The Office of Policy Coordination

On July 26, 1947, President Harry S. Truman signed the National Security Act, which laid the foundations of the modern national security establishment, based on the experience gained during World War II and the challenges presented by the intensifying Cold War. It created the National Security Council (NSC) to advise and assist the President on national security and foreign policies; established the office of the secretary of Defense, led by a civilian presidential appointee to coordinate the activities of the separate Departments of Army, Navy, and Air Force; and instituted a Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) organization responsible for the unified strategic direction, command, and integration of land, naval, and air forces. It also created the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the first peacetime coordinated and comprehensive intelligence service in the nation's history. As the Congress wrote the National Security Act initially, the CIA's mandate was very similar to that of its predecessor, the Central Intelligence Group, which President Truman had created in January 1946 by presidential directive. The CIA's mission was to collect intelligence by secret or overt means, perform research and analysis, and produce intelligence summaries and estimates.

The first few months of the CIA's existence coincided with an escalation of Communist activities throughout the world and particularly in Europe. The Soviet Union leveraged both the good will created by its fight against the Nazis during the war and the presence of its armies in a number of European countries after the war to inspire and support local Communist parties by open means or behind the scenes. In Czechoslovakia, the Communists had won only 38 percent of the votes in the 1947 elections and held a minority position in the government and parliament. But they controlled the police, security apparatus, and armed forces, which they used to engineer a coup in February of 1948. A government purged of non-Communists came to power, and the parliament quickly approved a new constitution proclaiming Czechoslovakia a People's Democracy, effectively placing it in the Soviet orbit.

A similar scenario risked being repeated in Italy, which had scheduled parliamentary elections for April 18, 1948. The Italian Communist Party, the strongest Communist party in Europe outside the Soviet Union, had outperformed the Christian Democrats in municipal elections in 1946 and 1947. Supported by millions of dollars funneled "in black bags of money directly out of the Soviet compound in Rome," they were poised to win the parliamentary elections. Almost forty years later, Gianni Agnelli, the Italian industrial mogul and head of the Fiat conglomerate, described the effects of a Communist electoral victory in Italy as follows: "[It] would have been a tragedy for Italy; ... would have been a tragedy for Europe; ... would have been a tragedy for the Mediterranean; and it would have been a setback for America."

The United States took a number of steps to ensure a favorable outcome of the elections. Significant economic and military aid available under the Marshall Plan was directed to Italy; the large Italian-American community in the United States sent millions of letters, postcards, and telegrams urging their friends and family back home to reject the Communists. The Voice of America and commercial radio stations in Italy broadcast hours of programming designed to influence the vote, with the Voice of America featuring prominent personalities like Frank Sinatra and Gary Cooper to pitch their message.

However, there was a need to act more decisively with direct but clandestine support that would help the Christian Democrats and their coalition partners get over the top. The CIA's Office of Special Operations (OSO) was the natural choice for the job. The OSO was the intelligence-gathering arm of the CIA that controlled the overwhelming majority of the agency's personnel and assets at the time. Most of the OSO officers had learned their tradecraft during World War II, serving in military intelligence units or in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), created by William J. "Wild Bill" Donovan in 1942 to collect intelligence and conduct sabotage operations against Axis targets in Europe and parts of Asia.

James Angleton, the OSO station chief in Rome, took charge of the CIA operation to influence the Italian election. Angleton had been instrumental in rebuilding the Italian intelligence services after the war and had unfettered access to their hierarchies, which he used to channel all available OSO assets toward supporting the Christian Democratic candidates and their allies. F. Mark Wyatt, a young CIA officer assigned to the operation recalled:

We had bags of money that we delivered to selected politicians, to defray their political expenses, their campaign expenses, for posters, for pamphlets, what have you. And we did many things to assist those selected Christian Democrats, Republicans, and the other parties that were completely reliable — that could keep the secret of where their funds came from.

We would like to have done this in a more sophisticated manner. Passing black bags to affect a political election is not really a terribly attractive thing. But we only had a few months to do this, and that was the principal thing that we did.

In the end, Alcide De Gasperi's Christian Democrats and their coalition partners were able to beat Palmiro Togliatti's Communist-Socialist alliance thanks to the strong anti-Communist get-out-the-vote effort supported by the Catholic Church and financed by the CIA.

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The legal cover for the CIA's conduct of the Italian operation had been provided by NSC directive 4-A of December 17, 1947, which directed the director of Central Intelligence (DCI) to "Initiate and conduct, within the limit of available funds, covert psychological operations designed to counteract Soviet and Soviet- inspired activities which constitute a threat to world peace and security or are designed to discredit and defeat the United States in its endeavors to promote world peace and security."

An increasing number of people in the national security establishment came to the realization that countering the Soviet threat in a cold war required a broader...