General William “Wild Bill” Donovan was a Medal of Honor recipient, decorated World War I veteran, Wall Street figure, and founder of the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS) — the CIA’s institutional predecessor. John Kiriakou discussed him during his tour of Arlington National Cemetery.[1]
Pads of paper in New York
In Kiriakou’s account of the agency’s origins, the United States was still scrambling through 1946 and early 1947 when a group of British MI6 officers came to New York. They were met by Donovan, Prescott Bush and a handful of other figures from Wall Street and the OSS days, and with pads of paper the group worked out the shape of a centralized intelligence service — the CIA.[2][3]
Hoover’s opposition
The obstacle was J. Edgar Hoover, FBI director since the Coolidge administration, who was adamantly opposed to the creation of the CIA and who — in Kiriakou’s phrase — famously hated Donovan. Hoover’s position was that the country did not need a CIA, that the FBI could do everything and was already doing it, and he was actively lobbying for no votes on Capitol Hill that would have defeated the National Security Act of 1947.[4][5][6]
When Congress first took up the bill, Hoover simply assumed the new agency would sit inside the FBI. Donovan, who had Truman’s ear, insisted to the President that it be an independent standalone agency.[7] Truman called Hoover into the Oval Office, told him to stop lobbying members of Congress, and struck a bargain: Hoover would endorse the National Security Act, and in exchange the CIA would be a division of the FBI, leaving Hoover head of both. It was a lie, and there had never been any intention of honoring it. Hoover lifted his objection, the bill passed, the President signed it, and Hoover realized he had been duped — and never forgave Truman for it.[8][9][10] He then tried to talk the President into first not signing the bill and, later, into disbanding the CIA in the next national security authorization act. It did not work.[7]
Donovan became, in Kiriakou’s telling, the first director of the CIA.[10][11]
The rivalry that followed
The institutional consequence outlasted both men. Kiriakou dates the competition between the CIA and the FBI to the moment of Donovan’s appointment, worsening through the 1950s with the overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran and the interventions in Latin America, through Vietnam in the 1960s and onward.[12] In the same year the agency was created, Hoover ordered the FBI to refuse any and all cooperation with it; the two spoke only when they truly had to. In all his years at the CIA, Kiriakou says, he never once went to the FBI — he had more dealings with the Egyptian intelligence service than with the Bureau.[10][13]