The Foundation of the CIA (Spy Agency) - Dr. Richard E. Schroeder

[Music] [Applause] [Music] welcome to the National Spy Museum my name is Vince Houghton I'm the historian and curator here at the museum is this anyone's first time here all right special welcome to you is anyone's first time coming to any of our programs here at the museum all right special welcome to you as well this is our last program of 2017 somehow it's December on Friday it doesn't feel like it necessarily but it is but if you get a chance before you leave if you haven't already pick up our winter 2018 communique this has all the programming that picks up in the new year I think it bleep it goes through March ish and then we'll have ones coming after that so the the spring is chock-full of great programming as well so if you like what you hear tonight or if you don't you know come back anyway and check out another one of our programs into the new year we're very fortunate to have an old friend here with us here tonight Rick Schroeder who is a former officer with the CIA's clandestine service he held senior management positions in the agency's directors operations and Science and Technology as well as the office of congressional affairs and the Center for the Study of intelligence where he was the deputy director he began his career at the CIA do I tell my ages you if I say in 1972 I in 1972 after two years of the United States Army as an intelligence officer for the Army staff here in Washington but also with the US military command in Vietnam since his retirement from CIA he consults on national security and teaches at Georgetown School of Foreign Service he is also a founding advisory board member immortus here at the International Spy Museum here since the beginning and is the author of a new book the foundation of the CIA Harry Truman the Missouri gang and the origins of the Cold War so you're not here to listen to me talk so Rick come on and thank you all for coming out when you could be over at the Christmas market across the street so I appreciate that as Vince said I've been a CIA officer for running on 250 years now and for the last 20 years I've taught intelligence courses at Georgetown School of Foreign Service and in teaching there at Georgetown I've discovered as well as from participating with the museum discovered that there's a great interest in the CIA and in the general subject of National Intelligence but also unfortunately there's considerable misunderstanding suspicion and even outright hostility about national intelligence so one of the reasons that I wrote this book is as a sort of a primer to try to explain not to specialist audiences or knowledgeable people like yourselves or my colleagues but to the general public what it is that the intelligence community does and the kinds of functions and capabilities we have but also the kinds of challenges we have so what I wanted to do was you'll forgive me for reading from notes here but my classes at Georgetown run two and a half hours long so I'm used to speaking extemporaneously for two and a half hours and I know that none of you wants that too late so let me just read this this is a this is a simple little book about how the modern US intelligence establishment was created but also to highlight major intelligence functions by focusing on important themes episodes and lessons and I'll talk about lessons but I want to emphasize that these are not necessarily lessons that we learned or that we remembered it's also about the men because the Missouri gang were all men who conceived and implemented the vision of a National Intelligence Service against heavy odds and in the face of widespread opposition and multiple near-death experiences as Harry Truman said the only thing new in the world is history that you don't know and as Yogi Berra said it's deja vu all over again and that theme of repeatedly having to relearn the same lessons over and over again runs from the early days of the OSS right down to the present and some of the experiences of OSS officers and early CIA officers will seem very familiar to our colleagues today now because I'm a historian myself let me step back a step and remind you that every advance state undertakes what deputy CIA historian Mike Warner described as secret state activity to understand or influence foreign entities look there we have technology in action and remember as Tony Mendez another member of the Board of Advisors here has pointed out sooner or later technology will always let you down so remember that throughout our history the CIA has or the u.s. not the CIA but the US has repeatedly conducted impressive intelligence during wartime but then for or abandon the discipline in peacetime and that's a theme that dates back all the way to the Revolution and anybody who served in the 1990s will remember the Cold War peace dividend you remember that we had defeated the Soviet Union there wasn't going to be any more history and so we were gonna have this wonderful peace dividend and for those of us in the business it was what was euphemistically called the intelligence glidepath and that means we went down 25% in budgets 25% in personnel during the 1990s just in time for 9/11 so the u.s. was founded with a great respect for intelligence and George Washington can be considered the first Director of National Intelligence but the US was slow to join the great power great game and the great game has called that because it's based on a book by Rudyard Kipling called Kim which he wrote in 1901 about Afghanistan so we were a little late to this great game in fact the first permanent US intelligence agency was the Office of Naval Intelligence in 1882 and it was created in response to the growing power and reach of the super weapons of the day which were battleships first time that foreigners foreign powers could credibly project power in a way that would really threaten the United States in the 1880s the US Navy was the 12th largest in the world even smaller than Brazil but in 1945 you'll notice quite a number of u.s. naval officers in our story World War one showed the us what greenhorns we were in intelligence and that's a direct quote from a distinguished office of naval intelligence officer named John Allen gaeda and there he is right there but officers like Gaeta and US Army code breakers in the American black chamber led by Herbert Yardley did impressive work but after the first world war guess what the United States did again this hard-earned experience was allowed to go to waste after the war until again we faced the global threats of the 1930s by then only a few practitioners remained along with a good number of enthusiastic amateurs I'm going to briefly discuss a number of these characters many of them members of the Missouri gang but for more detail you're gonna have to read my book or ask me questions after the presentation here we have Truman in the middle we have his military chief of staff to the commander in chief Admiral William Leahy we have the first DCI Sidney sours we have the second DCI who's not from Missouri quite Vandenberg and then on the other side we have Roscoe Hill encouter who was the first director of the CIA we have Clark Clifford who was a young White House lawyer also from Missouri and we have Larry Huston who was general counsel of both the OSS and the CIA also from Missouri so a good deal of these good number of these people were in fact from Missouri but the reason that they were called the Missouri gang was not a compliment in Kansas City Harry Truman during the first world war led a volunteer military unit an artillery unit that served on the Western Front and he later gained the ambivalent support of the Pendergast machine boss Pendergast basically ran the Democratic machine in Kansas City first as County Executive or mayor of Kansas City and then as senator from Missouri in fact Pendergast in Kansas City where this is this is a presentation Kansas City you can see with the liquor being poured out and the dance halls and stuff he was originally called after he joined the Senate the senator from Pendergast soared as as if if the the senator from Illinois could have been called the senator from Richard J Daley something like that in st. Louis and here we have the much more wholesome st. Louis the World's Fair of 1904 Roscoe Hillman Kadir the son of a German American mail carrier earned his US Navy Commission at Annapolis hillman Connor had an outstanding Annapolis record then served aboard ships and as a staff officer for senior commanders he taught romance languages at Annapolis but excelled as a naval attache or a uniformed overt intelligence officer in Paris finally businessman Sidney sours worked his way up the Mississippi River from New Orleans through Memphis to st. Louis making a fortune getting to know fellow businessman New York businessman James Forrestal who's going to show up later in my story and serving as a naval intelligence reservists of all the men involved in founding the CIA Hillman Carter besides his extent a fleet experience had the most actual intelligence experience but left the fewest footprints or records and I have to tell you that it was very very difficult to find out much about this guy even though he was the first director of the CIA and really had a quite distinguished career now I'm gonna say something which is sort of against my interest but if you look at the CIA's magazine studies and intelligence the March 2016 edition which is available free online I wrote an article about Helen Connors military and education which essentially is the time from when he entered the Navy served in France and then after Pearl Harbor was Admiral Nimitz's intelligence chief in the Pacific in 1942-43 so he really had a remarkably wide-ranging experience for a fairly middle grade naval officer he served in France during very pivotal turbulent years from the mid 1930s until early 1941 the spanish civil war in which Nazi Germany in the soviet union used the war to practice war games and just two years later the Germans turned those practices on first Poland and then Western Europe it was a time of aggressive Nazi expansionism was he was there in the first year at the European war and he witnessed the fall of France he was in Paris when the Germans marched in he exercised and demonstrated all the collection were porting analytic and operational skills of a classic field officer and here we have a picture of him courtesy of Keith Melton that's from his 1920 US Navy Academy yearbook and then there are a couple of the ships he served on and here is kind of an example of the world that he was in he demonstrated collection reporting analytic and operational skills as a classical field case officer and in this case what he did was he took a probe of western Germany the Rhineland just before the Germans sealed it off 1938 and here are the German labor Corps boys who were building fortifications and here the new advanced mechanized equipment that the Germans were using and he would drive around and because he spoke native German along with Spanish and French he would just pick up hitchhiking gi's German soldiers or the labor Corps guys and he would offer him cigarettes and say oh by the way I'm an American and tell me what you guys are up to and he got remarkable reports on fortifications and airfields and various kind of military facilities that they were building this was also a period with the on Schloss of Austria and the occupation of the Sudeten sued eight in the land of Czechoslovakia where there were repeated war scares in Western Europe not actual war but repeated panics and the picture on the right there or the left the picture on the left there is of people fleeing from Paris not during the actual war but because they got panicked in the late 30s finally he served under the former Chief of Naval Operations and future military chief of staff to the commander in chief William Leahy and the picture over on the fourth side is Leahy as ambassador to occupied France actually he was sitting in Vichy and that is his military staff and embassy staff he's presenting his credentials to the Vichy government let's see you folks the second from the right is Helen Cotter with the eyebrows and the guy next to him the third from the right is Douglas MacArthur the second who was not Douglas MacArthur's son but he's nephew he was a he was a senior State Department officer then you have Leahy in the middle he was in France on the 14th of June when the Nazis marched in to Paris and the Ambassador decided to leave he'll encounter and the military attache in Paris so that they could debrief and try to elicit information from the German governor of Paris and that's general fund student it's there who happened himself to have been a military attache German military attache in Warsaw so he said to Helen Cotter and his army buddy hey I understand what a tie Shay's do you're here to gather information so ask me anything you want and he'll and Gadar said to him how you're going to invade England and he said don't worry we've got it all worked out six weeks the war will be over which shows something any rate Hillman Cotter transferred back to the Pacific Fleet in November 1941 just in time to have his captain killed and his battleship West Virginia sunk out from under him during the surprise Japanese attack on December 7th this is this is West Virginia the captain was killed hill and Cotter was the executive officer so he was the senior surviving officer on the ship now those of you who know the museum well the spy museum well no may recognize that image of the flag over there the museum has an excellent video which they show called ground truth of any of you seen that it's really a terrific video unfortunately it's not running these days because of the James Bond villains special exhibit but it basically talks about the importance of intelligence and how critical it is to national success or failure and that's the final image on that video that happens to be the flag from Hell encounter ship so it's kind of fitting that the spy museum would show an image that dates back to the early director of the CIA after brief sea Duty hill and Cotter became chief of Pacific Fleet Commander Chester Nimitz as small understaffed disorganized and overwhelmed intelligence center now this is another one of those things that's going to happen over and over again Helen Cotter took over this Intelligence Center in the chaos immediately after Pearl Harbor he didn't have enough staff he didn't have the proper kinds of people didn't have the skills he needed sort of again as Yogi Berra said it's going to be deja vu all over again to the point when he becomes director the CIA his brilliant predecessor Joseph Rochefort was kicked aside by Washington rivals trying to shift blame for Pearl Harbor onto this gifted Japanese linguist and cryptographer so again another lesson when something goes wrong it's never your fault go blame somebody else and ideally blamed somebody who's not guilty my editorial comment in mid 1942 and Hill and Cotter and his intelligence Center Pacific Ocean Area that's what it was called intelligence center Pacific Ocean area found themselves in a similar beleaguered crisis to the Central Intelligence Group that hill and Cotter inherited in mid 1947 from DC eyes directors of Central Intelligence Sidney sours and Hoyt Vandenberg so again five years later he's going to find himself in a similar pickle meanwhile stepping back to mid 1941 the improvisational and devious President Franklin Roosevelt had been trying to want run what past for strategic national intelligence out of his desk drawer there wasn't any structure at all in July 1941 he picked ambitious aggressive and equally improvisational Republican New York lawyer and World War one hero William Donovan to be his coordinator of information over the bitter and unrelenting addition of the FBI and military and naval intelligence this is Donovan's favorite picture of himself shows him as a world war 1 hero and Congressional Medal of Honor winner there he is as director of the OSS and here is a 1946 aerial photograph showing you've got the what's called this is now the Kennedys so this theme of fraternal hostility runs through the whole story and as of course repeated during the late 40s and early 50s with the foundation of the CIA or for that matter it's repeated in 2005 with the creation of the Director of National Intelligence if you remember the log rolling that took place when the DNI was established in 2005 if intelligence is all about understanding and I think it is then the most important function is research and analysis collating evaluating and weighing fragmentary ambiguous and contradictory and often deliberately misleading information you know it's not just that we don't have the whole picture it's that our adversaries are sometimes actively trying to mislead us and if you don't believe that that happens today look at the cover of the Washington Post tomorrow morning or maybe today these challenges are shared by historians journalists and intelligence officers and I'm both an historian and an intelligence officer so I can tell you these are these are major challenges two of these intelligence officers were Ivy League historians William Langer and Sherman Kent who essentially invented the discipline of national strategic analysis and the CIA's analytic College today is named for Sherman Kent the OSS and CIA are almost unique and this is true still today are almost unique in putting scholars and analysis at the center of the intelligence process still thrown into a global war Donavan naturally followed the British model of espionage which the OSS called secret intelligence and covert action which the British called and we called special operations covert action as you know ranges from influence operations through propaganda sabotage working with allies and liaison all the way to rallying indigenous resistance and supporting military operations and here we have a couple of examples of that and this is the first time we see women in the picture by the way he also in Donovan also encouraged the development of enabling technologies and spy gears this is Stanley Lovell his pictures courtesy of Keith Keith Melton as well the picture in the middle is a Jedburgh team just about to parachute into occupied France and on the far side there you have Virginia Hall and that picture of the third one over there is the portrait of Virginia Hall which hangs in the CIA today and Donovan awarding her the Distinguished Service Medal so how we got here is the thanks to World War two the United States emerged as the only unwounded global superpower every other great nation was grievously crippled by the second world war but we came through remarkably unscathed thanks to Donovan during the war the u.s. created a unique intelligence framework by unique I mean they combine not only espionage and direct action covert operations and things of that sort but also analysis the only other service in the world that does that is the German BND and the reason they do was because they were created by the CIA and followed the OSS and CIA model the war also gave us first senator then vice-president and finally president harry s truman who unlike roosevelt was organized systematic history minded and fact oriented finally the war left us facing the nuclear cold war against an aggressive expansionist soviet union and gave us areas Truman's Missouri gang to create a new national security framework including among other things the CIA here we have practically the first time Truman and Roosevelt ever met each other and that was just after Truman had been named Roosevelt's vice presidential running mate in 1944 everybody knew Roosevelt was essentially mortally ill and was not going to survive next the fourth term and so Truman was chosen as a compromise running mate for Roosevelt because unlike Wendell Willkie he wasn't a northeastern liberal and unlike senator South Carolina Senator Jimmy Bern he wasn't a segregationist so he was a solid Midwestern new dealer and by the way he's only two years younger than Roosevelt he's 60 in that picture and Roosevelt is 62 the next picture April 12 1945 he's being sworn in as with Hill and cutter in the US Navy after Pearl Harbor Truman in April 1945 had no time to find his footing before being pushed onto the global stage to face Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin at Potsdam he's also facing the decision to deploy the atomic bomb against Japan this is July 1945 and as you know the next month he decided to drop the atomic bombs since Casablanca the Casablanca summit in 1943 Europe was seen as the central focus for the Global War and the division of post-war Europe had already been decided at Yalta just before Roosevelt died so there wasn't any question anymore that the Russians were going to get all of Eastern Europe OSS burned chief Allen Dulles there in the middle was appointed to run OSS Germany and many OSS officers were shifted to the Far East where the war was still going on in the picture on the right you see Dulles and on his right is another future director of the CIA Richard Helms at the end of the war in September in 1945 the u.s. stood is the only nuclear-armed global superpower and the OSS was almost a global service with broad strategic and tactical intelligence functions and capabilities so here you have all the OSS offices in Western Europe and North Africa and there you have them all in Southeast Asia this is this is in the end of 1944 early 1945 you notice there's no presence in Latin America and that's another reason because of all the rivalries the FBI exercised exclusive control over activities in Latin America and the OSS never got in there unfortunately the OSS was also a temporary wartime agency which by law had to be immediately disbanded at the end of the war as it was within three weeks of the formal Japanese surrender Tokyo Bay so three weeks after the Japanese surrendered the OSS was abolished and basically this whole infrastructure and most of the 13 to 14,000 members of the OSS were suddenly out of jobs almost immediately thereafter almost the entire active duty Army and Navy were also abolished we went from 16 million men in the Army and Navy down to less than a million without a doubt that was the world's greatest peace dividend vastly more than what happened after the fall of the Berlin Wall however the war along with the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan and also actually the demobilization of the American military transformed the Western world because all those soldiers came home they all get the GI Bill they all got married they all started having babies they all bought houses under GI loans they all went to college and the boom that the United States enjoyed in the 50s and 60s is in large measure because of the demobilization there Marshall Plan and the Truman Doctrine also managed to stabilize and rebuild Western Europe as the Soviet Union consolidated its hold on Eastern Europe Truman who considered Donovan a self-promoter ignored his calls for a peacetime strategic intelligence service and simply wiped out the OSS now there's a considerable controversy about that whether it was just sort of wrongheadedness on Truman's part the point was that as a temporary organization the OSS could not continue it had to be dissolved and so it was but Truman was painfully aware of the war ways fragmentation disorganization and inter-service rivalries had contributed to Pearl Harbor and he wanted to create a new post-war military and national intelligence structure so he did very consciously want to get something in place to kind of prepare the United ADEs for the post-war world to do so he turned to his military chief of staff and former ambassador to Vichy France Fleet Admiral William Leahy and his White House lawyer Missouri and Clark Clifford as well as to a business friend of his Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal and that's deputy chief of naval intelligence Rear Admiral Sidney sours Truman may have been an unlikely and underestimated president but Sowers was an even more improbable intelligence manager unlike Hillen Cotter or even Allen Dulles he had almost no practical intelligence experience he basically had run grocery stores banks and insurance companies before the war he frankly admitted that he got his position as deputy chief of the Office of Naval Intelligence thanks to his friendship with Forrestal because he was bored and lonesome as local naval intelligence chief in Charleston South Carolina and San Juan Puerto Rico there's sours on the far end there his primary claim to fame in Charleston was debriefing the first German u-boat crew captured off the United States their sours there's a British Navy officer there two German u-boat POWs and another naval intelligence officer and that's basically what's ours did he was a navy commander he got promoted to Rear Admiral and and wound up as Deputy Chief of Naval Intelligence and was brought in to help create the new National Intelligence structure because he understood the military position on how the new post-war organization should be created now the next two years were like the world's most convoluted fun Aryan opera with scheming intriguing backstabbing and histrionics most of them focused on the creation of the new national defense establishment rather than the new national intelligence establishment which was the CIA so everybody was occupied with fighting about whether they were going to have more aircraft carriers or more strategic bombers the Air Force and the Navy were fighting it out and in the meantime Clark Clifford and Leahy were just trying to slip the new CIA under the radar and actually succeeded in doing that early agency and other military intelligence historians have concentrated on that all of this inside the beltway maneuvering so I'm not going to do that and I didn't do very much of it in the book either hill and Gadar well out of the Washington sniping had spent the war in the Pacific in charge of Nimitz's destroyers here's his flagship and all the little baby his destroyers next to it after the war he commanded the world's most famous battleship USS Missouri immediately after the war on a celebrated cruise to Greece and Turkey and this is when the the Communists were threatening both Greece Turkey and Yugoslavia were actually threatening Italy so by sending he'll encounter in this battleship to the Mediterranean Truman was emphasizing that the United States had the military power sort of indirectly reminding people hey we also the atomic bomb he then returned to Paris as a naval at some military attache and there he is on the far right as military attache however as you can see from the picture in the middle during his Missouri command there he is with a bunch of sailors from the ship who happened to have been born in Missouri he was visiting st. Louis sort of on a VIP welcome back and one of those sailors was black so he proved himself in an episode that I recount in the book a civil rights trailblazer in January of 1946 two years before Truman integrated the US military so he brought the black sailor with him and insisted that he participate along with all the white sailors in all the festivities that took place he was also amazingly a defender of a persecuted homosexual office of policy coordination manager by the name of Carmel offi that Joe McCarthy tried to smear so here he is pioneer and civil rights pioneer even in defending homosexuals in France he was awarded the French Legion of Honor and was promoted to Rear Admiral before being recalled to take over Truman Central Intelligence Group now sours and he'll and Vandenberg had both been directors of Central Intelligence but they wasn't a CIA at that point there was only a very very small Central Intelligence Group so Hill and Cotter was the first DCI who actually commanded the CIA was created in September of 1947 under the National Security Act interestingly enough none of the early DC is from sours to Air Corps Lieutenant General Hoyt Vandenberg to Rear Admiral Helen Cotter to army lieutenant general Walter beetle Smith who was the next director wanted the job of trying to recreate or create a National Intelligence Service in the face of highly skilled organized and aggressive Soviet adversary and in an atmosphere of endless domestic and international crises some of them I detail in the book a kind of a hill encounters six crises so here we have the inventors of the high five I understand from Twitter today here we have Harry Truman watching the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court swearing in hill and Cotter Sidney sours and a man by the name of Joseph Hill who was the head of the National Defense Resources Board this is in September of 1947 and there you have the National Security Council with let me point out a few people theory it works I'm standing in the way here you have Truman here you have Secretary of State General George Marshall here you have Secretary of Defense James Forrestal remember he sours his friend here you have the DCI Dylan Goddard and there you have City sours who stayed with Truman after his brief tour as director of the Central Intelligence Group he helped create the CIA and the national security structure and he stayed on as executive secretary of the National Security Council basically through the entire Truman administration so there you have however in the face of hostility from his Washington enemies most of whom outranked him and one of whom Allen Dulles coveted his job Hill and Cotter lasted for three eventful years before returning to the fleet to fight another war and in part the the final blow to his position was the Korean War this time he went back to Korea as commander of a cruiser squadron off Korea and that's his flagship USS st. Paul you'll notice that the photo of the turn over to Beatle Smith in late 1950 there you have Dylan Cotter and Beatle Smith is one of the few pictures of Hillman Cotter smiling he's happy to be out of there and back on the deck of a battleship here we have Smith characteristic here we have also he was the director of espionage he was actually working for distinguished senior officer Houston another missourian who was the general counsel and then the CIA Helen Cotter returned to obscurity and was never heard of again until February of 1960 when he wrote an astonishing letter to the New York Times now what could he possibly have been writing about he was then for some reason that have never been able to figure out a member of a private fringe group called the National Investigative Committee on aerial phenomena it's called my captain and he complained in that letter in 1960 about US government efforts to conceal the existence of UFOs where that came from I have no idea this led to an internal CIA debate about whether to tell him about the you to Houston and the senior members like like Dulles Allen Dulles said gee maybe we ought to tell him that there is in fact this secret airplane they decided not to do it but it became spectacularly public two months later on the first of May 1960 when Gary Powers was shot now over Russia so Helen Cotter was only half wrong he's forgotten as the first director of the CLA however he's now he'll and Connor is now a cult figure in the UFO community who knew if you google Helen Cotter the first thing that pops up is all this conspiracy stuff about UFOs and Helen Cotter along with Curtis LeMay everybody remembers who Curtis LeMay was right Strategic Air Command bomb him back to the Stone Age both Helen cutter and LeMay were supposedly honored with a Gerald Ford aircraft carrier sized spaceship allegedly launched by the US government in 1988 at the end of the Reagan administration here's the Jerry Ford over there is a picture of the Jerry Ford and that's the size of the USS hilland Goddard part of the solar warden space fleet that the United States launched in the late 1980s supposedly I can neither confirm nor deny the last word about the CIA however should be left to its creator Harry Truman almost as soon as the OSS was abolished he began pestering his first Director of Central Intelligence Sidney sours with the demand where's my newspaper almost 20 years later even after a very public denunciation of how the CIA had strayed under DCI Allen Dulles Truman also wrote below his official portrait at CIA headquarters that the CIA is a necessity to the President of the United States from one who knows that's the first presidential portrait in the CIA headquarters that's the inscription so that's basically the story I wanted to tell you folks tonight and I left a lot out because I clearly would enjoy it if you read the book I think you'll find it interesting a lot of the pictures are from the book I would just leave you with a couple of thoughts one is Harry Truman's the only thing new in the world is history you don't know and that's actually not a made-up quote it's from Merle Miller's plane speaking so it's a direct quote from Truman then again deja vu all over again that's Yogi Berra of course never let the national interest stand in the way of protecting your rice bowl that's sort of the way Washington works right you know and sometimes your worst enemies are your brothers that's Anthony scaramouche II the mooch this very year so you know the the intrigues that went on here in the United States the painful lessons that the OSS learned overseas that we have to keep learning over and over again if you have any questions about that be delighted to answer them I can read you some more of these laws here that I came up with but I think that's enough for now so thank you all very much so any questions that's all right okay hold on we've got it right oh you got a microphone that you spoke of Admiral Hill and Connor in the most glowing terms that I've ever heard in a positive light which is kind of odd considering that all the literature that even the CIA puts out today they don't talk very positively about him and you mentioned that there was a lack of documentation on his early involvement it seems to me there's a lack of documentation period from the time that the OSS was disbanded up until the CIA was founded and do you have any reason why there's so little documentation let's see in terms of why there's not more documentation first of all in the early years both of the OSS and the CIA the people involved and Congress and the government in general felt that the stuff ought to be secret in fact there's another excellent book by named by the man by the name of David Barrett called the CIA in Congress there really goes into great depth about the creation Hillen Connor himself wasn't involved in the creation he was off happily being a naval attache during that period and you may find this hard to believe but government records are not always well organized and they're not perfect and I spent many many frustrating days in the National Archives going back over the US Navy at Touche reports to try to get something about hill and Goddard's experiences in Europe the frustrating thing about Helen Connor is if you look at books histories the way Washingtonians do by turning immediately to the index and looking for your name well I did that with Helen Connor I would look at histories and turned to the index and try to find Helen got her and be lucky to find a phrase let alone a sentence there really wasn't very much he kept an official diary when he was director the CIA but there's very little in that he never wrote anything himself except in the 1930s and 40s when he was a military attache and the National Archives has the original paper with his original ink signature on it but that's it he only had one child who died apparently unmarried and he just sort of disappeared Leahy on the other hand kept a diary every day of his life and immediately after the war Leahy's diaries were published Truman of course had a lot of stuff written about him everybody writes about Donovan nobody writes much about Sidney sours sours however sat for a couple of interviews CIA interviews which were originally classified sours was a very interesting guy because he had a very sharp tongue and so some of his more unvarnished opinions are really very interesting but it's a very small body of work even on him and if you go to the Truman library and Sowers remained a good friend of Truman's to the end of his life if you want to see the Sowers Papers they're one linear foot of paper so the only one the only one who really wrote very much was Lahey and Clifford of course but Clifford waited until the 1980s to write his memoirs so you're you're sort of left sort of scrambling these people are very opaque and it's very frustrating to see how little you really can find out about them and that's why I think he's underappreciated at the time when he was confirmed as director of the claa in the fall of 1947 it was an unanimous vote in the Senate to reconfirm him so they actually they actually held him in very high regard as I said he was there in a very very difficult period and a lot of crap happened while he was DCI and he got blamed for a lot of it you know the Soviets detonated an atomic bomb and it took us about a month to figure out they'd done it China fell to Mao Zedong and of course the Korean War started but at that point the CIA was not the well-oiled machine and the vast global organization that we have today it was just a very small group of people who were scrambling to try to put together it's kind of like the expression you know when you're up to your butt in alligators it's hard to remember that your mission was to save the world for democracy and also a lot of the things that the OSS had tried and failed at during the Second World War people like Frank Wisner tried again in the early 1950s and they failed again so two weeks ago John Prados was here is talking about book the ghosts of Langley and it was an unending litany of failures and screw-ups or malice or incompetence and what I'd like to remind you is that these folks were all honorable patriotic people who were trying the best they could under very difficult circumstances but not everybody had the same vision of what the best was and j edgar Hoover's vision was very different from say Hill encounters vision Rikai one day I actually ask you a question that related back to to John's talk John produces talk and it was just very much about the notes and it plays into his question about the notes and the documentation that you've been talking about John referenced Truman notes that were like someone wore a big hat and what did that mean he's really said the notes were very just kind of conversational the early notes unless I misunderstood he was talking about documentation from the Truman years and that this early foundation period that were you know maybe I'm making this up but I thought very lackadaisical not not conveying any substance well you know it's kind of interesting because Truman and Sowers both are very human people and Truman is notorious for having written a nasty letter to a music critic who was mean to his daughter you know said nasty things about her and how Margaret and how he was going to punch him in the face and kick him in the whatever's so Truman would form very strong opinions very quickly and he had enemies one of whom was Alec and the reason he didn't like Dulles was because Dulles was a senior political adviser to John Dewey the governor of New York who was running against Truman in 1948 and Dulles thought that when do we be Truman and it was clear that that was going to happen I mean even the Chicago Tribune knew that Dewey was going to be true Dulles was going to become the director of the CIA well didn't happen Truman not only had strong opinions but he was subject to forgetfulness and in 1964 for example he wrote a letter to the Washington Post he said oh the CIA has gone terribly wrong they've strayed off into overthrowing governments and all this covert action stuff well that it all happened under Dulles and he didn't like Dulles Truman for God that in 1947 when he created the CIA he did so specifically so that it could do things like covert actions on behalf of Democratic parties in the Italian election of 1947 so you know Truman was not an opponent of a lot of these things going on he just sort of changed his public position on it sours also had very strong opinions he didn't like Dulles either and in fact when it came to a height Vandenberg who was only director for about a year Vandenberg didn't wanted the job and Sowers who was trying to leave the job said to Vandenberg well look I know you don't want to be director of Central Intelligence you want to be chief of staff of the air for us when they create an air force but they're not going to make you chief of staff of the Air Force just because you're handsome you have to go and do something first so you know these are the kind of stories that you get from bless his heart Oh Harry but also from salaries but a lot of that stuff was originally the Sowers material was originally classified and those early histories of all the maneuvering was classified as well and they were published internally in the CIA and they were only Declassified literally decades later okay sir question how quickly did the CIA established relationships with other intelligence agencies around the world because I know that mi6 was a model for CIA originally as it was set up and there was close links between OSS and the UK during the Second World War but how clear was that was they were those relationships between CA and other international insurgency agencies established did that take it on time or was that quite quite quick well Christopher Andrew who's one of the great military intelligence historians has said that the American establish intelligence establishment the OSS was the greatest covert action that the British ever accomplished because remember I said that that Roosevelt ran foreign policy out of his hip pocket one of the things he did before we entered the Second World War was he dispatched personal friends around the world to sort of report to him on what was going on rather than relying upon the State Department it was actually supposed to do International Affairs and reporting he would dispatch people when one of the people he dispatched was Donovan and the British intelligence chief in Washington sent a note to London and said hey Donovan is coming to London giving the VIP treatment he met the king you know Church Oh greeted him they had all of this red carpet rolled out and one of the results of that was Donovan came back and immediately started working with Roosevelt to try to get Lindley's the 50 destroyers that England needed to protect their convoys and things of that sort so the British actually sort of won over Donovan and the OSS was kind of created on the British model and it used British techniques and the British trained the first wave of OSS officers so that was the closest relationship really from the very beginning now in the Far East for example in places like Thailand which were occupied by the Japanese the Thai government had been left in place by the Japanese and they were basically running a sort of an undercover government and were helping the OSS in Thailand in fact the Thai police would drive OSS officers around the country in Thai police cars so they were protecting them as much more much more ambiguous in places like France where you had the Royalists fighting against the Communists fighting against the Democrats and there wasn't really a stable government there China was the same way with nationalists and the Warlord's and the Communists Yugoslavia the same yet Royalists versus communists the the the other intelligence service that really we worked with very very closely from the beginning was the one we invented and that's the West German federal intelligence service which started off as the Gailen organization which had been the the Nazi intelligence organization for the eastern army in other words the army fighting against the Soviet Union and after the war Galen volunteered his organization to the US Army and when the CIA was created in 1947 the CIA basically took over the Galen organization and it became the federal intelligence service and and the relationship with them is still very close so you know they from the very beginning working with indigenous peoples or local either resistance or governments has always been a part of the way the OSS worked and incidentally I'm detecting that you're from the empire there that was a cause of great conflict between us and the Brits and particularly in Southeast Asia the military command there was called the South Asian seac Southeast Asian command it was commanded by Lord Louis Mountbatten and the OSS called the South East Asia command saving Europe's Asiatic colonies which is why the OSS worked much more closely with Ho Chi Minh and the Vietminh than they did either with the British or the French because not only did the OSS recognize but all of those captive peoples recognized that all the Brits and the French wanted to do was to come back in and take over their empires once the Japanese were pushed out so sir just a quick question if you could elaborate also on perhaps Singapore and Hong Kong regarding what you were discussing when it comes to Western powers trying to recolonize these territories after the Japanese vacated just curious to see where let's say Singapore Hong Kong and all the UH not least let's say key posts play a role in the greater scheme of things well actually I mentioned them both in the book but not in a good way because the Japanese after the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor Douglas MacArthur basically had any day warning to prepare before the Japanese moved against the Philippines and Hong Kong and Singapore and unaccountably he didn't do anything he left his bombers on the ground where the Japanese destroyed him and the Japanese just sort of swept right through there and MacArthur would never let the OSS into his operational area that's why they could only operate in Thailand Indochina Burma and then China so the area of singapore and hong kong was sort of our limits to the OSS and you know they were relatively small colonial out and it didn't it didn't really play a big geopolitical role I'm not a fan of either Dulles or McArthur by the way sorry anything else ma'am so my memory is kind of vague but if I remember correctly after Japan was occupied I think there was an organization by the name of CIC that was responsible for intelligence in Japan and later on it was absorbed to CIA so is this mostly military personnel who were responsible for intelligence in Japan after the war after the OSS was abolished September of 1945 there was still a very large military intelligence and naval intelligence these had dated back to the 1880s the OSS pretty much focused on strategic intelligence with their analysts people like Sherman Kent William Langer and they concentrated on preparing the battlespace before the invasion of Normandy things like that but the Army counterintelligence Corps was the one that was part of the big army big green machine and when the OSS left in 1945 everybody went home the Army counterintelligence Corps in Japan and the Army counterintelligence court in Germany were basically what was left and what they were doing in Germany was basically denazification they were going around trying to catch all of the ex-nazis you know especially the war criminals the same thing happened to a certain extent in Japan although they weren't MacArthur was not as aggressive in in sort of the D the fascist sizing of Japan as they were in Germany it was the counterintelligence corps that got gheylens organization the the X Nazi intelligence organization in 1945 and they ran it until 1947 basically until the oh the CIA took over and there was considerable question about whether or not the CIA was going to take the German Intel group because they were all you know they'd all been Nazi army officers that two-year period was one where there were a lot of people scrambling around basically military intelligence people trying to do what they could both in the Far East and in Europe but the the military was also shrinking you know they went from sixty million to half a million in basically a year so they were they were outnumbered outgunned out manned that's when a lot of things happened in Western Europe how a lot of the ex-nazis wound up in Latin America you know there was a there were various efforts to try to get Jewish refugees out of the concentration camps and a lot of Eastern European displaced people who didn't want to go back to places like Hungary or Czechoslovakia or East Germany once the Communists took over and a lot of those people managed to get into these refugees who were Nazis because everybody just got overwhelmed there just weren't enough people enough and enough records to track everybody down so if John Prados wants to talk about how the CIA helped Nazis escape and wind up in Latin America in some cases it happened but it was obviously not intentional and you know if you got a thousand refugees together it's just like what happened in Europe in the last two years with hundreds of thousands of Syrians and Libyans and everybody else trying to escape trying to get into Europe and the problems that the security forces and the police forces have in differentiating who is a legitimate refugee and who's an Isis sleeper for example so that was sort of what was going on it's not an easy time okay well we thank you thank you all very much [Applause] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] you [Music]

Channel: IntlSpyMuseum

Views: 49,986

Rating: 4.6329703 out of 5

Keywords: CIA, Cold War, spies

Id: bUI7ZLBEpeg

Length: 80min 4sec (4804 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 11 2018