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Authors: Allen W. Dulles
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were at work on a world-wide basis, except for Latin America, where the FBI was operating, and parts of the Far Eastern Command, which General MacArthur had already pre-empted.
Its guerilla and resistance branch, modeled on the now well-publicized British Special Operations Executive (SOE) and working closely with the latter in the European Theater, had already begun to drop teams of men and women into France, Italy and Yugoslavia and in the China-Burma-India Theater of war. The key idea behind these operations was to support, train and supply already existing resistance movements or, where there were none, to organize willing partisans into effective guerilla units. The Jedburghs, as they were called, who dropped into France, and Detachment 101, the unit in Burma, were among the most famous of these groups. Later the OSS developed special units for the creation and dissemination of black propaganda, for counterespionage, and for certain sabotage and resistance tasks that required unusual talents, such as underwater demolitions or technical functions in support of regular intelligence tasks. In conjunction with all these undertakings, it had to develop its own training schools.
Toward the end of the war, as our armies swept over Germany, it created special units for the apprehension of war criminals and the recovery of looted art treasures as well as for tracking down the movements of funds which, it was thought, the Nazi leaders would take into hiding in order to make a comeback at a later date. There was little that it did not attempt to do at some time or place between 1942 and the war’s end.
For a short time after V-J Day, it looked as though the U.S. would gradually withdraw its troops from Europe and the Far East. This would probably have included the disbanding of intelligence operations. In fact, it seemed likely at the end of 1945 that we would do what we did after World War I—fold our tents and go back to business-as-usual. But this time, in contrast to 1919 when we repudiated the League of Nations, we became a charter member of the United Nations and gave it our support in hopes that it would grow up to be the keeper of world peace.
If the Communists had not overreached themselves, our government might well have been disposed to leave the responsibility for keeping the peace more and more to the United Nations. In fact, at Yalta Stalin asked President Roosevelt how long we expected to keep our troops in Europe. The President answered, not more than two years. In view of the events that took place in rapid succession during the postwar years, it is clear that in the period between 1945 and 1950 Premier Stalin and Mao Tse-tung decided that they would not wait for us to retire gracefully from Europe and Asia; they would kick us out.
Moscow installed Communist regimes in Poland, Rumania and Bulgaria before the ink was dry on the agreements signed at Yalta and Potsdam. The Kremlin threatened Iran in 1946, and followed this in rapid succession by imposing a Communist regime on Hungary, activating the civil war in Greece, staging the takeover of Czechoslovakia and instituting the Berlin blockade. Later, in 1950, Mao joined Stalin to mastermind the attack on South Korea. Meanwhile, Mao had been consolidating his position on the mainland of China. These blows in different parts of the world aroused our leaders to the need for a world-wide intelligence system. We were, without fully realizing it, witnessing the first stages of a master plan to shatter the societies of Europe and Asia and isolate the United States, and eventually to take over the entire world. What we were coming to realize, however, was the need to learn a great deal more than we knew about the secret plans of the Kremlin to advance the frontiers of Communism.
In his address to Congress on March 12, 1947, President Truman declared that the security of the country was threatened by Communist actions and stated that it would be our policy “to help
Its guerilla and resistance branch, modeled on the now well-publicized British Special Operations Executive (SOE) and working closely with the latter in the European Theater, had already begun to drop teams of men and women into France, Italy and Yugoslavia and in the China-Burma-India Theater of war. The key idea behind these operations was to support, train and supply already existing resistance movements or, where there were none, to organize willing partisans into effective guerilla units. The Jedburghs, as they were called, who dropped into France, and Detachment 101, the unit in Burma, were among the most famous of these groups. Later the OSS developed special units for the creation and dissemination of black propaganda, for counterespionage, and for certain sabotage and resistance tasks that required unusual talents, such as underwater demolitions or technical functions in support of regular intelligence tasks. In conjunction with all these undertakings, it had to develop its own training schools.
Toward the end of the war, as our armies swept over Germany, it created special units for the apprehension of war criminals and the recovery of looted art treasures as well as for tracking down the movements of funds which, it was thought, the Nazi leaders would take into hiding in order to make a comeback at a later date. There was little that it did not attempt to do at some time or place between 1942 and the war’s end.
For a short time after V-J Day, it looked as though the U.S. would gradually withdraw its troops from Europe and the Far East. This would probably have included the disbanding of intelligence operations. In fact, it seemed likely at the end of 1945 that we would do what we did after World War I—fold our tents and go back to business-as-usual. But this time, in contrast to 1919 when we repudiated the League of Nations, we became a charter member of the United Nations and gave it our support in hopes that it would grow up to be the keeper of world peace.
If the Communists had not overreached themselves, our government might well have been disposed to leave the responsibility for keeping the peace more and more to the United Nations. In fact, at Yalta Stalin asked President Roosevelt how long we expected to keep our troops in Europe. The President answered, not more than two years. In view of the events that took place in rapid succession during the postwar years, it is clear that in the period between 1945 and 1950 Premier Stalin and Mao Tse-tung decided that they would not wait for us to retire gracefully from Europe and Asia; they would kick us out.
Moscow installed Communist regimes in Poland, Rumania and Bulgaria before the ink was dry on the agreements signed at Yalta and Potsdam. The Kremlin threatened Iran in 1946, and followed this in rapid succession by imposing a Communist regime on Hungary, activating the civil war in Greece, staging the takeover of Czechoslovakia and instituting the Berlin blockade. Later, in 1950, Mao joined Stalin to mastermind the attack on South Korea. Meanwhile, Mao had been consolidating his position on the mainland of China. These blows in different parts of the world aroused our leaders to the need for a world-wide intelligence system. We were, without fully realizing it, witnessing the first stages of a master plan to shatter the societies of Europe and Asia and isolate the United States, and eventually to take over the entire world. What we were coming to realize, however, was the need to learn a great deal more than we knew about the secret plans of the Kremlin to advance the frontiers of Communism.
In his address to Congress on March 12, 1947, President Truman declared that the security of the country was threatened by Communist actions and stated that it would be our policy “to help
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