A Riddle, Wrapped in a Mystery, Inside an Enigma: The Formation of a Modern Peacetime U.S. Intelligence Structure, 1943-1949

Abstract

By the end of the Second World War, American intelligence organizations were mounting extensive efforts against Soviet communications, despite the official designation of the USSR as an ally. Meanwhile, the USSR never ceased its tradition of espionage, which dated back to tsarist times. However, at the end of the twentieth century, many of the historians who acknowledge the significance of SIGINT (signals intelligence) in the Second World War, ignore intelligence almost completely in their histories of the Cold War. Intelligence is particularly ignored in historiography of the origins of the Cold War. In effort to draw a link between the two scholarships of the Cold War, this thesis, by focusing of the formative period of the Cold War, argues that between 1943 and 1949, intelligence had brief window of opportunity to influence early American policy toward the Soviet Union, but failed to do so as result of internal and external factors.