Central Agency

With a single directive last week Harry Truman: 1) created a new agency in Washington; 2) put the U.S. in the business of international espionage; 3) ended, for a while at least, a bitter, home-grown feud.

His order created a National Intelligence Authority, charged with correlating, evaluating, coordinating all information that can be gathered about foreign powers. The bulk of the work of the director of NIA will be with vast, nonsecret facts about economies, populations, politics. But the U.S. is also going to join, after all these years, in the game of spying on the neighbors. Harry Truman did not say so, but that is the idea.

Other great powers have always maintained espionage systems along with their armies and navies. The U.S., with a mixture of trust and indifference, never has--outside of cracking codes and listening to teacup gossip at foreign embassies. That historical innocence, which ended in the fiasco of Pearl Harbor, is now gone.

The General Proposes. State, War and Navy Departments agreed on the necessity of espionage and on the greater necessity of getting all the foreign intelligence funneled into one office. It was over control of the agency that the fight had been waged--a fight centering around mild, determined Major General William ("Wild Bill") Donovan, infantry hero of World War I and head of the Office of Strategic Services during World War II.

Even before OSS began to function, Bill Donovan was convinced that such an agency should be set up, to work not only in war but in peacetime. In 1941 he sent a confidential memorandum to President Franklin D. Roosevelt outlining a plan.

He proposed an overall information agency, provided with funds by Congress, advised by the Departments of State, War and Navy but not answerable to them; a single overall director. No special pleader would be allowed to distract the agency or distort its facts. The agency would report directly to the President.

State, War and Navy were dead set against the kind of independence which Donovan proposed for an agency which would inevitably exercise great influence on foreign policy. They wanted the control. Opposition to Donovan's plan became so bitter that someone even slipped his memorandum to the Patterson-McCormick press. The New York Daily News howled that the Government intended to set up a "spy director," a U.S. Gestapo and in some manner turn the nation over to the sister of Justice Felix Frankfurter.

Donovan had been careful to say that the agency should have no police power either at home or abroad. But the furor had its effect. In the end Donovan's idea of an independent agency went down the drain.

The President Disposes. Harry Truman's decision was based on a modified proposal from the Joint Chiefs of Staff and incidentally on one phase of the Navy's so far disregarded plan for merging the services. This is the plan as the President outlined it:

Funds for the Authority will come from State, War and Navy, thereby giving those Departments indirect control. The Authority itself will consist of the three Secretaries plus the President's Chief of Staff, currently Admiral William D. Leahy--thereby giving the services direct control.

The director will take orders from them and have no more than administrative power. To that job Harry Truman named quiet, 53-year-old Rear Admiral Sidney William Souers (rhymes with flowers), Naval Reservist, onetime Missouri businessman (life insurance, linen service, real estate, Piggly-Wiggly stores). Harry Truman knew him as an old friend. Businesslike Admiral Souers, who has had more active duty than most Reservists, is one of the few men to achieve flag rank without going to sea. For eight years he served as Senior Intelligence Officer in St. Louis. His latest Navy job: deputy chief of Naval Intelligence. Army & Navy officers who have worked with him applauded the appointment.

Bill Donovan, back in Manhattan practicing law, did not mourn too loudly the kicking around his original plan had got. Any kind of intelligence coordinating agency, he argued, was a realistic step in a confused and dangerous world.

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