ABSTRACT
When President Truman signed the National Security Act of 1947 into law, creating the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), he scarcely believed he was creating a new espionage organization for the United States, but rather that he was greatly improving the manner in which important national intelligence would find its way to his desk. Earlier he had disestablished the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the wartime foreign intelligence collection and analytical entity, declaring that he did not want an American Gestapo in peacetime. By 1947, he had changed his mind on the need for a civilian intelligence organization for three principal reasons. First, and most importantly, the lessons of the 1941 Pearl Harbor attack strongly suggested the need for greater early warning of a future surprise attack on the United States. Second, he needed a centralizing intelligence organization that would gather and analyze all the intelligence reports headed for the Oval Office and attempt to make something coherent out of them so he would not have to do it himself. It is not clear that he wanted the new organization to go out and collect intelligence information on its own, as this had been tasked primarily to the Armed Services and to the FBI. Third, he was convinced by Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal and others in his cabinet that the USSR would become a problem now that the Nazis were defeated, and that he needed a window into Stalin’s thinking and imperial ambitions, especially in Western Europe. The Cold War was beginning.
