Recorded this event in november of 2017. We are fortunate to have an old friend with us, richard schroeder, a former officer with the cia clandestine service. He began his career under the cia in 1972. After two years in the army as an Intelligence Officer for the army stuff in washington, the u. S. Military command in vietnam. He consults on National Security and teaches that georgetown. He is a founding Advisory Board member here at the International Spy museum. He is the author of a new book, the foundation of the cia, harry truman, the missouri gang, and the origins of the cold war. You are not here to listen to me talk. Rick, come on up. [applause] thank you for coming out when you could be over at the Christmas Market across the street. As vince said, i have been a cia officer for running on to 50 years now. For the last 20 years, i have taught intelligence courses at Georgetown School of foreign service. In teaching at georgetown, i have discovered, as well as from participating with the museum, i discovered there is a great interest in the cia and in the general subject of National Intelligence, it also, unfortunately, considerable misunderstanding, suspicion, and even outright hostility about National Intelligence. One of the reasons i wrote this book is as a primer to try to explain, not to specialist audiences or knowledgeable people like yourselves or my colleagues, but to the general public what it is that an Intelligence Community does and the kinds of functions and capabilities we have but also the kinds of challenges we have. So what i wanted to do was, you will forgive me for reading from my notes, my classes at george town run two and a half hours long so i am used to speaking extemporaneously for two and a half hours. And i know that none of you wants that tonight so. Let me just read this. This is a simple little book about how the modern u. S. Intelligence establishment was created, but also to highlight major intelligence functions by focusing on important themes, episodes and lessons. I will talk about lessons, but i want to emphasize that these are not necessarily nastiness that we learned more that we remembered. It is also about the man because the missouri gang were all men who conceived and implemented the vision of a National Intelligence service against heavy odds and in the face of widespread opposition and multiple near death experiences. As harry truman said, the only thing new in the world is history that you dont know. And, as yoking bera said, it is all visual all over again. That theme of repeatedly having to really learn the same lessons over and over again runs from the early days of the uss right down to the present. Some of the experiences of a west yes officers and really cia officers will seem very familiar to our colleagues today. Because i am a historian myself, let me step back a step and remind you that every advanced state undertakes what deputy cia historian mike warner described as secret state activity. To understand or to influence foreign entities. There we have technology inaction. And remember as tony mendes, another member of the board of advisers here, has pointed out, sooner or later technology will always let you down. So remember that. Throughout our history, the cia or, the u. S. , not the cia, the u. S. Has repeatedly conducted impressive intelligence during wartime but then forgotten or abandoned the discipline during peacetime. That is a theme that dates back all the way to the revolution. Anybody who served in the 1990s will remember the cold war peace dividend. Remember that . We had defeated the soviet union, there was not going to be any more history and so we were going to have this wonderful peace dividend. For those of us in the business, it was euphemistically called the intelligence glide path. That means we went down 25 in budgets, 25 in personnel during the 1990s, just in time forv, 9 11. The u. S. Was founded with a Great Respect for intelligence and George Washington can be considered the first director of National Intelligence. With the u. S. Was slow to join the great power of the great game. The great game is called that because it is based on a book by record killing called kim which she wrote in 1901 about afghanistan. So we were a little late to this great game. In fact, the First Permanent u. S. Intelligence agency was the office of Naval Intelligence in 1882. It was created in response to the growing power and reach of the super weapons of the day, which were battleships. First time that foreigners, foreign powers, could credibly project power in a way that would really threaten the United States. In the 18 eighties, the u. S. Navy was the 12th largest in the world, even smaller than brazil. But in 1945, you will notice quite a number of u. S. Naval officers in our story. World war one showed the u. S. What green horns we were in intelligence, and that is a direct quote from a distinguished office of nate office of naval Intelligence Officer named john allen gaeta. Officers like gaeta and u. S. Code breakers in the American Black Chamber did impressive work. After the first world war, guess what the United States did again . This hard earned experience was allowed to go to waste after the war until again we faced the Global Threats of the 1930s. By then, only a few practitioners remained along with a good number of enthusiastic amateurs im going to briefly discuss a number of these characters, many of them members of the missouri gang. But for detail, you will have to read my book or ask me questions after the presentation. We have truman in the middle. We have his military chief of staff to the commander in chief, admiral William Lahey. We have the first dci, we have the second dci whos not from missouri, then we have the first director of the cia. We have Clark Clifford who was a young white house lawyer whos also from missouri. We have larry houston who was general counsel of both the oss and this cia, also from missouri. A good number of these people were in fact from missouri. But the reason they were called the missouri gang was not a compliment. In kansas city, harry truman, during the first world war, led a volunteer military unit, and artillery unit, that served on the western front. He later gained the ambivalent support of the pander gassed machine. He basically ran the democratic machine in kansas city. First as county executive or mayor of kansas city and then as senator from missouri. In fact, pendergast and kansas city, this is a presentation of kit kansas city, you can see the liquor being poured out and dance halls and stuff, he was originally called, after he joined the senate, the senator from pendergast. Something like that. In st. Louis, here we have the much more wholesome st. Louis, the worlds affair of 1904, the son of a german american mail carrier earned his u. S. Navy commission at indianapolis. He had an outstanding annapolis record and then served aboard ships and as a staff officer for senior commanders. He taught romance languages at annapolis but he excelled as a naval attache or uniformed overt Intelligence Officer in paris. Finally, businessman sydni sours worked his way up the mississippi towards new orleans through memphis making a fortune. It getting to know a new york businessman who will show up later in my story and serving as a Naval Intelligence reservist. Of all the men involved in founding the cia, besides his extensive fleet experience, had the most actual intelligence experience. He left the fewest footprints or records. I have to tell you that it was very difficult to find out much about this guy even though he was the first director of the cia and really had a quite distinguished career. I will Say Something that is sort of against my interests but if you look at the cias magazine studies and intelligence, of march in 2016 edition, which is available free online, i wrote an article about his military education which is essentially the time from when he entered the navy, served in france, and then after pearl harbor was admiral nimitz intelligence chief in the pacific in 1942 to 1943. He really had a remarkably wide ranging experience for a fairly middle grade naval officer. He served in france during pivotal turbulent years from the early thirties to 1941. The spanish civil war in which nazi germany and the soviet union used the war to practice war games. Just two years later, the germans turned those practices on first poland and then western europe. It was a time of aggressive nazi expansionism, he was there in the first year of the european war and he witnessed the fall of france. He exercised and demonstrated all the collection, reporting, analytic and operational skills of a classic field officer and here we have a picture of him courtesy of keith mountain. That is from his 1920 u. S. Navy academy yearbook. Then there are a couple of the ships he served on. Here is kind of an example of the world that he was in. He demonstrated collection reporting, analytic and operational skills as a classical field case officer and, in this case, what he did was he took a probe of western germany, the rhineland, just before the germans sealed it off in 1938. Here are the German Labour core boys who were building fortifications and here are the new advanced mechanized equipment that the germans were using. He would drive around and, because he spoke made of german, along with spanish and french, he would just pick up hitchhiking gis, german soldiers, or the labor corps guys, and he would offer them cigarettes and say, by the way, i am an american, tell me what you guys are up to. Youve got remarkable reports on fortifications, and airfields, and various kind of military facilities that they were building. This was also a period with austria and the occupation of czechoslovakia where there were repeated wars scarce in western europe. Not actual war but repeated panics. The picture on the right or the left, on the left there, is of people fleeing from paris. Not during the actual war but because they got panicked in the late thirties. Finally, he served under the former chief of nato Naval Operations and future military chief of staff to the commanderinchief, William Lahey. The picture on the left is he was in. He was in front of the 14th of june when the nazis marched in to paris and the ambassador decided to leave him in paris so that they could be brief and try to illicit information from the german governor of paris. And that is the general who happened himself to be a military attache in warsaw so he said he said i understand what at issues do you are here to gather information so ask me anything you want. And they said to him how are you going to invade england . And he said dont worry we have it all worked out. In six weeks the war will be over. Which shows i guess something. So then he transferred helen qatar back to the Pacific Fleet in november 1941, just in time to have his captain killed and his battleship West Virginia during this surprise japanese attack on december 7th so hillenkoetter was the senior surviving officer on the ship. And for those of you who know the museum the spy museum well you may recognize the image of the flag over there. The museum has an excellent video which they show called ground troops. Have any of you seeing that . Its really a terrific video. Unfortunately it is not running these days because of the james bond villains special exhibit but it basically talks about the importance of intelligence and how critical it is to our National Success or failure. And that is the final image on that video. That happens to be the flag from hillenkoetter ship. It is fitting that the spy museum which show an image that dates back to the early director of the cia. After brief sea duty hillenkoetter became chief of the small understaffed disorganized and overwhelmed Intelligence Center this is another one of those things that will happen over and over again hillenkoetter took over this Intelligence Center in the chaos immediately after pearl harbor. He did not have enough staff. He did not have the proper kinds of people. He did not have the skills he needed. As yogi berra said, it will be deja vu all over again, to the point when he becomes director of the cia. His brilliant predecessor was kicked aside by washington rivals trying to shift blame for pearl harbor on to this gifted japanese linguist and cryptographer. Again, another lesson. When something goes wrong, it is never your fault. Blame somebody else. Ideally, blame somebody who is not guilty. My editorial comment. In mid1942, hillenkoetter and his Intelligence CenterPacific Ocean area found themselves in a similar beleaguered crisis to the Central Intelligence group that hillenkoetter inherited in mid 1947 from dcis directors of Central Intelligence. Again, five years later, he will find himself in a similar pickle. Meanwhile, stepping back to mid1941, the improvisational and devious president Franklin Roosevelt had been trying to run what passed as strategic National Intelligence out of his desk drawer. There was not any structure at all. In july of 1941, he picked ambitious and aggressive republican new york lawyer and world war i hero William Donovan to be his coordinator of information over the bitter and unrelenting opposition of the fbi and military and Naval Intelligence. This is donovans favorite picture of himself. It shows him as a world war i hero and congressional medal of honor winner. There he is as director and here is a 1946 aerial photograph showing you have got the Lincoln Memorial here. 23rd street. The potomac river. There is the original headquarters of the oss and cia. This is now the kennedy center. This theme of fraternal hostility runs through the whole story, and is repeated during the late 1940s and 1950s when the foundation of the cia, or for that matter, is repeated in 2005 with the creation of the director of National Intelligence. If you remember the log rolling that took place when the dni was established in 2005. If intelligence is all about understanding, and i think it is, the most important function is research and analysis, collating, evaluating, and weighing fragmentary, ambiguous, and contradictory and often deliberately misleading information. It is not just that we dont have the whole picture. It is that our adversaries are sometimes actively trying to mislead us. If you dont believe that that happens today, look at the cover of the Washington Post tomorrow morning or maybe today. These challenges are shared by historians, journalists, and Intelligence Officers, and i am both an historian and Intelligence Officer so i can tell you these are major challenges. Two of these Intelligence Officers were ivy league historians, who essentially invented the discipline of National Strategic analysis. In the cias analytic college today is named for sherman kent. This is true still today. Almost unique in putting scholars and analysis at the center of the intelligence process. Still thrown into a global war, donovan naturally followed the british model of espionage, which the oss called secret intelligence and covert action, which the british called and we called, special operations. Covert action ranges from influence operations, propaganda, sabotage, all the way to rallying indigenous resistance and supporting military operations. Here we have a couple of examples of that. This is the first time we see women in the picture, by the way. Donovan also encouraged the enabling of technology and sky gear. The picture in the middle is a jet berg team about two parachute into occupied france. On the far side, you have virginia hall. The picture of the third one is the portrait of virginia hall, which hangs in the cia today. Donovan awarding her the distinguished service medal. How we got here is thanks to world war ii, the United States emerged as the only unwounded global superpower. Every other great nation was grievously crippled by the Second World War but we came through remarkably unscathed. Thanks to donovan, during the war, the u. S. Created a unique intelligence framework. By unique, i mean, they combined espionage and direct action, covert operations and things of that sort, but also analysis. The only other service in the world that does not is the german and the reason they do is because they were created by the cia and followed the oss and cia model. Harry truman, who unlike roosevelt, was organized, systematic, history minded, and fact oriented. Finally, the war left us facing the Nuclear Cold War against an aggressive expansionist soviet union and gave us Harry Trumans missouri gang to create a new National Security framework, including among other things, the cia. Here we have practically the first time t