National Intelligence Authority
American intelligence agency
The National Intelligence Authority (NIA) was the United States government authority responsible for monitoring the Central Intelligence Group (CIG), the successor intelligence agency of the Office of Strategic Services established by President Harry S. Truman's presidential directive of 22 January 1946 in the aftermath of World War II. The National Intelligence Authority and Central Intelligence Group were both replaced respectively by the National Security Council and the Central Intelligence Agency under the National Security Act of 1947, which was implemented on 18 September 1947.
History
Despite opposition from the military establishment, the United States Department of State, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), President Truman established the National Intelligence Authority on 22 January 1946. The National Intelligence Authority and its operational extension, the Central Intelligence Group (CIG), was disestablished after twenty months. The disestablishment of the NIA and CIG came with the National Security Act of 1947, which established the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Council.
Membership
The NIA was composed of the secretary of state (James F. Byrnes and George C. Marshall), the secretary of war (Robert P. Patterson), the secretary of the Navy (James Forrestal), and a personal representative of President Truman (William D. Leahy, the chief of staff to the commander in chief). The board oversaw the activities of the CIG, which was headed by the director of central intelligence (DCI), who was a nonvoting member of the NIA. The first DCI was Sidney Souers.
“National Intelligence Authority” enters the record as american intelligence agency. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what National, Intelligence and Authority can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1652038. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1946 and 1947.
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This entry incorporates text from “National Intelligence Authority” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.