Page 62 - Gobierno ivisible

Date: 4/5/2011 Page: 62 of 237

Although the machinery was not established until 1948, one small hint of what was to come was tucked away in a
memorandum which Allen Dulles submitted to Congress back in 1947. It said the CIA should "have exclusive
jurisdiction to carry out secret intelligence operations." [2]

Like the Commerce Clause of the Constitution, the "other functions" proviso of the National Security Act has
been stretched to encompass activities by the CIA that are not even hinted at in the law. It is not generally realized
that the CIA conducts secret political warfare under interpretations of that law. Nor is it widely understood that
under the law and subsequent presidential fiat, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency wears two hats.
Not only is he the head of the CIA, but more important, as Director of Central Intelligence he is in charge of the
entire intelligence community, of which the CIA is only one, albeit the most powerful, branch.

In 1949 the Central Intelligence Agency Act was passed, exempting the CIA from all Federal laws that required
the disclosure of the "functions, names, official titles, salaries, or numbers of personnel employed by the Agency."
And it gave the Director of Central Intelligence the staggering and unprecedented power to spend money "without
regard to the provisions of law and regulations relating to the expenditure of government funds." It granted him
the unique right to spend the hundreds of millions of dollars in his secret annual budget simply by signing his
name. The law allowed "such expenditures to be accounted for solely on the certificate of the director." That and
that alone, the law said, "shall be deemed a sufficient voucher." *

Senator Millard E. Tydings, the Maryland Democrat who was chief sponsor of the 1949 Act, explained why he
felt it was necessary: "Men in this agency frequently lose their lives. Several have already done so, and under not
very pretty circumstances. If we forced the agency to have a record of vouchers, foreign agents could pick up
information as to the identity of our agents and what they were doing." [3]

By 1950 the broader outlines of the Invisible Government had begun to take shape, with the CIA at its center. In
that year the Intelligence Advisory Committee was created as a board of directors of the covert government. Later
its name was changed to the present United States Intelligence Board. Although the names of the men (and of
some of the agencies) represented on the board have changed, the main components of the secret government
have remained fairly constant. Its overall size, of course, has increased vastly.

Code-breaking and cryptology were consolidated in 1952 in the new National Security Agency, established by
presidential directive as part of the Defense Department. And, finally, the military intelligence agencies were
brought together under the newly created Defense Intelligence Agency in 1961. But these were essentially
administrative reorganizations. What has really changed since 1947 is not the general amorphous shape of the
Invisible Government, but its size, technology, scope, power and importance- all of which have increased in
geometric progression with a minimum of Congressional or public examination or understanding.

During the first three years of the CIA's life Admiral Hillenkoetter remained its director. He was replaced at a
critical moment in the Korean War by General Walter Bedell Smith, Eisenhower's Chief of Staff during World
War II, a former Ambassador to Moscow and the first four-star general in the U.S. Army who was never
graduated from West Point or any other military school.

The agency became more aggressive under "Beedle" Smith, who played an important role in the Korean conflict
and its intelligence post-mortems. But from the start, the man who placed his personal stamp upon the Invisible
Government more than any other was Allen Welsh Dulles.

Dulles was consulted when Congress created the CIA in 1947. The next year Truman named him to head the
three-man committee to see how well the new agency was working.*