There are predictions about what is coming next in Ukraine. Some say the Russians are facing what their leaders consider an “existential threat” to the existence of their nation. They have thousands of nuclear weapons, so the prospect of what we always considered as horrifying now is just another item on a fairly long list. We think it might be useful to see how we have arrived in this circumstance and what it might mean for our collective future. There is some interesting material flying about today regarding the community of Government workers in which most of our group served. We were part of what is known now as “The Intelligence Community (IC).”

Our part of the community held a certain pride as being the successors to a distinguished line of practitioners of the art. We still do.

What is interesting is that the tales are not news or even surprising. The information, parts of it anyway, have been around for a while. New accounts have emerged recently. Author Matthew Black just published another in a series of revelations about the “unusual” partnership of America’s organized crime enterprise and the Government during World War II.

“Operation Underworld: How the Mafia and U.S. Government Teamed Up to Win World War II” is available through Amazon. It was published almost on the eve of this new year on December 27th, 2022. We mean no disparagement to Mr. Black on the issue and purchased his book to see how it compares with what we already know.

The key point here is that these revelations must be harnessed to see what is going to happen to us next. The Mob’s participation in a world war was a secret. In our world today, technology is playing a role even more dramatic.

Inside the various stovepipes of information there has been common knowledge of how the legacy system worked. RADM Thomas A. Brooks had a unique position in which to tell part of the story. “Naval Intelligence and the Mafia in World War II” was the title of the first of his articles I got to work on when editing the Naval Intelligence Professionals Quarterly in 2007.

Admiral brooks had served 33 years as a career Naval Intelligence officer, retiring in 1991 after service in Vietnam and the majority of the Cold War against the Soviet Union. Part of his unique insight came from his Dad, who had served in the District Intelligence Office (DIO) of the 3rd District of the Naval Reserve organization.

In this first of a multipart series, Brooks wrote on the relationship between the DIO and organized crime in the context of Port Security, then a Navy rather than Coast Guard responsibility. Opening the vault doors on the secret history of a world at war allowed some discussion of the unusual arrangements necessary to secure victory.

We were working on some elements of that yesterday, notably the way naval Intelligence was able to gain access to Japanese diplomatic facilities in New York. That story helped prepare some of the recollections of Tom “Big Smoke” Duvall for inclusion in a larger story about how our IC became what it is today. That is a tale of great interest, given recent disclosures on activity by our premier Law Enforcement Agency, the FBI, and the CIA, successor to the Office of Strategic Services in 1947 under the provisions of the National Security Act.

This was a momentous change in the way our Government operated. Prior to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, two Departments were responsible for military activities and the information necessary for those operations. The Department of War was responsible for the Army. The Navy Department handled matters for operations on the World Ocean, with a Marine Corps capable of operations ashore where required.

Victory in the war against Germany and Japan also required mastery of a new element of warfare: strategic aviation. The War Department was responsible for generating an Army Air Corps capable of massing flights of a thousand airplanes to strike the Reich. And to fly long distances from island bases across the Pacific to hit the Home Islands of Japan. With the addition of the Atomic Bomb to payloads, some argued that an Air Force was itself the ultimate tool of warfare. Clearly, reorganization of the defense establishment was necessary, even if some of the premises on which the foundation was based would evolve.

We will be talking about those in the next book from Socotra House, now in progress. But in addition to Air Power and the establishment of an Air Force, the capabilities of the OSS had been demonstrated in the same manner as cooperation between competent but illicit enterprises and the government were proven on the docks. That paralleled something else developing in the uneasy territory of science and technology.

“Radio Intelligence” was an evolutionary term with a revolutionary impact as profound as that of Air Power. It first emerged as a potentially decisive tool in the First World War. It was a technical discipline best exploited by those in the communications field and not derived from ancient espionage techniques of bribery betrayal and honey traps. We speak of “sources and methods” today as the means of gaining valuable information. But it also refers to a process by which the vulnerability of the “source” was best understood by those who had to protect their own against enemy compromise.

We now routinely deal with the advances of technology, since we have no choice. Is a Chinese “app” like TikTok a threat? How secure are finances and information? Is it possible that the very nature of warfare itself is now changing?

The mounting catastrophe of the Russian war in Ukraine suggests that it has.

Our experience in the field supports that contention. Our “work in progress” is to take a look at the various equities that were forced to transform in victory (and defeat) and how those lessons might apply to the next great change in the way we are organized as societies and how conflicts between them can best be managed.

One good thing is that we are finally getting a common understanding about how things came to be with secret organizations playing significant roles in transitions of power in elections or kinetic conflict. It is electrifying to look back and see how we have arrived in our current partly invisible but powerful government. It may be a crisis like no other we have faced.

We think it would be useful to at least understand what is happening to us, you know? Stand by. There is much more to come. And it may be coming soon.

Copyright 2023 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com