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Other People's Mail. As an intelligence chief who grew up in his business. Allen Dulles is a new phenomenon in the U.S. So, too, is the organization which he heads. Although there was some brisk intelligence work in the Civil War, the U.S. throughout most of its history has underrated the importance of intelligence. U.S. Army and Navy intelligence services, handicapped by the reluctance of regular officers to make a career of such work, were barely adequate for tactical purposes. In the 1920s. the State Department supported the so-called "Black Chamber." which had begun as an Army counterespionage unit in World War I, and which later succeeded in cracking some foreign codes. By this means, the U.S. officials read secret instructions from Tokyo, giving maximum and minimum bargaining positions to Japanese delegates to the Washington Disarmament Conference. In consequence. Japan came out of the conference with less than it might have obtained. But in 1929, when he took office as Hoover's Secretary of State, Henry Stimson cut off Black Chamber funds on the ground that "Gentlemen don't read each other's mail." (Ironically, Stimson, as F.D.R.'s Secretary of War, later presided over the development of a cryptanalytic service several hundred times larger than the Black Chamber.)
In World War II, the OSS, brain child of General "Wild Bill" Donovan, tried to win acceptance as the main agency of strategic intelligence. Jealousy on the part of military intelligence agencies, and the fact that OSS had to be organized hastily, kept it from fulfilling this important role. The main contribution of OSS was a number of specific intelligence operations, some of them brilliantly performed, rather than as a central strategic intelligence service. It did leave with the Government a hard core of first-rate intelligence men.
"Promotional Intelligence." Before World War II had ended, these men, together with like-minded officials of other agencies, had begun to agitate for a permanent strategic-intelligence service. One of their strongest arguments was the fact that the existing U.S. intelligence system encouraged "sales-promotion intelligence." Any information evaluated by the Office of Naval Intelligence, for example, was likely to agree with Navy strategic doctrine and be in support of the Navy view in arguments between the services. The Air Force had a similar record, and if Army and State Department evaluation was less biased, that could be ascribed to the not very creditable fact that the Army and the State Department had fewer ideas on grand strategy than the Navy and Air Force.
There was no agency that was responsible to the President himself and committed to the interpretation of intelligence from the point of view of the U.S. Government as a whole. The Central Intelligence Agency, established in 1947, was designed to fill this function. Subordinate to the National Security Council and thus to the President, it was given responsibility for coordinating all U.S. intelligence activities, and for the preparation of national intelligence estimates representing the best combined judgment of all branches of U.S. intelligence, including CIA itself. This was supposed to give policymakers estimates free of the promotional bids of particular services or departments.