Special Intelligence Service of the Federal Bureau of Investigation: Forgotten Forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency

Abstract

The Special Intelligence Service (SIS) of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was created in 1940 as a foreign intelligence collection and analysis agency operating in the Western Hemisphere. Despite initial difficulties, it rapidly grew into a significant service, expanding its operations to Europe and providing finished intelligence products for the Department of State and other bureaucracies. The SIS was gradually closed in the years following World War II, but it transferred its networks, communications systems, procedures, and much of its personnel to the nascent Central Intelligence Agency. Thus, the FBI, and its particular institutional culture as established by J. Edgar Hoover, had a more significant impact than is generally recognized on the development of what becomes the central bureaucracy in the Intelligence Community established by the National Security Act of 1947.