CIA – the creating of the myth

Everyone knows the name, the first association - intelligence.

Intelligence is the word. Everyone knows their mission and you expect the agency to be behind everything you don't understand right away, everything to do with conspiracies, and where no guilty party can be made out at the end. All this will always have to do with the CIA - who else could be behind it?

But how was the CIA created? Did it just happen? Who has invented it or is even that unclear? No, the history is quite clear ... it began during World War II.

At the end of the year 1941, the American fleet had a rather bad surprise in Pearl Harbor. No one knew about the impending Japanese attacks on the US. No information was available, no one knew enough about the potential enemy. That was supposed to change, something like that could never happen again. That was the time of birth of the CIA.

Months before that, in the spring of the same year, the retired Lt. Colonel William ‘Wild Bill' Donovan, by then a renowned lawyer and friend of Roosevelt, had suggested to Franklin D. Roosevelt to set up a centralized department, an authority responsible for collecting data and information and interpreting them, in order to be prepared for all kinds of surprises. Roosevelt was not opposed to the idea, but it wasn't one of his priorities yet. However, he made Donovan head of the new ‘Office of the Coordinator of Information.' Donovan, however, was right and on December 7, 1941, and the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Roosevelt reacted and on June 13, 1942 he signed the demanded organization into life.

The OSS Donovan becomes the director of this organization and it is his job to develop it. With a lot of enthusiasm, he sets to work and started his casting process - a comparison with the movie industry seems right here, because he needed more than just military veterans and strategists. He needed diversity as well as bright and creative thinkers - so he included people such as film director John Ford and the writer and poet Archibald MacLeish. Donovan wanted his people to be imaginative and open-minded. After all, he did not only want the old ways of information gathering, but to also think of new and superior ones. At that time, it was in mid-1942, the agency was still called ‘Office of Strategic Services,' or short ‘OSS.'

The mission of the OSS - information gathering, as well as psychological and guerilla warfare. There was a lot of work to do until the end of World War II in 1945, and the employees in the strategic positions, as well as those working secret-agent like behind enemy lines were not so very different from the well-known British movie hero - it was a time of secrets in which there was never a lack of missions. Well, on October 1, 1945 the first chapter of the OSS that was later to become the CIA, ended.

The war was over, new missions were needed. The OSS was closed down and their tasks transferred to the Department of Defense. However, on January 22, president Truman is ready to write a new chapter of the OSS success story. They did have enough experience and preventing surprises, after all, was still important for the future. First off, the old authority was to be restructured, the same way companies are doing it today every few years in order to shake up the old routines and create the feeling of preparing for the future.

The Central Intelligence Group was formed, which was, however, still under the supervision of the National Intelligence Authority. But Donovan is already discussing the future with President Truman and suggests the basis for the National Security Act of 1947, that finally creates the new authority on the 18th of September of the same year - the CIA, the Central Intelligence Agency. The name says clearly what their mission was to be - combining all governmental departments that were working in intelligence, so also the National Intelligence Authority and the Central Intelligence Group. From now on, the CIA is the head of intelligence. That's how Truman wanted the agency to be - a source of information for political decision-makers.

It might have been already suspected at the end of Second World War that their might be future problems with the other superpower, the Soviet Union. O, the Soviet Union, the Eastern bloc and the Communist countries were the new field of activity.

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