56. Memorandum From the Secretary of State’s Special Assistant for Research and Intelligence (McCormack) to Secretary of War Patterson and Secretary of the Navy Forrestal0
Annex VI (SC–172)
DEVELOPMENT OF A NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE PROGRAM
SUBJECT
- National Intelligence Authority
After the meeting of the Secretaries of State, War and Navy on Tuesday, December 11th1 two questions were left for discussion:
- a.
- Whether the Executive Secretary of the Authority should be, as proposed, a State Department official;
- b.
- What should be the role and composition of the Advisory Groups or Boards who are to assist the Executive Secretary in discharging his functions.
Before leaving for Moscow, the Secretary of State instructed me to make every effort to resolve these issues with the Secretaries of War and Navy at an early date. This memorandum suggests modifications of the State Department’s plan to meet the views of the War and Navy Departments.
It is proposed:
- a.
- To provide specifically that the Executive Secretary will represent the Authority as a whole, and not any one Department, and to make the provision enforceable by giving a majority of the Authority (e.g., the Secretaries of War and Navy) the power to remove the Executive Secretary; and
- b.
- To amend the provisions with respect to the Advisory Groups or Boards so that (1) the War and Navy Departments, if they wish, may appoint their Intelligence Chiefs as the Board members and (2) the Executive Secretary will be required to submit to the proper Advisory Board, for concurrence of comment, all recommendations for the intelligence program or for any operating plan designed to carry it out.
The proposed modifications of the Plan are listed in Tab A hereto.2 The considerations on which they are based are discussed below.
Status of the Executive Secretary
If there is to be an interdepartmental organization, rather than a separate entity outside the Departments, all personnel in the central agency, including the Executive Secretary, must hold office in one of the interested Departments. The State Department strongly believes, and it seemed to be the consensus at the meeting of the three Secretaries, that an independent budget for the central agency should be avoided for security reasons. Since passage of the Independent Offices Appropriation Act, 1945 (Public Law 358, 78th Congress), a non-departmental agency without an independent budget appears to be impossible. A copy of the relevant provision of the statute is attached as Tab B.3
If the interdepartmental type of organization is approved, and the Executive Secretary must hold office in one of the Departments, it is suggested that the State Department is the logical one because of the responsibility of the Secretary of State in foreign affairs. In existing interdepartmental coordinating mechanisms for matters involving foreign [Page 143] policy it appears to be customary for the Director or Executive Secretary, as well as the Chairman, to be a State Department officer. That is so in each of the following cases:
- Interdepartmental Committee on Cultural and Scientific Cooperation
- Liberated Areas Committee
- Executive Committee on Economic Foreign Policy
- Petroleum Facilities Coordinating Committee
- Interdepartmental Committee on Rubber
- Committee on Trade Agreements
- Interdepartmental Committee on Resumption of Communications with Liberated Areas
- Special Committee on Communications.
Concern has been expressed by the War and Navy Departments that the Executive Secretary would regard himself as responsible to the State Department rather than to the Authority. The suggestion for meeting that point is to insert the following provision in the plan:
“The Executive Secretary, in his capacity as such, will be responsible to the Authority as a whole and may be removed by a majority vote of the Authority.”
Advisory Groups or Boards
The State Department has proposed two “Advisory Groups.” “Intelligence,” composed of full-time representatives of the G–2, the DNI and the AC/AS–2, and the other for “Security,” composed of full-time representatives of the Chief Coordinator, Treasury Enforcement Agencies, the AC of S, G–2, the DNI and the Director of the FBI. The War Department has expressed the view that these arrangements do not insure that the G–2, DNI and AC/AS–2 will be brought in as members of the team.
It was not the State Department’s intention to minimize the role of the Service Intelligence Chiefs. It was thought that, since they would be represented in the central organization at every level, they would participate fully in the development of the national intelligence program and of all operating plans designed to carry it out.
Further, it was the State Department view, and it still is, that through a board of officers assigned full-time to the job of assisting the Executive Secretary, the G–2, DNI and A–2 would have a fuller and more effective [Page 144] participation in the central agency than if they sat merely as a “board of directors” holding occasional meetings and passing on finished papers. A full-time Advisory Group or Board would be part of the office of the Executive Secretary, would be familiar with the thinking of that office, would have time to study all plans and programs in detail and could do much to bring the Secretariat and the departmental intelligence agencies to a common point of view.
However, it is recognized that the War and Navy Departments have a right to specify who their representatives on the Advisory Boards will be, and it is therefore proposed to amend the plan so as to leave the War and Navy Departments and the Army Air Forces free to appoint their Intelligence Chiefs as part-time members or to appoint some other representatives as either full-time or part-time members, whichever may prove to be best.
It is also proposed, in order to relieve the Executive Secretary of the necessity of representing the State Department in discussions with the Advisory Boards, to add a State Department representative to each of the Boards.
Finally, it is proposed to make the role of the Advisory Boards explicit by means of the following provision:
“Before submitting to the Authority any recommendation for the intelligence program or any operating plan designed to carry out that program, the Executive Secretary shall submit such recommendations to the appropriate Advisory Board for concurrence or comment. If any member of the Advisory Board shall not concur in the recommendations, he shall have the right to submit a statement of his views to the Authority to be considered in connection with the recommendations.”
Conclusion
It is hoped that the above-suggested modifications will meet the views of the War and Navy Departments, so that the modified plan can be submitted to the President as the agreed recommendations of the three Secretaries.
- Source: Truman Library, Papers of J. Anthony Panuch, State Department Research and Intelligence No. 1. No classification marking. Copies were distributed to Staff Committee members under cover of an unsigned, undated note. (National Archives and Records Administration, RG 353, Records of Interdepartmental and Intradepartmental Committees—State Department, Lot File No. 122, Records of the Secretary’s Staff Committee 1944–47) Attached to the memorandum is an annex, “Chart A,” of the revised organizational plan. See the Supplement.↩
- Document 55.↩
- See the Supplement.↩
- See the Supplement. Enacted June 27, 1944; 58 Stat. 361. The Act provided that the Executive Branch could not use appropriated funds to support any agency that had been in existence for more than 1 year and for which Congress had not specifically appropriated funds.↩
- Printed from a copy that bears this typed signature.↩