Paul Simpson - A Brief History of the Spy

The Central Intelligence Agency was created by a National Security Act passed by Congress on 26 July 1947 and began operating in September, replacing the Central Intelligence Group which had been brought into existence in January 1946, once Truman appreciated that coordination of the various sources of intelligence data was vital. Admiral Sidney Souers, General Hoyt Vandenburg and then Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter were successive Directors of Central Intelligence during the CIG years, with Hillenkoetter transferring over to the CIA on its formation.

It’s fair to say that the CIA was not an immediate success. According to some reports, they simply weren’t up to the job. There’s a story that is still told in Berlin about the early days of the Agency’s involvement there: networks of agents would be set up secretly operating within the Soviet sector, in accordance with normal espionage principles, but then all those involved were invited to a cocktail party at the American base. This was great in terms of boosting morale for the agents — but it meant that all the Stasi, or the NKVD, had to do was arrest one person, and they could ascertain the identities of not just their one or two contacts, but potentially a whole host of them.

A similar error of judgement caused the loss of multiple teams during the Korean War: ethnic agents who were going to be parachuted into mainland China were trained and lived together, and inevitably shared information about their missions. Betrayal of one team would lead to betrayal of others.

There certainly appeared to be a sorry litany of key world events that the fledgling agency failed to predict, which were highlighted by an article in the New York Herald Tribune in August 1950. Much of this work was carried out by the Office of Reports and Estimates (ORE), which would pay the price for the various failures when the Agency was reorganized in late 1950.

This began with the Soviet takeover of Czechoslovakia in the spring of 1948. The Communists had become the single largest political party in Czechoslovakia in the elections held in 1946, with Klement Gottwald taking office as prime minster under President Edvard Beneš. Even though Beneš hoped to maintain diplomatic links with the West, the Communists took control of key ministries and started a drive towards total power. In September 1947, the newly formed Cominform (a group comprising members from the Communist parties around the world which aimed to spread the communist creed worldwide) noted that Czechoslovakia was the sole East European country in which ‘the complete victory of the working class over the bourgeoisie’ had not been achieved.

Action against non-communist ministers was stepped up, leading to the mass resignation by twenty-one of them in February 1948. Beneš was pushed into a corner, unable to back the non-communists for fear of the Red Army using a communist-backed insurrection as a pretext to invade. Gottwald threatened a general strike unless Beneš created a communist-led government — still technically a coalition, since it included the Communist Party, and the (pro-Moscow) Social Democrats. It meant that Czechoslovakia was now in the Soviets’ hands, and the elections held that May were purely for show.

The CIA weren’t expecting things to develop so quickly — a refrain that would be heard frequently under Hillenkoetter’s leadership — and they sorely misread the intentions behind the actions. ‘The timing of the coup in Czechoslovakia was forced upon the Kremlin when the non-Communists took action endangering Communist control of the police. A Communist victory in the May elections would have been impossible without such control,’ Hillenkoetter told Truman in a letter on 2 March, while on 10 March, a report suggested that ‘the Czech coup and the [Soviet’s] demands on Finland [for a ‘treaty of mutual assistance’ — a prelude to a takeover]… do not preclude the possibility of Soviet efforts to effect a rapprochement with the West’.

Three months later, the American government was shocked by a communiqué issued by the Cominform on 28 June, expelling Yugoslavia from its ranks. ‘The leadership of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia has pursued an incorrect line on the main questions of home and foreign policy, a line which represents a departure from Marxism-Leninism,’ it stated. The Communist Party had placed itself ‘outside the family of the fraternal Communist Parties, outside the united Communist front and consequently outside the ranks of the Information Bureau’. The CIA had not put the various pieces of intel together to foresee Stalin splitting with someone regarded as one of his staunchest allies, Yugoslav prime minister Marshal Josip Tito.

In fact, the relationship between the two men had been rocky for some time, despite some surface signs of trust, such as the Cominform placing its headquarters in Belgrade. Tito had his own very clear ideas about how much he wanted his country to be under Soviet domination — he was happy to cooperate with Russia, and to emulate such concepts as the Five-Year Plan (Stalin’s grandiose centralized economic plans), but they would be implemented in a way that suited Yugoslavia, not the USSR. There were tensions over Tito’s use of troops in Albania, and his plans for a joint Yugoslav-Bulgarian Balkan Federation, which Stalin at first denounced, and then suddenly demanded be speeded up (possibly so he could plant pro-Moscow Bulgarians in strong positions in the joint organization).

Letters were flying between Moscow and Belgrade, with Tito eventually pointing out that ‘No matter how much each of us loves the land of Socialism, the Soviet Union, he can in no case love less his country, which is also building Socialism.’ Moscow announced on 12 June that Belgrade would no longer be hosting the Danube navigation conference, claiming the city would have ‘difficulty in providing the necessary facilities’, a charge the Yugoslavs denied. The split followed two weeks later — and would lead to Yugoslavia ploughing a different course from other Communist countries for many years to come.

Although the CIA had noted developments, they were criticized for not predicting the cataclysmic nature of the split, and the potential for change within the Soviet-dominated countries. In his written response to President Truman following the Herald Tribune article, DCI Hillenkoetter would point out:

CIA noted that Tito was taking energetic steps to purge the Yugoslav Communist Party of diversionists, and on 10 June reported that the Yugoslav government was groping for a policy that would make it ‘the Balkan spearhead of evangelical and expansionist Communism’. When Yugoslavia defied the USSR on June 20 by insisting that the Danube Conference be held at Belgrade, the CIA estimated that the Kremlin faced a serious problem in reconciling within the Satellite states the conflict between national interests and international Communism.

In other words, yes, they did spot what was going on, but no one could have guessed it would be that serious.

The split between Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union was thrown into shadow by the start of another major rift between Russia and its former wartime allies, with the blockade of the non-Soviet sectors of Berlin that began in earnest on 24 June 1948. However, on this occasion, the accusation that the CIA failed to give adequate warning of this was not just unfair — it was manifestly wrong.

As part of the Potsdam Treaty which divided Germany into four sectors — run by Britain, France, the US and the USSR — Berlin itself was similarly divided. This was a constant thorn in Stalin’s side: it provided a staging-post for American and British intelligence deep in the heart of Soviet East Germany; disaffected and reluctant citizens could find a haven from Communism by claiming asylum there and it was a reminder that Stalin had failed to achieve everything he wanted from the end of the war. The Western sectors were heavily reliant on cooperation from the Soviets, and when Stalin took exception to the way in which Britain, France and America were advancing with democracy and a new currency within occupied Germany, he decided that he wanted the allies out of Berlin. Pressure on what he regarded as the weak point of the coalition might also lead to a permanent split between the various states.