29 January 2007
We Never Sleep
It was with some anxiety that I woke at 0445 on America's East Coast to see if all was right with the world. Had the Public Radio affiliate at American University in fact picked up the essential BBC World Update program after the brutal classical music coup d'etat at WETA?
The alarm on my radio is set to deliver a one-two punch in the pre-dawn: the sound comes on the radio, and then, fifteen minutes later, the alarm begins to beep, telling me there is important information coming down the line.
Conditions seemed favorable as the sound rose in the darkness, and under the eiderdown I heard the carefully modulated vowels of a BBC presenter somewhere across the sea.
The winter wind pounded insistently on the flanks of Big Pink. Right on the mark, direct from Bush House near the Prime Meridian, the broadcast began with the magic words: "Its ten o'clock in London..." I padded out to the kitchen and started the coffee, then raced back to the bedroom and rolled into a warm protective ball like a hedgehog.
I listened to what had happened overseas since I lost consciousness. The last thing I had seen was a desperate inquiry from an old friend, who had seen a documentary on television that asserted there were links between the CIA and Naval Intelligence to the massacre at renegade preacher Jim Jones's colony at Jonestown in Guiana.
The "Ryan" bill, named for the Congressman who was killed there, was intended to "reign in" the CIA, and it had been that mysteriously dropped following the killings at the airstrip. There was more, much more, and it made me ball up tighter than ever under the covers. The times had been crazy then, men with guns and airplanes and mysterious comings and goings.
Actually, it was exactly like this morning. My pal asked for commentary on the conspiracy theories. If I actually knew anything, of course I would have to have them all silenced. But thankfully, I don't. If there is some connection between the People's Temple and the assassination of Councilman Mosconi in San Francisco, it does not go through my old organization.
I listened to the BBC in the background and began to formulate my response. It was the Pinkertons, I thought. That is where it really began, and those guys never slept.
Naval intelligence was really a player in the old days. My guild has a proud tradition of autonomy that sadly began a long slide after the reorganization of the defense establishment in 1948. I will give you some background to establish the context in which conspiracy buffs have sought to link us with a variety of things, my favorite being the assassination of John Kennedy.
Naval Intelligence was the first standing intelligence organization in the United States Government. Certainly there were earlier ones; George Washington had spies, including the earnest and courageous but somewhat inept Nathan Hale, who was hanged by the Brits for his lack of elementary tradecraft.
Lincoln utilized the Pinkerton Detective Agency to great effect in smoking out Copperhead plots, and to foil Confederate war plans.
Founded in 1851 by Scotsman Allan Pinkerton in Chicago, the Pinkerton Agency was a private investigative and quasi-police organization. Pinkerton had been a Chicago deputy sheriff and saw a business case for a company that could deliver justice in exchange for money, the former being something in short supply in the city of the Broad Shoulders, though not the latter.
Pinkerton was hired as a contractor (there is nothing new under the sun) to provide security for the unpopular President, who had been elected with only 40% of the popular vote. While passing through Baltimore to the inauguration, Pinkerton foiled a plot to assassinate Mr. Lincoln, and immediately became indispensable.
On the facade of his three-story Chicago headquarters was the company slogan, "We Never Sleep." Above this was an icon of a huge black-and-white eye. The logo spawned the term "private eye," though in wartime, the Pinkerton role in was very public indeed. Pinkerton was named Chief of the Secret Service through the Civil War.
The key is that Pinkerton left the government with the great demobilization and no standing intelligence or law enforcement institution remained in place. As a private citizen, Pinkerton used his men as a de facto, though purely private, national police force.
It was ironic, really, since he had been forced to emigrate to America because of his membership in the thoroughly radical (and failed) Chartist Movement for universal suffrage in the UK.
Pinkerton's men were regarded as incorruptible. They gained fame for chasing down bank and train robbers in the Wild West. They got the James Brothers and almost nabbed Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
By the time the West was being fenced off, Pinkerton's agents were infiltrating revolutionary Irish labor group known as the Molly Maguire's. Twenty of the Mollys ultimately were convicted and executed for subversive activities, exposed by Pinkerton informant James McParland.
Pinkerton died in 1884, two years after the establishment of the Office of Naval Intelligence by Lieutenant T.B. M. Mason. His sons Robert and William Pinkerton, carried on the family business, and have not slept since.
The Pinkerton Detective Agency remains in business today, though it is not as ubiquitous as it once was. The Government now has sixteen standing intelligence organizations with a broad assortment of legal powers to obtain information, and detain miscreants.
There is something of the Pinkerton model about all of us. The Pinkerton Agency was so well regarded by the Government, that it was used as a model for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, founded in 1908.
What became the Office of Naval Intelligence began as the brainchild of LT Mason, who in 1882 convinced the Secretary of the Navy to establish a small organization to collect and record "such information as may be useful ... in time of war as well as in peace."
Until World War I, Naval intelligence mostly collated information about foreign navies, including their ships, stations, tactics and personnel.
It was not until World War One that it took on vastly expanded duties in the field of counter-intelligence. Until that time, the primary mechanism of collection was through officers with diplomatic status assigned to embassies overseas. It was entirely overt, and not a hint of James Bond was associated with the mission.
Which is not to say that there were not some interesting collection missions, but it was never a core value.
The title “ALUSNA,” an acronym created from the words “American Legation- United States Naval Attaché” is still used in the corps of overt collection officers around the world. The attaché system was taken over by the Defense Intelligence Agency in the 1970s as part of the consolidation of military resources after Vietnam.
This is part of a story of long but mostly honorable decline in influence. Prior to the establishment of the Department of Defense, the Navy and Army each were cabinet positions, and the secretaries of the Services were able to carry out their inter-service rivalries in front of the President.
There were some wild moments along the way. The legend of Naval intelligence as an arm of Human Intelligence comes from the years between the Great Wars of the Twentieth Century.
J. Edgar Hoover is very much a part of the story, since President Roosevelt began to reign in the military intelligence corps by forcing them to acknowledge the FBI as lead agency for counter-intelligence operations in the continental US.
I am going to attend the funeral this week of one of the last of the men who participated in these clandestine and sensitive operations. Naval intelligence enlisted the support of the Luciano Gang in New York to keep the dock secure through the Longshoreman's Union. Captain “Tony” Marsloe was 91 when he died last month, and he was one of the officers who visited regularly with Luciano in jail.
Naval Intelligence was instrumental in getting the mobster sprung and deported to Italy in 1946.
The key to this is that the operation was run out of the THRID Naval District in new York, and the personnel who ran operations there were almost exclusively reservists, called to active duty for the duration of the War.
Most of that function went away with the peace in 1945; in 1948 the Secretaries of War and the Navy lost their cabinet status, and were ordered to report to the new Secretary of Defense. Cooperation was ensured by making the Navy Secretary the first SECDEF. His name was James V. Forrestal, and he was something of a conspiracy theorist himself.
In fact, he was convinced that the Israelis were following him around town, and eventually threw himself from the tall tower of the Bethesda Naval Hospital where the fourth most powerful man in the US Government was being held for observation.
As it turned out, he was being followed. But that is another story altogether.
Counterintelligence continued to be a function until the establishment of the separate Naval Investigative Service in 1976. That agency was transferred away from Naval Intelligence a decade later, and now it is a television show, starring Mark Harmon.
If you want a conspiracy, I thought grimly, there it is. I clearly should have gotten more sleep.
Copyright 207 Vic Socotra
www.vicsoctra.com