Page 59 - Gobierno ivisible

Date: 4/5/2011 Page: 59 of 237

THE INVISIBLE GOVERNMENT -- A HISTORY

http://www.american-buddha.com/invisiblegov.6.htm

THE INVISIBLE GOVERNMENT was born December 7, 1941, in the smoke and rubble of Pearl Harbor. It was
still a child when the Cold War began after World War II, an adolescent during the 1950s, and it reached its
majority a year after President Kennedy took office.

Whatever else the multitude of inquiries into Pearl Harbor proved, they did show that the United States was badly
in need of a centralized intelligence apparatus. There were plenty of warning signs before Pearl Harbor of the
coming Japanese attack, but they were not pulled together, analyzed and brought forcefully to the attention of the
government.

"The CIA," the Hoover Commission said in 1955, "may well attribute its existence to the surprise attack on Pearl
Harbor and to the postwar investigation into the part Intelligence or lack of Intelligence played in the failure of
our military forces to receive adequate and prompt warning of the impending Japanese attack."

The United States shed its isolationist traditions and emerged from World War II as the leader of the West.
Regardless of Pearl Harbor, its new global responsibilities and objectives would have, in any event, led to the
creation of a global American intelligence network. Added to this, the early emergence of the Soviet Union as an
adversary almost before the V-J celebrations had ended made the growth of an Invisible Government in the
United States virtually inevitable.

Even in the absence of a clash between Western democracy and international Communism, the conduct of United
States foreign policy in the postwar world would have required intelligence information upon which the policy
makers could base their decisions.

This was stated in characteristic style by President Truman in 1952. On November 21, shortly after President
Eisenhower's election, Truman stole away from the White House to deliver a talk behind closed doors at a CIA
training session.

"It was my privilege a few days ago," Truman said, "to brief the general, who is going to take over the office on
the twentieth of January, and he was rather appalled at all that the President needs to know in order to reach
decisions -- even domestic decisions." The modern presidency, Truman declared, carried power beyond parallel in
history, more power than that of Genghis Khan, Caesar, Napoleon or Louis XIV.

No central intelligence organization existed when he became President in 1945, Truman continued. "Whenever it
was necessary for the President to have information, he had to send to two or three departments ... and then he
would have to have somebody do a little digging to get it.

"The affairs of the presidential office, so far as information was concerned, were in such shape that it was
necessary for me, when I took over the office, to read a stack of documents that high [gesturing], and it took me
three months to get caught up."

President Roosevelt had been concerned about the same problem. In 1940 he sent William J. Donovan, then a
New York attorney, on an informal intelligence-gathering mission to England, the Mediterranean and the Balkans.
"Wild Bill" Donovan returned with the information Roosevelt wanted -- and a recommendation that a central
intelligence organization be established.