Bureau of Secret Intelligence

The Bureau of Secret Intelligence (Office of the Chief Special Agent) was founded in 1916. The U.S. Department of State's Bureau of Secret Intelligence, later known as the Office of Security (SY) and now as the U.S. Diplomatic Security Service, was also known as U-1, an off-the-books adjunct to the Division of Information.

The origins of the U.S. State Department's Diplomatic Security Service (DSS) goes back to 1916 with a handful of agents assigned special duties directly by the Secretary of State (SECSTATE), Robert Lansing.

Lansing, who used MID and Department of the Treasury Secret Service agents to obtain secret information, longed for direct control over his own agents; therefore, in 1916 he created a Bureau of Secret Intelligence.

President Wilson allowed Lansing and Frank Polk quietly and informally to channel the flow of military and law enforcement material into the State Department's Bureau of Secret Intelligence (U-1). The two men picked a young clerk named Leland Harrison "to take charge of the collection and examination of all information of a secret nature coming into the Department from various sources and also to direct the work of the agents specially employed for that purpose."

Lansing moved to create this inter-agency "secret service" for the Department of State. Many German and Austrian acts of fraud, propaganda, sabotage, and espionage cut across or fell between the jurisdictions of various U.S. law enforcement agencies. Secretary of the Treasury William McAdoo admitted that the Secret Service, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Post Office Inspection Service were often "crossing wires with [one] another in running down crimes and conducting investigations" of espionage, fraud, and sabotage. To rectify this, Lansing proposed creating an office under the Department of State’s Office of the Counselor to review investigation reports from several law enforcement agencies.

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