A Covert Life by Ted Morgan

Author:Ted Morgan [Morgan, Ted]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-80566-9
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-10-05T04:00:00+00:00

12

LOVESTONE JOINS THE CIA

On April 12, 1945, Franklin Delano Roosevelt died at the start of his fourth term as president. His vice president, Harry S Truman, replaced him. On May 14, Truman called in William J. “Wild Bill” Donovan, head of the wartime OSS, and told him: “The OSS belongs to a nation at war. It can have no place in an America at peace. I am completely opposed to international spying on the part of the United States. It is un-American.” The OSS was dismantled on September 20, 1945, but the United States remained for only four months without a distinct intelligence agency. For Truman, who was inexperienced in foreign affairs, had been thrown into the foreign policy pond that July at the Potsdam Conference with Churchill and Stalin. His first brush with the Soviets changed his outlook; he realized that he needed to know Stalin’s intentions. By the end of the year he was yelling at his advisers, “I want someone to tell me what’s going on around the world! Damn it, different people are telling me different things.”

In January 1946, Truman created a Central Intelligence Group. His chief of staff, Adm. William D. Leahy, recommended Sidney W. Souers—a Missouri businessman and rear admiral in the reserves who had been deputy chief of naval intelligence during the war and in civilian life ran the Piggly Wiggly grocery chain—to head it.

On January 24 at the White House there took place a mock ceremony that showed Truman’s continued disdain for espionage even while he realized its necessity. The president stuck a black mustache above Leahy’s lip, gave him a wooden dagger, and said: “By virtue of the authority vested in me as Top Dog, I require and charge that Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy and Rear Admiral Sidney W. Souers receive and accept the vestments and appurtenances of their respective positions, namely as Personal Snooper and Director of Centralized Snooping.”

It took another year and a half to move to the next step, under the pressure of events. For in January 1946 the Communists took over Poland in fraudulent elections; in March 1947 Truman warned about the danger of Greece and Turkey going Communist; and in May a Communist coup made Hungary a Soviet satellite. The objections to reading other people’s mail were now more muted.

On July 26, 1947, Truman signed the National Security Act, which provided for a National Security Council, a secretary of defense, and a Central Intelligence Agency. On September 18, the Central Intelligence Group became the Central Intelligence Agency, headed by another admiral from Missouri and friend of Leahy, Rear Admiral Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter. Fifty years old, tall, and athletic-looking with brush-cut hair, “Hilly” was soon derided by intelligence professionals as an inept old sea dog, an “amiable Dutchman” worse than “Piggly Wiggly Souers.”

As William R. Johnson, a twenty-eight-year veteran of the CIA, once put it, “The new CIA … was a little like the Baltimore Orioles when they were first admitted to the American League. All

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