USAREUR Units - 66th MI Brigade

Much of the work of the Counter Intelligence Corps was performed abroad, as American occupation forces in Europe and the Far East first attempted to root out the remaining vestiges of Nazism and militarism and then faced the task of countering Communist subversion.

In Germany, all Army counterintelligence assets were consolidated into a single large unit, the 1,400-man-strong 970th Counter Intelligence Corps Detachment, which blanketed the American Zone of Germany with a network of regional and field offices. In 1948 this was converted into the 7970th Counter Intelligence Corps Detachment, organized under a table of distribution (TD) as a one-of-a-kind unit to perform a specific mission. The change brought about difficulties in obtaining personnel, however, and as a result the 7970th was superseded by a new TOE outfit, the 66th Counter Intelligence Corps Detachment, in 1949.

Counter Intelligence Corps operations overseas faced their own special problems. Some higher commanders abroad objected to the idea of CIC agents living in civilian clothes apart from the structure of the Army as a whole and sought to remilitarize the operations. At one point, all counterintelligence personnel in Germany were put back into uniform and ordered into Army billets with considerable loss of operational effectiveness. Another problem was that some CIC personnel acclimatized themselves to life overseas all too well and had married foreign wives. In June 1950 the CIC chief issued an order that any CIC member marrying a foreign national without grant of a waiver would be terminated. Finally, operational necessity drew the corps into unfamiliar activities. In Germany, for example, CIC agents helped crack down on the black market. In most overseas commands, Cold War needs forced Counter Intelligence Corps units to engage in positive collection of intelligence. With no mechanism for gathering human intelligence at its disposal outside of the attache system, the Army was forced to misapply its counterintelligence assets to fill the void.

NOTE: For Army lineage purposes, the distinction between TOE and TD units lies in the fact that TOE units are permanently placed on Army rolls and are activated and inactivated as needed, whereas TD units are organized on a one-time basis for a particular mission and are not perpetuated after discontinuance. A typical example of a TOE unit would be an infantry battalion, while a typical TD unit would be an Army garrison. Because of the peculiar demands of intelligence work, many intelligence personnel have historically served in TD (later TDA, or table of distribution and allowances) units.