Abstract
This thesis analyses the impact of the arrival of social scientists known as intelligence intellectuals (or intel intellectuals for short) on the organisational structure and development of the early CIA. It argues that it was the promise of a scientifically sound intelligence analysis process, executed by academics seconded from university social science departments, and institutionalised as part of a strategic intelligence modus operandi, that significantly helped the CIA fulfil its Cold War mission and helped legitimise the role of this new organisation. By 1950, the Agency was reeling from accusations it had failed to predict the Soviet Union’s development of the atom bomb (August, 1949), China falling to the Communists (October, 1949) and the outbreak of the Korean War (June, 1950). Given the United States’ then recent emergence as a superpower, and the existential conflict that it faced with the Soviet Union (and also Communist China after 1949) it was critical that America’s leading minds could be put to work at producing strategic intelligence: coordinating the best available knowledge of the world in a way that met the needs of the President and his foreign policy makers, and safeguarded U.S interests abroad. The new Director of Central Intelligence, General Walter Bedell Smith, was put in charge of reforming CIA and did so between October 1950 and February 1953. Professors like William Langer of Harvard, Sherman Kent of Yale and Max Millikan of MIT were given permission to take leave of absence from their universities. They brought with them their social science-trained associates with wartime experience at OSS’s Research and Analysis, and hired new Ph.D graduates, with the intention of fashioning them into a new generation of civilian peacetime intelligence analysts. Little attention has been given to reports commissioned from social scientists for foreign policy tools like the CIA’s national intelligence estimates. They dealt with the major issues of their day: over Soviet intentions and capabilities, of crisis management and on strategic opportunities for the U.S and its allies. William Langer, Sherman Kent, Max Millikan and their recruits imposed a standard of evaluation on CIA’s intelligence analysis methods that would last for the next thirty years.