The Foundation of the CIA: Harry Truman, The Missouri Gang, and the Origins of the Cold War

The Institute of World Politics

This event is a part of the Global Impact Discussion Series by founder and moderator Patricia Schouker, IWP alumna. About the Book: This highly accessible book provides new material and a fresh perspective on American National Intelligence practice, focusing on the first fifty years of the twentieth century, when the United States took on the responsibilities of a global superpower during the first years of the Cold War. Late to the art of intelligence, the United States during World War II created a new model of combining intelligence collection and analytic functions into a single organization—the OSS. At the end of the war, President Harry Truman and a small group of advisors developed a new, centralized agency directly subordinate to and responsible to the President, despite entrenched institutional resistance. Instrumental to the creation of the CIA was a group known colloquially as the “Missouri Gang,” which included not only President Truman but equally determined fellow Missourians Clark Clifford, Sidney Souers, and Roscoe Hillenkoetter. About the Author: Richard E. Schroeder specializes in Cold War and intelligence issues. His Ph.D dissertation at the University of Chicago was on the Hitler Youth as a paramilitary organization. Trained as an infantry platoon leader, he served as a US Army intelligence officer on the Army Staff in Washington, DC, and the US Military Command in Vietnam. He is the author of classified US Army political studies. Following his tour in Vietnam, he was research director on the Louisiana gubernatorial campaign of the late Congressman Gillis W. Long. During his thirty-one year career as an officer of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Clandestine Service, he held senior management positions both in Washington and Europe in the CIA Directorates of Operations and Science and Technology, and spent three years in CIA’s Office of Congressional Affairs responsible for Directorate of Operations liaison with Congressional Intelligence Oversight Committees. He also served as Deputy Director of the CIA Center for the Study of Intelligence. His final assignment before retirement in 2003 was as CIA Chair and Professor of Political Science at National Defense University’s Industrial College of the Armed Forces. He is a founding member of the Board of Advisors of the International Spy Museum in Washington, DC. He currently consults on national security issues and since 1999 has been an adjunct professor in the graduate Security Studies Program and the undergraduate Science, Technology, and International Affairs Concentration of the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. He has lectured on intelligence at the Bush School at Texas A&M, the University of Missouri, the Air Force and Naval Academies, Marquette, the Ohio State University, the Patterson School at the University of Kentucky, Westminster College, New Mexico State University, Kent State University, the Allied Museum, Berlin, and the National Security Agency. He and his wife Leah have one son, and live in Washington, DC.