/specialCollection/DCI/Intell & Miscellaneous Papers FOIA/Misc-008.pdf

his successor well positioned to continue work toward a permanent central intelligence organization.
Souers bequeathed to him several talented officers (among them Walter Pforzheimer,7 Lawrence
Houston,8 and Ludwell Lee Montague9) and a well-advanced draft of enabling legislation for a new
central intelligence organization. In addition, as Documents 1946-03-05D, 1946-03-14, and 1946-03-16
illustrate, the CIG under Souers had made significant progress in determining how best to preserve and
transfer from the War Department to the CIG those elements of the Strategic Services Unit (SSU)
deemed to be “of continuing usefulness.” The project status reports contained in this document
collection reveals a heavy workload aimed at defining the missions and the tools of the new US
intelligence apparatus.
The DCI’s second major task was to find his successor so he could return to St. Louis and his varied
business interests. He soon fixed on Hoyt S. Vandenberg, a war hero and the nephew of a prominent
Republican senator, as the ideal candidate to guide the CIG and secure passage of legislation for an
independent central intelligence agency. Vandenberg was reluctant, but Souers, who had impressed
wartime colleagues as a shrewd intelligence operator, secured his agreement.
Not all of Souers’s proposals were implemented. For example, he argued that the various departmental
intelligence bodies should coordinate their representation on budget issues, a tactic that he
characterized as “one of the more effective means for guarding against arbitrary depletion of
intelligence sources at the expense of national security.” After the bruising interdepartmental battles to
create the CIG, a proposal was unlikely to gain traction for decades to come.
In June 1946, Souers returned to St. Louis, but his “retirement” was brief. Within a year, he was
recalled to Washington to set up an intelligence service for the Atomic Energy Commission. In
September 1947, he became the executive secretary of the newly created National Security Council, a
post in which he would help steer the evolution of the CIG’s successor, the Central Intelligence
Agency.10 Even after leaving that post in 1950, he remained a close adviser and poker-playing buddy to
the President, spending much of his time in Washington. Truman later commented in an oral history,
“You can depend on this guy. He was one of my greatest assets.” Souers suffered a debilitating stroke
and died on 14 January 1973, just weeks after Truman’s death in Kansas City.
6 Darling, p. 106.
7 Walter Pforzheimer played a key role in drafting the legislation that created CIA and went on to serve as the Agency’s first
Legislative Liaison. He also collected a wide range of books on the craft of intelligence, a collection that forms the basis of
the CIA Library’s Historical Intelligence Collection. Pforzheimer was the collection’s first curator, a post he held until 1974.
8 An OSS veteran, Larry Houston served as the General Counsel of the Strategic Services Unit before holding the same post
in the CIG under Souers. After the creation of CIA, he served as its General Counsel from 1947 to 1973. He is widely
recognized as one of the architects of CIA and a central player in virtually every Agency undertaking during his tenure.
9 Ludwell Lee Montague was an Army intelligence officer who served as executive secretary of the wartime Joint
Intelligence Committee. On joining the CIG, he headed the Central Reports Staff, and, when CIA replaced the CIG, he helped
set up the Office of National Estimates. He was a member of the Board of National Estimates until his retirement in 1971.
10 Entries in the diary of Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, the third DCI, show that Souers was in frequent contact with
Hillenkoetter regarding legislation pertaining to the CIG. (See 1947-04-09a).