Harry S. Truman Quotes
The CIA was set up by me for the sole purpose of getting all the available information to the President. It was not intended to operate as an international agency engaged in strange activities.
Intelligence agents tend to prefer covert activities to the less dramatic, non-exciting, activity of gathering and analyzing intelligence. Most national intelligence services tend to enlarge their portfolio to include covert activities regardless of what the national leaders intended. Because of the secrecy, they can often get away with this.
Harry S Truman, 1884-1972, 33rd President of the United States (Democrat, MO), Letter to the editor, Look Magazine, May 1964
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
The American Embassy in Berlin had wiretapped the telephone and telegraph wires of the German Foreign Ministry. The man who did that was hired by Secretary of State Lansing as the first employee of the new unit.
This quotation comes as a major surprise to most people who perceive modern CIA as the MAJOR U.S. spying and covert action organization. It is a marvelous case study of agency “mission creep”.
In her younger days Steinham worked with the CIA. Originally the Office of Strategic Service, the precursor to the CIA, was an amalgam of some of the nation’s most educated and dedicated people who tended to be very idealistic in saving the world from fascists like Nazi Germany and Japan. The were extremely nonpolitical and were not involved in the liberal conservative battles that the agency got itself into as the Red Scare and the fear of Communism affected much of the society including the CIA.
When Bob Casey was the CIA Director, he the declassification of all the operational files of the WWII Office of Strategic Service. The huge collection is referred to as Record Book 2.6
Casey continuously violated the law and lied to the President and Congress.
Harry S. Truman was an American politician who served as the 33rd President of the United States (1945–53). He served as a United States Senator from Missouri (1935–45) and briefly as Vice President (1945) before he succeeded to the presidency on April 12, 1945 upon the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt. He was president during the final months of World War II, and approved the plan to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Truman was elected in his own right in 1948. He presided over an uncertain domestic scene as America sought its path after the war and tensions with the Soviet Union increased, marking the start of the Cold War.
