It was against this background of deepening international tension that the Central Intelligence Agency was conjured into being. The first step toward the establishment of a peacetime foreign secret service had been taken in January 1946 when, in a mock ceremony in the Oval Office perhaps intended to mask his profound anxiety about the dangers of creating an American gestapo, Harry Truman appointed his trusted friend Rear Admiral Sidney W. Souers the first head of the interim Central Intelligence Group (CIG), conferring on him a black cloak and wooden dagger and pronouncing him “director of centralized snooping.”38 The CIG was to function as a White House “news desk,” furnishing the president with digests of information gathered by the intelligence divisions in the State Department and armed services.39 With the arrival in February of the Long Telegram, however, and the alarming deterioration in American-Soviet relations that followed, support grew for a more powerful centralized body with its own research and analysis capability. Following a series of congressional debates—the U.S. secret service was the first in history to originate in parliamentary legislation—a national security bill was en-acted on July 26, 1947, creating both a Central Intelligence Agency and a National Security Council (NSC) to advise the president. Mention of the Soviet Union was conspicuously absent from the National Security Act and the debates leading up to it. Nonetheless, an important clause of the Act, which authorized the CIA to perform unspecified “other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security,” would later be invoked as legal justification for anti-Soviet covert operations.40
That was still in the future, however. In the first years of its existence, the CIA, reflecting the temperament of its director, the amiable but inef-fectual Admiral Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, steered clear of political war-
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fare, preferring to stick with the more gentlemanly business of intelligence gathering. Not surprisingly, this squeamishness exasperated the “Park Avenue cowboys,” the rambunctious corporate lawyers who had run the OSS
and, since that organization’s demise, had been lobbying for a revival of special operations to counter the new totalitarian threat. Joining the Park Avenue cowboys in their calls for stronger anti-Soviet measures were the
“Dumbarton Avenue skeptics,” a cadre of anticommunist Sovietologists who, during the war years, had gathered in the Georgetown home of future ambassador to France Charles “Chip” Bohlen to express their dissent from the foreign policy of the Roosevelt administration.41 At the head of this coalition of “determined interventionists” was George Kennan, an ardent advocate of covert operations and psychological warfare, who in May 1947 was effectively handed control of U.S. Cold War strategy when he was chosen by George Marshall to head the powerful new State Department body, the Policy Planning Staff (PPS).42 Thanks to his authorship of the Long Telegram and the “X” article, Kennan has long been recognized as the chief architect of the American foreign policy of “containment.” It is only recently, with the release of newly declassified government documents, that historians have come to appreciate the extent to which his definition of containment anticipated the more aggressive strategy of “liberation” more commonly associated with the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower and his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles.43
The first significant victory for the determined interventionists came in December 1947, when the National Security Council gave the CIA its covert operation charter in the shape of top-secret directive NSC 4-A, instructing Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) Hillenkoetter to undertake “covert psychological operations” against the Soviet Union.44 The Agency used its new powers in the spring of 1948 to prevent communist victory in elections taking place in Italy, distributing anticommunist literature, providing pro-western newspapers with scarce newsprint, and conducting a disinformation (or “black”) propaganda campaign under the leadership of future counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton.45 The communists were defeated at the polls, whether as a result of the U.S. intervention or the conservatism of Italian voters is not entirely clear. But the interventionists were not satisfied. Moscow was tightening its stranglehold over eastern Europe—witness the brutal coup that had taken place in Czechoslovakia in February—and, under Hillenkoetter, the CIA’s
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