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¶An Office of National Estimates was established; in the first month of Smith's regime, it produced ten times as many combined intelligence estimates as CIA had turned out in three years.
¶For the first time, all U.S. intelligence agencies began to get regular guidance from a central source on what information they should look for and the urgency with which it was wanted.
Smith and his team also shook up CIA's staff, which included a considerable number of dubious security risks and dilettantes. In Smith's first month, 50 employees were fired. The criterion which Smith established was simple. Said he: "I don't care whether they were blabbing secrets or not. Just give me names of people at Georgetown cocktail parties."
The Mysterious Visitors. CIA staffers, who respected but feared Smith, are even more impressed by Allen Dulles, who runs the agency smoothly and with apparently inexhaustible energy. Dulles is in his office every morning by 8 o'clock, often works through till 11 at night. Though he is burdened with the reading of a staggering number of documents and the usual quota of time-consuming conferences (including a weekly meeting of the National Security Council), Dulles manages to see scores of visitors every day, ranging from foreign ambassadors to secret agents. To avoid embarrassing confrontations, Dulles' visitors are frequently dispersed among a number of nearby offices, with Dulles himself moving from room to room like a big-city dentist.
These summer weekends Dulles hurries up to his handsome shore place at Lloyd Neck, Long Island, where he spends as much time as possible with his wife, two married daughters and son Allen Macy, an ex-Marine lieutenant who is still recuperating from a near-fatal head wound suffered in the fighting around Korea's Bunker Hill last November.
Room for Improvement. Much of the increased respect with which CIA is now regarded in Washington is directly attributable to Smith and Allen Dulles. But Dulles himself is the first to admit that there is plenty of room for improvement. Relations with the military intelligence services, though better than ever before, are still less than good. (The Navy, which had advance warning of the Batista coup d'état in Cuba last year, failed to pass the word on to CIA.) Because of insufficient filtering and analysis at lower levels, a vast and confusing flood of information is still passed up to top U.S. officials. Says Dulles: "We have got to get more selective, and that may mean fewer people."
Congress has let CIA alone. So far, the only serious interference has been Joe McCarthy's demand that a CIA employee appear before his committee—a demand which Dulles, with White House backing, flatly and successfully rejected (TIME, July 27).
So Dulles has a free hand to tackle an old, old job with new methods. He thinks that U.S. intelligence is now better than the British, but he has not yet caught up with the more serious competition. Because the U.S. is—and expects to remain —an open society, the job of Communist intelligence here, Dulles thinks, is easier than his own. Some day, however, he hopes that his collection of scholars, scientists, historians, lawyers and spies will be running a service second to none in its field—as effective, perhaps, as Joshua's.