Euphoria over the American victory in World War II was short lived. It became apparent that the destruction of the Axis Powers had only created a power vacuum into which another totalitarian state, the Soviet Union, steadily and inexorably moved. The United Nations, created to guide a lasting peace, soon appeared to be a hollow shell, its Security Council paralyzed by Russian vetoes. Confronted by Soviet repression in Eastern Europe and Communist subversion in the West, the United States slowly moved to meet the new challenge. In this Cold War between East and West, at first the weapons were economic and diplomatic. The United States succored hard-pressed Greece and Turkey with military and economic aid in 1947, then moved to restore the destroyed economy of Western Europe with the Marshall Plan in 1948. A Soviet blockade of the Western zones in Berlin was countered by a massive airlift. Finally, the United States abandoned two centuries of tradition and joined in a peacetime military alliance with the European democracies when it became a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949.
However, the threatening international scene was not reflected in America's military posture. The vast armies fielded in World War II had been demobilized quickly. Once the draft came to an end in 1947, the Army shrank to a strength of 550,000. Much of this force was tied down in occupation duty, with four skeleton divisions in Japan, two for a time in Korea, and another in Germany In the summer of 1948 Congress renewed Selective Service, spurring recruitment and allowing a slight buildup of Army strength to about 600,000. Many Americans hoped that the American monopoly of the atomic bomb would preserve the peace. But the Soviets demolished this assumption in 1949 by exploding a nuclear device of their own. Meanwhile, stability in the Far East was deteriorating. By 1949 Communist Chinese armies had brought all of mainland China under the red flag. The United States had withdrawn its occupation troops from South Korea, and a Communist government in the North now stared balefully across the 38th Parallel at its democratic neighbor to the South. In June 1950 it marched across the border. In response, an unready America was drawn into a new war.
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The shock of the Korean War-and the subsequent Chinese Communist interventiontransformed American national security policy. The Army grew to 1.5 million men, organized into twenty active divisions. Large forces were deployed not only on the Korean peninsula, but also on the continent of Europe. At the time, American leaders feared that the Korean attack might be an attempt to divert the West from a possible Soviet onslaught against the West European democracies. Originally NATO had been a paper alliance; now it was backed up by American steel. l For a whole generation, American soldiers would man many of the lines first established in both Asia and Europe during the early 1950s. And Army Intelligence, initially reeling from two major surprises (the initial Korean attack and the later Chinese offensive) was ultimately revitalized.
Restructuring Military Intelligence
In the aftermath of World War II, Army Intelligence was affected not only by the massive postwar contraction of military strength, but by sustained organizational turbulence. This was brought about by two conflicting types of pressure. Some policy makers simply wanted to return to prewar conditions, dismissing wartime expedients as aberrations caused by a never-tobe-repeated crisis. Others attempted to make use of the lessons learned in World War II to create a better structure. As a result, much of the Military Intelligence architecture with which the country had fought World War II was dismantled and intelligence assets placed in new configurations.
During World War II, control of communications intelligence collection assets had been split between the Signal Security Agency and the theater commanders. This arrangement had created significant problems, since it was impossible to neatly separate the tactical aspects of communications intelligence from the strategic ones.2 Even before the fighting had ended, the Army had decided to entrust exploitation of the electronic communications spectrum to a single agency. On 15 September 1945, the Signal Security Agency was separated from the Signal Corps and became the Army Security Agency (ASA), assuming command of "all signals intelligence and security establishments, units, and personnel" of the Army. 3 The new agency, which continued to function under direct control by the Army G-2 in Washington, inherited the mission, functions, and assets of its wartime predecessor and took over the communications intelligence and communications security resources previously at the disposal of theater and Air Force commanders. In addition to unifying the Army's cryptologic structure, the formation of the Army Security Agency also marked a brief
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reversal in the tendency towards increased autonomy for the Army Air Forces in this field, since the AAF's radio squadrons, mobile, and other cryptologic assets were resubordinated to the agency.
Army counterintelligence organization also underwent a substantial restructuring. By the time World War II ended, the Counter Intelligence Corps and the Security Intelligence Corps formed in 1944 had both been placed under the Army Service Forces' director of intelligence. Agents of both organizations now received the same training and operated under the same regulations. Under these new conditions it was obviously pointless to maintain two parallel counterintelligence elements. Accordingly, in April 1946 the Security Intelligence Corps was merged with the Counter Intelligence Corps. In May numbered CIC detachments were constituted to operate in support of each of the nine service commands and the separate Military District of Washington (MDW). These detachments were assigned numbers in a sequence running from 107 to 116.
President Harry S. Truman presented a different kind of organizational challenge to the Army when he abolished the wartime Office of Strategic Services on 1 October 1945. The assets of the OSS were divided: analytic personnel were shipped off to the State Department, but the bulk of the organization, consisting of military personnel trained in clandestine collection, counterintelligence, covert action, and black propaganda, combined into the new Strategic Services Unit under the War Department. However, the organization was not assigned to G-2, but to the Office of the Assistant Secretary of War, which created an anomalous situation.
The existence of the Strategic Services Unit forced a reexamination of the entire national intelligence structure, a task which the Lovett Board assumed at the end of 1945. An executive order early in 1946 established a new Central Intelligence Group, a rudimentary national-level intelligence agency. This prototype central intelligence agency was at first merely a cooperative interdepartmental activity that depended on the armed services and the State Department for its staff, budget, and facilities. However, it did serve as a holding area to dispose of what remained of the Strategic Services Unit, most of whose members were slated for demobilization with the rest of the Army.4 Nevertheless, in 1946 a vestigial undercover capability still remained at the disposal of the U.S. intelligence community
A further step in the immediate postwar reorganization of U.S. Army Intelligence came about in May 1946 when the Army did away with its wartime structure. Not unexpectedly, the reorganization gave greater power to the traditional Army Staff and to the heads of the old-line technical services. One important result of the post-World War II Army reorganization was that MID, now redesignated the Intelligence Division, was restored to its prewar status as one of five equal functional divisions on the War Department General Staff. Now
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headed by a director of Intelligence, the division was specifically intended to serve as an operating agency as well as an element engaged in intelligence planning and staff supervision. Fortunately for all parties involved, the Intelligence Division had already relinquished the task of preparing the Army's official histories, which it had taken on in World War II. The Intelligence Division's resumption of operating functions led to the abolition of the separate Military Intelligence Service.5 In addition, the discontinuance of the Army Service Forces at this time resulted in the Counter Intelligence Corps' once more falling under the control of the War Department's Intelligence Division.
The Intelligence Division now set intelligence requirements for the Army, supervised collection, conducted evaluation, produced finished intelligence, and disseminated this information throughout the Army. Compartmented intelligence continued to be channeled through the Special Security System created in World War II. In November 1946 two separate detachments, both sharing a common commander, were set up within the division to manage the various Special Security Offices (SSOs). Detachment F supervised those at three locations in the continental United States; Detachment M directed a more extensive network overseas.
The Intelligence Division focused on the global requirements imposed by the rapidly deepening Cold War between the West and the Soviet Union. It had not only Army-wide intelligence taskings, but was responsible as well for satisfying national needs for political and economic intelligence. The 1946 reorganization placed the Intelligence Division and its director at an apogee of institutional power. The director of Intelligence had sole authority over the Army assets he needed to discharge his responsibilities. In addition to the internal resources which he controlled directly, he wielded influence in the management oversight of the Central Intelligence Group through his membership on the National Intelligence Board. The director also served on the board that governed national signals intelligence policy.
Almost immediately, however, the scope and autonomy of the Intelligence Division and its director came under attack. There were already conflicts in jurisdiction between the Intelligence Division and the intelligence arm of the now practically autonomous Army Air Forces. It was obvious that the pending creation of a separate Air Force, a process well under way by 1946, would result in the transfer of the air-oriented portions of Army Intelligence to the new service. There were other kinds of pressures at work. Many believed that lack of coordination between Army and Navy Intelligence had helped to bring about the disaster of Pearl Harbor. With tensions between the United States and Russia growing visibly, there was a demand to create a national-level intelligence
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body with greater powers than the Central Intelligence Group to coordinate the activities of the service intelligence components and to specialize in gathering political and economic intelligence.6
Both of these pressures came to a head in June 1947, when Congress passed the National Security Act. The bill created an independent Air Force and simultaneously unified all armed services under the secretary of defense. These actions significantly affected the structure of Army Intelligence. The Air Force developed a separate intelligence organization of its own. Air attaches took their places beside military attaches; counterintelligence assets already serving with Air Force units were withdrawn from the Counter Intelligence Corps; the Army Security Agency gave up control of its three radio squadrons, mobile, and one radio security detachment to the new service.7 Finally, in 1950 the Air Force established its own special security officer system.
The most important impact of the 1947 act, however, came with the establishment of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). This new national-level intelligence authority reported to the freshly created National Security Council (NSC). Unlike its predecessor, the CIA was not subordinate to the services, but had its own budget and personnel and a large mandate to independently gather and produce intelligence at its own discretion. The formation of the CIA did not directly interfere with the independence of Army Intelligence, but the role of the Army's director of Intelligence in influencing national intelligence decisions was decidedly curbed, although not eliminated, and the new agency assumed control over large areas of political and economic intelligence for which the Army had been responsible.
Postwar Operations: Human Intelligence
and Counterintelligence
Under peacetime conditions, the Intelligence Division in the post-World War II period had at its disposal three major institutional elements: the Army attache system, the Counter Intelligence Corps, and the Army Security Agency. The oldest and most traditional of these, the attache system still provided the Army with 80 percent of its uncompartmented intelligence. The attache network was large-before the final separation of the Air Force and later
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economies by the Truman administration 285 officers were serving in seventy stations-and increasingly professional. As early as October 1945 the Intelligence Division had begun offering training courses to officers selected for attache duty, and by 1946 this effort was being directed by a Strategic Intelligence School. Although the work of its graduates was increasingly hampered by tight security measures in Communist countries, they continued to provide valuable military information from their far-flung assignments.
For a short period, the Intelligence Division also operated the Gehlen Organization, an intelligence apparatus inherited from the German Army of World War II. Maj- Gen. Reinhardt Gehlen, former head of German intelligence on the Eastern Front, thoughtfully had brought his complete files with him when he surrendered to the American Army. Gehlen, his documents, and his personnel were moved to the United States for a time and placed under Intelligence Division control.8 Ultimately, the organization returned to Germany, passed under CIA direction, and finally became the nucleus of the present West German Bundesnachrichtendienst.
For counterintelligence, the Intelligence Division relied on the reestablished Army Counter Intelligence Corps, responsible for the procurement, training, and administration of all counterintelligence personnel. In the continental United States, six numbered Zone of Interior armies had taken over the functions of the nine former service commands following the dissolution of the Army Service Forces, and this brought about a realignment of existing CIC elements. Three CIC detachments were inactivated, and the 108th, 109th, 111th, 112th, 113th, and 115th Counter Intelligence Corps Detachments were subordinated respectively to the First, Second, Third, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Armies, while the 116th CIC Detachment continued to support the Military District of Washington. These geographic arrangements would remain unchanged for twenty years. Other counterintelligence units were attached to divisions based in the United States: to the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project that dealt with the military applications of atomic energy, to overseas commanders, and to the Intelligence Division itself. Usually, investigations continued to be supervised by the local G-2s, although the most sensitive cases were controlled by the director of Intelligence.
When the Counter Intelligence Corps first came under the command of the Intelligence Division, it was supervised directly by the division's counterintelligence staff element. However, it proved impracticable to exercise detailed control over a Camp Holabird-based organization from the Pentagon, so the position of chief, Counter Intelligence Corps, and commanding general, Counter Intelligence Corps Center, was authorized in April 1947. In short, the Counter Intelligence Corps had reverted to the institutional status it had originally held during the first part of World War II.
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Holabird, redesignated a fort in 1950, soon became an important center of intelligence activities. In addition to housing the CIC's administrative headquarters and the Counter Intelligence Corps School, it was the seat of the Counter Intelligence Corps Board, which directed research and development and handled personnel matters. The fort also began housing certain field activities of the Intelligence Division of the General Staff. In 1950 the Central Personality index, the name file which the Intelligence Division had set up the year before, was moved on post, and in 1951 Holabird became the home of the Army's Central Records Facility, which served as a centralized repository for the records of all the Army's personnel security investigations in the continental United States and contained microfilmed copies of the files of overseas CIC detachments.
In the aftermath of World War I, the Army had allowed its counterintelligence function to atrophy This course was not paralleled after World War II. The Army was first confronted with the necessity of providing large occupation forces abroad with counterintelligence support and then by the security demands of the Cold War. As a result, while total Army strength melted away in the course of postwar demobilization, the number of CIC personnel declined only modestly, falling from a high point of 5,000 in World War II to 3,800. However, there was a worrisome decline in quality Rapid demobilization of veterans and the termination of the draft eliminated the reservoir of skilled and highly educated personnel upon which the Counter Intelligence Corps had been able to draw. In World War II, two-thirds of all enlisted agents had been college graduates; half had possessed law degrees or the equivalent. Now, overseas commanders were soon reporting that only 10 percent of Counter Intelligence Corps School-trained personnel had completed a college education. The Army partially solved the problem by increasing the proportion of officers in the force and authorizing the recruitment of warrant officers. Moreover, not all trends were negative. In 1946 members of the Women's Army Corps (WAC) were admitted to the CIC School, and in 1950 CIC personnel were first trained to make use of a new and promising investigative technique, the polygraph.9
The years following the war saw the Counter Intelligence Corps come out on the losing side in several jurisdictional disputes. In 1949 the corps lost responsibility for the Army's industrial security program to the Provost Marshal General's Office. It also clashed with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). In 1947 President Truman issued Executive Order 9835 instituting a Federal Loyalty Program, which directed that all investigations of civilians be performed by the FBI. This contradicted the existing Delimitations Agreement between the armed services and the FBI, in existence since before World War II. Ultimately the Army signed a new agreement with the FBI in 1949, allowing the FBI to investigate Army civilians in the Western Hemisphere, while the Army handled
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investigations overseas. However, areas of friction between the two organizations continued to exist.
One problem, as the G-2, Sixth Army, pointed out perceptively, was "a basic difference in concept of subversive intelligence." The FBI's responsibility was "primarily for accumulation of admissible evidence to provide the basis for legal action against individuals or organizations, usually for acts which are already completed." Army Intelligence, on the other hand, functioned "primarily to forestall acts of violence or to prevent the spread of disorder; anticipatory planning is essential; and advance information on trends and developments must be continuously available."10 As it turned out, these differences in concept would prove even more troubling twenty years later.
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.11 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 1949.12
The 441st Counter Intelligence Corps Detachment, at one point almost as large as its European counterpart, played a similar role in supporting the occupation of Japan. Counterintelligence in Japan was facilitated by the activation of a unique unit, the 319th Military Intelligence Company, formed in 1946 of Nisei interpreters from MacArthur's Allied Translator and Interpreter Section. 13 Although the Counter Intelligence Corps and its predecessor organization had accepted Japanese-American personnel since 1940, there were too few of them in Japan to meet the needs of the occupation. To remedy this situation, the men
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of the 319th Military Intelligence Company were given theater counterintelligence credentials to make use of their invaluable language capabilities in assisting investigations.
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.
The Army Security Agency
The Intelligence Division's most important asset was provided by the newly formed Army Security Agency (ASA). In many ways the Army Security Agency was unique; its official historian later wrote that it was "within, but not part of, the overall military establishment." 14 A large portion of the headquarters continued to be staffed by civilian experts, and the agency's organizational pattern had no parallel in the rest of the Army. The Army Security Agency was put together on the "stovepipe" principle, and Arlington Hall controlled the activities of all units through a separate ASA chain of command. This distinctive vertical command structure, which provided centralized control over all Army signals intelligence and communications security assets, set ASA apart, as did the high walls of compartmented secrecy surrounding its sensitive operations. All that most members of the Army knew about the Army Security Agency was that they were not supposed to know anything about it.
As a separate entity within the Army, the agency was almost completely selfsufficient. In addition to conducting its own operational missions, ASA administered its own personnel system, ran its own school, arranged for its own supplies, and conducted its own research and development. The agency's cryptologic activities continued to be indispensable to the nation's security. The postwar drawdown of strength affected the ASA just as it did the rest of the armed forces, and the
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organization had to be realigned to meet new national priorities. But the competence which had marked the activities of its predecessors was still there.
In the field, ASA's principal assets were seven large fixed field stations, most of them left over from World War II, at Vint Hill Farms, Virginia; Two Rock Ranch, California; Helemano, Hawaii; Clark Field, the Philippines; Fairbanks, Alaska; Herzo Base, Germany; and Asmara, Ethiopia. Although the headquarters of the 2d Signal Service Battalion was disbanded in 1946, having become redundant when the Army Security Agency established its own personnel system, the stations continued to be manned by lettered detachments of the battalion until May 1950, when all of ASA's TDA elements were redesignated as numbered Army Area Units in the 8600 series. Field stations were supplemented by tactical units-signal service companies and detachments-operating from semifixed positions. The ASA exercised command and control of overseas elements through its regional headquarters in Europe and the Pacific, and later through smaller headquarters elements in Hawaii, Alaska, and the Caribbean. Overall direction of the Army's cryptologic effort and necessary analysis and production work were centralized at ASA's Arlington Hall headquarters.
Since the Army Security Agency's mission had a national impact, it had to be responsive to requirements generated by agencies outside the Army. Initially, ASA operated under the umbrella of the Army-Navy Communications Intelligence Board established during World War II. Other players soon became involved in the results of ASA work, however, and membership on the board was expanded. At first it became the State-Army-Navy Communications Intelligence Board, evolving a little later into the United States Communications Intelligence Board (USCIB), an element which included FBI and CIA participation.
As part of its mission, the agency supervised all Army communications security, produced and distributed all cryptomaterial, and served as the ultimate maintenance point for cryptomachinery. It also had responsibility for strategic communications cover and deception. All this entailed a substantial commitment of resources. The Army Security Agency's major effort in the communications security field after World War II was the replacement of the supersecure SIGABA with a cryptomachine that operated on less sensitive design principles, the SIGROD, later redesignated as ASAM-5. The idea was to place SIGABA in a reserve status for possible wartime demands, and to use SIGROD, the compromise of which would be less damaging.
ASA's initial organization proved short lived. Ever since World War II, the demand for the centralization of all cryptologic activities under the control of a single body had been increasing. By 1946 the Army had realized that both Army and Navy cryptologic organizations should be placed under the direction of a common agency to ensure a proper coordination of effort. The creation of an independent Air Force, with its own Air Force Security Service, seemed to threaten the field with greater fragmentation than ever before. In response, during 1949 the Armed Forces Security Agency was established under the joint Chiefs of Staff.
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The Armed Forces Security Agency, commanded by officers from the various services on a rotating basis, brought together at a high level all U.S. cryptologic operations and relieved the individual services of their direction and production functions in this field. In practice, the design concept behind this new agency proved flawed. The Armed Forces Security Agency was responsive only to the needs of the armed forces, leaving wider national concerns unmet. Moreover, the planned musical chairs rotation scheme for providing the agency's leadership destroyed administrative continuity.15 In 1952 the National Security Agency (NSA), a civilian agency under the Department of Defense, replaced the Armed Forces Security Agency.
In 1949, however, it seemed that the formation of the Armed Forces Security Agency would gut ASA, reducing it to the role of a residual Army cryptologic agency with a function limited to ensuring Army communications security. In addition to giving up a major portion of its original mission, the ASA transferred most of its civilian staff to the new national-level agency, including William Friedman and almost the whole group of Signal Intelligence Service pioneers. A long Army tradition that stretched back to the days of the World War I Cipher Bureau thus passed to a joint service organization. The Army Security Agency met the organizational challenge by restructuring itself to meet Army-specific needs. After 1949 the agency turned its attention to developing mobile field units to support tactical commanders at every level, a task accelerated by the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950.
Postwar Military Intelligence: Deficiencies
There were definite weaknesses in the structure of post-World War II Military Intelligence. Army Intelligence as yet had not become truly professional. Officers served in intelligence assignments on the basis of detail; their commissions, and in many cases, their career interests, lay with their basic branches. 16 Continuity in the more specialized areas of intelligence, such as counterintelligence and signals intelligence, rested in the pool of reserve officers who had continued in active service after World War II. Their numbers, however, inevitably diminished. To remedy this situation, in 1946 a panel of intelligence officers, the Forney Board, had recommended that a Military Intelligence Corps be established, consisting of both detailed and permanently assigned members. But other elements of the Army Staff had vigorously rejected the recommendation, on the usual grounds that any officer should be capable of performing intelligence duties.
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Training presented another problem. Under the new Army organization adopted in 1946, the director of Intelligence had limited responsibilities in the training field. The Strategic Intelligence School, the attache training facility under the direct control of the intelligence Division, was an exception. So was the area of language training. In 1946 the Military Intelligence Service Language School organized in World War II was redesignated the Army Language School and moved to the Presidio of Monterey in California. There, it continued to function under Intelligence Division control until it was resubordinated to Sixth Army headquarters in 1950.17 The Intelligence Division also maintained lettered language detachments in Germany Japan, and (briefly) China for advanced individual instruction. The Army Security Agency had a training school for its own personnel. Originally located at Vint Hill Farms, near Warrenton, Virginia, the school relocated to Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, in 1949 and found a more permanent home at Fort Devens, Massachusetts, in 1951. The Counter Intelligence Corps maintained an equivalent institution at Fort Holabird.
Linguists, signals intelligence personnel, and counterintelligence specialists were all needed in peacetime. However, there was no similar demand for photo interpreters and order of battle specialists. As a result, the combat intelligence specialties were allowed to atrophy. The Military Intelligence Training Center at Camp Ritchie, Maryland, which had trained combat intelligence specialists during World War II, was closed shortly after the war came to an end. The Army General School at Fort Riley, Kansas, offered some intelligence courses, but the Army Ground Forces, not the director of Intelligence, had jurisdiction over its offerings.
Lack of trained personnel, along with lack of money, meant that the TOE for a Military Intelligence Service Organization issued in 1948 could not be implemented. On paper, the Military Intelligence Service Organization was a model plan, calling for intelligence organizations made up of cellular teams tailored to meet the intelligence requirements of each level of command. The concept called for administrative, linguist, and nonlinguist teams, each made up of one officer and two enlisted personnel. A Military Intelligence Service platoon made up of appropriate teams would support each division, while MIS companies and battalions would perform similar functions at corps and army level, respectively. Overall control would be vested in a group commander at theater level. Subordinate commanders would perform administrative and housekeeping duties only. 18 However, none of the larger units envisaged by the arrangement was ever organized in peacetime. Apart from ASA units and the CIC's oversized detachments, by 1949 the only intelligence unit in the U.S. Army larger than a platoon was the Niseimanned 319th Military Intelligence Company in Japan.
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The same problems of inadequate resources also plagued the intelligence elements in the Army's reserve components. The situation here was considerably better than it had been after World War 1, since there were many more intelligencetrained officer and enlisted personnel, and various types of intelligence units had been formed, including new strategic intelligence detachments and signals intelligence units. The Anny's Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) had also instituted programs for training both Military Intelligence and Army Security Agency officers. However, reserve unit training was weak, with equipment lacking, and the Military Intelligence Reserve's officer component was imbalanced. Of the over 10,000 Military Intelligence Reserve officers, there were too many field grade and too few company grade personnel to meet mobilization needs.
At the level of tactical collection, although technological advances afforded some improvements, this was counterbalanced by the shrinking of collection assets within the skeleton Army. Although additional aircraft were assigned to the division, and a new type of light plane, the L-19 (later the O-1 "Bird-dog"), specifically designed to meet Army observation requirements, entered the inventory in 1950, there were not very many divisions left to support. Similarly, the flash- and sound-ranging capabilities of the field artillery observation battalion were now supplemented by radar, but by 1950 there was only one observation battalion left.
Finally, there were gaps in the intelligence architecture. What little electronic warfare and electronic intelligence capacity remained in the Army was controlled by the chief signal officer and operated without reference to the Army Security Agency, even though it was already all too clear that jamming would certainly have a great effect on the collection of signals intelligence in any wartime situation. Except for the attache system, the Army still lacked any dedicated capabilities for collecting human intelligence in peacetime, although Counter Intelligence Corps units overseas did provide some incidental positive intelligence. It would take the impact of another crisis to force the Army to reevaluate its intelligence structure and to make the necessary improvements. In June 1950 the crisis arrived.
Korea
The war in Korea confronted the U.S. Army with two major intelligence failures within the space of six months. The initial North Korean invasion came as a surprise, as did the later Chinese intervention. In each case Army Intelligence had been aware of hostile capabilities and had misinterpreted intentions. The reasons, apart from normal human fallibility, were unsurprising. Peacetime budgetary constraints had depleted Army Intelligence assets, and what remained had been targeted against Soviet Russia and the European threat. The Korean peninsula had been declared beyond America's defense perimeter and therefore outside the jurisdiction of the major theater commander in the Far East. The hard fact was that before June 1950 Korea was not
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high on the list of intelligence priorities for either the CIA or the Army. Once the conflict began, political and diplomatic constraints limited the ability of American collection assets to provide a definite early warning of the thirtydivision Chinese attack that ultimately materialized.
Army Intelligence initially responded to the outbreak of hostilities in Korea through desperate improvisation. There were only two Korean linguists on the staff of MacArthur's G-2. The Technical Intelligence Section of the Far East Command had been disbanded in 1949. The four occupation divisions in Japan had been stripped of their tactical Counter Intelligence Corps detachments, and when they deployed to Korea provisional CIC detachments had to be cobbled together from the assets of the 441st Counter Intelligence Corps Detachment in Japan. The three Army Security Agency units in the Far East were manning semifixed installations and were unable to take the field. Not until October did the first sizable ASA unit, the 60th Signal Service Company, reach the Korean peninsula, and the company had to be transported from Fort Lewis, Washington. In the meantime, the Eighth Army depended for cryptologic support upon a small unit organized by making use of locally available resources. Communications security was lax, both among Republic of Korea (ROK) troops and the Eighth Army. The Eighth Army had come from restful occupation duty in Japan, and the chief of the Army Security Agency put it, with some exaggeration, "They receive about 400 violations a minute over there."19 Communications security was threatened further by the initially fluid tactical situation; several high-level machine cipher devices had to be destroyed to prevent their capture in the early stages of the fighting.
Chinese intervention created another set of problems. The security-conscious Chinese initially approached the battlefront completely undetected, even though MacArthur personally conducted a visual reconnaissance mission over North Korea.20 Even after the Chinese engaged, ground patrols repeatedly lost contact with the enemy. In a desperate attempt to find out more about the Chinese advance, Korean nationals equipped with smoke grenades were airdropped into the intelligence vacuum to signal the presence of the enemy. General Matthew Ridgway assumed command of the Eighth Army in late December 1950 at the height of the crisis. He found himself confronted with an intelligence map showing only "a big red goose egg . . . with '174,000' scrawled in the middle of it" north of his lines, all that Army Intelligence knew then
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about the strength and disposition of the enemy. The following month, he too undertook a personal aerial reconnaissance behind enemy lines.21
The inadequacy of the Army's tactical intelligence capabilities on the Korean peninsula took many months to rectify. As late as 1951 a survey revealed that only 7 percent of Eighth Army personnel holding intelligence positions had either previous training or prior experience in intelligence, which spurred the creation of a Far East Command intelligence school at Camp Drake, Japan. Intelligence exploitation was handicapped also by the Army's limited supply of Mandarin linguists. Even toward the end of the war, deficiencies abounded. Ridgway's successor with the Eighth Army General James Van Fleet, commented that there were still serious problems in aerial photography, aerial visual reconnaissance, covert collection, ground reconnaissance, and communications reconnaissance. He went on to observe: "During the two years that the U.S. Army has been fighting in Korea . . . it has become apparent that during the between-war interim we have lost, through neglect, disinterest, and possible jealousy, much of the effectiveness in intelligence work that we acquired so painfully in World War II. Today, our intelligence operations in Korea have not yet approached the standards that we reached in the final year of the last war."22
Nonetheless, the shock of the Korean conflict did give a new impetus to the development of Army Intelligence, causing a rapid growth both in personnel and in organizational structure. The strength of the Office of the Assistant Chief of Staff, G-2, as the Intelligence Division was called after April 1950, grew to exceed 1,000 men. The SSO system managed by G-2 was expanded to service the three corps which the United States committed to Korea. In addition, the role of the SSO became significantly enhanced. In 1949 these officers had begun to provide an "eyes only" system of private communications to commanders. After the Korean War, special security officers became deeply involved in the production of finished intelligence for the commands they supported.
Changes were not confined to the Army Staff level. The Counter Intelligence Corps more than doubled; the position of chief of the Counter Intelligence Corps was elevated to a major general's slot. The largest CIC unit, the 66th Counter Intelligence Corps Detachment that supported USAREUR, was raised to group status in 1952. At the outset of the Korean War, a counterintelligence detachment was organized to protect the Pentagon, and subse-
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quently was incorporated as a subelement into the newly activated 902d Counter Intelligence Corps Detachment. This unit, operating under the direct control of the assistant chief of staff, G-2, was tasked with conducting exceptionally sensitive worldwide missions in support of Department of the Army requirements. Another development in the counterintelligence field that took place during the Korean War was the creation of Technical Service Countermeasures teams to ferret out possible listening devices, an initiative prompted by the 1952 discovery that the Great Seal of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow had been "bugged" by the Soviet Intelligence Service.
In the field, large intelligence organizations were developed to meet the needs of the combat forces. The Military Intelligence Service Organization concept at last became a reality, and tactical groups, battalions, and companies of intelligence specialists were formed to support the Army around the globe. The first Military Intelligence service group, the 525th, was organized in December 1950; its commander, Col. Garland Williams, had been the first Chief of the Corps of Intelligence Police before Pearl Harbor.23 Two additional groups were activated before the Korean War came to an end-the 500th Military Intelligence Service Group in Japan, which absorbed the personnel and mission of the old Translator and Interpreter Service, and the 513th Military Intelligence Service Group in Germany Five Military Intelligence Service battalions were also activated, along with numerous numbered companies and platoons. Additionally, four Military Intelligence Service groups and ten Military Intelligence Service battalions, all in the 300 series, were activated in the Organized Reserve Corps, redesignated the Army Reserve in 1952.
Korea was a limited war: at first the conflict was described not as a war at all, but as a United Nations "police action."24 This had limited the scope of certain kinds of intelligence activities. The intelligence community made no attempt to revive the World War II Counter Subversive program which had laced the Army's ranks with informers. Censorship activities were limited, and the press was allowed to operate under a "voluntary" self-censorship until the spring of 1951. The assistant chief of staff, G-2, did set up an Army Security Center in Washington, D.C., to handle high-level prisoner interrogation and document exploitation, but this turned out to be less important than its World War II predecessors, since enemy prisoners of war were retained in Korea, and few high-ranking prisoners were captured. However, some World War II precedents were found useful. In Operation INDIANHEAD, a multidiscipline intelligence task force-a World War II "T" Force in miniature-was dispatched to sift through the rubble of Pyongyang after that
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North Korean capital was overrun by United Nations troops.25 And the various collection techniques perfected in World War II proved useful in the new conflict.26
The Korean War revitalized the Army Security Agency, which found a new role in providing support to tactical operations. During the course of the war, the agency reorganized and redesignated its existing signal service companies as communication reconnaissance companies and activated new communication reconnaissance companies, battalions, and groups to support tactical commanders at every level.27 The new concept placed a communication reconnaissance group in support of the field army. The group would command subordinate ASA units and had the mission of dispatching liaison teams to the combat divisions. At the corps level, flexibly organized communication reconnaissance battalions directed the activities of separate numbered companies.
By the end of the Korean War, the Army Security Agency's 501st Communication Reconnaissance Group was supervising the operations of three attached battalions and five companies in support of the Eighth Army. Another major ASA tactical element, the 502d Communication Reconnaissance Group, commanded subordinate units giving support to the expanded Army presence in Europe. The 503d Communication Reconnaissance Group served as a command and control element for various ASA units in the continental United States. Additionally, new field stations had been established in Europe and the Far East. After 1951 the position of chief of the Army Security Agency was usually filled by a major genera1.28
Finally, the Army at last took steps to enhance its human intelligence collection capabilities. Confronted by an almost complete intelligence void in the early stages of the Korean War, it expanded an existing small intelligence element set up by the Far East Command following the withdrawal of American occupation troops in 1949 into a full-fledged collection organization. Initially, a provisional
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CIC unit, the 442d Counter Intelligence Corps Detachment, used tactical liaison office teams assigned to each division to dispatch locally recruited line-crossers. These generally unskilled and untrained Korean agents were told to gather whatever low-level intelligence they could. 29
Following the Chinese intervention, this approach expanded greatly. The provisional status of the 442d Counter Intelligence Corps Detachment was dropped. The divisional teams continued to function, but, in addition, the Army undertook more ambitious collection projects. By the summer of 1951 the Army was devoting increasing resources to the effort. Since the mission was not really appropriate for the Counter Intelligence Corps, the 442d was inactivated and its functions assumed by the 8240th Army Unit, a TD-based organization with elements in both Japan and Korea. The Counter Intelligence Corps personnel initially transferred to the 8240th Army Unit were replaced gradually by specialists from other intelligence disciplines.
In late 1951 the scope of the unit's mandate widened to include special operations. This came about when the Eighth Army unit supporting Korean guerrillas on the offshore islands was integrated into the 8240th Army Unit in accordance with doctrine that such activities belonged at the theater level. At the same time, the 8240th Army Unit itself became the Army element of Combined Command Reconnaissance Activities, Korea, a theater-level joint-service agency created to coordinate intelligence and special operations activities in the war zone.
By the time the Korean armistice was signed in the summer of 1953, the 8240th Army Unit had 450 military personnel assigned and had evolved into an Army simulacrum of the World War II OSS. It not only provided the Far Eastern Command with information, but also ran a 20,000-man private army of Korean guerrillas, the United Nations Partisan Forces in Korea. With five infantry and one airborne regiment, the Partisan Forces harassed the enemy from bases on islands off the shores of both coasts of the Korean peninsula. As if all this were not enough, the 8240th also engaged in an extensive program of "black propaganda." 30
Summation
The Korean War was another major milestone in the development of Army Intelligence. It revived intelligence capabilities which had grown moribund in the post-World War II retrenchment. It also witnessed the development of large-scale intelligence formations in the field. For the first time, Army Intelligence personnel were organized into groups and battalions. However,
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although the Army Security Agency imposed these arrangements on its reserve components in the aftermath of the war, the Army decided that large reserve units were not needed in the other intelligence disciplines, and by mid-1953 all the Military Intelligence Service groups and battalions in the Army Reserve had been inactivated.31 For the next few years, the Military Intelligence presence in the Army Reserve would be confined largely to numerous small counterintelligence, censorship, or strategic research and analysis detachments.
In addition, the war can be seen as a milestone in the development of intelligence technologies. The war itself was fought mostly with World War II equipment. The venerable M209 still provided communications security for tactical units. The light planes organic to the divisions were only slightly improved versions of the Piper Cubs that had given the Army reconnaissance support in the previous conflict. ASA's radios as well as its trucks represented war surplus. Yet this was beginning to change. A new family of cipher machines began to enter the Army inventory at this time. Scientists started to find ways in which new and evolving technologies could be applied to the Military Intelligence field. In 1953 the Army became involved in Project MICHIGAN, a research and development effort in which civilian scientific personnel explored the possibilities of using various types of manned aircraft, drones, balloons, and missiles carrying television and other sensors to allow surveillance and target location up to 200 miles behind enemy lines.32 The new technologies under development would have profound consequences for the structure of Army Intelligence in the years that followed.
1 A broad overview of U.S. defense policy during this period is provided in Doris M. Condit, History of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Volume II: The Test of War, 1950-1953 (Washington, D.C.: Historical Office of the Secretary of Defense, 1988).
2 SRH 169, p. 59.
3 Ibid., P. 85.
4 Bradley F. Smith doubts that the SSU ever exceeded 750 people. The Shadow Warriors, p. 408.
5 James A. Hewes, From Root to McNamara: Army Organization and Administration, 1900-1963 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1975), p. 160, mistakenly indicates that MIS was redesignated as the Army Security Agency.
6 Considering the substantial American Intelligence successes in World War II, one is surprised at some of the sentiments expressed during the congressional hearings that led up to the establishment of the Central Intelligence Agency. Army Air Forces' General Hoyt Vandenberg expressed the opinion that the United States was "400 years behind" in the intelligence field, which he appeared to equate with clandestine human intelligence collection. National Security Act of 1947: Hearing Before the Committee on Expenditures in the Executive Departments, H.R. 2319, 80th Cong., 1st sess., 27 June 1947, p. 10.
7 ASA units transferred to AFSS were the 1st, 2d, and 8th Radio Squadrons, Mobile, and the 136th Radio Security Squadron. Frank M. Whitacre, A Pictorial Review of USAFSS, 1948-1973: 25 Years of Vigilance (San Antonio: U.S. Air Force Security Service, 1973).
8 Gehlen's defection and early connection with Army Intelligence are described in E. H. Cookridge, Gehlen, Spy of the Century (New York: Random House, 1971), pp. 115-54.
9 CIC activities in the postwar period are covered in History of the Counter Intelligence Corps, vol. 24, U.S. Army Intelligence Center, 1959.
10 Bidwell, History of the Military Intelligence Division, vol. 6, pp. 649-50.
11 Sometimes the Nazis were used against the Communists, as demonstrated in Allan A. Ryan, Jr., Klaus Barbie and the United States Government: A Report, with Documentry Appendix, to the Attorney General of the United States (Frederick, Md.: University Publications of America, 1984).
12 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.
13 However, the Translator and Interpreter Service-in April 1946 it lost its allied status and title-continued an independent existence under G-2 control.
14 Army Security Agency, History of the Army Security Agency and Subordinate Units, FY 1951, vol. 1, p. 5.
15 SRH 123, The Brownell Report, pp. 47-52.
16 This tendency was reflected even at the top. In 1949 the Hoover Commission reported that "four of the last seven G-2's were without any intelligence experience whatsoever." Henry Howe Ransom, The Intelligence Establishment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970), pp. 109-10.
17 One of the first heads of the Army Language School was Brig. Gen. Elliott Thorpe, MacArthur's former counterintelligence chief.
18 TO&E 30-600, M.I.S. Organization: A Pictorial Presentation . . . . (January 1952) (Fort Riley, Kans.: Army General School, 1952).
19 Army Security Agency Staff Meeting Notes, 14 Nov 50, Army Cryptologic Records.
20 D. Clayton James, The Years of MacArthur, vol. 3, Triumph and Disaster, 1945-1964 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985), p. 216. Intelligence problems presented by the Chinese intervention are discussed at length (insofar as security considerations allowed) in Roy H. Appleman, South to the Naktong, North to the Yalu, JuneNovember 1950, U.S. Army in the Korean War (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1961), pp. 757-65, 769-70. Some additional insights are contained in Eliot A. Cohen and John Gooch, Military Misfortunes: The Anatomy of Failure in War (New York: Free Press, 1990), pp. 175-82.
21 General Matthew B. Ridgway, Soldier: The Memoirs of Matthew B. Ridgway, as told to Harold H. Martin (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1974), pp. 205, 216. Another senior commander was even more personally involved in reconnaissance activities in this war. In January 1951 the Air Force chief of staff, General Hoyt S. Vandenberg (a former Army assistant chief of staff, G-2), joined a ground patrol twelve miles in front of the main U.N. lines while on an inspection trip to Korea. James F. Schnabel, Policy and Direction: The First Year, U.S. Army in the Korean War (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1990), p. 327.
22 Bidwell, History of the Military Intelligence Division, vol. 7, p. 1080.
23 During World War II, Williams had also been in charge of supply and procurement for the OSS.
24 T. R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness (New York: MacMillan Co., 1963), p. 90.
25 Memo, GHQ, FEC, Military Intelligence Section, 6 Feb 51, sub: After Action Report, Task Force INDIANHEAD, INSCOM History Office.
26 In The Korean War (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1987), p. 244, Max Hastings states that "throughout the war United Nations intelligence about Chinese and North Korean strategic intentions remained very poor." It should be pointed out, however, that not all material bearing on the subject has been released yet.
27 The buildup of the Army Security Agency that took place during the Korean War was facilitated, in part, by the deployment of the two ASA companies in the National Guard and two other ASA companies in the Organized Reserve Corps.
28 However, none of the three general officers who headed up the Army Security Agency during the period of the Korean conflict possessed any background in Military Intelligence. ASA chief Brig. Gen. William Gillmore admitted, "1 have had no experience in this line of work. I am going to depend on you people for guidance and support all the way through." ASA Staff Meeting Notes, 15 Aug 50, Army Cryptologic Records. In contrast, the first three chiefs of the Army Security Agency-Brig. Gen. Preston W. Corderman, Col. Harold G. Hayes, and Brig. Gen. Carter W. Clarke-had all served in communications intelligence during World War II.
29 S. L. A. Marshall mentions such collection activities in his book, The River and the Gauntlet: Defeat of the Eighth Army by the Chinese Communist Forces, November 1950, in the Battle of the Chonchon River, Korea (New York: Morrow, 1953), pp. 3-4.
30 Alfred H. Paddock, Jr., U.S. Army Special Warfare: Its Origins (Washington, D.C.: National Defense University Press, 1982), pp. 100-108.
31 For reasons which have escaped documentation, all reserve component ASA units after the Korean War were in the Army Reserve, not the National Guard.
32 Bidwell, History of the Military Intelligence Division, vol. 7, pp. 1102-03.
page created 10 September 2001