U.S. Department of Defense
Document Type
Article
Date of this Version
9-6-1940
Abstract
This document consists of a memorandum instructing senior staff officers in the headquarters of the War Department to set up intelligence sections in their offices. Those senior Army staff officers included the Chief of the Air Corps, the Chief of the Chemical Warfare Service, the Chief of Engineers, the Chief of Ordnance, the Chief Signal Officer , the Quartermaster General, and the Surgeon General. Also included are a “Distribution Sheet” showing who copies were sent to and a letter from the National Archives forwarding the memorandum to Robert L. Bolin.
The memorandum was a charter for organizations that grew into large intelligence agencies in the Army and the Department of Defense.
During World War II, the Chemical Warfare Service, the Corps of Engineers, the Department of Ordnance, Signal Corps, Quartermaster Corps, the Medical Department, and the newly created Transportation Corps came to be known as the Army Technical Services. During the war the offices of the chiefs of the Technical Services grew considerably as did the intelligence sections in them.
The intelligence sections survived retrenchment after World War II. In the 1950s, several of those intelligence sections evolved into small specialized intelligence agencies including the Army Chemical Corps Intelligence Agency, Army Ordnance Intelligence Agency, the Army Signal Intelligence Agency, Army Quartermaster Intelligence Agency, The Army Medical Information and Intelligence Agency, and the Army Transportation Intelligence Agency.
During the early 1960s, the Army Technical Services were reorganized radically and the intelligence activities in the Technical Services were incorporated into the Defense Intelligence Agency and a new Army technical intelligence agency.