National Security Act of 1947
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The National Security Act of 1947 created the CIA and the National Security Council, over the dead-serious opposition of J. Edgar Hoover. Truman signed it with two restrictions attached that Kiriakou treats as the agency's original terms of service: no law enforcement, and no domestic spying.

Where the design came from

Kiriakou's account of the eighteen months before the Act is that the United States was improvising. From 1945 to early 1947 "we were just winging it", with MI6 the pre-eminent service in the Western world and the KGB in the Eastern, and Truman's advisers telling him to prepare for a Soviet invasion of Western Europe.

His solution was to borrow the expertise. Truman asked the British to send MI6 officers to New York to sit with Americans and help build "what he called a central intelligence agency, a place where all foreign intelligence could be collected and analyzed." The officers were met by Bill Donovan, Prescott Bush "and a handful of other swells from Wall Street and the OSS days", and "with some pads of paper, they came up with a centralized intelligence service that we called the CIA."

What they were converting was not a bureaucracy. The Office of Strategic Services had been "a group of badasses who were parachuting behind Nazi and Italian fascist lines in the Second World War and blowing up bridges and meeting up with freedom fighters", a completely hands-on paramilitary organisation. OSS was wound up in 1945 and its core men formed the new CIA in 1947, so that at the start there were no analysts, scientists or administrators, just "a group of these guys who had just finished fighting World War Two" learning to think like an institution.

Passed on a lie

As Kiriakou tells it, Hoover liked everything as it was in 1947 and actively lobbied for no votes on Capitol Hill, enough to defeat the bill. He was, in the fullest telling, "arguably the most powerful man in government next to the president himself", and he had run the FBI for forty-eight years. Truman got wind of the lobbying, called him into the Oval Office and struck a deal: Hoover would endorse the Act, and in exchange the CIA would be a division of the FBI, "so you'll be head of the FBI and of the CIA." Hoover was also told to go back to the Hill and tell everybody to vote yes. He lifted his objection.

"That was a lie. He was lying to Hoover, he never had any intention." In the final language the CIA was an independent entity reporting directly to the president; Hoover realised after passage that he had been duped, "and Hoover never forgave Truman for lying to him." Kiriakou is candid about provenance in at least one telling, introducing it as "a story that I heard many years ago." In a softer version, Hoover simply assumed from the outset that the CIA would be part of the Bureau.

The 54-year grudge

Hoover's revenge outlived him: he ordered the FBI not to cooperate with the new organization, and that institutional freeze, Kiriakou says, lasted until after the 9/11 attacks, when the two agencies' computer systems were still incompatible and the CIA literally could not send the FBI its cables. His most recent assessment is guarded rather than triumphant, the relationship has "finally changed, or it's in the process of changing."

The independence had immediate consequences. Within a few years, in Kiriakou's phrase, the agency had "practically gone rogue": its first covert operation was to steal the Italian election by planting newspaper articles that eviscerated the Italian Communist Party and financing the Christian Democrats, an intervention he dates to 1947 in one account and 1948 in another, and by 1953 it was operating in Iran, the Dominican Republic and southern Africa. Judged from 1947 onward, Kiriakou argues, the agency's record of analytic failure is the story nobody audits.

Truman's second thoughts

Kiriakou's coda is the op-ed Truman wrote sixteen years later, in the days after the Kennedy assassination. In the Washington Post's morning edition it said "it was a damn fool mistake that I made, and if I'd known what the CIA was going to do, I never would have signed it into law, and it should be disbanded." In the evening edition it was not there, "because the CIA didn't want it there."

Kiriakou's reading of the man is sympathetic: Truman "didn't really understand everything that he was signing that day", was "one of those rare straight-talkers in modern American history", and watched the agency become the monster it became, believing, at the end, that it had been involved in Kennedy's killing. He draws the obvious conclusion from the disappearance of the column: "people in positions of power and authority, they know what they're up against, and it's just too powerful."

See also

- CIA
- J. Edgar Hoover
- National Security Council
- Italian election covert action
- William Donovan
- Truman CIA op-ed
