Vic Socotra

29 August 2009

The Way Things Work- Part 847

(Radio Intercept Operator)

You cannot go far wrong in the study of history if you attribute the reasons things happen to money and sex. That is the joy and curse of the human condition; then, it is a simple matter of overlying the unique but common templates of individual tribes (or amalgams of tribes as nation states) upon them.

Everything is part of it; alas, it would result in a book so large that it would be quite beyond anyone’s individual ability to read it, much less write it. Remember the impact of the introduction of video CamCorders? We achieved the ability to record life in real time, endless, boring real time. So long that it took as much time to watch as it did to live.

There is no time for that. Check the warehouses of data at Fort Meade for the practical application. The advance of technology- and it’s weakness- are the enduring sub-text. So we will hit the highlights here and concentrate on the broad brush.

This is the tale of the hunt for the earthly remains of the six Nazis of Operation Pastorius yesterday with a snippet of the complex life of John Edgar Hoover. He was the proximate reason the Nazis were executed, but that is really a subset of the unique tribe he had created at the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation, later significantly augmented as the Federal Bureau in 1935 based on a spectacular publicity campaign by Director Hoover.

Regrettably, I have money issues this weekend- or better said, the need to continue to get paid, and thus am trapped in Proposal Hell writing ad hoc copy to answer some potentially lucrative government requirements. That means working Saturday and Sunday. Accordingly, we will try to set the stage for the exciting and sexy stuff today; it includes lots of money and mysterious U-Boats, but up front it represents the collision of several small tribes of dedicated and vainglorious professionals on this side of the Atlantic Ocean.

For those of you in the business, bear with me. I will be mercifully brief. For those who are not, perhaps this exercise in How Things Work, Part 847, will be useful for understanding this odd world around us.

Spies and Cops are the tribes that frame the saga of Operation Pastorius. It was intended to be a companion-piece to the opening of unrestricted submarine warfare along the East Coast of the United States. “Operation Drumbeat” ws the deployment of the high-seas U-oat fleet to American, and is the English translation of the German term “Paukenschlag.”

Admiral Wilhelm Canaris thought up the name for the operation, honoring the memory of the leader of the first organized settlement of Germans in America at Germantown, PA. His name was Francis Daniel Pastorius, and it seemed like a propitious christening.

It did not work out that way, but for a moment we need to diverge, and talk about technology and tribal culture.

The Office of Naval Intelligence is the oldest continuously operating intelligence organizations in the United States. There have been spies in all the nation’s wars, of course, General Washington had dozens, and the Civil War is rife with bold men and women who stole secrets. The key to the War Department’s history of espionage was that it was ad hoc, and organizations and networks were dissolved when no longer necessary.

The ONI has a grand tradition, based on the needs of the Fleet. ONI was established under LT T.B.M. Mason in 1882 to "seek out and report" the advancements in other nations' navies. The Service recognized the capability as being of value to share information amongst the various Bureaus and to use the information in justifying funds needed for Navy expansion and modernization.

No sex here, but money to be sure. Hence, the intelligence tradition began with the assembly of note-cards of helpful information about foreign ports and technology. I’m an alumnus of that organization, and could drone on for hours about it, but I will spare you.

The post-civil war era in America was a lean time for the military. Thousands of veterans migrated overseas to serve as consultants on military matters. The budget shrunk to accommodate the Indian-fighting Army, and hundreds of decrepit Monitors useful primarily in fighting ourselves, should we have chosen to do so.

ONI was useful is supporting the great Naval modernization justified by the strategic mystic Albert Thayer Mahan, among others. With the introduction of astonishing ships like the Royal Navy’s HMS Dreadnaught came a dramatic global arms race. It included the idea of undersea boats, and investment in supporting technologies like Marconi’s wireless.

Therein lies the birth of a new tribe: the Radio Intelligence weenies. Where before, ONI could assemble information through the use of language-trained Attaches, now an amazing new source of information was available through the interception of signals freely available in the ether.

We call it SIGINT today, which is a grab-bag term for all the things one can derive from a signal event. Location is one of them, of course, the easiest to achieve through direction finding. Better is the ability to intercept and understand the meaning of transmissions by the adversary.

You can do it through code-breaking, of course, though that is about as hard a thing as can be done. It is much easier to steal the codes, and that brings us right around to sex and money, the key enablers of the human condition.

The first War in Europe was a metamorphosis in technology. The War Department had an excellent SIGINT capability under legendary code-breaker Herbert O. Yardley, but the operation was closed down after the State Department withdrew financial support in 1929. SECSTATE Henry Stimson sniffed that “Gentlemen don’t read other Gentlemen’s mail.”

Of course they do. One of the ones who dined out on that premise for much of the 20th Century was John Edgar Hoover.

Oh, it is tempting to veer off into scandal about him, but at the time, he was an ambitious and focused young man, not the frog-eyed cartoon we remember from our youth. He had joined the government in 1924, and he was a young man on the move. The only two intelligence organizations in the US Government when he arrived were at War and Navy, and to a small degree Treasury, which after Prohibition commenced the first directional finding unit to identify Rum Runners.

Or perhaps I should say that there were now at least five and maybe six tribes of Spooks, if you include the people doing the wire-tapping authorities for the FBI.

The Coasties provided the first direct link between SIGINT and law enforcement, since they were responsible for customs enforcement.

Meanwhile, the Departments of War and the Navy were already splitting efforts along functional lines. The leadership reasoned that information derived from the radio was somehow different from information derived from other sources, and there were deep secrets that needed to be kept from the outside.

And kept from those on the inside as well.

The whole matter was so painful that the President’s intelligence watch divided responsibility between the Army and Navy in an intricate alternate watch system, if one can believe the struggle between the Munitions Building and Main Navy adjacent to the Reflecting Pool down on the national mall.

They were also fighting within the buildings for who would control the sources and methods of the new intelligence.

It would be mind boggling if the Radio Wars in the intelligence community had not continued all the way to the present day.

The six missing Nazis at Blue Plains are just some of the casualties. But that will have to wait until tomorrow. There are a couple more items we have to place in context before we can venture into the woods near the old DC Almshouse and look for where the anonymous dead might lay in Potter’s Field.

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