-Caveat Lector-
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W. L. Pforzheimer, 88, Dies; Helped to Shape the C.I.A.
February 16, 2003
By TIM WEINER
Walter L. Pforzheimer, one of the founding fathers of the
Central Intelligence Agency and the creator of its
historical archives, died on Monday at his home in
Washington. He was 88.
Mr. Pforzheimer was one of a small number of men who
started working for the intelligence agency at its creation
in 1947 and kept serving it, even in retirement, until the
century's close.
Though he retired in 1974, he was the agency's
institutional memory - an unusual role at an institution
that tends to prefer its past shredded.
He was a short, round man whose mind was sharp and whose
tongue was sharper. In one of the two apartments he kept at
the Watergate in Washington - he lived alone in one, his
enormous collection of books and intelligence artifacts
occupied the other - he would usually be found with fellow
retired intelligence officers, sipping Scotch and telling
stories from the cold war. These sessions lasted well into
his 80's, until he suffered several strokes.
"He was for me the embodiment of institutional memory - he
knew the agency, all the events that mattered, all the
people that mattered," said John C. Gannon, a former deputy
director for intelligence at the C.I.A.
After his retirement, Mr. Pforzheimer often taught and
lectured young intelligence officers. Whether told over a
lectern or over a cocktail, his stories were endless, and
"all of them had elements of truth," said Hayden Peake, the
curator of the Historical Intelligence Collection, housed
at the agency and founded in 1956 by Mr. Pforzheimer.
Mr. Pforzheimer's story was a classic tale of a young,
wealthy man who went to Yale (class of 1935) and wound up
after World War II at the C.I.A. The college's unofficial
anthem, the "Whiffenpoof Song" ("We are poor little lambs
who have lost our way . . ."), was the soundtrack of the
war for that well-bred class of officers. Many were present
at the creation of the intelligence service.
In the war, he played two roles. One was at Army Air Force
Intelligence Headquarters in Europe, where his chief of
operational intelligence was Col. Lewis W. Powell, the
future Supreme Court justice.
His other role was laundering significant sums of money for
the Office of Strategic Services, the C.I.A.'s forerunner.
The cover organization for the money laundering was called
the Yale Library Project. The story was that the money was
being spent on the university's collections. Mr.
Pforzheimer had the perfect alibi: He was on the governing
board of the Yale Library Associates, and later became its
longest-serving trustee.
Mr. Pforzheimer was always a headquarters man, never
overseas. In the C.I.A.'s first decade, he was the agency's
liaison to Congress. This was a heady job because the
agency had started work without a legislative charter and
was running covert operations around the world before it
had the slightest legal authority to do so.
"It wasn't a case of wanting a law changed - there was just
no law," Mr. Pforzheimer recalled. In 1949, Congress passed
legislation authorizing the agency's secret budget and, by
implication, its secret operations.
In those days, Congress asked few questions of the agency.
In 1955, Senator Leverett Saltonstall of Massachusetts
stated the prevailing wisdom: "It is a question of our
reluctance, if you will, to seek information and knowledge
on subjects which I, personally, would rather not have."
Mr. Pforzheimer pithily summed up the agency's relationship
with Congress in those days: "Amusing. Amusing. The word is
amusing."
In 1956, the director of central intelligence, Allen
Dulles, asked Mr. Pforzheimer to set up the C.I.A.'s
historical intelligence collection. Mr. Pforzheimer's
father and uncle had been in the rare book business, and he
had begun his own collections of intelligence books and
memorabilia.
Mr. Pforzheimer, born in Purchase, N.Y., was single and is
survived by no immediate relatives. He donated more than
15,000 books to Yale in 2001.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/16/obituaries/16PFOR.html?ex=1046466671&ei=1&en=e614e48f95c7b03c
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