37. Letter From the Assistant Director of the Bureau of the Budget (Appleby) to Attorney General Clark0
Dear Tom: Harold and I have given a great deal of thought to the proposal contained in your memorandum “U.S. Secret World-Wide Intelligence Coverage.”1
The memorandum emphasizes the similarity of the proposal to the “time-proved program” as carried on in South America. It seems to us that the use of the South American experience alone as a basis for a world-wide operation overlooks the vast difference in the two situations.
Should we engage in any clandestine intelligence operations in peacetime, our needs will certainly be far broader than was the case in South America. They will be less related to operational decisions which can be taken instantly. They will need to get at more fundamental and long-range matters in commercial, scientific, and other areas. The proposal seems to speak in terms of security intelligence alone. This limited view of intelligence has, I think, been in part responsible for many of our failures to estimate situations properly in the past, to find ourselves sometimes on guard against the least of our dangers, and to see dangers on occasion that were out of proportion to the real situation.
Some operation such as that described in the memorandum is already being carried on abroad. It seems to us that before any additional or new activity in this field is encouraged, a considerable amount of planning of a Government-wide kind should be accomplished. As you know, the President directed Secretary Byrnes on September 20 to take the lead in providing for such planning and coordinating on a continuing basis.
What we should be striving for is a way to build a Government-wide intelligence operation in which all pertinent facilities or resources in every department are utilized and in which the extreme compartmentation and interdepartmental jealousies characteristic of our wartime operation are done away with. The specific needs of the Government including those of any agency should be determined and operations planned on that basis. Then, too, plans in which the specific operating contribution of each agency is developed, need to be prepared and issued for the guidance of the departments. Neither the Operational [Page 89] Committee nor the Policy Board in the plan you sent me, if I understand their duties, supply this need.
I am informed that the State Department will soon be taking the initial steps to create the interdepartmental committees necessary to begin this long-range job.
With personal regards, I am,
Sincerely yours,
- Source: National Archives and Records Administration, RG 51, Records of the Office of Management and Budget, Director’s Files, Series 39.27, Intelligence. Secret. Revised by Appleby on October 30.↩
- Document 17.↩
- Printed from a copy that indicates Appleby signed the original.↩