General Walter Bedell Smith as Director of Central Intelligence, October 1950 - February 1953 by Ludwell L. Montague; Bruce D. Berkowitz (intro); Allan E. Goodman (intro) - 1992

University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, July 1992. Hardcover. First Edition. Red cloth over boards with gold lettering to spine. As New book in a Fine jacket with light rubbing. No tears, creases or folds. Not from a library. No remainder mark. Not clipped. xxviii + 308 pages.

The second volume in the official history of the CIA made available under the CIA's Historical Review Program. The author was a leading government official who participated in the interdepartmental debate over the postwar organization of U.S. intelligence that occurred in 1945. He drafted many of the policies of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during this bureaucratic struggle, including JIC 239/5, the plan that was also the basis for the establishment of the Central Intelligence Group, the predecessor of the CIA. He served as General Smith's executive assistant when Smith was appointed Director of Central Intelligence in 1950. Montague contends that Smith is so important to the development of the intelligence community that the history of the community can legitimately be thought of as "pre-Smith and post-Smith." The book focuses on the initiatives that Smith implemented in order to reform the U.S. intelligence community, which was under heavy criticism at the time for a series of intelligence failure. The reorganization of the intelligence community described here contains, with just a few exceptions, the predecessors of the major organizational components of today's CIA. Most of this work survived the declassification process relatively intact to give us a detailed analysis of a critical period in the development of the intelligence community.