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  CIA Briefings of Presidential Candidates John L. Helgerson

 

Foreword: Getting To Know the President

This is an important and original book. How world leaders understand or misunderstand, use or fail to use, the intelligence available to them is an essential but still under-researched aspect both of modern government and of international relations. The making of the American intelligence community has transformed the presidency of the United States. Before the First World War, the idea that the United States might need a foreign intelligence service simply did not occur to most Americans or to their presidents. After the war, Woodrow Wilson publicly poked fun at his own pre-war innocence: "Let me testify to this, my fellow citizens, I not only did not know it until we got into this war, but I did not believe it when I was told that it was true, that Germany was not the only country that maintained a secret service!" Wilson could scarcely have imagined that, less than half a century later, the United States would be an intelligence superpower. Though the intelligence nowadays available to the President is, like all human knowledge, incomplete and fallible, it probably exceeds--at least in quantity--that available to any other world leader past or present.

The starting point for the study of relations between presidents and their intelligence communities since the Second World War are the briefings they receive from the CIA before their inauguration. John L. Helgerson is well equipped to write this path-breaking study of these briefings. A political scientist before joining the CIA, he served as the Agency’s Deputy Director for Intelligence during the Bush administration and was head of the team that briefed Bill Clinton in Little Rock after the 1992 election. In addition to having access to classified files, Mr. Helgerson has interviewed previous Agency briefers and all surviving former Presidents.

Both briefers and former Presidents are agreed on the simple but important fact that each President is different. Presidents differ more widely in their previous knowledge and experience of intelligence than in their grasp of most other areas of government. Harry Truman entered the Oval Office in April 1945 almost wholly ignorant of intelligence matters. His determination that no future president should take office as uninformed as he had been is partly responsible for the intelligence briefing offered to all presidential candidates since 1952. Unlike Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower did not need to be persuaded of the importance of intelligence. Ike was the first President since George Washington already experienced in the use of intelligence when he took the oath of office. He wrote after the Second World War that "intelligence had been of priceless value to me...and, in no small way, contributed to the speed with which the enemy was routed and eventually forced to surrender."

Recent presidents have varied almost as greatly in their experience of intelligence as Truman and Eisenhower. Agency briefers found Presidents Reagan and Bush, in Mr. Helgerson’s words, "virtual polar opposites." Despite Ronald Reagan’s membership in 1975 of the Rockefeller Commission on CIA activities within the United States, he had no previous experience as an intelligence consumer and felt the need for generality. Bush, by contrast, was the first former Director of Central Intelligence, with the arguable exception of George Washington, to be elected president. He had a closer working relationship than any previous president with the CIA. Like Reagan, President Clinton had no previous experience as an intelligence consumer.

Mr. Helgerson provides the first detailed account of the way in which Agency briefers have attempted, with varying success, to adapt briefings to the differing experience, priorities, and working patterns of successive presidents. One of the earliest changes in the new administration is usually the format of the President’s Daily Brief, probably the world’s smallest circulation, most highly classified, and--in some respects--best informed daily newspaper. Some presidents, it appears, like it to include more humor than others. On average, about 60 percent of the items covered in the President’s Daily Brief do not appear in the press at all, even in unclassified form.

The most important lesson of this book is that, if the CIA is to provide effective intelligence support to policymakers, there is no substitute for direct access to the President. There is the implied lesson also that, if presidents are to make the best use of the CIA, they need to make clear to the Agency at regular intervals what intelligence they do and do not want. As a result of his own experience as DCI, Bush plainly took this lesson to heart. Some presidents, however, have provided little feedback.

Most good books leave the reader wanting more. Getting To Know the President is no exception. As well as holding the interest of his readers, Mr. Helgerson will also increase their curiosity. What, for example, were the exotic and closely-held methods or the sensitive human-source and technical collection programs on which DCI George Bush briefed President-elect Jimmy Carter? Just as it is reasonable for readers to ask questions such as these, so it is also reasonable on some occasions for intelligence agencies to avoid precise replies in order to protect their sources and methods.

There is an inevitable tension between the curiosity of readers and scholars on the one hand and the security-consciousness of intelligence agencies on the other. Historians and intelligence officers are unlikely ever to reach complete agreement on how much of the past record can be declassified without compromising current operations. In recent years, however, the CIA Center for the Study of Intelligence has gone further than most of the world’s major intelligence agencies in opening up some of its records to historical research, publishing important volumes of documents on subjects such as the Truman administration, the Cuban missile crisis, Soviet estimates, and spy satellites. All historians will hope that these documents will be followed by many more.

It is also to be hoped that Getting To Know the President will set a precedent for intelligence agencies in other countries. Until similar volumes are available on the briefing of, among others, British prime ministers, German chancellors, French and Russian presidents, and leading Asian statesmen, the use made of intelligence by world leaders will continue to be a major gap in our understanding of both modern government and international relations.

Christopher Andrew
Corpus Christi College
Cambridge

Preface

This volume was produced while I served a one-year assignment with the CIA’s Center for the Study of Intelligence. I am grateful to the Agency for that opportunity. The resulting study, needless to say, is my work alone; the opinions offered are not those of the Central Intelligence Agency nor the US Government.

To the maximum extent feasible, contemporaneous written records have been used to construct the account of developments presented. For the earlier presidential transitions, it has proved possible to declassify all relevant documents. Among the numerous individuals who helped search for source materials, a few were especially helpful and deserve special thanks: CIA officers Janet Platt, Becky Rant, Emma Sullivan, and Michael Warner; Andrea Mehrer at the Library of Congress; and Dwight D. Eisenhower Library archivist David Haight.

Interviews with former presidents, CIA directors, and numerous others involved in the nine presidential transitions provided invaluable additional material with which to flesh out the sparse written record. I deeply appreciate the honor and time granted me by Presidents George Bush, Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, and Gerald Ford in agreeing to be interviewed. Similarly, I am grateful to the CIA directors who were most involved in the transitions--Robert Gates, Stansfield Turner, William Colby, and Richard Helms--for sharing their recollections. Former Agency officer Meredith Davidson provided invaluable assistance in reconstructing the events of the early 1950s.

CIA protects carefully the confidentiality of comments made to its officers by serving presidents, and I have continued that tradition in this account. Readers will find neither exposes of our presidents’ private moments nor specific descriptions of what they said during briefing sessions, especially regarding sensitive policy issues of continuing relevance and importance. Similarly, it would not be appropriate to use this volume to offer judgments about how well the various presidents used the intelligence they were provided.[1] Nevertheless, I have been able to recount in unclassified form the circumstances under which the Agency established its relationships with successive presidents and to discuss, in general terms, the subjects about which they were briefed. None of those interviewed showed any reservation in speaking about the relationship between the President and the CIA during the period of their personal involvement.

I thank David Peterson, Richard Kovar, and Judith Van Roy for their editorial assistance and, most of all, Harriet Malone for her superb work in producing countless drafts of this study.

John L. Helgerson

[1] In the author’s judgment, the most comprehensive and objective account of how presidents have used intelligence throughout their terms of office is Christopher Andrew’s For the President’s Eyes Only (London: Harper Collins, 1995).

Introduction

It was President Harry Truman, in whose administration the Central Intelligence Agency was created, who instituted the custom of providing candidates for the Presidency with confidential briefings on foreign developments. In 1952 he authorized the CIA to brief Gen. Dwight Eisenhower and Governor Adlai Stevenson so that the successful candidate would be as well informed as possible on the world situation when he took office. The briefings would also position the CIA to develop a close working relationship with the new president and his advisers. These two objectives have guided the Agency’s efforts during presidential transition periods ever since.

Thus it was, after Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton won the 1992 election, that the Central Intelligence Agency moved quickly to establish a presence in Little Rock to provide intelligence support to the new President-elect. As CIA’s Deputy Director for Intelligence, I was sent to meet with the Governor and his staff to describe the materials the Agency proposed to make available and to elicit the Governor’s agreement to receive regular briefings from the CIA. Events unfolded in such a way that I became the head of a team that spent most of the period from November 1992 through January 1993 in Little Rock providing daily intelligence updates to the President-elect.

In keeping with President Truman’s long-ago initiative, the Agency wanted to help the new President-elect prepare for his foreign policy responsibilities and acquaint him and his staff with CIA’s capabilities for collecting, analyzing, and delivering intelligence that would be vital to them when they took office. As we made arrangements for briefing Governor Clinton, we attempted to learn as much as possible from the Agency’s experience in previous transition periods. What we discovered was that the CIA had provided pre-inaugural intelligence support to all eight presidents elected since the Agency was founded, but had no systematic records of those efforts. There was no body of organized information to indicate what had worked before and what had not. Such records and memories as we did have, however, made clear that we needed to make decisions quickly on how to proceed in a number of areas that would have an important bearing on whether we met our two primary goals.

The key variables that seem to determine whether the Agency is successful in serving a new president fall into four general categories. The first of these relates to the level and type of person or persons the Agency puts forward to represent it. In some transitions the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) has been personally and extensively involved, in others the DCI took no active role. Sometimes the Agency has fielded very senior officers as its briefers, but in other instances relied on much more junior representatives. When senior officers do the briefings they generally give the Agency’s product and approach greater credibility and access, but their selection also increases the likelihood that the exercise will be seen as political.

A second category of key variables concerns other political considerations to which the Agency must be sensitive to ensure that the Intelligence Community and a new president come to work together well. Foremost among these is the background of the president-elect himself, particularly as it relates to his familiarity with the CIA and its products. It is quite a different matter, for example, to establish a relationship with an individual who has moved up from the vice presidency in the way that Presidents Gerald Ford and George Bush did, as contrasted with individuals who have come to the position with no Washington experience in the manner of Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. Similarly, the Agency’s experience has varied significantly depending on whether or not the new president has come from the same political party as his predecessor.

The DCI’s own political or career ambitions have sometimes raised delicate political problems. It is not unlikely, for example, that during a transition period the interests of the DCI would not correspond with those of the CIA as an institution. A most important political variable is the attitudes of the outgoing president and the national security adviser. Their support for the Agency’s efforts to establish an early and effective relationship with a new administration facilitates matters immensely.

The third group of key variables concerns logistic arrangements for the briefings. Should briefings be given prior to the election to both, or even multiple, candidates? Alternatively, should they be postponed until after the vote and provided exclusively to the single president-elect during the transition? How many briefings should be given and with what frequency? Experience shows that it matters, too, where the briefings are given and whether only the candidate is briefed or staff assistants are included as well.

Finally, concerning the substance of the information provided, there have been considerable variations in the amount and the type of material made available. All candidates in recent years have valued receiving the President’s Daily Brief (PDB), the CIA intelligence summary created exclusively for the President. Some have wanted to receive additional, supplementary intelligence publications during the campaign and the transition period. A few have wanted oral briefings by a number of substantive experts as opposed to hearing from a single Agency briefer each day; others have found multiple briefers confusing or overwhelming.

An important issue to be faced by the Agency during each transition concerns how much information derived from sensitive human sources and technical collection efforts and regarding covert action programs should be included in the material given a president-elect, and when. Presidents in office are always informed of such programs, and careful attention is given to the timing, level of detail, and content of the presentation. And finally, concerning the substance of the support provided, there have been dramatic variations in the amount of tailored assistance the Agency has provided presidents-elect to prepare them for pre-inaugural planning and policy deliberations, speeches and press conferences, and, in particular, their meetings and communications with foreign statesmen.

Given the importance of these variables in determining whether the CIA will come to work well with a new president during the transition period and beyond, it seemed desirable for the Agency’s own purposes to create a record of what we have done in the past, noting what has worked and what has not. Even a cursory examination of the Agency’s experience over the past 40 years reveals that it is often not intuitively obvious or self-evident what approaches will translate into success. Not infrequently, moreover, certain actions that have assisted us in realizing one of our goals have undermined achievement of the other.

I have also been prompted to pursue this undertaking by observing firsthand the importance of the transition period in informing and preparing an incoming president. I was struck to discover during the 1992-93 transition that the Central Intelligence Agency is virtually alone (with the obvious and distinguished exception of the Secret Service) in providing day-to-day, on-site, direct support to the president-elect during this critical period. This puts a responsibility on the Agency not only to represent the Intelligence Community as a whole but, to the extent feasible, also to make available to the president-elect materials from other executive departments handling national security and foreign policy matters, including the National Security Council, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Departments of Defense, State, and Treasury.

In preparing this study I have been pleased to discover, or confirm, that certain of the intelligence briefings provided to incoming presidents have turned out to be of genuine and lasting historical importance in their own right. To use one example, the DCI and the Deputy Director for Plans (Operations) provided President-elect Kennedy information on the Agency’s plans for what would become the Bay of Pigs operation in Cuba. This occurred at a meeting with only the three of them present. A great deal of what has subsequently been written by others about what Kennedy was told, when he was told it, and what he said in response, is substantially wrong. I hope this account can clarify the circumstances of this and other important briefings provided to presidents over the years.

Finally, because the CIA’s role during transitions is unique, the Agency seems to me to have an obligation to record what it has done and to make its account as widely available as possible. Perhaps this material will be of use not only to Agency officers charged with meeting our briefing responsibilities in the future, but also to others interested in CIA’s contributions during these important chapters of our national history.

Chapter 1. Briefing Governor Clinton in Little Rock

During the presidential campaign of 1992, President Bush continued to receive intelligence briefings on a regular basis just as he had for the previous 12 years. When he was on the road campaigning he was sent the President’s Daily Brief (PDB), which informed him each morning of new developments warranting his attention and provided him in-depth analysis of sensitive international situations. When he was in Washington, the President would read the PDB with the Agency’s briefing officer present so that he could hear of any late updates, review and discuss supplementary materials, and ask for new or follow-up information.

Fortunately, in light of the election outcome, President Bush’s background had made him uniquely mindful of the value of providing intelligence briefings to the challenger as well. He had been Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) in 1976, and in that capacity had personally provided briefings to Governor Jimmy Carter at his home in Georgia. Bush played a major role in arranging briefings for Governor Ronald Reagan in 1980, and as Vice President he received briefings during the transition to his own presidency in 1988. There was no doubt that as President he would approve briefings for Governor Bill Clinton, continuing uninterrupted the practice set in motion by President Truman forty years before.

The DCI Visits Little Rock

Soon after the Democratic convention in 1992, National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft contacted Washington attorney Samuel Berger to offer intelligence briefings to Governor Clinton. At that time, Berger, who subsequently became Deputy National Security Adviser, was serving as a primary adviser to Governor Clinton on foreign policy matters. Scowcroft and Berger agreed that, as a first step, DCI Robert Gates would travel to Little Rock and provide a worldwide intelligence briefing.

In preparation for his meeting with the DCI, the candidate’s staff had prepared extensive reading materials for his review. On the appointed day, the Governor met over lunch with his running mate, Senator Albert Gore, and with the outgoing chairmen of the two Congressional intelligence committees, Senator David Boren and Representative David McCurdy, who were to participate in the briefing session.

The DCI also had spent considerable time preparing, mindful of the Governor’s lack of familiarity and experience with the Intelligence Community and its products.[2] Knowing that presidential campaigns often kept candidates too busy for regular briefings, Gates also wanted to make the most of what might be the Agency’s only opportunity to deal directly with the candidate before the election.

Governor Clinton was a gracious host when the DCI began his briefing in Little Rock on the afternoon of 4 September, and the session proceeded in a relaxed atmosphere. The substantive issues on which the DCI focused included the turmoil in Russia, conflict in the former Yugoslavia, and developments in Iraq, North Korea, China, and Iran. He stressed the problem of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. There was some discussion of foreign economic espionage directed against the United States and relatively brief treatment of a half-dozen Third World issues ranging from hunger in Africa to prospects for Cambodia.

The Governor listened attentively and asked probing questions, primarily on proliferation, Iraq, and the situations in Bosnia and Russia. On nonsubstantive matters, which were discussed only briefly, the DCI was heartened when Governor Clinton expressed his support for a strong and capable US intelligence service. Responding to an allusion by the DCI to intelligence budget stringencies, Governor Clinton turned to Boren and McCurdy and joked, "Is this your doing?"

The others were actively involved as well. Senator Gore, in particular, had a number of questions, and Boren and McCurdy drew on their experiences to highlight various aspects of the intelligence business.

Following that meeting, no further briefings were provided to Governor Clinton until after the election on 3 November. This was not surprising; experience with other candidates in recent years had shown that such briefings have been difficult to arrange or politically awkward during the period of the heaviest campaigning and presidential debates.

Establishing a "Permanent" Presence

Like other Americans, Agency officials followed the campaign and watched the polls carefully, but they took no steps to establish a CIA presence in Little Rock until after the election had been decided. This left senior managers somewhat anxious about whether a field facility could be set up in time to provide the highest quality intelligence materials to the President-elect should he want them immediately. As it turned out, this was not a problem; it was a full week before the confusion of the postelection period dissipated and Agency officers could discuss the practical aspects of intelligence briefings with the President-elect’s team. In the interim, the DCI reconfirmed President Bush’s approval for the establishment of an Agency outpost in Arkansas.

A team drawn from CIA’s Offices of Communications, Security, Current Production and Analytic Support (CPAS), and Logistics discreetly established an Agency office in Little Rock in the days following the election. The DCI asked the author, as the Agency’s Deputy Director for Intelligence, to head the team and to elicit from Governor Clinton and his staff agreement that he should receive daily intelligence briefings from CIA. Although this was accomplished smoothly, at the time I had more than a few apprehensions. We were aware that staff members in some previous transitions, including at least a couple at very senior levels, had worked vigorously to thwart undertakings such as we were about to propose.

On 11 November, I met with Berger and Nancy Soderberg of Governor Clinton’s staff to make our pitch. The meeting was held in downtown Little Rock in a hastily commandeered office in the building into which the transition team was moving that very day. Berger and Soderberg could not have been more receptive. They were not familiar with the Intelligence Community or its range of products but were interested in ascertaining what kinds of support could be provided Governor Clinton and key staffers in Little Rock and Washington.

The PDB Briefing Process

During the Bush and Clinton presidencies, the Agency’s practice has been to print the PDB in the early morning hours and to have our briefers present it personally to presidentially designated recipients at the opening of business. Having the briefer present when the PDB is read allows Agency officers to answer a large proportion of follow-up questions on the spot. More involved questions and requests for additional information are brought back to analysts at Headquarters, with written or oral answers provided the following day. This system provides the Agency a firsthand and timely method of keeping abreast of policymakers’ interests and a reliable means of protecting the security of the PDB.

We described the functions of the various agencies and the products normally provided to the President. Our discussion naturally focused on the PDB, including an explanation of how the President received it from an Agency briefer each day and how the Agency responded to follow-up questions. We recommended that the Agency also provide the Governor a daily Supplement to the PDB, inasmuch as the regular publication would still reflect the interests of President Bush and its focus would not necessarily correspond with the needs of Governor Clinton.

Berger and Soderberg were shown copies of that day’s PDB and a proposed supplemental current intelligence publication. We also showed them the National Intelligence Daily (NID) and other selected materials, noting that the publications they had before them had been printed earlier that morning in a hotel room in Little Rock. They were clearly impressed with the quality of the books; the installation in Little Rock of secure communications equipment for receiving high-quality color computer graphics from CIA Headquarters proved well worth the effort.

Berger undertook to discuss the issues related to intelligence briefings with Governor Clinton and promised to get back to us promptly. In fact, the next day Soderberg called our advance command post to indicate that Governor Clinton did indeed want to receive the PDB and a briefer, at least for a trial period, to see what kinds of information it contained and what his schedule permitted.

On 13 November, 10 days following the election, we had our first session with Governor Clinton in the book-lined study of the Governor’s Mansion. Senator Gore was at the Mansion for other meetings and joined us. Our introductory exchange was a bit awkward as we all fumbled around deciding where best to sit to go over the materials we had brought. We settled on a large round table in the corner of the study. After offering a brief but friendly welcome, our two new customers immediately read every word of that day’s PDB, obviously intrigued to see what it contained.

Much of our discussion concerned procedures related to the PDB. The President-elect wanted to be sure he could receive briefings whenever they could be fitted into his schedule. We assured him that he could but suggested a fixed time, preferably an early morning session, as the most likely to be satisfactory on an ongoing basis. We informed the Governor that the PDB in the recent past had been provided also to the Vice President, the National Security Adviser and his Deputy, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the White House Chief of Staff, and the Secretaries of State and Defense, but that in the future the distribution list would be his to control. Governor Clinton replied that he wanted Senator Gore to begin receiving the PDB immediately and asked that we provide it to other Cabinet-level recipients once they were named, assuming this was agreeable to President Bush. I took the opportunity to wonder aloud whether it would not make sense to provide the PDB also to the Secretary of the Treasury, given the steadily growing importance of economic issues. The President-elect thought for only a moment, declared this to be a very good idea and ordered that immediately after the inauguration we should begin regular briefings of the Secretary of the Treasury as well.

The Governor was immediately interested in our suggestion that he receive a personalized supplement. After some discussion, he indicated he would accept in it some material chosen by us to elaborate items discussed in the main PDB. However, he underscored that he wanted the Supplement to focus primarily on specific issues requiring early policy action. He opined off the cuff that his list of topics would surely include proliferation issues, Haiti, Bosnia, and Somalia. Senator Gore suggested that we include items on global environmental issues.

Berger was charged with drawing up a list of topics to be covered in the Supplement. In fact, such a list proved unnecessary, because the staff quickly observed that the issues the Governor had identified received virtually daily treatment in the regular PDB. Occasionally, in the weeks to come, the staff was to request that a specific topic be treated in the Supplement, and we readily complied.

The discussion of our preparing materials directly related to policy decisions prompted me to volunteer at the first meeting that CIA saw its proper role as providing intelligence reports and analysis, including exploration of the likely ramifications for the United States of pursuing given courses of action. Experience had shown, however, that we should not be in the business of formulating or advocating policy options. In the back of my mind were memories of the policy buzz saws--particularly regarding Latin America and the Persian Gulf--the Agency had walked into during the 1980s. To our relief, Governor Clinton and Senator Gore both understood immediately and agreed with our understanding of the proper role of intelligence. At no time were we to have any problem avoiding policy entanglements.

On the substantive side, both Governor Clinton and Senator Gore had comments on many of the items in the PDB that first day. Various pieces prompted stories of world leaders they had met and countries they had visited. Like all of our readers, they found the graphics--the maps, charts, and imagery--to be especially useful. The fact that the session went on for approximately an hour was flattering but prompted well-founded fears on our side that our chief problem in Little Rock would be scheduling our briefings. It was a continuing challenge to fit the intelligence briefings into the Governor’s always-hectic schedule.

At this session Governor Clinton was again a gracious host, as he had been when the DCI visited, welcoming us and inquiring about our arrangements in Little Rock. On learning that the Agency had set up its operation in a modest motel near the airport, the Governor expressed surprise. I half-jokingly responded that we thought it important to impress a new president with our frugality given CIA’s limited budget. He took this in good humor, and after laughing appreciatively sat back and said, "Well, I am impressed."

Following the session with the Governor, we had an opportunity to talk with Mrs. Clinton as we were departing the Mansion. When she remarked that she was aware of substantial adjustments being made at CIA to deal with the changing international situation, we volunteered that the Agency occasionally had provided support to her predecessors and would be pleased to provide her also with written material and/or briefings to prepare for foreign trips or visitors. She expressed gratitude for the offer and indicated she would follow up through the National Security Adviser.

Substance of Discussions

The daily intelligence briefings continued almost without interruption from 13 November to 16 January 1993, when both the Governor and the briefing process relocated to Washington. Throughout that period, we made a point to provide Governor Clinton exactly the same material that was being shown to President Bush in Washington. This included, in addition to the PDB itself, drafts of National Intelligence Estimates and selected raw intelligence traffic--including Directorate of Operations reports, State Department cables, and NSA traffic. However, it quickly became apparent that the Governor’s primary interest was in studying the PDB.

Three subjects were addressed with great frequency in the PDB. First among these was Russia. At the time, the United States and Russia were still putting the finishing touches on the START II agreement. Debate was under way in the press and the Congress about how much additional aid the United States should provide Russia, and there was much discussion of a possible Russian-American summit, possibly one that would include President-elect Clinton. As background to these issues, there were the worrisome daily developments in Moscow as President Yel’tsin and the Russian Congress fought over their conflicting visions of Russia’s political and economic future. Coverage of these subjects resulted in the publication of more than 50 PDB articles on Russia that the Governor studied during the transition period.

The other two topics that received extensive treatment were Somalia and Yugoslavia. Our policy-level readers had a great appetite for understanding events on the ground in Somalia while discussions proceeded in the Executive Branch, the press, and the Congress about whether and how the United States should become involved. Governor Clinton obviously knew that he would inherit the Somalia problem whether or not President Bush introduced US forces. Similarly, there were numerous intelligence items reporting on the situation in the former Yugoslavia, and here, too, the Governor read with special care, aware that he would be called on to make decisions concerning the level of any US involvement in the conflict there. Governor Clinton seemed throughout to value our efforts to keep him abreast of these developments, and he came to them already well informed. These were two foreign policy problems he had raised in the campaign; he had obviously done his homework, particularly regarding the policy aspects of each.

The next tier of items in terms of the frequency with which they were addressed in the PDB included Iraq, GATT talks in Europe, Haiti, and the Israel-Lebanon situation. During this period, Iraq was relatively calm, although Washington and Baghdad were still jockeying over what was acceptable behavior in terms of the placement of Iraqi air defense weapons and US overflights. This testing continued throughout the period, and we all were mindful that Iraq’s actions might be designed in part to elicit some statement or sign of the attitudes of the incoming Clinton administration.

Concerning Europe, the United States was in the process of negotiating certain intractable agricultural issues with the European Community (EC)--particularly France. This discussion was all but certain to be incomplete at inauguration time. In Haiti, a ragtag fleet of new boats was being built as Haitians prepared to flee their country in the belief the new US President would be more welcoming than the outgoing Bush administration. And in the Middle East, Israeli, Palestinian, and Lebanese leaders were conducting an angry war of words over the fate of the Palestinian expellees then camped on the Lebanese border.

Of these second-tier problems, Governor Clinton clearly was most interested in Haiti. It, too, had been among the foreign policy issues he had highlighted during the campaign. The Iraqi, European, and Israeli issues all were of interest but were fundamentally different in the sense that Governor Clinton obviously did not believe they would require fundamental policy decisions immediately.

A few items in the PDB led to interesting discussions about the relationship between intelligence reporting and appropriate follow-up in the policymaking and law enforcement communities. Sometimes this included discussion of actions that might be taken by the President himself. When he read one piece on the possible transfer of missiles between two countries, for example, the Governor initiated a discussion about actions a president might take in response to such a report. Such occasions permitted us to explain the mechanisms through which the acquisition of intelligence information results in concrete operational accomplishments in the areas of proliferation, narcotics, or other sanctions enforcement.

Unlike the situation in some previous presidential transitions, there was in 1992 a very close congruence between the subject matter presented in the intelligence reporting and the international developments receiving the most attention in the US press. With minor variations, the same issues received the most prominence during the campaign and, to a lesser extent, in the presidential debates.

In fact, during the presidential debates of 1992 there was very little focus on international events. The first debate, held in St. Louis on 11 October, had included some discussion of three high-priority issues: Bosnia, Iraq, and Somalia. The Governor’s interest obviously continued at a high level as these subjects were discussed subsequently in the intelligence reporting. There were, however, certain other issues raised in the St. Louis debate that turned out to receive almost no coverage and were of little day-to-day interest, including the international politics surrounding the question of US defense commitments and troop levels in Western Europe and the next steps in arms control.

The subsequent two presidential debates, held in Richmond on 15 October and in East Lansing on 19 October, included almost no discussion of foreign affairs. There were some exchanges on global economic issues and the new world order, including the opening of foreign markets to US exports. In East Lansing there was a brief exchange on Iraq. These discussions, however, concerned overall policy direction and did not translate into concrete interest on the Governor’s part in follow-up intelligence reporting.

To our pleasure, and occasionally to our embarrassment, Governor Clinton read the PDB carefully no matter what might be next on his schedule. We frequently made suggestions that he might want to concentrate on certain items and skip others if he were in a hurry, but he seldom accepted these invitations. On one memorable day the hurried Governor was busy putting on his necktie and drinking a Diet Coke when we met for our session. He said he would not have time to read the book and asked that I simply tell him what was important. I gave him two-sentence summaries of a half-dozen items and one longer article in the PDB. When I finished this staccato account I expected the Governor to depart, but he said, "Well, that sounds interesting," seized the book, and sat down and read the whole thing. He had tied his necktie.

Certain aspects of the PDB grabbed the attention of Governor Clinton as they had captured the attention of previous readers over the years. As mentioned earlier, chief among these were the graphics, which he always looked at first. Also, he was obviously interested in the Weekly Leadership Notes, a feature of the PDB that describes briefly what the President’s counterparts around the world will be doing during the coming week. Finally, like his predecessors, Governor Clinton reacted well (charitably, actually) to our occasional attempts at humor; he, too, suggested that more humor would be welcome.

Not everything worked. One item that President Bush had found useful, for example, had been a looseleaf notebook that the Agency had assembled containing page-size maps of virtually every place of interest in the world. President Bush would regularly open his desk drawer, pull out this collection of maps and refer to it while reading or discussing the PDB. In one of our early sessions with Governor Clinton, we presented such a map notebook to him. He received it with thanks, but that was the last we ever saw or heard of it.

Similarly, we were a bit discouraged, although not altogether surprised, to find that the Supplement was only a limited success. I thought analysts in the Agency did a fine job of preparing perceptive background articles pegged to issues treated briefly in the PDB and in providing in-depth material on issues we knew to be high on the Clinton agenda. The first of the Supplements, for example, included articles on reform in Russia, the economic outlook for East Asia, the crisis in Angola, and Bosnian Serb flight activity. The second Supplement addressed the politically charged issue of detention camps in Bosnia, included biographic material on the three presidential candidates in South Korea, and discussed the background on the fighting in Lebanon. Such material was made available to the Governor for a period of days, but it was clear that while he was interested in principle, he simply did not have time to go through this material unless it was related to a high-priority issue that had to be addressed immediately.

When it became clear that the Supplement was not being read and we found ourselves holding it over from one day to the next, we experimented with a much reduced version in which we provided a single page of material on only one or two background issues. These, too, proved of limited utility.

What did turn out to be of use was an art form created in Little Rock by John McLaughlin, CIA’s Director of Slavic and Eurasian Analysis, who spelled me for two-week periods in delivering the briefings. McLaughlin was in Little Rock during a period when the Governor’s schedule forced postponement of several briefings until noon or even afternoon. By this time, the wheel of international events had turned enough that the morning PDB was lagging behind press reports that were by then available to us and the Governor. As a result, McLaughlin began typing up one-page summaries of developments since the PDB was published, and we found that these were of interest to Governor Clinton. His interest derived from the fact that he was using the briefing process as a useful supplement in preparing for his frequent press conferences. Whenever the PDB briefing was delayed well into the day, we prepared these updates and used them instead of the formal Supplement, which was gradually phased out.

Unlike some of his predecessors, Governor Clinton during the transition did not receive any comprehensive briefings on the organization of the Intelligence Community or on sensitive collection programs involving human assets or technical collection techniques. Neither did he receive a comprehensive briefing on covert action programs before the inauguration. As a result, we found ourselves during the PDB briefings occasionally providing explanations of Intelligence Community programs that grew naturally out of the substantive issues discussed in the PDB. This gave us, for example, opportunities to brief on US imaging systems and to describe NSA and its product. On a couple of occasions we provided brief accounts of specific covert action programs, an awareness of which was essential to make sense of the day’s PDB.

In retrospect, this probably was a good way to introduce a new president to sensitive covert action and collection programs; that is, tying the fact of a program to its intelligence payoff. Earlier experience had shown that comprehensive briefings on these programs sometimes were overwhelming and did not stick with the recipient. Obviously, after inauguration, any president should still receive a general overview briefing from the DCI and/or the Deputy Director for Operations. In expressing his views on this subject, former President Bush was decidedly of the opinion that a president-elect needed to be briefed on any sensitive programs that had the potential to blow up on him, but otherwise should be spared the details until in office.[3]

Other Opportunities To Help

To underscore the unique relationship between the United States and Mexico, several recent presidents-elect have made a point of meeting with the President of Mexico during the transition period before holding meetings with any other foreign leader. Governor Clinton was no exception and scheduled a meeting with President Carlos Salinas in Austin, Texas, on 8 January 1993. We had assumed such a session would occur and had prepared a fair amount of material addressing economic issues--especially the North American Free Trade Agreement--as well as Mexico’s political situation and bilateral narcotics cooperation. As it turned out, the Governor’s own staff had prepared him extremely well on the NAFTA, so our material on that subject was largely unneeded.

The day or two before Governor Clinton’s departure for Texas to see President Salinas proved to be most hectic. Fearing this, we had worked with his staff to prepare a package of one-page pieces that supplemented the briefing books he had already received. In the discussion in the Mansion before departure on 8 January it was clear that he had read the Agency’s material carefully. This included specifically the material on the narcotics problem, which obviously was high on the Governor’s agenda.

The biographies the Agency had prepared of Mexican leaders with whom the Governor would be meeting were also of high interest. We have found in recent years that high-level policymakers have welcomed short videos on foreign leaders. In addition to passing along factual information, the videos can effectively show speaking style, body language, emotional intensity, and so on. The Agency had produced a video on President Salinas, and the day before the departure for Texas we had an opportunity to show it to Senator Gore, who in turn recommended it enthusiastically to Governor Clinton.

Having no confidence we would find an opportunity for Governor Clinton to watch this video in traditional VCR format, we had acquired a minivideo machine, a Sony Watchman, and created a small tape version. Time ran out in our briefing, so Governor Clinton and his traveling companions took the video machine with them so that he could watch it en route to Austin. Berger jokingly remarked that he had heard each new administration receives a free video machine from the CIA. It was returned the next day.

The meeting with President Salinas gave us a welcome opportunity to demonstrate how the Agency can be useful in preparing a president for meetings with foreign leaders. To our satisfaction, when we saw Governor Clinton the next day following his return from Texas, he volunteered that he had found President Salinas and the Mexican approach at the meeting to be "exactly as you had predicted."

We also provided material for use during the many telephone calls the President-elect made to world leaders. The first such instance involved Korean President Roh Tae Woo whom, by coincidence, Governor Clinton was to telephone the first day we saw him in Little Rock. Agency officers provided similar information to assist the Governor in making contact with perhaps a dozen other world leaders as well.

The most interesting conversation for which we were able to support Governor Clinton was the one he had with President Boris Yel’tsin on 4 January 1993. Before the call, the Governor’s aides and we had discussed with him what Yel’tsin presumably wanted from him and the points he was likely to raise during the call. In fact, there were no surprises. The items discussed, as were later reported to the press, included START II and its ratification, Ukrainian support for the treaty, issues of economic reform in Russia, cooperation between the United States and Russia on Bosnia, and the timing of a future meeting between Presidents Yel’tsin and Clinton.

Although it is hardly satisfying to hear only one side of a conversation, particularly one that is conducted through an interpreter, it appeared to be helpful that we were able to sit in the room with the President-elect during his discussion with Yel’tsin. Following that fairly lengthy conversation we were able immediately to go over some of the points Yel’tsin had made. Our discussion served, I believe, to clarify certain of the inherently ambiguous points that had come up. In fact, during that immediate follow-on session and over the next two days, we continued to furnish Agency materials that provided context to the points Yel’tsin had made, especially those related to arms control issues.

McLaughlin had the sad task of helping Governor Clinton with some other telephone calls as well. These were the ones he made to the families of US personnel who were casualties in Somalia. McLaughlin acquired the facts needed to place the calls and, at the Governor’s request, coordinated with the White House to be sure that calls from the President-elect did not interfere in any way with calls being made by President Bush.

We had been asked to provide substantive and logistic support of a different nature at an earlier point when the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had visited Little Rock. On 4 December, Adm. David Jeremiah, accompanied by Assistant Secretary of State for Political/Military Affairs Robert Gallucci, visited Little Rock to explain the plan for US involvement in Somalia. This visit had been expected but was firmly scheduled only at the last minute. The afternoon before, the White House, through the DCI, had contacted us requesting that the CIA team in Little Rock make the supporting arrangements for Admiral Jeremiah’s visit.

The visit went very well, although with much less elaborate logistic support than is usually provided for a flag-rank officer. Agency personnel from the Office of Communications and the Office of Security handled all the arrangements and served as escort officers. They rented a van to transport the expected large number of briefing boards, cleared the military team with the Secret Service, and transferred the Admiral and his supporting staff to the Governor’s Mansion and back to the airport. Once at the Mansion, they introduced Admiral Jeremiah and his team to the Clinton staff.

The briefing itself was attended not only by Governor Clinton but also by Senator Gore and by Warren Christopher, who had not yet been designated Secretary of State. Other Clinton aides were also present. Inasmuch as we had spent almost a month at that point briefing Governor Clinton daily on the situation on the ground in Somalia--and as I had just finished the morning PDB update--Dave Jeremiah devoted relatively little time to describing the current situation and turned instead to a discussion of planned US actions.

As always, Jeremiah provided an informal and to-the-point briefing, and Governor Clinton and the others obviously appreciated it. I was relieved to have it occur, because a certain amount of frustration was building among the Clinton staff, who sensibly wanted to know what Somalia operation they would inherit. Gallucci from State clarified issues related to the policy side of the US involvement. Knowing he would assume responsibility for an ongoing project, Governor Clinton asked about the expected duration of the operation, the conditions under which US forces would be withdrawn, and where things stood regarding the formation of a UN-controlled follow-on force that would relieve the US units. Governor Clinton’s own predictions about how long US forces would be required to stay in Somalia ultimately proved to be right on the mark.

Later in December, McLaughlin and the rest of the group then in Little Rock had a full and exciting day when Governor Clinton named his national security team. While McLaughlin was waiting for his late-morning appointment on 22 December, the National Security appointees entered the Mansion’s reception area. This gave McLaughlin and the Governor’s aides an opportunity to caucus with the appointees in an informal roundtable discussion of the latest events in Serbia, Russia, and the Middle East in preparation for the day’s press conference.

During the press conference, the appointments of Warren Christopher, Les Aspin, Tony Lake, Madeleine Albright, Jim Woolsey, and Sandy Berger were announced. Following the press conference, Agency officers had a welcome opportunity to meet the DCI-designate, brief him on the international situation, and show him quickly around the facility that had been established in Little Rock.

As luck would have it, about the time the personnel announcements were made, Little Rock Airport became completely fogged in and none of the appointees was able to depart the city as anticipated. The stranded group all assembled for dinner that evening with one exception--the DCI-designate. Christopher indicated the next day that the group had been curious about Woolsey’s whereabouts, joking that "those CIA folks" must have spirited him away. We dispelled the mystery surrounding the DCI-designate’s disappearance. It had been important for him to get to California the next day, so one of our communications officers had rented a car--at Woolsey’s expense--and driven him to Dallas so he could catch an early morning flight to California.

Great Support Made It Work

Immediately after the election, two representatives of the Office of Communications had been dispatched to Little Rock to find office space for our support operation. They quickly located what turned out to be a perfect setup in the Comfort Inn, a modest motel approximately one mile from Little Rock Airport. There was an even more modest restaurant, a Waffle House, adjacent. The location facilitated the regular turnover of personnel and provided convenient access to the Governor’s Mansion, which was a five- to ten-minute drive from there.

From a security point of view it was an ideal arrangement; we were able to rent a group of rooms that allowed us to control the space above, below and on each side of our command post. The center of our operation was an apartment formerly used by the motel manager, who had earlier installed a "panic alarm" hooked directly into police headquarters. The apartment contained a large living/dining room that we converted into office space and two bedrooms, one of which was used as an office for the senior briefer and the other as a refuge for the person who caught the overnight shift. Finally, the facility had a kitchenette that made it much more habitable for all concerned. Coming from Washington, we were impressed that the cost of our individual rooms was $38.50 per night. We paid twice that for the apartment. The motel staff could not have been more supportive or discreet. Initially, they presumed that we were with the Secret Service, an impression that we soon corrected.

Our security officers took pains to get to know the Secret Service detail in Little Rock. This was time well spent; its members were eager to give us any backup security assistance we might need at the command post and were most helpful in facilitating our access to the Governor’s Mansion. Their help was all the more necessary when we accompanied the Clintons to California and South Carolina.

At the time we established our operation, the press in Little Rock was desperate for news of the President-elect’s every activity. This made us apprehensive that press attention to our presence could force our relocation to secure quarters. As a result, we investigated the possibility of operating from Little Rock Air Force Base. The Commanding Officer was eager to have us locate there and was prepared to offer every assistance. Our security and communications officers visited the base and were given a tour of the proposed facilities. Secure storage, office space, and communications were available to us.

The problem was that the air base was several miles beyond the city of North Little Rock on the other side of the Arkansas River; the drive to the Governor’s Mansion would have been considerably longer. Moreover, although some quarters might have been available, we would not have been able to stay nearly as close to our command center. In the motel we could simply walk out of one room and into another to receive secure calls, faxes, and so forth. With this convenience in mind, we kept the air base as a fallback possibility, but we were never forced to use it.

It was three weeks before the press became aware of, or at least paid any attention to, the fact that the CIA was present in Little Rock and was providing intelligence briefings to the President-elect. In the early days of our operation the Governor’s staff had been happy to follow our suggestion that we simply make no public announcement about our operation. At a later stage, however, there was discussion in the press about how Governor Clinton was preparing to take on the international responsibilities of the presidency. At that point, the Governor’s team confirmed publicly that he was receiving regular briefings from the Agency and was seeing all intelligence material available to President Bush.

It took a few days for the press to get the story straight. Initial inquiries came from the Los Angeles Times on the first of December. On the second, the Arkansas Democrat Gazette made reference to "daily written briefings from the Administration and briefings by telephone." A day later, The New York Times came closer, reporting that "the Central Intelligence Agency has set up an office in Little Rock from which to deliver a copy of the National Intelligence Daily to Mr. Clinton. Mr. Clinton also receives a fifteen-minute oral briefing on security matters every day that aides say is the same one that Mr. Bush gets at the White House." Later, on NBC’s morning news program, the Governor’s spokesman, George Stephanopoulos, explained that the President-elect was fully informed about foreign policy issues because the "CIA briefs him daily."

The press kept a vigil on the side street from which all traffic entered and exited the Governor’s Mansion and on many occasions filmed our comings and goings. Nevertheless, we were not pursued or otherwise bothered and were successful throughout in protecting our identities and location. Keeping a low profile, however, meant we made little use of the bar in the Capital Hotel downtown; it was the gathering place for visiting politicos, but was also the hangout for all the reporters.

We were pleased that the residents of Little Rock not only caused no difficulties for us but also had a healthy outside-the-beltway perspective on our Agency. On one of the early occasions when I arrived in the city, for example, I stepped up to the car rental counter at the airport and was provided a useful lesson in humility. The clerk at the counter, while filling out the forms, asked, "What firm are you with?" I said it was a government rental; I was with CIA. To her quick "What’s that?" I said, "Central Intelligence Agency." Without a flicker of recognition or interest, she requested, "Could you spell that, please?" It is good to be reminded that, at least in some locales, we are neither as famous nor as infamous as one might suppose from reading the newspapers in Washington.

If the Office of Communications had found it easy to acquire an ideal and inexpensive location from which to operate, they were challenged a good deal more in establishing the communications links to Washington. The problem came from the fact that we needed to install in Little Rock an unusually capable system that allowed us to transmit a quantity and quality of material significantly greater than anything we had previously done for VIP support on the road. In normal circumstances, traveling PDB recipients receive a black and white document transmitted via a rather basic secure fax system. As a result of work that was already under way in Washington, it was clear that we had the hardware and software capability to deliver a very high quality version of the PDB to Governor Clinton in Little Rock. The system had never been field-tested, however, so we needed to be sure we had a reliable and redundant capability. The equipment that was installed allowed us to input text at Headquarters and immediately receive and edit it at the other end. It also allowed us to transmit very high quality color graphics, maps, and imagery.

Over and above the PDB operation, we were able with this capable communications system to send large numbers of documents in both directions to support the briefing operation on a real-time basis. This capability was invaluable in enabling us to answer questions and provide background material to Governor Clinton and his aides. Over time the Agency team became sufficiently adept at using the new equipment that it could replicate the process in California when Governor Clinton traveled there over the Thanksgiving holiday and at Hilton Head, South Carolina, where he spent several days after Christmas.

In large part because of the hard work of our people at Headquarters, we were able to publish a book indistinguishable from the one published by the Agency’s printing plant. Personnel in Washington put in countless hours of overtime to provide 24-hour support of all kinds. Their mastery of the digitized color graphics process was but one critical contribution. All who participated in this operation thought it set a standard that we should seek to emulate for future VIP on-the-road support.

Looking back, we flinched to discover that our undertaking in Little Rock was by no means inexpensive, even though the cost of hotel rooms was a modest $38.50 per night. Substantial expenditures were made for personnel rotation and accommodations, computer equipment and communications lines, and per diem expenses. By inauguration day, we had incurred expenses in excess of a quarter million dollars.

What Was Accomplished

By any quantitative measure, we succeeded in the primary purpose of providing intelligence briefings to help the President-elect become well informed about international developments. Governor Clinton read hundreds of intelligence reports on current developments relating to US interests. A large proportion of these reports addressed subjects that were of high priority to him personally, including Bosnia, Somalia, and Haiti. One cannot know precisely how valuable this intelligence reporting may have been, but we did observe with satisfaction that Governor Clinton read the material daily and carefully.

Beyond the PDB briefings, the Agency provided a great deal of ad hoc support. We saw this material being used to prepare for meetings and telephone calls to foreign leaders and in other policy deliberations. On a more pedestrian level, we were struck that the Clinton team turned to the CIA for help with such things as acquiring safes for secure storage and arranging for the establishment of secure communications between Little Rock and Washington. At varying times we functioned not only as representatives of the Intelligence Community but as surrogates for the State Department, the Joint Chiefs, the Department of Defense, and the General Services Administration.

At no time did we seek or receive any systematic feedback from Governor Clinton on the assistance we were providing, but he was appreciative throughout the transition period. And we have some independent accounts of his reactions. Former President Bush recalls, for example, that when the Clintons visited the White House after the election, the Governor "went out of his way to tell me the briefings were useful and he planned to continue them." Bush added that Governor Clinton "told me the CIA information made a big difference on Haiti. He said that the Agency’s intelligence made an impact on him and was influential in the decisions he subsequently took."

Immediately after the election, Bush had delegated to Scowcroft the job of dealing with the Clinton team regarding the intelligence briefings. During the Clintons’ visit to the White House, however, Bush underscored how useful CIA’s daily briefings had been to him and urged the President-elect to continue to receive them when in office. Bush says he also stressed the need to limit the distribution of the PDB. "I told him you had to control and limit access so that the Agency could put everything in the book."

CIA employees felt their efforts rewarded when President Clinton spoke of this briefing process during a visit to the Agency’s headquarters in Virginia on 4 January 1994, after almost a full year in office. The President observed, "Intelligence is a unique mission. Nobody knows that better than those of us who have the honor to serve in the Oval Office. When President Truman autographed the photo of himself that hangs in this building, he wrote, ’To the CIA, a necessity to the president of the United States, from one who knows.’ Every morning, the president begins the day asking what happened overnight. What do we know? How do we know it? Like my predecessors, I have to look to the intelligence community for those answers to those questions. I look to you to warn me and, through me, our nation of the threats, to spotlight the important trends in the world, to describe dynamics that could affect our interests around the world."

From the Agency’s institutional point of view, establishing the practice of regular briefings of the President and senior national security officials met our primary goal in the Little Rock operation. In fact, the current system of PDB briefings is among the most satisfactory we have had. We have met with the President and cabinet-level officers on a daily basis over an extended period in only two previous cases: throughout the presidency of George Bush and for a fifteen-month period during the presidency of Gerald Ford.

The Little Rock undertaking also enabled Agency personnel to meet a large proportion of the people who were to become prominent in the Clinton administration. Senior Agency briefers established at least some relationship with all those who later became key White House figures. We had an opportunity to meet all of those appointed to the top national security posts and the majority of other Cabinet-level appointees. Each of the new appointees was exposed to the Agency’s role in supporting the President-elect. On one occasion a new Cabinet appointee was clearly surprised to see Agency briefers waiting to see the Governor and inquired about the frequency with which such briefings were given, asking if they occurred weekly or on some other basis. The questioner was obviously surprised and impressed when told that the Agency briefed each day.

All Agency personnel involved in the Little Rock operation--in Arkansas and at Headquarters--came to have a sense of satisfaction and pride in what they were able to accomplish. Each was also aware, however, of the unique opportunity they had been given and of their good luck that the operation worked out as well as it did.

[2] Robert Gates, interview by the author, McLean, Virginia, 12 April 1993. Subsequent references to the Gates briefing come from this interview.

[3] George Bush, interview by the author, Kennebunkport, Maine, 6 May 1993. Subsequent references to Bush’s comments come from this interview.

Chapter 2. Truman and Eisenhower: Launching the Process

On 22 November 1952, the newspapers reported that President Harry Truman, shortly after noon the previous day, had stolen away from the White House to give an "impromptu" speech at the Central Intelligence Agency. Truman had come to CIA at the invitation of the fourth Director of Central Intelligence, Gen. Walter Bedell Smith, to address a training course of government officials. In that speech--delivered on a Friday afternoon almost two weeks after the national election--Truman revealed a great deal about his motives in founding the CIA and his aims in having the Agency provide intelligence briefings to the new President-elect, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower.

The President reminisced with his audience about how there had been no CIA when he had succeeded to the presidency in 1945. At that time, by many accounts, he had been surprised to discover how much information relating to intelligence and national security matters had been withheld from him. The most dramatic evidence of how ill-informed he was came on his 12th day in office when Secretary of War Henry Stimson briefed him for the first time on the Manhattan (atomic bomb) Project, about which Truman had heard only hints while serving as Vice President and on key Senate committees.[4]

Truman also recalled how difficult it had been for him to obtain information from the various government departments, each of which seemed "walled off" from the others. On various occasions Truman had lamented to Smith that he "used to do all this myself." The President noted that this situation had been corrected over the intervening years, saying that the CIA’s global intelligence operations and procedures for forwarding information had made it possible to "keep the President informed better than ever before." In a rather backhanded compliment, Truman said he believed that "we have an intelligence information service now that I think is not inferior to any in the world."[5]

Truman was responsible for the very existence of that intelligence service. Within a year of his becoming President, in January 1946, he formed the Central Intelligence Group (CIG). In the President’s mind, its key responsibility was to ensure that he personally received intelligence reports on a timely basis. On 15 February 1946 the CIG launched the Daily Summary, and in June a counterpart Weekly Summary was produced for the first time. Both these publications were sent to the White House for the President. Both the daily and weekly publications continued to be published after the Central Intelligence Group became the Central Intelligence Agency in September of 1947.

There was much bureaucratic wrangling throughout the early years of the Central Intelligence Group and the Central Intelligence Agency about their proper role in the production of current intelligence. Virtually all key players involved with intelligence--in the military services, the War (later Defense) Department, and the State Department--had serious reservations about the new intelligence agency duplicating their work in current intelligence. The President was virtually alone in expecting to receive a daily, comprehensive current intelligence product, whatever the formal charters of the CIG and CIA might say. Needless to say, his expectations carried the day.

To consolidate the production of current intelligence, CIA in January 1951 formed the Office of Current Intelligence (OCI), which existed until the late 1970s when its functions were assumed by other offices. The CIA officers who formed OCI were already preparing a closely held, all-source weekly intelligence publication, the first of its kind, called the Situation Summary. This was a global review, built around the Korean situation and its worldwide implications that formed the basis for General Smith’s weekly briefings of the President. Shortly after the establishment of OCI, two new publications were inaugurated for wider distribution. The daily publication became the Current Intelligence Bulletin, first issued on 28 February 1951; in August a companion weekly publication, the Current Intelligence Weekly Review, was begun.

Managers of OCI felt their early efforts had been rewarded when Truman, vacationing in Key West, Florida, wrote of the new publication, "Dear Bedel [sic], I have been reading the intelligence bulletin and I am highly impressed with it. I believe you have hit the jackpot with this one. Sincerely, Harry Truman."[6] The Current Intelligence Bulletin continued largely unchanged for the next 25 years.

While Truman received, read, and expressed his appreciation for the Agency’s daily and weekly publications, it had become clear over the years that he especially valued the oral briefings delivered by the directors of CIA. The President experimented with various procedures for these briefings, and in the early years there were periods when he received them on a daily basis. What finally proved most satisfactory, however, were weekly worldwide intelligence updates.

The weekly briefings worked best during the extended period when "Beedle" Smith served as DCI. Smith briefed Truman each Friday, accompanied at the White House by a CIA officer, Meredith Davidson. Davidson would assist the Director in the preparation of his material (a notebook was left behind with the President each week), but he did not normally go into the Oval Office. The briefing was based primarily on the Situation Summary, which was prepared with the President’s needs in mind. Davidson’s reward was to join the DCI and the President’s Special Consultant for National Security Affairs, Sidney Souers (who had served as the first DCI for a five-month period in 1946), for coffee and a post-mortem on the President’s reactions and follow-up requests.[7]

Mindful of how useful the weekly briefings were to him, Truman determined that intelligence information should be provided to the candidates in the 1952 election as soon as they were selected. In the summer of 1952, the President raised this idea with Smith. He indicated he wanted the Agency to brief Gen. Dwight Eisenhower and Governor Adlai Stevenson, remarking at the time, "There were so many things I did not know when I became President." Smith suggested to Truman that Davidson might be the proper individual to brief both Eisenhower and Stevenson to ensure they were receiving the same information.

Later, during his speech at the Agency on 21 November, Truman explained his rationale in providing briefings to the President-elect. He observed that the office of the President of the United States "now carries power beyond parallel in history," adding, "that is the principal reason why I am so anxious that it be a continuing proposition and that the successor to me and the successor to him can carry on as if no election had ever taken place. I am giving this president--this new president--more information than any other president had when he went into office."

Referring to a widely publicized meeting he had held with Eisenhower at the White House to discuss foreign policy issues earlier that same week, Truman said, "It was my privilege a few days ago (18 November) to brief the General who is going to take over the office on the 20th of January." Truman did not mention in his address that on that occasion he had given Eisenhower a comprehensive National Intelligence Digest prepared by the CIA. Keyed to an NSC policy outline, the Digest summarized, in Smith’s words, "the most important national intelligence on a worldwide basis."[8]

Eisenhower wrote in his memoirs more than a decade later that his meeting with Truman "added little to my knowledge." He recalled that Truman "received me cordially; however...the conversations...were necessarily general and official in nature. So far as defense affairs were concerned, under the instructions of the President, I had been briefed periodically by Gen. Walter Bedell Smith and his assistants in the Central Intelligence Agency on developments in the Korean war and on national security."[9] According to Davidson, Truman told Smith he "had kept it general on purpose, for political reasons."

Strained Relations Complicate the Arrangements

In his remarks at the Agency, Truman could not bring himself to be completely deferential to his successor. In a mild dig, he observed that Eisenhower had been "rather appalled at all that the President needs to know in order to reach decisions." In private, the President was bitingly critical of his elected successor. The press, for its part, was reporting that the meeting of the two men at the White House had been "coolly formal." The New York Times, for example, noted "there was some evidence of tension between Mr. Truman and his successor," observing also that "the President-elect looked serious and was somewhat brusque when he left the President’s office."[10]

While Truman’s motives appear to have been straightforward in providing information to enable Eisenhower to assume the presidency fully informed, the implementation of his intentions left something to be desired and prompted suspicions on the part of Eisenhower and his staff. Indeed, tensions between the two came close to undermining the planned briefing process and with it the Agency’s access to the President-elect during the important transition period. Ironically, the ultimate result was to elicit from Eisenhower a statement making clear he saw the CIA as a relatively apolitical provider of information. In the end he was willing to hear from the CIA things he was unwilling to hear from others.

A difficult private exchange between the President and his eventual successor had begun shortly after the Republican convention, when Truman sent telegrams to Eisenhower and Stevenson inviting them to lunch with his Cabinet on Tuesday, 19 August. Truman proposed that he ask Smith and other CIA officers to brief "on the foreign situation" and have the White House staff report on other issues as well. In his telegram, Truman also extended an offer of weekly intelligence briefings for both candidates.[11]

Eisenhower declined the invitation. In reply, he told Truman he thought he should receive "only those communications from the outgoing Administration that could be known to all the American people." Eisenhower added that, "The problems which you suggest for discussion are those with which I have lived for many years." The General concluded with a paragraph indicating he would welcome weekly reports from the CIA, but he wanted it understood that his possession of those reports "would not limit his freedom to discuss or analyze foreign programs as he wanted."[12]

The White House, obviously irritated that Eisenhower had declined Truman’s personal invitation, released the texts of the telegrams from both men. What was not released to the public--nor, so far as I can tell, known to senior CIA managers at the time--was a very direct note that Truman had written by hand and sent to Eisenhower at his campaign headquarters in Denver on 16 August. In that note Truman indicated he was sorry if he had caused Eisenhower embarrassment with the luncheon invitation, but he underscored that his intention was to provide information that would permit a continuous, uninterrupted foreign policy despite the change of administrations.

In language only Truman would use, he wrote, "Partisan politics should stop at the boundaries of the United States. I am extremely sorry that you have allowed a bunch of screwballs to come between us." Truman added, "You have made a bad mistake, and I’m hoping it won’t injure this great Republic. There has never been one like it and I want to see it continues regardless of the man who occupies the most important position in the history of the world. May God guide you and give you light."[13]

After reading Truman’s note, Eisenhower obviously decided there was no point in responding in kind and sent back to Truman, on 19 August, a relatively conciliatory reply, also handwritten. Eisenhower reiterated the thought that, for political reasons and in the absence of any national emergency, he should not meet with the outgoing President and Cabinet and thus had declined the invitation. He repeated his appreciation for the offer to send him weekly CIA reports, opined that those would be sufficient to keep him up-to-date on developments abroad, and assured Truman of his support for a bipartisan foreign policy.[14]

Although Eisenhower had taken a relatively moderate tone in his reply to Truman’s outburst, he clearly was bothered by the overall exchange and indicated as much in separate correspondence with Smith. The General felt free to be open with Smith; they had worked closely together during the war in Europe when Smith served for an extended period as his Chief of Staff.

Following Eisenhower’s nomination, Smith had sent a note of congratulations that Eisenhower had not acknowledged before the exchange with Truman over the briefings in mid-August. In a letter stamped "Personal and Confidential" dated 14 August, Eisenhower thanked Smith for his note of congratulations the previous month, but then launched immediately into some observations on his exchange with Truman. "The past two days my whole headquarters has been in a little bit of a steaming stew over an incident in which, according to the papers, you were at least briefly involved. It was the meeting that Governor Stevenson had with the President and the Cabinet. According to the reports reaching here, you were brought in to help brief the Governor on the world situation."[15] Eisenhower expressed his understanding that the briefing of Stevenson had taken only a very few minutes but underscored that, "To the political mind it looked like the outgoing Administration was canvassing all its resources in order to support Stevenson’s election." The General went on to stress the importance of doing what is right, recalling the challenges he and Smith had faced together in Europe during the war.

The lecture from Eisenhower caused great pain to his longtime friend and admirer (one former Agency officer recalls that "it upset the hell out of Beedle"). Nevertheless, in a reply to Eisenhower dated 18 August, Smith made no mention of the critical note. Rather, he offered in rather formal language the briefings that Smith had discussed with the President and which the President, in turn, had offered to Eisenhower. Smith proposed that he provide Eisenhower information on the world situation like that the President received each Friday morning, and that this information should be delivered by an officer of the CIA. Smith’s letter was delivered to Eisenhower in Denver.[16] Fortunately for the Agency, in light of the tension that had developed, Eisenhower accepted the invitation to receive CIA briefings.

Eisenhower’s "turning over of command" ceremony had been held at SHAPE (Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe) in Paris on 30 May 1952. The following day the General, Mrs. Eisenhower, and Eisenhower’s personal staff departed Europe for Washington. Although he had been on leave without pay from his post as President of Columbia University since early 1951, Eisenhower had continued to use the University home at 60 Morningside Drive in Manhattan when he was in the city. This residence became his headquarters for the next several months, and it was here that the first briefing by the CIA occurred.

Preelection Briefings

The first briefing was on Saturday morning, 30 August, by Melvin Hendrickson, then head of the military branch in OCI’s "Indications Staff." Like many Agency officers at the time, Hendrickson had several years of Army experience; his last post had been assistant military attaché in Oslo.[17] With military precision, Eisenhower entered the library of his residence exactly at 7:45 to receive Hendrickson and an accompanying security officer, the two being introduced as "the gentlemen from CIA." Eisenhower suggested that they move to an adjoining smaller room.

The General took about 20 minutes to read carefully through the briefing material but paid scant attention to the information on the disposition of Soviet and satellite armed forces after confirming with Hendrickson that there had been no significant changes in their deployment since his briefings by the US Army in Europe some months earlier. There was more extended discussion of the situation in Iran, of France’s growing difficulties in North Africa, and regarding trade between Japan and China. The latter subject was discussed in the context of the war in Korea and the ongoing armistice talks. Eisenhower commented specifically, "Since trade is one of our most powerful weapons, it seems to me that we should employ it to its maximum. Where are the Japanese going to get their materials if they can’t get them from China?" Concerning the North African situation, the General’s bottom line was a cryptic "If the French don’t do something fairly soon, they will have another Indo-China on their hands." At the conclusion of this first substantive discussion, Eisenhower indicated that he would like to receive future similar briefings.[18]

During the remaining weeks before the election on 4 November, Eisenhower received three additional briefings from CIA. The second in the series took place on 25 September when the General was in the midst of an extended whistlestop campaign tour. He had flown from New York to Moline, Illinois, and from there had traveled virtually nonstop through numerous small towns in Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Missouri, West Virginia, and finally Maryland. CIA’s Hendrickson boarded the train in Silver Spring, Maryland, and briefed Eisenhower during the short trip into Baltimore.

During a subsequent period of almost nonstop campaigning, Eisenhower blocked out two weekends for rest. One was when the Eisenhowers were staying at the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver, Mrs. Eisenhower’s hometown. Hendrickson provided the third preelection briefing at the couple’s Brown Palace suite on 11 October, again a Saturday morning. On this occasion, Eisenhower, in turn, provided Hendrickson one of the more unusual experiences intelligence officers have had. Hendrickson recalls being invited to join the General and Mrs. Eisenhower at a rodeo in Denver that weekend. The Eisenhowers were driven around the rodeo grounds in a stagecoach. Hendrickson rode shotgun, up top with the driver.

The fourth and final preelection briefing was on 25 October, ten days before the election. Eisenhower had been campaigning in Detroit and had taken an overnight train to New York. This time Hendrickson boarded the campaign train in the early morning at Harmon Station, New York, and briefed Eisenhower as they traveled to Grand Central in New York City.

During each of the briefings during the preelection period, Eisenhower spent 15 to 20 minutes studying the written material and, typically, another 10 to 15 minutes discussing that material and other items on his mind. He asked few specific factual questions but did make comments on a wide spectrum of issues, primarily the Soviet, Korean, and Iranian situations, which were at the forefront of US Government attention in 1952. Eisenhower also read carefully and commented on Agency materials relating to security arrangements for the prospective Middle East collective security alliance then under consideration.[19]

The package of written briefing materials presented to Eisenhower (and Stevenson) at each meeting typically included 20 or more short items--one or two paragraphs in length--summarizing the current situation in a specific country of interest. Events in the USSR, Iran, Korea, Egypt, Yugoslavia, and Japan were included in almost all sessions, but in the course of the briefings more than 50 countries were addressed. In addition, there was normally one longer article on a priority country, Iran being the most common. Each package also contained the "Conclusions" of one or two recently published National Intelligence Estimates. The latter typically assessed the prospects for Communist expansionism in different regions of the world.

The General, while a candidate, was appreciative of the preelection briefings, commenting that they had been very helpful. At the conclusion of the fourth session, however, he added--clearly referring to the Soviet Union and Korea--that he "missed the G-3 information" (US military plans and operations) that he observed "was essential for a complete understanding of those situations." Eisenhower also commented that "if he got the job, some other arrangement would have to be made for the briefings." He mentioned specifically securing clearances for some of his staff so that they, too, could benefit from the information being provided.

In an intriguing parting comment, Eisenhower mentioned to Hendrickson, "When you get back to Bedell Smith, tell him if I get elected I’ve got a job for him." Decades after the fact, it has proved impossible to establish whether this comment was passed to the DCI personally. In an interesting coincidence of timing, however, Smith, less than a week later on 1 November, forwarded to President Truman a written request to resign his post as DCI and to retire from active military service.[20]

Support to the President-Elect[21]

One day after he was elected President, Eisenhower on 5 November 1952 traveled to Augusta, Georgia, for two weeks’ vacation. When the CIA briefings resumed late in the month, the most significant thing that had changed was that they were no longer given by Hendrickson but by General Smith, accompanied by Davidson. The first session following the election was held on 21 November, this time again on the train as the President-elect traveled from New York to Washington for a reunion dinner of his US Military Academy classmates at the Army-Navy Club. The train stopped at Baltimore to permit Smith and Davidson to board and talk with the President-elect on the remaining leg into Washington.

By coincidence, Davidson, while still working in Army Intelligence, had briefed Eisenhower on a couple of occasions at the Pentagon just after the war. To Davidson’s astonishment, when he was escorted into the President-elect’s car, Eisenhower immediately brightened as he recognized him and extended a warm greeting. In a jocular exchange, Davidson explained that he had not served in Europe as Eisenhower had, rather he "had been fighting the big war in the Pacific."

Smith cautioned Eisenhower that "you had better watch out, he has been briefing the opposition," referring to Davidson’s sessions with Stevenson in Springfield, Illinois. This joking remark caused Eisenhower to turn deadly serious. Davidson was impressed that Eisenhower wanted to hear no jokes about Stevenson and was very positive about the Agency’s briefings of the Governor. Eisenhower observed that he thought very highly of Stevenson because he had kept the campaign on a high plane and demonstrated mastery of foreign affairs.

The relaxed social exchange with the Eisenhowers (both General and Mrs. Eisenhower were in dressing gowns) continued almost until the train had completed its late-evening run to Washington. The substantive part of the briefing, therefore, continued while they were parked at Union Station. Subjects of particular interest again included events in Korea and the negotiations under way to bring the conflict to an end. But Smith also provided an overview of the general world situation.

Because the DCI himself was now conducting the briefings, and because of the preexisting relationship between Eisenhower and Smith, the session involved substantially more give-and-take than had been the case before the election. A more serious analysis of the issues was also to be expected because Eisenhower, like all presidents-elect, realized he would have to grapple with the world’s problems within a matter of weeks. Eisenhower asked a number of questions, particularly about the political aspects of the Korean quagmire. He especially wanted to clarify in his own mind what China was up to and to understand better that country’s role and motivations in the conflict. Eisenhower asked, for example, "I never did know why we let the Chinese call themselves volunteers?" In reply, Smith explained the nuances of the situation, concluding by saying, "We didn’t have to bomb Peking--that’s why we acquiesced."

Well after midnight, Smith and Davidson took their leave of the President-elect at Union Station. General and Mrs. Eisenhower spent the night in their Pullman car on the train. Mrs. Eisenhower had been an active participant throughout the discussions. Davidson recalls that "she gave me the impression of being much more political than Ike."

In Eisenhower’s memoirs he recalls that "In a Detroit speech on October 24, I announced my intention, if elected, to go to Korea before the following January and to determine for myself what the conditions were in that unhappy country." For some days Eisenhower and his closest advisers had been discussing the wisdom of making this dramatic proposal public.[22] Once it was announced, the idea was very well received and, in fact, has been cited by many observers as having clinched the Eisenhower victory 10 days later.

After the election, while preparing for his trip to Korea, Eisenhower telephoned Smith to inform him that he was not comfortable relying exclusively on US Army information regarding what was going on in Korea; he wanted the DCI to come to New York to give him the Agency’s independent assessment. The President-elect called at virtually the last moment and emphasized that their visit should be given no publicity.

In keeping with their interpretation of Eisenhower’s instructions, Army security officers took Smith and Davidson to the briefing location in New York via a circuitous route. The two were led in the front door of a drugstore and out the back, for example, in a counterintelligence maneuver that served only to enrage the always-impatient Smith. Ironically, they reached Eisenhower’s office in the Commodore Hotel for an afternoon appointment that had been wedged into a day filled with a dozen other well-publicized visitors. Smith and Davidson were waiting in an outer office as a luncheon group hosted by Eisenhower broke up. Smith was surprised to see Gen. William Donovan, the founder of the Office of Strategic Services, among those leaving the General’s office.

Because the President-elect had requested Smith’s frank and personal assessment of the situation in Korea, the two generals were alone for most of the briefing session. Near the end of the session, Davidson was called in to answer two or three factual questions. Eisenhower departed secretly for Korea early the following day, 29 November.

Smith took very seriously his responsibility to provide an independent assessment. He had insisted that his CIA staff derive facts about military developments from the US Army and Navy but jealously guarded his prerogatives as DCI to make assessments and estimates based on those facts. By chance, Smith and Davidson ran into John Foster Dulles in the lobby of the Waldorf Astoria hotel shortly after they had seen Eisenhower at the Commodore. Dulles elicited confirmation that they had seen Eisenhower and asked what they told him. Smith responded with a curt, "That’s between him and me."

The late-November visit to the President-elect’s office also created a bit of momentary tension with the Secret Service. Smith was sometimes reluctant to have a protective officer from the Agency’s Office of Security accompany him and would override vigorous recommendations to the contrary by CIA’s Director of Security, Sheffield Edwards. In this case, the DCI adamantly opposed having additional people accompany him to New York given the ground rules Eisenhower had set regarding secrecy. Edwards earlier had approached Davidson, insisting that he become weapons-qualified so he could protect the DCI. On the train from Washington to New York, the DCI learned that Davidson was carrying a weapon and challenged, "Edwards got to you, didn’t he?" The DCI’s reaction was mild, however, compared with that of Secret Service officers when they discovered that Davidson was carrying a weapon during incidental conversation in the President-elect’s outer office.

The private meeting between Eisenhower and Smith on 28 November went on for more than an hour and allowed the two to conduct some intelligence business beyond their discussion of Korea. During that session Smith secured Eisenhower’s approval of a proposal that CIA should establish a briefing facility in New York City to provide continuous support to Eisenhower and his staff. The facility was subsequently set up, but not as close to Eisenhower’s as Smith would have liked. Agency officers recall that Sherman Adams, who was to become Eisenhower’s Chief of Staff, intervened to ensure that the CIA office was "a broom closet some distance from the President’s office." Adams obviously did not want Smith to have the same access to the new president that he enjoyed with Truman.

The Agency maintained its office in the Commodore from 28 November through the end of the transition period in January 1953. A CIA briefing officer representing the DCI was present at all times. For most of the period the officer was Ed Beatty, a former newsman who was editor of CIA’s Current Intelligence Bulletin. Each day a courier from Washington would bring to the New York office the latest current intelligence products for use by the President-elect and his staff. Eisenhower’s staff did utilize this facility, and Adams himself came by seeking information on at least one occasion. Eisenhower, however, relied exclusively on the briefings provided by the DCI.

During the transition period in late 1952 the press occasionally wrote of the DCI’s "weekly" briefings of the President-elect. But, in fact, the General’s schedule did not permit briefings on any regular schedule. His trip to Korea and the Pacific took more than two weeks, with the result that the next CIA briefing did not occur until 19 December. Eisenhower was accompanied at that meeting by Adams and Smith by Deputy Director for Intelligence Robert Amory. Specifically labeled "off the record" on Eisenhower’s calendar, it was a session Smith would rather not have attended. He entered Eisenhower’s office in high spirits but came out crushed. Sitting in morose silence all the way back to Washington, he finally muttered, "And I thought that it was going to be great." Smith never explained what had happened.

He had offered his resignation in writing to President Truman some six weeks before, obviously hoping for a challenging appointment from his old friend and colleague. It was widely known at the time that Smith aspired, perhaps unrealistically, to be Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Agency historians have surmised that Eisenhower informed Smith he would not be appointed Chairman of the Joint Staff, asking him instead to serve as Under Secretary of State.

Smith did, in fact, serve in the number two job at the Department of State during the first year and a half of Eisenhower’s first term. But it was no secret that he did not enjoy being the Under Secretary. He felt uncomfortable with the nonmilitary way the Department functioned, he did not like John Foster Dulles, and he was uneasy about Allen Dulles’s appointment as DCI.

The last occasion on which Smith is known to have met with Eisenhower while serving as DCI was on 14 January 1953 in New York City. There Smith joined John Foster Dulles and other Eisenhower advisers and appointees for an extended foreign policy conference with the President-elect. Less than a week later, on 20 January, Eisenhower was inaugurated.

The New President as an Intelligence Consumer

To no one’s surprise, Eisenhower’s preferences on how he should receive intelligence support did not change once he became President. CIA histories indicate that the day after his inauguration in 1953 the Agency’s Director of Current Intelligence, Huntington Sheldon, sent to James Lay, Jr., the Executive Secretary of the National Security Council, a list of publications the Agency could furnish the White House. It quickly became apparent, however, that the President did not want to receive written intelligence materials on a regular basis and had no interest in frequent briefings by CIA experts. As had been his preference during the transition period, the President relied instead on periodic high-level briefings.

The practice that developed and continued throughout the eight years of the Eisenhower presidency involved the Director of Central Intelligence, Allen Dulles, providing weekly briefings to the National Security Council. Eisenhower chaired these NSC meetings, and under his leadership they were more regular and more formal than under any president before or since. He told President-elect Kennedy in 1960 that the NSC "had become the most important weekly meeting of the government."[23]

The NSC met every Thursday morning at 9:00 a.m. and with rare exceptions opened its meetings with an intelligence briefing by the DCI. The briefing addressed subjects mutually agreed with Lay of the NSC staff, representing the interests of the President’s Special Assistant for National Security Affairs, Gen. Robert Cutler. If the President, Cutler, or Lay did not have specific subjects they wanted addressed, the CIA was free to propose its own agenda, although the Agency’s ideas were always vetted with Lay before the briefing.

Agency veterans remember a wide variety of subjects being addressed at the NSC meetings, reflecting the President’s broad interests. He was intrigued with matters ranging from Italian elections, to the battle of Dien Bien Phu, to periodic updates on Agency covert action operations. Eisenhower would interrupt periodically with questions and, within limits, permit questions from others as well. When his patience ran out, however, he was not at all reluctant to cut off discussion, saying "OK Allen, let’s go ahead."

According to Gen. Andrew Goodpaster, who served as Secretary of the White House Staff, Eisenhower expected Dulles to provide the latest intelligence on the crisis of the moment but, more important, to concentrate primarily on providing the intelligence background to whatever larger or longer term planning issue was on the agenda. Because of this long-term focus, most of the briefing materials used by the DCI were prepared by CIA’s Office of National Estimates. Goodpaster recalls that Eisenhower frequently would ask, "How solid is that information--where does it come from?" Dulles was reluctant to answer "with fourteen people in the room." Eisenhower, Dulles, and one staff aide (sometimes Goodpaster and sometimes Senior Staff Assistant Gordon Gray) would then hold a smaller, follow-on meeting after the regular NSC to answer the President’s more probing questions.[24]

The briefing process during the 1950s had several important advantages from the Agency’s point of view. Among these was the fact that the DCI was able to provide intelligence on important matters on a predictable schedule in a forum that included not only the President, but also the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Secretaries of State and Defense, and other key players in the foreign policy decision making process. The single-most-important advantage of the system, however, was that it was unambiguously obvious each week whether the President was interested in, and well served by, the intelligence he was receiving. With this feedback, CIA was able to be responsive to his needs and those of the NSC. Senior Agency officers believed the system worked well. Sheldon summed it up by saying, "The Director got used to the procedure and was happy with it, and everybody was happy with it; it simply remained that way until the next administration."

The vast majority of the briefings of the National Security Council were provided by the DCI himself. It was clear to all involved, however, that Dulles was much more comfortable with political and economic subjects than with scientific and military issues. Quite often the Director would permit a specialist to brief on such subjects, always designating personally the individual he wanted to do the job. Herbert Scoville, Jr., the Assistant Director for Scientific Intelligence, gave many of the briefings on scientific subjects, and the Agency’s nuclear specialist, Herbert Miller, distinguished himself with briefings in that specialized field. Amory--the Agency’s DDI--from time to time would brief on military matters.

White House records make clear that attendees at the NSC meetings noticed the difference between briefings delivered by the DCI and those delivered by the substantive experts. Gray addressed this subject in a meeting on 11 January 1961 when he discussed transition matters with McGeorge Bundy, representative of President-elect John Kennedy. Responding to questions by Bundy about whether the President should have daily briefings and, if so, who should deliver them, Gray wrote in his memorandum for the record, "I had made a note several months ago to discuss with my successor intelligence briefings in the Council. I believe that these should be crisper and should be conducted by more junior officers with a special briefing competence . . . I acknowledged to Mr. Bundy that this would cause serious personal problems and I was not sure I would advise him to tackle it. It was simply a question I left with him." In that same conversation, however, Gray asserted that the practice of having the DCI brief the Council every week was "a very useful device."[25]

Goodpaster recalls that "Eisenhower had a lot of respect for Allen Dulles growing out of Dulles’s work during the war. The President thought he was very skilled at top-level intelligence--collecting it and analyzing it." Eisenhower would read enough of the Intelligence Community’s estimates to get the point and the highlights and, according to Goodpaster, "felt the formal estimates and papers were the genuine view," meaning they were not politicized.

But there were some problems. Eisenhower had been struck, for example, at how the "bomber gap" of the mid-1950s turned out to be a false alarm. When the Intelligence Community and the US military began writing of the Soviets’ great progress in missile production during the late 1950s, "Eisenhower was more than skeptical; he was unconvinced, challenging repeatedly, ’what do they base this on?’"

According to Goodpaster, Eisenhower believed there were at least two reasons why the bomber and missile issues turned into serious political problems. One difficulty was that there was a lot of contact between elements of the Intelligence Community, particularly the Air Force, and Capitol Hill, in which Congress "heard this continual drumbeat about how we were falling behind." The other problem, in Eisenhower’s view, was that "there was a lot of self-interest in the intelligence assessments of the military services--they were out to promote their own programs."

Throughout his presidency, Eisenhower avoided reading daily intelligence reports from any one agency. In fact, he normally read no daily reports. Instead, Goodpaster, with the help of the President’s son, Lt. Col. John Eisenhower, each morning would review the separate reports from CIA, State, Defense, and the Joint Chiefs. They would meld this material into one early morning oral briefing. In those sessions, Eisenhower occasionally would ask to see a specific raw report or analytic paper, or task additional work.

Agency veterans recall that Sheldon and Deputy Director for Intelligence Loftus Becker in early March 1953 did discuss the idea of producing a brief, all-source, daily current intelligence publication exclusively for the President. As the Agency came to understand Eisenhower’s preferences, however, this idea was never followed up. In any event, no such publication was actually produced until the Kennedy administration. One innovation that was begun in the early Eisenhower years and continued throughout his administration was the practice of cabling a daily intelligence report to the President while he was traveling abroad. That practice has continued to the present.

Briefing Governor Stevenson in 1952

During the 1952 presidential campaign, it proved considerably easier to arrange briefings of Govenor Adlai Stevenson than it was to arrange the briefings of Eisenhower. For a start, the Governor accepted President Truman’s invitation to lunch and an initial round of discussions on 19 August at the White House. Thereafter, he was briefed every two to three weeks by the CIA at the Governor’s Mansion in Springfield, Illinois. Those sessions took place on 30 August, 15 September, and 1 and 20 October.

In the initial division of labor, it was decided that Davidson would travel to Springfield to brief Stevenson. The plan had been for him to brief both candidates, but as luck would have it they requested their first briefing on the same day. The material Davidson took to Illinois was almost exactly the same as that provided Eisenhower. The exception--a distinction not observed in subsequent years--was that Eisenhower received material that included information derived from communications intelligence. Stevenson lacked experience with this sensitive material and did not receive it.

Stevenson was an even more gracious host and careful reader than Eisenhower. During their Saturday afternoon sessions, he invariably offered his CIA visitor refreshments and had numerous questions and comments about the material he read. It was clear from the outset that Stevenson had the background and the intellect to take full advantage of the intelligence the Agency was providing. Thinking back on the briefings more than four decades later, Davidson still commented with awe, "I was impressed with the questions he asked. He was well ahead of all of us."

Of the many substantive issues that arose during the intelligence briefings in 1952, the single one in which Stevenson was most interested was Iran. Mohammed Mossadeq had become Prime Minister in April 1951, and shortly thereafter he had secured passage of a law nationalizing the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. In the succeeding months, relations between Iran and the United Kingdom steadily worsened and approached the crisis point during the fall of 1952. Diplomatic relations were severed in October.

The United Kingdom was concerned about oil, prestige, and compensation, and the United States was worried that Mossadeq might be deposed by the Tudeh (Communist) Party. Stevenson, like Eisenhower, wanted to follow the situation very carefully. Fortunately for the Agency, it was not until after the election that serious discussions began between the United States and the United Kingdom about a covert action program to remove Mossadeq. Whether to brief a presidential candidate on a covert action program as important as the one that was implemented in Iran the following year was a question that did not arise.

Supplementing the briefings he received during the 1952 campaign, Stevenson asked a number of questions to which the Agency responded with written memorandums. In one case, for example, DCI Smith personally sent a memorandum to the Governor analyzing Josef Stalin’s address to the 19th Communist Party Congress, held on 15 October. In addition to a factual account of the points Stalin had made, Smith included an analysis that comes across in retrospect as a policy lecture to the candidate. The memorandum concluded with the observation that, "It is extremely unwise to underestimate the importance of any of Stalin’s statements, although sometimes it is not as easy as in the present instance to highlight their actual meaning. The significance of the above is unmistakable."[26]

The Challenger Briefed Again in 1956

During the 1956 presidential campaign, President Eisenhower continued to receive routine intelligence briefings at NSC meetings just as he had for the previous four years. Without hesitation, Eisenhower authorized the resumption of support to Stevenson during the 1956 campaign along the lines of the briefings he and the Governor had received four years earlier.

The responsibility for keeping Stevenson informed in 1956 fell primarily to the Agency’s Deputy Director of Current Intelligence, Knight McMahan. This time the logistics of the briefings were not as simple as they had been in 1952 when the candidate worked out of one location in Springfield. McMahan briefed Stevenson on 10 September at the Biltmore Hotel in New York City, on 17 September and 1 October at the Sheraton Park Hotel in Washington, and on 29 October in Boston. McMahan conducted these briefings alone, except that on 17 September in Washington he was joined by the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence, Gen. Charles Cabell.

Like his predecessor four years earlier, McMahan observed, "One could not help being impressed with Stevenson; he was a very informed man, but what he read brought him up to date and included things he didn’t know anything about."[27] Much of the information provided Stevenson in 1956 addressed the crisis in Hungary. Beyond that issue, the Governor studied very carefully material presented to him on Soviet disarmament policy. He was also interested in developments in India and in the warming relationship between India and China. He had questions on the Sino-Burmese relationship, developments in Malaysia and Singapore, the disputed islands off the China coast, and Russia’s threatening activities in the vicinity of Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands.

Stevenson’s interests in Hungary and the Asian issues, however, were secondary to his primary concern, which was the developing Suez crisis, caused by Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s refusal to allow Israeli shipping access to the Canal, in violation of longstanding agreements. Agency memorandums for the record show that during the first three briefings Stevenson asked a number of questions about the Suez situation.[28] He cross-examined McMahan closely on such details as the convention of 1888 that governed Canal operations, Israeli shipping, developments in the UN, the attitudes of the nonpermanent members of the Security Council, possible solutions to the controversy, the status of international funding for Nasser’s Aswan Dam project, and the failure of Britain’s blue-ribbon negotiating mission. As the crisis continued to build, Stevenson probed the legal aspects of Nasser’s position and the Egyptian leader’s ability to maintain his government against expected economic sanctions. And he was interested in regional aspects of the problem, including tensions between Israel and Jordan and the buildup of British forces on Cyprus.

On 29 October, McMahan, in his own words, was "caught in the worst situation possible for an intelligence briefer: briefing Stevenson in Boston on the day Israel attacked Egypt." McMahan had taken the train from Washington to Boston the previous day while the interagency "Watch Committee" was reviewing newly available intelligence confirming that Israel, with British and French support, was completing its mobilization and would attack Egypt. Because the evidence came from intercepted communications, this sensitive material was not included in the written briefing materials prepared for Stevenson. Instead, McMahan intended to handle this breaking story orally.

To McMahan’s chagrin and embarrassment, he had no more than settled into a chair to begin his briefing of Stevenson when one of the Governor’s aides burst in to inform hi