-Caveat Lector- <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/"> </A> -Cui Bono?- Click Here: <A HREF="http://www.prouty.org/">The Col. L. Fletcher Prouty Reference Site</A> ----- C H A P T E R 2 Understanding The Secret Team in the Post-World War II Era Understanding The Secret Team Part I Ratcliffe: We're here with Fletcher Prouty. The date is May 6, 1989 and we now begin an interview regarding his book The Secret Team, The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World, published by Prentice Hall in 1973. In The Context of Its Time: The National Security Act of 1947 Much of post-World War II American political history and agendas seems to hinge on events that occurred immediately after World War II. With the passage of the National Security Act of 1947, can you discuss the original intent of Congress regarding the role of the CIA as specified in this law. Prouty: It's very important while discussing the National Security Act of 1947 to be sure we go back into the spirit and the thinking of the time. We had just ended the greatest world war ever fought in late 1945, with the surrender of the Japanese on September 2, 1945. During 1945 and early in 1946, President Truman abolished the OSS. There was no longer a need for an operational organization of that type now that the war was over. But there were assets of the OSS, primarily things such as agents, agents lists, who the agents worked with, and other activities like that, that you just can't abandon. They have to be taken care of. These were placed in an office which was concealed in the State Department for quite a while. President Truman also, by presidential directive, created the National Intelligence Group and placed it under General Vandenberg, an army officer and later Chief of Staff of the Air Force, who had considerable experience with intelligence matters. Both of these acts by President Truman were more or less standby. He knew there would have to be some change in the law to act on these intelligence matters. At that time also, you will remember, the Soviet Union had been our ally during the war. It was not "the" enemy as it became during the Cold War. So the National Security Act of 1947, the language of the law was written during 1946, was based pretty much on the reality of World War II, and not upon the Cold War realities. For those of us looking back, that is difficult to think about because we have so ingrained in us now the fact that the Soviet Union is the enemy, communism is the enemy, and that the Germans, Japanese, and Italians who were our enemy in World War II are all now friends. So you must go back into that era and begin there when you talk about the origins of the CIA and the passage of this very important law, the National Security Act of 1947. I was teaching a major year-long course, at Yale called The Evolution of Warfare. Of necessity I was very interested in these activities of 1946 and 1947 as part of my course. So I read everything I could get from the congressional hearings, from the newspapers, everything that was going in those years regarding the creation of this new law. What you could see were some rather practical things, and then some indications of things that were going to come. First of all the Army and Navy had to share their aviation interests with a new branch of the service: the Air Force. That was one of the facts that the public recognized about this new law. We created then a single Department of Defense -- we hadn't had one before. Many of the officers, especially senior officers, who had fought World War II did not like this term, Department of Defense. There's a very basic distinction, especially in warfare, but also in athletics, in sports, in any competition between being on the offense and being on the defense. On the offense, you know what you're doing. On the offense, you're planning something. If you're on the offense with a Department of War, as we used to have, it doesn't mean you're planning to fight, but it means you're ready to fight. And you let everybody know that. If you're on the Department of Defense, you're waiting for somebody else to make a move, and then you react. The philosophy of the entire military structure of this country changed with this business of the Department of Defense. And coming as it did, right when we were the most powerful nation in the world, with an enormous army, navy, and air force, and the nuclear weapon which nobody else had in that period -- to put all of that on the defense was an enormous oversight. Those of us who were close to all that felt it that way. There was no way to say that the World War II armies of the United States were to go on the defense. That really destroyed the structure of the Army and a lot of people on active service felt that at that time. I say that because this business of the communists/anti-communists bit, and the idea of a Department of War or Department of Navy as against a Department of Defense -- another major shift -- was then joined by this new idea of a Central Intelligence Agency. One of the problems during World War II was not that we did not have enough intelligence. Rather it was that it wasn't coordinated. The intelligence that General MacArthur and Admiral Nimitz had in the Pacific was not always coordinated with the intelligence that General Eisenhower and General Bradley and their allies had in the European theater. There were a lot of times when Washington had different intelligence from different sources and didn't have the means to coordinate it properly for the overall benefit of our military forces who were fighting all over the world. We had new ways of gathering intelligence. We had new electronic means. Radar was used to gather intelligence. We had aerial photography. We had all kinds of devices that were not in the ordinary James Bond intelligence of pre-war days. Congress understood from a lot of testimony from experienced military leaders that one of the greatest shortages and one of the greatest mistakes in the war was that we did not have coordinated intelligence. So when Congress wrote the language of this legislation for the CIA -- and I printed this literally in the book so that anyone who wants to read it will see exactly what the law says[1] -- it said that the CIA is created to coordinate the intelligence of the rest of the government. That was why it was created. With that as a primary duty of CIA, then the other little tasks and things they were supposed to do come forward and it is a clearer explanation -- in fact, it is the only explanation when it is put that way. There was not a single word, for example, in the law that said that the CIA should collect intelligence. There wasn't a single word in the law that said the CIA should get involved in covert operations, and this is the same law that exists today by the way. We haven't changed it. But gradually things changed, whether they were written into the law or not. But we're talking about the law of 1947, how it was written and what it meant. The people that first became members of this new CIA knew that their job was the coordination of intelligence. They had no doubt about that. The enormous move toward Cold War, anti-communism and all that -- all the buzz words that we've lived on for the last 30 or 40 years -- did not exist then, at least not strongly. It was coming over the horizon. While the National Security Act of 1947 was being written, primarily by men like the great lawyer Clark Clifford, a close friend of President Truman's, and an enormously influential man in this period -- while that was being done, Churchill had made his speech in Missouri about the Iron Curtain and the Cold War and those things. The country was beginning to move in that direction. That era, the strange McCarthy era had not come, but it was inevitable, it was on the way. What to do with nuclear weapons was underway at the time. For instance, our military had never had a weapon as dynamic as the atom bomb. What is important about an atom bomb, as it is with a barrel of oil, is that it has no real value until it's been delivered. The organization most able to deliver the atom bomb was the Air Force. And immediately war planners saw that to use atom bombs, we would have to have an enormous fleet of very large aircraft. One of the first things they did was they began to build a bigger and better B-29, which was the largest plane we had during the war, and finally even the B-36 and then the B-52 to carry the atom bomb. They needed an enormous plane to do that. It was a monster of a device in those days. These things began to shape strategy. Then as they began to think about this, if atomic bombs were going to be used as the primary weapon, how were you going to put a navy and an army into the battleground that atom bombs had devastated or could devastate, either way, because the enemy then did not possess the atom bomb and its delivery capability. This would be interesting. If you went to a military school in the forties, you could talk about an enemy, but we were a Department of Defense; we weren't supposed to be talking about a particular enemy and gradually over time "enemy" became synonymous with Russia. If we had opposing forces in a combat situation, we'd have the blue forces and the red forces. We always knew we were the blue ones and so gradually this thinking about the Soviet Enemy came about. While we were predominant with the nuclear weapon, it almost was ridiculous to think of any other country as possessing an equal and opposite force to ours. That furthermore underscored the enormous mistake made in calling this military the Department of Defense, because if ever we were strong on the offense, it was immediately after World War II. We weren't a defensive nation at that time, but we were made a defensive nation by the Department of Defense. I haven't heard many people discuss that in so many words; I did in Yale when I was teaching. I used to talk about that a lot because I had hoped then that that was not really what was going to be the end of all this planning. As the CIA started late in '47, it was primarily a roll-over of World War II, militarily trained people. The head of it was an admiral, Admiral Hillenkotter. I think out of the number of personnel that they had, over 5,000 were military people -- they weren't reservists -- they were active duty people. Gradually, people from the World War II OSS and new recruitment began to fill up the agency, but that took years. That got us into the Allen Dulles era and the Eisenhower administration. During the late forties, the number of civilians that rolled into the agency gradually was a relatively small number. I say "relatively small" with respect to today. Among them though were some very strong OSS residual members who were well-trained in covert work that involves clandestine operations. And despite the fact that covert operations were totally overlooked in the law, even so much as to suppress that kind of activity by not putting it in the law and not creating a budget basis for that kind of expenditure of funds, the people with that specific type of training came into the CIA. Certainly the military wasn't going to get into that business, nor was the State Department, so it was a question of where do you keep this new capability in a peacetime infrastructure. In this way the residual OSS capability fell into the lap of the CIA. But even then, that took years. It didn't happen until General Walter Bedell Smith came home from Russia (where he had been Ambassador to Russia) and became the Director of Central Intelligence in October, 1950. At that time he brought Allen Dulles into the CIA as his Deputy Director of Plans, which means that he was put in charge of covert operations. Dulles had been with the OSS. Bedell Smith announced to the President that if he was going to be in charge as the Director of Central Intelligence, he was going to have OPC (Office of Policy Coordination) under him and not scattered around with responsibilities in the State Department and the Defense Department. A lot has been said about OPC in the sense of how could such an organization have been created without law, and how was this ingenious little device created of appointing its senior officer so that he would be nominated by one secretary, either State or Defense, and seconded by the other. He would be approved as though he didn't have a single commander. Everybody knew that was temporary and it had no real significance, because what OPC was doing was to preserve certain assets, certain highly classified assets of World War II. It was not initiating operations. Now I don't mean to disregard some of the very practical things that were being done. For instance, we had clandestine operations underway in Greece as a result of the Greek civil war right after World War II and these spilled over into Bulgaria and nearby countries across the Greek border. We had other operations going on in China, but relatively speaking they were small and they were again residuals of World War II. They were not planned operations against some communist nation or that kind of thing. But they existed and this was there. The Chief of OPC at the time was Frank Wisner who had been a very dominant OSS leader in Eastern Europe during World War II. Later he directed the massive campaign against Indonesia in 1958. So Wisner was very active in the covert activities. But when General Smith became the DCI, he insisted upon bringing that group into the agency. Now strictly speaking, that was not supported by law. It was simply an expedient. The Creation of the National Security Council One of the most important facets of this National Security Act of 1947 was the creation of the National Security Council. We had not had an organization like that in peace time in other years; not under Roosevelt, not before and I don't even recall anything like that in the World War I period. What was decided was that there are times, when for purposes of national security, there must be top-level decisions made and that the President needed assistance in making those decisions. So the National Security Council, by law, consists of the President, the Vice-President, the Secretary of State, and the Secretary of Defense -- and no others. They can invite others and others do attend the meetings. But there are no other statutory members. If we relate that to today's affairs in all these questions about the Iran and Contra hearings and all those related problems, there could not have been a decision about covert operations involving the Contras, or Iran, or an exchange of hostages, or any of that without a decision from the National Security Council -- that's by law. There's no other way to do it. Other than an illegal way, and I don't think that's ever even been assumed. There had to be decisions from the National Security Council. >From my own experience and background, I simply cannot believe that the members of the National Security Council during this Iran-Contra period have removed themselves from the whole situation as though they had nothing to do with it. That's preposterous -- by law they had to participate. If they didn't do it, they were derelict in their duty and they should be tried for that. That's what the National Security Council was created to do. In the forties, the National Security Council met and created a directive which I believe was called "10-slant-2" [10/2]. 10/2 recognized that the U.S. government might from time to time be involved, or involve itself, in covert action. Generally this would mean relatively small activities. Not major warfare like the Korean War or the Vietnam War. Not even large operations such as the invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. These were small operations and were truly clandestine, covert actions. And there were many of them, many of them highly classified and still secret, because they were small. Later on, when I got into this business in the fifties, we had things like that going all the time, but they were small. The decision to involve the United States in covert action had to be made by this National Security Council -- no one else; no one else had the authority. Even the DCI, the head of the intelligence agency, was not part of the National Security Council. Therefore, he was not involved in the decision. He would be told about the decision. During the forties and early fifties, things worked that way. The Dulles-Jackson-Correa Report In 1948, a rather important event happened: President Truman wanted to have a highly qualified group study how the CIA was moving along; how it was progressing, and whether or not it was becoming effective. So he established a committee, headed by Allen Dulles, a New York lawyer with the most prominent, largest law firm in New York City, Sullivan and Cromwell; a man named Mathias Correa, who I believe was also a lawyer, although I don't recall his career that closely; and then a man named William H. Jackson. Jackson had a lot of OSS experience. I think Correa did, and I certainly know that Dulles did. This committee of three men -- primarily Allen Dulles -- made an extensive study of the activities of the CIA, and in their report to the President, they recommended a move more into the clandestine operations area, and more into the traditional deep intelligence area than the law had visualized. There was a very interesting aspect about this committee. It was appointed by President Truman in his final year as president, as the successor to Roosevelt. Roosevelt died in '45 and Truman was the Vice-President, so he hadn't won an election yet. He was going to run for re election in late '48 for a new term beginning in '49. His opponent was Thomas E. Dewey. Interestingly, Thomas Dewey's speech writer during the 1948 campaign against Truman was Allen Dulles. So you see Dulles was riding two horses across this stream. He was technically Truman's advisor with respect to intelligence matters -- he and Jackson and Correa while at the same time he was writing speeches for Thomas E. Dewey strongly opposing the re-election of Truman. I don't know whether Truman knew he was writing speeches for Dewey or whether Dewey knew he was working for Truman. I have no way to solve that little problem. But it's important to understand the effect of that, and it helps you understand the mind of this man Dulles. Dulles would see nothing wrong in that sort of thing. He would see nothing wrong in working for Truman and trying to undercut him by helping Dewey or vice versa. This had an influence on the report. Because (of course) Dulles was absolutely convinced, as were Jackson and Correa, along with most of the country, that Dewey was going to be elected president. So as he wrote this report, he saw that report as, you might say, his own Mein Kampf. It was his own idea of what CIA was going to become because he was positive that Dewey would make him the Director of Central Intelligence when Dewey became president. That designed and shaped the report. As we know, Truman turned around and beat Dewey in a great surprise. And without much ado, the Dulles-Jackson-Correa report was slid under the White House door on the first of January, 1949, and we never heard much of it after that. Many of the elements within the report did appear years later, because when Eisenhower became President, John Foster Dulles became Secretary of State and General Walter Bedell Smith became his Deputy Secretary of State. In doing so, he stepped down from the CIA, and Allen Dulles became the Director of Central Intelligence. At that time Dulles pulled out his own Dulles-Jackson-Correa report and began to put it in effect. He remained the DCI for the next 9 years. The single primary character of the CIA is Mr. Dulles. There's no question about it, it was his agency. Nobody else has left any mark like his. But you need to see that background to understand what the passage of the National Security Act really meant in 1947. What it says in law is what creates many of these controversies about intelligence today. Because there still is no law that says that the CIA is an intelligence organization -- it says that it is a coordinating agency. There is no law that says it is a covert operations agency. So that's a fairly good summary as I've seen it through my own lifetime of the law itself, the effect of the law, and particularly how the CIA was an outgrowth of the law. It's important to understand what the CIA was trying to do, what the National Security Council was trying to do, and what the Congress was trying to do. This eventually led to the remarkable statement by President Truman, I believe in December 1963 when he wrote, as a columnist for a newspaper, that the greatest mistake he made in his entire career as President was to sign the National Security Act of 1947, and that portion of law which created the Central Intelligence Agency.[2 ] Ratcliffe: Even though at the time it could be argued that he could not have seen the effect of his signing into law something which over time, would change by degree into something else. Prouty: It's true that he never did sign the law that would come to encompass all these things. The law he signed was limited. If they had stayed within its parameters the agency would have been much different. But he recognized that by setting this up, he initiated it. He got the ball rolling, right or wrong. Ratcliffe: I suppose this is already explained by what you've just said, but could you comment briefly on what you wrote on page 138 of The Secret Team: Congress had been so certain that the Agency would not become operational and policy-making that it was content to place it under the control of a committee. Congress knew that the Agency would never be permitted to become involved in clandestine operations and therefore that the NSC would never have to direct it in an operational sense.[3] At that time, how do you feel Congress felt so unequivocal about this? Prouty: That's not a hard statement to understand in the time of the 1940's. It is today in the eighties or in the seventies or in the sixties. In the late 1940's, Congress and its Congressmen, many of whom were veterans of World War II, knew very well that the United States government was not going to have covert operations, a covert establishment running around the world. They also knew they had not even created a new major intelligence organization. Congress, in other words, believed the words of the law that it had just written and passed. Furthermore, we weren't in the buzz-word period, or the Pavlovian period, of anti-communism at that time. It was coming, but it didn't exist then. And we were sitting on top of the atom bomb capability, which meant that we were the absolute power in the world. Things were so different in the late forties that you can't take those statements without a lot of care and understanding, and transpose them to either the sixties, seventies or eighties; it's just ridiculous. You have to read them in terms of the forties. And that's a pretty true statement of the forties. But of course you'd change it if you were writing it today, and I'm sure Congress' view of the CIA today is nothing like that. But that is an important commentary on what has changed. What has really changed is in people's minds, but not actually in the language of the law. The language of the law -- that same law exists today -- but it is people's minds that have changed. It's our concept of the world that has changed. That's a very important statement. Opening the Door to CIA Clandestine Operations: Shifting NSC Oversight from Directing to Approving Plans Ratcliffe: You describe, in a multitude of examples, Allen Dulles' ability to subvert the watchdog role of the NSC (to prevent the CIA from carrying out clandestine operations) by such moves as engineering the creation of the Special Group 5412/2 that effectively neutralized the oversight functions carried out under the authority of the Operations Coordinating Board. This was one of the major steps forward taken by Allen Dulles as a result of his report. It looked like a small thing, and it was applied bit by bit; but once the NSC found itself in the position of doing no more than "authorizing" activities of the CIA rather than "directing" them, the roles began to turn 180 degrees, and the ST became the active party. When the NSC was established, it was realized that if such an eminent body of men made decisions and then directed that they be carried out, they would not necessarily be in a position to see that someone actually did carry them out. Therefore, provision was made for an Operations Coordinating Board, (OCB), which would see that the decisions of the President and his Council were carried out. This was effective only as long as the NSC was directing activity. The OCB would require that the NSC staff keep a record of decisions in duplicate, and the Board would ride herd on these decisions and see that they were done. It had trouble doing this when CIA was just getting its proposals "authorized". When the NSC was divided into a small and elite Special Group for the purpose of working with the CIA on matters that were from time to time clandestine, the task of the OCB became more difficult because of the cloak of security. Still, the OCB tried to keep up with such decisions, if by no other means than to require "blind" progress reports. But when the NSC, through the Special Group, simply sat and listened to outside proposals and then permitted or authorized actions that were highly classified and highly limited by need to know, the role of the OCB became impossible to perform. This was exactly what Allen Dulles wanted. His report had stated that he should be able to initiate operations and to take his proposals directly to the President, and that the President or an authorized representative would then approve what the DCI brought to him. He had not been given that authority by the law, and he could not have done it under Truman because Truman used the NSC and OCB differently from what Dulles visualized. But year by year during the Eisenhower Administration he worked to erode the NSC-OCB pattern until he was able to work through the Special Group 5412/2 almost without interference. Part of his success was due to his effective control of communications, which made it appear all the time that projects had been thoroughly staffed in all parts of the Government concerned and that the approval of the NSC (Special Group) was merely a formality. By the time Kennedy became President, he was led to believe that the NSC was unimportant, one of those Eisenhower idiosyncrasies, and that he could do without it. If he could do without the NSC, he certainly could do without the OCB. (Since it could be shown that the OCB was not able to perform its job properly because it was unable to find out what the Special Group had approved, there was no reason for OCB either.) Without either of these bodies in session, the DCI was able to move in as he desired, with very little effective control from any Council member. This was a major change brought about by a kind of evolution and erosion. It was certainly a downgrading process; but the trouble was that all too few people had any realization of what had taken place, and those who had were either with the CIA or the ST, and they were not about to tell anyone.[4] Now you just mentioned how the OCB was originally set up to have some supposed authority given to it by the Secretaries of Defense and State, and how Walter Bedell Smith, in late 1950, succeeded in making that position subbordinate to himself[5] as DCI. Can you explain how, particularly Dulles, who was so central to this, was able to redefine this watchdog role of the NSC over clandestine operations? Prouty: First of all, let me make a technical correction to your question. The OCB was the Operations Coordinating Board, which was a part of NSC by law. OCB was composed of a group of senior individuals who would follow the decisions made by the National Security Council and make sure the bureaucracy carried them out. That was the function of the OCB, a different organization. The Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) was no more than a cover name for the residual OSS organization that was under Frank Wisner and an extremely distinct organization from OCB. It came from World War II; it was a necessary function. It was like sweeping up things left on the floor after the war. We had to keep alive the records from the OSS, and it was agreed to put this organization only notionally[6] within the State Department, but to control its chief by making the new Secretary of Defense and his counterpart the Secretary of State responsible for the leader of the organization. Giving him some control that way. The budgetary function was minimal. It was just a matter of paying people -- that's about all -- and taking care of the records. A lot of people have misinterpreted the OPC, although when it gradually worked its way into the CIA under Bedell Smith, it did become dominant again. It became rather strong and it became the main clandestine operation sector of the agency later known as the Deputy Director of Plans. (So I'd like to correct the two letters which are somewhat similar but the jobs are entirely different.) Now we'll go back to Mr. Dulles and how he was able to circumvent the law. The best way is to say again that the report that he had written with Correa and with Jackson outlined his vision of how the CIA ought to be. He believed that. He thought that it ought to have a full intelligence power, including secret intelligence, and that it ought to have clandestine capability to carry out any operation directed by the National Security Council. He thought that could be started in '49. By the time he got to be the DCI in 1953, things hadn't worked that way. The CIA had been kept rather quiet. It was coordinating intelligence, and it was doing very little in the covert activities field. He felt that should change, but he didn't have any lawful way to do it. So what he did was he would take a plan that they had made up because of some input from a foreign country or from one of his station chiefs around the world that was in response to some action. Then he would go to the National Security Council. They didn't direct him to go to X country and do something; they were approving something that he felt he ought to do in response to an action that some of his operators, some of his agents, had seen in a foreign country. That device enabled him to create activities that most of the time were reacti ons or responses. So the NSC found itself not directing covert operations, but approving reactive covert operations. There's quite a bit of difference. When you're doing that with an organization like the CIA, under an ambitious leader like Allen Dulles, it's pretty hard to tell the difference because sometimes you can create a response by kicking somebody under the table and they pound you in the nose and then you point to your partner and say, `Look at that guy -- he just hit me!' But your partner didn't know that you kicked the other person from under the table. The best example of that tactic -- the absolute best example I know -- was the Gulf of Tonkin incident. The North Vietnamese that came out in the vicinity of the destroyers -- which the Navy now admits were never even hit by anything fired at them, probably not even fired at -- those very high-speed North Vietnamese Komar ships came out there was because they had been hit clandestinely. So the first act was by our own forces aided with South Vietnamese. Then when the North Vietnamese came out in response, they had been provoked. They did not initiate the attack. But in the discussion of that, both by President Johnson and in the Congress when they were discussing the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, they were only told that the attack had been made by the North Vietnamese upon our Navy without provocation. So you can control covert activities by using that same device -- the kick under the table -- and then you can say, `Hey now, look what happened in the Congo,' or `Look what happened in Indonesia,' or `Look what happened in Tibet -- we've got to do something about it.' This was the Dulles technique. He tried to have the agency ready to be responsive anywhere in the world. And of course he had to do it that way because there were no plans. They didn't sit here and say, `Well, here's what we see happening in such-and-such a country, and here's what we think ought to be done, and here's how the United States should get in there with a covert operation to perform this or that.' There was none of that. There was no planning shop. In fact, I've always thought -- and I worked very closely with them -- that one of the strangest devices they used was to call their covert operations the Deputy Director Plans, because there were no plans. I worked with them intimately for nine years. I never saw a single plan come out of the Deputy Director Plans. They would simply smile and say, `Well, that's just our euphemism for covert operations.' They could have used some other word than "plan". But this is how Dulles worked. He was very effective. He had a lot of experience with OSS and the other side of it is that his brother was the Secretary of State and the dominant vote in the National Security Council. I don't think this would have been the same if he had been an individual with some neutral or objective Secretary of State. It made quite a bit of difference under the Eisenhower era to have the two Dulles' working together in the development of covert operations. Ratcliffe: So we see this key revising of the word, as specified in the law, that the NSC would direct the CIA, and the agency in effect was turning this into the NSC approving measures brought to it by the CIA. Prouty: Precisely. I remember one example -- only one out of nine years' work with clandestine operations -- when I knew that the NSC had directed the CIA to involve itself in something and that was Tibet. When the Chinese Communists started overrunning Tibet, it was the NSC that put the CIA into that operation. And I must confess that in all those years, '55 to '64 -- pretty active years -- I never saw another one come by direction. They were all responsive and reactive operations to things where Mr. Dulles, or people that followed him, would go in to brief the NSC from their own papers and say, `Here's what's been happening in country A; we propose an operation to oppose that.' That's why we got into what's called "counterinsurgency." We countered the insurgency. Almost everything we were doing was a reactive response, but that was the Dulles method. That was his characteristic. The Function of the Director of Central Intelligence: Coordinating Intelligence of the Government Intelligence Community Ratcliffe: I'd like to quote a part here regarding the intelligence community as a whole. You wrote that Over the years it has become customary to speak of the various intelligence organizations within the Government as members of "the community". This word is quite proper, because there is little cohesion and homogeneity within this vast infrastructure which has cost so much and which performs so many varied and separate functions. The members of the community are the CIA; the Army, Navy, and Air Force as separate divisions; the Defense Intelligence Agency; the FBI; the Atomic Energy Commission; the State Department; and the National Security Agency. All are by law brought together by the Director of Central Intelligence, or DCI. His title is not "the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency" -- although he does head that Agency for the purpose of "advising the NSC in matters concerning such intelligence activities of the Government departments and agencies as relate to National Security." (National Security Act of 1947) This is the DCI's first duty as prescribed by law. He is to advise the NSC of the activities of the other departments and agencies.[7] Please discuss the importance of the fact that all of the above listed members of the intelligence community "are by law brought together by the Director of Central Intelligence," and the implications of such an all-encompassing position. Prouty: The law established -- created, it didn't establish -- establish means something else in government -- the law created the CIA to coordinate intelligence of the other branches of the government, as I listed them above. The law specifically deals with the function of the Director of Central Intelligence; he is different from his organization. He is the Director of Intelligence over the other intelligence organizations within the scope of the law that established them. He's not their boss in the sense that the Navy intelligence operates for the CNO -- or the Chief of Navy -- but as far as intelligence matters are concerned and as far as coordinating intelligence matters, he is the director for the coordinating purposes. It's quite a clear distinction but you can see it does get waffled around. Certain intelligence assets of various departments -- we'll say the Navy -- are very independent. Navy's intelligence organization goes way back to Revolutionary War days. They are an excellent professional organization; they are world-wide and they are very powerful and very able. They were not subverting themselves to any new boss. They knew their job and they made that clear when the law was being written. In fact they protested the law more than anybody else. The Army has its own black intelligence; very deep intelligence. In many ways, deeper than the CIA has ever learned how to do. They were not going to fold that into the CIA either. The Air Force was brand new -- had no intelligence other than experience as part of the Army. However, the Air Force had the aircraft: the U-2, the SR-71, the bombers, and the reconnaissance planes. They had the methods of intelligence they used that the DCI needed. So the Air Force, although it was new, in some ways was probably more important than the other branches. What I'm saying is that this intelligence community which the law created to bring together was not homogenous. But they were essential to each other. No more than say the National Security Agency. Just think what any of these would be without the National Security Agency. They all depend upon the National Security Agency for the interception of electronic transmissions and all the other communications of intelligence, friend and foe and all the rest. The National Security Agency is a function of the Department of Defense. In fact, the office where I used to be assigned was responsible for directing the National Security Agency in order that we could coordinate it with State and CIA and the others ourselves to make sure it was effective. It was a very nice way to do this thing, and it was important in those days. So there is an intelligence community of great importance and great significance to each one of its components, but the sole chief of that community by law is the Director of Central Intelligence in the role that he's coordinating. No more than that. He doesn't direct these people in a clandestine exercise; not at all. Then he is the head of the CIA and then he carries out things that are assigned to the CIA. So it's quite clear how that works, although I'm afraid historically there are many, many abuses and, a lot of times, oversights in that primarily because many of these agencies and departments have very parochial interests of their own and it's pretty hard for anybody to coordinate them. Ratcliffe: In the law for Powers and Duties under the National Security Act, Section 3, it says "to correlate and evaluate intelligence relating to the national security". What about going through very briefly and examining or discussing the stated or explicit role of each of these members as well as any important unstated roles that they carry out today. Let's start out with the CIA. At least in terms of the way it should work which may vary a lot from the way it does. Prouty: That's an excellent way to put the question, because it's impossible to answer that. As we've discussed, the law was written in '46 and '47 in an era that we cannot duplicate at all. So I would just say right off that it would be futile to try to enforce the law literally on either the Defense Department or the CIA or the State Department. However you have to abide by the law. At that point you begin to let the, you might say, law of customs step in. What have we been doing? What have we accepted? Today, you could never press back into the bottle what was decided in '46 and '47 and say that is what the CIA is going to do. There is just no way to do that. I don't know how to prescribe for the CIA what it ought to be doing today by thinking about the law. But, there is one part of the law that can take care of this, and this was one of the really beautiful things about that law. No matter what the CIA wants to do or tries to do or is funded to do, it has to have the money to operate. The critically important statement is "funded to do" -- because Congress permits the CIA to do an awful lot by pouring money into the CIA. If you have the money, you're going to spend it, that is Parkinson's Law. If you build an office and you put a man in the office, he's going to go do some work whether you tell him to or not. So you fund the CIA, and you're going to get things done. 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