Walter Pforzheimer, 88; CIA’s First Legislative Counsel and Curator of the Agency’s Archives

Walter Pforzheimer, a lawyer who was the first legislative counsel of the Central Intelligence Agency and a bibliophile who was the first curator of its historical intelligence collection, has died. He was 88.

Pforzheimer, who had diabetes and in recent years had been incapacitated by several strokes, died Monday at his home in Washington.

Pforzheimer officially retired from the CIA in 1974, but maintained his ties with the agency until his death, meeting from time to time with its top officers, with whom he shared his recollections and his strongly held opinions on how intelligence and espionage operations were being managed.

He helped draft the National Security Act of 1947, which established the CIA, and was instrumental in guiding it over the legislative hurdles on Capitol Hill. In 1949, he did the same for the CIA Act, which addressed logistical and housekeeping measures essential to the operation of a federal agency.

As one of a few remaining survivors to have participated in the founding of the CIA, Pforzheimer in recent years assumed an unofficial role as custodian and keeper of the agency’s institutional memory. John Gannon, the CIA’s former deputy director for intelligence and chairman of the National Intelligence Council, called Pforzheimer “one of the rare people who really did know just about everything about the agency from the days of its creation. And he was a wonderful storyteller. Visiting him was a fascinating experience, having him bring it all to life.” When the CIA celebrated its 50th anniversary in September 1997, Pforzheimer was among 50 officers and former officers of the agency to receive a CIA Trailblazer award.

He was born in Purchase, N.Y., and graduated from Yale University and Yale Law School. Early in World War II, he helped organize various operations for the Office of Strategic Services, a forerunner of the CIA. Later in the war, he was an Army Air Forces intelligence officer in England.

His beginnings in intelligence were almost accidental. In remarks to the CIA’s general counsel’s office in 1991, Pforzheimer said that shortly after graduating from officers candidate school, he was approached by a young officer. “[He] asked me, ‘Would you like to go into intelligence?’ Beats digging ditches, I supposed, and so I did.”

He served in intelligence units that by 1947 had evolved into the CIA. In 1956, CIA Director Allen Dulles asked him to start a historical intelligence collection, and until his 1974 retirement, Pforzheimer served as its curator. Having been brought up in a family of book collectors, he was a natural for this job.

In the late 1940s or early 1950s, Pforzheimer acquired a letter written by George Washington on July 26, 1777, dealing with documents relating to the British spy Maj. John Andre. It says, in part: “The necessity of procuring good intelligence is apparent and 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 enterprises of the kind, and for want of it, they are generally defeated.”

Pforzheimer’s personal collection included a photograph and a visa issued to World War I spy Mata Hari, who was executed in France in 1917; a shorthand transcript of the trial of James Aitken, alias “John the Painter,” the only American convicted of sabotage -- setting fire to a British Navy storehouse of hemp and rope -- in England during the Revolutionary War; and an 1864 Confederate States of America bill to create a “special and secret service.”

At the CIA, his collection of intelligence documents, reference works and literature is known to libraries and scholars around the world, and is said to be one of the world’s greatest resources in intelligence literature. Within the intelligence community, Pforzheimer acquired the title of dean of intelligence literature. On retiring from the CIA, he taught courses in literary intelligence at the Defense Intelligence College.

Pforzheimer leaves no immediate survivors.