THE OLD B OYS The American Elite and the Origins of the CIA BURTON HERSH Expanded, unexpurgated, and with an updated preface INTRODUCTION THE OLD BOYS The American Elite and the Origins of the CIA In 1961 I was a kid attempting to break into magazine free-lancing. The Bay of Pigs debacle had barely overtaken the Kennedy administration, and through a well-intentioned friend I finagled an audience with the highly regarded progressive Carey McWilliams, long since the rock and senior brain around The Nation of that era. McWilliams’s editorial office was small, I remember, with an ink-blotched, chipped-up desk that looked as if it had been dragged into an alley behind some principal’s office somewhere and rescued by liberals from the Department of Sani- tation. The plaster was grey, and crazed into cracks in a great many places, and smeared with a formless crescent behind where McWilliams tilted back his creaky oak chair and impatiently rubbed his scalp against the wall while hashing up story ideas. Amidst all this atmosphere, McWilliams came right to the point. What with the end of the Eisenhower administration and the Cuban misadventure, the CIA was accessible for the first time. The moment was ripe to dig out a full-length exposé of the Agency, until recently seemingly untouchable. The Allen Dulles era was mani- festly at an end. How about starting in for the magazine with that assignment? There could be no guarantee, but the magazine would probably pay expenses up to thirty dollars. At that time of my life I had no experience of any kind with investigative jour- nalism, a single friend with a couch in the entire D.C. area, and a well-substantiated hunch that it was going to take at least thirty dollars to get to Washington. Worse, what little I knew about the CIA suggested that the place was a citadel, as impreg- THE OLD BOYS. The American Elite and the Origins of the CIA by Burton Hersh. ©2000 Burton Hersh. www.e-onart.com nable as a carrier group out there in the oceanic Federal bureaucracy. I haven’t — and did not have — much appetite for Kamikaze missions. I attempted a careful little smile and told McWilliams I’d have to think that over. That constituted my last visit to the offices of The Nation. But no man can escape his destiny. Twenty years passed. I wrote a great many magazine pieces, along with several books. One subject I poked away at regularly was politics, Washington. The vicis- situdes of the Agency made more news every season. In time I did manage a fairly extended article that traced one contretemps inside the intelligence community, and immediately there was publishing interest in a com- prehensive workup of the history of the CIA. I began to read, peruse library sources, chat up a few retirees: the more I approached the subject, the more I suspected that what was going on in there would call for a lot more than a traditional reporting — even a thoroughgoing investigative reporting — scenario. I’d have to commit years. The material I did come across began to provoke in me, beneath the action levels, a kind of intermittent reverie on America’s unadvertised geopolitical intent. The pertinent questions surfaced: how did we choose to entrust our information gathering and assessment competencies — to say nothing of subversion and “action” programs — to a civilian (i.e., a commercially and politically rather than a militar- ily) driven system? Whom, in an open society, does a secret service serve? Just when did the meaning of the word “intelligence” pass beyond the accumulation and inter- pretation of strategically useful detail and begin to reference a thicker and thicker playbook of technologies for manipulating and strong-arming neighboring societ- ies? From these developed larger concerns. What kind of objectivity could any intelligence hierarchy claim which arrogated the right to bottle up information, then constructed its recommendations to accommodate its institutional purposes? How THE OLD BOYS. The American Elite and the Origins of the CIA by Burton Hersh. ©2000 Burton Hersh. www.e-onart.com could one estimate the performance of a generation of intelligence professionals vain about its aptitude for disinformation and prepared without apology to repudiate even authentic accomplishments? Insiders breathed higher purposes. Like nations or tribes, the world’s secret services appeared mutually antagonistic, yet all seemed obscurely and irresistibly in touch, their whispered exchanges often enough the last flutter before war broke out or obliteration threatened. Should I be asking? Henry Luce decided publicly in 1941 that ours was the American Century. Perhaps Henry was accurate, give or take, although we started late and appear to be petering out any time these days. What Luce seems never to have mulled over particularly was what such a global mandate was going to mean to this unlikely crop of imperial Americans, let alone whether finding a century named after ourselves would turn out a particularly good thing. The same year Henry Luce laid claim to the nineteen-hundreds, an extraordi- narily nimble New York antitrust attorney named William J. (“Wild Bill”) Donovan inveigled Franklin Roosevelt into underwriting the first encompassing intelligence instrumentality, the Office of the Coordinator of Information. Donovan’s profession was relevant, and it is equally no accident that all three load-bearing protagonists throughout this work — Bill Donovan, Allen Dulles, Frank Wisner — achieved status in America by way of important Wall Street law partnerships. In many ways a trusted corporate attorney accomplishes substantially for his clients what today’s one-stop national intelligence factory goes after for its patron: he puts the deals together, he damps down crises and flaps, he keeps the process as confidential as possible. He finds out everything he can and resorts to every means imaginable to shape the outcome. He proceeds by the case system, and preferably one emergency at a time. THE OLD BOYS. The American Elite and the Origins of the CIA by Burton Hersh. ©2000 Burton Hersh. www.e-onart.com Furthermore, an intelligence service concocted by lawyers—men accustomed not merely to spotting the problems but also to defining them to their clients and recommending appropriate action — is far more likely than a traditional military intelligence staff to reach in and condition policy. Attorneys have a seductive way of subordinating their clients, of insinuating their legerdemain until they become the movers. And thus it develops that in many strategic entanglements the lawyers have at least as much control over the outcome as elected officials. Although not just any attorney, of course, from anyplace at all. “Commonly authors assert,” Robin Winks has written, “that CIA people tend to be from the Ivy League (to which the University of Virginia and West Point are sometimes admitted); or more specifically from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.” A Yale professor himself, Winks has discovered that more of Yale’s graduates “go into intelligence work . than any other university.” Winks’s reprise of the careers in clandestinity of succes- sive generations of Yalies, Cloak and Gown, points up New Haven’s sturdy, regular contributions. Yet broadly — historically — there’s lots of evidence that Princeton is likely to emerge as the forge of the Cold War, the caldron from which poured its true institutional leadership. It’s also quite likely that the intelligence community in the United States owes more than it acknowledges to the personality of Woodrow Wilson. As teacher and president of Princeton University, Wilson’s horse-and-buggy high-mindedness cou- pled with a scholar’s rigor shaped up successive generations of would-be global salvationists and implacable bond salesmen. A great deal lingered of the mission- school origins of the place. Behind those rosy stone-work facades both John Foster and Allen Dulles shed provincialisms, along with the ultimate doyen of The New York Times, Arthur Krock, such State Department groundbreakers as Dewitt Poole, and quite a proliferation of downtown investment prodigies like Ferdinand Eberstadt THE OLD BOYS. The American Elite and the Origins of the CIA by Burton Hersh. ©2000 Burton Hersh. www.e-onart.com and James V. Forrestal. Once he became President, the emerging leadership responded to Wilson’s dry, prevailing Presbyterian heat. To define wartime intentions and sort out conflicting communiques, the President and his closest advisor Colonel Edward House secretly assembled at Columbia University a coven of academic intellectuals: The Inquiry. The Inquiry itself attracted a pair of the most independent-minded journalists around, Walter Lippmann and William Bullitt, who, along with the Dulleses, showed up in Paris to support the Peace Commission but deserted Wilson months before the cer- emony at Versailles. That same year the unpredictable Columbia-trained lawyer and war hero Colonel William J. Donovan took on his first Presidential reconnoitering mission — to size up the Russian civil war in Siberia. The world calmed down through most of the twenties; after 1933 the wind rose continually. With Franklin Roosevelt’s election William Bullitt reappeared and pro- vided his President, while ambassador to Moscow and Paris, a range of idiosyncratic political broadsides which corresponded, in their way, to the military assessments William Donovan had started to drag in via the back door of the White House. By 1941 Donovan was in and out the front door regularly: Roosevelt set him up in charge of a broad-scale U.S. information-gathering and “unorthodox-warmaking” enterprise. The faction-ridden Coordinator of Information’s office gave way in 1942 to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). From then on a civilian-directed, opera- tionally oriented spy service would top the wish list of America’s emerging power elite.