CIA Formation

What role did President Harry S. Truman play in the formation of the CIA?

Harry S. Truman was president after Franklin Roosevelt died. He had been Roosevelt's vice president and he was very foresighted when it came to national security and the Cold War. He realized that we have this enemy, the Soviet Union, which was incredibly secretive. You simply could not visit it, except through clandestine means. And so the CIA was necessary he thought, to try to find out what the Soviet Union was up to.

How did President Truman form the CIA?

Truman started the CIA in January of 1946. At that time, nobody knew what they were doing. It was a very formative period in the CIA's history, and they felt their way and tried different things. Half of them were really silly and unproductive. If you were in kindergarten, you might think of some of these things, but other methods were valuable, and slowly they evolved and became more sophisticated.

How did President Truman shape the CIA?

Truman appointed a CIA director and gave funds to start the CIA. He gave them marching orders and allowed them to conduct operations in secret. Those are the important elements that started the CIA.

What is the 'Central Intelligence Agency Act of 1949'?

The act of 1949 laid out the CIA's basic authorities and authorized it to conduct these secret operations. That was a very unusual thing in this democracy, to have an agency that is answerable directly to the President and can do all of these activities in secret. It was a very far-sighted thing to do at that time.

What are examples of top secret projects conducted by the CIA under President Truman?

The CIA under Truman would do things like send CIA officers into the Soviet Union in balloons. They would actually float them into the Soviet Union. That's how desperate they were to find out anything about the Soviet Union, because it was a closed society. The borders were closed. The CIA also experimented with using pigeons, and even insects, to try to introduce bugs into Soviet facilities. Very rudimentary, but it shows you just how desperate they were to find out the slightest fact about the Soviets.

How did the CIA experiment with mind control?

The CIA experimented with Project CHATTER and various other projects that had to do with mind control experiments, by introducing LSD into people's drinks to see if that would get them talking. These experiments were often done without permission of the people, which was incredible, but those were the ethics of the day perhaps, maybe not. These were very desperate efforts to try anything to learn secrets about the Soviets.