This paper is unsigned but for your information was written by
Stephen Penrose, who has been with me here for
about three months but
[Page 830]
who is
leaving to become President of Beirut University.
Penrose was with OSS during the war—in charge of their Middle East Division and
later came to Washington in one of their divisions. He left C.I.A. because
he felt that there were too many Captains and Colonels placed in charge of
divisions who did not have background for the Intelligence type of work.
Hillenkoetter told me he thought
Penrose was an extremely able person but it had
been reported to him that Penrose did not get along
with some of his subordinates. I don’t know whether that is true or not but
in the short time he has been here I haven’t found that to be the case.
To my mind there is little question that his statements might be colored to a
degree because of his leaving C.I.A., but I have found him to be a “solid
citizen”—everything he has told me has a basis in fact.
Enclosure1
Washington, January 2, 1948.
Memorandum by Stephen
Penrose
REPORT ON CIA
Special Operations is continuing to lose its experienced officers with
four and five years of wartime experience. It is on the point of losing
its foreign exchange expert, who learned his business with the Navy in
World War I, and who, in the last war provided funds for secret
operations in OSS so successfully that
not a single operation was ever blown through improper use of money. His
record was not duplicated even by the British service. With him goes all
capacity of SO for fiscal
counter-intelligence. With him also is lost the agent cashier most
widely trusted by the Treasury.
SO is also probably losing a branch chief
who was closely connected in OSS with
the advance preparations for the Africa landings and acquired there and
later a knowledge of handling undercover work
[Page 831]
which is not now equalled in the organization
since the previous departure of other similarly experienced men.
One of the most experienced and effective field mission chiefs in the
organization has just returned to this country and there is strong
likelihood that he will decide to leave the work. This man is the author
of a recent report on the situation in Austria, prepared at the request
of USFA, which has made a very great
impression on the State Department.
None of these losses is necessary, for all three men had considered
intelligence as their profession. They are simply fed up with what they
consider to be the inept and unimaginative policies of SO, and have lost confidence in its
leadership.
Special Operations is headed by an officer known among his Army friends
as “Wrong-Way” Galloway. Their
doubtful esteem of him is more than matched by that of his associates
and subordinates within his office and by that of the heads of other
branches within CIA. He is hardly on speaking terms with General
Sibert of OO. He
has permitted the State Department SO to
hamper and control the nature of most SO
field operations and has secured so little support for his major liaison
officer that the latter, another man of considerable experience, is also
looking elsewhere for work. Colonel
Galloway has little comprehension of the real nature of
secret operations, and is so irascible and dogmatic that he discourages
any efforts to discuss technical details with him. For his technical and
organizational advice he is accustomed to call upon subordinates like
William Tharp, Chadbourne
Gilpatrick, or Harry Rositzke, who
although they have been in the organization for some time, have had
practically no real operational experience. Their freely offered
operational theories appear to be acceptable to Colonel Galloway at the same time that
they are the despair of their more experienced associates.
Gilpatrick has just become the major deputy to
the Chief of Operations Staff, who has been persuaded to assign
elsewhere the only technically experienced assistant he possessed on his
immediate staff. As a result of this development apprehension has
increased on the operating levels, and new withdrawals are being
contemplated.
In the face of the losses of experience, Colonel Galloway is bringing back into his office the
Colonel Dabney whose unwise and uninformed
suggestions as regards organizational structure are in part responsible
for the ineffectiveness of operation which has so discouraged the older
men. The policy of bringing in newcomers to occupy key posts without
giving them operational seasoning results in keeping the organization
constantly off balance through the varying and uncertain direction which
it receives. Colonel Galloway’s
deputy is a Captain McCracken (Navy) whose interest
in the work is not matched by any intelligence experience, and his
complete subordination to Colonel
Galloway gives him little opportunity to serve as
anything but a “yes-man”. Captain
[Page 832]
McCracken replaced Captain
Goggins who was only too happy to return to
active Navy duty in Panama after serving a term as Colonel Galloway’s deputy.
In spite of this situation within SO it is
still the one branch of CIA which has the respect of outside agencies.
OIR in State prefers to receive raw
intelligence direct from SO rather than
in processed form from OR&E not only for the sake of speed but
because the type of processing now given by OR&E detracts from
rather than adds to the value of the reports. With rare exceptions the
studies put out by OR&E are such as might be written by any fairly
well-informed person, and they command little respect from the users of
such reports in State, Army or Navy. The Strategic Intelligence Division
of the Army recently pointed out that it had received no useful
additions to its files since the R&A Branch of OSS had
been broken up. It considers its conferences with CIA to be largely a
waste of time, particularly as regards Russian matters. Captain
Frankel (Navy) of the OR&E Russian division
seems content to rest upon his short visits to Russia as sufficient
qualification of him as a Russian expert.
A report on an aviation subject was recently prepared for OR&E by the
Library of Congress. The research people of the Library developed a
rather low opinion of the OR&E men with whom they had contact who
seemed to be astonished at the quality of the report, which they felt
was beyond their capacity. On a later report in the same field the
Library furnished to a research man from OR&E a complete
bibliography for his research, covering European materials in the main.
They were told by him to omit anything which was not in English since he
could not handle any foreign language. This eliminated at least 80
percent of the material. Naturally the Aeronautics Division of the
Library was not favorably impressed by the capacity of the research man
or of those who directed him and had presumably planned his work.
An unduly large proportion of the effort of OR&E is devoted to
putting out the daily intelligence summary. This publication, containing
chiefly State Department materials, could be put together in short order
by a small unit of editorial analysts instead of requiring half the day
of the majority of branch heads and their staffs, as appears now often
to be the case.
OR&E, which should be the top research and analysis office in the
government, is headed by a former assistant military attach é in Turkey
who was never distinguished either for research or administrative
ability during his pre-war stay on the Yale faculty. His stature is not
such as to attract highly qualified research experts. One of the ablest
men in OR&E, the head of the scientific branch, is there more
because of the influence of Dr. Bush than of anyone in CIA, and he is very critical of
the inflexible and unimaginative organizational and personnel policies
of CIA as
[Page 833]
interpreted by Col.
Shannon, with whom he has already come into
conflict.
Dr. Wallace Brode, the distinguished scientist
mentioned, has not been permitted to organize his own branch according
to his own ideas, although his organizational views were proved by
experience at Inyokern during the war. When his plans were finally
forwarded they were accompanied by a set of contrasting plans drawn by
Col. Babbitt and Col.
Shannon, in the drafting of which Dr.
Brode was not consulted. Such action was
contrary to the written agreement made between Dr. Bush and General Vandenberg.
Contacts between CIA and outside scientific agencies are channeled, as
are most CIA liaisons with other agencies, through the Office of
Collection and Dissemination or the Office of Operations. The former is
controlled by Col. Sands, a former CIC head in Germany under Gen.
Sibert, who heads OO. Contact with AEC is
supposedly maintained by Col. Seaman of OCD, formerly an officer with Manhattan
District but possessing no scientific stature approaching that of Dr.
Brode through whom AEC would greatly prefer to channel their relations with
CIA. Dr. Brode is a member of the National Research
Council, relations with which are supposed to be carefully channelled
through OCD to some secretary of the
Council. Dr. Brode is thus supposed to handle
relations with himself through the devious intermediation of a chain of
uninformed contacts.
In short, OCD, which should be vitally
concerned with expediting and facilitating contacts with outside
agencies for operational or informational purposes, interposes a
mechanical and inflexible channelling procedure which can and does block
such contacts and bottleneck the interchange of information which should
flow freely through them. Without question a system of approving outside
contacts is essential but it must be administered imaginatively and not
in the mechanical fashion which is apt to be typical of military
procedure.
With regard to the Office of Operations, it has brought CIA into
considerable disrepute among a number of large business concerns and
notably Standard Oil of N.J., because of the ineptitude with which
contacts were established and handled. As a result CIA is effectively
blocked off from such potential sources of valuable intelligence, which
Operations Office was set up to tap.
Partly because of the bad relations existent between the heads of OO and SO and
partly because of the ineffectiveness of the former office practically
no leads have been provided to SO for
long range undercover operations or personnel. OO, because of its expected wide connections with business
firms and educational institutions, was supposed to unearth numerous
opportunities which SO could be counted
on to
[Page 834]
exploit, or to acquaint
SO with personnel who might be
utilized in SO’s operations. Neither
service for SO has developed in
practice.
In the direct line of its own responsibility for briefing and debriefing
competent Americans travelling abroad OO
has shown little alertness to respond to cases brought directly to its
attention. Recently the impending voyage abroad of a well-qualified
observer was brought to OO’s notice, but
no contact was made before the man’s departure and none has occurred
since his return. Because of the lack of contact it was not possible to
judge OO’s competence at briefing and
debriefing, but the indications are that relations with the geographic
experts of OR&E or SO are not
sufficiently close or frequently developed to permit the manning on
short notice of a qualified briefing panel or the preparation of a
professional brief.
The disturbing situation which has been described is the more alarming
because it occurs at a time when, as almost never before, the government
needs an effective, expanding, professional intelligence service. On the
contrary, CIA is losing its professionals, and is not acquiring
competent new personnel who might gain experience in the only rapid way
possible, namely by close association with those professionals. It is
dependent in most working branches for imaginative and energetic
direction upon career military men of a type which is not apt to be
either imaginative or energetic as regards non-military intelligence or
procedures. As a direct result, CIA has failed to win the confidence of
the military services or the State Department and is rapidly losing what
confidence they had had in its predecessor organizations. Yet effective
cooperation with these departments is a sine qua non of CIA success.
Under present conditions such cooperation does not exist to any
practical degree. Other departments feel no assurance that they can rely
upon CIA to perform intelligence functions which they will privately
admit could and probably should be performed centrally. Without that
assurance they will continue, as they are continuing, to operate their
individual intelligence services in a manner which cannot but nullify
the principles of coordination and centralization which were implicit in
the establishment of CIA.
