Was FDR the father of the CIA?

FDR was an avid supporter of US government intelligence gathering prior to our entry into WWII. He was uncomfortable with the parochial nature of thoe FBI, military and State Department organizations. There was little coordination, so intelligence gathering was often duplicated on one hand, while important leads might easily fall through the cracks. Analysis of raw intelligence was very hit-or-miss. FDR tried to bring some order and coherence to the Intelligence community, but was never entirely successful at it.

FDR instead ran his own covert network of intelligence agents. These were often old friends and successful businessmen who traveled the world. Most never knew that FDR had a whole stable of these unofficial "agents" gathering information on behalf of the American President. Sometimes FDR's friends came up with outstanding information, but without professional analysts to process that data into useful intelligence, most of the information gathered was of doubtful use.

With the onset of WWII "Wild Bill" Donovan was brought in to create and run an agency to perform special operations modeled on the British MI-5/6. That agency was the OSS, but its personnel generally just called it "the outfit". Donovan recruited a mixed bag of socialites and Ivy League graduates looking for an adventurous way to fight Fascism. For the first time the U.S. intelligence had a operational arm intended to take on Special Operations against targeted foreign governments. Most were trained initially by the British, and often performed heroic service with partisan units behind German lines. They parachuted into enemy territory, evaded the Gestapo and then armed and led guerrilla actions. Now, long after the events many analysts are no longer convinced that the efforts of OSS was really all that instrumental in bringing down the German Reich. They tried and they were heroes even though their successes tended to be magnified and their failures forgotten.

At the conclusion of WWII, FDR was no longer President. Truman inherited FDRs makeshift system of gathering and analyzing intelligence data, and was appalled at how inefficient the whole thing was. Congress was asked to pass legislation to bring coherence out of what was still a gaggle of intelligence services whose efforts were uncoordinated. The result was the Central Intelligence Agency, and it was staffed at least initially with daring-do holdovers from the OSS. "The Company" was conceived as a centralized clearing house for all intelligence data collected by the FBI, military and State Department intelligence units. Didn't work out that way, because the FBI and CIA were each constrained in their field of operations. The military was focused entirely on foreign military information, and the State Department had shown itself utterly incapable of gathering useful information and had no means of conducting intelligence operations inside foreign countries and governments. The Company could and did fill the vacuum. The CIA was a new and powerful means for the government to gather information, analyze it, and as a means of conducting operational responses to the information gathered. It built on the old OSS structure and was very proactive. In the early years, a great deal of emphasis was placed on HUMINT for data. Covert action, often against perceived political threats to U.S. interests were authorized and carried out with mixed results.

As time went on and the reach of technology widened, there was a shift from the murky world of using foreign "Joes" to the "less odious" gathering of data by electronic and remote sensing systems. The American People, Congress and a whole succession of administrations chose to reduce our reliance on human agents. It was felt, wrongly of course, that intelligence data gathered by NASA was fully capable of filling our intelligence needs. What happened was that good CIA field agents withered on the vine, their networks collapsed and we were left with very few informants privy to what was happening behind the closed doors of the world. We are still the world leaders in technical intelligence gathering, but are far too reliant on other intelligence services (like the Israelis) for "fly on the wall" reports of what is going on in the world. That makes us vulnerable, and its a condition that probably won't be fixed anytime soon.

Asherman,

Thanks, there's a lot of good stuff there and a bunch of things I'm cross-referencing through research. Are you a teacher? In my original post, the blog I linked to claims that there's a book with FDR's plans for a CIA that was handed down to Truman. Have you heard of that before?

Harry Truman said, after the Bay of Pigs invasion, about his setting up the CIA, "I think it was a mistake. If I had known what was going to happen, I never would have done it." The CIA has become a secret government with no accountability to anyone but itself.

Doesn't sound familiar. FDR may have wanted to eventually reorganize the intelligence community so that it would be more coherent and able to process data into intelligible information for policy makers to act upon. The fact is that FDR didn't do that, and it probably wasn't even possible while the country was fighting determined enemies on two fronts. The CIA and NASA both were born of the WWII intelligence experience. They were created by the joint action of the Executive and Congress as vitally required in the post-war, Cold War era. As so often happens, the original conceptions of what and how those new institutions would work didn't pan out over the long run. The reorganization of our intelligence community solved some of the old problems, but it also created new and often unintended/anticipated new problems. That's almost always the case when we set out to make the world anew.

Beating up on the intelligence community is a popular thing to do for both politicians and the media. Intelligence that isn't secret, is mostly worthless. The result of that is no one ever learns of the successes or the gallant and heroic sacrifices made on the countries behalf. Failure, on the other hand has an unfortunate habit of becoming known, and then fingers are pointed. The intelligence community gathers data from many open and covert sources, processes that data into information, and presents the product to policy makers, almost always in the Executive Branch as provided for by law. The Executive once was the President and the CJS, but has evolved into a larger group often acting without the direct presence of the President who is only later briefed by the National Security Adviser. The extra layer makes decision making more difficult and spreads responsiblity so that errors are more likely and more difficult to "pin" on anyone in particular. This situation has been in place over many Administrations headed by both Parties.

9/11 may have been a wake up call for the nation, but many members of the intelligence community had been warning of its increasing possibility for over a decade. American intelligence shifted emphasis from HUMINT to technical intelligence, and that has greatly injured our ability to know what is happening in outside the country, and to properly assess probable future policies of foreign governments. This weakness in our intelligence program will not be easily overcome, and consequently future intelligence products will have an inherent blind-spot.

The enemy we face today, the Radical Islamic Movement (RIM), has chosen a strategy that plays upon the weaknesses in our system and that is difficult to respond to in traditional ways.

Our open society that encourages dissent is deliberately targeted for propaganda using the immediacy and emotionally charged impact of instant global television. The North Vietnamese pioneered the technique of targeting American Will, but the RIM is much more sophisticated and has better tools to work with. Sound bytes and dramatic heart-rendering pictures of ghastly wounds and broken children overwhelm reason. We just assume that we are "responsible", even when that just isn't so. The fact that most casualties are directly caused by terrorist actions, not the US military, is lost in our empathy for suffering. The enemy keeps chaos alive and on network television with indiscriminate terror dictated more by its publicity value than its efficacy to directly harm our military. The tactic is meant to build political opposition within the country, and they have enjoyed some success at that even among people who should know better.

The strategy adopted by the RIM makes them difficult to respond to in tradition ways. They are not openly under the control of any particular government, but draw covert support from governments and populations mostly centered in Southern Asia. Some governments are allied with the West, but have populations who support the aims of the RIM. Other governments themselves support RIM, even though the bulk of their population may not. The RIM terrorists aren't properly an army, nor are they common criminals motivated by material personal gain. Being without uniforms or membership in a formal military unit, even determining who is and who is not a part of the RIM is problematical. Small cells may be broken up, but there is not much "center of gravity" against which conventional forces can be directed. To seriously attrit the enemy they have to be identified and brought out where they can be directly attacked. In Iraq the most fanatical supporters of RIM are drawn into the fight, and they become more vulnerable to attack. We are seriously making inroads against RIM in Iraq and Afghanistan, but it is impossible to fully assess, much less, tell the world just how well the campaign is going. That the terrorist activities have been concentrated inside Iraq and Afghanistan has probably helped reduce those attacks elsewhere, but that is impossible to prove.

The RIM terrorists operate in a decentralized fashion. RIM cells can be spontaneously formed, plan a terrorist action and carry it our with minimal direction or logistical support of central control. Its a cheap way of waging war, and difficult to combat. The direction, support and encouragement tying mostly independent cells together is provided using modern technology, especially communications technology. The Western world has become almost as dependent upon instantaneous communications as it is on petrochemicals. A hundred years ago the cutting edge of communications was the telegraph wire. Telephone communications required a human operator for switching up until 50 years ago and party-lines still existed. Today virtually everyone has multiple telephones capable of connecting almost instantly with any other telephone anywhere in the world. Telephone numbers are so easily obtained that they are discarded after a single use. Telephone message traffic for any single day consists of trillions of messages. The RIM terrorist C-cubed system is embedded and hidden in that avalanche of material of no interest to the intelligence community.

The Internet and personal computers were virtually unknown at the end of the Cold War, but today are used constantly for really sophisticated communications around the world. A classified document/diagram can be instantly transmitted to either a single individual, or the world at large without the sender being obvious. Again the RIM sites are hidden among all the other sites on the Internet.

Identifying, tracking and utilizing communications is so immense that it is astounding that NSA is able to do as well as it has. The NSA is staffed with many of the world's foremost experts on communications technology. Operating with equipment that is always obsolete before its even installed, NSA has developed techniques of focusing on those messages most likely to contain messages/data antithetical to the United States. That is the equivalent of isolating the haystack containing a needle down to someplace in Kansas rather than in the whole wide world ... and the needle may be shifted from one haystack to another periodically. That happens every day of the year. Once technology narrows the field, human analysts have to review each possibility looking for hidden clues to determine which are the most promising to follow up on. Once a pattern is detected, associated messages can be given more immediate and focused attention. Neither the system for concealing or finding covert communications is perfect. Hide and seek with the potential for a whole lot of people dying if one makes a mistake and fails.

How and where the intelligence community obtains its data must remain among the nation's most highly classified secrets. This sometimes poses a problem of how one can best utilize knowledge to the nation's overall advantage without alerting the enemy that you've found a chink in his C-cubed system. The more people who know a secret, the less secure that secret becomes. Inadvertent and accidental leaks, especially by non-professionals (includes most politicians), are almost predictable. Conscious betrayal of national secrets may not lawfully be considered treason, but that's what they are regardless of the intent of exposure.

Is this Bill Clinton's father?