The Nuclear Spies: America's Atomic Intelligence Operation Against Hitler and Stalin by Vince Houghton

Author:Vince Houghton [Houghton, Vince]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nuclear Warfare, Science, War, Military, Political Science, History, Politics, Intelligence & Espionage
ISBN: 9781501739606
Google: YA2QDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 43212202
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2019-09-01T00:00:00+00:00

5

Regression

The Postwar Devolution of U.S. Nuclear Intelligence

Discussions about the nature of postwar U.S. intelligence began almost a year before the Second World War ended. In October 1944, Office of Strategic Services director William Donovan met with President Roosevelt to recommend a permanent, centralized intelligence agency placed under the direct supervision of the president. Donovan understood that the OSS was created as a wartime agency designed to support the military directly, and was thus placed under the control of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. His new peacetime agency, he argued, should focus on national and not just military intelligence. The executive branch, with the assistance of both the War and Navy Departments and the secretary of state, should coordinate the new organization. Roosevelt, who had come to trust Donovan’s experience and insight, agreed in principle with Donovan’s plan, but Roosevelt’s death on April 12, 1945, put the OSS director’s proposal in jeopardy.1

Roosevelt had protected Donovan from much of the bureaucratic infighting that characterized the relations between U.S. intelligence agencies during the Second World War. Army and Navy Intelligence, the Department of State, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation had formed intelligence organizations long before the start of the war,2 and only Roosevelt’s favor had kept the upstart OSS on relatively equal footing. Roosevelt’s death, and Harry Truman’s rise to the presidency, meant that Donovan would have to fight the parochial interests of each of these agencies without his powerful patron. Truman, as he later explained in his memoirs, was open to the idea of a “sound, well-organized intelligence system,” and he agreed that “plans needed to be made.” But he argued that “it was imperative that [the United States] refrain from rushing into something that would produce harmful and unnecessary rivalries among the various intelligence agencies.”3

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