American Cryptology during the Cold War - The Black Vault

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special operations.) JCS had used security as justification for the denial of ULTRA to OSS,
but the British were at least as security conscious as the Americans, and they seemed able
to get COMINT of the highest sensitivity to those in the HUMINT business who needed it.
The outright denial ofULTRA to OSSjust did not make sense. 61
Truman discontinued OSS immediately after the end of the war, partly to rid himself
ofDonovan, who was not in favor with the president. But within six months Truman once
again had himself an intelligence organization, called the Central Intelligence Group.
CIG was bedeviled by the same problems that submerged AFSA - lack of its own budget
and personnel resources (people were loaned in from other intelligence organizations),
absence of a congressional mandate, and lack of firm direction from the top. But the idea
was the same as that ofAFSA - to establish central control ofU.S. intelligence operations.
When CIA was created in 1947, succeeding CIG, it got its congressional mandate, its
budget, and its own personnel. It still lacked firm leadership, but that was remedied in
1950 with the appointment of General Walter Bedell Smith as DCI. Smith had been
Eisenhower's chiefofstaffin Europe, and he knew how to run a tight ship. Tussling with
"Beetle" Smith was like landing in a cactus patch.
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In the early days the only high-level COMINT available to CIG was a copy of the MAGIC
Summary put out by the Army, which was available in the Pentagon. In the very early
days, only fifty people in CIG had a COMINT clearance. But in June of 1946 Hoyt
Vandenberg became DCI. Vandenberg was fresh from a tour as chairman of USCIB and
knew the value ofCOMINT. In December he created an organization within CIG, called the
Advisory Council, to deal with what he hoped would be a flood ofCOMINT reports.
For a while there were few reports to disseminate. Requests for access to COMINT
reports were generally denied. But in early 1947, two CIG organizations began to get
involved with COMINT operations. The first was OSO (Office of Special Operations, the
clandestine organization), which in March proposed to the Army and the Navy that they
begin a Joint Counterintelligence Center (JCIC), using COMINT as the basic source of
information. The services received this enthusiastically, and JCIC was established at
Nebraska Avenue, with the understanding that it would eventually move to CIG. (It
moved to CIA in 1949.)
At about the same time, Colonel Robert Schukraft, chief of the Communications
Division at CIG, was establishing a relationship with ASA. Schukraft had been a key
figure in wartime Army COMINT and knew many of the people involved in the COMINT
business. He began a relationship with Frank Rowlett at ASA\
HANDLE VIA TALENT KEYHOLE COMI
L SYSTEMS JOINTLY
NOT R
TO FOREIGN NATIONALS
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