“I Think It Was A Mistake”, Admits Ex-Pres.
| Arash Norouzi |
The Central Intelligence Agency was one of four government agencies signed into being by President Harry S. Truman in July 1947.
Due to its secret nature, however, accountability was severely lacking, and it began to develop a reputation as a rogue agency. In the early 1960’s, former President Truman himself began to criticize the CIA.
Perhaps the earliest instance of this was in 1961-1962, during a filmed interview for a proposed television documentary series on Harry Truman. Merle Miller, a writer and author, spent many hours in conversation with Truman, but none
of the networks were interested in the series, and the project was aborted.
In 1963, Truman wrote an audacious syndicated newspaper article which
revealed his inner conflict.
“For some time I have been disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment”, he wrote.
Years later, in 1974, Miller compiled the shelved interviews into a posthumous “biography” of Truman.
In the book, Truman was far more “plain” — calling his decision to create the CIA a “mistake”.
• Harry Truman | Letters, Speeches, Etc.
• Harry Truman media archive
• Dwight D. Eisenhower | Letters, Speeches, Etc.
Plain Speaking: An Oral
Biography of Harry S. Truman
by Merle Miller
35. The CIA
I SAID earlier that Mr. Truman was not much given to second thoughts, and I learned not to expect any. But one morning as we were yet again waiting for the cameraman to change film, I said, Mr. President, I know that you were
responsible as President for setting up the CIA. How do you feel about it now? A few days earlier we had been discussing the Bay of Pigs fiasco.
“I think it was a mistake. And if I’d know what was going to happen, I never would have done it. I needed . . . the President needed at that time a central organization that would bring all the various intelligence reports we were
getting in those days, and there must have been a dozen of them, maybe more, bring them all into one organization so that the President would get one report on what was going on in various parts of the world.
“Now that made sense, and that’s why I went ahead and set up what they called the Central Intelligence Agency.
“But it got out of hand. The fella . . . the one that was in the White House after me never paid any attention to it and it got out of hand.
[President
Eisenhower] Why, they’ve got an organization over there in Virginia now that is practically the equal of the Pentagon in many ways. And I think I’ve told you, one Pentagon is one too many.
“Now, as nearly as I can make out, those fellows in the CIA don’t just report on wars and the like, they go out and make up their own, and there’s nobody to keep track of what they’re up to. They spend billions of dollars on stirring up
trouble so they’ll have something to report on. They’ve become . . . it’s become a government all of its own and all secret. They don’t have to account to anybody.
“That’s a very dangerous thing in a democratic society, and it’s got to be put a stop to. The people have got a right to know what those birds are up to. And if I was back in the White House, people would know. You see, the way a free
government works, there’s got to be a housecleaning every now and again, and I don’t care what branch of the government is involved. Somebody has to keep an eye on things.
“And when you can’t do any housecleaning because everything that goes on is a damn secret, why, then we’re on our way to something the Founding Fathers didn’t have in mind. Secrecy and a free, democratic government don’t mix.
And if what happened at the Bay of Pigs doesn’t prove that, I don’t know what does.
“You have got to keep an eye on the military at all times, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s the birds in the Pentagon or the birds in the CIA.”*
• Excerpted from Plain Speaking: An Oral Biography of Harry S. Truman (1974) by Merle Miller, pgs. 391-392. The interviews themselves were conducted from 1961-1962.
• Footnote by Miller below:
*I should add that publicly Mr. Truman continued to uphold the CIA. This was one of the few areas in which what he said publicly differed from what he said privately.
On a disastrous day at the Army Command and General Staff School that Bob Arthur described in detail in the August, 1971, issue of Esquire, Mr. Truman was asked about the CIA by a young Army officer who was a veteran of Korea. On that
occasion Mr. Truman said, “When I took over the Presidency he received information from just about everywhere, from the Secretary of State and the State Department, the Treasury Department, the Department of Agriculture. Just everybody.
“And sometimes they didn't agree as to what was happening in various parts of the world. So I got a couple of admirals together, and they formed the Central Intelligence Agency for the benefit and convenience of the President of the
United States. So instead of the President having to look through a bunch of papers two feet high, the information was coordinated so that the President could arrive at the facts.
It’s still going, and it’s going very well.”
On the other hand, now that I've looked at it again, that’s pretty faint praise.
Moreover, it has recently been revealed that as far back as February, 1947, General Marshall in a memorandum to President Truman said of the agency five months before it was set up: “The Foreign Service of the Department of State is the
only collection agency of the Government which covers the whole world, and we should be very slow to subject the collection and evaluation of this foreign intelligence to other establishments, especially during times of peace. The
powers of the proposed agency seem almost unlimited and need clarification.” [George C. Marshall]
Related links:
Truman on 175th Anniversary of Declaration of Independence (July 4, 1951)
A Crowning Stupidity! | The Cincinnati Enquirer, April 12, 1951
THE CIA by Fred J. Cook in The Nation (June 24, 1961)
MOSSADEGH t-shirts — “If I sit silently, I have sinned”
