From NSC 10/2 to NSC 68

The 50th anniversaries of the Marshall Plan and the Berlin Airlift have

overshadowed the anniversary of another event that has left a subtle but lasting

impact on United States foreign policy.

The National Security Council's Directives 4-A and 10/2 together marked a

departure in American history. For the first time, the United States government

formally authorized the conduct of peacetime covert action overseas. NSC 4-A in

December 1947 assigned the responsibility for covert action in the worsening

cold war to the new Central Intelligence Agency. Six months later NSC 10/2

superseded that directive, leaving covert action authority with CLA but significantly

affecting the agency's exercise of this mission.

NSC 10/2 created the semiautonomous Office of Policy Coordination (OPC)

in the Central Intelligence Agency. During the Congressional investigations of

the mid-1970s a Senate staffer, Anne Karalekas, prepared from classified agency

histories an unclassified, monograph-length history of CIA. Karalekas discussed

OPC in brief but revealing detail, and for two decades her passages on the office

have remained the most accurate and reliable résumé of PC's four-year existence.

Scholars have tended to credit her conclusion that the changes made by NSC 10/

2 encouraged CLA to misunderstand its mandate and promote covert action as a

Dr. Michael Warner is Deputy Chief of the History Staff, Central Intelligence

Agency. An earlier version of this article was delivered at the Society for History

in the Federal Government's annual conference, 19 March 1998. It was reviewed

by the ClA's Publications Review Board. That review neither constitutes CIA

authentication of information nor implies CA endorsement of the author's views

No classified documents or sources were used in its preparation.