Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [87]
Two years into his presidency, Truman ended Edgar’s hopes of achieving his most ambitious dream, control over foreign intelligence. This was something he had been angling for as early as 1940, when he proposed an FBI Special Intelligence Service, with agents stationed all over the world. This was the dream he was nurturing when he fought his hated rival, William Donovan, for control of overseas intelligence. Though forced to settle for jurisdiction over just a slice of the global territory, Latin America, his real ambition remained worldwide.
Before the war was over, Edgar had again been talking privately of a worldwide network of FBI agents. In London, U.S. diplomats suspected he already had undercover men in place in the embassy code room, snooping on State Department communications. Donovan’s men watched the FBI nervously.
In November 1944, at Roosevelt’s request, General Donovan had produced a blueprint for peacetime intelligence. It foresaw a ‘central intelligence authority’ under the personal supervision of the President and, Donovan hoped, with himself at its head. Edgar said there was no need for such an agency, and pressed for a return to pre-war arrangements, with the FBI holding the reins. Suddenly there was a string of press attacks on Donovan’s plans, warning of the dangers of a ‘Super Spy System.’ Donovan was convinced that one of the stories, based on a top-secret memorandum, had been deliberately planted by Edgar.1
Edgar’s machinations came to nothing, however, with Truman in the White House. The President told Budget Director Harold Smith he was ‘very much against building up a Gestapo’ at the FBI. Far from allowing it to expand, he thought the Bureau should be ‘cut back as soon as possible to at least the pre-war level.’
Edgar went on lobbying to secure what he claimed was his turf. Generals and admirals, congressmen and senators were persuaded to plead his cause at the White House. They obliged because they, too, had territory to protect, and because some believed Edgar’s claim, dating back to the war, that Donovan’s OSS was ‘hiring a bunch of Bolsheviks.’ A check conducted after the war, by Edgar’s own agents, identified no Communists in what remained of the organization.
Truman turned a deaf ear to Edgar’s claim to both domestic and foreign intelligence. ‘One man shouldn’t operate both,’ he told his aide Harry Vaughan. ‘He gets too big for his britches.’ The President rarely agreed to see Edgar, and slapped him down hard when they met to discuss this issue. ‘Hoover tried to argue with the President,’ said Vaughan. ‘Truman said no, and when Hoover persisted, he said, “You’re getting out of bounds.”’
The President eventually approved the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency, as a response to the real threat of Soviet subversion, but with no role for Edgar. The CIA was to be responsible to the President, through a National Security Council, and its focus was to be on intelligence evaluation rather than field operations. (The ‘covert action’ capacity, for which the Agency is now best known, was a later development.)
Though Donovan never headed the Agency, Edgar also had to swallow the fact that it was essentially the general’s brainchild. The creation of the CIA, moreover, stripped Edgar even of his wartime windfall, the territories south of the Mexican border. The FBI’s various overseas posts, in London, Paris and Rome, Ottawa and Mexico City, survived only for liaison purposes. Nevertheless, Edgar defiantly continued intelligence-gathering in Mexico, which duplicated CIA operations far into the future.
‘So furious’ was Edgar about the creation of the CIA, said William Sullivan, ‘that he gave specific instructions that under no circumstances were we to give any documents or information to the newly established CIA …’ ‘Hoover pursued a scorched-earth policy,’ said future CIA Director Richard Helms. ‘He cleaned out all the files, wouldn’t allow his