The first director of Central Intelligence was Rear Admiral Sidney Souers. The second was Lieutenant General Hoyt Vandenberg. The third, and first head of the CIA, was Rear Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, sworn in on 1 May 1947. During the war Hillenkoetter had been Admiral Nimitz's intelligence officer in the Pacific region. He had also served four tours of duty as naval attache in France both before and after the war, and had witnessed at first hand the rise of the dictators and the beginnings of the cold war in Europe. He had made a thorough study of the writings of Marx, Lenin and Stalin and could quote from them at length. By appointing a military officer to run the CIA, Truman was placating military concern about giving intelligence secrets to civilians. The main U.S. experience of intelligence work had been in wartime when military requirements naturally are pre-eminent, so this concern was natural, particularly since most people in 1947 thought that World War III with the Soviet Union was likely to start before long.
Hillenkoetter had a calm, quiet manner which led some to conclude that he was indecisive, but this was to underrate both him and the enormous problems he faced as director of the new agency. His main aim was to establish the primacy of the CIA in the intelligence bureaucracy. Given the chronic feuding which had dogged the start of the agency and its predecessors and which still existed, this was an uphill task. What made Hillenkoetter's position even more difficult was the lack of clear policy guidelines from the President and the National Security Council. This was to remain a persistent problem for the agency.
When the new NSC proposed that the new DCI be made its executive agent, thus giving him day-to-day superiority over the other intelligence agencies, there was such an uproar from the State Department and the military that Hillenkoetter had to back down. This was to have serious implications, for it meant that almost from its inception the DCI never had the dominating position within the intelligence community that had clearly been intended. This, in turn, affected the CIA's position which depended upon the relationship between the President and the DCI. In Truman, Hillenkoetter was dealing with a President who was never clear what to do with the agency and was never prepared to give it the support necessary to establish its priority. That situation changed under Eisenhower and his DCI, Allen Dulles, who had a very close relationship. In the 1960's Kennedy and later Nixon were to give presidential backing to their DCI's as the overall head of the intelligence community but they never developed the practical means to enforce it. In the 1980's, although Reagan gave William Casey cabinet rank it was personal to Casey. It did not mean that the DCI had overall administrative control of intelligence.
During the first year Hillenkoetter had little respite from the CIA's bureaucratic rivals. There were bitter arguments with army intelligence over control of overseas agents. The State Department fiercely resisted the CIA's use of diplomatic cover and communications systems, a row which went on for decades. The FBI, still smarting over the loss of its South American bailiwick, did everything to frustrate the agency when it came to take over FBI offices abroad. Files were burned and agents vanished with the explanation that the CIA was not sufficiently security conscious. J Edgar Hoover's enmity was unrelenting and the relationship between the two organisations remained frosty until his death in 1972.
As the cold war intensified, this bureaucratic bickering became less and less acceptable. In July 1948, a full year after the National Security Act, the New York Times described intelligence as "one of the weakest links in our national security" and criticised the feuding and rivalry among the various intelligence organisations. It was a particularly sensitive time for these criticisms to be aired. Besides the very tense international situation in Europe and the Far East, a presidential election was in the offing and Truman's prospects were considered dim. In August 1948 the House Un-American Activities Committee heard sensational allegations about communist infiltration of the government, notably the State Department. Truman could not afford accusations of slack security and he appointed a three-man commission to conduct a thorough investigation of the working of the agency. It consisted of Allen Dulles, William Jackson (a future deputy DCI) and Mathias Correa, who had been assistant to navy secretary James Forrestal during the war. All three were New York lawyers. They presented their report to the NSC in January 1949. It became known as the Dulles report, and was the blueprint for the CIA's future administration.
THE DULLES REPORT
The Dulles report called for the creation of five divisions to replace the multitude of ad hoc offices and sections in the CIA which aggravated a sense of disorganisation. The proposed divisions were estimates; research and reports, which would provide the raw material for estimates and monitor current intelligence information requiring speedy reporting and analysis; operations, including covert action, espionage and counterintelligence; administration, which would look after day-to-day housekeeping, and coordination, which would link the CIA to other government intelligence agencies.
Coordination, Dulles stressed, was the key. The agency was not just another intelligence service, its job was to coordinate and synthesise intelligence information. Dulles criticised the failure to promote inter-agency cooperation and coordination, a failure he said, which lay at the heart of the CIA's poor performance in centralising and coordinating the work of the other intelligence agencies to date. He saw the agency as being at the heart of policymaking.
Dulles' report coincided with another which had been commissioned by the United States intelligence board - the President's oversight body for all the government intelligence agencies - composed of the good and the great. It recommended that the DCI be recognised by the other agencies as having responsibility for the coordination of all intelligence functions and activities. Lawrence Houston, the CIA's general counsel, described it as a "devastating" blow to those who were trying to keep down the powers and authority of the CIA and the DCI, particularly officers in military intelligence. When Hillenkoetter read out the report, Houston recalled:
"There was a deathly hush around the room, General Chamberlain, the G-2, looked up and said, 'Hilly, what's all this about? You're the boss.' And the colonel down at the end of the table turned absolutely green."0
THE 1949 ACT
In the wake of the Dulles and USIB reports, a Central Intelligence Agency Act was passed in 1949 which became the legal and administrative linchpin for CIA operations. It also set out the authority of Congress to regulate the CIA, although this authority was left deliberately vague when it came to the CIA's clandestine activities. This, and the political consensus of the time that the CIA was necessary and was doing necessary - if unpleasant - work, gave the agency considerable flexibility and freedom. It never had to account for its expenditure of discretionary funds (except to the President) and it could hire as many people as it wanted.
At the height of the cold war, it was tacitly accepted that Congress would not scrutinise the CIA too closely. When the cold war generation of congressman and senators began to move off stage in the late 1960's and early 1970's, and as the Vietnam war and Watergate broke down political habits and fuelled popular suspicions of government and secrecy, the agency's mystique seemed less impressive to their successors. But at the start, and for the first twenty years, the agency led a charmed life when it came to Congressional and public scrutiny.
BEDELL SMITH
In October 1950 Hillenkoetter was appointed commander of the Navy Task Force in Korea. He was succeeded by Genera
