Transcripts For CSPAN3 Origins Of The CIA 20240712

Recorded this event in november of 2017. We are fortunate to have an old friend with us, richard schroeder, a former officer with the cia clandestine service. He began his career under the cia in 1972. After two years in the army as an Intelligence Officer for the army stuff in washington, the u. S. Military command in vietnam. He consults on National Security and teaches that georgetown. He is a founding Advisory Board member here at the International Spy museum. He is the author of a new book, the foundation of the cia, harry truman, the missouri gang, and the origins of the cold war. You are not here to listen to me talk. Rick, come on up. [applause] thank you for coming out when you could be over at the Christmas Market across the street. As vince said, i have been a cia officer for running on to 50 years now. For the last 20 years, i have taught intelligence courses at Georgetown School of foreign service. In teaching at georgetown, i have discovered, as well as from participating with the museum, i discovered there is a great interest in the cia and in the general subject of National Intelligence, it also, unfortunately, considerable misunderstanding, suspicion, and even outright hostility about National Intelligence. One of the reasons i wrote this book is as 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 an 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 will forgive me for reading from my notes, my classes at george town run two and a half hours long so i am used to speaking extemporaneously for two and a half hours. And i know that none of you wants that tonight so. Let me just read this. This is a simple little book about how the modern u. S. Intelligence establishment was created, but also to highlight major intelligence functions by focusing on important themes, episodes and lessons. I will talk about lessons, but i want to emphasize that these are not necessarily nastiness that we learned more that we remembered. It is also about the man 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 dont know. And, as yoking bera said, it is all visual all over again. That theme of repeatedly having to really learn the same lessons over and over again runs from the early days of the uss right down to the present. Some of the experiences of a west yes officers and really cia officers will seem very familiar to our colleagues today. Because i am a historian myself, let me step back a step and remind you that every advanced state undertakes what deputy cia historian mike warner described as secret state activity. To understand or to influence foreign entities. There we have technology inaction. And remember as tony mendes, another member of the board of advisers here, has pointed out, sooner or later technology will always let you down. So remember that. Throughout our history, the cia or, the u. S. , not the cia, the u. S. Has repeatedly conducted impressive intelligence during wartime but then forgotten or abandoned the discipline during peacetime. That is a theme that dates back all the way to the revolution. Anybody who served in the 1990s will remember the cold war peace dividend. Remember that . We had defeated the soviet union, there was not going to be any more history and so we were going to have this wonderful peace dividend. For those of us in the business, it was euphemistically called the intelligence glide path. That means we went down 25 in budgets, 25 in personnel during the 1990s, just in time forv, 9 11. The u. S. Was founded with a Great Respect for intelligence and George Washington can be considered the first director of National Intelligence. With the u. S. Was slow to join the great power of the great game. The great game is called that because it is based on a book by record killing called kim which she wrote in 1901 about afghanistan. So we were a little late to this great game. In fact, the First Permanent u. S. Intelligence agency was the office of Naval Intelligence in 1882. 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 18 eighties, the u. S. Navy was the 12th largest in the world, even smaller than brazil. But in 1945, you will notice quite a number of u. S. Naval officers in our story. World war one showed the u. S. What green horns we were in intelligence, and that is a direct quote from a distinguished office of nate office of naval Intelligence Officer named john allen gaeta. Officers like gaeta and u. S. Code breakers in the American Black Chamber did impressive work. 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 im going to briefly discuss a number of these characters, many of them members of the missouri gang. But for detail, you will have to read my book or ask me questions after the presentation. We have truman in the middle. We have his military chief of staff to the commander in chief, admiral William Lahey. We have the first dci, we have the second dci whos not from missouri, then we have the first director of the cia. We have Clark Clifford who was a young white house lawyer whos also from missouri. We have larry houston who was general counsel of both the oss and this cia, also from missouri. A good number of these people were in fact from missouri. But the reason 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, and artillery unit, that served on the western front. He later gained the ambivalent support of the pander gassed machine. He 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 and kansas city, this is a presentation of kit kansas city, you can see the liquor being poured out and dance halls and stuff, he was originally called, after he joined the senate, the senator from pendergast. Something like that. In st. Louis, here we have the much more wholesome st. Louis, the worlds affair of 1904, the son of a german american mail carrier earned his u. S. Navy commission at indianapolis. He had an outstanding annapolis record and then served aboard ships and as a staff officer for senior commanders. He taught romance languages at annapolis but he excelled as a naval attache or uniformed overt Intelligence Officer in paris. Finally, businessman sydni sours worked his way up the mississippi towards new orleans through memphis making a fortune. It getting to know a new york businessman who will show up later in my story and serving as a Naval Intelligence reservist. Of all the men involved in founding the cia, besides his extensive fleet experience, had the most actual intelligence experience. He left the fewest footprints or records. I have to tell you that it was 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. I will Say Something that is sort of against my interests but if you look at the cias magazine studies and intelligence, of march in 2016 edition, which is available free online, i wrote an article about his military education which is essentially the time from when he entered the navy, served in france, and then after pearl harbor was admiral nimitz intelligence chief in the pacific in 1942 to 1943. He really had a remarkably wide ranging experience for a fairly middle grade naval officer. He served in france during pivotal turbulent years from the early thirties to 1941. The spanish civil war in which nazi germany and the soviet union used the war to practice war games. Just two years later, the germans turned those practices on first poland and then western europe. It was a time of aggressive nazi expansionism, he was there in the first year of the european war and he witnessed the fall of france. He exercised and demonstrated all the collection, reporting, analytic and operational skills of a classic field officer and here we have a picture of him courtesy of keith mountain. That is from his 1920 u. S. Navy academy yearbook. Then there are a couple of the ships he served on. 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 in 1938. Here are the German Labour core boys who were building fortifications and here are the new advanced mechanized equipment that the germans were using. He would drive around and, because he spoke made of german, along with spanish and french, he would just pick up hitchhiking gis, german soldiers, or the labor corps guys, and he would offer them cigarettes and say, by the way, i am an american, tell me what you guys are up to. Youve got remarkable reports on fortifications, and airfields, and various kind of military facilities that they were building. This was also a period with austria and the occupation of czechoslovakia where there were repeated wars scarce in western europe. Not actual war but repeated panics. The picture on the right or the left, on the left there, is of people fleeing from paris. Not during the actual war but because they got panicked in the late thirties. Finally, he served under the former chief of nato Naval Operations and future military chief of staff to the commanderinchief, William Lahey. The picture on the left is he was in. He was in front of the 14th of june when the nazis marched in to paris and the ambassador decided to leave him in paris so that they could be brief and try to illicit information from the german governor of paris. And that is the general who happened himself to be a military attache in warsaw so he said he said i understand what at issues do you are here to gather information so ask me anything you want. And they said to him how are you going to invade england . And he said dont worry we have it all worked out. In six weeks the war will be over. Which shows i guess something. So then he transferred helen qatar back to the Pacific Fleet in november 1941, just in time to have his captain killed and his battleship West Virginia during this surprise japanese attack on december 7th so hillenkoetter was the senior surviving officer on the ship. And for those of you who know the museum the spy museum well you may recognize the image of the flag over there. The museum has an excellent video which they show called ground troops. Have any of you seeing that . Its really a terrific video. Unfortunately it is 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 our National Success or failure. And that is the final image on that video. That happens to be the flag from hillenkoetter ship. It is fitting that the spy museum which show an image that dates back to the early director of the cia. After brief sea duty hillenkoetter became chief of the small understaffed disorganized and overwhelmed Intelligence Center this is another one of those things that will happen over and over again hillenkoetter took over this Intelligence Center in the chaos immediately after pearl harbor. He did not have enough staff. He did not have the proper kinds of people. He did not have the skills he needed. As yogi berra said, it will be deja vu all over again, to the point when he becomes director of the cia. His brilliant predecessor was kicked aside by washington rivals trying to shift blame for pearl harbor on to this gifted japanese linguist and cryptographer. Again, another lesson. When something goes wrong, it is never your fault. Blame somebody else. Ideally, blame somebody who is not guilty. My editorial comment. In mid1942, hillenkoetter and his Intelligence Center Pacific Ocean area found themselves in a similar beleaguered crisis to the Central Intelligence group that hillenkoetter inherited in mid 1947 from dcis directors of Central Intelligence. Again, five years later, he will find himself in a similar pickle. Meanwhile, stepping back to mid1941, the improvisational and devious president Franklin Roosevelt had been trying to run what passed as strategic National Intelligence out of his desk drawer. There was not any structure at all. In july of 1941, he picked ambitious and aggressive republican new york lawyer and world war i hero William Donovan to be his coordinator of information over the bitter and unrelenting opposition of the fbi and military and Naval Intelligence. This is donovans favorite picture of himself. It shows him as a world war i hero and congressional medal of honor winner. There he is as director and here is a 1946 aerial photograph showing you have got the Lincoln Memorial here. 23rd street. The potomac river. There is the original headquarters of the oss and cia. This is now the kennedy center. This theme of fraternal hostility runs through the whole story, and is repeated during the late 1940s and 1950s when the foundation of the cia, or for that matter, is 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, the most important function is research and analysis, collating, evaluating, and weighing fragmentary, ambiguous, and contradictory and often deliberately misleading information. It is not just that we dont have the whole picture. It is that our adversaries are sometimes actively trying to mislead us. If you dont 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 am both an historian and Intelligence Officer so i can tell you these are major challenges. Two of these Intelligence Officers were ivy league historians, who essentially invented the discipline of National Strategic analysis. In the cias analytic college today is named for sherman kent. This is true still today. Almost unique in putting scholars and analysis at the center of the intelligence process. Still thrown into a global war, donovan 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 ranges from influence operations, propaganda, sabotage, all the way to rallying indigenous resistance and supporting military operations. Here we have a couple of examples of that. This is the first time we see women in the picture, by the way. Donovan also encouraged the enabling of technology and sky gear. The picture in the middle is a jet berg team about two parachute into occupied france. On the far side, you have virginia hall. The picture of the third one is the portrait of virginia hall, which hangs in the cia today. Donovan awarding her the distinguished service medal. How we got here is thanks to world war ii, 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 combined espionage and direct action, covert operations and things of that sort, but also analysis. The only other service in the world that does not is the german and the reason they do is because they were created by the cia and followed the oss and cia model. Harry 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 Harry Trumans 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 roosevelts Vice President ial running mate in 1944. Everybody knew roosevelt was essentially mortally ill, and was not going to survive the fourth term. And so truman was chosen as a compromised running mate for roosevelt because unlike wendell wilkie, he was not a northeastern liberal and unlike senator jimmy byrne, he was not a segregationist. He was a solid midwestern new dealer. By the way, he is only two years younger than roosevelt. He is 60 in that picture and roosevelt is 62. The next picture, april 12, 1945, he is being sworn in. As with hillenkoetter and the u. S. 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. He is 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 summit in 1943, europe was seen as the central focus for the global war and the division of postwar europe had already been decided just before roosevelt died. There was not any question anymore that the russians were going to get all of eastern europe. Oss chief in the middle, was appointed to run oss germany and many oss officers were shipped into the far east where the war was still going on. In the picture on the right, you see dulles, and on his right, another future director of the cia richard helms. At the end of the war in september 1945, the u. S. Stood as the only Nuclear Superpower in the oss was almost a Global Service with broad, strategic, and tactical intelligence functions and capabilities. Here you have all the oss officers in western europe and north africa and there you have them all in Southeast Asia. This is the end of 1944, early 1945. You will notice there is no presence in latin america. That is 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, 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 at 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 1 million. Without a doubt that was the worlds 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 martial plan and actually the demobilization of the american military, transformed the western world because all those soldiers came home, they all got 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 boon that the United States enjoyed in the fifties and sixties is in large measure because of the demobilization. The tremendous doctrine and the marshall 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 peace time strategic Intelligence Service and simply wiped out the oss. There is a considerable controversy about that. Whether it was just sort of wrongheadedness on trumans 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 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 States for the post war world. To do so, he turned to his military chief of staff and former ambassador to france, fleet admiral William Lahey and his white house lori lawyer Clark Clifford. As well as to a business friend, james forestall. That is deputy chief of Naval Intelligence, rear admiral sydni sours. Truman may have been an unlikely and underestimated president president , but sours was an even more improbable intelligence manager. Unlike helen carter or even alan douglas, he had almost no practical intelligence experience. He basically had run grocery stores, banks, and Insurance Companies for the war. He frankly admitted that he got his position as deputy chief of the office of Naval Intelligence thanks to his friendship with forestall because he was bored and lonesome as local Naval Intelligence chief in Charleston South Carolina and san juan puerto rico. There is souers on the far and there. His primary claim to fame in charleston was debriefing the first german uboat crew captured off the United States. There is souers, theres a british navy officer, there are two german uboat p. O. W. s and another naval Intelligence Officer. Thats basically what souers did. He was a navy commander, he got promoted to rear adm. And sorry, wound up as deputy chief of Naval Intelligence. He was brought in to help create the new National Intelligence structure because he understood the military position on how the new post world War Organization should be created. The next two years were like the worlds most convoluted 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 the actually succeeded in doing that. Early agency and other military intelligence historians have concentrated on all of this inside the beltway maneuvering. So i will not do that. I did not do very much of it in the book either. Hillenkoetter, well out of the washington sniping, had spent the war in the pacific in charge of nimitz is destroyers. Here is his flagship and all the little destroys next to it. After the war, he commanded the worlds most famous battleship, the uss missouri. Immediately after the war, on a celebrated cruise to greece and turkey. This is when the communists were threatening both greece, turkey and yugoslavia and actually threatening italy. By sending hillenkoetter and his battleship to the mediterranean, truman was emphasizing that the United States had the military power, sort of indirectly reminding people that we also had the atomic bomb. He then returned to paris as a naval as a military attache. 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 happen to have been born in missouri. He was visiting st. Lewis, sort of on a vip welcome back. One of those sailors was black, so he proved himself, in an episode that i recount in the book, a civil rights trail blazer in january of 1946. Two years before truman integrated the u. S. 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 homeless homosexual office of policy coordination manager by the name of caramel coffee. John mccarthy tried to smear him. Here he is pioneering 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 trumans Central Intelligence group. Now souers and then didnt bird had both been directors of Central Intelligence. But there was not a cia at that point. Who is only a small Central Intelligence group. Hillenkoetter was the first dci who actually commanded the cia. It was created in september of 1947 under the National Security act. Interestingly enough, none of the early dcis from souers two brandenburg to rear adm. Hillenkoetter two army general walter smith who is 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 adversaries. And in an atmosphere of endless domestic and international crises, some of them which i detail in the book. A kind of hillenkoetter 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 hillenkoetter, sydney souers and a man by the name of joseph hill who was the head of the National Defenses resources bureau. This is in september of 1947. There you have the National Security council with, let me point out a few people over here. Im standing in the way. Here you have truman, here you have secretary of state general george marshall, here you have secretary of defense james forestall. He is a friend of souers. Do you have the dci, hillenkoetter, and then you have sydney souers who stayed with truman after his brief tour as director of the Central Intelligence crew. He helped create this cia and the National Security structure and he stayed on as executive secretary of the National Security council. Basically through the entire administration. There you have the whole bunch. However, in the face of hostility from his washington enemies, most of whom outranked him and one of whom allen dulles coveted his job. Allen, you lasted three years before going back to the fleet to fight another war. In part, 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 is his flagship, uss st. Paul. You will notice that the photo of the turnover to beatle smith in late 1950. There you have hillenkoetter and smith. This is one of the few pictures of hillenkoetter smiling. He is happy to be out of there and back on the deck of a battleship. We have smith characteristically glum. Here we have Frank Whitmer who also plays a role in my book. He was the director of covert which at the time was divided from espionage, the office of policy coordination, carmel offie, the homosexual who hillenkoetter went bad for him, is working there as well. We have a distinguished senior officer who is the head of congressional affairs, we have larry houston, another missouri and who is the general counsel of flee oasis and this yay. Hillenkoetter 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 i have never been able to figure out a member of a prominent fringe group called the National Investigative committee on aerial phenomena, called nicap. He complained in that letter in 1960s about u. S. 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 u2. Houston and the senior members, like dulles, alan 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, when gary powers was shot down over russia. So hillencouter was only half wrong. He is forgotten as the first director of the cia, but he is now a cult figure in the ufo community. Who knew . If you google him, all the things that pop up our are conspiracies about ufos. Do you remember lemay . Bomb them back to the stone age . Both hillencouter and lemay were honored with a that launched at the end of the reagan administration. Here is jerry ford, and that is the size of the usss hillencouter, 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 should be left to its creator, harry truman. Almost as soon as the oss was abolished, he began pestering syd sours with his demand, wheres my newspaper . Even with the public denunciation of how the cia had strayed under alan dulles, truman 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. Thats the first president ial portrait in the cia headquarters, and thats the inscription. So thats 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 youll find it interesting. A lot of the pictures are from the book. I would leave you with a couple of thoughts. One is Harry Trumans, the only thing new in the world is history you dont know, and that is not a madeup quote. Its from a perl millers plain speaking, so it is a direct quote from truman. And again deja vu all over again, yogi berra. Never let National Interests stand in the way of protecting your rice bowl that is the way washington works, right . And sometimes your worst enemies are your brothers. That is anthony scaramucci, the mooch, this very year. The intrigues that went on here in the United States, painful lessons that the oss learned overseas, that we have to keep learning over and over again. If you have any questions about that, i would be delighted to answer them. I can review some more of these read you some more of these, but i think that is enough for now. Thank you very much. music [applause] so, any questions . Sir . Hold on, weve got a mic. You spoke of admiral hillencouter in the most glowing terms i have ever heard, so positively, which considering all the literature that even the cia puts out today, they dont talk very positively about him. You mentioned there is a lack of documentation on his early involvement. It seems to be a lack of documentation period from the time when the oss was disbanded, up until the cia was founded. Do you have any reason why there is so little documentation . Lets see in terms of why there is not more documentation, first of all, in the early years, both the oss and cia, the people involved in congress, in the government in general felt that this stuff ought to be secret. There is an excellent book by a man by the name of David Barrett called the cia and congress, which goes really in depth into the creation. Hillencouter himself was not involved in the creation. He was off being a naval attache during the creation. You may find this hard to believe, but government records arent always well organized and they are not perfect. I spent many, many frustrating days in the National Archives, going back over the u. S. Navy attache reports to try to get something about hillenkoetters experiences and europe. The frustrating thing about him is if you look at books, history is the way washingtonians do, by turning immediately to the index and looking to your name, i did that with him. I would look at histories and turn to the index and try to find hillenkoetter, and would be lucky to find a phrase, let alone a sentence. The captain official diary when he was he kept an official diary when he was director of the cia, but there is very little in that. He never wrote anything himself except in the 1930s and 1940s, when he was a military attache, and the National Archives has the original paper with his original ink signature on it, but thats 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. Immediately after the war, leahys diaries were published. Truman of course had a lot of stuff written about him. Everybody writes about donovan. Nobody writes much about sydney sours. Sours, however, sat for a couple of interviews, cia interviews, which were originally classified. Sours was a very think i very interesting guy because he had a very sharp tongue. Some of his more unvarnished opinions are very interesting, but it is a very small body of work even on him. If you go to the Truman Library and sours remained a good send friend of trumans until the end of his life, if you want to see the sours papers, they are one linear foot of paper. The only one who really wrote very much was leahy, and clifford of course, but clifford waited until the 1980s to write his memoirs. So you are sort of left sort of scrambling. These people are very opaque and it is very frustrating to see how little you really can find out about them. And that is why i think hes underappreciated. At the time, when he was confirmed as director of the cia, in the fall of 1947, there was the unanimous vote in the senate to reconfirm him. So 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. The soviets detonated an atomic bomb and it took us about a month to figure out they had done it. China fell to mao zedong, and of course, the korean war started. But at that point, the cia was not the level, the sheen, the vast the machine, the vast Global Organization we have today. It was a small group of people who were scrambling to try to put together it is like the expression, you know, when youre up to your butt in alligators, it is hard to remember that the mission was to save the world for democracy. And a lot of the things that the oss had tried and failed at during the Second World War, people like frank widmer tried again in the early 1950s and failed again. Two weeks ago, john was here, talking about his book the ghosts of langley, and it was an unending litany of failures and screw ups, or mountainous incompetence. What i would 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. J edgar hoovers vision was very different from, say, hillenkoetters vision. I wanted to ask you a question related back to johns talk. It was about the notes and it plays into the question about the notes and documentation youve been talking about. John referenced truman notes that were somewhat like, someone wore a big hat. What did that mean . He said the notes were very conversational, unless i misunderstood. He was talking about documentation from the truman years and this Early Foundation period maybe i am making this up, but i thought very lackadaisical, not conveying any substance. You know, it is kind of interesting because truman and sours both are very human people. Truman is notorious for having written a nasty letter to a music critic who was mean to his daughter, said nasty things about her, margaret, and how he was going to punch him in the face and kick him in the whatever. So truman would form very strong opinions very quickly, and he had enemies, one of whom was allen dulles. The reason he did not like dulles is because, he was a senior political adviser to john dewey, the governor of york, who was running against him in 1948. And dulles thought when do we beat truman and it was clear that that was going to beat truman and it was clear that that was going to happen even the Chicago Tribune new it dulles was going to become the director of the cia. That didnt happen. Truman not only had strong opinions, but he was subject to forgetfulness. In 1960 four, for example, he wrote a letter to the Washington Post and said oh, the cia has gone terribly wrong. Theyve strayed off into overthrowing government as all this covert action stuff. Well, that had all happened under dulles and he didnt like dulles. Truman forgot 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. Not an opponent a lot of these things going on. He just sort of changed his public position on it. Souers also had very strong opinions. He did not like dulles either. In fact, when it came to haunt vandenberg who is only director for about a year. Vandenberg did not want the job and souers was trying to leave the job. He said to vandenberg, look i know you dont want to be director of Central Intelligence, you will be chief of staff of the air force when they created an air force. But, they are not going to make you chief of staff of the air force just because your handsome, you have to go and do something first. So these are the kinds of stories that you get from, bless his heart,. A lot of that stuff, the souers material, was originally classified. 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. So. Ok. Sir, question. I. How quickly did the cia establish relationships with other agencies around the world . I know that mi6 had close links with the oss in the Second World War. How quickly where those relationships between cia and other interNational Intelligence agencies established. That take a long time or was it quite quick . Well christopher, whos one of the great military intelligence historians has said that the american is stamp intelligence establishment, the oss, was the greatest covert action that the british ever accomplished. Because, remember i said 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 as he is supposed to do. He would dispatch people. One of the people he dispatched was donovan. The British Intelligence chief in washington sent a note to london and said, hate donovan is coming to london, give him the vip treatment. He met the king, churchill 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 and get 50 destroyers that they needed to protect their convoys. Things of that sort. So the british actually sort of one over donovan and the oss was kind of created on the british model and it used british techniques and the british train the first wave of oss officers. That was the closest relationship, really from the very beginning. Now on the far east, for example in places like thailand which were occupied by the japanese, the tight government had been left in place by the japanese and they were basically running a sort of undercover government. They were helping the oss in thailand. In fact, the type police would drive oss officers around the country in type police cars. They were protecting them. It was much more ambiguous in places like france where you had the royalists fighting against the communists fighting against the democrats. And there was not really a stable government there. China was the same way with the nationalists and the war lords and the communists. Yugoslavia the same. You had royalists versus communists. The other Intelligence Service that really, we worked with very closely from the beginning, was the one we invented. That is the west German Federal Intelligence Service which started off as the organization which had been the nazi Intelligence Organization for the eastern army, the Army Fighting against the soviet union. After the war, he volunteered his organization to the u. S. Army and when the cia was created in 1947, this cia basically took over the organization and it became the federal Intelligence Service. Relationship with them is still very close. From the very beginning, working with Indigenous Peoples or local, neither resistance or governments, it has always been a part of the way the oss worked. Incidentally, im detecting you are from the empire there. That was a cause of great conflict between us and the brits. Particularly in Southeast Asia. The military command there was called the south asian Southeast Asian command. It was commanded by lord louis mountbatten. The oss called the Southeast Asia command, saving europes asia attic colonies. Which is why the oss worked much more closely with ho chi minh and vietnam either than they did 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 perhaps on singapore and hong kong. About what you were discussing when it comes to western powers trying to recolonize these territories after the japanese vacated. Just curious how singapore, hong kong and all these key posts play a role in the greater scheme of things. Well. I actually mention them both in the book. But not in a good way. Because, the japanese, after the surprise attack on pearl harbor, Douglas Mcarthur basically had a day warning to prepare before the japanese moved against the philippines and hong kong and singapore. On accountability he did not do anything. He left his bombers on the ground where the japanese destroyed them and the japanese sort of just swept right through there. Mcarthur would never let the oss into his operational area. That is why they could only operate in thailand, indochina, burma and then china. So the area of single poor and hong kong was sort of off limits to the u. S. They were relatively small colonial outposts and it did not really play a big geopolitical role. I am not a fan of either dulles or mcarthur by the way. Sorry. For anything else . Maam. 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. Later on, it was absorbed into cia. Is this mostly military personnel who were responsible for intelligence and japan after the war . After the oss was abolished in september of 1945, there was still a very large military intelligence and Naval Intelligence. This dates back to the mid eighties. The oss focused on strategic intelligent intelligence with their analysts like sherman cant and william langer. They concentrated on preparing the battle space before the invasion of normandy and things like that. But the Army Counter Intelligence corps was the one that was part of the big army, the big green machine. When the oss left in 1945. Everyone went home. The Army Counter Intelligence corps in japan and the Army Counter Intelligence corps in germany were basically what was left. What they were doing in germany was basically removing nazis. They were going around trying to capture the ex nazis. Especially the war criminals. The same thing happened to a certain extent in japan, although mccarthy was not as aggressive, in sort of the removable removal fascists in japan as they were in germany. It was the Counter Intelligence corps that got gehlen organization, the ex nazi Intelligence Organization in 1945. They ran it until 1947 basically. Until the cia took over and there was considerable questions about whether or not the cia was going to take the german intel group because they had all been nazi army officers. That twoyear period was one where there were a lot of people scrambling around, basically military intelligence people, trying to do what they could. Cloth in the far east and in europe. But the military was also shrinking. They went from 16 million to half 1 million in basically a year. So, they were outnumbered, outgunned, outmanned, that is when a lot of things happened in western europe. How a lot of the ex nazis wound up in latin america. There were various efforts to try and get jewish refugees out of the concentration camps and a lot of Eastern European displaced people who did not want to go back to places like hungary or czechoslovakia or east germany once the communists took over. And a lot of those people manage managed to get into these refugee channels who were nazis. Because everybody just got overwhelmed. There were just not enough people, enough records to track everybody down. So, if