Page 60 - Gobierno ivisible

Date: 4/5/2011 Page: 60 of 237

Out of this emerged the Office of Coordinator of Information, with General Donovan as its head. On June 13,
1942, this was split into the Office of Strategic Services, under Donovan, and the Office of War Information. The
function of the OSS was to gather intelligence, but it first became famous by dropping parachutists behind enemy
lines in France, Norway, Italy, Burma and Thailand, setting a pattern of combining special operations with
information-gathering that is still followed by the CIA.

By 1944 Donovan had prepared for Roosevelt a plan to establish a central intelligence agency. It was referred to
the Joint Chiefs, and pigeonholed. But after Truman became President (and dug his way out from under the stack
of papers he later complained about) he sent for Admiral William D. Leahy and asked him to look into the whole
problem.

In the meantime Truman issued an order, on September 20, 1945, disbanding the OSS. Some of the OSS agents
went into Army Intelligence. Others were transferred to the State Department. There they formed the nucleus of
what became the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, an important branch of the Invisible Government.

Four months after the OSS closed up shop, Truman, on January 22, 1946, issued an executive order setting up a
National Intelligence Authority and, under it, a Central Intelligence Group, which became the forerunner of the
CIA. The Authority's members were Secretary of State James F. Byrnes, Secretary of War Robert P. Patterson,
Secretary of the Navy James V. Forrestal and Admiral Leahy. The Central Intelligence Group was the Authority's
operating arm. To head it, Truman selected Rear Admiral Sidney W. Souers, the deputy chief of Navy
Intelligence. Souers had been a businessman in St. Louis before the war; the nation's first Director of Central
Intelligence once headed the Piggly Wiggly Stores in Memphis.

Souers was anxious to get back to his business interests, and five months later, in June, Truman named Air Force
General Hoyt S. Vandenberg to the post. He served until May 1, 1947, when Truman appointed Rear Admiral
Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter. An Annapolis graduate who spoke three languages, Hillenkoetter had several years'
experience in Navy Intelligence. He had been wounded while aboard the battleship West Virginia at Pearl Harbor.
Later he set up an intelligence network for Admiral Chester W. Nimitz in the Pacific.

When the CIA was created by the National Security Act of 1947, Hillenkoetter became its first director. The CIA
came into being officially on September 18, 1947. The Act is the same as that which established a Department of
Defense and unified the armed services. It also created the National Security Council * and, under it, the CIA.

The duties of the CIA were set forth in five short paragraphs:

"(1) to advise the National Security Council in matters concerning such intelligence activities of the government
departments and agencies as relate to national security;

"(2) to make recommendations to the National Security Council for the coordination of such intelligence activities
...;

"(3) to correlate and evaluate intelligence relating to the national security, and provide for the appropriate
dissemination of such intelligence within the government ... Provided that the Agency shall have no police,
subpena, law-enforcement powers, or internal-security functions ...;

"(4) to perform, for the benefit of the existing intelligence agencies, such additional services of common concern
as the National Security Council determines can be more efficiently accomplished centrally;

"(5) to perform such other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security as the
National Security Council may from time to time direct."