“Yes, sir,” responded Colonel David K. E. Bruce.
Donovan then asked him a question that went straight to the heart of the matter.
“Have you the pill?”
At this, the OSS’s commander of European covert operations admitted that he had not brought the agency’s specially concocted suicide pill.
“Never mind,” Donovan said. “I have two of them.”
The man who practically invented American spying would one day be recognized as the father of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Two years after the war ended and the OSS was disbanded, the dawn of the Cold War convinced powerful members of Congress and the Truman administration that the country needed a permanent clandestine service, which led to the founding of the CIA. Many OSS veterans wound up with positions of importance and authority in the CIA, including one of Donovan’s most trusted operatives: former corporate lawyer Allen W. Dulles, who served as the agency’s director from 1953 to 1961 and profoundly shaped its culture.
The younger brother of the towering John Foster Dulles, who served as Eisenhower’s secretary of state, Allen was among the small group of Eastern intellectuals who helped shape postwar American foreign policy, especially with regard to what they perceived as the existential threat of communism. While John Foster, whom Eisenhower would eulogize as “one of the truly great men of our time,”2 extended America’s dominance through the projection of the soft power of diplomacy, Allen represented not just the ultimate spy who trafficked in the exploitation of secrets but also the feared enforcer from democracy’s home office.
Largely invisible to the American public, the CIA emerged as one of the most powerful institutions in Washington, maneuvering in the shadows against the Soviets and frequently exceeding its intelligence-gathering mandate to become an instrument of covert foreign policy, staging coups in third-world countries including Iran, Guatemala, and the Congo. In an age when the epic clash between East and West trumped every other consideration, even the preservation of democracy, installing friendly governments was often justified as the price of blocking Soviet aggression and influence.
All too eager to cultivate his image as a power broker and that of the agency as an instrument of American will, Dulles once advised a journalist to think of the CIA as “the State Department for unfriendly countries.”3
The case of Iran demonstrated how the imperatives of the struggle for Cold War advantage sometimes produced unintended consequences. By working with the British to covertly undermine a democratically elected government and reaffirm Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the latest in a line of royals known as the Shah, as the country’s all-powerful leader in 1953, the United States gained a steadfast ally. The coup would pay huge dividends through the years, but the Shah’s hardline tactics eventually produced significant dissent, which helped foment the Islamic Revolution of 1979.
The battle for secrets was deeply embedded in the arc of the Cold War, starting with the act of espionage that enabled the Soviet Union to explode its first atomic device in August 1949, effectively launching the arms race. In 1953, American citizens Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were convicted and executed for passing Manhattan Project secrets to the Soviets, providing a widely publicized object lesson about the power of acquired knowledge to tilt the international order.
When the Pentagon began to worry about the possibility of a “bomber gap,” the CIA was tasked with investigating the situation.
The resulting estimate was based on “knowledge of the Soviet aircraft-manufacturing industry and the types of aircraft under construction… and included projections concerning the future rate of build-up on the basis of existing production rates and expected expansion of industrial capacity,” Dulles recalled in his memoir.4 The CIA estimated that the Soviets would produce hundreds of M-4s in the coming years.
The large contingent of American agents scattered across the world, using fake names and awash in spy-craft, routinely risked their lives to obtain vital intelligence about Soviet assets, capabilities, and plans. But human intelligence was not the answer to every problem.
Harry Truman wrestled with this dilemma as far back as 1947, authorizing a series of border-skirting missions in modified fighters, bombers, and even balloons, with mixed results. Several aircraft were lost at sea, and a Navy plane went down over Siberia. His successor could see the stakes rising. Eisenhower needed to know what the Soviets had, before they surprised him with something big.
The possibility of building a series of reconnaissance airplanes and routinely flying over the heart of the Soviet Union to photograph military assets arrived in the Oval Office several days after the midterm elections. This idea was first proposed by James Killian, the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who chaired a special commission that had been formed to consider the sort of weapons needed to protect the country from another Pearl Harbor, and Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid.
No one played a more critical role in advocating for the aerial surveillance than Allen Dulles, who recalled, “Without a better basis than we had for gauging the nature and extent of the threat to us from surprise nuclear attack, our very survival might be threatened.”5 The man who sent operatives into dangerous situations and routinely pushed third-world leaders around was never cavalier about the projection of American power. In fact, after it was all over, Khrushchev paid Dulles a telling compliment: “Despite all of Dulles’s blind hatred for communism, when it came to the possibility of war being unleashed, he remained a sober politician.”6
After carefully studying the proposal and determining that the potential rewards far outweighed the risks, Dulles told the president: “Difficulties might arise out of these flights but we can live with them.”7
For Eisenhower, a grandfatherly figure who reflected traditional America’s middle-of-the-road impulses, the need to gather information about the Soviet military buildup cast a large shadow across his presidency. The rivalry would largely define his years in the White House. Shortly after entering office in January 1953, he had used the veiled threat of nuclear weapons to bring North Korea and Red China to the bargaining table, which resulted in an end to the hostilities. Still, the man who managed the enormous military and political challenge of the D-day landings, one of the pivot points of the century, proved a reluctant warrior in the White House. During those tense years, Ike moved forward with modernizing the country’s nuclear forces, which led to a large number of tests in the Nevada desert and on isolated islands in the Pacific, and he partnered with Canada to form the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD), to provide constant monitoring of the distant skies. But he understood the horrors of war and was determined to avoid overt confrontation at all costs, especially with the Soviets, realizing that any direct collision between the superpowers could quickly spin out of control.
Understandably concerned that the Soviets might see the provocation of an invading spy plane as an act of war, Eisenhower approved the plan with one big condition: No missions were to be flown by military pilots. This directive was supported enthusiastically by Killian and Land, who had encouraged the CIA to take the lead, but frustrated the Air Force generals who had shepherded the initiative. Ike was adamant. In the event that one of the planes was ever shot down, he wanted the White House to have plausible deniability.
As a boy in Michigan, Clarence L. “Kelly” Johnson sometimes hiked to the top of a bluff with his younger brother, Clifford, to fly kites during a thunderstorm. “I think he thought he was Ben Franklin,” Clifford said with a smile many years later.8 “He learned a lot about how the wind worked.” In time he would learn to harness the forces of nature for more ambitious purposes.