Limit CIA Role To Intelligence By Harry S Truman from Washington Post
The Washington Post
December 22, 1963 - page A11
Harry Truman Writes:
Limit CIA Role
To Intelligence
By Harry S Truman
Copyright, 1963, by Harry S Truman
INDEPENDENCE, MO., Dec. 21 —
I think it has become necessary to take another look at the purpose
and operations of our Central Intelligence Agency—CIA. At
least, I would like to submit here the original reason why I
thought it necessary to organize this Agency during my Administration,
what I expected it to do and how it was to operate as an arm
of the President.
I think it is fairly obvious that by
and large a President's performance in office is as effective
as the information he has and the information he gets. That is
to say, that assuming the President himself possesses a knowledge
of our history, a sensitive understanding of our institutions,
and an insight into the needs and aspirations of the people,
he needs to have available to him the most accurate and up-to-the-minute
information on what is going on everywhere in the world, and
particularly of the trends and developments in all the danger
spots in the contest between East and West. This is an immense
task and requires a special kind of an intelligence facility.
Of course, every President has available
to him all the information gathered by the many intelligence
agencies already in existence. The Departments of State, Defense,
Commerce, Interior and others are constantly engaged in extensive
information gathering and have done excellent work.
But their collective information reached
the President all too frequently in conflicting conclusions.
At times, the intelligence reports tended to be slanted to conform
to established positions of a given department. This becomes
confusing and what's worse, such intelligence is of little use
to a President in reaching the right decisions.
Therefore, I decided to set up a special
organization charged with the collection of all intelligence
reports from every available source, and to have those reports
reach me as President without department "treatment"
or interpretations.
I wanted and needed the information in
its "natural raw" state and in as comprehensive a volume
as it was practical for me to make full use of it. But the most
important thing about this move was to guard against the chance
of intelligence being used to influence or to lead the President
into unwise decisions—and I thought it was necessary that
the President do his own thinking and evaluating.
Since the responsibility for decision
making was his—then he had to be sure that no information
is kept from him for whatever reason at the discretion of any
one department or agency, or that unpleasant facts be kept from
him. There are always those who would want to shield a President
from bad news or misjudgments to spare him from being "upset."
For some time I have been disturbed by
the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It
has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of
the Government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded
our difficulties in several explosive areas.
I never had any thought that when I set
up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and
dagger operations. Some of the complications and embarrassment
I think we have experienced are in part attributable to the fact
that this quiet intelligence arm of the President has been so
removed from its intended role that it is being interpreted as
a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue—and
a subject for cold war enemy propaganda.
With all the nonsense put out by Communist
propaganda about "Yankee imperialism," "exploitive
capitalism," "war-mongering," "monopolists,"
in their name-calling assault on the West, the last thing we
needed was for the CIA to be seized upon as something akin to
a subverting influence in the affairs of other people.
I well knew the first temporary director
of the CIA, Adm. Souers, and the later permanent directors of
the CIA, Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg and Allen Dulles. These were men
of the highest character, patriotism and integrity—and I
assume this is true of all those who continue in charge.
But there are now some searching questions
that need to be answered. I, therefore, would like to see the
CIA be restored to its original assignment as the intelligence
arm of the President, and that whatever else it can properly
perform in that special field—and that its operational duties
be terminated or properly used elsewhere.
We have grown up as a nation, respected
for our free institutions and for our ability to maintain a free
and open society. There is something about the way the CIA has
been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position
and I feel that we need to correct it.
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