A Brief History of the Spy Read Online Free PDF

solving the problems of peace. This will require two things:
    1. That intelligence control be returned to the supervision of the President.
    2. The establishment of a central authority reporting directly to you, with responsibility to frame intelligence objectives and to collect and coordinate the intelligence materialrequired by the Executive Branch in planning and carrying out national policy and strategy.
    This central authority would be led by a director reporting to the president, aided by an Advisory Board consisting of the Secretary of State, the Secretary of War, the Secretary of the Navy, and such other members as the President might subsequently appoint. Its primary aim would be to coordinate all intelligence efforts and the collection ‘either directly or through existing Government Departments and agencies, of pertinent information, including military, economic, political and scientific, concerning the capabilities, intentions and activities of foreign nations, with particular reference to the effect such matters may have upon the national security, policies and interests of the United States’.
    The memo was leaked to the press, and caused an uproar. Columnist Walter Trohan said that it would be ‘an all-powerful intelligence service to spy on the post-war world and to pry into the lives of citizens at home’ which ‘would operate under an independent budget and presumably have secret funds for spy works along the lines of bribing and luxury living described in the novels of [British spy novelist] E. Phillips Oppenhem’.
    Roosevelt took no action on Donovan’s suggestion, and, following the president’s death, his successor Harry S. Truman decided not to allow the OSS to continue post-war, fearing that it would become an ‘American Gestapo’. The order to disband was given on 20 September 1945, and the OSS ceased functioning a mere ten days later, with some of its key capabilities handed over to the War Department as the Strategic Services Unit.
    Yet only four months after he had seen fit to shut down America’s key central intelligence-gathering organization, President Truman signed an executive order establishing the Central Intelligence Group to operate under the direction of the National Intelligence Authority. What had changed?

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A NEW REALPOLITIK
    ‘I can say even today that I do not think any insoluble differences will arise among Russia, Great Britain, and the United States,’ President Roosevelt informed the American people in his ‘fireside chat’ broadcast around the world on Christmas Eve, 1943, following meetings with his counterparts – British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Soviet leader Josef Stalin, and the Chinese Generalissimo, Chiang Kai-shek – in Cairo and Tehran. He went on to say:
    In these conferences we were concerned with basic principles – principles which involve the security and the welfare and the standard of living of human beings in countries large and small.
    To use an American and somewhat ungrammatical colloquialism, I may say that I ‘got along fine’ with Marshal Stalin. He is a man who combines a tremendous, relentless determination with a stalwart good humour. I believe he is truly representative of the heart and soul of Russia; and I believe that we are going to get along very well with him and the Russian people – very well indeed . . .
    The doctrine that the strong shall dominate the weak is the doctrine of our enemies – and we reject it.
    Roosevelt certainly seemed prepared to accept Stalin’s assurances that people in the Baltic states (Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia) would be free to choose whether they stayed under Soviet domination. Although Stalin made it clear that he wanted a far western border for Poland, bringing much of the country under Soviet control, the discussion was postponed. However Stalin’s appetite for increasing Soviet hegemony was noted by Roosevelt’s adviser Charles Bohlen, who told the US ambassador to the Soviet