<h1 class= "pgc-h-center-line" > Chapter 2 At the beginning of the Cold War, the CIA group was changed to the CIA</h1>
At its peak, the Strategic Intelligence Agency had 25,000 staff, and American agents were scattered across strategically important regions such as Europe, North Africa, and Asia, but the 21 teams sent to Germany were almost completely wiped out; Roosevelt's death finally brought the Strategic Intelligence Agency to an end. At the beginning of the Cold War, the United States acted as the "world policeman", and the CIA began to enter the American political arena.
Colonel Parker's report pronounced the death penalty for the Strategic Intelligence Agency
As soon as Donovan became director of the Strategic Intelligence Bureau, he put forward three conditions: first, to report only to the president; second, the president instructed all branches of the government to provide the help he needed; and third, although subordinate to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, its funds were covered by the president's secret funds.
After these conditions were met, Donovan immediately began to work actively, recruiting troops, and rapidly expanding the ranks of the Strategic Intelligence Agency, bringing the number of personnel of the Strategic Intelligence Bureau to 25,000 at its peak, and successively establishing intelligence outlets around the world. With the development of the war situation and the effective work of the Strategic Intelligence Agency, the status of the Strategic Intelligence Bureau in the military has also been significantly improved, winning the respect and support of the military, and laying a good foundation for the further development of the Strategic Intelligence Agency.
In addition to being called "The Savage Bill", Donovan also had the nickname "Crazy Bill". He was a valiant veteran of the battlefield who was awarded the Order of Honor by Congress for his heroic performances in France during World War I. But he knew nothing about politics, so few of his army and admirals could trust him. Donovan's idea of building spy agencies by snaring Wall Street agents, Ivy League school nerds, mercenaries, stuntmen, thieves, and scammers to expand the ranks of the Strategic Intelligence Agency surprised the generals of those armies.
The Strategic Intelligence Agency had trained a group of intelligence analysts at the time, but Donovan and his right-hand man, Alan Dulles, relying on the methods taught by British intelligence agencies, sent agents deep behind enemy lines, braved bullets to blast bridges, and joined forces with French and Balkan resistance groups to deal with the German Nazi offensive.
By the year before the end of World War II, Donovan's agents had long since spread across strategically important regions such as Europe, North Africa, and Asia. At this time, he wanted to make a quick decision and directly sent agents deep into Germany to carry out sabotage activities. Unfortunately, almost all of the agents sent to Germany died in the end. The 21 two-man groups he sent out were almost completely wiped out, and only one group was later lost.
Still, Donovan did not, on the whole, live up to President Roosevelt's trust in him. With extraordinary talent, wisdom, and energy, he quickly made the vast agency of the Bureau of Strategic Intelligence efficient. The variety of talents he selected laid the foundation for the development of American intelligence. Of these, four went on to serve as CIA directors. They were: Alan Dulles, who commanded the intelligence network against Germany in Switzerland; Richard Helms, who assisted Donovan in leading secret anti-Nazi activities; William Kolby, who parachuted into Norway as a Jodburgh commando and carried out sabotage missions in occupied France; william Casey, who set up an espionage group infiltrating Germany. He also had many others in the Strategic Intelligence Agency, who later became the backbone of the CIA, occupying most of the senior positions in the CIA, the more famous ones being: Wesner, Angleton, Klein, etc. In addition, Donovan reused a large number of professionals, such as william and his wife, experts in deciphering codes.
Under Donovan's leadership, the Strategic Intelligence Agency achieved brilliant results during World War II, helping the United States win the war. After the end of World War II, the Strategic Intelligence Agency, as an intelligence agency formed during the war, could no longer exist in name only; at the same time, it was difficult for the Bureau to continue its activities due to the large expenditure and opposition of other departments.
Donovan also felt that with the end of World War II, the Strategic Intelligence Agency should retire from the stage of history. He wrote to President Roosevelt on November 18, 1944, proposing that the United States establish a unified, military-independent central intelligence service to undertake peacetime intelligence work in the United States.
In fact, as early as 1943, Donovan had been invited by General Eisenhower's chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Walter Biddle Smith, to plan U.S. peacetime intelligence. General Eisenhower wondered how Donovan had turned the Strategic Intelligence Agency into a part of the U.S. military establishment. But Donovan did not want to mix his intelligence work with the U.S. military in postwar peacetime. In his letter, he told Roosevelt that he could engage in "subversive activities overseas" against enemy nations while learning about "foreign capabilities, intentions, and activities." He believes that the establishment of the Strategic Intelligence Agency has never exceeded 13,000 people, less than a division of the Army. Donovan hopes to create an intelligence team with independent personnel after the war, a team that specializes in "anti-communism," defending the United States from attack, and providing classified intelligence to the White House. He urged the president to "start shipbuilding immediately" and made it clear that he intended to be the "captain" of the ship.
Donovan's right-hand man, David Bruce, once said that Donovan had an infinite imagination and that ideas were in his pocket. He would exhale like a racehorse when he got excited. At first glance, his instructions knew, if not absurd, that they were at least unusual, and that it would be miserable if any subordinate refused to complete the task he had assigned. Bruce said: "I spent several weeks under his guidance painstakingly testing to see if it would be feasible to destroy Tokyo with bats caught from caves in the West. An incendiary bomb is strapped to the back of a bat – that's the spirit of the Strategic Intelligence Agency. ”
President Roosevelt seems to be considering Donovan's proposal, but he is skeptical of Donovan's motives, having said: "If Donovan had not been an Irish Catholic and a Republican, the president would probably have been Donovan." "I don't know if this is praising him or hurting him." In early 1945, Roosevelt also ordered Colonel Richard Parker, the White House's chief military assistant, to conduct a secret investigation into the wartime activities of the Strategic Intelligence Agency.
As soon as Colonel Parker began to investigate, the news leaked out of the White House and immediately made headlines in major newspapers in New York, Chicago and Washington. They warned in unison that Donovan wanted to form the "Gestapo of america." As soon as Roosevelt saw these comments, he knew that Donovan was likely to immediately become the focus of public opinion attacks, so he immediately told Donovan not to easily leak his plan to the outside world, so as not to be attacked by the outside world. On March 6, 1945, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff convened a meeting to formally shelve Donovan's plan. Because the "chairman of the Board of Chiefs" wants the new spy agency to serve the Pentagon (the U.S. Department of Defense) not the White House. What they wanted was an intelligence exchange center, mainly for general officers and civilians, to filter the intelligence gathered by military attachés, diplomats and spies stationed abroad and provide it to commanders at the level of four-star generals for reference. As a result, the battle for control of the US intelligence agencies, which has lasted for three generations, has gradually begun.
In the spring of 1945, on the eve of the end of World War II, the Americans no longer wanted to know about Japan but the Soviet Union, but the Americans knew almost nothing about the Soviet Union's movements on the European continent, and even less about other countries. Therefore, Donovan, with his foresight and unique understanding of intelligence work, suggested that Roosevelt establish an intelligence agency that would oversee the overall situation. But donovan never imagined that President Roosevelt would die on April 12, 1945, before he could consider or make a decision after receiving his letter.
Roosevelt's sudden death disappointed Donovan and suddenly felt that his future was bleak. On the morning of Roosevelt's death, Donovan, with a sense of decadence, went with William Casey, a director of strategic intelligence, to a dull breakfast downstairs at the Ritz Hotel in Paris, which they frequented. Kathy, who was sitting across from him, was a subordinate of Donovan and later became the director of the CIA.
At this point, Casey felt that his boss, Donovan, was in a bit of a wrong mood and said to him, "Do you think the death of the president will have an impact on your advice?" ”
Donovan glanced at Casey, then lowered his head and said, "It's not just an effect, it's just going to be over." Believe it or not, just wait and see! ”
Donovan's judgment was fairly accurate —on the same day, Colonel Parker submitted an extremely confidential investigation report to the new president, Truman. The report on the Strategic Intelligence Agency was not fully declassified until the end of the Cold War. The report is like a political murder weapon created by the U.S. military and carefully polished by FBI Director Edgar Hoover. Hoover did not look down on Donovan at all, and he had ambitions to control the global intelligence agency, so he did his best to denigrate Donovan. Colonel Parker's report not only destroyed the myth that Donovan had created to protect the agents of the Strategic Intelligence Agency, but also sowed in the mind of the new President Truman the seeds of a deep and persistent distrust of secret intelligence work, thus completely depriving the Strategic Intelligence Agency of the possibility of existence. In the report, Colonel Parker bluntly said that the Strategic Intelligence Agency "has done serious harm to the interests of the American people, business, and the nation."
In his report, Parker makes no significant example of how the Strategic Intelligence Agency helped win the war, but merely relentlessly lists the fact that the Strategic Intelligence Agency failed. Cadre training was "crude and unorganized"; British intelligence commanders thought that American spies could be "manipulated in the palm of their hands"; in China, the Kuomintang leader Chiang Kai-shek used the Strategic Intelligence Bureau to get what he wanted; German spies had infiltrated the activities of the Strategic Intelligence Agency throughout Europe and North Africa; the Japanese Embassy in Lisbon discovered that the officers of the Strategic Intelligence Bureau intended to steal the Japanese codebook, so they changed the code, resulting in the "complete interruption of major military intelligence" in the United States in the summer of 1943. One "informant" told Parker: "The folly of the Strategic Intelligence Agency has cost Americans their lives in the Pacific, the exact number of whom is unknown." After the fall of Rome in June 1944, the Strategic Intelligence Service provided false information that led to thousands of French troops being besieged by Nazi forces on the island of Elba. Parker wrote: "The strategic intelligence agency's mistakes and miscalculations of enemy forces resulted in the loss of some 1,100 French troops. ”
The report also physically attacked Donovan, saying that the briefcase he dropped at a cocktail party in Bucharest was picked up by a Romanian dancer and handed over to the Gestapo. He was appointed and promoted not on merit, but on the basis of his connections on Wall Street and the Who's Who; he left them behind after sending contingents to remote workstations like Liberia; he mistakenly sent commandos to neutral Sweden; and in France, he sent guards to protect a German ammunition depot that had been seized, only to blow them to pieces.
Colonel Parker admitted that Donovan's men had indeed carried out several successful sabotage missions and rescued some of the Attacked American pilots. Parker said the Division of Strategic Intelligence "did a great job" in the office's research and analysis department, so he concluded that after the war, analysts could be placed at the State Department, and the rest had to go. "Wouldn't it be strange to have the almost incurable members of the Strategic Intelligence Bureau indiscriminately in secret postwar intelligence agencies." He reminded.
Colonel Parker's report essentially sentenced Donovan to death for the Strategic Intelligence Service. But Donovan still has to fight for the last word. A month after Roosevelt's death, Washington was busy fighting for power and profit. On May 14, Donovan approached the newly installed president, Truman, and in the president's office, he made a new proposal to Truman by "digging the foot of the Kremlin wall to curb communism." But Truman only received Donovan politely, and after less than fifteen minutes of listening, he hastily sent him away on the grounds that he had more important matters to deal with in a hurry.
Still, throughout the summer of that year, Donovan campaigned around Washington, fighting back in Congress and in the press. On August 25, Donovan once again told President Truman that a choice must be made between "knowing and ignorant." He once again reminded Truman that "the United States does not yet have a coordinated intelligence system, and the weaknesses and risks of this situation are well known."
Donovan had always treated Truman with pride and disdain, and this time, he had hoped that through his own bitter words, he would be able to persuade the president to establish the CIA, but unfortunately he did not touch the pulse of the new president. Where did he know that Truman had already determined that Donovan's plan had the characteristics of a "Gestapo", and instead of supporting his proposal to establish the CIA, he decided to disband his Strategic Intelligence Agency and remove Donovan from office. On September 12, 1945, about six weeks after the United States airdropped an atomic bomb in Japan, Truman made the decision to dismiss Donovan and ordered the Agency of Strategic Intelligence to be disbanded within 10 days, and intelligence gathering was integrated into the Army intelligence system, and the intelligence analysis department was merged into the State Department of State Research. Donovan has since lost the opportunity to continue leading U.S. intelligence efforts. Although his photograph was still hanging in the foyer of the CIA headquarters, and many people believe that he was the "father of the CIA", he was not involved in the establishment and formation of the CIA, and he never served as the director of the CIA.
In this way, the Strategic Intelligence Agency, which made great contributions to the United States during World War II, has since come to an end.
Truman finally agreed to the formation of the Central Intelligence Group
In Washington, the debate over where U.S. intelligence should go was intensifying. The "Board of Chiefs" explicitly wanted to establish an intelligence agency controlled by the Chairman of the Board of Chiefs of Staff. The Navy and Army also advocate having their own independent intelligence agencies. Hoover wanted the FBI to carry out a global espionage mission. The State Department wanted to dominate, and even the postal secretary wanted to step in — and with the dissolution of the Bureau of Strategic Intelligence, the departments began to grab territory.
This chaotic situation was a source of great distress to General John Magrud, who had been Donovan's right-hand man. General John Magrud was a very insightful Confucian general. He firmly believed that if the United States did not have a unified intelligence agency, if it wanted to gain a new hegemonic position in the world after the war, it would only rely on luck and rely on Britain. He argued that U.S. intelligence should be run by a newly created secret service, and that the Pentagon and the State Department should not rush into these tasks.
But in Washington, almost no one paid any attention to his views at the time. After the dissolution of the Strategic Intelligence Service, almost all of them went on their own, losing nearly ten thousand staff members within three months. By the end of 1945, there were fewer than two thousand staff members left in the former Strategic Intelligence Service. Even the personnel stationed in London, Paris, Rome, Vienna, Madrid, Lisbon and Stockholm at that time were almost completely gone. On the fourth anniversary of Pearl Harbor, Alan Dulles decided that President Truman had disrupted the U.S. intelligence apparatus and returned to New York to work at the "Sullivan and Cromwell Law Firm, where his brother John Dulles and others worked." These people believe that the U.S. intelligence agencies are running out of time.
The intelligence analysts who did not leave were assigned to the State Department and other research bureaus, and as a result, they were treated like refugees. Sherman Kent, who later formed the CIA Intelligence Service, wrote in his diary: "I don't think there have been more tragic and distressing periods in this life than that." ”
At that time, World War II had ended, and the Cold War pattern was brewing.
In the summer of 1945, on the day of Germany's Nazi surrender, the U.S. Strategic Intelligence Agency sent a force to the devastated Berlin to monitor the every move of the Red Army, which was advancing toward the European continent. As soon as Alan Dulles, who was in charge of Germany at the time, arrived in Berlin, he found a relatively well-equipped building in the ruins to use as an office and immediately began to work. His beloved general Richard Helms managed to spy on the Soviets. Helms, who became director of the CIA half a century later, said: "Don't forget, we didn't know anything at first. What does the opponent want to do? Their intentions, their abilities, as we know it, are equal to zero, or close to zero. As long as you can find a phone book or a map of the airport, it is very popular. We are still ignorant of many countries. ”
Helms returned to Berlin with Alan Dulles this time. At the age of 23, he became a hit as a reporter for the American News Agency when he interviewed Hitler at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Soon after his arrival in Berlin, he heard from Truman about his intention to disband the Strategic Intelligence Agency.
The night Truman's order to disband the Strategic Intelligence Agency reached Berlin, the men stationed in Berlin were furious. Led by Alan Dulles, they went to the requisitioned brewery in Berlin, drinking authentic German beer unscrupulously and angrily venting their complaints about the order. Alan Dulles did not expect that the American intelligence agency envisioned by Donovan would be gone, and that only a few people could remain overseas. To Helms' disbelief, their mission came to an abrupt end. That night, they were eager to set fire to the distillery.
But a few days later, a telegram arrived from headquarters in Washington, D.C., claiming to want them to "stick to their posts." This, in turn, overwhelmed the likes of Alan Dulles and Helms, wondering what was going on.
It turned out that the telegram had come from General John Magrud.
On September 26, 1945, just six days after Truman ordered the dissolution of the Strategic Intelligence Agency, U.S. Secretary of Defense Operations Henry Stintson resigned. This person has been a staunch opponent of the creation of a peacetime "central intelligence" service. He thought that the President had ordered the dissolution of the Strategic Intelligence Agency this time in order to create a peacetime "central intelligence" agency. So he resigned indignantly.
After Henry Stinson resigned, John Magrud thought the opportunity had come, so he went into the Pentagon to discuss a plan with Henry Stinson's assistant, John McIlloy, to persuade the president to set up a new intelligence agency. John Magrud had feelings for both Donovan himself and the Strategic Intelligence Agency. He and John McIlroy had been good friends for many years, and knew the energy of the assistant minister in Washington, D.C., and even more so at the Pentagon. He decided to take the opportunity to lobby John McIlroy to join forces with him to force President Truman to accept Donovan's proposal.
When John McIlroy had heard John Magrudd's tirade, he felt that what he was saying was not unreasonable, so the two joined forces and contacted others in the Department of Defense to resist Truman's order to revoke the Bureau of Strategic Intelligence.
The trick of the two "Johns" worked. In the face of strong public pressure, President Truman did indeed make concessions and adopted a compromise approach, renaming the abolished Strategic Intelligence Service the Strategic Intelligence Service. "To maintain the Strategic Intelligence Agency, it is necessary to continue its activities." This paper order brought the hope of forming the CIA back to life.
At this time, John McIlroy invited robert Lovett , an old friend in charge of air combat affairs ( who later became secretary of defense ) as assistant to the chief of strategic intelligence , and set up a secret committee to chart the direction of U.S. intelligence operations ; he also told President Truman that he wanted to "make a difference" in intelligence work.
Under the new sign of the "Strategic Intelligence Service", Maglod issued orders to the intelligence stations stationed overseas, ordering the staff of the former Strategic Intelligence Service to stick to their posts and continue to work. At this time, the Red Army had entered Germany and was fighting with the United States for territory. Magrud immediately sent agents to East Germany in an attempt to prevent the Red Army from taking over East Germany. They bribed the police and politicians in Germany to build intelligence networks in East Germany. However, despite its great efforts, the Strategic Intelligence Service ultimately failed to achieve its objectives. The Soviets not only successfully took over East Germany, but also further expanded their sphere of influence on the European continent.
However, the failure of East Germany did not affect the enthusiasm of the Strategic Intelligence Service. Alan Dulles and Helms set out to clean up the officers involved in the Berlin black market. Berlin was in chaos, where anything and people could be bought and sold. At that time, if you bought 20 boxes of Camel cigarettes for $12 at the U.S. Military Welfare Agency, you could change hands for a Mercedes-Benz car that left the factory in 1939.
In addition to rectifying the market order, these American operatives were also scouring for well-known German scientists and spies in the hope that they would serve the United States so that their technology would not be used by the Soviets. However, due to the busyness of the Soviet movements, this work soon took a back seat.
All the American agents could do at the time was track down the movements of soviet troops transferred to Berlin. The Soviet Union was advancing, but Washington repeatedly backed down and had to try to defuse the resistance of the American troops in Berlin, which made Helms quite angry. So he took his men and set out to recruit German police and politicians in order to establish an intelligence network in East Germany. In November, Peter Hitchel, another officer of the Strategic Intelligence Service in Berlin, said: "We are watching the Russians take over East Germany in its entirety. ”
It was only then that the "Joint Chiefs of Staff" and the extremely powerful Secretary of the Navy, James Forristel, began to fear that the Soviet Union, like the Nazis had done before, would take all of Europe and then advance to the eastern Mediterranean, the Persian Gulf, North Africa, and North Korea. If the action is not careful, it will lead to the formation of an uncontrollable confrontation between the East and the West, and even lead to a new and larger-scale global war. Faced with the threat of a new war, the leaders of the U.S. intelligence community split into two opposing factions.
One faction believes that it is necessary to patiently slowly collect confidential intelligence through espionage activities and understand the new world situation through espionage activities, and Helms and others belong to this category. The other faction favored clandestine warfare, i.e., changing the world by drawing the battlefield to the enemy through covert operations, and Frank Wisner, who was stationed in The Romanian Intelligence Station at the time, fell into this category.
Wisner was originally the son of a rich gentleman of a landlord in Mississippi and a handsome lawyer in military uniform. In September 1944, Wisner was ordered to fly to Bucharest, the capital of Romania, to serve as the new director of the Strategic Intelligence Service's intelligence station in Romania. At that time, the Soviet Red Army and the American delegation had taken control of Bucharest, and Weissner issued a military order to monitor the movements of the Red Army. Together with the young Kim Michael, he planned to rescue the attacked Allied pilots and requisitioned a 32-room mansion from the Bucharest Beer King. Under the sparkling crystal lamp, the officers of the United States and the Soviet Union exchanged champagne and mingled together. Wisner was the first Strategic Intelligence Bureau official to have a drink with the Soviets. At the time, he was proud to report to Washington headquarters that he had established good relations with Soviet intelligence.
As everyone knows, in less than a year, Wesner's so-called "good relationship" has ceased to exist. The Soviets had long since deployed personnel within his Strategic Intelligence Service and soon infiltrated Wesner's circle of Romanian allies and agents. The Soviets soon seized control of Bucharest, catching tens of thousands of Romanians of German descent on trains and transporting them to concentration camps in the Far East or leaving them to fend for themselves. Wisner watched as 27 carriages full of these Romanians drove out of Bucharest station and headed in the direction of the unpredictability of Siberia. This memory lingered on him for the rest of his life.
In a panic, Wesner returned to the Strategic Intelligence Agency's intelligence station in Germany and confided in Helms what he felt. At the end of the year, the two of them flew back to Washington together. During the 18-hour voyage, they talked on their knees, and the most talked about was that it was not known whether the U.S. government would tolerate the existence of their intelligence organization after returning home.
In the face of the "Red Terror" from Europe, Americans felt a new threat. At this time, Truman also soberly realized the importance of intelligence work. On January 9, 1946, the White House held a hasty meeting, and Truman's grumpy military chief of staff, Admiral William Leahy, bluntly told the president: "Our way of handling intelligence is shameful." ”
Truman also realized that he had caused chaos and decided to put it right, so he summoned Rear Admiral Sidney William Sals, deputy director of the Naval Intelligence Bureau, and told him to set up a new intelligence agency. On January 22, 1946, Truman decided to establish a peacetime unified intelligence system, a National Intelligence Council centered on the Secretary of State, the Secretary of the Army, the Secretary of the Navy, and the President's Military Adviser, with overall responsibility for planning, developing, and coordinating the foreign intelligence activities of the United States throughout the United States, and established a Central Intelligence Group under the National Intelligence Council as the executive body for intelligence operations to manage the overseas intelligence activities of the former Strategic Intelligence Agency.
Sals, a Missouri-born Democrat, made his fortune with life insurance and the first U.S. supermarket chain, Piggy Twist. Although this person served on the post-war committee set up by The Minister of the Navy, Forristel, specializing in the future direction of intelligence, he did not have a big vision, and he only wanted to return to the St. Louis supermarket as soon as possible to make money. To Sols' trepidation, he discovered that Truman intended to make him the first head of the Central Intelligence Unit. Sure enough, on January 23, Sals was appointed head of the CIA group.
General William Leahy recorded the appointment in his official journal of January 24, 1946: at the White House luncheon, only a small number of staff officers attended the ceremony. President Truman awarded Major General Thors and me black cloaks, black hats, and wooden swords. Immediately afterward, the President appointed Sauls as head of the CIA.
Sals felt a little panicked when he got the new appointment. At that time, the Central Intelligence Group had about 2,000 intelligence officers and staff members, in charge of the files and files of about 400,000 people, many of whom had no idea what they were doing or what they should do. After Sals was sworn in, he was asked what he wanted to do, and he just smiled and said, "I want to go home." ”
Although Sals was in charge, he did not have a peer mandate. The White House didn't give him instructions, didn't know what President Truman wanted, and perhaps the president himself didn't know. Truman had simply said that he would have daily intelligence summaries so that he wouldn't have to go to bed every morning and read a whole bunch of cables 2 feet high. In the eyes of the founding members of the Central Intelligence Group, perhaps only those "intelligence summaries" that did not know what they were doing were what President Truman could see.
Regarding the tasks entrusted to the Central Intelligence Unit, General Maglod believes that the White House has tacitly accepted that the Central Intelligence Unit can engage in clandestine activities. But no written document from the White House mentioned the incident, and almost no one in the U.S. government recognized the legitimacy of the new group. The Pentagon and the State Department have refused to deal with Mr. Salis and his men. But Sauls left an important memorandum during his short tenure, making the important point that U.S. intelligence "urgently needs to gather the highest quality Soviet intelligence in the shortest possible time."
At that time, the United States could say that it knew nothing about the Kremlin, and the only way to know it was from the new ambassador to Moscow, General Walter Biddle Smith, who would later become the director of the CIA, and George Kennan, who was called "Russia".
Born in Indiana, where his father owned a retail store, Smith rose from second class to general, neither gilded nor college degree at West Point. During World War II, he served as Eisenhower's chief of staff, and every battle in North Africa and Europe cemented his efforts. He was a killer under Eisenhower, and his comrades and colleagues respected and feared him. He had to do everything himself and worked hard.
Once, he attended a dinner party between Eisenhower and Churchill, and near the end of the banquet, he fainted from a bleeding ulcer. After the blood transfusion, he went to great lengths to get the British doctors to agree that he would be discharged and return to the commander's tent. During World War II, he shared the hardships of Soviet officers and repeatedly negotiated joint operations against the Nazis at allied headquarters in Algiers. In the dilapidated red-tiled schoolhouse in the Remus Mountains of France, which was used as the headquarters of the American army's advance, he looked at the German commander with disdain, accepted the Nazi surrender, and ended the European war. On May 8, 1945, "Victory Day in Europe," he had a few minutes of meetings with Alan Dulles and Helms in the Remus Mountains. Alan Dulles was suffering from rheumatism, but came to see Eisenhower on crutches in the hope of gaining his consent to set up a supremely powerful American intelligence center in Berlin. Unfortunately, Eisenhower did not have time to meet Dulles that morning, which deprived him of a good opportunity to control Berlin.
In March 1946, Smith flew to Moscow to receive instructions from the embassy chargé d'affaires a.i. Kennan. Kennan had been in the Soviet Union for many years and had spent much time trying to decipher Soviet leader Stalin. By this time the Soviet Union had already paid a terrible price of more than twenty million people and occupied most of Europe. The Red Army had liberated many countries in Eastern Europe from the Nazi heel, and the shadow of the Kremlin was gradually hanging over more than a hundred million people outside the Soviet Union. Kennan, who had foreseen that the Soviet Union would inevitably control the occupied territories by force, reminded the White House to prepare for a showdown.
A few days before Smith arrived in Moscow, Kennan sent a telegram to Washington. It was an extraordinary telegram, not only the most famous in the history of American diplomacy, but also one of the longest in the history of the world telegraph. The entire telegram, which is more than 8,000 words long, describes in detail the Soviet Union's "paranoia." Kennan profoundly pointed out in the cable that the Soviets did not respond to the logic of reason, but they were extremely sensitive to the "logic of force", which made the Americans have to defend.
Kennan rose to prominence and soon became the U.S. government's best Kremlin expert, known as the "Russian Pass." It was precisely because of this telegram that the alliance between the two great powers of the United States and the Soviet Union in the battlefield of World War II was changed in advance, thus becoming an opponent of the Cold War. Years later, Kennan recalled, "We were accustomed to having a great enemy ahead because of our wartime experience. This enemy must be in the center, and must be a complete villain. ”
To learn more about the Soviet Union and Stalin, on a cold night in April 1946, Smith drove an American-flagged limousine to the heavily fortified Kremlin. As soon as he reached the gate, several Soviet intelligence officers checked his identity. The car passed the old church and the broken bell under the tower inside the palace walls. The soldier in black boots and red pants saluted and guided him toward the deep palace. Smith went alone, led by the guards, through several majestic gates embellished with dark green leather, and finally entered the vast and empty conference hall, and finally met Marshal Stalin.
As soon as they met, Smith asked Stalin a sharp question: "What did the Soviet Union want to do?" How far do you really plan to go? ”
When Stalin heard such a question, he seemed a little unhappy. While smoking a cigar, he drew carelessly on a piece of scrap paper that appeared with irregular lines and circles that even he did not know. Later, he told Smith that the Soviet Union had no ambitions for any country, and denounced Churchill's recent warning that the "Iron Curtain" had descended on the European continent during a speech in Missouri. Stalin said, "Russia knows its enemies very well."
Smith asked, "Do you really think that the United States and Britain might form an alliance to contain the Soviet Union?" ”
Stalin hardly thought about this question, and immediately replied, "That's right. ”
Smith went on to ask Stalin: "How far does Russia intend to go?" Stalin stared directly at Smith and said, "We have no intention of going very far." ”
Smith's visit, apart from being boring to himself, did not ask anything about it. At that time, the United States was also well aware of the ambitions of the Soviet Union, but it could not get evidence of this. So on 10 June 1946 they removed Sidney William Sals from his position as head of the Central Intelligence Unit and replaced him with General Hoyt Vandenberg.
The CIA was established
The second head of the CIA, General Vandenberg, was a handsome Air Force officer, and he was led by Eisenhower's air combat tactics in Europe. The CIA he now manages is located on a hill by the Potomac River. The headquarters is located at the former headquarters of the Strategic Intelligence Service at 2430 E Street, next to an abandoned gas plant, a corner-style distillery and an ice rink.
As soon as General Vandenberg took office, he found that the CIA lacked three basic resources: funding, authority, and personnel.
Determined to put the United States back on track to have intelligence operations, Vandenberg changed the tactics of his predecessors, using the main forces of the Central Intelligence Group to gather intelligence about the Soviet Union, and set up a "Special Operations Service" (OSO), and privately "defrauded" $15 million from several lawmakers for espionage and subversion missions overseas. He knew everything about the Soviet forces in Eastern and Central Europe, including their movements, capabilities and intentions, and ordered Helms to submit his report as soon as possible.
Helms had 228 overseas agents at the time, specializing in intelligence operations in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary. At that time, a large number of political exiles, former intelligence officers, former spies and brokers of all kinds across Europe were peddling information made up according to the needs of their customers. The lies cobbled together by clever crooks were used as relevant intelligence for the Soviet Union and its satellite countries.
Helms later determined that at least half of the information in the central intelligence archives about the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe was a lie. The Berlin and Vienna workstations have become disinformation factories. His officials or analysts could not tell the truth from their delusions.
From day one in office, Vandenberg was horrified by the astonishing reports coming back from overseas. This information made it difficult for him to distinguish between true and false, but he still presented it upwards. Some of the intelligence is written like this —
Express: A Soviet officer drunkenly talked that the Soviet Union would launch a no-warning attack.
The Express: Soviet commanders in the Balkans boasted that they would soon capture Istanbul.
Express: Stalin prepares to invade Turkey, encircle the Black Sea, take the Mediterranean and the Middle East ...
General Vandenberg received the information and sent it untouched to President Truman's office. The president and his top aides didn't take such things seriously, and they were thinking about how to stop the Soviet Union from continuing its advances on the European continent. It was suggested to President Truman that the best way to stop the Soviets was to cut off the Red Army's oil supply lines in Romania. President Truman agreed to this proposal and ordered the CIA to send someone for the mission.
When General Hoyt Vandenberg received this order, he decided to begin changing the previous CIA course of action and turning the CIA into a combat agency. General Vandenberg personally went to the newly appointed Chief of Operations, Robert Patterson, and then Secretary of State James Burns, and asked them to quietly allocate $10 million in secret funding to the CIA to support the work of the "global intelligence personnel."
As soon as General Vandenberg received the money as he wished, he ordered intelligence officers in the Balkans to help the National Peasant Party in Romania form a revolting army, to provide them with weapons and equipment to deter and interfere with the Red Army, and at the same time to establish an intelligence station in the occupied area of the Soviet Red Army in Vienna, with Wisner as its manager.
As a result, this intelligence station was quickly cracked by Soviet intelligence agencies and the Romanian secret police. Under torture, the staff of those intelligence stations confessed the entire PLAN for Romania. The Soviets immediately set out to crush the rebel forces that had just been established by the Romanian National Peasant Party. CIA staff at the Romanian intelligence post fled back to the United States. After running back to the United States, the station master of the intelligence station, Wesner reported the entire process of the defeat to General Vandenberg. He believed that in the situation at that time, the CIA was powerless to compete with the Soviets. Soviet troops and intelligence agencies already had full control of the Balkans. The British army and intelligence agencies had been completely withdrawn, leaving the Soviets with a large space for development and giving Stalin an opportunity to take advantage of. In fact, it is now the domain of the Soviets.
The intelligence station chief's analysis from the front line attracted the attention of General Vandenberg, who immediately reported the situation to the President. The Abandonment of the Balkans by the British, and the subsequent cessation of military and economic assistance to Greece and Turkey, forced Greece to spend $250 million a year on "anti-communist" causes. But the Greeks simply could not come up with so much money, and Greece was in danger of falling into the Soviets' sphere of influence at any time. Once Greece became the Soviets' sphere of influence, the entire Western world would be exposed to the Soviets at a glance, a reality and consequence that the Americans did not want to see.
Since Truman came to power, due to his ineffective containment of the "Red Terror", he has been criticized from all sides, and his reputation and support rate have dropped significantly. Faced with this situation, Truman decided to take some action to improve his reputation. A few days later, he gave a horrific speech in Congress in which he exaggerated the warnings to members of the Senate and The House of Representatives that the "Red Terror" that the United States now faces is no less than the war of that year. The only way to save the future now is if the "anti-communist" efforts are intensified overseas, otherwise the whole world will face a new catastrophe. He also cited a variety of intelligence from the Central Intelligence Group, telling the lawmakers that Greece was "under threat from thousands of militants," that the entire Western world was about to fall into the hands of the Soviets, and that the United States would have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to stabilize the current situation; otherwise, the chaos would not only not end there, but would soon spread throughout the Middle East. This is the status quo that people do not want to see.
Truman concluded, "I believe it is American policy to support free peoples against any foreign armed forces and political pressures that seek to subjugate them." Truman's speech, later called "Trumanism" by historians, was the role of a "world policeman" from then on. Their view is that when an enemy of the United States attacks any country, it is tantamount to attacking the United States.
Truman's speech had the desired effect. Soon after, as large amounts of dollars and weaponry entered Greece, a large number of CIA agents also poured into Greece, and Greece soon became one of the largest intelligence bases in the United States overseas. The main content of this intelligence activity is to engage in anti-communist activities and expand the influence and sphere of influence of the United States around the world.
In order to meet the needs of the United States' continuous outward aggression and expansion, the United States Congress passed a National Security Act in July 1947. Under this law, President Truman established the National Security Council in September 1947 to replace the National Intelligence Council, which had been established a year earlier, and decided to establish a CIA under the national Security Council to take over the CIA's operations, archives, and personnel. Thus, on September 18, 1947, the CIA, the world's most public intelligence agency, was born in this delicate political environment, and Rear Admiral Roscoe Henry Hillencott was appointed the first director of the CIA.