23December 2009
 
Let’s Get Ready (to Rumble)


(President Lyndon Johnson Signs the Tonkin Gulf Resolution)

Rex stayed in the Bureau of Naval Personnel on the Bluff above the Pentagon until June, 1964.
 
He was now adept in the operational art, had served as a Human Intelligence collector in the heart of the enemy in Moscow, and now knew every billet, career performance and middle name of each intelligence officer in the US Navy.
 
Having a real intelligence officer like Rufus Taylor as DNI made a huge difference for Rex.
 
With a community of less than four hundred officers, it was not unusual for the Director of Naval Intelligence to plan the community for years in advance. Officer so-and-so, based on the happenstance of a language or regional skill, might be designated to hop-scotch behind another through a series of key jobs, shore and afloat, to produce a well rounded and highly competent candidate for Flag selection when the time came.
 
Rex had made a practice of being in the right place at the right time. Things were changing.
 
The clubby ad hoc system was challenged by the reality of a growing cadre of officers to manage. Just after Rex left the Bureau, the Combs Board recommended an increase in the number of senior intelligence officers to respond to the increased requirements of DIA.
 
At the same time, Admiral Taylor was designated the “code sponsor” for hundreds of air intelligence officers, a measure intended to provide a degree of fairness to non-rated ground-pounder officers whose services to strike warfare were indispensable but whose careers were often neglected by the aviation community.  
 
That was going to take a mountain of paperwork and a world of headaches to manage a career field over which there was no actual command authority, and Rex thankfully did not have to take that on. Millie Doyle jut shrugged and began to figure out how to undermine the system.
 
With increased interest in affairs in SE Asia, there was an aspect of his career that needed attention, and Admiral Taylor thought it was high time to fix it.
 
Rex had a strong operational background, human intelligence and Russian language experience, and he now knew the community inside and out. There was a broader community that he had to learn about, and that is precisely why he received orders to the Naval Security Group as Deputy Assistant Chief of Staff for Plans and for Operations.
 
It was time to enter the world of the radio Spooks, and learn the side of the business that had been created with the fusion of language skills and primitive computers: Naval Cryptology.

(Nebraska Avenue in Navy Days)

Oh, yes, of course there was now an NSA, the radio equivalent of DIA. The creation of the agency had merged the Girl’s School activities of the Army Security Agency at Arlington Hall and the Naval Security Group at Nebraska Avenue in the NW District.
 
Both facilities had been appropriated by the military at the start of WW II, an continuing needs precluded their return, right down to this morning. Both campuses have new occupants, though the security fences have been strengthened and made even taller.
 
Forgive the digression, but it is important to understand how the intelligence baby came to be divided. Following the lead of their allies at Bletchley Park in the UK, Army and Navy cryptologists had made a decisive contribution to the victory over the Japanese.
 
It came with a queer sort of division that grew between those who gleaned intelligence from the ether and those who acquired it from other, less esoteric sources.
 
Breaking the enemy codes was rightly considered the biggest secret of them all, and there were those, like the Navy’s Redman Brothers (Joe and John), whose personal reputation and careers gave them a vested interest in the division of the intelligence art. The preservation and advancement of their careers by centralizing radio intelligence under an office in Naval Communications in Washington.
 
Their duplicity had been one of the dirty little secrets of the great victory, buried under the classification of the work they did- and credit stolen from others.
 
That is the nature of Washington, and one has to shrug and move on. In effect, the Redman brothers had successfully got away with claiming sole credit for the victory at Midway, the great gamble and turning point of the war against the Japanese.
 
It took years to unscramble the injustice that had been done to CDR Joe Rochefort, the pioneering Japanese linguist who had actually turned the key on the JN-25 codes, but the Redmans had powerful patrons, not the least of whom was Admiral Richmond K. “Terrible” Turner, Chief of War Plans, 1940-41, whose bad judgment about Japanese intentions may have contributed to the disaster at Pearl Harbor.
 

(VADM Richmond K. Turner)

Turner is now buried in Golden Gate National Cemetery in San Bruno, California alongside his wife and Chester Nimitz, Raymond A. Spruance, and Charles A. Lockwood, heroes all, an arrangement made by all of them while living. So there are some things that were better not addressed in life, and the Navy was still split, even as radio intelligence functions of the military departments were integrated in a new Agency whose center of gravity was not Washington, but Fort Meade.
 
In August of 1964 there was a climactic event. There were so many of them in the first half of the strangest decade in a century for America. Given the U-2 shoot-down, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the assassination of a President and intense domestic turmoil played out before the looming threat of atomic annihilation, it may not have occurred to Rex how pivotal the event was to the rest of his life.
 
McNamara was part of it, of course, and the CIA activities that never made the front page. Every sentence in this brief account could be footnoted with opposing theories and conspiracies, from the assassination to the bloody end of the war. In the end, it doesn’t matter to me or to you or the dead.
 
The key is the pressure under which those who lived, and how they responded. They did it, day by day, good guys and bad, and that is what we ought to remember.
 
That August of 1964 marked the watershed of something that in parallel with the civil rights struggle back home, nearly ripped the country apart.
 
North Vietnamese motor torpedo boats were reported to have attacked USS Maddox and Turner Joy. It does not matter if it was once or twice. It happened.
 
The Tonkin Gulf Incident is still so emotional among those who participated that I will not address it here. The details are really of little consequence. Lyndon Johnson had his causa belli, and the Congress acquiesced with the resources. The rest is history.
 
But as a cautionary in light of later developments, Robert McNamara received reports from the Naval Attaché in Saigon that the South Vietnamese Navy was woefully unready, under-trained and unreliable. It was not a good foundation for a struggle that would play out along a coastline vaster than that of Florida, and that did not include the rivers.
 
The assessment was not at one with the Secretary’s vision, and there could only be one answer to inconvenient opinion. He directed the abolition of the Naval Attaches, and consolidated their function as part of a new in a new Defense Office, managed not by the Navy, but by DIA.
 
Meanwhile, in SE Asia, there were reprisal air strikes against the North Vietnamese, and a resulting vastly increased requirement for target intelligence and for anti-aircraft defense information in the North. And lots more information about what the Vietnamese were saying to one another on the radio.
 
My pal Mac was the Fleet Intelligence Officer (N-2) in Hawaii back then. He served two four star officers there, the first a crusty old Admiral named U.S. Grant Sharp, and who was related by marriage to the original Unconditional Surrender Grant of the Civil War. He preferred immediate and massive intervention with the Vietnamese, a view not shared by Washington, which always knows best.
 

(ADM Tom Moorer)
 
Admiral Sharp was followed as Pacific Fleet Commander by Tom Moorer. He was an aviator and a savvy operator with a better political sense. He had the tough questions for his intelligence officers, and he was in charge when the Tonkin incident occurred.
 
Mac mentioned to me that the first Naval Intelligence officer assigned to the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MAC-V) arrived on station with nothing. Mac had to arrange a trip to Saigon to take him paper, pencils, staples, pens, etc. so he could begin to function.
 
No one then even imagined what a trip lay ahead, but it became a life-changing experience for millions.
 
Copyright 2009 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Subscribe to the RSS feed!
 
Close Window