The Birth of the CIA

[Gil Jesus]

President Truman's creation of the CIA.

 

[Roger Odisio]

Harry Truman's Washington Post article, published one month after the JFKA, to which Oliver Stone refers in the clip, was entitled "Limit CIA Role to Intelligence".  It appeared only in the first edition of the Post, then disappeared. No one else picked it up.  Yet this was Truman talking, the guy who created the CIA as President.  https://ia801309.us.archive.org/20/items/LimitCIARoleToIntelligenceByHarrySTruman/Limit CIA Role To Intelligence by Harry S Truman.pdf

 

Truman was blunt about the article's purpose.  "For some time I have been disturbed by the way the 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, therefore, would like to see the CIA be restored to its original assignment as the intelligence arm of the President...and that its operational duties be terminated or properly used elsewhere."   

 

Exactly JFK's position about the CIA before he was murdered.

 

Allen Dulles didn't want the focus to shift to the CIA at a time it was beginning to come under scrutiny.  So he traveled to Independence, Mo. to try to convince Truman to retract, or at least fudge, his point.  Truman refused.

 

Dulles went back to Washington and wrote a note to his files anyway that Truman had in fact acknowledged he had been misunderstood, or he didn't mean to say what it appeared. Or some such lie (I haven't seen the note.)

 

This was the last gasp of those who sought to rein in the monster that the CIA has become.

[Ron Bulman]

The true birth of the CIA in the 1950's - 60's as we've come to be concerned about (Mockingbird, MKULTRA, JFKA) came about when Eisenhower appointed his Secretary of State's brother to head it.  Its origins go back to the (not so) Civil and Revolutionary wars.  All wars have spies.  CIA is a spy agency.  Originally meant to spy on our foreign adversary's.  Not us.