Creating an American
Intelligence Academy:
An Important Lesson from the Past

by Dean Andromidas

[Print version of this article]

Dec. 13, 2019—Lyndon H. LaRouche’s 2004 article, published under the title, “How Can Intelligence Serve an Un-Intelligible President?” calls for a reform of the American Intelligence Community, with the founding of an Intelligence Academy as its central focus. Any reform must follow the principles laid out, but ignored, in LaRouche’s proposal. In an effort to make that possible, an identification of past and successful reorganizations will aid in guiding reforms as well as the establishment of an Intelligence Academy called for by LaRouche.

This article will provide the background for motivating LaRouche’s proposal. It will tell the story of a very important office of the Central Intelligence Agency, one which neither planned the overthrow of governments nor the assassination of leaders. It neither carried out secret operations nor spied on Americans. There are few books and articles written about it, and there are no biographies of its principal leaders. None of its principal leaders wrote a tell-all memoir or was the subject of lurid fiction.

I refer to the Office of National Estimates (ONE), founded in 1951, which would come to perform the central and most important function of a then crippled Central Intelligence Agency. Overseen by a Board of Estimates (BOE), from 1951 until it was dismantled in 1973 under orders of James Schlesinger and Henry Kissinger, it sought to provide the American Presidency strategic intelligence estimates free from the prejudices of a policy establishment increasingly being taken over by a doctrine more suitable for the likes of the British Empire than our republic. Its creation was part of an effort by key patriotic individuals to block what had become a preventive (later called pre-emptive) war doctrine under President Truman.

The individuals involved include names all but forgotten in popular history: General Walter Bedell Smith, who served as Chief of Staff to General Dwight D. Eisenhower in World War II; William J. Donovan, founder of this country’s first strategic intelligence service, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS); and historians William Langer and Sherman Kent, who were the fathers of American strategic intelligence analysis; and others. All served in World War II and all possessed a high degree of professionalism and integrity.

Our story begins with the outbreak of the Korean War. Truman called it an intelligence failure, the failure to forecast an act of aggression by the Communist bloc; others, including many of the protagonists in this report, saw it as a failure of the policy of the Truman Administration. That policy began in 1946, only a few months after the close of World War II, when Truman invited Winston Churchill to Fulton, Missouri to deliver his infamous Iron Curtain speech calling for the control of nuclear weapons by the “English-speaking peoples” as the only defense against the Soviet Union. Churchill thus foreshadowed what would soon emerge as a call for preventive war against the Soviet Union, which was followed by a systematic march to a “Cold War,” that by June 1950 threatened to escalate into a devastating nuclear war.

When war on the Korean Peninsula broke out, our protagonists saw that if a catastrophic miscalculation were to be avoided, the nation would need a strategic intelligence capability, one which could not only forecast the intentions of the adversary, but evaluate the validity of the proposed policies drafted by policy makers whose capacities, if not intentions, were a danger to the country.

Truman’s Preventive War Doctrine
and the CIA

In August, 1949, the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb, several years before the 1953 date forecast by the CIA. The hardliners in the Truman administrations, led by Paul Nitze, Dean Acheson (Secretary of State) and George Kennan as well as others, sought an “appropriate response.”

Shortly after the Soviet nuclear test, at the request of George Kennan, director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, the Defense Department’s Joint Intelligence Committee submitted an estimate of the nature of the nuclear threat at the point that the Soviets would have 10, 50, 100, and 200 nuclear bombs, taking as given that the Soviets could launch war once in possession of a deliverable stockpile of bombs.

That estimate, designated JIC-502, was not a truthful estimate, but an apocalyptic sales pitch for a massive military buildup that could easily be interpreted as preparation for pre-emptive war. It claimed that once the Soviets had 200 atomic bombs, they could launch a surprise attack and defeat the U.S.

It claimed that by mid-1951, the Soviet Union would have 50 atomic bombs, which could destroy the command and control establishment of the U.S. military as well as several cities. By 1952, the Soviet Union would have 100 atomic bombs, which would cause such damage that it would remove the U.S. capability to oppose the Soviet expansion of power in Europe and Asia, and by 1954, the “year of maximum danger,” the Soviet Union would have 200 bombs that could “delay indefinitely the industrial and military mobilization of the U.S., Canada, and the UK.”

These assertions were made without any analysis of Soviet capabilities to actually deliver the weapons, let alone produce them at that rate. At the time, the only operational Soviet bomber was the Tupolev Tu-4, a copy of the U.S. World War II era B-29 bomber that dropped the A-bombs on Japan. The Tu-4 could by no means reach the U.S. Nor did the estimate even attempt to analyze Soviet strategic intentions.

JIC-502 claimed that a nuclear-armed Soviet Union had introduced the notion that “a tremendous military advantage would be gained by the power that struck first and succeeded in carrying through an effective surprise attack.” Thus victory was assured for the nation that struck first—justifying preventive first strike. The estimate asserted that the Soviets required only enough bombs to destroy specific targets that would prevent the U.S. from striking back.

While the estimate was fully accepted by the Army, Air Force and State Department, as well as the National Security Council, it was totally rejected by the Navy, which had no problem seeing through the sophistry of its reasoning.

In February 1950, the CIA’s Office of Research and Estimates drafted a rebuttal of the apocalyptic JIC-502, with its “Estimate of the effects of the Soviet possession of the atomic bomb upon the security of the United States and upon the probabilities of direct Soviet military action.” Dubbed ORE 91-49, the CIA’s rebuttal warned:

It is always possible, therefore, that the U.S.S.R. would initiate a war if it should estimate that a Western attack was impending. [Nonetheless,] It is not yet possible to estimate with any precision the effects of Soviet possession of the Atomic Bomb upon the probability of war. The implications of atomic warfare, either military or psychological, have not yet been fully appraised. In particular, we have as yet no clear indications concerning the place of atomic warfare in Soviet military concepts or concerning the effect of U.S. retaliatory capabilities upon any Soviet consideration of a deliberate and unprovoked atomic attack on the U.S.

The State Department, Army and Air Force totally rejected the CIA’s rebuttal. The Air Force called the estimate “dangerous as an intelligence basis for national policy,” and charged that it failed to—

recognize that we are at war right now, and that an all-out national effort designed to maintain permanent military and political superiority over the Soviet Union is required.

Rejecting the CIA estimate, the Truman administration proceeded to draft its “appropriate response” in what became a National Security Council policy paper, designated NSC-68. Declaring that the United States was already in the moral equivalent of war with the Soviet Union, it called for a massive military buildup, both conventional and nuclear, not seen since World War II, to be completed by 1954, dubbed the “year of maximum danger,” when JIC-502 claimed the Soviets would achieve military superiority and be able to launch war against the U.S. It went on to assert that a policy of mere defense was not sufficient, but—

must envisage the political and economic measures with which the military shield behind which the free world can work to frustrate the Kremlin design by the strategy of the cold war. . . . The whole success of the proposed program hangs ultimately on recognition by this Government, the American people, and all free peoples, that the cold war is in fact a real war in which the survival of the free world is at stake. . . .

This proposed military buildup would increase the defense budget from 10 billion to 40 billion dollars. In 1953, it was planned to further increase military spending to 65 billion, but was cut back to 40 billion by the incoming Eisenhower administration.

While NSC-68 was being drafted, another NSC policy paper was also being drafted that would in effect integrate the implementation of NSC-68 with the British Empire. Titled “A Report to the National Security Council by the Executive Secretary on British Military Commitments” (NSC-75) and completed on July 10, 1950, it was an audit of the British Empire’s military capability.

Requested after the Soviet A-bomb test and drafted with the involvement of Paul Nitze, the report revealed that the British had more than 700,000 men under arms and deployed throughout the empire. The report concluded that if the Empire collapsed, and Britain could no longer carry out these deployments, it would be impossible for the U.S. to fill the vacuum while carrying out current U.S. policy, especially NSC-68. It concluded that it would be more cost effective to aid Britain in saving its Empire!

Competent military commanders, including General Dwight D. Eisenhower and General Douglas MacArthur, understood that deterrence does not require absolute military superiority, especially in the age of nuclear warfare; it requires military capabilities that clearly demonstrate the futility of military aggression by any potential enemy.

Moreover, they knew the impossibility of carrying out a nuclear war. As President, Eisenhower often said, “The only thing worse than losing a nuclear war is winning a nuclear war.” Eisenhower understood the necessity for military doctrine to be complemented by a policy where statecraft, armed with the tools of diplomacy, could reach out to a potential enemy, seeking agreements that put into motion policies and processes that serve to eliminate the potential causes for war. To do otherwise merely reinforces your potential enemy’s determination to counter force with force.

Upon becoming President, Eisenhower was determined to end the fatuous reasoning of the hardliners and to implement a new defense policy with his so-called “New Look,” based on classical deterrent doctrine and technological attrition. Eisenhower saw the idea of a “year of maximum danger” as “pure rot”:

I have always fought the idea of x units by y date. I am not going to be stampeded by someone coming along with some trick formula of “so much by this date.” I’m damn tired of the Air Force sales programs. I will not have anyone in Defense who wants to sell the idea of a larger and larger force. . . .

Korean War

On June 35, 1950, the North Korean army launched its attack across the 38th Parallel. The Truman administration immediately claimed it was a move by the Soviet Union to launch a global war, labeling it a sneak attack and a new Pearl Harbor. Led by Secretary of State Dean Acheson, in a meeting with the President and his security chiefs, there was a call for immediate U.S. military response. A conveniently forgotten point in that meeting was the fact that the year before, Acheson himself had ordered the withdrawal of American troops from South Korea and had put the Korean Peninsula outside the U.S. strategic perimeter.

By contrast, the invasion was no surprise to General Douglas MacArthur, whose own assessment from as early as 1945 was that the removal of U.S. troops would lead to an invasion. For MacArthur, the entire region of China and the Koreas had been completely militarized as a result of the Sino-Japanese War, World War II, and the Chinese civil war that came an end in 1949. In such an environment, the impetus for “military solutions” was there.

The invasion was also no surprise to the CIA. On February 28, 1949 the CIA’s Office of Research and Estimates produced the estimate, ORE3-49, “Consequences of U.S. Troop Withdrawal from Korea in Spring 1949,” which stated in its summary:

Withdrawal of U.S. Forces from Korea in the spring of 1949 would probably in time be followed by an invasion, timed to coincide with Communist-led South Korean revolts by the North Korea’s People’s Army, possibly assisted by small battle trained units from Communist Manchuria. . . . U.S. troop withdrawal would probably result in a collapse of the U.S.-supported Republic of Korea, an event which would seriously diminish U.S. prestige and adversely affect U.S. security interest in the Far East.

The Korean War should be understood within the context of the Truman administration’s preventive war doctrine and the decision to launch a huge military buildup, as explicitly stated in the Paul Nitze-authored NSC-68. This was a reckless, provocative policy that the Soviet Union viewed as an intention to launch preemptive war.

As the war proceeded, a catastrophe was in the making. On January 11, 1951, the National Security Council passed NSC-100, “Recommended Policies and Actions in Light of the Grave World Situation.” Classified as Top Secret, it was drafted by the NSC’s National Security Resources Board, under the direction of its chairman Stuart Symington. NSC-100 called for nothing less than World War III. The document states:

On the political front, the free nations are on the defensive everywhere. This is primarily because during an era in which the naked power of aggression heeds only naked power, the free nations do not in political discussion bring up their prime power advantage, the atomic bomb and the capacity to deliver it. That advantage now gives possible superiority of power to the free world, but it is a power which every week from here on will steadily decline.

NSC-100 called for a declaration of China as the military aggressor and then called for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Korea. This would be followed by a massive air campaign against China’s lines of communications and its munitions industry. Among it aims was to “Establish a United States position of strength in the Far East, thus obtaining an active strategic base against Russia in the event of war with the Soviets.” If the UN would not approve such action, the “United States should proceed unilaterally.” It went on:

On the political front, the United States could make its greatest contribution to the defense of Western Europe and other areas of interest to the free nations by announcing, preferably through NATO, that any further Soviet aggression in areas to be spelled out, would result in the atomic bombardment of Soviet Russia itself.

Among the goals was to:

Establish the moral justification for use of United States’ atom bombs in retaliation against Soviet aggression. . . . And thus afford the United States a measure of freedom it does not now have to use the atom bomb under circumstances other than retaliation out of what devastation might be left of this country after an initial atomic attack.

Truman referred this call for World War III to the Departments of State and Defense for consideration. Fortunately this policy was never fully carried out. This might have had to do with the development that I will now discuss.

A New CIA Is Created

Within days of the end of World War II, President Truman infamously ordered the complete shutdown of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), calling it a potential Gestapo—a potential secret police. This left the United States without a national intelligence service. Yet, less than a year later, Truman issued executive orders to create a Central Intelligence Group, which in 1947 was superseded by the Central Intelligence Agency under the 1947 National Security Act. Under this Act, the Director of the CIA served as the President’s chief intelligence authority with the title, Director of Intelligence, and sat as Chairman of the Intelligence Advisory Board, comprising the intelligence directors of the Army, Navy, Air Force and State Department.

Following a short directorship under Lt. General Hoyt S. Vandenberg, the directorship fell to Admiral Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter. Unable to attain a high level of authority, Hillenkoetter was unable to bring the CIA’s far more truthful estimates to bear on White House policy.

Before the Korean War broke out, a report calling for the reorganization of the CIA—the Dulles-Jackson-Correa Report—was issued. The primary authors were OSS veteran Allen Dulles, who had returned to practicing law at that time; Mathias F. Correa, another veteran of the OSS and a member of the staff of Secretary of Defense James Forrestal; and William Harding Jackson, a New York lawyer and investment banker with J.C. Whitney, who had served in military intelligence and the OSS during World War II.

The report called for a strong CIA director. In June 1950, after the outbreak of the war, General Walter Bedell Smith accepted the appointment under an order by Truman. Why Truman made such an astute decision is one of the great paradoxes often seen in history. With the U.S. engaged in a ground war in Asia, Bedell Smith saw the necessity for the CIA to be capable of providing the president with truthful intelligence, while countering insane policy initiatives, like the above-mentioned NSC-100.

Who was Walter Bedell Smith?

Bedell Smith served as Eisenhower’s chief of staff for the Allied General Staff in Europe during World War II. A World War I veteran, he was arguably the most accomplished staff officer in the history of the American Army. His views of the Russians and his strategic outlook paralleled those of Eisenhower. He strongly disagreed with Churchill’s 1946 Iron Curtain Speech and strongly opposed a preventive war doctrine.

Smith had fought in World War I and seen how the British and French could not and would not end it, and when the war did end, how they laid the basis for a new war. He was among those officers,—which included Douglas MacArthur, George C. Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower—who were committed to building an army that would ensure an early victory, in order to create the basis for a lasting peace.

Committed as they were to building a war-winning military and industrial capability, these individuals understood, as Franklin D. Roosevelt did, that the threat to peace came not only from Nazism and fascism but from the 19th century methods of the British, French and other imperial powers. They agreed with FDR’s intention to build a war-time alliance with the Soviet Union, one that hopefully would create the necessary trust to continue after the victory, to carry out the work of dismantling the European empires.

In 1941, Bedell Smith held the important position of Secretary of the General Staff, making him the executive officer of Chief of Staff George Marshall, and in 1942 he became the Secretary to the Combined Chiefs of Staff. In this capacity he took part in war planning at the highest level, and in this capacity he often briefed Roosevelt directly on strategic matters.

British General Sir Kenneth Strong, who served under General Eisenhower and Bedell Smith in the Allied and then the Supreme Command headquarters in World War II, was a close admirer as well as friend to both Eisenhower and Bedell Smith. At the close of the War in Europe, Strong recalled:

I had come to regard myself as one of Bedell Smith’s closest friends, but toward the end of the war he made a kind of solemn declaration to me. We had, he said, been close personal and official friends, but after 14 July, things would have to change. Though he would always remain my personal friend, I should bear in mind that the United States regarded Russia as the country of the Future and his official co-operation would be with them. Britain was old-fashioned and out of date. The war had finished her, and the Americans must ally themselves with the nations of the future. I was a little surprised to hear this from Bedell Smith, but I am afraid that he was only repeating what many Americans were thinking at the time.

Roosevelt’s death brought a much smaller man into the presidency, and over the next four years Bedell Smith, like many Americans, saw that trust between America and the Soviet Union disappear, and saw the relationship turning into a very dangerous rivalry that could ignite a far more catastrophic war.

Faced with an intellectually and morally challenged President, one increasingly captured by a security team pursuing a provocative policy toward the Soviet Union, Bedell Smith, as the President’s chief intelligence adviser, saw his most powerful weapon as the truth—that is, truthful and compelling strategic intelligence that would counter adventurous policies as represented by the NSC-68 and NSC-100 mentioned above.

Bedell Smith’s Solution Paralleled LaRouche

Bedell Smith’s solution for re-orienting the CIA shared two fundamental characteristics later defined in LaRouche’s “How Can Intelligence Serve an Un-Intelligible President?” These fundamental features are the following:

1. The institution would be independent of the politically controlled policy establishment while possessing a high degree of patriotism and integrity. LaRouche defined its mission:

We require an institution which has no principal mission but the discovery of the truth about the current and prospective future developments affecting the security of the U.S.A. in the performance of its continuing mission, from administration to administration. It must, first of all, provide forewarning, and otherwise advise the instruments of the Federal government, respecting the developing shape of world history. . . .

2. The institution would also have to overcome what LaRouche identified as a fallacy of composition. As LaRouche wrote:

Competent intelligence practice at the higher level of national estimates and policy formation, must not degrade itself to mere Sherlock Holmes-like farce of interpreting facts in an empiricist’s way. We must always focus upon the sets of variously real and merely fictitious notions of controlling principles, which define a kind of physical geometry, a physical geometry, false or true, but nonetheless believed, which controls human mass behavior to the effect of defining the likely, characteristic form of action governing responses within that social system, either within, or among nations.

It is decisions, on estimates and proposed policies of practice, made at that indicated higher level of intelligence functions, which must subsume decisions on interpretation of developments, such as the case of 9/11, and proposed strategic and comparable actions. This requires a cadre of professional intelligence specialists who operate competently at that level of overview of the processes considered. . . .

These conceptions define an intelligence methodology that represents a “species difference” from that of the British. The British like to think they are the great masters of the “craft of intelligence.” Nothing could be further from the truth. While General William Donovan welcomed British assistance in certain technicalities of the so-called craft of intelligence, he understood that “species difference” in terms similar to those stated by LaRouche.

The British system is the ultimate “fishbowl.” Its principles are oligarchical. It is in fact a monarchy that rests on a Venetian-like system of oligarchical vested interests that dominate subject nations in a far-flung empire. This domination extends to the vast majority of its own “subjects” in a strictly “class” social system. Warfare takes the form of “cabinet warfare,” since the vested interests of the opposing oligarchy cannot not be completely ignored, lest a republican political revolution be unleashed. The role of “leadership” is strictly confined to that which serves the interests of this Venetian-like system. Since it is a system of vested interests and not one of overarching principle, as it should be in a true republic, in such a system, “decisions by committee,” where compromises are reached among vested interests, are the order of the day.

These vested interests determine the role for British intelligence in their policy of “balance of power” or “geopolitics.” Such a system may serve the interest of the East India Company, or the City of London, but such a system, when modern warfare is employed, has proved to be disastrous, as witnessed in Britain’s performance in two World Wars.

The British managed and still manage their intelligence organization on the basis of this “committee” approach. They love to tout their “Joint Intelligence Committee” as the supreme pinnacle of their self-proclaimed brilliant intelligence system, where all the individual intelligence services are represented, supposedly allowing them to come up with the best intelligence “assessment” or “appreciation” as they call it.

In his report on the British intelligence services in 1945, William Jackson wrote, in a letter to Donovan:

[A Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC)] appreciation is important, then, because it expresses an agreed view of the most responsible intelligence experts based on all available information. Against this obvious advantage, there may be a lesser disadvantage. . . . The result sometimes appears to be a compromise which represents no one’s view, least of all that of the intelligence agency which should know most about the subject. . . .

Totally rejecting this committee approach, both Donovan and Bedell Smith understood the crucial role of individual leadership. Smith had no stomach whatsoever for “joint committees” as were always being proposed by the British. This was a view strongly shared by Donovan himself and was a cardinal principle held by Eisenhower, because it was the basic leadership principle of U.S. military doctrine. Furthermore, the very idea of a joint committee actually taking responsibility for any decision was anathema, because when everyone takes responsibility, in reality, no one takes responsibility.

When Eisenhower’s intelligence G2, the British Brigadier Kenneth Strong, inquired whether Eisenhower’s Chief of Staff, General Bedell Smith, would like to hear the views of the local Joint Intelligence Committee, Smith snapped back, “We’ve hired you for your knowledge and advice. If you are wrong too often, we’ll fire you and hire someone else to take your place.” From that moment, Strong reportedly forgot his British upbringing and took full responsibility for the estimates he presented to Smith and Eisenhower.

Militarily, this leadership principle is embodied in the conception of a General Staff, which must never be merely an efficient bureaucracy to carry out functional tasks, but a system whereby the creativity of leadership is exercised at all levels. Where there is leadership there is both responsibility and authority. The qualities of leadership are not confined to the commander, although he holds ultimate authority and responsibility, but must be exercised at all levels. It is in that context that Bedell Smith saw the mission of the intelligence officer.

In an address at the Army War College, on February 19, 1952, Rear Admiral Felix L. Johnson, Director of Naval Intelligence, described Bedell Smith’s personal view of the intelligence officer by quoting by Smith himself from 1951, where Smith posits the notion of the “inspired class”:

You can never really become an Intelligence Officer of the inspired class unless you happen to be born with that delicate touch which produces a reasonable and measurable evaluation without full knowledge of all the facts . . . but there are characteristics which you can develop even if they do not come as part of your standard equipment at birth. The first is an attitude of constant suspicion—an unwillingness to take anything for granted; the second is a form of scientific mindedness—the ability to approach all things with a sense of analytical inquiry; and finally, perhaps more important than anything else, a restraint which enables one to remain silent.

Bedell Smith Calls Donovan

Bedell Smith’s first move on becoming Director of Central Intelligence was to contact General William Donovan. Their relationship went back to World War I, when Donovan served under MacArthur in the famous Rainbow Division, as battalion commander.

Prior to U.S. entry into World War II, Donovan had succeeded in creating the civilian Office of the Coordinator of Information (COI), as an organization independent of all other departments, whose mission was to provide intelligence directly to the President. In developing the COI, Donovan “invented” what is known as “All Source Intelligence,” drawn from all the departments of government—not only the Army, Navy, State Department and FBI, but also other departments such as Commerce, Agriculture and especially the Library of Congress. The idea was to create a unique intelligence product, drawing on all of these sources, that would serve the requirements of the Presidency.

With the U.S. entry into the war, Donovan proposed to transform the COI into the OSS, with a broader mandate to conduct special operations. In the face of opposition by all government departments, Bedell Smith, then serving as Secretary to the Army General Staff, and later of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, intervened with the idea of attaching the OSS directly to the General Staff. Donovan fully agreed with the proposal.

In 1943, during the Italian campaign, while Smith was Eisenhower’s Chief of Staff in the Supreme Allied Command in Europe, he asked Donovan to draft a proposal for a post-war centralized and professional intelligence service. Donovan responded in a long letter under the title, “The Need in the United States on a Permanent Basis as an Integral Part of our Military Establishment of a Long-Range Strategic Intelligence Organization with attendant ‘Subversion’ and ‘Deception of the Enemy’ Functions.”

While accepting the structure of the CIA as defined by the National Security Act of 1947, Smith—in cooperation with Donovan—worked to re-orient the CIA to create a truth-seeking organization and not a “fishbowl.” The mission of the CIA, for Smith, was the creation of what are called “estimates,” i.e., Strategic Intelligence Estimates that expand to the level of entire nations the military estimate a commander makes of the enemy he is facing. The commander takes into account the strength, disposition, morale, and all related intelligence available to him through his General Staff and makes a determination of what he believes are the intentions of the enemy. It has to be both truthful and precise, while looking into the future.

The Strategic Estimate goes one step further than the evaluations of field commanders, in that it is an estimate of the intentions and capabilities of an entire nation or group of nations. It must take into account not only that nation’s political leadership, but its economic, scientific, and social conditions.

For Bedell Smith, the production of these estimates was the principal mission of the CIA. All of its intelligence-gathering capabilities, including the clandestine services, were to be focused on the production of these estimates, which would be presented to the President.

Bedell Smith’s mandate as CIA Director not only designated him as director of the CIA itself, but as Chairman of the Intelligence Advisory Committee (IAC), which included the directors of military intelligence (Army, Navy and Air Force), State Department, and the FBI. Unlike the British Joint Intelligence Committee, the CIA Director, as Director of Intelligence for the President, had the final responsibility in the decisions of this board. The drafting of the estimates was the responsibility of the CIA, done in cooperation with other agencies and departments, which made their contributions. The IAC, in a sense, oversaw that process.

He also worked to ensure that the CIA was an institution of the Presidency, not of any single administration, and that it maintained a strict separation from the making of policy, the latter being the responsibility of the National Security Council.

His second challenge was to create an institution that could overcome the fishbowl problem inherent in the drafting of intelligence product. He overcame this problem with the crucial advice of William Donovan. At Smith’s request, on October 13, 1950, Donovan drafted a proposal on how such a board should be organized. Donovan wrote:

[An] Evaluation Group, [composed of] men of experience and imagination and constructive intellects [was required. Such a group might] include a scholar, a strategist familiar with the uses and capabilities of the different services, a scientist with knowledge and experience in current inventions, and two to three broad-gauged men of affairs. A working committee familiar with the skills of research and analysis could collate the information for submission to the Board itself. Final evaluation should be the responsibility of the Board. To impose that duty on the analysts is like a cashier being his own auditor.

Such a board would be similar to the Research and Analysis Branch of the OSS. Donovan asserted:

[It] should be the intellectual base of the organization. Such a concept, together with the putting under one tent the various essential functions of Secret Intelligence and Operations, placed intelligence on a different plane. . . . [Staffing of this new Branch would involve] certain outstanding older and representative economists, scientists and linguistic and other specialists on a consultative basis, [while the] day to day working echelon could well be organized and run by the younger groups in the 40-year bracket. The interplay of the older with the fresher minds should help you a lot in your day to day operations as well as in your evaluation and other studies.

Bedell Smith took Donovan’s fundamental idea and proceeded to re-orient the entire CIA. He transformed what was then the CIA’s Office of Estimates and Analysis into the Office of National Estimates (ONE), to be overseen by an “evaluation group” dubbed the Board of Estimates. While Estimates would be formulated by a team of ONE staffers that would often include experts, including Army, Navy or Air Force intelligence officers, and representatives from the Departments of State and Defense, the work was overseen and evaluated by the BOE. The ONE and its Board of Estimates would become the pinnacle of the CIA structure.

Smith sought potential candidates for this new branch from those who had been thrown out of the intelligence community when Truman disbanded the OSS. He especially brought back many people who had served in the OSS’s original Research and Analysis Branch. First among those contacted was William Langer, an expert in diplomatic history and Chairman of the History Department at Harvard University, who had headed the R&A branch in OSS and who had returned to Harvard after the war. Langer agreed to head ONE for a year.

Another veteran of the R&A branch contacted was Sherman Kent, who was a professor of history at Yale. Kent was an expert in 19th century French history and, at Langer’s departure, would head up the BOE until his retirement in 1967. Kent would play a crucial role as head of ONE and the BOE as we will see below.

As competent historians, Langer and Kent applied their theoretical expertise, bringing an understanding of the relationship between the past, present, and future to the task of intelligence analysis and estimating. Many more historians would join their team.

The choice of other board members closely reflected Donovan’s advice. The group grew to include Maxwell Forster, a Boston lawyer who was known for his linguistic skills and had served on the General Staff under Bedell Smith during World War II; two OSS veterans; Raymond Sontag, a diplomatic historian; Calvin P. Hoover, a professor of economics; Deforest Van Slyck, and Ludwell Montague, two trained historians who had served in military intelligence during World War II and had joined the CIA at its formation; Vice Admiral Bernhard H. Bieri, Sr.; and General Clarence R. Huebner.

The Board of Estimates had at most 26 members and a staff of about 40. The staff was organized according to regional and sectional specializations, while the members of the board were all “generalists,” an arrangement designed to counter the fishbowl syndrome.

The heavy hand of McCarthyism was not welcome. Commenting on the issue of the agency’s security screening, Sherman Kent said, “When an intelligence staff has been screened through [too fine a mesh], its members will be as alike as tiles on a bathroom floor—and about as capable of meaningful and original thought.”

Sherman Kent’s Key Role in Shaping ONE

We know little about Sherman Kent, because, unlike former CIA director Allen Dulles, and James Angleton, the longtime head of the CIA’s counterintelligence, Kent never gave interviews to the press. Even after retirement, he maintained a discretion far stronger than many of those who claimed to have served in the most secret parts of the CIA.

Yet, Sherman Kent played a seminal role in developing not only ONE and the BOE, but also in the profession of “intelligence analyst,” a vocation that hardly existed at the time. We are not talking about the “intelligence agent,” or “spook,” which the layman equates with the CIA, or the “James Bond” fantasy figure popularized by Ian Fleming, himself a member of British intelligence.

While Kent had wanted to stay in intelligence after World War II, the dismantling of the OSS led to the dismissal of many in the OSS R&A branch staff and the transfer of the rest to the State Department, which eventually sent the personnel to various branches of the government. Kent and many others soon left government service. He then spent a year writing his landmark book, Strategic Intelligence for American World Policy, the first study to define the meaning, collection, and evaluation of Strategic Intelligence.

Kent was adamant about the need for the separation of intelligence and policy within government. In his book, he warned that an intelligence analysis once “captured” by the policy makers will end up “swinging behind the ‘policy’ of the operating unit” and thus “prostituting itself in the production of what the Nazis would call Kämpfende Wissenschaft.” The latter can be translated as “combat science” and was coined by Nazi historian Walter Frank, who rewrote history to suit Nazi policy. Frank was infamous for writing “histories” to justify the extermination of the Jews. He committed suicide in 1945 just before the allies could arrest him. For Kent, those in the CIA who crossed that line were “seeking power through sacrificing the truth.” These are strong words reflecting strong convictions and a high degree of integrity.

Kent was also a key intellectual force. He founded Studies in Intelligence, the official internal journal of the CIA. The purpose of that publication, in his mind, was not to write about topical issues such as the order of battle of the Soviet Army, but to write about what he saw as the new discipline of Intelligence Analysis. He also wanted to create an Intelligence Academy, not entirely unlike what Lyndon LaRouche later proposed. But such an academy, as he conceived it, was never formed, nor did his Studies in Intelligence fully live up to Kent’s intentions.

For Kent, an Estimate was not produced to flatter the presidential administration’s policy. He warned that the role of the intelligence officer is to maintain a rigorous, “disinterested objectivity.” He cautioned:

[T]o wish simply for influence can, and upon occasion does, get intelligence to the place where it can have no influence, whatever. By striving too hard in this direction intelligence may come to seem just another policy voice, and an unwanted one at that.

Kent also warned the policy maker:

Let things be such that if our policy-making master is to disregard our knowledge and wisdom, he will never do so because our work was inaccurate, incomplete, or patently biased. Let him disregard us only when he must pay greater heed to someone else. And let him be uncomfortable—thoroughly uncomfortable—about his decision to heed this other. And if the policymakers ignored the considered judgments of their intelligence arm, in favor of their own “intuition,” they would be turning their back on the two instruments by which Western man has since Aristotle steadily enlarged his horizon of Knowledge—the instruments of reason and the scientific method.

It goes without saying that the intelligence officer had to demonstrate a high degree of rigor as well as integrity, with a commitment to the national interest. However, the Estimate or other serious intelligence product, which often must analyze fast-moving strategic and complex developments, could never be the work of a single analyst, although a single analyst often is responsible for a “breakthrough.” It also has to be the work of a process of deliberation, a view often cited by LaRouche in dealing with his own intelligence staff.

Kent was very aware of this need for deliberation—but deliberation which would always struggle to maintain “disinterested objectivity,” and require intelligence officers to be constantly self-conscious of their mental processes to a very high degree. He encouraged the testing of hypothesis, and he was especially on guard against groupthink, when an entire group of analysts immediately come to an interpretation or forecast of events. Working assumptions, for Kent, were always to be vigorously challenged to determine their validity.

As the head of the BOE, his specific task was to ensure the necessary “disinterested objectivity” and the analytical rigor that would hopefully ensure a high degree of truthfulness. BOE member Ludwell Montague described their task as not “administrative” but “wholly substantive,” explaining:

Their days were spent in individual and more often collective efforts on every aspect of the estimates. They met first thing in the morning to hear the day’s news and perhaps discuss it in terms of NIEs [National Intelligence Estimates] in the works to come; they met again often with the ONE staff, often with representatives of the IAC [Intelligence Advisory Committee] agencies to talk about the schedule, to produce terms of reference, to review drafts, and to arrive at duly coordinated texts suitable to present to the Director and the IAC. They invited and listened to ambassadors, officers of the foreign aid program, attachés, members of the numerous military assistance groups (MAG, later MAAG), CIA officers in from the field, and many others. Above all they studied the new intelligence. Each day their reading room received a wide spectrum of the daily take which ranged from routine items like the FBIS [Foreign Broadcast Information Service] reports, [and] CIA, attaché, and State Department cables, to the most sensitive materials that lay in the arcane code word areas on the far side of Top Secret. This was the daily grist for thought and discussion.

Indeed, almost as much as the labor on the draft estimates, the reading of the highly privileged news made its contribution to the collegial nature of the Board. And it was this very group effort that so often resulted in the posing of the right questions and the struggling for the best answers. As one Board member has pointed out, the collegial spirit also made its contribution to a finished product of high quality. There were always, he remarks, one or two colleagues who had not been so immersed in a paper as to be bored with it and willing to let it go forward irrespective of flaws. Seemingly there was almost always one of these fresh brethren who stepped in as a potent “no” man.

This article cannot detail the numerous estimates ONE delivered and their effect on policy; nonetheless many were clearly at odds with those produced by the cold warriors. While they would accept that the Soviet Union, as a communist state, desired to convert the entire world to communism, they knew the leaders of the U.S.S.R. realized that world domination would not come within their lifetime. More importantly, these estimates made clear that the Soviet Union was not considering launching war for world domination.

The ONE estimating on the Soviet Union is described by Harold P. Ford, a former Chairman of the Board of Estimates:

Not least, the estimative batting average of NIEs proved fairly good on a number of key issues. These included: The basic character of the U.S.S.R. and its likely conduct in the world. Here the service that the NIEs performed was to narrow the field of estimative debate and raise the quality of inquiry. In time, the prevailing view of the Intelligence Community came to be that Moscow did intend to expand its influence everywhere it could on every opportunity, skillfully exerting such pressures as the traffic would bear in each instance, but that in so doing the U.S.S.R. would exercise care to avoid what it believed to be serious risks of provoking general war or of permitting local crises to escalate too far. Here the significance for U.S. intelligence became just what risks the Soviet Union was likely to run in each particular instance; the significance for U.S. policy making: keep your guard up and your powder dry, but the sky is not about to fall. Through a sometimes maze of wishful thinking on the one hand and “worst case” over-insuring on the other, and in a setting of intense fears of domestic Communism here at home, the NIEs brought American policymakers a concerned and alert but sane, and what proved to be generally accurate picture of what to expect in the way of Soviet world behavior.

Bedell Smith’s reorganization immensely improved the estimative process, and its impact on Truman did, without doubt, help temper the most extreme policy initiatives of the likes of Paul Nitze, Dean Acheson, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Omar Bradley, and others. Still, the Korean War dragged on—serving in effect as a cover for the continuing, massive military buildup.

It required the election of Dwight Eisenhower, who came to office in January 1953, on a commitment to end the war, to roll back the military buildup and bring it within the bounds of deterrence, not preemptive war. Above all, Eisenhower sought a policy of “constructive engagement” with the Soviet Union and announced his intention to hold a summit conference with Josef Stalin, which only failed due to the latter’s death in March 1953.

Through his National Security Council, Eisenhower worked closely with CIA’s estimative machinery, not only to identify potential dangers facing the country, but as a review of the effectiveness of the administration’s policy initiatives.

Assassination of Kennedy and the
Attack on ONE/BOE

When John Kennedy came into the White House in 1961, many of the most problematic security advisers re-entered the presidential administration, including Paul Nitze, Dean Rusk, Walt Rostow, and Robert McNamara—some of whom were determined to replace Eisenhower’s deterrence and engagement policy with so-called “flexible response,” which was as dangerous as Truman’s “preventive war” doctrine. This was a policy Kennedy would more and more distance himself from, opting instead for his own policy of engagement and deterrence.

When Kennedy replaced Allen Dulles as CIA Director with John McCone, a close friend of Eisenhower whom McCone had served as head of the Atomic Energy Agency, Kennedy found a strong ally. McCone was an extremely able administrator, was well respected by Sherman Kent and others in the CIA, and is still considered second only to Bedell Smith in terms of his leadership of the organization. Moreover, McCone served as a liaison between Kennedy and Eisenhower. In fact, McCone met with Eisenhower, who was then living in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, every four to six weeks, after which he would brief President Kennedy.

For his Indochina policy, Kennedy found a strong ally in the CIA estimative machinery. In 1963, Kennedy had begun to shift his Indochina policy, under the advice of MacArthur and Eisenhower, both of whom cautioned against American involvement in a war in Asia that the Asians themselves were not willing to fight. This was a view strongly held by the Board of Estimates, not simply by conviction, but by a truthful analysis that clearly demonstrated that the Saigon government was unable to mobilize the necessary popular support to carry out a war against the Viet Cong.

When Kennedy was assassinated and Lyndon Johnson reversed Kennedy’s Vietnam policy, the ONE began to be targeted for destruction. ONE’s opposition to escalating the war was well known, and it delivered estimates that demonstrated that the interventionist policy would fail. Unable to convince the Johnson administration of the danger of military intervention in Indochina, McCone resigned in 1965.

Harold P. Ford summarized that BOE/ONE view of Indochina:

With some exceptions, ONE and the NIEs made a remarkably good record over the years in accurately estimating the outlook in Indochina. This record is all the more notable because much of the time the message which the NIEs presented was not congenial to policy making consumers—who not only usually took a much more optimistic view of prospects, but at times put pressure on intelligence officers to shape up and get on the team. The admirable batting average of the ONE and the NIEs has been widely acknowledged. Two such examples:

(1) General Bruce Palmer, Jr., formerly General Westmoreland’s MACV [U.S. Military Assistance Command in Vietnam] Deputy in Vietnam and later Army Vice Chief of Staff:

“On balance the Agency [CIA] did a good job in assessing the situation in Southeast Asia. Its overall intelligence judgments were generally sound, and its estimates were mostly on the mark. . . . Our Vietnam experience should tell us that when the views of the Central Intelligence Agency—the preeminent national intelligence organization—are not given adequate consideration in the policy counsels of the government, flawed policy judgments are more likely to result and the chances of policy failure are raised accordingly.”

(2) The Pentagon Papers: “. . . [T]he American intelligence community repeatedly provided the policymakers with what proved to be accurate warnings that desired goals were either unattainable or likely to provoke costly reactions from the enemy.”

On the other hand, there were others at CIA who were willing to get involved in what became fruitless counter-insurgency operations.

The wholesale attack to eliminate ONE was launched under President Richard Nixon, by James Schlesinger, Henry Kissinger, and Andrew Marshall.

When Nixon dumped Richard Helms because he refused to cooperate on the Watergate cover-up, he nominated James Schlesinger, who came in as CIA Director and immediately put into effect the process that led to the disbanding of the ONE. Henry Kissinger was the driving force behind this. The reason was the ongoing, strong impulse within the ONE and BOE to stay away from falling into line under the pressure of policy implementation. When Nixon came into office in 1969, he also gave Kissinger and his NSC staff added influence over the Intelligence Community at the expense of the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI).

Kissinger’s key hatchet man was Andy Marshall, his chief adviser on the NSC staff. According to the official CIA biography of DCI William Colby, written by Harold P. Ford, Marshall wrote a memorandum to Colby in which he complained that “many, if not most, intelligence officers in State and CIA did not share the world view of top U.S. military leaders,” by which he meant those driving the Vietnam War. These differences in fundamental assumptions, Marshall explained, might be one of the “most important barriers preventing U.S. intelligence from adequately supporting top-level decision making.”

From the very beginning of the Nixon administration, Kissinger, through Marshall, insisted that intelligence must do far more in assisting policy makers to exert pressure on foreign governments: The administration wanted the CIA to give it new insights into the specific weaknesses of given countries—that is, knowledge of their internal politics, perceptions, and policymaking styles—so that the White House could then “enhance the threats we make, to practice effective deception and other psychological operations against them.”

Parallel to this direct attack were the exposés of the wrongdoings of the CIA, including those of the Church Committee and other congressional investigations. While it should have been clear that whatever wrongdoing the CIA had engaged in was under the orders of the administration in power, the scandals greatly affected the prestige of the CIA as a whole, and in fact served to reduce its ability to stick to the truth and the most truthful estimates.

In 1973, under pressure from Kissinger et al., ONE/BOE was disbanded and replaced with a system of national intelligence officers, all of whom would be trapped in a series of fishbowls. The estimates were in the hands of area officers who in effect had no staff and had to seek officers from within the agency staff willing or able to join a particular project. Even more important, there were no high-level review processes as under the Board of Estimates.

CIA deliberation was fully wrecked when George W. Bush became DCI and introduced his Team A and Team B, in which Team B was the neocons—who did nothing more that criticize Team A as part of the process of destroying a professional intelligence capability.

In an appeal to revive the ONE/BOE, the late Harold P. Ford, one of the first generation of BOE estimators, wrote in 1993 that such a revived process must be based on the principles of the original Board of Estimates. In his short book, Estimative Intelligence, Ford wrote:

Hence the principal offices of the CIA, Defense, and State that engage in national estimating must be manned by the finest experts available, on the model of the R&A officers of the OSS. These offices must never be manned by just available “warm bodies.” These standards must apply not only to government experts, but to the quality and effectiveness of (and needed larger number of) those officers brought into national estimating from the outside. For in the end, it will basically be the quality of the people involved—the experts and their managers—that will or will not bring us the quality national estimating of which we are capable.

All in all, national intelligence estimating will continue to fall short of its potential until and unless it gains and maintains the deserved quality/status that DCI Walter Bedell Smith foresaw for this enterprise when, in establishing the NIEs and ONE in 1950, he told his Intelligence Community colleagues that national estimating should become “the heart” of the intelligence process.

Postscript: LaRouche and a New Model Board of Estimates

Dismantling the Board of Estimates brought U.S. strategic policy full circle back to the preemptive war doctrine of the Truman era. The new doctrine was called “Flexible Response.” Cooked up by the RAND Corporation and other hand-maidens of the Military-Industrial Complex, it became American strategic doctrine through the work of James Schlesinger and Henry Kissinger.

Just like the Truman policy of seeking absolute military superiority over the Soviet Union across the military spectrum, from conventional to nuclear, Flexible Response was implemented under the fatuous claim that having absolute military superiority would allow America to counter any level of Soviet military attack, with the second fatuous claim that this would keep the conflict under the nuclear threshold.

Nonetheless, that policy envisioned the possibility of using tactical nuclear weapons under the even more fatuous claim that the use of tactical nuclear weapons would keep the conflict under the strategic nuclear threshold!

Neither Kissinger nor Schlesinger had any interest in determining the validity of their insane doctrine. Yet in the same year that the ONE was dismantled, Lyndon LaRouche took up, as a private initiative, an effort not only to blow the whistle on this dangerous policy, but to pose the alternative.

In January 1974, LaRouche launched the New Solidarity International Press Service which, in 1977, became the weekly Executive Intelligence Review. To support such a publication, LaRouche designed and established an intelligence staff structured to provide in-depth coverage of all geographical areas, international economics, and scientific and technological developments. It was structured to provide him with daily “estimates” of strategic developments (although they were not referred to as estimates). In support of LaRouche’s role as executive of an international political and philosophical association, the International Caucus of Labor Committees, the staff also provided him the required intelligence for the formulation of policies.

While LaRouche acknowledged only a modest involvement in the formal intelligence agencies of the United States during World War II, his own “intelligence agency,” in principle, paralleled in many respects the conceptions of Donovan and Bedell Smith. From the standpoint of “estimates,” LaRouche continued where ONE left off, but went one step further. As early as 1977, he published a series of strategic estimates warning of the possibility of an early nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union, driven by powerful London and Wall Street financial circles committed to handling the ongoing financial crisis by imposing brutal austerity and anti-industrial, anti-growth environmentalist policies. Their insane Flexible Response policy was aimed at forcing the Soviet Union to submit to this new global policy.

LaRouche’s evaluation of the Soviet side was somewhat similar to the estimates of the Bedell Smith era. He concluded that while the Soviets aspired to world hegemony at some point in the future, they nonetheless adhered to a war avoidance policy. But LaRouche assessed that the Soviet failure to understand the role of Wall Street and the City of London could lead to dangerous miscalculation and general war.

In 1977, LaRouche wrote:

The central, continuing problem of the Soviet leadership is that heavily underlined by V.I. Lenin, who called it “Oblomovism.” The heritage of rural backwardness permeating Russian culture to the present day, mediated significantly through the old Soviet Ukrainian party apparatus—from which N.S. Khrushchev and L.I. Brezhnev came up—has been re-enforced by the garrison-economy experience of 60 years of invasion, containment and Cold War. The majority of even the Soviet Central Committee has no sensuous comprehension of the “outside world.” They lack, in particular, the intellectual powers of a V.I. Lenin or Rosa Luxemburg. They are unable to throw aside inherited errors in face of contrary scientific evidence, unable to project a self-consciousness of the world as seen through non-Soviet eyes. . . .

Despite this, the Soviets overall have a war-avoidance posture because they have no driving force for war beyond narrow considerations of strategic defense capabilities and deployments of Warsaw Pact forces. On the contrary, Chase Manhattan, Lehman Brothers and certain forces in London are seized presently by a driving force for war-by-miscalculation, not because they are anti-Communist, but because their political-economic strategic interests compel them to bring the Warsaw Pact into a position of subordination. At best, the Soviet long-term political strategy is a crude parody of Lenin’s anti-imperialist perspective of world socialist transformation. Their policy is one of waiting out the internal process in the capitalist sector which leads eventually to the “final triumph of socialism,” and correlates this with a policy of developing and maintaining a sufficient margin of war-fighting capability to win a total war if that can not be avoided. Their perception of peaceful relations with capitalist states is essentially one of a long-term delaying tactic against nations which they regard as intrinsically absolute adversaries.

That same year, LaRouche wrote on the danger of the Kissinger-Schlesinger Flexible Response doctrine:

The possibility of winning a war by limiting initial objectives to first-line military targets is an illusion, comparable to the would-be professional boxer who enters the ring believing that if he is sufficiently clever he will never be hit a painful blow. One must in fighting a war, start by acknowledging that the adversary’s deployed military capabilities will effect that damage of which they are capable, a damage which can be only partially deflected. The idea of some “Superman” from the American comic strips arriving to destroy an adversary’s first-line weapons before they are fired is just that—an infantile fantasy, like Goebbels’ “miracle weapons.”

On the other hand, if one can eliminate an adversary’s war-fighting capabilities in depth, and is prepared to survive his initial force capabilities, then the basis for winning the continuing war is firmly grounded. It is after the maximum possible destruction of in-depth logistical and related capabilities of the principal adversary that the continuation of the war by ground-fighting in an ABC-shaped [atomic, biological, chemical] geometry of aerial-and-ground artillery and infantry begins.

World War III does not begin with ground-fighting on a theater-limited scale between principal adversary forces. Once the war between principal adversary forces is initiated, the war begins with total, simultaneous use of the so-called “maximum deterrence,” and then the ground-fighting begins amid the ABC-saturated rubblepiles.

There is no other way to order the fighting of a thermonuclear war, unless one is determined to lose that war.

This is the situation the lunatics of the Carter Administration are gambling with.

LaRouche did not stop there. He put forward political and economic alternatives, including reforming the global financial system, to bring it back to the standards of the Bretton Woods system as intended by President Franklin Roosevelt; reinvigorating the space program as the science and technology driver that would put the economy back on the path of progress; and having the military engaged in creating a defense against nuclear missiles through technologies based on new physical principles. He called for a debt moratorium for underdeveloped countries and the creation of an International Development Bank for financing infrastructure-driven development programs for these countries.

It was in this period that LaRouche opened contact with elements of the U.S. Intelligence Community in the Reagan Administration, leading to the announcement by President Ronald Reagan of the Strategic Defense Initiative.

Selected Bibliography

Books

Harold P. Ford. CIA and the Vietnam Policymakers: Three Episodes 1962-1968, CIA, Center for the Study of Intelligence, 2007.

Harold P. Ford. William Colby as Director of Central Intelligence, 1973-1976, CIA, Center for the Study of Intelligence, 1993.

Harold P. Ford. Estimative Intelligence, The Intelligence Profession Series, No. 10, Association of Former Intelligence Officers, McLean, Virginia, 1993.

Sherman Kent. Strategic Intelligence for American World Policy, Princeton University Press, 1951.

Willard C. Matthias. America’s Strategic Blunders, Intelligence Analysis and National Security Policy, 1936-1991, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001.

Ludwell L. Montague. General Walter Bedell Smith as Director of Central Intelligence, October 1950-February 1953, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1st Edition, February 15, 2007. The original CIA edition is here.

David Robarge. John McCone as Director of Central Intelligence, 1961-1965, CIA, Center for the Study in Intelligence, 2005.

Kermit Roosevelt. War Report of the OSS (Office of Strategic Services), United States War Department, Strategic Services Unit History Project, July 1, 1976.

Major-General Sir Kenneth Strong. Intelligence at the Top, Recollections of an Intelligence Officer, Cassell & Co., London, England, 1968.

Articles, Papers, Monographs

Dean Andromidas. “How Eisenhower Stopped Truman’s March to Nuclear Armageddon,” EIR Vol. 42, No. 31, Aug. 7, 2015. Pages 9-21.

Dean Andromidas. “Eisenhower’s Fight Against the British Empire’s ‘Cold War’,” EIR Vol. 37, No. 7, Sept. 24, 2010. Pages 14-21.

Donald Phau and Dean Andromidas. “MacArthur’s Victory at Inchon: Defeating the British Empire,” EIR Vol. 40, No. 15, April 12, 2013. Pages 34-44.

Jack Davis. “Sherman Kent’s Final Thoughts on Analyst-Policymaker Relations,” Sherman Kent Center for Intelligence Analysis. Occasional Papers: Vol. 2, No. 3, June 2003.

“Sherman Kent and the Board of National Estimates: Collected Essays,” CIA, 2007.