Intelligence, Espionage, and Cold War Origins

We have learned a great deal over the past decade and a half about the impact of the “intelligence revolution”—by which is meant the open and clandestine collection of information, the organization and implementation of covert operations, and the systematic analysis of adversary intentions and capabilities—on World War II strategy.1 That knowledge has led, in turn, to a reassessment of the role of intelligence in earlier periods, and to the emergence of intelligence “studies” as a distinct subdiscipline, complete with its own newsletters, journals, organizations, scholarly meetings, and university courses.2 But this proliferation of scholarship stops abruptly with the conclusion of the war: it is as if the possibilities for serious research on intelligence end with September 1945, in a manner almost as decisive as President Harry S. Truman's when in that same month he abolished with the stroke of a pen the first full-scale intelligence organization the United States had ever had, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).3