01/10/2010
 
Numerology

(Insignia of a US Navy Vice Admiral, 0-9)

Admiral Fritz Harlfinger had a big year in 1970. A two-star submariner, he was the Director of Naval Intelligence, and running out of jobs in the Navy. In the up-and-out world of the US military, a smart flag officer was always on the lookout for the right billet to fill.
 
Everyone does, at least every career officer with aspirations. Ted told me about an aggressive Captain who worked in Rex’s office, when Rex took over as the 48th DNI. In the Pentagon, then as now, the little fish arrive early, and the larger fish arrive at more civilized hours. The Captain would arrive before the Admiral, and take the in-basket from the DNI’s office down to the office of the Warfare Baron responsible for submarines so that the bubble-heads in Op-02 were appraised of the most sensitive issues in the intelligence world.
 
Of course Ted got in before the Captain, and culled the box of anything really significant before the submariners got hold of it.
 
The Captain was fiercely committed to making Admiral, and would do about anything to further his chances. I was happy just to make what I did, but the ego that drives some people is quite extraordinary. That is absolutely true about flag officers.
 
See, there is no permanent grade for Flag or General Officers that is higher than two stars. Rear Admiral, lower and upper half, is the last time a rank is associated with the officer himself. The number of three and four star billets is drastically smaller than that for two-star officers, and the trick to the thing is that an officer serving in a billet coded for more stars wears the stars of the office, rather than the officer.
 
My pal Mac was a likely candidate to be Director of Naval Intelligence, and his old Boss Tom Moorer, would have picked him to be the 47th Director of Naval Intelligence if Fritz was not such a well-connected individual with the Hill, and with the submarine mafia inside the Navy.
 
Confusing? Maybe to the outside, but it is deadly serious to those on the inside. Normally, an officer is permitted to retire in the grade of the last job they held. So, for example, Admiral Elmo “Bud” Zumwalt made some remarkable changes to his Navy while he was Chief, 1970-1974.
 
Recognizing some of the systemic problems of the Service in the context of his Vietnam Service, he aggressively sought to reduce racism and sexism in the service.
 
His war on the Flag community was as profound as that as the one he ran against injustice and hidebound tradition. On the one hand he issued Z-Grams that modernized grooming standards for officers and troops: beards, longer sideburns and bold mustaches were permitted. Beer-dispensing machines were introduced to barracks.
 
Not all of these changes were well-received by senior naval personnel, so on the other hand, Zumwalt entertained himself my ensuring that every naval officer senior to him on the lineal list was retired before he was.
 
That included my pal Mac, though he objected on principle, since there were only two flag allotments to intelligence at the time, and major operations in progress actually required additional experienced personnel. But that was a function of the numbers, and that is what Bud Zumwalt was determined to do.
 
Zumwalt was almost 100% successful; only two Admirals senior to him survived his era- Tom Moorer, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who declined the invitation to retire, and Hyman Rickover, whose Office of Naval Reactors was essentially a service reporting directly to Congress as much as the chief of Naval Operations.
 
Anyway, Mac was in the running to be the Director of Naval Intelligence when Fritz got the job in August 1968, and had to make his career at DIA, doing plans and policy at first, and later as Chief of Staff. He did some remarkable things there, and it is worth a moment to contemplate what was happening outside the Navy.
 
During the 1960s, DIA ran into opposition from the Services as you might expect. The Agency tried to assert its authority over Pentagon intelligence gathering operations as a matter of turf, while at the same time the Vietnam War was severely testing the youthful analytic organizations capability to produce accurate, timely and relevant intelligence.
 
That included the charter to gather information on American military personnel who were either missing-in-action (MIA) or who had became prisoners of war (POW). LCDR Jack Graf formally became one of the case files in the POW-MIA office on 11-15-1969, when his OV-1C Mohawk observation aircraft was downed by hostile fire.
 
And that event, as pivotal as it was to Rex’s life, perhaps did not register with the impact it would later assume. Like the extremely sensitive operations regarding the lost Soviet ballistic missile submarine, the world was a complex place. The 1960s saw competing needs for actionable information on the Viet Cong, the North Vietnamese regular forces, Red China's atomic test, and the Cultural Revolution, conflict in Malaysia, Cyprus and Kashmir; the Six-Day War between Egypt and Israel; the murder of US sailors on the USS Liberty, unrest in several African countries, particularly Nigeria; the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia; and North Korea’s seizure of the USS Pueblo.
 
During Mac’s time there, DIA, was shifting its focus from consolidating management roles over the Services to being a producer of national intelligence. Mac managed to get the tracking of merchant shipping stripped away from DIA and returned to Navy from whence it had come. The matter required great delicacy, as you might expect.
 
Mac’s efforts at DIA paralleled what Fritz Harlfinger was doing inside the Navy.
 
There was an enduring problem about SIGINT. A whole staff community and several enlisted ratings had been established to deal with the great secrets of the World War Two era, and it continued right through the establishment of the National Security Agency, which was formed by stripping the Army and Navy of their large cryptologic capabilities.
 
The creation of NSA had the practical consequence of creating a vast stovepipe of information that was not shared or integrated into the operational capabilities of the forces afloat, or in the field, and with the advent of high-speed communications, there appeared to be a way to deliver information to those who needed it, and yet were located outside the confines of Fort Meade Maryland.
 
Harlfinger presided over the fielding of a global system that integrated SIGINT and acoustic information and reporting from Human and naval sources all over the world. The Navy called it the “ocean surveillance information system,” and Fritz called himself the father of Operational intelligence, or what we know as “OPINTEL.”
 
There are many who would snort at that contention, but that is what Fritz said, and he was determined to get his third star.
 
Here is the premise: other “information” disciplines, like the oceanographers, and the communicators who ran the special classified networks had capabilities that were intrinsically related to intelligence writ large.
 
As a diesel submariner (one the increasingly sad class of non-nuclear “General Submarine Officers” that were doomed) and intelligence subspecialist, Fritz had no logical place to go, except retirement when his time as DNI was done. Unless, that is, he could figure out a new srtructure that required an officer in the next higher grade.
 
Admiral Harlfinger had a golden opportunity. He decided to cherry-pick the best of all the functions, roll them into a new, larger organization, and have a three-star officer placed in charge. Just, coincidentally, at the time that he was ready to leave the two-star billet of the DNI.
 
The new organization was to be called Op-942.
 
That is where Rex comes into the story again. Laboring in the vineyard of collection, the re-organiztion began. In March 1971, Rex was designated Acting Commander of the Naval Intelligence Command.  On July 22, 1971, upon being promoted to the flag rank of Rear Admiral, he assumed duty as the Director, Naval Intelligence Division, Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, with additional duty as Commander Naval Intelligence Command and direct Assistant for Intelligence to the Chief of Naval Operations.
 
See, even though he was the 48th Director of Naval Intelligence in everything but name, newly promoted Vice Admiral Harlfinger had taken that with him, along with several other things, including the DNI’s car and driver.
 
I’ll tell you more about that tomorrow, but it took until February 1973 to sort it all out.

Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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