American Cryptology during the Cold War - The Black Vault

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system, oversight was not detailed. Occasionally a big-ticket item would come up, like
LIGHTNING (see p. 204), and Erskine's office would become involved. But Congress had not
yet instituted an effective review of the intelligence agencies (and did not until the mid­
1970s), and CIA did not yet have the authority to ride herd on the finances of the DoD
intelligence organizations. So by the standards of later days, no one was really paying
much attention to the intricacies ofNSA's money.59
NSA AND CIA - THE EARLY YEARS
Will you please have the proper instructions issued discontinuing the cryptanalytical units inthe
offices ofthe Director ofCensorship, the Federal Communications Commission and the Strategic
Services. Ifyou are aware ofany other agencies having services ofthis character. will youplease
have them discontinued also.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, Memorandum for Director ofBudget, 8 July 1942
The origins of CIA were rooted in World War II. Roosevelt, under the pressure of
wartime exigency, created an espionage agency in 1942, called the Office of Strategic
Services (aSSn, under New York lawyer and World War I battlefield hero (winner of the
Medal of Honor in France) William Donovan. Donovan's agency both collected and
produced intelligence and mounted covert operations around the world. It was a mission
that CIA was to inherit several years later.
NSA's difficulties with CIA stemmed from decisions made in the 1940s, almost all of
them bad. JCS, which owned most of America's intelligence assets, opposed OSS from the
beginning and did everything in its power to deny to ass the resources to do its job. The
Joint Chiefs failed to keep OSS out ofthe HUMINT business, but in one area they succeeded
almost totally: COMINT was denied.
Roosevelt's order (above) resulted in the closure of a small OSS COMINT organization.
Even worse, it was used by the JCS to deny to OSS access to ULTRA. Thus ass reporting
was crippled from the beginning. It had access to agent reports, photoreconaissance, POW
and defector reports - everything, in short, but the most useful and reliable information. If
World War II was, as has been claimed, a COMINT war, OSS remained on the intelligence
sidelines. 60
And it rankled. OSS seniors who later served in the higher ranks of CIA never
accepted the JCS policy. The British intelligence services, which dealt closely with OSS,
were appalled. Their own intelligence community was unified, and HUMINT was routinely
integrated with COMINT in highly specialized offices, in order to reap full value from both.
(For instance, Ian Fleming, a British naval officer and later author of some note, was
responsible for the integration of Bletchley-produced ULTRA with the Navy's HUMINT and
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