15 October 2010

Fifty Stars

(Main Navy and Munitions, Washington, DC. Official navy Photo)

The rescue of the Chilean miners seemed to be going like clockwork, and the whole thing was a marvel. It appeared they would all be out of the hole by midnight. Peter glided by the cocktail nook and topped up my glass. Mac sipped on his ginger ale. He continued his account of meeting all nine of the men who were selected to five star rank.

“Of course, I got a chance to meet all of them because I went to Guam in 1945.” Mac had veered back into the conclusion of the world war to explain the degrees of separation between the highest ranking men to ever serve in the American military, and whose like will never, God help us, be seen again.

“The ramp-up for the invasion of the Home Islands was going to be the last act of the war, and everyone came out to see the preparations. It was all over everywhere else.”

“You actually met General MacArthur,” I said in wonder.

Mac nodded. “I was one of the briefers in Fleet Admiral Nimitz’ morning meeting, so there they would all be in the front row when they visited.”

“How many stars would that be?” I asked. “When I did that at PACFLT HQ for the monthly component meeting we sometimes had seventeen or so, between the four star commanders and their deputies. We thought it was a pretty big deal.”

Mac contemplated the number of stars in the briefing room on Nimitz Hill. “Maybe fifty, depending on which delegations were on the rock. It was pretty remarkable.”

“And you met Dwight Eisenhower, my favorite president? Did he come to Guam from Europe?”

“No, I met him when I was at CINCNELM at Ike’s old headquarters on North Audley Street in London years later. By then, the Navy had taken over the building. Ike himself came back from his crusade in Europe in November of ’45 to be Army Chief of Staff in the Pentagon.”

“Was the Pentagon all Department of War and the Army then?”

“Yep. Army and War moved out during the war and turned the Munitions Building over to the Navy. That is Constitution Gardens now, where that and Main Navy were, right where the Vietnam Memorial is now. That is where I ran into Admiral Forrest Sherman when I came back to Washington from Hawaii. His advise to apply for the Naval Intelligence board and the big selection to Lieutenant Commander is what convinced me to stay in the service.”

“So you made two-and-a-half stripes after six years in the Navy? That is fast, I said, sipping some of the cool pale wine in my glass.

“The Navy selected just about every Lieutenant on active duty for 04 on the October board of 1945. Biggest selection list in the history of the service. Then they divided it in half, the upper part being “permanent” and the lower half “temporary.” We were all “temporary” ranks during the war. You know where they drew the line?”

I looked at him quizzically. “Four number below me. That permanent promotion is what turned the trick,” he said with a note of amused satisfaction.

“That sounds like more of the pure luck that got you orders to Pearl instead of Manila and capture by the Japanese, or that idiot in Counter-intelligence who didn’t want you and sent you to work for Jasper Holmes and Joe Rochefort. Or Jasper canceling your orders to USS Wahoo where you would have been killed on her last patrol.”

“Or running into Admiral Sherman that day in the passageway. I suppose it is a little remarkable, he said. “But that is just the way it happened.”

“There were so many things that were in flux then, it boggles the mind.”

“True. I was working for Captain Sam Frankle, the guy who relieved Eddie Layton as the Fleet Intelligence Officer at Pearl. Sam didn’t want to be there. He said the place where all the action was happening was back in Washington. He wanted to get into the Central Intelligence Group, the organization that absorbed Wild Bill Donovon’s Office of Strategic Services.
“That became the CIA in 1948, right?”

The Admiral nodded. “But that is getting a little ahead of things. I came back in 1946, and Sam had found a billet in the Office of Naval Intelligence. After I was selected for special duty, he gave me the choice of three jobs, The first was at the Intelligence School at Anacostia, across the river, a job with him in ONI, or a job at the Pentagon working on the Diplomatic Summary.”
“Which did you choose?” I asked, scribbling frantically.

“I had no interest in the school, and ONI did not sound that interesting. I picked the DIPSUM job, and reported to the Pentagon to work with Willard Mathias and Brewer Miriam as the Navy editor. Brewer represented State Deparrtment, and Willard was an Army civilian. Both of them had been Army officers during the war, but they were demobilized but doing the same jobs. It was a great job. We took COMINT decrypts and published the summary every week. We were collecting successfully on just about everyone.”

“So that was essentially the prototype of the Directorate for Intelligence at CIA?”

“Precisely. I got frozen in rank forever as an Lieutenant Commander. I was seven-and-a-half years in that grade. With all the changes going on in town, I only stayed in the Pentagon for about a year, and then transferred to main Navy to work at Y-Branch in ONI.” The Navy was trying to figure out what it was going to be in the post-war world.”

“What did you do there?”

“Well, it was 1948. I reported to CDR Bob Hudson, who had the Pacific Area Desk for Operational Intelligence. The former Pacific Strategic Intelligence Section of Fleet Admiral Ernie King’s COMINCH staff had migrated to become a part of ONI, and re-named the Special Section, since we dealt with Communications Intelligence.

“Hudson had been Eddie Layton’s deputy during the war, and he gave me a month’s leave to marry Billie in June of that year. He later was medically retired, and I took over publication of the weekly report, which included sensitive reporting on what the French were up to against the Viet Minh insurgency in their former Colony.”

“We remember Korea as the conflict of the decade, but Mao was taking the mainland away from the Kuomantang, and the politicians were in an uproar about who lost China.”

Mac smiled. “Nobody lost China. It stayed right where it was. But there was something else going on in Main Navy. Something very secret.”

“What was that?” I asked.

“We had a secret we called RUNRA. I am not sure I am going to go into it, here at Willow, but I will tell you that is the reason I started spending so much time at Naval Security Group Headquarters up on Nebraska Avenue.”

“That is where the Redman Brothers got so much wrong on interpreting the Japanese codes during the war, right?”

“Times change. I spent so much time going over what we got on the Russians that CAPT Jack Frost- he later made three stars and became Director of NSA- decided to give me an office right there at the old girl’s school. I worked there until they decided to establish the Armed Forces Security Agency to consolidate the Army and Navy code-breakers. We relocated to the first floor of “B” building at Arlington Hall Station.”

“So you worked right across the street from Big Pink,” I said. “Would have been a great commute.”

Mac leaned back and smiled. “Then we moved out to Fort Meade when AFSA became NSA.”

“No such Agency,” I said.


(Admiral Forrest Sherman. Official Navy Photo).

“Nope.” Mac finished his ginger ale. “Forrest Sherman became Chief of Naval Operations in ’49, and he had a keen interest in intelligence as you know.” He fished a piece of paper out of the pocket of his sport coat and handed it to me. “This is a quote that Captain Wyman Packer attributed to Sherman in his ‘A Century of Naval intelligence.’ It sounds a lot like what Colin Powell said about intelligence.”

I knew what he was talking about. “Tell me what you know,” I quoted from memory. “Tell me what you don’t know, and tell me what you think, but never confuse them.”

Mac grinned. “Shorter and more succinct. But I think Sherman summed it up pretty well.”

I lookd at the paper and read the words that the CNO had addressed to then-CDR Rufus Taylor:
“I want to know what you really know when you have solid evidence to back it up, and I am going to hold you responsible for that. Then I want to know what you suspect, and what you think is probably and so on…and then, I want to know anything you have in the way of hunches or guesses. I can put it all those things together, and you’ll be held responsible only for that information one which you say you have solid evidence…”

“That was a man who understood OPINTEL, wasn’t he?”

“That is what I did my whole career, or at least until I came back to the Defense Intelligence Agency from the Pacific years later. I was in a rut.”

“That is a rut a lot of people envy you for. Let’s talk a little more about that soon. Maybe you will explain how it all developed into the Cold War and Vietnam.”

“Sure,” said Mac. “And it was OPINTEL that led to my meeting with Ike Eisenhower. But I will tell you this about everything that happened later,” leaning forward and lowering his voice. “LBJ did it.”

Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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