This unique history offers the most detailed and best documented account of the early years of the CIA currently available. It reveals the political and bureaucratic struggles that accompanied the creation of the modern U. S. intelligence community. In addition, it proposes a theory of effective intelligence organization, applied both to the movement to create the CIA and to the form it eventually took.

The period covered by this study was crucially important because it was during this time that the main battles over the establishment, responsibilities, and turf of the agency were...