, not averse to a bit of treason on the side, secretly sold details of how his own organization, the Black Chamber, solved the Japanese codes to the Japanese embassy in Washington for the sum of $7,000 (approximately $99,000 today). This prompted the Japanese to start using cipher machines in the first place, rather than simple code books. Furthermore, Yardley immediately published the same information in a popular hardback, The American Black Chamber, to the profound outrage of the Japanese:

The American government shut down Yardley's “Black Chamber” and replaced it with the Signal Intelligence Service, or SIS, under the skilled and considerably more professional cryptographer William F. Friedman. SIS and Friedman cut their teeth on the Red machine (solving it in 1936, two years later than the British) but made their true debut in urgent code-breaking by tackling the Purple machine. Friedman's most able codebreakers, Frank Rowlett – a genteel but extremely touchy man from the south – and Solomon Kullback – a noisy, prickly New Yorker – solved the Red machine and led the efforts to crack Purple. Both men, despite their highly noticeable personal quirks, possessed keen intelligence and high aptitude for cryptanalysis.

The Purple machine used a triple set of fixed electrical switches rather than interchangeable rotors for encryption purposes. Connected by a Byzantine tangle of wires that baffled all but the most careful specialists, these switches operated in three banks, a fast bank, an average bank, and a slow bank. Set to different patterns according to a five-digit code supplied at the start of message, the switch banks randomized letter sequences much more effectively than the Red machine.

This intensive randomization greatly increased the Purple machine's security, but Rowlett and Kullback soon detected and exploited a number of design flaws. Though quite similar to the Enigma machine, the fixed switch banks could not be rearranged like the Enigma's mechanical motors, meaning that though they introduced true randomization, this occurred within a much smaller range of possible combinations.

Even worse from a security point of view, the Japanese remained unaware that cipher letter frequency must be equalized to foil statistical code-breaking. The Purple machine still split coded letters into two groups, one of 20 and the other of six, though the six letters no longer represented vowels. Still, they occurred much more frequently than average, which, combined with statistical letter frequencies in Japanese, enabled deduction of common words such as the inevitable “oyori” (“and”). The Japanese made further amateurish mistakes that proved windfalls for the alert, keen minds of Kullback and Rowlett. They continued using the Red machine alongside the Purple machine for almost a year, frequently sending the same message on each, giving the SIS decoders excellent “cribs” to work from. Certain stations also sent signals with the same set of words at the start, providing smaller but still useful “cribs” in this fashion.

Though Kullback and Rowlett made some progress, the true breakthrough came from a highly perceptive assistant code-breaker, Genevieve Grotjan. She noticed that, though random, the ciphers still formed 25-letter clumps. From this, without ever seeing a Purple machine, she deduced the use of three banks of switches, one set fast and another set slow, with the capability to set a different bank as fast or slow each time the machine operated. The team, cheering, drank Grotjan's health with a round of Coca Colas. Rowlett later described the moment of triumph: “Small promptly started dancing around her desk, raising his arms like a victorious prizefighter, and yelled 'Whoopee.' Ferner, who was usually very quiet and not very much inclined to show enthusiasm, clapped his hands, shouting 'Hurrah! Hurrah!' I could not resist jumping up and down and waving my arms above my head and exclaiming 'That's it! That's it! Gene has found what we've been looking for!'”

Genevieve Grotjan's discovery enabled the American team to build their own Purple Machine, a process requiring three weeks of intensive wiring and the exercise of considerable brainpower. Each of the three banks was connected to the each of the other two by 500 soldered wires. Constructing this proved a painstaking effort, since any error in the thousands of connections would render the machine useless for decoding. The main engineer, Captain Leo Rosen, managed the feat of building an exact working replica of the Purple machine without ever having seen the original.

Once completed, the machine enabled commencement of the decryption program dubbed MAGIC. Since SIS represented an Army organization, military intelligence leaders worked out a bizarre arrangement whereby the Navy's OP-20-G service used the Purple machine on days with odd-numbered dates and SIS utilized it on the even-numbered dates. This lessened, but failed to fully prevent, feuding and arguments between the two services. Once war began, the Americans built numerous duplicates of Rosen's original so dozens of posts could work simultaneously on Japanese signals traffic.

Though MAGIC offered a firm foundation for American cryptanalysis in the Pacific Theater for the rest of the war, decoding remained a constant battle of intellects between coders and decoders. The Japanese updated their codes frequently and used various methods to render them less easily penetrated, while the American code-breakers labored to develop workarounds. Decryption rates sometimes fell as low as 15% or rose as high as 80%, with a general but not invariable upward trend as the war progressed.

American decoding success fluctuated throughout the war and some messages remained uncrackable, but the intelligence and dedication of a few men and women exercised a powerful effect over both individual actions and the whole course of war against the Empire of the Rising Sun.

Given the American capabilities before the war, conspiracy theories abound today about President Franklin D. Roosevelt knowing in advance of the attack on Pearl Harbor and allowing the Japanese to launch it in order to involve America in the war. While the Americans' MAGIC program carried out decryption of Japanese codes for over a year before Pearl Harbor, no factual basis for the conspiracy theory exists. In fact, many verifiable factors debunk it, including Roosevelt's efforts to deescalate Japanese aggression, the need for a massive, far-flung conspiracy to permit the alleged deception, and the fact that the Japanese and Americans both recognized the inevitability of a collision for years. While the American listening posts intercepted messages relating to Pearl Harbor, the Japanese chose to use the rare J-19 code for these particular signals rather than the JN-25. The Americans gave highest priority to the important JN-25 code; only eight people worked on the J-19 transmissions received every day at that time. The specific orders – couched in vague terms in any case – simply became lost in the flood of data confronting the MAGIC analysts on a daily basis. The overworked personnel filed the intercepts among reams of other backlog work, and the specific messages which might have clued the Americans in received no deciphering until 1945.

The British also picked up vague indications and attempted rather halfheartedly to pass them to the Americans, but the personal quirks of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover prevented the information from reaching Roosevelt or any high-ranking military personnel. The British sent an agent named Dusko Popov, a melodramatic though effective Yugoslavian who hated Nazis passionately. A slender, elegant, luxury-loving man with an insatiable interest in beautiful women, Popov knew Ian Fleming and, some believe, formed part of the basis for the fictional character James Bond.

Dusko Popov

Popov came to the United States to contact the FBI, rather than military intelligence, because the FBI ran counterespionage and spy-catching operations in the United States. He carried two pieces of information with him. The first concerned a new Nazi microdot system enabling hundreds of words of text to be printed in a minuscule fleck on a piece of paper, effectively concealing a whole message from casual inspection. More vitally, he also bore a questionnaire the Germans sent to their spies in the United States. This questionnaire included all items the Third Reich deemed most urgent to learn. Dozens of questions centered on Pearl Harbor – what ships regularly anchored there, what air defenses it possessed, and so on. The British noted that the Germans almost certainly sought to collect this data for their Japanese allies, suggesting an imminent attack on Pearl Harbor.

Hoover declined to see Popov for two weeks after his arrival in August 1941, so the Yugoslavian agent passed the time in the expected manner by traveling to Miami and starting a passionate affair with an American model. Oddly, Hoover may have had similar motives, since the delay sprang from his vacation with Clyde Tolson, his assistant and possible homosexual partner.

Finally ushered into Hoover's presence by threatening G-men, Popov found himself greeted with a blustering tirade from the FBI director. Hoover accused him of “corrupting” his men's morals with the example of sleeping with a model, to which Popov, refusing to be intimidated, responded calmly he was a man who enjoyed living well. He delivered the information, and tried to reason with Hoover: The information in Hoover's hands, without exaggeration, represented intelligence “dynamite.” The FBI later claimed Hoover passed the questionnaire and its insistent focus on Pearl Harbor to Roosevelt, but the original questionnaire and a number of copies of Hoover's report based on it survive. The FBI chief omitted all mention of Pearl Harbor and Hawaii in the digest eventually supplied to the president and key military and naval figures, and the Bureau did not forward the questionnaire itself.

For reasons known only to himself, Hoover threw away a major intelligence coup by the British which could have foiled the Pearl Harbor attack. Most likely, with practically no military knowledge, he simply failed to understand the significance of the intense Axis interest in the naval base and dismissed it as a series of pointless questions about a distant, unimportant location on the Hawaiian Islands, far less significant than anything referring to the mainland United States.

The OSS during World War II

American military intelligence agencies had broken some of the Japanese codes before the attack and were aware of its possibility, but the nature of the military’s agencies meant that no single office was responsible for collecting and distributing the information. Inevitably, much the same way the British were hesitant to share intelligence even with allies, different American departments were reluctant to “give away” their valuable information, meaning the warning was never passed high enough to elicit a response.[2] It was clear to Roosevelt that the United States needed a “central” intelligence outfit to act as an authority on intelligence gathering and presentation.

With this in mind, the COI split in early 1942, with its propaganda arm and half its staff moving under the War Department and the other half, responsible for intelligence gathering and clandestine operations, transitioning to the newly formed Office of Strategic Services (OSS). The OSS was so named because Donovan wanted to capture the strategic nature of his endeavors. The OSS became an official department on June 13, 1942, and with it, the United States had a modern, if little understood, intelligence arm.

From the start, the OSS and SOE sought to collaborate in their work. The SOE had concerns the political and bureaucratic mess around OSS would hold the American organization back, and they hoped to help their colleagues overcome these obstacles. They recognized that American resentment at Britain's leading role in the war could cause divisions and hinder trans-Atlantic cooperation, as had happened when the armies had been brought together in North Africa, and they were keen to avoid this happening in the field of clandestine warfare.

Working in their favor was the fact that the organization and recruitment techniques of the OSS were similar to those of the SOE. That said, recruitment included an element of bluntness that was at odds with the British approach, as all recruits were asked if they would be willing to land by parachute behind enemy lines, knowing that if they were caught they would be tortured to death. The OSS wanted to be sure of the character of its recruits from the start.

With its large immigrant communities, America provided access to recruits from a wide range of backgrounds, which meant they had a variety of languages and diverse knowledge of European customs. One large pool of recruits was the Italian American community, which had provided tough men, some of them from criminal gangs, who were keen to get put into action in fascist Italy.

The training was also similar to that in Britain. They were taught to kill with their bare hands and use a wide range of weapons, infuriating members of the Congressional Country Club when they ruined its golf course with hand grenade practice. There was training in parachuting, stealthy movement, and lock picking. They practiced for a host of different scenarios, from stealthily killing a sentry to drawing conclusions about the inhabitants of a room based on its contents.

The lives of these agents were absolutely secret. Even while training, friends and family had no idea where they were or what they were doing. This was the nature of the sort of war for which the OSS was preparing, a war in which secrecy was vital and deception was the only true defense.

OSS agents carried out their operations in two different formats. Some individual agents went in wearing civilian clothing, disguised and undercover behind enemy lines, while operational groups went in wearing uniforms, dressed and equipped as American soldiers. Their operations were more connected to guerrilla warfare than espionage, and so they worked by remaining hidden rather than blending in. Being in uniform meant they should, in theory at least, be treated as combatants if they were to be captured, thereby receiving protections intended for prisoners of war under the Geneva Convention.

Individual agents were sent into many different countries, and though most targets were enemy nations or occupied territories, there were also operations on neutral ground. Agents based out of the American embassy set up networks of operatives in Spain, then led by Franco’s right-wing dictatorship, which remained neutral. Agents in Spain were important because of that country's sympathies to the Axis cause, and because many escaped POWs and downed airmen had been smuggled out through there via French escape lines.

Covert networks were often set up not as groups where everyone knew each other, but as chains of people. Thus, each person in the chain would know the person they had recruited and the person who had recruited them, but no one else. That way, if one person was captured, their interrogation would only put two others at immediate risk.

To oversee their work in Europe, the OSS set up a base in London, close to the American embassy. There, they had easier access to the continent and the leaders of the war in Europe. Donovan himself came across the Atlantic to try to persuade the American military and the British establishment to make use of the OSS and to allow it the freedom to operate, but the OSS had a tough time selling the establishment on their value and initially ended up working under British supervision.

One of the OSS's greatest successes was the infiltration of Germany itself. Within a year of setting up in London, they had dispatched 150 operatives into the heart of Hitler's Reich, providing an invaluable intelligence network that stayed surprisingly well hidden. 95% of its operatives survived the war.

Both the OSS and SOE took great care to ensure their agents departed with complete, convincing, and coherent outfits. Every detail, down to the socks on their feet and the cigarettes in their pockets, had to match not just the country to which they were going, but their cover story as well. If their paperwork said they were factory workers from Bordeaux, everything about them had to match that story. OSS operatives were even taught how to smoke like Frenchmen after an agent gave himself away by casting aside an unfinished cigarette.

Forgers and secret print works produced the documents that would allow agents to pass safely through occupied Europe. Ration cards, travel papers, doctors' notes, and letters from grieving relatives about deaths in the family were all used to weave elaborate cover stories and the reasons why a person would be on the move.

The OSS and SOE were interested in destabilizing the Axis powers and supported schemes to undermine the Axis governments and even assassinate their leaders, though aside from Heydrich, these seldom came to anything. The OSS was particularly concerned with Hitler's psychological state and how they might undermine him, so they commissioned detailed reports analyzing his behavior and way of thinking. One of these correctly predicted Hitler's mental state toward the end of the war, with setbacks leaving him increasingly paranoid, unwilling to trust those around him, retreating into a safe space, and eventually committing suicide.

Inside Germany, the OSS networks gathered information on events around Hitler, his daily routines, and the security measures around him. Their contacts included not only Germany's underground political opposition, but also people inside the establishment, including a high-ranking foreign ministry official. They had heard about Hitler's increasingly strange behavior and the strain it had placed on senior officials within Germany.

Thus, analysts developed schemes to mentally unbalance Hitler, some of them more convincing than others. At one point, they considered dropping large quantities of pornography over Hitler's home with the hope that seeing the materials would somehow unsettle him.

Detailed plans were drawn up for assassinating Hitler and Himmler, his likely successor. It was believed that taking out the men at the top might critically weaken the German war effort and end the war sooner. However, the plans for these operations, titled Foxley and Foxley II, were never put into action. Indeed, the most noteworthy assassination attempts aimed at Hitler would come from disgruntled Nazis as the war turned against Germany.

Attempts to undermine the war effort were not all focused on the leadership. In 1944, the OSS and SOE started recruiting German soldiers who had been taken as prisoners of war and sending them back to Germany to spread rumors designed to undermine morale. These included stories of widespread infidelity by wives and girlfriends of soldiers away at the front, non-existent Allied covert operations in Germany, and a fictional order that only certain Axis units would be allowed to retreat if things went wrong.

In October 1940, Italy invaded Greece, and this initially unsuccessful campaign led to a German intervention that drove the Allies out and conquered both Greece and Yugoslavia by June 1941. A brutal guerrilla war followed as local partisans fought to drive the invaders out of the Balkans. This region was important for access to the oilfields of both Romania and the Middle East, and because of this, the Allies were keen to support the resistance. Thus, both the OSS and SOE sent in operatives, but they found a far more difficult situation than in France. The resistance movements were bitterly divided along ideological and ethnic lines. In Yugoslavia, Croats, Serbs, and Slovenes fought each other as well as the Germans, while Greece descended into civil war between covert groups. Once a peace had been reached, the largest group tried to force its will upon the others. In Albania, there were over 50 different groups, some Nationalist, some Communist. The division between communists and nationalists was particularly important in Yugoslavia, where two leading movements emerged - the nationalist Chetniks, led by General Mihailović, and the Communist resistance, led by Josip Broz, commonly known as Marshal Tito. The Allies were already worried about what Europe might look like after the war, and about the spread of Communism in particular, so they threw their backing behind the Chetniks, but Mihailović used the weapons they gave him to attack the Communist resistance as well as the Germans. In response, the Americans and the British shifted to supporting Tito in the hope of uniting the resistance against the invaders.

Tito

The passions roused in the Balkans led to a particularly brutal and bitter war. Prisoners, whether from the occupiers or opposing resistance groups, were regularly beaten and killed. Even OSS and SOE officers were caught up in the internecine struggles, often asked to help one side or targeted for attacks by another.

Following the Axis invasion of the Balkans, many locals had taken to the hills. As a result, the role of OSS and SOE operatives was quite different from in France. Rather than living undercover in areas heavily patrolled by the enemy, acting as spies, and making careful, furtive connections, they joined guerrilla bands living in out-of-the-way villages, often in the high hills. From there, they encouraged and supported campaigns of sabotage and ambush against the Germans, doing their best to direct strong-willed local leaders.

The ability of Western operatives to direct guerrilla activities was helped by the resources they brought. They could arrange Allied air drops, bringing in weapons, ammunition, and other supplies for the partisans. This made them valuable assets for both Nationalist and Communist leaders.

OSS and SOE operatives often arrived in the region with specific objectives, such as destroying strategically important bridges, blocking the Danube River, or disrupting copper mining in Serbia. Though they might bring with them the equipment and skilled specialists to carry out the tasks, they usually tried to encourage local resistance groups to do the work. The idea was to stir up trouble and encourage guerrilla warfare, not for the Western Allies to fight their own Balkan campaign.

As in France, attacks on Axis facilities and troops often led to brutal reprisals. Captured resistance and Allied operatives were tortured and executed. Civilians in the areas near attacks were also rounded up at random and killed to discourage support for the resistance.

The invasion of Italy in 1943 provided a boost for the guerrillas in the Balkans. The Italian government had quit the war, and while half of Italy had remained in German hands under a puppet government initially led by Mussolini, the Germans could no longer rely on Italian troops. The Germans hurried to round up Italians stationed in the Balkans, meaning that both the Italians and the Germans dealing with them had been removed from the equation. Some Italians handed over their weapons and equipment to the partisans, and an OSS officer helped with negotiations at Split that led to a major handover of supplies to Tito's forces.

The OSS and SOE also sent operatives to train and coordinate with Chinese guerrilla groups, which proved far more challenging than working with resistance organizations in Europe. The linguistic and cultural barriers between the European agents and the people with whom they were working caused several problems, and the Westerners found the culture and the environment of fierce political debate common in Chinese groups alienating. With limited knowledge of local languages, they struggled to understand and communicate with most of the people they met, and everything had to be filtered through Chinese leaders.

Many of the Chinese commanders were unwilling to be led by the American and British agendas and would avoid carrying out suggested operations for fear of bringing down the wrath of the Japanese by providing only limited intelligence reports. They did not want to openly oppose the outsiders who were a valuable source of weapons and other equipment, so they told the agents what they thought they wanted to hear, including stories of successes on fighting fronts where little real action was happening.

Work with the Chinese resistance was frustrating but important work, given China's leading role in fighting the Japanese. Despite the difficulties, they launched ambushes against Japanese troops, sabotaged transport lines, and raided enemy bases. One of the biggest and last successes for these groups came in August 1945. Led by OSS operatives, Chinese guerrillas planted explosive charges on the mile-long bridge over the Hwang-Ho River and blew up two of the bridge's spans just as a Japanese troop train was crossing. The bridge was destroyed and the train fell into the river, taking 2,000 soldiers with it.

As was the case in Europe, both sides recruited spies to gather information on the other's activities. Very few British or American operatives were able to pass as natives and so they relied on recruiting local agents. Women played a particularly prominent role, as the Japanese recruited local women to spend time with Allied troops to get them to reveal information about themselves and their work. The Allies did the same, targeting prostitutes and mistresses of Japanese officers for recruitment. As with similar operations in Europe, the hope was that sex appeal might loosen the men's lips.

As well as gathering information, the Allies tried to spread misinformation to undermine Japanese morale, which became particularly important near the end of the war. The Allies were winning, but Japanese military culture made surrender unacceptable, and many soldiers fought on to the bitter end, which promised to drag out the war. To undermine this attitude, the OSS created false Japanese paperwork in the form of an order making it acceptable for soldiers to surrender in difficult circumstances. This was made using official Japanese paperwork materials captured in Burma with the help of a disillusioned Japanese officer. Detachment 101 got the fake orders into Japanese hands by planting them in a Japanese courier's mailbag after they ambushed and killed him.

By 1945, every facet of OSS and SOE operations in Asia had improved from its tentative start. During the last eight months of the war, OSS teams did huge damage to Japanese supplies and communication lines through acts of sabotage, and the killing of 12,348 Japanese soldiers, leaving the enemy constantly on edge.

Despite the successes in different fields throughout the war, Donovan’s nascent agency struggled to make headway because the cards were always stacked against it. The military services, which each still possessed their own intelligence gathering structures, actively worked to hamstring the OSS, and the Joint Chiefs, along with the State Department, convinced Roosevelt that the OSS was not the answer to the lack of central intelligence and led him to issue a decree that effectively barred the OSS from accessing or attempting to decode some of the war’s most sensitive intercepts.[3] This came as a blow to the OSS, which was still learning the hard way the lessons of espionage its peers, friend and foe, had been practicing for years.

His efforts at traditional intelligence gathering thwarted, Donovan turned to more creative and occasionally disastrous efforts to give the United States an advantage in the Second World War and cement his own legacy as a pioneer in espionage. Among Donovan’s infamous exploits during the war was his idea to send bats armed with incendiary devices into Tokyo, hoping to destroy the city.[4] Although this idea was never carried out, it points to Donovan’s infatuation with creative thinking. In another plan, which was disastrously seen through, Donovan’s OSS dropped 21 two-man teams behind enemy lines in Germany with no support structure to gather intelligence and break the enemy’s morale. Of these teams, only one was ever heard from again.[5]

Such exploits helped define Donovan, and the intelligence apparatus’ legacy as a win-at-all-costs, secretive, cloak and dagger operation, but it was met with backlash from every office, including the FBI, State Department, Joint Chiefs, and President Roosevelt himself. In fact, Roosevelt ordered an investigation into the organization’s tactics early in 1945. The investigation was supposed to be a secret, but leaks to the press and the subsequent headlines implied Donovan wished to create an “American Gestapo,” an alarming pejorative given the ongoing war against the Nazis.[6] The Joint Chiefs, at the behest of Roosevelt, and no doubt with their own desires for a central intelligence agency under the purview of the War Department, ordered all OSS actions relating to the war shelved on March 6, 1945.

The leaders of the OSS recommended it be turned into a peacetime central intelligence agency, but they were overruled and the organization was disbanded in October 1945, with its intelligence gathering and analysis elements being transferred to the State Department. Meanwhile, in Britain, the SOE was officially merged with the SIS in January 1946, but in reality the SOE was effectively disbanded. A month later, a mysterious fire in its records office destroyed the evidence documenting many of its wartime operations, activities a post-war British government might not have wanted to reveal.

A Transition

President Roosevelt died in office on April 12, 1945, and his successor, Harry S. Truman, was even less enthused about the OSS. On his first day in office, Truman was presented with a Top Secret document produced jointly by the armed services and the FBI (both of which had their own aims to take the postwar intelligence lead), which detailed all the failures of the OSS and pointedly explained that the agency had done nothing to help the Allies win the war. The report claimed the OSS’s tactics were predicable and sophomoric, and that its agents were nowhere near as well trained or talented as their adversaries and peers. The report faulted the OSS for indirectly, through incompetence, costing the lives of thousands of American and Allied troops through leaked plans and poor operational security, and the report further accused Donovan himself of losing a briefcase full of sensitive information at a cocktail party in Bucharest. According to the document, the briefcase was then given to the Gestapo by a Romanian dancer. It also accused Donovan of promoting officers based on his personal relationships with them, leading to an agency directed by woefully ill-equipped Wall Street types and social climbers.[7]

Armed with this damning information, Truman fired Donovan and ordered the complete dissolution of the OSS within 10 days, just six weeks after Japan’s surrender marked the end of the war. He may have been further convinced by newspaper stories and public sentiment that the OSS’s tactics seemed a bit too much like the beginning of an American Gestapo.[8]

Although no serious argument has been publicly mounted that refutes the Top Secret report’s findings, it definitely left out some of the positive accomplishments of Donovan’s organization. The most famous of these involved a small group of agents called Service Unit Detachment 101, which established a base in Burma (present day Myanmar) in 1944 and created a guerrilla force comprised of the local tribesmen, the Kachin. Over the course of a year, the guerrilla force grew from a handful of tribesmen to a force of over 10,000 soldiers. This newly created unit helped the allies trap two vital Japanese divisions during the American offensives in Burma, and was crucial to allied success in the Pacific.[9] This victory showed one of the great strengths of clandestine operations, and the ability to quickly multiply a force through unconventional tactics such as money exchanges and propaganda programs. Detachment 101 was awarded a Presidential Unit Citation by Roosevelt, the only OSS unit to be honored in such a way.[10]

Following Donovan’s firing and the shakeup that followed the end of the Second World War, there was a great power vacuum in Washington. John Magruder (1887-1958), Donovan’s second-in-command, sought out Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy (1895-1989) days before the termination date to try and achieve a stay of execution for the intelligence service. McCloy granted it, so much of OSS’s infrastructure remained in place (albeit without Donovan) under the name Strategic Services Unit (SSU). Truman, kept in the dark about this development initially, reluctantly acquiesced to this fait accompli.

Magruder

McCloy

Magruder, a charismatic and eloquent man who struck quite a contrast with Donovan’s cavalier and often grating and unpopular style, convinced McCloy that to properly conduct the type of espionage that would be needed in the postwar world, an intelligence agency must be empowered to work outside the usual parameters of legality and morality, neither of which the Department of War or the Department of State could do. The timing for this message couldn’t have been better, because the SSU quickly had its hands full as the Soviet Union began taking control of East Germany. SSU agents who had been overwhelmed by their fellow spies during World War II were now polishing their techniques in Germany as the Soviet Union became the obvious next adversary.

However, due to the churn from Donovan’s firing and the uncertain future of the intelligence service, the talent quickly left the field. Spies returned to their lives as university professors, lawyers, and newspapermen, leaving the SSU a mostly empty shell that was unable to mount any real espionage activities.[11]

With the wholesale downsizing of military and other war-related enterprises following the end of the war, Truman seemed willing to let his intelligence agency die on the vine, but one dissenting and convincing voice came from, of all people, Truman’s budget director, Harold Smith (1898-1947). Charged by Truman to manage the postwar drawdown, Smith warned the president that if he did not properly fund and organize a central intelligence arm, the nation would quickly revert to the vulnerable state it found itself in back in 1941, meaning an attack such as Pearl Harbor could occur unchecked. Persuaded by the argument, Truman saw the light and, on January 24, 1946, created the Central Intelligence Group (CIG). He named Naval Reserve Rear Admiral Sidney Souers (1892-1973) its first director.

Smith

Souers

The formation of the CIG represents the dawning of the modern age of American central intelligence, and Souers is considered the CIA’s first director despite the fact the agency did not yet have that name. He was an interesting choice to head the new agency – as a grocery store magnate, Souers was clear about his desire to return to St. Louis following the war and continue life as a civilian, so he only reluctantly accepted the directorship, and he would last less than 6 months in the job. His time was marked largely by confusion, mostly because he understandably did not know exactly what Truman wanted from the agency. Furthermore, Truman still kept the intelligence agency at arm’s length, tasking them originally only with collating the stacks of intelligence cables that came across his desk daily and creating a single document for his perusal. The CIG also still faced resistance from the War Department, State Department, and FBI, all of which refused to share information with Souers’ new agency.[12]

John Magruder, the man most responsible for keeping the OSS alive in 1945, again seized an opportunity. Realizing that Truman’s vague charter establishing the CIG left much room for interpretation, Magruder began exploiting loopholes in the charter to build a modern clandestine service irrespective of domestic or international laws. Much of the CIA’s apparent lack of oversight through the latter half of the 20th century can be traced back to Magruder’s decisive actions in the early days of the CIG to establish a service that operated largely outside traditional governmental reach.

On June 10, 1946, Souers got his wish and was able to return to Missouri. Army General Hoyt Vandenburg (1899-1954), a dashing and charismatic pilot, was named director and made immediate and successful efforts to get the CIG back into the intelligence game by focusing on international spying, which no other agency was capable of handling either legally or logistically. By July, Vandenburg had secured the agency’s first real funding, to the tune of $15 million, which he gathered under the table from sympathetic Congressmen. With that, he began planning overseas operations against the Soviet Union.

Vandenburg

On July 17, 1946 the CIG was officially recast as an operating agency, meaning it could now receive a legitimate budget, albeit a modest one. A few months later, it used this newfound budget to fund a clandestine operation in Romania that aimed to form Romania’s National Peasant Party into a resistance force against the occupying Soviet Union, similar to the force that enjoyed such success in Burma in 1944. This time, however, the CIG agents attempting to organize the party, green and unsophisticated in their approach, were quickly sniffed out by the much more experienced Soviet secret agents. The communist forces summarily crushed the attempted resistance, killing or imprisoning nearly all involved Romanians,[13] and the first intelligence battle between the United States and USSR in the Cold War had been fought. The ensuing back-and-forth between the two giants would largely define the geopolitics of the latter half of the 20th century.

Despite this rough start, Vandenburg’s central intelligence apparatus had established itself as a group capable of coloring outside the lines. Once talent and experience caught up with ambition, the clandestine service was sure to be formidable.

The Birth of the CIA

The CIG was officially renamed the Central Intelligence Agency on July 26, 1947 upon the signing of the National Security Act. This landmark bill, the largest governmental reorganization in modern history, also changed the Department of War to the Department of Defense, created the US Air Force as a separate military branch, and altered foreign policy to face the growing threat of the Soviet Union, which now included a burgeoning nuclear weapons program.

The act’s intelligence provisions were purposely vague to allow the CIA to continue to operate with little oversight and a secret budget.[14] The CIA would report directly to the newly formed National Security Council (NSC), comprised of the president and a close group of senior advisors. To appease those still worried about the agency becoming an American Gestapo, the agency would be responsible only for foreign espionage, which meant domestic investigations would be carried out by the FBI. However, this separation of duties further cemented the lawless nature of the CIA, and all tactics for information gathering were on the table so long as they were only carried out in foreign nations or against foreign citizens.

With the creation of the Air Force, Vandenburg left the CIA to become the Air Force’s first Chief of Staff, and he was replaced by Roscoe Hillenkoetter (1897-1982), the agency’s third director in 15 months.

Hillenkoetter

The NSC’s first test for the new agency was a tall one. On December 14, 1947, the NSC tasked the CIA with executing top secret covert operations in Italy to prevent communists from winning the April 1948 elections. There was much concern that if the communists win the election, no less than the seat of Catholicism, Vatican City, would be in jeopardy of annexation by an atheist, totalitarian regime. An estimated $10 million was transferred from the CIA’s secret coffers, mostly to Italian-Americans with family back in Italy, to be wired to Italy to fund political fronts. These fronts had been created by the CIA and existing political organizations, especially those with ties to the Vatican. The operation was successful, if expensive, as the American-backed Christian Democrats won the 1948 election, setting the stage for the CIA to act as the United States’ direct influencer in ostensibly democratic elections worldwide.[15]

The immediate postwar years brought about two events that shaped the future of the CIA. The first was a simple declaration by Truman in March 1947 that the United States would aid any nation resisting subjugation or outside pressures, and an attack launched by an American enemy anywhere in the world would be considered an attack on America. This “Truman Doctrine” was clearly aimed at the Soviet Union, and it became the CIA’s de facto orders to stop the spread of communism worldwide. The next was the Marshall Plan, the country’s effort to prop up European and Asian nations following the Second World War. The plan would rebuild devastated nations and prevent the spread of communism in them.

The Marshall Plan benefitted the CIA because of the large amounts of money being distributed. The agency was able to place sympathetic Soviet expert George Kennan (1904-2005) on the plan’s board and future CIA Director Allen Dulles (1893-1969) as an advisor. Thanks to the efforts of these men, the CIA gained the ability to skim hundreds of millions from the tens of billions of dollars earmarked for Europe and Asia, providing a virtually unlimited pile of untraceable money for clandestine operations, which would now be limited only by imagination.[16] The CIA also finally had the support of the Defense Department. In 1948, Secretary of Defense James Forrestal (1892-1949) authorized the CIA to conduct guerrilla movements, fund underground armies, and engage in sabotage and assassination in the name of American ideology.[17] The groundwork was now firmly laid for the CIA to move into the extralegal, morally ambiguous territory that would come to define it.

Dulles

Initially, the agency suffered from poor leadership. Hillenkoetter was widely considered incompetent by national leadership, to the point that Dulles, Hillenkoetter’s employee, was called on more and more to be the face of the CIA in presentations to Congress and other official meetings.[18] Dulles was even called upon by Forrestall to conduct a top secret investigation into the CIA’s failings in 1948. This report, dubbed the Dulles-Jackson-Correa Report, detailed with great clarity all the ways in which the CIA had failed and continued to fail. It became clear to all involved, especially Hillenkoetter, that Dulles was better equipped to fill the top position, but Dulles was a devout Republican and Truman, a Democrat, could not in good conscience replace his own hand-picked director with a person with such different political views. As a result, the overwhelmed Hillenkoetter stayed on, but with Truman expected to lose the 1948 presidential election to Republican Thomas Dewey, it seemed a foregone conclusion that the new president would install Dulles. When Truman surprised the nation and defeated Dewey, Hillenkoetter was given a stay of execution and remained in place.

Ultimately, two major intelligence failures quickly sealed his fate. On September 20, 1949, Hillenkoetter’s agency declared that the Soviet Union, while working feverishly on an atomic bomb, would not achieve their goal for at least another four years.[19] Even as Hillenkoetter was delivering this confident assessment, analysts were already investigating a radiation signature detected days earlier by an Air Force crew near Alaska that conclusively proved the USSR had just tested their first nuclear weapon. The next CIA shockwave came the following year, on June 25, when North Korea invaded South Korea and touched off the Korean War. Again, the CIA was caught by surprise after having repeatedly assured Congress that such an attack was years away if it would happen at all.

These failures proved too much for Hillenkoetter to overcome. Truman finally fired Hillenkoetter and replaced him with General Walter Bedell Smith, a career Army officer and former Ambassador to the Soviet Union. To this point, the CIA was a troubled and ineffective organization, so much so that upon his appointment, Smith declared, “I expect the worst, and I am sure I won’t be disappointed.”[20]

Disappointed he was not. Beyond the damning (and accurate) information presented in the Dulles-Jackson-Correa Report, Smith discovered that the CIA had been engaging in paramilitary activities, attempting to sneak escaped dissenters back into Soviet territories to foment revolution. These adventures had not only failed to shake Soviet strength, but also resulted in the death or capture of hundreds of would-be revolutionaries with little tangible benefit.[21] The Soviets were light years ahead of the United States in espionage. Double agents and moles embedded in Western intelligence outfits were the primary reason for the CIA’s failures, but Hillenkoetter’s decision to continue to conduct paramilitary operations despite failure after failure certainly contributed.

Smith

Smith immediately began restructuring the agency with a focus on refining intelligence gathering and analysis. He wished to move away from the expensive and ineffective covert operations, believing the CIA’s primary mission should be to protect the nation against military surprise. The Soviet nuclear program and North Korea’s invasion represented failures of the tallest order.

That said, intelligence is largely based on predicting the future, and no matter how good a nation’s espionage or how effective its analysts are, it is always possible to miss something. Smith learned this in November 1950 when China entered the war, deploying 300,000 troops and driving the Americans almost to the sea. The attack surprised America’s leadership, including the CIA head, who repeatedly assured the NSC that, based on the intelligence the CIA collected, China would not enter the war on any significant scale.

Recently declassified presidential briefing documents shed light on this intelligence failure. During the October 2, 1950 daily briefing, Smith assured Truman that “the Chinese have long had the capability for military intervention in Korea on a scale to materially affect the course of events in Korea. . .CIA estimates, however, that the Chinese Communists would not consider it in their interests to intervene openly in Korea if, as now seems likely, they anticipate that war with the UN nations would result.”[22] Then, on October 20, as hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops massed at the Korean border, the CIA told the president that the agency “believes. . .the optimum time for [Chinese intervention] has passed. The USSR and China are not considered at this time willing to assume the increased risk of precipitating a third World War which would result from direct Chinese Communist intervention in Korea.”[23] On October 31, after Chinese troops had been captured on the battlefield and in their interrogations revealed multiple communist Chinese regiments were now fighting, the CIA told the president, “There probably are small numbers of Chinese Communist troops currently operating in Korea, but CIA does not believe that the appearance of these Chinese Communist soldiers indicates that the Chinese Communists intend to intervene directly or openly in the Korean War.”[24] The following day, despite being faced with reports of at least 400,000 Chinese troops massed in Manchuria on the North Korean border and intelligence that suggested a Sino-Soviet agreement providing for Chinese leader Mao Zedong’s forces to enter the war directly, Smith asserted, “On the basis of available evidence, CIA continues to believe that Chinese Communist participation in the Korean conflict will be limited to defense of the Manchurian border and that open large-scale intervention by Communist China is not likely.”[25] Smith woefully misread Chinese intentions during the early stages of the Korean War, and his agency had just committed his own declared greatest sin by walking the United States into a military surprise. This particular surprise nearly cost the country the war.

Reeling from his agency’s failure, Smith doubled down on his belief that the CIA should be a professional intelligence service, not a paramilitary organization. He felt the two main culprits in the CIA’s departure from norms were Allen Dulles and Frank Wisner, the Deputy Director of Plans, which was a euphemism for covert operations. Together, Dulles and Wisner, working with the lion’s share of the agency’s budget, oversaw the “cloak and dagger” covert operations abroad. An aghast Smith asked the NSC if their intention was really for his organization to support armed revolution in Eastern Europe and Asia, and the reply was a resounding yes.[26]

Smith now understood Dulles and Wisner had the real power, and he had no means to control them. Furthermore, the number of paramilitary covert missions had jumped dramatically since the beginning of the Korean War, still with little success. One declassified history of CIA operations states the operations were “not only ineffective but probably morally reprehensible in the number of lives lost.”[27] These lives were mostly Korean and Chinese agents dropped into North Korea and China with little training or support in the hopes of fomenting resistance by blindly locating anti-communist groups within the communist nations.

Deputy Director Bill Jackson, a coauthor of the Dulles-Jackson-Correa Report, resigned in 1951, citing his own frustrations with the maverick operations division and the inability to rein them in. This left an opening at the position that, unfortunately for Smith, only one person in the agency was qualified to fill: Allen Dulles. With that, Dulles took the position, Wisner was promoted to Chief of Covert Operations, and Smith now had virtually no control over the majority of his own agency, as Dulles and Wisner answered directly to the NSC and their reputations were still intact, unlike Smith’s. The CIA director was placed in the unenviable position of trying to rein in what he considered rogue agents who had the ears of the nation’s decision makers, while struggling to piece his own reputation back together.

Jackson

A vast majority of the information collected during the early days of the Korean War was either made up by assets to keep collecting CIA paychecks or deliberate misinformation fed by the enemy through double agents. Agent John Limond Hart took over as Seoul station chief in September 1952 and immediately suspected that the voluminous amount of intelligence being gathered from thousands of Korean agents dropped into North Korea was suspicious. Hart’s subsequent investigation determined that nearly every Korean agent on the CIA’s payroll was either inventing reports or was directly working for the communists.[28] For 18 months of the war, the Seoul station had been sending intelligence reports back to headquarters, and it was now apparent that nearly every report was deceptive. Without the means to verify which had been compromised, every report was unusable, and Hart suggested the Seoul station cease operations until a new structure could be developed and instituted, arguing that a compromised station was worse than no station at all.

Fearing the agency could not withstand another scandal and unable to admit to the armed services that the CIA had failed so miserably in Korea, Smith chose to keep the findings quiet and continue operations in Seoul. Instead, he sent Deputy Director of Intelligence Loftus Becker to inspect each Asian station in November 1952 and see how deep the problems ran. Becker’s findings were so shocking that after returning and briefing Smith, he turned in his resignation, considering the future of the CIA hopeless.[29] This incident, only declassified in the 2000s, highlights what many consider the most dangerous aspect of the CIA: its lack of any meaningful oversight. The secretive nature of the agency means that most reports never see the light of day, so they are never scrutinized by anyone outside the CIA’s direct chain, which is short and high-reaching.

All the while, the CIA’s operations during the Korean War not only continued, but picked up steam. The CIA turned its attention to China, where Mao’s People’s Liberation Army had defeated Chiang Kai-shek’s forces in a civil war in 1949. The CIA sought to take advantage of the estimated 1 million Kuomintang Nationalist guerrillas still living in China and conceivably willing to help oust Mao. What followed was a scattershot policy, developed by Dulles and Wisner, whereby American recruits were asked to parachute into China to link up with guerrilla forces. Not surprisingly, this was unsuccessful, as few bright young Americans were willing to take such a risk when the agency could not guarantee assistance should they be captured.

Eventually, the agency shifted their policy to arming Chinese refugees in the hopes that they would organize and return to the mainland to subvert Mao’s forces. The CIA spent an estimated $100 million on arms and ammunition to equip a force of 200,000 nationalist guerrillas. The entire endeavor turned out to be a scam, as most Chinese refugees absconded with the arms and were never heard from again.[30]

Although the CIA’s actions in Korea led to thousands of lives lost among American forces and allied assets thrown into harm’s way, and despite the fact the agency’s attempts at covert operations were almost universally identified and sabotaged by communist forces, the Korean War was considered an overall positive for the agency. Thanks to Smith’s efforts to keep the agency’s failures quiet, there was little public outcry, and agents were learning, slowly and painfully, from their errors.

By the time the war ended in July 1953, the CIA was respected both by the public and the federal government as a capable intelligence service, but Smith still believed Dulles and Wisner were leading the agency in the wrong direction by focusing on covert paramilitary operations rather than traditional intelligence gathering. Nonetheless, the two of them still enjoyed the blessings of the NSC because the Soviet Union was still gaining power and communism was still spreading. American leaders believed political warfare would be the only way to staunch the spread of communism, and with the CIA they had a perfect organization to color outside the legal lines.

The CIA’s own director disagreed with the assessment, but the 1952 presidential election would solve that problem.

The Eisenhower Years

Weary of the constant fighting he had endured for most of his presidency, Truman did not seek reelection in 1952, and World War II hero Dwight D. Eisenhower coasted to victory in the 1952 presidential election, largely on a platform promising to quickly end the Korean War, contain the Soviet Union’s expansion, and cut the federal deficit. Eisenhower became the first Republican president since Herbert Hoover lost his reelection bid in 1933.

One of the new president’s first actions was tabbing Dulles to lead the CIA. Smith protested the appointment, but Dulles’ star was already shining brightly, the appointment was confirmed with no Senate opposition, and it was roundly cheered by the press. For better or worse, the intelligence community was largely placed in the hands of the Dulles brothers, as Allen’s brother John became Eisenhower’s Secretary of State.

John Dulles

True to his campaign promises, and benefiting from the March 1953 death of Soviet leader Josef Stalin, who had been secretly continuing the Korean War by pressuring his fellow communist leaders, Eisenhower quickly worked to secure an armistice agreement.[31] Fearing that large and expensive armed forces designed to fight a land war in Europe against the Soviet Union would lead to American economic collapse, the president envisioned a “New Look” foreign policy. Rather than maintain readiness for a traditional war against the Soviet Union, this policy would rely on the country’s nuclear superiority to dissuade the Soviets from attacking Europe or other American interests. Eisenhower’s plan also relied on the CIA to provide accurate intelligence and, in a departure from Truman’s hesitancy to allow the agency off the leash, demanded the agency engage in more covert political warfare, with the aims of destabilizing communist regimes around the world.[32] Allen Dulles eagerly took on these objectives.

Eisenhower’s understanding of the still developing CIA overestimated the agency’s capabilities. On June 16-17 1953, 370,000 East Germans took to the streets in East Berlin to protest their harsh treatment under Soviet occupation. The rioters burned Communist Party buildings and destroyed police cars and Soviet infrastructure before being turned back by Soviet tanks. Hopeful that the CIA would be able to turn the uprising into a full-scale revolution in Berlin, Eisenhower ordered the CIA to look into assisting the protestors. Frank Wisner took the lead and evaluated methods in which the agency could arm the protestors, but he ultimately found there was nothing to be done without risking a shooting war with the Soviet Union. American leaders thus monitored the situation helplessly as the revolt was crushed almost as quickly as it began.[33]

The CIA’s inability to put pressure on the Soviet Union when the situation seemed so ripe for it frustrated the president, who now wondered if his intelligence apparatus was as capable as he was led to believe. He convened a group of intelligence experts, including Walter Bedell Smith, George Kennan, and Foster Dulles, to evaluate and redefine the country’s intelligence policy in regards to the Soviet Union. Dubbed the Solarium Project (for the room at the top of the White House where it convened), the group realized that no matter how advantageous a situation seemed, it would be impossible for the CIA to prop up effective resistance in Soviet strongholds such as Berlin, where the regime had dedicated so much energy and money to keep the city out of Western hands. Instead, the Solarium Project determined that the most effective way for the CIA to undermine the Soviet Union and limit the spread of communism would be to covertly take advantage of already unstable areas and governments, typically by removing and replacing the head of the nation with a new leader more willing to align with the United States. Thus, as the Soviet Union continued its expansion in Eastern Europe and beyond, the United States began actively competing to gain influence in unstable regions.[34]

The resulting policy shift ushered in one of the most notorious and controversial periods in American history. Under Eisenhower, the CIA engaged in an estimated 170 major covert actions in 48 countries, using the growing fear of communism to engage in political warfare across the globe.[35] Ostensibly, the CIA’s foreign policy direction was still to stem the spread of communism, but in practice the agency was called upon to engage in covert actions at the whim of the administration, and the locations quite often had tenuous connections with the Cold War or the Soviet Union. Many of the CIA covert actions began centering on American financial interests.

The first major act of political warfare under Eisenhower occurred in Iran in 1953, and it had very little to do with Russia, communism, or the Cold War. The British had developed the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), the precursor to today’s British Petroleum, in 1909, and thus controlled the pumping, refining, and shipping of all oil in the south of Iran. Iran was not a former British colony, but the two nations’ relationship resembled a colonial one in many ways. Britain paid the Iranian government a relative pittance in rent and taxes, and although these payments did account for over half of the destitute nation’s annual budget, they represented only about a tenth of the amount the AIOC pocketed yearly. Understandably, many in Iran wished to nationalize the oil fields for their own national profit.[36]

Britain’s exploitation of Iran’s oil production also led to very obvious and dramatic economic inequality. British oil officials lived in palaces while the oilfield workers lived in squalor, without electricity or running water, earning the equivalent of 50 cents a day. The communist Tudeh Party attempted to gain a foothold in the largely unhappy socioeconomic climate of the 1930s and 1940s, but it could only boast a modest 2,500 members even at its height during World War II, hardly an imposing Soviet force.[37] The presence of this tiny communist party however, would give the United States the impetus it sought to justify its brand of political warfare.

Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, who had been appointed by Shah Mohammad Reza in 1951, quickly went to work legally seizing power from the monarchy and immediately passed into law a bill declaring the nationalization and absorption of AIOC by the Iranian government. London was angry and worried, and the British quickly took action. MI6 stepped up surveillance of Mossadegh, and the Royal Navy seized an Iranian ship carrying oil out of the country in mid-1952, declaring it a violation of a British embargo.[38] Mossadegh responded by expelling all British diplomats, which included many undercover MI6 agents, and with that, Britain’s Iranian spy service was effectively cut off from all meaningful activities in the nation. The Shah attempted to appease the Western powers by dismissing Mossadegh weeks later, but Parliament quickly called a vote on the matter.

Mossadegh

Mossadegh was overwhelmingly reelected, tying the Shah’s hands and causing worry in London that the Shah instead may be overthrown. The British, unable to control the situation in exile, reached out to the United States’ burgeoning spy service for help. In November 1952, the CIA drew up an ostentatious plan, dubbed Project Ajax, to engineer a coup that would overthrow Mossadegh and replace him with a more preferable alternative. Truman bristled at the idea, but as a lame duck, he had little say in the matter, and the plan gained traction as soon as Eisenhower took office in January 1953.

CIA agent Kim Roosevelt, Jr., grandson of Theodore Roosevelt and cousin of Franklin Roosevelt, was tasked with spearheading a coup to oust Mossadegh, ostensibly to prevent him from colluding with the Soviet Union to turn Iran communist. This was the given reason despite the fact no evidence exists that this was ever a realistic threat, or that Mossadegh even had communist leanings.

Roosevelt, Jr.

Roosevelt, Jr. had been stationed in Iran for years, stockpiling weapons and equipment in case of Soviet invasion. He quickly and deftly switched his focus internally to an overthrow of the democratically elected Mossadegh. As the CIA agent went to work undermining and sabotaging Mossadegh, the CIA paid an estimated $1 million to politicians, street gangs, holy men and anyone who could potentially derail Mossadegh’s office.[39] Gangs assaulted Tudeh Party members, mullahs denounced Mossadegh’s policies in influential mosques, press members sowed doubt and perpetuated false claims about him, and senior military officials were paid to voice disagreements with his policies. The British spy agency nominated Mossadegh’s optimal replacement, retired General Fazlollah Zahedi, to serve as a Western puppet. The United States agreed, and Dulles privately began putting together a plan for Zahedi to mount a CIA-backed coup against the Mossadegh government.[40]

Eisenhower, to this point, was unconvinced that Mossadegh was a communist sympathizer, and he wondered if legitimate aid to prop up Mossadegh might be the better option. Although much more amenable to covert actions such as these than his predecessor, Eisenhower still balked when presented with an actual concrete plan to remove a democratically elected head of state from power, especially considering he had doubts about the legitimacy of the CIA’s aims. Dulles was eventually able to convince the new president that a secret coup was the right answer, not because Mossadegh himself was a communist, but because he was not amenable to the British or Americans, which would suggest Iran would inevitably fall into to the Soviet’s sphere of influence if left unchecked. Eisenhower reluctantly agreed, so he authorized the CIA mission to overthrow Mossadegh on July 11, 1953.[41]

The plan, already drafted by the CIA and MI6, called for Zahedi to lead a military coup against Mossadegh, then immediately pledge fealty to the Shah, thus transferring the true power of the nation back to the monarchy. The CIA paid news agencies to broadcast reports accusing Mossadegh of being a communist, a Jew, and a traitor. The CIA also funded thugs masquerading as communists to attack mosques and other gathering places. The CIA had also bribed many members of the parliament, the Majlis, to vote Zahedi into power, making the coup as legitimate as it could. At dawn on August 19, Mossadegh fled Tehran, making the coup successful.

The coup was seen as an overwhelming success in Washington, and the CIA and White House officials were ecstatic over the success of Project Ajax and the possibilities it opened. Despite the secretive nature of the CIA, Project Ajax was heavy-handed and relied largely on huge bribes and bold action, making it less a covert operation and more a steamroller. The CIA had originally hoped to fund the coup with $100,000-$200,000, but its actual direct costs ran to an estimated $10-20 million, still a reasonable amount for overthrowing a sovereign government.[42] It was no secret in Iran that the Shah owed his restoration not only to the United States, but to the CIA, which became interwoven into Iranian culture and sowed a mistrust of the West that still permeates today.

Despite the CIA’s initial joy at the operation, it had, like all such far-reaching actions, unintended and long-lasting consequences. The Shah, as planned, moved Iran away from a constitutional monarchy and became an absolute ruler who remained loyal to the Western nations which gave him power. The Consortium Agreement of 1954 gave Western oil companies 40% ownership of all Iranian oil production, and although this agreement was far worse for the AIOC, it endeared the Shah to the United States because the agreement greatly increased the Americans’ oil profits in the next decades.

The Shah, for his part, instituted an era of progressivism and modernity to Iran, thanks in large part to the greatly increased oil funds. He limited the powers of the elites of the nation, increased women’s equality, and banned communism. However, while Iran enjoyed an unprecedented period of growth and maturation, the policies alienated the Shah from the right, the elites, religious fundamentalists, the communists, and ultra-progressive factions.

In an apparent surprise to the CIA, the Shah was overthrown in 1979 by a group of revolutionaries from all sides of the political spectrum, and the notorious Ayatollah Khomeini, a religious fanatic, became the Supreme Leader. The new theocracy implemented brutal Sharia practices and reversed many of the Shah’s progressive reforms, such as women’s rights. Under Khomeini, Iran reverted to an ultra-conservative state, the average citizen’s standard of living plummeted, and the nation was embroiled in the Iran-Iraq War from 1980-1988, costing hundreds of thousands of lives. Iran had its own hand in American politics as well, as the November 1979 seizure of the American Embassy in Tehran by a group of Muslim students and President Jimmy Carter’s subsequent mishandling of the hostage situation was largely responsible for Carter’s defeat against Ronald Reagan in the 1980 election. Thus, while the CIA’s first attempt to unseat a national ruler was successful, its unforeseen consequences ushered in an era of oppression and backwardness that ultimately resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands and helped cement the power of leaders who are bitterly opposed to the West.

The CIA next turned its attention closer to home. A year after the successful Iranian coup, Dulles approved the overthrow of the leftist government of Guatemala and President Jacobo Arbenz on December 9, 1953, using a script very similar to the one used in Iran. This time, rather than oil, Arbenz’s downfall involved bananas. Arbenz had moved to redistribute a majority of the land owned by the United Fruit Company, a well-connected American corporation, and like the AIOC in Iran, United Fruit sought government intervention to ease pressure. As with Mossadegh, Arbenz, despite his left leanings, was no communist, but this did not stop the CIA from action. The agency used a similar refrain, asserting that the government could be swallowed up by the Soviet machine and become a communist satellite. This argument made far less sense than the Iranian argument, as the Soviet Union had shown almost no interest in meddling in Latin American affairs to this point.

Regardless of the pretext, the CIA manufactured a rebel force and launched Operation PBSuccess, the aim of which was to place in power the CIA’s handpicked revolutionary leader, Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas. Armas was to lead a small force of loyalists into the capital and seize power while CIA-funded forces created the right environment through demonstrations and violence. This time, in a dark turn, the CIA also engaged in bombing attacks on Guatemalan cities through its private air force, personally authorized by President Eisenhower.[43] This marked a dangerous turn for the spy agency, as the acts of political warfare now included actual warfare.

Arbenz surrendered to rebel forces on June 27, 1954, and Armas, once installed as dictator, made the quality of life far worse for the average citizen. His reversal of Arbenz’s land reforms gave United Fruit control of the country’s resources, and his far-right policies proved wildly unpopular. Armas was assassinated in 1957 by a leftist palace guard, and he was replaced by a series of authoritarian rulers. Constant leftist demonstrations and attacks led to the Guatemalan Civil War from 1960-1996, resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths.

The CIA had again executed the successful overthrow of a sovereign government, but it had done this one loudly and publicly. The spy service was growing a reputation as a blunt and heavy instrument wielded somewhat haphazardly by Eisenhower. There was a feeling of elation among Washington’s senior leaders, but Eisenhower was worried that his clandestine service was making too much noise. Indeed, both operations nearly died on the vine thanks to intelligence leaks.

This may explain why Eisenhower chose not to act when the situation seemed ripe in October 1956. Following Stalin’s death in 1953, Nikita Khrushchev surprisingly outmaneuvered his foes and rose to power in the Soviet Union. Khrushchev, recognizing Stalin’s draconian policies were wildly unpopular among the people, began an era of “destalinization.” In a secret announcement to the Congress of Soviets in February 1956, Khrushchev denounced many of Stalin’s actions, marking a dramatic shift in Soviet leadership. Under Stalin, the open questioning of any Soviet policy, past or present, would have been unthinkable, and the Soviet Union maintained power over its satellite nations largely through a strict policy of never allowing dissenting speech, which meant Khrushchev’s words were potentially explosive should they ever get out.

As fortune would have it, the CIA received a copy of the text by April and released it to the American press, where it was printed it in its entirety on June 4, 1956.[44] The CIA simultaneously ramped up propaganda campaigns in the Soviet satellites, most notably Hungary, which had demonstrated a growing mistrust of the Soviet overlords. This was carried out largely through Radio Free Europe, the CIA’s propaganda radio station, beamed to Eastern European nations, which. That summer, the station focused heavily on satellites such as Hungary being able to control their own destiny - citing Khrushchev’s proclamation that the Soviet system was flawed, Radio Free Europe told listeners they could now release themselves from the yoke of Soviet control.

On October 23, 1956 demonstrators rushed through the streets of Budapest, seeking a new government and the reinstallation of Imre Nagy, the popular communist Premier who had fallen out of favor with Soviet leadership and been expelled the year prior. Nagy was reinstalled as Premier on October 24, but his opponents still controlled the party and quickly petitioned the Soviet Union to send forces to once again remove him.

This seemingly presented an opportunity for the United States to act by attempting to keep Nagy in power and undermining Russian influence in the region. Instead, Eisenhower did nothing as the Soviets launched a major offensive on November 4, conquering Budapest on November 8 and regaining control of the rest of the country by the end of the month. Nagy was deposed by the Soviet Union and fled to the Yugoslavian Embassy, where he was lured out and arrested on November 22, then executed and buried in an unmarked grave on June 16, 1958. In total, an estimated 30,000 Hungarians were killed during the fighting, 50,000 were injured, and more than 200 were executed along with Nagy.[45]

Eisenhower’s decision not to intervene, likely because of Hungary’s nearness to the Soviet Union, both geographically and politically, caused considerable consternation within his spy agency. CIA officials felt they could have taken advantage of the situation and firmly seated Nagy in power without causing a war with the Soviet Union. Many agents expressed frustration with the administration’s decision, wondering what the purpose of the agency’s paramilitary capability was if direct intervention against Soviet influence would not be used when the situation was apparently so perfect for it.[46] Perhaps not coincidentally, there were no major American business interests in Hungary in the mid-1950s.

The CIA suffered two major failures in the 1950s that would staunch the positivity gained by the coups and shift the direction of the agency’s future. The first occurred in Syria, where the CIA had quietly installed pro-American Adib Shishakli into power in 1949. Shishakli was overthrown by a combination of the Ba’ath Party and communist forces in 1953, and the CIA sought to administer another coup, along the lines of Iran and Guatemala, to ensure the nation did not fall to communism. America began delivering money and training troops, as had become custom, in preparation for an engineered coup, but this time the CIA’s plot was sniffed out by the Syrian head of intelligence, Adbul Hamid Serraj, who was considered by the CIA to be the most powerful man in Damascus at the time. The plot called for Serrai to be assassinated, along with the chief of the Syrian general staff and the head of the communist party.[47]

Serraj set up a covert operation of his own, and when American spies paid Syrian officers who were secretly in collusion with Serraj, they immediately went on television and stated that the corrupt Americans were attempting to seize control of the legitimate Syrian government. The CIA station chief in Damascus, Rocky Stone, who was posing as an ordinary staffer in the US embassy, was arrested by the Syrian government and roughly interrogated. Stone told his captors about the entire plot. He subsequently became the first American official expelled from a Middle Eastern country, and the entire operation was scrapped, becoming a very public failure and pulling the curtain back on covert operations.

The next major public embarrassment for the agency came in Indonesia. Having just gained its independence from Dutch colonial rule in 1949, Indonesian President Sukarno was ostensibly supported by the United States as his country began a democratic phase. However, President Sukarno had unwisely declared his nation neutral in the growing Cold War, unwilling to align himself with either America or the Soviet Union, which was an unacceptable position for the Dulles brothers. Declared neutrality was seen as a movement toward communism, and their inclination to interfere was bolstered by the recent discovery of an estimated 20 billion barrels of untapped oil beneath Indonesian ground.[48] Although Sukarno’s exact misdeed is unclear, former CIA Deputy Director for Plans Richard Bissell later intimated that the original plan to solve the Indonesia crisis was to assassinate Sukarno. The CIA even had a specific assassin in mind, and ultimately the plot was scrapped not for moral reasons, but for logistical ones. The agency doubted whether they could get their assassin close enough to the well-guarded president.[49]

As the CIA was making alternative plans to remove Sukarno from power, he doubled down on his own reluctance to align with either of the major powers. In April 1955, he convened an international conference in his home country, attended by the heads of state of 29 nations from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, and chartered a global movement of nations away from the Cold War superpowers, aiming to be free of the politics and set their own international policies and trade agreements.[50]

In response, the White House immediately ordered the CIA to put in motion a plan to remove the president. The first attempt came during the 1955 parliamentary elections, the first held in Indonesia since it gained independence. The CIA funneled an estimated $1 million to Sukarno’s rivals, the Masjumi Party, a radical Islamic party. The efforts failed, as the Masjumi placed second to Sukarno’s party. Even more alarmingly, the Indonesian Communist Party finished fourth with 16% of the votes.[51]

Although never accused of practicing communism himself, Sukarno welcomed politicians of all stripes in his parliament. The communists moved up to the third spot in the 1957 parliamentary elections, and the CIA could no longer stand by. Despite no evidence existing that the communists comprised anything but a relatively marginal political party, the CIA put into motion an ambitious plan to oust the president by recruiting Indonesian military leaders to stand up a shadow government in Sumatra, on the island north of the capital, and consolidate power before marching on Jakarta.

On September 25, 1957, President Eisenhower ordered the CIA to overthrow Sukarno in a nation that the United States was instrumental in bringing independence to just eight years prior.[52] The plan was to fund and arm the army rebel group, strengthen the determination and will of the rogue group, and stimulate action among anti-communist groups.

Within 72 hours, an Indian newspaper controlled by the Soviet intelligence apparatus ran a long story detailing the American plot. This did not deter the CIA, but it did give Sukarno ample time to prepare. After three months of planning, the operation was set in motion, and American vessels began supplying arms to the rebel forces in January 1958. The group set up a radio station in February and used it to declare themselves a revolutionary government and demand the immediate ban pf communism. They also called on foreign nations to avoid interfering with the coup.[53]

Eight days later, on February 21, Sukarno’s Indonesian Air Force bombed the radio station out of existence and the Indonesian Navy established a blockade around the rebel positions. The CIA agents and their rebel forces were forced to retreat into the dense jungles and await further instructions, but the situation escalated quickly as a US Naval Battle Group, including an aircraft carrier and two battalions of Marines, stationed itself off the coast of Singapore just 10 minutes away from Sumatra by air. Foster Dulles publicly called for the Indonesian people to revolt against Sukarno’s “Communist despotism” on March 9.[54] In a predictable tit for tat, Indonesian forces moved their own naval fleet, consisting of eight ships with two battalions of soldiers, as well as a wing of its air force, off the coast of Sumatra, 12 miles from the American fleet in Singapore.

The CIA attempted airdrops of weapons, ammunition, and cash to the rebel forces using Polish pilots on the CIA’s payroll, but the drops were easily spotted and intercepted by Indonesian forces. The CIA-backed forces attempted an offensive on Sulawesi, an island well east of Sumatra and Jakarta, hoping to rally forces to converge on the capital, and the US Navy conducted a reconnaissance mission looking for targets on the island, but the recon team was mistakenly shot down by US-backed rebels using CIA supplied machine guns. In another mistake, a CIA owned B-26 on a bombing run to an Indonesian airfield crashed on takeoff, killing the two Polish crewmembers. Another B-26 on the same mission successfully attacked the airfield.[55]

By the end of April 1958, the rebel forces in Sumatra were crushed. The five CIA agents embedded with the rebels made a mad dash to the coast, driving south in a military jeep until it ran out of gas, then stealing food from local shops and moving at night to avoid detection. The group finally reached the sea and commandeered a fishing boat before radioing their position to the CIA station in Singapore, which dispatched a submarine to rescue them.[56]

Running out of options, the CIA began using its own pilots and aircraft on bombing missions over Indonesia, in violation of Eisenhower’s orders to Dulles to not use American personnel or equipment in any military operations. This ended in predictable disaster when pilot Al Pope’s B-26, painted black and with obliterated markings, was shot down by Indonesian forces while attempting to sink a ship carrying an estimated 1,000 Indonesian troops on May 18, 1958. Pope survived, but he was immediately captured. Somewhat shockingly, Pope was carrying his personnel records, previous flight reports, and a membership card for the officer’s club at Clark Field in the Philippines. There was no denying that he was an American asset.[57]

Pope was held by the Indonesian government, but he was not given prisoner of war status pursuant to the Geneva Convention. Although Pope’s flight logs showed damning evidence that he had attacked civilian as well as military targets and killed many citizens, Sukarno quietly released the American on July 2, 1962, four years after his capture.

After Pope’s capture, the Dulles brothers decided that they had had enough and cabled their officers the following day to cease all Indonesian operations. The CIA attempted to save face by briefing the White House that the Indonesian armed forces were now actively suppressing communism, and Sukarno had, in effect, learned his lesson and was now acting in a manner favorable to the United States. Eisenhower was not fooled, and the Indonesia fiasco, coupled with the Syrian failure, led him to begin doubting his intelligence agency was capable of the types of covert actions he felt were needed to keep the Soviet Union at bay. At the very least, he was no longer confident the CIA’s activities would avoid a large-scale shooting war.

Eisenhower made motions to correct the problems, perhaps the most pressing being that an agency tasked with operations around the globe was carrying those operations out with very little oversight, an almost unlimited budget, and no repercussions even when mistakes were committed. Eisenhower himself did little to shake these notions, as Allen Dulles, who so blatantly ignored the president’s orders to avoid using Americans in a military capacity in Indonesia, kept his job and was never reprimanded, at least in public.

Eisenhower formed a committee known as the “Hull Board” in October 1958 to take a critical look at the CIA, from top to bottom, and brief him with its findings. Perhaps inevitably, the Hull Board recommended greater oversight of the agency and a more clearly defined relationship between the agency and the Pentagon, as the current practice involved the CIA poaching many of the military’s best and brightest officers for “liaison” work that more often meant military members were used as de facto spies. Eisenhower, despite his stated objectives of cleaning up the system, virtually ignored the Hull Board’s findings and instead defended the existing covert policies.[58]

The nature of American politics, in which presidents may serve no more than two consecutive terms, mean that the president’s final year in office can be more interesting than most, but also less effective. Some presidents wish to quietly hand over the reins, making as few policy decisions as possible in their lame duck year, while some seek to implement all the changes they have envisioned at a time they no longer hampered by reelection considerations.

Eisenhower chose the latter, and arguably the most noteworthy event of Eisenhower’s presidency in 1960 began the year prior. Fulgencio Batista, Cuba’s military dictator, lost power to the charismatic young revolutionary Fidel Castro on New Year’s Day 1959, and the administration and the CIA were initially unsure how to proceed. Batista was wildly unpopular within his country, and he seemed to understand his days were numbered. Castro, despite the belief sowed largely by the United States, was no communist, at least not in the beginning, and his revolutionary government, the July 26th Movement, was not a communist party.[59] However, there were fears in the CIA that Castro’s open style government, not unlike Sukarno’s in Indonesia, would welcome communist members, and some of his closest allies, including his brother Raul and Argentinian revolutionary Che Guevara, had stronger communist ties.

Castro found himself backed into a corner after taking power as much of Cuba’s wealthy, conservative society fled with Batista, as their business interests had largely coincided with his right-wing policies. Amid fears of the radical Castro’s policies, a large part of the Cuban economy fled with the wealthy business owners, and Castro also outlawed gambling, another former wealth spring.

In short order, Castro turned to nationalization and expropriation, and by the fall of 1959, he began nationalizing hotels, sugar plantations, and other sources of revenue, many of them American owned.[60] As far as the Eisenhower administration was concerned, Castro’s government was now communist, in practice if not in ideology, and there was a fear in Washington that Castro’s revolution would spread beyond Cuba. While some minor and ineffective offensives by groups with similar makeup to Castro’s were carried out in Panama, Guatemala, and the Dominican Republic in 1959 and 1960, there is no evidence that Castro played any role in the adventures.[61]

By December 1959, the United States had at least internally categorized Castro’s regime as communist, and due to its location just 90 miles from Florida, the government felt it could not allow Castro to continue unchecked. Director Dulles said in a December 4 speech that Castro’s nationalization equaled communism, and Cuba would use the nationalization policies as a pretext to break ties with America and seek aid from the Soviet Union instead. The White House immediately ordered the CIA to explore the “elimination” of Castro, and while Dulles changed the word “elimination” to “removal from Cuba” as he passed the memo along, the White House’s intent was clear.[62]

The CIA’s first actions against Castro followed a familiar script. A March 16, 1960 memo laid out an objective to replace Castro with a regime friendlier to American interests, much like the agency had successfully accomplished in Iran and Guatemala. This would be accomplished by the CIA funding, arming, and training rebel forces inside and outside of Cuba to organize and prepare to unseat Castro in Havana. In conjunction with that, the CIA would oversee a propaganda offensive meant to sow discontent among Cuban citizens. Eisenhower approved the plan the following day.[63]

From the beginning, the plan faced a few issues. First, Castro was proving to be quite popular, and he faced almost no internal resistance as he nationalized more companies, including the United Fruit Company’s 272,000 Cuban acres in April 1960.[64] With these nationalizations and land reforms, Castro now had all the resources he would need to repel all but the most grandly designed attacks on his rule.

Thus, even as the CIA began planning for the invasion, the agency also began exploring simpler and more direct methods to oust the revolutionary leader. These methods ushered in a notorious period of actions that would be comical if not for the fact that they were conspired and carried out by one of the most powerful organizations within the most powerful nation on Earth, and apparently in earnestness.

The first harebrained scheme involved somehow embarrassing Castro to minimize his masculinity, which was seen as a strong factor in him keeping his rule. A CIA plot was hatched to sprinkle radioactive materials on the leader’s shoes during a scheduled visit to Chile, aiming to induce rapid hair loss and thus a loss of masculinity and prestige.[65] The plot was never carried out because Castro changed his travel plans at the last moment. Another plot meant to lessen the leader’s prestige, again never carried out, involved spiking his food with a drug meant to make him act irrationally, preferably just prior to a public appearance.[66]

Eventually, the CIA recruited American mafia members to carry out a “hit” on Castro. Elements of the Miami mob, eager to regain their lost profits from Castro’s ban on gambling and presumably excited for the opportunity to carry out a murder sanctioned by the government, agreed, but the situation never presented itself.[67] The CIA also explored poisoning Castro’s ubiquitous cigars, and a box of Castro’s preferred Cuban cigars was even doctored with the poison, but the CIA ultimately opted to not follow through with this plot.[68] Another plot involved smuggling a poison pill to Castro, to be placed in a drink via a standard pencil delivered by one of Castro’s aides who was secretly an agent of the CIA. In the end, Castro fired the aide before the pill could be delivered.[69]

Eventually, the CIA abandoned assassination plots and other cloak-and-dagger type operations to focus on the approved invasion plan. The plan was propped up by the general feelings of the Cuban citizens; Castro’s honeymoon period was over, and much of the wealth being generated by the nationalized industries was being sucked up by the government. Inequality reigned, and many, especially rural peasants, began bristling at the regime. By the end of 1960, if the nation were not communist, it had become close enough to communist that no one could really tell the difference. The Eisenhower administration ordered the CIA to move ahead with the assault, to be carried out by dissidents and aided by the CIA and American armed forces, albeit in a clandestine manner.

As Eisenhower’s second term neared its end, he left it up to Vice President Richard Nixon on how to proceed in Cuba, which made sense since Nixon was running on the Republican ticket against Senator John F. Kennedy in what was expected to be a hotly contested race. Eisenhower’s attention was understandably diverted at this time, especially after a secret CIA U-2 spy plane was shot down over Russia on May 1, signaling an end to the positive relationship he had worked hard to cultivate with Khrushchev. Eisenhower’s reputation as a straight shooter was also mortally wounded in this, his last year in office, as he was caught in lie after lie, both by Khrushchev and the American people, about what type of plane went down and what its mission was. The CIA had incorrectly briefed the president that the pilot had died in the crash, leading Eisenhower to think his lies could never be refuted. Instead, pilot Francis Gary Powers was very much alive, and he and his plane, almost completely intact, were in Soviet captivity.

Ironically, Eisenhower had authorized the U-2 overflight, after much cajoling from the CIA, largely to help Nixon’s chances in the upcoming election. Kennedy was campaigning on a platform of nuclear strength, asserting repeatedly on the campaign trail that Eisenhower and Nixon had let the Soviet Union overtake the United States in nuclear missile capability. This “missile gap” was completely false, and Eisenhower sought to prove it with the U-2 flights over Russian missile complexes. However, instead of assuring the public of America’s very real missile superiority, the U-2 fiasco, played out daily in American newspapers, sapped the public’s confidence in the administration and hampered Nixon’s election chances.[70]

Nixon realized that the CIA was not ready to launch the Cuban operation, but he ordered preparations to be carried out, with a plan to attack following the 1960 elections.[71] This delay gave Castro ample time to prepare for any action, and as the CIA attempted airdrops of weapons and ammunition to dissenting forces in Cuba, Castro loyalists routinely intercepted them. One historian estimates that no more than three of 30 such airdrops actually reached rebel hands.[72] The CIA had trained a force of 500 guerrillas in Guatemala, but the expected force of dissidents in Cuba itself never materialized. By August 1960, it had become clear to both the CIA and the White House that storming the beaches of Cuba with such a small force stood almost no chance of success without overt American military assistance.

Eisenhower continued his ambitious final year in office by moving to eliminate the man he called the Castro of Africa, Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba. Lumumba, having been democratically elected in June 1960, led the Congo’s successful democratic movement away from the often brutal Belgian colonization. He sought American aid to keep his nation’s independence, as Belgium armed forces were launching attacks on the capital, but the United States refused to move against its Western ally, so Lumumba instead turned to the Soviet Union for support.[73] This tarnished Lumumba as a communist in the eyes of the White House, and a plan was quickly launched to take action before Eisenhower left office.

Eisenhower, in a first, declared Lumumba should be “eliminated.”[74] The CIA in early October delivered arms and $250,000 to Joseph Mobutu, the man they had tapped to become the next ruler of the Congo. Mobutu’s forces captured Lumumba and handed him over to the Belgian military, which executed him in January 1961.[75] Mobutu ruled the nation as a brutal dictator for more than 30 years, with his corrupt government killing untold numbers of innocent citizens and stealing billions of dollars in the nation’s vast natural resources.

Perhaps inevitably, as the Eisenhower administration left office, their decisions spilled into the next administration. When Kennedy won the 1960 election by a mere 120,000 votes and took office the following January, no one bothered telling him that the Cuban invasion plan was doomed. In fact, although Eisenhower had never actually authorized the Bay of Pigs invasion, Dulles and CIA senior staffers led Kennedy to believe Eisenhower had already given it the green light, and that the only loose end was a new presidential signature.[76] The young president authorized it as one of his first acts in office.

The amphibious assault was further hampered by Kennedy’s insistence that, even though CIA assets would provide air support, only aircraft available to Cuban exiles be used in the assault. The president further stipulated that the aircraft could not be launched from Florida, and that it should instead come from Central America, a much greater distance. This meant there would be almost no air support for the landing. Finally, the location was moved to the Bay of Pigs, which offered much less concealment than the originally slated landing in a more mountainous region. Kennedy also got cold feet at the last moment and slashed air support by 80%.[77]

If the mission’s success was unlikely before, it was basically impossible now. After the meager forces were predictably massacred, Kennedy intimated to Eisenhower that he had feared Soviet retaliation in Berlin if the nation was implicated in the attack, so he pulled back the expected American support in the final moments.

The immediate harm done by the failed Bay of Pigs invasion was hard to quantify, but at the very least, Kennedy’s reputation was soiled. Despite his efforts, there was no hiding the fact that the United States was pulling the strings in the invasion attempt, and the public, not understanding why the administration would act as puppeteers for such an act, was furious with the new president. Moreover, Kennedy’s mishandling of the situation gave Khrushchev a leg up in their interactions; the Soviet premiere now viewed Kennedy as noncommittal and afraid of taking decisive actions, which would lead in many ways to the Cuban Missile Crisis. Lastly, Kennedy’s intense desire to correct his mistake led to a single-minded pursuit of getting rid of Castro however he could, and some of the crazy plots hatched under Kennedy made Eisenhower’s gaffes look sophisticated by comparison.

The final casualty in the failed invasion was Allen Dulles’ career. Kennedy, who kept Dulles on as a political maneuver, had all the pretext needed to remove the old hand. Dulles’ failure, along with the Joint Staff, to inform Kennedy that not only had Eisenhower never authorized the invasion, but agreed with the assessments that it would not be successful without serious American military aid incensed the president. The CIA quickly scrambled to produce a report exonerating Dulles of responsibility, but the future of the CIA was altered by the disaster.[78]

The CIA would face its share of criticisms in the coming decades, but moving forward, the agency was largely removed from the kingmaking policies of Eisenhower and Dulles. Following evidence that the CIA participated, if peripherally, in Nixon’s Watergate scandal in 1972, a very public airing of the agency’s dirty laundry occurred. Dubbed “Family Jewels,” the mass declassification of documents, largely related to the Eisenhower years, opened the public’s eyes to the lawlessness and lack of oversight of the agency in its early days. The CIA now routinely declassifies documents and reports in an effort at providing more transparency.

Online Resources

Other 20th century history titles by Charles River Editors

Other titles about the CIA on Amazon

Further Reading

Central Intelligence Agency. Daily Summaries #1408: 1950/10-1950/12. https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/06749455.

Friedman, Norman. The Fifty Year War: Conflict and Strategy in the Cold War. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2000.

Flight to Freedom — The Colditz Glider — An excerpt from the Soaring magazine article on the Colditz Glider by Wade H. Nelson. Retrieved March 21, 2005.

Foot, M. R. D.; Langley, J. M. (24 May 1979). MI9 Escape and Evasion 1939–1945. The Bodley Head Ltd. ISBN 0-370-30086-6.

Henry Chancellor, Colditz: The Definitive History: The Untold Story of World War II's Great Escapes London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2001.

“History of the CIA” About CIA. CIA.gov. Last modified November 1, 2018. https://www.cia.gov/about-cia/history-of-the-cia.

Holt, Thaddeus (2004). The Deceivers: Allied Military Deception in the Second World War. Scribner. ISBN 0-7432-5042-7.

Prados, John. Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006.

Rankin, Nicholas (1 October 2008). Churchill's Wizards: The British Genius for Deception, 1914–1945. Faber and Faber. p. 466. ISBN 0-571-22195-5.

Reinhold Eggers, Colditz: The German Story Translated and edited by Howard Gee. London: Robert Hale, 1961.

Rothmiller, Mike. True Stories of the OSS and CIA: Secrets, Lies and Deception. New York: Exoplanet Media, 2015.

Weiner, Tim. Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA. New York: Anchor Books, 2007.

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[1] “History of the CIA,” About CIA, CIA.gov, last modified November 1, 2018, https://www.cia.gov/about-cia/history-of-the-cia.

[2] Weiner, Tim, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (New York: Anchor Books, 2007), 6.

[3] “History of the CIA”.

[4] Weiner, Legacy of Ashes, 5.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid., 7-8.

[8] Ibid, 8.

[9] Prados, John. Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006, 30-31

[10] Ibid, 31.

[11] Weiner, Legacy of Ashes, 14.

[12] Ibid., 15.

[13] Ibid., 21.

[14] Rothmiller, Mike. True Stories of the OSS and CIA: Secrets, Lies and Deception. New York: Exoplanet Media, 2015. 19.

[15] Weiner, Legacy of Ashes, 29-30.

[16] Weiner, Legacy of Ashes, 32.

[17] Ibid., 33.

[18] Ibid., 41.

[19] Ibid., 54.

[20] Ibid., 55.

[21] Ibid., 52.

[22] Central Intelligence Agency, Daily Summaries #1408: 1950/10-1950/12, https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/06749455.

[23] Ibid.

[24] Ibid.

[25] Ibid.

[26] Ibid., 60.

[27] Ibid., 61.

[28] Ibid., 64.

[29] Ibid., 65.

[30] Ibid., 68.

[31] Friedman, Norman, The Fifty Year War: Conflict and Strategy in the Cold War. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2000. 170.

[32] Weiner, Legacy of Ashes, 84.

[33] Ibid., 86.

[34] Ibid., 87.

[35] Ibid.

[36] Prados, Safe for Democracy, 99.

[37] Ibid.

[38] Ibid., 100.

[39] Weiner, Legacy of Ashes, 95.

[40] Ibid., 97.

[41] Ibid.

[42] Prados, Safe for Democracy, 107.

[43] Ibid., 120.

[44] Weiner, Legacy of Ashes, 154.

[45] Ibid., 157.

[46] Ibid., 158.

[47] Ibid., 160.

[48] Ibid., 164.

[49] Ibid., 165.

[50] Ibid.

[51] Ibid., 166.

[52] Ibid., 170.

[53] Ibid., 171.

[54] Ibid., 173.

[55] Ibid., 174.

[56] Ibid.

[57] Ibid., 175-176.

[58] Prados, Safe for Democracy, 183.

[59] Ibid., 206.

[60] Ibid., 207.

[61] Ibid.

[62] Ibid., 209.

[63] Ibid., 212.

[64] Ibid., 213.

[65] Ibid., 215.

[66] Weiner, Legacy of Ashes, 181.

[67] Prados, Safe for Democracy, 215-216.

[68] Ibid., 217.

[69] Ibid.

[70] Friedman, The Fifty Year War, 252.

[71] Weiner, Legacy of Ashes, 189.

[72] Ibid., 190.

[73] Ibid., 187.

[74] Ibid., 188.

[75] Ibid., 189.

[76] Ibid., 192.

[77] Friedman, The Fifty Year War, 255.

[78] Ibid., 257.