Dan Snow's History Hit - The Birth of the CIA

Episode Date: November 7, 2022

American intelligence services like the CIA are commonly thought of as global behemoths of international surveillance and covert operations, responsible for carrying out everything from cyber espionage to assassinations and political coups. But its origins in the Second World War paint a picture of a very different kind of intelligence agency, operating on a smaller scale, and with very different goals. We are joined by historian Nicholas Reynolds, who has in his time been a marine and an employee of the CIA, who will guide us through the birth and growth of the agency, and tackle some of the most persistent conspiracy theories that surround it along the way.Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Joseph Knight.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe to History Hit today!To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Welcome everybody. Welcome to Dan Snow's History at the CIA. You might have heard of it. They're a little intelligence outfit. You know, they run a few spies, topple a few governments, maybe knock off a few presidents. No, they don't. Come on, folks. We're going to talk about this in a minute. Conspiracy theories coming up at the end of this podcast. In this episode, we're going to talk about the birth of the modern American intelligence apparatus. We talk about some of the US intelligence's greatest coups during the war and the birth of the CIA. Nicholas Reynolds, Nick Reynolds is one of those wonderful people. He's worked as a historian. He's been a warrior. He was in the US Marine Corps in the

1970s. Then he worked at the CIA. And more recently, he was the historian at the CIA Museum. He writes wonderful books about American intelligence. He's just written a new book about the rise of American intelligence in World War II. He's the ideal guy to get on the podcast and talk about the birth of official American intelligence, which from the smallest of the beginnings is now obviously a big deal. Enjoy. Nick, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It's my pleasure to be here. Talk to me about the late 30s, the very, very early 1940s. We hear stories about how small the American army was, for example,

a huge shipbuilding program beefed up the Navy during and before 1941. What was America's intelligence services like? They were very small as well. I like to say that we were in the cottage industry phase where you had a few skilled craftsmen working on their own, barely aware that there was another craftsman down the road working on something similar. We had some codebreakers. We had some traditional naval and military intelligence, the kind of people who did order a battle, who counted ships and kept track of where they were. But we didn't really have anything like

MI6. We didn't have a strategic intelligence service, the kind of service that might answer a big question like, is Stalin going to attack? What are their long range plans? See, you didn't really have spies in foreign capitals. There might have been one or two sort of shipwatcher kind of guys, but no, basically, we did not have high level spies in foreign capitals, the sort of things that the Soviets had already excelled at. So the Soviets, by 1940, already have thorough going penetrations of both the US and the British governments. We didn't have anything like that.

Wow. 80 years is a long time in intelligence history. Things are pretty different now. So what happens with Pearl Harbor? Is that just a gigantic wake-up call to the American intelligence community? Pearl Harbor is a wake-up call, but there's a wake-up call before that. And that is June 1940, when the Nazis march into Paris. That is the point at which the United States can no longer smugly say,

we're separated from Europe by an ocean. The French will take care of everything on the land. They have a great army that has defended the alliance before. And the British, they have the Royal Navy still unmatched at that point. And so when half of that equation collapses, then the United States can no longer say, oh, the British and the French have this. It's really not our problem. The flip side of that is that the British feel a tremendous need for help. You can no longer rely on the French. So who can you rely on? The

other great power that might be a candidate is the Soviet Union, but it's not a very good candidate for Britain in 1940. So that leaves the United States. So Pearl Harbor is the next step in that progression. Not only do you have to pay attention, you, the United States, have to pay attention to what's going on in Europe, but you also need to mobilize. You need to defend yourself actively. And you are now in a war in the Pacific after Pearl Harbor. And a few days later, Hitler declares war on the United States. So that gets the U.S. into the Atlantic War.

So you've got the U.S. rearming, looking at war in two completely different theaters, two different oceans. Presumably, it's a huge investment into intelligence. And also, what about the institutions? What sort of shape do they choose for their new intelligence entities? I like the word institutions, because we often tend to forget that what you need is to build the house before you put the people in the house, and you need to build the house well and strongly. So we have a set of architects from London. So there's an MI6 station, mostly in New York, but there's also an office in Washington. And there's a guy named Bill Stevenson, who's Canadian slash British. He's loyal to the crown, for sure. And he's very busy helping the United States to build up an intelligence network, all the

while agitating for the United States to join the war effort, which he does by buying radio stations, planting ads, embarrassing isolationists and whatnot. And the other presence is visitors from London. And there's Admiral Godfrey of Naval Intelligence who comes over with Ian Fleming. And they literally have blueprints. They have memos that they hand to their American counterparts or would-be American counterparts, the people that Britain thinks should be running American intelligence. is a man named William J. Donovan, who is a prominent New York lawyer, has a Medal of Honor, the rough equivalent of the Victoria Cross, and is a World War I war hero. He's also an Anglophile. He's the guy who Godfrey and Fleming thinks should run American intelligence. Is he the right choice?

That's about three PhD theses right there. He's a great choice in some ways. He's a charismatic figure. He's a Republican internationalist, which enables Roosevelt to say that he's got a national unity government. Roosevelt's a Democrat, and he has a pretty good network on They've been political opponents in the past. They've saidorganized and he also associates intelligence largely with special operations, that is strapping on a parachute, jumping behind enemy lines, and trying to do as much mischief as you can. So mixed bag, but he's about the only viable candidate there is at that point in time. And is he good, Nick, at building institutions? Does he build a lasting organization that can handle something as important as the United States intelligence? As one of my colleagues said, OSS is the organization that he builds during the war. And the two words to describe OSS would be shape-shifting blob, which suggests that there are a lot of growing pains. And Donovan has

working for him people with the right kind of ideas, according to yours truly and other historians. So if you run a large organization, you don't write every memo. There are people who write them for you. You put your signature on them. You may or may not identify deeply with what's in the piece of paper. So Donovan has the right kind of people working for him. They write good memos about how a lasting intelligence service should be created, but he himself is charging off in so many directions at once that he often doesn't get to any particular place. Once again, it's a mixed bag. Donovan is way better than nothing, but he is not a good long-term builder.

So we think about US intelligence successes, of course, the Battle of Midway, the breaking of the Japanese naval codes, realizing that the Japanese were going to launch an operation against Midway Island and being able to ambush them and destroy those four carriers. But presumably that was a Pacific Fleet intelligence setup. That presumably wasn't anything going on in Washington at the Office of Strategic Services. That's correct. So what happened at Midway was kind of the last gasp of old-fashioned naval intelligence. What you saw was a really appealing character, one of my heroes, a guy named Joe Rochefort working in a basement in Pearl Harbor. What Joe is doing is putting together from bits and pieces, a little bit of code breaking, a little bit of traffic analysis, a little bit of intuition, knowledge of the Japanese language and the Japanese Navy. He doesn't even have a high school diploma. He doesn't even have his O-levels. And there he is telling the commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet,

the Japanese are going to be here. And it's a little hard for the old Navy to swallow this, but he gets it done. You're right. That's a triumph that has almost nothing to do with Washington and the Office of Strategic Services. Code breaking against Japan was generally a success, but once again, nothing to do with OSS. That was the Army Signal Corps, and its product

was channeled through Army intelligence to the decision makers downtown. So what you see here still is a remnant of what I mentioned earlier, the cottage industry phase where you have a craftsman here, a craftsman there, and there's no overarching power. There's nothing that really guides them. In the UK, you have a much more cohesive set of rulers. You also have a guy, Winston Churchill, who's been running governments since around the turn of the century. And you have things like the JIC. You have a committee that meets and talks about intelligence policy and intelligence operations. So the US still has quite a ways to go in 1942 when it does Midway. Tell me then, what does the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services,

what successes would you chalk up? Would you place at their door? That's the $64,000 question. I would give them credit for existing, A. It's quite something to build an organization from absolute zero, right? And you get up to a total of 13,000 people, most of whom are gainfully employed by 1943-44. So that's quite an achievement. You also recruit an amazing amount of talent, some of the best and the brightest in the country, and put them to work. The problem is you can't create a working institution, especially in a subtle and complicated field like intelligence, in two or three years. So they have problems with

distribution. They create great reports, but they never quite figure out how to get them to the right decision makers or to get the decision makers interested in absorbing them. It takes them a long time to pick up on how to do espionage, right? The great way to do espionage is to have a decades-long plan like the Soviets did. And so, if you're starting and, you know, it's hurry up and win the war, that's a complicated thing. And so, OSS only has really one strategic success in espionage, and that's a gentleman who brings documents from the Nazi foreign office to Allen Dulles in Switzerland. So I would give him credit for something below the strategic level.

So something closer to tactical. They're good at line crossers, especially after D-Day. So French spies or French citizens who live in the area, they get them to go across the lines, see what the Germans are up to, come back and report. So more or less 50 miles out from the front lines. OSS is pretty good at that. And that's something that I credit Donovan with and his staff in London, which is working closely with SOE, by the way. And there's also good operations that are conducted with SOE, the Jedbirds, small teams that parachute behind the German lines. It's not a great strategic success, once again, but it's something closer to the tactical. They produce intelligence, sort of reconnaissance reports. This German division

is over there. That division is over here. And they link up closely with the French resistance, which provides a lot of intelligence before D-Day, by the way. How much credit do they deserve for D-Day itself, do you think? The plan, the deception? Because I know a lot of Brits who would claim a lot of credit for that. But I guess there's enough credit to go around. I would say D-Day is an allied intelligence success. And there are a number of components of that success. Code breaking is a huge part of it. And that is both Bletchley Park reading German enigma traffic and the United States reading Japanese diplomatic traffic.

The Japanese ambassador in Berlin happens to be a former military attache and a Japanese general. And he tours the fortifications in Normandy. And he writes this wonderful report, 32 pages, that the Americans intercept and decode and send back over the Atlantic as a pamphlet. And this is like a Michelin guide to the fortifications at D-Day. Bletchley Park is great at producing German order of battle, figuring out from the message traffic who's sending what and where they're located. The French Resistance does a great job of reporting, as I mentioned earlier.

They're all over the place. Plus, they know the turf. So OSS and SOE make their contribution, but the biggest contributions are from other groups. And I should also mention aerial reconnaissance is huge too. So these resources overlap and produce a comprehensive picture of the German defenses in Europe in the spring of 1944. You listened to Dan Snow's History Hit. I'm talking about the birth of American intelligence. More coming up. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga.

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Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. I'm so interested in US military and intelligence history. In that very brief period, right at the end of the war, before it was clear that they were locked in a gigantic, hegemonic struggle against the Soviet Union, if indeed there was a pause, what happens in intelligence history in that short term? So from the end of the OSS to the birth of the famous CIA? So right at the end of the war, there's a, I call it a food fight. There's a big struggle in Washington about who's going to do what after the war. This is progress in the sense that after earlier wars, the United States tended to send both its soldiers and its spies

home and say, we'll call you when the next war comes. In this case, there's consensus that we need to keep intelligence going after the war. Part of it is driven by Pearl Harbor and the atomic bomb. So a sense that we need to be able to prevent an atomic Pearl Harbor. The Soviets are not identified as the capital T-H-E enemy at this point, but there is this sense that there are still bad things lurking out there and we need to know what they are. So what is the United States going to have after the war? OSS is sent

home for various reasons, which I can get into if you're interested, but part of it is Donovan. Washington's just had enough of him. And there's consensus that we're going to keep the code breakers and we're going to improve ever closer ties between American code breakers and British code breakers. But you don't want to stand on only one leg in the intelligence world. What happens if you lose one kind of source? If you lose an enemy code and it goes dark, then you want to have a spy who can fill in for that. Ideally, they complement each other, but sometimes you rely on one or the other. But you want to have some kind of redundancy in there. So you want something like OSS. So there's this big argument that goes on. What's it going to be like? Who's it going to work for? Is it going to work for the president? Is it going to work for one of the secretaries? And it's basically unresolved. In 1946, Truman says, enough. Early 1946, he says, you got to do something. It may not be perfect, but let's just put a marker down and start to adjust from there. And he creates something called the Central Intelligence Group, which is not exactly an

agency. It's more like a committee. But that's the first step on the road to the post-war CIA. The development of that into the CIA, is that a response to global competition with the Soviets? What is it that gives that impetus for that creation? I think it's fair to say that it is the Soviets. To people who were in touch with the Soviets, even in 1945, after the fighting's over, it's like, this ain't going to be easy. So there is that growing realization. Of course, there's Churchill's speech, the Iron Curtain speech that he delivers over

here, if memory serves, in 46. So there's the sense that there is this threat. And the other thing is Harry Truman, who is one of the heroes of my book. Harry Truman's an orderly guy. Harry Truman is somebody who says, we've got to do this right. We've got to think about what we're doing. We've got to make sure the institutions work right. And so when you get those two things together, you get the Soviet threat and you get Truman, who remains president until 1952,

you see the growth of institutions. So in 1946, Truman creates the Central Intelligence Group by executive order. 1947, when he creates the CIA, that's a piece of legislation. So he gets credit from me for being an institution builder. I've got to ask, I know we're straying beyond your book now, but you worked at the CIA, you worked at the museum there, you're a historian, you know the archive. Is it strange for you that people's habit over the last 60 years has been to blame any unexplained event, any curiosity in the entire world as being down to the CIA? Is that flattering? Is it laughable?

What is your response? You see some of this in World War II. Part of it's the American ambivalence towards intelligence. As far as I can reconstruct in the UK, MI5 and MI6 are just accepted as necessary organs of government. In the United States, it's never that way. At the end of the war, you see this argument over what powers a CIA, all lowercase at this point, would have. And Truman famously says, I don't want a Gestapo. And that's kind of reflecting the American ambivalence. I want intelligence, I want information, but I don't want Gestapo. And there's a suspicion that anything that doesn't operate in daylight, anything that is not completely transparent, that there's something wrong there, that there's a conspiracy that is not in the average citizen's best interest. So I see it as a function of the continuing American

ambivalence towards intelligence organizations. You even see that today. You see various conspiracy theories that, to me, and it's not just because I used to work in the field, but some of these conspiracy theories that you see are pretty far-fetched. But I think that's a reflection of the American ambivalence that there's something going on and we don't know what it is. Speaking as a historian and looking at a broader picture, the strength of America comes from all the many strains that we have in this country. And that means the strains are very different and sometimes they clash. But in the UK, around this time, you see a far more homogenous society and government. People accept the same basic assumptions. They might not like each other. I mean, Labour might not like the Conservative Prime Minister and so forth. But you see a lot more agreement about the basic ingredients of government. So long story short, America has always been ambivalent about intelligence work, and I'm guessing will continue to be. I also think on that point that it's like when you look at conspiracy theories involving

Soros or Bill Gates or the Murdoch family, there's a desire, I think, from normal people like us who walk the streets to believe that someone somewhere is in control of this mad anarchic journey that we're on. And even if you don't agree with them, even if you think the CIA are deeply evil, it's somehow comforting to think that there are desks in Washington or in Northern Virginia where decisions are made. And even if they're shadowy people you disagree with, decisions are made that make the world go round. I think you're right. I mean, if you go back and you look at something like, so 1968 is a terrible year in American history. So you have the prominent murders of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King. When a historian takes a look at them, you can go one of two ways. You can

say, well, there had to be some kind of guiding hand in both of these assassinations. And we can't just accept that basically a busboy in a hotel took it upon himself to kill the leading candidate for president. And on the other hand, a loner like James Earl Ray took it upon himself to kill the leading civil rights figure. So it's a lot more satisfying to say, hey, we're just not finding it yet. There's something else out there. There's another power that we need to keep looking for. So I don't know, if you're a historian like me, you tend to lean towards the Berkey side of things, tend to lean towards, well, you know, a number of unfortunate things came together in just the right way. And that's how it happened,

as opposed to there was a conspiracy and things unfolded in an orderly sense. You just have to keep trying to penetrate the veil to figure out what the conspiracy is. The haphazard and the chaotic. Thank you so much for coming on, Nick. I'd love to talk to you another time about more recent CIA history, but your fascinating book is called? Need to Know, World War II and the Rise of American Intelligence. Well, we needed to know. Thank you for coming and sharing all that with us. with us my pleasure dan it's great talking to you this part of the history of our country all of our god you