Operations Coordinating Board
According to the Wikipedia article on the National Security Council (NSC):
"President Dwight D. Eisenhower created the Operations Coordinating Board (OCB) to follow up on all NSC decisions. The OCB met regularly on Wednesday afternoons at the Department of State, and was composed of the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Deputy Secretary of Defense, the Directors of CIA, USIA, and ICA, and the Special Assistants to the President for National Security Affairs and Security Operations Coordination. The OCB was the coordinating and implementing arm of the NSC for all aspects of the implementation of national security policy. NSC action papers were assigned to a team from the OCB for follow-up. More than 40 interagency working groups were established with experts for various countries and subjects. This 24-person staff of the OCB supported these working groups in which officials from various agencies met each other for the first time."
Records of the National Security Council, 1947-69: Records of the Operations Coordinating Board (OCB), 1957-61:
- The OCB was "Established as an independent agency by EO 10483, September 2, 1953, to report to the NSC on the development, by appropriate Executive branch agencies, of operational plans for national security policies of international import. Incorporated into the NSC, effective July 1, 1957, by EO 10700, February 25, 1957. Abolished by EO 10920, February 18, 1961."
U.S. Department of State: Release of Foreign Relations Series: National Security Policy, 1961-1963], Press Release, September 26, 1996:
- "...documents the John F. Kennedy administration's major restructuring of the national security bureaucracy, which the preceding Eisenhower administration had systematically developed. President Kennedy abolished the Operations Coordinating Board, transferred some of the functions of the Planning Board to the Department of State, and consolidated the National Security Council and White House foreign policy staffers under his National Security Adviser, McGeorge Bundy. In so doing, he created the embryo of the modern NSC organization."
Related SourceWatch articles
- Central Intelligence Agency
- covert operations
- Robert Cutler
- executive order (EO)
- Gordon Gray
- Henry A. Kissinger
- Robert D. Murphy
- psyops
External links
- NSC 5412, National Security Council Directive on Covert Operations: "...effectively neutralized such oversight functions as were intended to be carried out under the authority of the Operations Coordinating Board (OCB) which was a part of NSC by law. OCB was intended to be a group of senior individuals, who would follow the decisions made by the National Security Council and make sure that the bureaucracy carried them out."
