Foreign Relations of the United States, 1945–1950, Emergence of the Intelligence Establishment

410. Memorandum From the Secretary of State’s Deputy Special Assistant for Research and Intelligence (Howe) to the Special Assistant to the Secretary (Sheppard)⁰

Washington, January 9, 1950.

SUBJECT

• Status of Miscellaneous Projects

1. NSC 50 Progress Report

I call your attention to Admiral Souers’ NSC memorandum of December 28,¹ distributing CIA’s further progress report on implementation of NSC 50,² which claims to answer the State Department’s request for further amplification of organizational planning for national intelligence. I have discussed this with General Magruder.

2. National Intelligence

There are three current papers on this subject in various stages of completion. The documentation is, in fact, going to sizeable proportions which, for such a technical subject, I think is unavoidable:

(a) Hillenkoetter’s report on “State’s Four Papers”³ (you will remember that we put into the IAC four papers to implement NSC 50); this memo dated December 30, 1949, I will make available to you. It is tantamount to a unilateral rejection by CIA of the State Department’s recommendations which were supposed to have gone to OCAPS for staff work, not for rejection. However, they do indicate more thoroughly than heretofore the basis (and illogic) of CIA’s position on national intelligence.

(b) R Staff Paper:⁴ I enclose a stencilled draft of this paper. We omitted recommendations, partly in order to discuss this matter fully before finishing up and because positive action depended to a large extent on CIA’s response to the last NSC action asking for further amplification on this subject. The staff paper, we believe, is excellent: it indicates quite clearly the issues involved in national intelligence and the reasons we feel so strongly that national intelligence should be established according to these lines. I have informally left a copy of this with General Magruder. No other distribution has been made.

(c) General Magruder’s draft⁵ is not finished. He read parts of it to me last week. If we straightened out the nomenclature, I think we would find ourselves in almost complete agreement. Furthermore, his paper is on the whole complementary to ours in that he proposes to lay down a specific organization for CIA to fulfill its assignment on national intelligence and to prescribe categorically what each organizational unit is to do. This should be very helpful.

3. OPC–OSO Reorganization.

Almost nothing has been done further on this. I have, however, tried another hand at drafting the nature of the problem and for whatever use, I attach it hereto.⁶

4. CIA Budget.

I did not speak to Magruder about this and I therefore do not know the NME views. This will need to be pursued this week.

5. Tuesday Meetings.

Park handled the meeting last week and he has sent you a minute⁶ on what transpired. I believe the memo also indicates the appropriate subject for next week which arose out of the meeting.

Fisher Howe ⁷

0. Source: National Archives and Records Administration, RG 59, Records of the Department of State, Records of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research: Lot 58 D 776, National Intelligence Staff Study. Top Secret.
1. Not printed. (Ibid., Records of the Executive Secretariat, NSC Files: Lot 63 D 351) See the Supplement.
2. Document 407.
3. Document 405.
4. Dated January 3; see Tab A to Document 420.
5. Not found but probably an earlier version of Tab B, Document 420.
6. Not found.
6. Not found.
7. Printed from a copy that bears this typed signature.