National Affairs: Soldier for Sailor

A soldier will replace a sailor as director of the country’s top-secret Central Intelligence Agency, the White House announced. The President had persuaded Lieut. General Walter Bedell (“Beedle”) Smith to take the job held for the past 39 months by Rear Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter.

CIA, despite its brass bosses, is actually a civilian agency which operates as a collector and clearing house of information about the intentions of other nations. It shuns publicity, gets little public attention until something blows up. When something blew up in Korea, U.S. Senators demanded to know why CIA had not given adequate warning. Admiral Hillenkoetter said that CIA had in fact known about heavy North Korean concentrations and had passed the information on. He insisted that CIA’s job was merely to report to the departments concerned—State, Defense, etc.—on how things looked, but not to try to divine what was going to happen. Officially, however, his agency “correlates and evaluates intelligence relating to the national security.”

There was a feeling around Washington that Admiral Hillenkoetter, for all his record as a naval officer, was a fish out of water in the department. Beedle Smith was talked about as a successor, long before Korea. But 54-year-old General Smith, serving as commander of the First Army in New York, was troubled with ulcers. He was also tired after years of service to his country, which included three years as Ike Eisenhower’s chief of staff in Europe and three postwar years as U.S. Ambassador to Russia, and he was anxious to retire to private life. When asked flatly to take the job, however, after his health had improved, Soldier Smith took the request as an order.

He had no illusions about the difficulties of operating an all-seeing international eye. Commenting on the CIA assignment, before he took it, he said: “American people expect you to be on a communing level with God and Joe Stalin and I’m not sure they are so much interested in God. They expect you to be able to say that a war will start next Tuesday at 5:32 p.m.”

Roscoe Hillenkoetter will go back to sea as commander of a cruiser division.