The CIA was created on September 18, 1947, when the National Security Act of 1947 took effect. The act itself was signed by President Truman on July 26, 1947, but the agency formally came into being on September 18. For the larger history of the agency, see the CIA article.
The agency’s creation was the answer to a specific set of failures. American intelligence in 1945–1947 was dispersed across the Army’s G-2, the Navy’s ONI, the State Department’s research bureau — the FBI, which under J. Edgar Hoover claimed the right to investigate anything touching “subversion.” The Office of Strategic Services had been dissolved by Truman on October 1, 1945, by executive order, and its records and remaining personnel had been scattered to the War and State departments. There was no central authority.
The first formal proposal for a peacetime intelligence agency came from Admiral William D. Leahy, the first Director of Central Intelligence, who in 1946 commissioned a study of the problem. The resulting Eberstadt Report, completed in early 1947, recommended a National Security Council and a central intelligence organization directly answerable to the President. The National Security Act was drafted through the spring of 1947, passed the Senate on July 21 and the House on July 25, and was signed by Truman on July 26. The agency came formally into existence on September 18, 1947.
The first directors
The first Director of Central Intelligence was Admiral Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, a former naval intelligence officer who served from May 1947 to October 1950. Hillenkoetter was widely regarded as too passive for the job. The CIA under him was criticized for its failure to predict the Soviet atomic test in August 1949, for the loss of China in 1949–1950, and for the lack of clear mission definition. Truman replaced him in October 1950 with General Walter Bedell Smith, Eisenhower’s former chief of staff, who ran the agency from 1950 to 1953 and gave it a clearer bureaucratic standing inside Washington.
The decisive appointment, however, was that of Allen Welsh Dulles in February 1953. Dulles had run the OSS’s Bern station during the war, had handled the German intelligence officer who would become the “Fritz Kolbe” case, and had a network of European contacts. Under his leadership, the agency’s clandestine service grew from a few hundred officers to a force of several thousand, Directorate of Plans (later the Directorate of Operations) acquired a near-monopoly on American covert action abroad. The agency’s first headquarters, the “Original Headquarters Building” on the campus that became Langley, was occupied in November 1961.
The founding in context
The CIA’s creation in 1947 should not be read in isolation. It was the same legislative package that produced the National Security Council, the unification of the armed services under the Department of Defense, and a more formal role for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The whole architecture was the answer to what Truman and his advisers understood as the structural failure that had produced Pearl Harbor and the early-Cold War intelligence surprises. As Truman wrote later, the National Security Act was meant to ensure that “the Government should be able to bring its full resources to bear on the problems of national security.” The CIA was a piece of that structure, not the whole of it.
The agency was, from the first, controversial. Walter Lippmann and other commentators objected in 1947 that a secret agency reporting only to the President was incompatible with constitutional government. The Truman administration argued, and most of Congress agreed, that the need for central coordination outweighed the risk. The Church Committee’s 1975 investigation, more than a quarter-century later, returned to many of the same objections. By then, however, the agency was a permanent part of the American national-security apparatus, and every President since Truman has relied on it.