Walter Pforzheimer

Founder and archivist of the CIA

Walter Lionel Pforzheimer, lawyer, intelligence officer and book collector: born Port Chester, New York 15 August 1914; died Washington, DC 10 February 2003.

"The necessity of procuring good Intelligence," wrote George Washington,

is apparent & need not be further urged – All that remains for me to add is, that you keep the whole matter as secret as possible. For upon Secrecy, Success depends in Most Enterprizes of the kind, and for want of it, they are generally defeated, however well planned & promising a favourable issue.

Washington's letter was dated 26 July 1777, at the height of the American War of Independence. It was a lesson that Walter Pforzheimer, one of the founders of what is now the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), never himself forgot. But that they should not be forgotten such lessons must also be preserved, and it was his second task to preserve them.

One of his first steps in this direction was to acquire Washington's letter, one of the earliest statements by a competent authority on the intelligence needs of the new-born country. If Pforzheimer was an intelligence man by career, he was by a far earlier conviction a collector of documents and books.

He was born in 1914, the son of Walter Pforzheimer, one of three brothers who made a fortune in oil stock. All three were interested in books, and two, Walter and Carl, made notable collections, Walter specialising in French books, while Carl's more famous collection of English literature, once in the Pforzheimer Foundation, is now mainly at the University of Texas. Arthur, the third brother, became a bookseller.

Walter junior was educated at Yale, arriving alone in a chauffeured car as a freshman in 1931. "I took to Yale as a duck does to a pond," he said. He graduated in the class of 1935, and on his 21st birthday his father summoned him and said, "Well, son, you don't need another car, so I'm giving you this library as a present. Here it is." It was, said Walter, a shock that shaped his life.

After Yale Law School and a brief career in business, he joined the army. His beginnings in intelligence were almost equally accidental. Shortly after graduating from Officers Candidate School, he was approached by a young officer he had not met before, who asked, "Would you like to go into intelligence?" "Beats digging ditches," he said to himself, "and so I did." So he found himself part of William Donovan's new intelligence operation, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Its object was the systematic acquisition and analysis of intelligence; as such, it was the forerunner of the CIA.

In the Second World War, he played two roles. One was at the American Army Air Force Intelligence Headquarters in England, where his chief of operational intelligence was Col Lewis W. Powell, a future Justice of the Supreme Court. (In July 1945 he was in Berlin, where he "liberated" some of Hitler's books.) His other role was laundering significant sums of money for the OSS. The cover organisation for the money laundering was called the Yale Library Project. The story was that the money was being spent on the university's collections, for which he had the perfect pretext: he was on the governing board of the Yale Library Associates, and was later to become its longest-serving trustee.

At the end of the war Pforzheimer stayed on to become the agency's Legislative Counsel for liaison with Congress, and was one of those who made what had been a wartime emergency stopgap into a permanent intelligence force, drafting the bill that brought the CIA into existence in 1947.

In 1956, the CIA Director Allen Dulles asked Pforzheimer to start a historical intelligence collection, and, until his retirement in 1974, he was its curator. He also taught courses in literary intelligence at the Defense Intelligence College, and continued to work at the agency long after his formal retirement, strengthening the library, and lecturing to foreign military officers on the history of intelligence.

As an undergraduate, he had put together a collection of the works of the Philadelphia-born novelist, short-story writer and humorist Frank Stockton (1834-1902). His father's gift added a virtually complete collection of the works of Molière to date, even down to contemporary English piracies of the playwright's texts. He also preserved his father's collection of French royal autographs and armorial bindings of the ancien régime. Besides these, he put together his own huge collection of intelligence material, which he had begun well before Dulles issued his official invitation.

Pforzheimer never said that this collection was better than that the CIA's, feeling that to say so would not only be disloyal, but would have revealed classified information. But he did say that the CIA did not have the George Washington letter about intelligence or a letter to Nathan Hale from his Yale room-mate.

His own collection included a photograph and a visa issued to Mata Hari, executed as a spy in France in 1917, a shorthand transcript of the trial of "John the Painter", the only American convicted of sabotage (he set fire to the naval warehouse of hemp and rope at Chatham during the War of Independence), and the prototype spy's autobiography, Matthew Smith's Memoirs of Secret Service (1699).

In one of the two apartments that he kept at the Watergate in Washington – he lived alone in one, his collection occupying the other, whose floor had to be specially strengthened – Pforzheimer could be found with fellow retired intelligence officers, sipping Scotch and telling stories from the Cold War. But Yale was his home, he said, and its libraries his special delight. In 2002 he made over his four collections to the Beinecke Library there, though he retained them to the last: "I go out the door feet first, then my library can go up to New Haven," he once said. In the event the books just beat him to it.

A Festschrift published for his 80th birthday, In the Name of Intelligence (1994), included contributions by Christopher Andrew, M.R.D. Foot, Nigel West and Lord Dacre of Glanton.

Nicolas Barker