Approved for Release: 2013/06/25
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Secret NOFORN
Chapter 4
192
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months as the Deputy Director for Plans, Bissell found himself involved in a major struggle with Killian and Land, who were serving on President Kennedy’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (successor to the Eisenhower administration’s President’s Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities). These two influential Presidential advisers strongly advocated removing the Agency’s overhead reconnaissance programs from the DDP and placing them in a new, science-oriented directorate, but Bissell resisted this proposal. With his position in the Agency becoming increasingly untenable, Bissell resigned on 17 February 1962, after turning down an offer from the new DCI, John A. McCone, to become the CIA’s first Deputy Director for Research.⁵⁶
Two days after Bissell’s departure, the new Directorate came into existence, and it absorbed all of the Development Projects Division’s special reconnaissance projects. Only conventional air support for the Clandestine Services remained with the DDP in the new Special Operations Division. The U-2 program was no longer connected with covert operations.
The first half of 1962 was a confusing period for the Development Projects Division. After losing the individual who had created and supervised it for seven years, the DPD also lost its feeling of autonomy when it was transferred from its own building to the new CIA Headquarters at Langley. Soon afterward, Col. Stanley W. Beerli, who had headed the DPD since 1960, returned to the Air Force. Then on 30 July 1962, the overhead reconnaissance projects underwent a major reorganization with the formation of the new Office of Special Activities (OSA) to replace the DPD. The original organization of OSA with 10 division or staff heads reporting directly to the director of the office (at that time known as the Assistant Director for Special Activities) proved too cumbersome, and, on 30 September 1962, a reorganization divided most of these offices between two major subordinates, the Deputy for Technology and the Deputy for Field Activities (see chart, page 193). The Office of Special Activities (OSA) continued to control reconnaissance activities and related research and development after the Directorate of Research was enlarged and renamed the Deputy Directorate for Science and Technology (DDS&T) on 5 August 1963 (along with the other
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⁵⁶ Killian interview (S); Land interview (TS Codeword); Richard M. Bissell to John A. McCone, 7 February 1962, DCI records, job 80-B-1676R, box 18, folder 10 (S).
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Secret
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Approved for Release: 2013/06/25