THE PRESIDENT'S BOARD, 1956-60

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP89B00980R000400120002-6
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: S
• Document Page Count: 17
• Document Creation Date: December 15, 2016
• Document Release Date: March 31, 2004
• Sequence Number: 2
• Publication Date: October 7, 1970
• Content Type: NOTES

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ILLEGIB
October 7, 1970
EXECUTIVE SECRETARY'S NOTE
SUBJECT: The President's Board, 1956-60
In the Summer 1969 issue of "Studies in Intelligence,"
there appeared an article entitled "The President's Board:
1956-60" (sub-title: "Overseeing the Intelligence Community").
In the remote event that members have a few spare moments
during the present meetings, they may wish to glance through
the article, which is appended, to find out what the writer con-
siders the Board's history, objectives, and accomplishments
were during that period.
"Studies in Intelligence" is a quarterly publication by
CIA (classified SECRET-NOFORN) in which members of the
Intelligence Community present articles "on any theoretical,
doctrinal, operational, or historical aspect of intelligence. "
NRO review(s) completed.
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Overseeing the intelligence
community.
THE PRESIDENT'S BOARD: 1956-60
Philip K. Edwards
At the beginning of 1956, in part at least as an alternative to the
proposals for a congressional watchdog committee that had been so
vigorously debated during the preceding year, President Eisenhower
appointed a Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities
to" help him oversee the work of the intelligence community and
especially the CIA. Composed of men both competent and nationally
prominent, the PBCFIA-no pro forma institution-kept intelligence
activities under lively scrutiny for the remainder of the Eisenhower
administration. Its critiques and recommendations were the prime
mover in many of the important new developments of the period,
for example the creation of the USIB and the establishment of the
community's remarkably fast system for "critical" communications;
and they helped shape many others, such as the accomplishments in
advanced reconnaissance which were to achieve a breakthrough in
data on the Soviet strategic posture.
Formation and Functioning
After General James H. Doolittle had completed his investigation
of the Agency in October 1954, J. Patrick Coyne of the National Se-
curity Council staff had suggested that the Doolittle committee be
formalized as a permanent advisory body to the President; and in the
following February Lyman Kirkpatrick (who as the Agency's IG
had been "case officer" for that committee) recommended to Allen
Dulles in writing that CIA take the initiative on this suggestion, formu-
lating the charter for a President's Board, nominating the members,
and preparing a presidential announcement. Then in June the Hoover
Commission, in endorsing the Mark Clark task force report on federal
intelligence activities, likewise recommended that such a committee
be formed. It was not until November 1955, however, that Dulles
sent a memorandum to the President referring to Senator Mansfield's
proposal for a congressional watchdog committee, explaining that he
had not expressed opposition to it only because that would have
been tactically unwise, urging that a board of about seven consultants
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be named before the Mansfield bill came up, and suggesting ten
names from which to choose. After another two months spent chiefly
in lining up the membership, the President created the PBCFIA by
Executive Order 10656, effective 13 January 1956.
The Board's first chairman was James R. Killian, and the list of
members included such well-known names as Robert A. Lovett, Benja-
min F. Fairless, General Doolittle, Admiral Richard L. Conolly (who
had been a member of the Clark Task Force), and Joseph P. Kennedy.'
When early in 195S Dr. Killian was named Science Advisor to the
President he relinquished the chairmanship to General John E. Hull
but remained on the Board. Staff Director for the Board was first
Brigadier General John F. Cassidy and from 20 July 1959 on "Pat"
Coyne, detailed from the NSC. In CIA the Inspector General was
designated the normal channel for contacts with the Board, and Kirk-
patrick established close working relationships with Cassidy and
then Coyne.
Board members had been warned prior to their appointment that
they would be expected to meet for several days not less often than
twice a year, but in practice they worked much harder than that re-
quirement implied. They met somewhat more often than that, and in
between meetings they traveled, singly and in groups, all over the
world inspecting intelligence operations. Beginning on 2 April 1956
they were briefed at great length on all aspects of intelligence activi-
ties. They required the submission of detailed semiannual reports from
each intelligence agency. They themselves reported in writing to the
President at least annually, and they made a total of 37 major recom-
mendations for improvements in the community. They followed
through to see that these recommendations were acted on and that
the President should know about it if they weren't.
Although, as is to be expected of any high-level, part-time advisory
body, the Board's conclusions occasionally suffered from insufficient
intimacy with operations-they found a big problem, for example,
where there hardly was one, in coordinating USIA's unattributed (but
'Other original members were General Hull and Edward L. Ryerson. Later
in the year C. W. Darden and David K. E. Bruce were appointed. Kennedy had
resigned, officially because his son was campaigning for office; but he had in fact
not felt comfortable in the work, not having had much experience with intelligence.
In subsequent years resignations were tendered by Bruce, Fairless, and Killian.
The last was replaced by William O. Baker.
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not unattributablc) propaganda with that of CIA-the recommenda-
tions were by and large realistic and discerning. and the efforts re-
quired to meet them were well spent. Certainly they concentrated
on the crux of the intelligence mission-early warning, plans for war-
time operations, data on Soviet missiles-and the means to these
ends-signals intelligence, communications, advanced reconnaissance,
and an integrated intelligence effort under a strong DCI. Only sec-
ondarily were they concerned with effecting economics by reducing
duplicate activities. With respect to clandestine operations the Board's
work was less productive, but it did improve the coordination of
covert. action programs and lent the weight of its approval to some
measures undertaken by the Agency.
War and Warning
Two of the Board's first set of recommendations, submitted in De-
cember 1956, had to do with planning for wartime. One of these, ask-
ing for plans to assure the "proper functioning" of the (headquarters)
intelligence* community in wartime, a difficult problem because of
shifting assumptions about wartime conditions and plans for con-
tinuity of command, was eventually assigned as the responsibility of
a USIB committee on "emergency planning" considering a whole
spectrum of types of emergency, and no further action on it was
separately reported to the Board. The other, however, urging that
planning for wartime activities in the field be brought "to the highest
readiness" and that realistic war-gaming with the military- forces be
begun, required semiannual reports recounting in detail these plans
for all theaters and especially the results of war-gaming and progress
in correcting revealed deficiencies. Joint CIA-JCS reports were in fact
submitted every six months until 1960, when it was agreed they might
be made annually in the future.
The Board's persistence in seeing that measures it recommended
were carried out is better illustrated in those designed to improve
early warning capabilities. The President's concern about the danger
of surprise attack, evidenced at the summit conference in 1955, had
not been allayed; Jerome Wiesner's "Warning and Defense in the
Missile Age" had pointed up the problem; an IAC subcommittee was
studying it, and a recent National Estimate bad not been optimistic.
The matter was under consideration in the Board's meeting of 28 Sep-
tember 1957, but the launching of Sputnik I the following week must
have contributed urgency to the language of the recommendation
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made on 24 October, that under the personal direction of the DCI and
with the highest priority, the total resources available to the intclli-
gence community be concentrated on processing and communicating
prior warning of Soviet attack. Another recommendation of the same
date, that the IAC be merged with the US Communications Intelli-
gence Board, singled out the National Indications Center as a particu-
lar concern of the proposed USIB. The text of the report to the Presi-
dent which conveyed these recommendations apparently mentioned
also the need for a survey of the whole strategic warning mechanism
centered on the NIC and the Watch Committee.
To the Board's next meeting, at the end of February 1958, it could
be reported that the Secretary of Defense had been designated execu-
tive agent for providing a worldwide network for critical communica-
tions, that processing and relay, procedures were being worked out
(the CRITIC system) with the aim of getting warning messages from
originator to action desk in speeds approaching ten minutes (as* against
the 1 to 40 hours, plus up to 5 hours shuttling around Washington,
that a sampling the previous fall had shown top priority messages to
be delayed), and that relay stations in the NSA network, which would
form the core of the communications net, were being automated. In
May a progress report noted that Defense was working on the new
communications system, and in July the CRITIC procedures were put
into effect.2
There were already signs of Board and ANIhite House impatience
for more rapid progress, however. In June, when Deputy Secretary of
Defense Quarles had requested a second postponement for a joint
progress report (with CIA) on the system, he received a curt note from
Robert Cutler, presidential assistant for national security affairs, to
the effect that the President would be informed of this "further de-
ferral" and that the report would be expected by 15 August. In its
next set of recommendations, in October 1958, the Board asked that
work be intensified on measures for improvement without waiting for
the over-all study being made of the communications system; and the
NSC, passing this recommendation on to the DCI, specified that a
system of tests of the CRITIC system be set up. The tests, as reported
to the Board in its April 1959 meeting, showed message times greatly
reduced, to an average on the order of an hour, but the goal of ten
minutes could not be approached, the DCI stressed in a memorandum
for the Secretary of Defense, until Defense had developed the pro-
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posed new communications system. In May, William 0. Baker, who
had headed a panel set up to help improve NSA operations, told Kil-
lian that the network Defense was trying to use was "fragmentary, un-
economic, and dangerous."
At the Board's next meeting, in July 1959, General Hull insisted
that CRITIC performance be improved without waiting for new equip-
-anent to be installed in the network; and out of this meeting came
recommendations devoted exclusively to critical communications-that
the existing system be reorganized in a way compatible with the
ultimate global network, that this be done under guidance of the
Secretary of Defense, that there be frequent tests, and that procedures
be improved. In December, in a report to the President that Dulles
ruefully called "tough," the Board drew attention to its longstanding
request for a full survey of the strategic warning mechanism and
recommended that the DCI complete this, prepare specific indicator
lists to supplement that covering general indicators, and bring the
Watch Committee and the NIC to maximum efficiency.
The strategic warning survey was still only about one-third done
when the Board vent out of existence with the change in administra-
tion in January 1961, but the drive for speedy communications had
produced impressive results. Throughout the government-controlled
bulk of the network the lag for CRITIC messages was in fact approach-
ing an average ten minutes, and it was only from places where com-
mercial communications still had to be used that it had to be measured
in hours.
The putative missile gap that was a matter of genuine concern
during these years and until after the Board had been disbanded was
reflected in all its deliberations after Sputnik I and particularly in its
attention to two collection systems, Comint-Elint and advanced recon-
naissance, which spearheaded the attack on not only the warning
problem but also that of missile characteristics and deployment. (The
President himself was apparently more concerned in December 1958
with warning: in grumbling that people always tell him this or that
reconnaissance project won't give itself away and then a lot of the
balloons come down in the USSR and all the manned overflights are
detected, he remarked that the U-2 didn't seem to be much good for
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warning anyway; you have to have live agents in (lie right place for
that. But a month later we find him getting briefed personally on all
the latest photographic take.)
Both of these systems were on the agenda for Allen Dulles to talk
to Killian about the day before the Board met with the President
to make its first recommendations; in December 1956 "the Bissell
project" or "Aquatone" had been operational for less than a year, and
Killian's advice was to be sought. It was not until the next year, how-
ever, that Richard Bissell, along with Arthur Lundahl, Whose Photo
Interpretation Centex was processing the take, gave the full Board a
briefing at its September meeting. The Board also discussed the earth
satellite program, which seemed less promising than manned vehicles
for reconnaissance because satellites could not be put just where you
wanted them. Its recommendation, issued in October, was that ad-
vanced reconnaissance be given "adequate consideration and han-
dling," but more broadly that the primary efforts of intelligence be
devoted to the Soviet missile program and to getting the "hard facts"
on the Soviet strategic air arm.
The U -A' program was apparently kept under considerable presi-
dential restraint, at least until shortly before it was blown by the
Powers shoot-down, although by then the missile gap had become a
hot political issue. Meeting in April 1958, the Board noted the stand-
do,.vn of Aquatone because of current international tension; and on 1
March 1960, Dulles suggested in writing to the NSC that the cardinal
objective of information on Soviet missile deployment could be better
achieved if the U-2 were given freer rein. This latter was counter to
the Board's recommendation in the preceding December-another of
the few unrealistic tangents it went off on-that the Priority National
Intelligence Objectives be revised to call for national intelligence
(rather than things of departmental interest, such as order of battle),
a recommendation presented just after the PNIOs had been revised
and with the oral comment that there should be only one national
object of any considerable priority-Soviet missile deployment.
With respect to the development of reconnaissance by earth satel-
lite there seems to have been little to report for a year and a half
except the spending of $7 million on intelligence aspects of the satel-
lite program as of 21 May 1958, but in March 1959 a progress report
was submitted by the Defense Department's Advanced Research Proj-
ects Agency: the USIB agencies were represented on a working panel
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? for space surveillance; in January, Defense and NASA had signed an
agreement for mutual support; an interim National Space Surveil-
lance Coordinating Center was in operation pending the readiness of
a permanent one, expected by July 1960; for ten months a satellite
detection "fence" had been carrying on experimental operations to
find "dark" objects in space; the jet Propulsion Laboratory was analyz-
ing tracking problems. Later that month the USIB took over from
ARPA the direction of the panel on intelligence requirements and
capabilities in space surveillance and an ad hoc Satellite Requirements
Committee.
By the -spring of 1960 the prospects for SAMOS satellites were
sufficiently encouraging that Robert Amory, the DD/I, recommended
to Dulles (two days before the Powers shoot-down) that he present
to the Board, as one of three fundamental issues for intelligence for
the next decade, the proposition that reconnaissance by satellite should
be made wholly overt and its legitimacy established as a matter of
international law.a During its May 1960 meeting the Board spent one
afternoon in CIA's Photo Interpretation Center, and in September both
the developments with respect to SAMOS and a review of the U-2
program were on the agenda of its next-to-last meeting.
In response to the Board's broader call for primary attention to the
Soviet missile program, an ad hoc subcommittee of the IAC was
formed under the chairmanship of Herbert Scoville, Assistant Director
for Scientific Intelligence, to consider the problem, and early in Feb-
ruary 1958, Scoville offered the IAC alternative charters for a sub-
committee on Guided Missile Collection Activities (which he himself
advocated) and one on Collection Activities generally, which the ad
hoc. committee had proferred.' In the meantime, however, the USCIB
had apparently also taken up the question. On 26 February it tabled
in a joint IAC-USCIB meeting the draft charter for a Critical Col-
lection Problems Committee, and this was approved. The CCPC then
became the instrument for focusing collection efforts on missile intelli-
gence with a priority symbolized by putting the Deputy DCI in its
? Amory's other two propositions have fared better; they were that military in-
telligence should be unified and that a national photo interpretation centc?should
be set up.
'This was no new project for Scoville; almost a year earlier he had proposed
to Lucian Truscott, the DCI's new Deputy for Coordination, that a committee
be established to coordinate scientific and technical collection activities.
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chair. It was reported to the Board on 28 February that the Com-
mittee was already overseeing two projects, and a progress report of
21 May identifies two, presumably the same two, as acoustic intelli-
gence and one concerned with the airfields of the Soviet Long Range
Air Force. The Board seems never to have given any further special
attention to the activities of the CCPC unless one of its very last
recommendations, in October 1960, that SAC renew the peripheral
collection of Elint, would have been a concern of the Committee.
The NSA
Elint-Comint was in any case the other major collection system con-
tributing to early warning and missile intelligence, and it needed at-
tention. In 1956, Elint activities were scattered among several agencies
while Comint was shared by NSA, reporting to the Defense Depart-
ment's Office of Special Operations, with the intercept agencies of
the individual services. In December Allen Dulles told Killian that
the NSA problem was the most serious in the community; he hoped
that the Board's attention to it would maintain the impetus toward
a solution that had been given by the recent appointment of General
John A. Samford as NSA director. Judging by the recommendations
the Board made that month, the NSA problem had two aspects-the
difficulty of breaking the best Soviet ciphers, and how to make a
fruitful selection from the mass of intercept traffic available-along,
perhaps, with some more general managerial difficulties.
Besides a probably mistaken recommendation that Comint be put
under an Assistant Secretary of Defense, presumably in order that it
have more high-level attention,s the Board's proposals were, first, that
the President himself lend his prestige to a recruitment drive for
cryptanalysts to work on Soviet ciphers and, second, that Defense
make a strong effort to develop better machines and techniques for
NSA to use in selecting intercepts. Gordon Gray's Office of Defense
Mobilization, however, under whose auspices the Board had suggested
.the recruitment drive might be mounted, recommended in April 1957
that a panel of ten under William O. Baker first study the problem;
and the President approved this recommendation, asking for a report
by 1 September.
`This was successfully opposed by Defense, with CIA concurrence. It was
.acaa.:aaay a VUUX Dy uwng unuer
Special Operations.
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The report of the Baker panel, of which a draft began to circulate
in September and was commented on by CIA only the following
January, recommended among other things that a research institute
be founded to study Soviet ciphers, that measures be taken to speed
up the communications network for warning purposes, and that
NSA take jurisdiction over Elint also. At its meeting of 28 February
1958 the Board noted that the Baker report was being implemented,
and in the following April it received a DCl report on the progress
of the implementation; but it was not until the end of July that State
and Defense concurred in giving Elint to NSA.
The Board continued throughout its existence to give particular
attention "to NSA. In October 1958 one of its formal recommendations
called for strong leadership on the part of the Agency's director; at
its April and Jul), meetings in 1959 it heard reports on the "noticeable
progress" Samford was making; and in December 1959 it recommended
that collection requirements levied on NSA be channeled through
OSO for review and guidance. The DCI took strong exception to this
last recommendation, even after it was explained that it referred only
to the requirements of the military services, saying that the regula-
tion of requirements was a matter for USIB, where all the military
agencies concerned were represented, and the OSO should stick to
management. In the NSC's follow-through on the recommendation,
it was generalized to refer to the implementation of Comint-Elint
fusion, and the NSC required joint DCI-Defense progress reports on
8 March and 15 June 1960 and annual reports on 1 May thereafter.
In May 1960, after Samford had left the NSA, the Board pointedly
recommended more continuity in the directorship. And in December
1960, finally, it showed its concern over the Martin-Mitchell deTection
by recommending an investigation by an outside agency, preferably
the FBI, and by proposing that the Secretary of Defense be given
the same kind of authority over personnel in security matters as the
DCI has.
Strong Central Direction: the DCI
One of the main themes that ran through all the Board's thinking
was expressed in the very first of its first set of recommendations, that
the DCI should "exercise a more comprehensive and positive coordi-
nating responsibility" and move the community's effort "in the direct
tion of integration, reduction of duplication, and coordination." Inte-
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gration under strong centralized direction, another recommendation
declared, should strengthen the intelligence effort and contain its
costs. In part to achieve this purpose, a third callcd for the revision
of the NSCIDs. And a fourth proposed, in order to free the DCI to
exert this central leadership, that he turn over day-to-day detail to
a chief of staff or executive director.
Almost every subsequent meeting of the Board produced further
needling along these lines. It met with some response, certainly, but
that the Board was dissatisfied with how much is evident in the fore-
most of its final recommendations, submitted in October 1960. In an
almost exasperated tone it recommended that the DCI say, first,
what legislative or executive action was needed to centralize the direc-
tion of intelligence activities and, second, whether the DCI should
also head an agency operating in competition with other intelligence
agencies. Dulles replied in effect "None" to the first and "Yes" to the
second. It was his disposition to lead by persuasion rather than
command, and he believed that strong central direction of the tradi-
tionally competitive agencies of the community could be achieved
only gradually.
In the matter of appointing a chief of staff, in particular, he felt
strongly that no one should stand between him and his deputies in
the functional directorates. He proposed in February 1957 to meet
the Board's purposes by creating a new deputy for coordination, a
position for which Lucian Truscott would be available, with no other
duties than to exercise that function of the DCI's, and at the Board's
next fall meeting he defended this proposal, said that he was also
expanding the duties of his executive assistant, John Earman, to those
of an executive officer, and suggested that an exchange of letters with
the President, perhaps made public, on the DCI's coordination respon-
sibility would help to emphasize it. No action was taken on the latter
suggestion, but the President approved the new Deputy position in
May 1957.
This compromise arrangement the Board found, after a trial period,
to be inadequate, and in October 1958 it again recommended the
creation of an executive director. The NSC, however, presumably on
Dulles urging,? amended this proposal in passing it on and offered
? He is recorded during the following December as having expressed to Robert
Lovett of the Board his continued opposition to the recommendation.
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as an alternative the expansion of the Inspector Ccncral's respon-
sibilitics. The latter was reported to the Board's next meeting as having
been accomplished.
Directives and Coordination
Another centralizing measure that was resisted the Board pushed
? through with greater determination-the consolidation of the USCIB
and JAC as a single USIB. It made this recommendation in October
1957, but three months later Dulles, reporting to the NSC that the
service intelligence agencies were opposed, suggested that any such
action be deferred. The NSC referred this response to the Board for
consideration; the Board reiterated its recommendation. On 14 March
1958 the President flatly directed compliance, and six months later the
USIB held its first meeting.
This consolidation required a rewriting of NSCID 1, but the
NSCIDs were already in the process of revision as a result of the
Board's first set of recommendations at the end of 1956. In September
1957 it had been reported that only numbers 5 and 9 were still giving
trouble. No. 9, concerning Comint, touched on delicate questions with
respect to the exclusiveness of the NSA charter (cannot CIA continue
to do its own processing of plain-text intercepts picked up in clan-
destine operations? Could not some hard-to-cover NSA stations be
? eliminated if one took advantage of CIA liaison with friendly foreign
services to get their Comint?) and whether the DCI should have
membership in the State-Defense Special Committee to which the
USCIB was supposed to report. Now with the unified USIB the Special
Committee was eliminated altogether and the other questions pre-
sumably became easier to solve.
By October 1958, at any rate, the directives issue was one of imple-
menting the new NSCIDs by issuing DCIDs. Here the persistent
sticker became aspects of clandestine coordination not settled in
NSCID 5-FBI contacts with foreign intelligence services and, more
seriously, "agreed activities" in clandestine collection on the part of
the military services. The Board was well aware of the latter problem,
especially in its acute manifestation with respect to clandestine Army
activities in Berlin; several members had brought back their own im-
pressions from inspection on the spot. What the Army wanted was a
license to explore operational possibilities up to a point without prior
coordination. When the DCID was finally issued in December 1959,
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almost simultaneously with another needling recommendation from
the Board, it withheld any such license; but it did not lay the issue
to rest. The military elements in Berlin, where most of the trouble was,
were prepared to follow the directive in good faith, but their superiors
in West Germany were not.
Another kind of coordination was involved in an innovation ap-
parently pushed through by the Board's staff man, General Cassidy,
and Kirkpatrick in CIA acting in concert-coordination in producing
finished current intelligence. In January 1957, evidently seeking some
accounting for the surprise we suffered in the British-French-Israeli
attack on Suez, the Board asked for copies of all the community's
current intelligence dailies for 24 October 1956 (and all weeklies for
that week and monthlies for that month). In reviewing this material
Cassidy found flaws in current intelligence operations-no community-
coordinated product, inadequate coordination of collection require-
ments, bad telephone security-and in March he brought these to the
attention of the DCI. Kirkpatrick, recalling how two years earlier his
inspectors had recommended that the Agency's current intelligence
product be coordinated to obtain the concurrence of other members
of the community and that it be tailored more sharply to the needs of
the President and the NSC, now recommended to Dulles that the
Cassidy suggestions be acted on in this sense.
The matter was taken up at all the IAC meetings during April
1957 and a reply to Cassidy formulated, which Dulles forwarded on
1 May. It brushed off any idea of drastic change: there would be more
consultation with other agencies in the course of producing the
Agency's daily, and dissemination was being reviewed. In July Cassidy
was reported annoyed at the failure to institute production of current
intelligence endorsed by all agencies, and in September Kirkpatrick
again called Dulles' attention to deficiencies in the Agency product
and recommended that Truscott prepare a plan for the production and
dissemination of coordinated, community-wide current intelligence.
This time it worked: in November the dry run of a new, coordinated
daily to be renamed Central (instead of Current) Intelligence Bulletin
was being reviewed.
Costs and Duplication
A secondary benefit the Board expected to derive from a better
integrated and coordinated intelligence community was the contain-
ment of costs through reduction of duplication. (This objective may
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' That progress with respect to some of the recommendations was not reported
to the Board does not necessarily mean that none was reported to the NSC.
'As a compromise when the Bureau of the Budget proposed a survey of in-
telligence activities which the Board felt would encroach on its own functions.
? have held a higher priority with the President himself than it seemed
to with his Board; Eisenhower was reported shocked to learn that
intelligence agencies were spending a billion dollars a year and
desirous that they economize.) No action, however, was reported taken
in specific response to this suggestion in the Board's first recommenda-
tions. In September 1957 Killian suggested to Cutler, not as a formal
recommendation of the Board, that the IAC's annual report on the
status of the foreign intelligence program would be better as a DCI
report which included figures on the budget and personnel for the
whole government intelligence program; and this suggestion was ap-
parently the nucleus of the cost-control attempts that began a year
later. -
In April 1959, it was reported to the Board that in response to one
of its recommendations of the preceding October, to the effect that
the DCI should search out and eliminate areas of unnecessary duplica-
tion, a conmiunity-wide budget was being worked on (and CIA man-
power being reduced). Since July 1958 an ad hoc working group had
been studying the problem, and in June 1959 the CIA Comptroller
submitted to the USIB a procedure for uniform cost estimating and
a USIB Cost Estimates Committee was formed. No further progress
in this matter, however, seems ever to have beeri-ieported separately
to the Board.7
Perhaps realizing that the approach through the budget held no
promise of early reductions in duplication, the Board also made a
more specific attack on this problem which was evidently of con-
cern to the President. Just before Christmas 1959 it asked the USIB
for an inventory of all intelligence periodicals published in the com-
munity; and when it had received and studied this it recommended,
in May 1960, that the duplication among them, especially those issued
by Defense agencies, be eliminated. In earl;: October it reissued this
recommendation without making special reference to Defense..
About this time Cordon Cray, who had now become the Presi-
dent's assistant for national security affairs, wrote to the Board that
the President wanted more accomplished in reducing duplication and
hoped the Joint Study Group, which had been formed in July,8 would
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be effective therein. At the end of October the NSC asked the DCI
for a progress report by 6 January 1961 and then for another by 1
June. At last report to the Board, however, the USIB Ad Hoc Com-
mittee on Intelligence Publications, which had been formed to make
the inventory and extended to study action on the recommendation,
was still working with the objective of reducing the number of
intelligence dailies from 13 to 1.
Covert Action
The Board was uneasy about the Clandestine Services' non-intelli-
gence activities. One of its first recommendations, in December 1956,
was that procedures be set up to insure that projects under NSC
5412 get "joint staffing" a and formal approval in advance and that
State and Defense be kept abreast of their implementation within
the principle of need to know. The rules drafted in response to this
recommendation and approved in March 1957 provided that a Special
Group consisting of the Under Secretary of State (Herter), Deputy
Secretary of Defense (Robertson), and the President's national se-
curity assistant (Cutler) would be the policy authority 10 and would
in each case decide whether it was necessary to have an ad hoc staff-
level group examine the proposal in detail, except that sensitive proj-
ects with no military implications might, with the President's per-
mission, be approved by the Secretary of State alone.
It was reported to the Board in September 1957 that the Special
Group was holding meetings, but it apparently remained less than
fully active. In October 1958, perhaps because of trouble with the
operations in Indonesia that had been discussed at its meeting the
previous spring, the Board issued three recommendations designed to
restrict freedom of covert action. One insisted that the Special Group
review all. clandestine programs. It was pointed out that the President
assumed it had been reviewing them; he directed that they be
"staffed" in advance, reviewed while in progress, and analyzed on
conclusion.
'This phrase caused a good deal of confusion until it was explained to mean,
not the planning and direction of the operations by an interagency staff, but a
detailed (i.e., staff-level) joint examination before policy approval.
"Such a group had always, with some variation in detail, been the pro forma
authority under 5412; under this pressure from the Board it was to become more
active now.
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offices for CIA to deal with concerning operations with military im-
plications. This call for coordination machinery outside the Special
Group procedures must have referred to operations really requiring
joint planning and execution, as a major operation against Cuba would.
(In a curious exchange of views the President thought that the De-
fense office in question should be the Joint Chiefs; Gordon Gray
suggested that political aspects might involve the Secretary of De-
fense and ISA; and the President replied that if it was a political matter
it wasn't Defense's business.) It was reported to the Board at its meet-
ing the following spring that action was being taken on this recom-
mendation by setting up a "cold war planning group" with representa-
tives from OSO, the Joint Staff, and the Secretary's office.
The spring 1959 meeting, most of which was devoted to a briefing
in depth designed to overcome the skepticism the Board had dis-
played about the effectiveness of political and psychological opera-
tions, was also told that the Special Group (now Gray-Herter-Irwin
and later Gray-Murphy-Gates) had instituted regular weekly meet-
ings and would be briefed in advance on all projects. The Board con-
tinued anxious that the Group exercise real control: at its meeting the
following July it quizzed Gray and Dulles as to whether the State
member gave positive advice or just went along with the DCI's
proposals, whether the Defense member participated in decisions on
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Another recommendation asked that Defense designate one of its
political matters, and whether the Group as a whole was doing every-
thing the President had expected it to do.
The third recommendation of October 1958 concerning covert action
was that the DD/P organization be relieved, first, of evaluating the
effectiveness of its own operations and, second, of making the esti-
mates on which its operations would be based. The first response to
this was simply to note that Richard Bissell, with whom the Board
had been acquainted originally as Dulles' assistant in the specialty of
advanced reconnaissance and then as agreeing to take over the DD/P
research organization, the Technical Services Staff," was now, in his
capacity as the new DD/P, undertaking a major reorganization of
the directorate. Progress in the reorganization as bearing on this
recommendation was several times reported both to Board meetings
and in writing to the NSC, but the response was not completely
"Presumably.in addition to his responsibility for Aquatone. No formal action in
this sense was ever taken.
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satisfactory: Cray once complained that a DCI report addressed itself
only to the first half of the double-barreled recommendation, and
Kirkpatrick pointed out to Dulles that another report claimed changes
which in fact were only the formalization of procedures long since
practiced.
In May 1960 the Board recorded its feeling that there remained
more to be done by recommending that the reorganizing of the
clandestine services be continued. At the same time it recommended
that chiefs of station be given higher cover rank, a matter on which
talks were then begun with State.
For all its uneasiness about the covert action programs, the Board
was anxious to get something going in Cuba. In January 1960 it had
to be explained at some length that while general plans could be
laid and assets developed, no specific project could be formulated until
policy was decided at the top. And after some operations in Tibet
had been described, Hull remarked that it seemed silly to make
such an effort on the other side of the world when Cuba was right
on our doorstep.
The agenda for the Board's last meeting, in January 1961, included
consideration of the report of the Joint Study Group, the prepara-
tion of its own report to the President, and a meeting with the Presi-
dent. Its members all resigned, of course, with the change of ad-
ministration; but it was apparently expected that the Board itself
would continue in existence and new members be appointed. On 6
February Dulles sent McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy's national security
assistant, a list of the former members and suggested four that it
might be most desirable to reappoint (Lovett, Baker, Hull, Doolittle),
along with some replacement possibilities (Sidney Souers, Frank Pace,
Killian or George Kistiakowsky, Cordon Cray); and two weeks later
a CIA Regulation was issued reaffirming that the IG should be the
channel to the Board. It was not until May, however, after the Bay
of Pigs, that the Board was reconstituted under a different name,
the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.
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