21 April 2007
Red Tie
We spend an awful lot of money on intelligence, and we have been doing it for a long time. Granted, there have been times when there was more and less of it, but for the last five or six wars there has been plenty to accomplish wondrous and horrific things.
I irritated some and pleased others as I tried to puzzle through the aftermath of the shootings down at Blacksburg. There seem to be some aftershocks of violence that are related to that, but it is hard to tell. There is a steady drumbeat of horror out there in the wide world related to what they call the Long War, and the drip-drip of the usual mayhem of our social interaction. With so many murders every day, it is hard to say which dot is properly connected to any other.
That is the art of analysis, and the core of the trade in which I apprenticed long ago to hunt the Soviet submarines and wound up finding so many other things.
The institution I served was intended to prevent mayhem, or at least channel it in a manner governed by international convention and the instruments of diplomacy. Sometimes it went to war, but that was supposed to be the last resort, since there was so much at stake. The end of the world was part of the calculation.
Those who served in the twilight struggle like to stay in touch, and recall, with nudge and wink, some of the extraordinary things that occurred. The Old Spooks organization that I belong to is desperate enough that they have entrusted publication of the Spook Gazette to me. I have become, at this late date, Cub Reporter Jimmy Olsen to the alumni.
The big Spring meeting was yesterday, a lovely day, and we all wore our red ties with the embroidered Soviet battleships on them. I rushed around with my digital camera and took candid shots of the membership. The gathering was livelier than usual, and turn-out was brisk. As in all associations, there is a generational stewardship in the leadership of this one, and those with their roots in World War II are almost all gone, and those from the heyday of the Cold War are turning their energy to other things.
There are a lot of things to remember, and a future to confront. It is tough to balance. Our speaker at this Red Tie was an active duty officer whose identity, for reasons of non-attribution, I cannot disclose. He is recently returned from the Wars, and he matter-of-factly laid out the challenge of the conflict. He talked about fire-fights and mercenaries, fanatics, real blood, regular mortar attacks and Armani suits in 120-degree-temperatures. It is so dramatically different than what we have done before that it was a bit breathtaking, and he held the audience spellbound.
There was a time when Naval Intelligence was a national player in its own right, employing unique platforms and collection capabilities, to perform extremely sensitive missions across the whole spectrum of the art. There was a time when the Director of Naval Intelligence would be summoned to the Oval Office on great matters of state. Now, the office is much diminished in stature, a staff code to the administrative manager of the Navy, whose Chief is a wraith of those who have gone before, when Navy was a mighty and independent Cabinet-level Department.
The transformation was so huge because it was so necessary. We are inclined to forget today that the organizational model of yesteryear, with the co-equal Departments of State, War and the Navy, was such that two wars were necessary in the Pacific, one for General MacArthur, and another to beat the Japanese.
The group continues only on the backs of volunteer labor, and of course, in that line of work you get what you pay for. In this case, the Gazette gets me. I was snapping pictures and trying to drink a glass of white wine in the throng when someone asked why I did not include more material about cryptology in the Gazette.
I had to put my glass down to ponder the question. No one outside the intelligence business would care; it is akin to writing emotionally about a feud between the marketing and engineering departments of the 1960s-era Ford Motor Corporation.
Still, the schism is deep and fundamental, almost religious. It is of frightful intensity to people who spent their lives in the intelligence services.
In this case, the only way to account for the emotion is that there is so little known about it in the wide world.
Schism is the only word for it. There is no other way to account for it. The fight between Naval Intelligence and Naval Communications is where the story begins, and who would be empowered to interpret the fruit of intercepted radio transmissions. I know a man who is the last one alive who is in a position to know how bitter this was, more important to some of the participants than the war itself. There were careers and reputations at stake.
He had no particular loyalty to the tribes back in Washington, since they were not then codified. He could have been either a cryptologist or a generalist, and was neither. He was a deck officer, commissioned in the Line and by happenstance assigned to an intelligence billet at Pacific Fleet. There he worked for both the cryptologic and general intelligence organizations, supporting by turns the legendary code-breaker CDR Rochefort and CAPT Eddie Layton, the intelligence officer to Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz.
Washington got even with Joe Rochefort for his success in identifying the Japanese target of Midway Island. They sullied his reputation, transferred him out, and denied him the medal that signified his remarkable success. It took years to sort things out, since it was all conducted behind the veil of secrecy, and the honorable participants were gagged by their oaths of secrecy.
I cannot begin to address the depth of the horror that attends the beginning of this story. There is a domineering and bombastic Chief of War Plans, a weak and vacillating Chief of Naval Operations, and a struggle over who owned the charter of radio intelligence. It is vastly important, in terms of lives and treasure.
It is also so emotional because War Plans managed to bungle indications that could have predicted the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Critical message traffic- the low-level Honolulu Consulate stuff that showed the intense interest in Fleet mooring assignments- was denied to the local commander. The stream of information could have changed the outcome of the Day of Infamy on December 7th.
There is plenty of shame higher up in the government for the bungling. Early in 1941, policy veered to a forward strategy under MacArthur in the Philippines, and the effort to provide him with B-17s bombers that that could threaten the Home Islands of Japan.
The blame for Pearl Harbor rested at Main Navy headquarters in Washington, and the leadership of the Navy, not with poor Admiral Kimmel in Hawaii.
Of course there was a cover-up when things were safe, and scapegoats. The travesty was swept under the rug. It took years of effort to get Joe Rochefort the Distinguished Service Medal he was denied during the war. Ronald Reagan gave it to his children in the Oval Office, since Joe was long in his grave.
It all goes back to individual personalities, and that is why the Spooks still gather, even if the world has changed. With all that baggage, the family conflict is not over. As the editor of the Gazette, I am naturally opposed to the schism. Just when I am on the verge of understanding one part of it, I am dragged on to something else.
There is a lingering rear-guard battle over honors denied in an organizational dispute that occurred in 1968. Some good people got killed, and only a few remember. The injustice has been eating at some of the people involved for a long time, and they would like to settle things before they move on, a sort of joint legacy between the living and the dead. It is hard to let that sort of thing go, and that is why feelings are still so strong.
If only we could really talk about what went on. That is one of the reasons the emotions run high. I have an article from a guy who is still really pissed about what happened in the Gulf of Tonkin, right at the beginning.
My ex-father in law once interrupted a story I was telling about one of the schisms in the intelligence world, and I was getting really worked up. He said: “So, how is this different than what happens on the top floor of the Ford Glass House in Dearborn?”
I looked at him in amazement, realizing that what mattered so much to me was really was as dusty to him as Ford Marketing vs. Engineering, in a meeting chaired by Finance.
It only came to me later that there was a difference, and I hadn't been able to articulate it. In this case, Marketing was running a land war in Asia and Engineering had nuclear weapons
Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com