The Counter Intelligence Corps (Army CIC) was a

World War II World War II or the Second World War (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War II, Allies and the Axis powers. World War II by country, Nearly all of the wo ...

and early

Cold War The Cold War was a period of global Geopolitics, geopolitical rivalry between the United States (US) and the Soviet Union (USSR) and their respective allies, the capitalist Western Bloc and communist Eastern Bloc, which lasted from 1947 unt ...

intelligence agency An intelligence agency is a government agency responsible for the collection, Intelligence analysis, analysis, and exploitation of information in support of law enforcement, national security, military, public safety, and foreign policy obj ...

within the

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consisting of highly trained special agents. Its role was taken over by the U.S. Army Intelligence Corps in 1961 and, in 1967, by the United States Army Intelligence Agency. Its functions are now performed by its modern-day descendant organization, United States Army Counterintelligence. The National Counter Intelligence Corps Association (NCICA), a veterans' association, was established in the years immediately following World War II by former military intelligence agents. Counterintelligence corps badge

Origins

The CIC had its origins in the Corps of Intelligence Police founded by Ralph Van Deman in 1917. This organization, operating within the USA and on attachment to the

American Expeditionary Force The American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) was a formation of the United States Armed Forces on the Western Front (World War I), Western Front during World War I, composed mostly of units from the United States Army, U.S. Army. The AEF was establis ...

in France, at its peak numbered over 600 men. However, in the post-war period, the policy of

isolationism Isolationism is a term used to refer to a political philosophy advocating a foreign policy that opposes involvement in the political affairs, and especially the wars, of other countries. Thus, isolationism fundamentally advocates neutrality an ...

, retrenchment of military spending, and

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meant that by the mid-1930s its numbers had fallen to fewer than 20 personnel.

World War II

The looming threat of war in the late 1930s brought an expansion of the CIP back to its World War I levels, and the entry of the United States into

in December 1941 brought an even greater expansion and a new name. On 13 December 1941, the Adjutant General of the Army issued an order renaming the CIP as the Counter Intelligence Corps, effective from 1 January 1942. A new complement of 543 officers and 4,431 non-commissioned agents was authorized. Garland H. Williams was the first Chief of the School and CIC. The CIC recruited men with legal, police, or other investigative backgrounds, and particularly looked for men with foreign language skills. Special CIC teams were created during World War II in Europe, in large part from the Military Intelligence Service personnel (see Ritchie Boys). However, there were never enough of these, and local interpreters were often recruited. As most CIC agents in the field (as well as Military Intelligence Service in Europe) held only non-commissioned officer rank— corporals and various grades of sergeant— they wore either plain clothes, or uniforms without badges of rank; in place of rank insignia, and so as not to be perceived as privates, agents typically wore officer "U.S." collar insignia. They were instructed to identify themselves only as "Agent" or "Special Agent" as appropriate, in order to facilitate their work. These practices continue among modern counterintelligence agents. Within the U.S. the CIC, in collaboration with the Provost Marshal General and the

Federal Bureau of Investigation The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is the domestic Intelligence agency, intelligence and Security agency, security service of the United States and Federal law enforcement in the United States, its principal federal law enforcement ag ...

(FBI), carried out background checks on military personnel having access to classified material, investigations of possible sabotage and subversion, and allegations of disloyalty, especially those directed against Americans of Japanese, Italian or German ancestry. Despite the prohibitions in the delimitation agreement with the FBI, the CIC ended up devoting considerable effort to civilian investigations. As Volume 7 of '' The History of the Counter Intelligence Corps'' explains: "Espionage and sabotage, being enemy directed, involved more than one person. Usually there were a number in the chain extending from the agent in the United States back through cutouts and couriers to the enemy country. This inevitably involved civilians with military suspects and the case became connected with the FBI. The military aspect became minor, and major investigative effort was in the civilian community to locate the higher-ups who presumably were controlling more than one agent." However the use of informants within the Army became politically controversial, and CIC was forced to curtail its activities. In particular, the CIC was ordered to cease its domestic investigations, to destroy its investigative records, and to ship its agents out to overseas theaters. The reason for this sudden and unprecedented expulsion has never been clarified. One leading theory was expressed in the official history of the Corps, "the speed f these eventsleft little doubt that someone—possibly Communists who still held key positions in government—was determined to halt CIC investigative activities in the United States". Another possible explanation is that the CIC mistakenly bugged the hotel room of Eleanor Roosevelt and incurred the President's wrath. In any event, the CIC protected the investigative records it had so painstakingly accumulated. According to Sayer and Botting (p. 47) "When the command was given to cease any investigations of known or suspected Communists and destroy all files on such persons immediately, eight of the nine Corps Area Commanders took the remarkable step of disobeying this order". According to the official history of the Corps, this information proved highly valuable in controlling communism: "the information acquired by CIC from May 1941 to September 1945 regarding communism and its adherents played a major part in keeping communism under control in the United States ever since".

Manhattan Project

CIC units were also involved in providing security for the

Manhattan Project The Manhattan Project was a research and development program undertaken during World War II to produce the first nuclear weapons. It was led by the United States in collaboration with the United Kingdom and Canada. From 1942 to 1946, the ...

, including duty as couriers of fissionable bomb materials from

Los Alamos, New Mexico Los Alamos (, meaning ''The Poplars'') is a census-designated place in Los Alamos County, New Mexico, United States, that is recognized as one of the development and creation places of the Nuclear weapon, atomic bomb—the primary objective of ...

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. They also operated in 1945 at the United Nations Organizing Conference in San Francisco, over which

Alger Hiss Alger Hiss (November 11, 1904 – November 15, 1996) was an American government official who was accused of espionage in 1948 for the Soviet Union in the 1930s. The statute of limitations had expired for espionage, but he was convicted of perjur ...

presided as secretary-general. Three years later, when Alger Hiss was accused of being a Communist and filed a libel suit against his accuser, his lawyers unwittingly hired an undercover CIC Special Agent as their Chief Investigator to help prepare his libel suit. In the European and

Pacific The Pacific Ocean is the largest and deepest of Earth's five oceanic divisions. It extends from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Southern Ocean, or, depending on the definition, to Antarctica in the south, and is bounded by the cont ...

theaters of operations CIC deployed detachments at all levels. These detachments provided tactical intelligence about the enemy from captured documents, interrogations of captured troops, and from para-military and civilian sources. They were also involved in providing security for military installations and staging areas, located enemy agents, and acted to counter

stay-behind A stay-behind operation is one where a country places secret operatives or organizations in its own territory, for use in case of a later enemy occupation. The stay-behind operatives would then form the basis of a resistance movement, and act as ...

networks. They also provided training to combat units in security, censorship, the seizure of documents, and the dangers of booby traps. In some cases CIC agents such as

Henry Kissinger Henry Alfred Kissinger (May 27, 1923 – November 29, 2023) was an American diplomat and political scientist who served as the 56th United States secretary of state from 1973 to 1977 and the 7th National Security Advisor (United States), natio ...

found themselves acting as the ''de facto'' military government on the occupation of large towns before the arrival of Allied Military Government for Occupied Territories (AMGOT) officers. As the war in Europe came to a close, CIC were involved in the Operations Alsos,

Paperclip A paper clip (or paperclip) is a tool used to hold sheets of paper together, usually made of steel wire bent to a looped shape (though some are covered in plastic). Most paper clips are variations of the ''Gem'' type introduced in the 1890s or ...

and

TICOM TICOM (Target Intelligence Committee) was a secret Allied project formed in World War II to find and seize German intelligence assets, particularly in the field of cryptology and signals intelligence. It operated alongside other Western Allied ...

, searching for German personnel and research in atomic weapons, rockets and cryptography.

Post-war operations

Operation Paperclip

At the end of World War II CIC agents were successful in

Operation Paperclip The Operation Paperclip was a secret United States intelligence program in which more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians were taken from former Nazi Germany to the US for government employment after the end of World War I ...

that obtained German rocket scientists for the United States before the Soviets took them. This action aided in the success of the American rocket development program and resultant adventure into space. CIC actively continued counterintelligence activities in the Cold War, Korean War and Vietnam War.

Project Happiness

After the war, in West Germany, the CIC also directed the so-called "Project Happiness" that sought to recruit former

Gestapo The (, ), Syllabic abbreviation, abbreviated Gestapo (), was the official secret police of Nazi Germany and in German-occupied Europe. The force was created by Hermann Göring in 1933 by combining the various political police agencies of F ...

and SD members as informants to infiltrate East German communist parties, such as the SED and KPD.

Other activities

In the immediate post-war period, the CIC operated in the occupied countries, particularly Japan, Germany and Austria, countering the

black market A black market is a Secrecy, clandestine Market (economics), market or series of transactions that has some aspect of illegality, or is not compliant with an institutional set of rules. If the rule defines the set of goods and services who ...

, and searching for and arresting notable members of the previous regime. Despite the problem of demobilization, with many experienced agents returning to civilian life, CIC became the leading intelligence organization in the American occupation zones, and very soon found themselves facing a new enemy in the emerging

. The outbreak of the

Korean War The Korean War (25 June 1950 – 27 July 1953) was an armed conflict on the Korean Peninsula fought between North Korea (Democratic People's Republic of Korea; DPRK) and South Korea (Republic of Korea; ROK) and their allies. North Korea was s ...

in June 1950 meant that CIC was once again involved in a military conflict, and it underwent a major expansion. However this proved to be CIC's last chance to enjoy resources and recruits. The proliferation of intelligence agencies had meant duplication of effort and disputes over responsibility, so in 1961 the CIC ceased to exist as an independent organization, as it was rolled into the Army's new Military Intelligence Branch. While serving in the U.S. Army in the 1960s, Christopher H. Pyle learned that "Army intelligence had 1500 plain clothes agents watching every demonstration of 20 people or more throughout the United States". Pyle's disclosures led to Congressional investigations and a crackdown on what was regarded as the Army's investigative excesses. This ended what advocates regarded as the peak of counterintelligence efficiency: "At the height of the disturbance period, a CIC agent could get a report from the street to Fort Holabird HQ in 20 minutes, from practically any city in the U.S., seconds or brief minutes later the report was in Operations Center in a lower basement of the Pentagon".

The "ratline" controversy

One of CIC's operations in post-war Europe was the operation of a " rat-line" – a conduit for spiriting informants and defectors out of the Soviet Zones of Occupation to safety in South America, via Italy or Spain, with false identities and documents paid for by CIC and made by the Vatican. A Department of Justice investigation also uncovered the CIC's dealings with Father Krunoslav Draganović, a Croatian cleric based in Rome, who while working for CIC, also operated his own clandestine rat-line to transport

Ustaše The Ustaše (), also known by anglicised versions Ustasha or Ustashe, was a Croats, Croatian fascist and ultranationalist organization active, as one organization, between 1929 and 1945, formally known as the Ustaša – Croatian Revolutionar ...

war criminals to Latin America. A further report in 1988 also examined the CIC's use of Nazi war criminals and collaborators as informants in the years after World War II. In June 1988, Office of Special Investigations within the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice issued a public report which revealed that "at least 14 suspected Nazi war criminals, a number of whom likely were involved in the murder of Jews in occupied Europe, had been employed as intelligence informants by the CIC in Austria."

Notable CIC agents

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, composer * Donald L. Barlett, journalist * Noel Behn, writer and theatrical producer *

Willy Brandt Willy Brandt (; born Herbert Ernst Karl Frahm; 18 December 1913 – 8 October 1992) was a German politician and statesman who was leader of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) from 1964 to 1987 and concurrently served as the Chancellor ...

, later German chancellor * John F. Collins, Mayor of

Boston Boston is the capital and most populous city in the Commonwealth (U.S. state), Commonwealth of Massachusetts in the United States. The city serves as the cultural and Financial centre, financial center of New England, a region of the Northeas ...

*Hugh Colopy, Akron, Ohio attorney * Miles Copeland Jr., musician * Philip J. Corso, Lieutenant Colonel at

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*J. Griffin Crump, editor, The Journal of Intergroup Relations * William E. Dannemeyer, California congressman * Ahn Doo-hee, lieutenant, Assassin * Gene Gutowski, Film Producer *Foxtrot, Art Dealer * Mike Gravel, Alaska senator * Bill Hartman, athlete * Anthony Hecht, poet * Clint Hill. former United States Secret Service Agent *

, Secretary of State * Arthur Komori, District Court judge, Military Intelligence Hall of Fame inductee. * Morton Kondracke, journalist * Donald Lunde, psychiatrist of Ed Kemper and Patty Hearst * Robie Macauley, editor and novelist * John J. McFall, California congressman *William A. McNeill, DET 430th CIC *

Ib Melchior Ib Jørgen Melchior (September 17, 1917 – March 14, 2015) was a Danish-American novelist, short-story writer, film producer, film director, and screenwriter of low-budget American science fiction movies, most of them released by American I ...

, film producer * Horace Miner, anthropologist * George J. Mitchell, Maine senator * Tom Moody, Mayor of

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* William Hughes Mulligan, Federal judge * Richard Case Nagell, robbed a bank in 1963 * Walter Pincus, journalist * Cruz Reynoso, lawyer and jurist * Richard Sakakida, USAF Lt Col after war, Military Intelligence Hall of Fame inductee. *

J. D. Salinger Jerome David Salinger ( ; January 1, 1919 – January 27, 2010) was an American author best known for his 1951 novel '' The Catcher in the Rye''. Salinger published several short stories in '' Story'' magazine in 1940, before serving in World Wa ...

, novelist * Robert Saxton Taylor, Library Officer * Jerry Seltzer, roller derby promoter * Richard A. Snyder, Pennsylvania State Senator * Bob Shamansky, Ohio congressman * Michel Thomas, Linguist, Language Teacher *

Waldo Tobler Waldo Rudolph Tobler (November 16, 1930 – February 20, 2018) was an United States, American-Switzerland, Swiss geographer and cartographer. Tobler is regarded as one of the most influential geographers and cartographers of the late 20th centur ...

, geography professor * William Lewis Uanna, Security Expert

Footnotes

Sources

CIC Records: A Valuable Tool for Researchers
(scroll down)
Counter Intelligence Corps History and Mission in World War II (PDF)

External links

441st Counterintelligence and Military Intelligence Official History

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