(CNO Arliegh Burke (l) is relieved by George Anderson. Photo Life Magazine)
 
At the height of the Cuban crisis, the new Secretary with his slicked-back hair would stalk past the Marine with only a glance into CNO Flag Plot on the fourth deck of the Pentagon and demand to speak on radiotelephone with the commanders of individual units conducting the quarantine against Cuba.
 
Chief of Naval Operations George Anderson actually had the man thrown out at one point, which flabbergasted the Secretary. In this case, McNamara was right not to completely trust his Navy.
 
The rules of engagement permitted US Navy combatants to drop practice depth charges on Soviet submarines to force them to the surface and enforce the “quarantine,” an interesting term of art for the blockade ordered by President Kennedy. It avoided the baggage that went along with the more formal term, but which Anderson and his navy leadership took with its forceful traditional meaning.
 
“Damn John Paul Jones!” said McNamara one day in the Flag Plot, thinking the depth charges might be overly provocative. That got the Whiz Kid escorted out of Flag Plot, past the vault door to cramped two-story Intel Plot where the Navy Spooks knew things that could not be told in the larger watch spaces.
 
As much as they knew, they did not know that the Soviet submarine skippers, harried and pursued, had been authorized the use of their nuclear torpedoes if deemed necessary, and the sounds of the explosions in the water from the practice charges came within a hair’s breadth of causing a sleep-deprived Russian to use them.
 
Right-thinking officers talked the Russian out of it, a fact that was not known until 2002, when the Kremlin archives were still open, and the participants still alive.
 
The establishment of the Defense Intelligence Agency in October of 1961 had complicated the process of supporting the decisionmakers even as it had been intended to streamline things. It actually was made it all the more confusing. For all their faults, the two (now three) military departments were efficient at what they were doing when they acted unilaterally. The equipment they acquired was designed only to support the narrow mission areas of sea, land and air, and never intended to permit cross communications or interoperability.
 
World War II in the Pacific, as you will recall, was fought as two separate and independent campaigns, an Army one to the south and Navy one across the mid-Pacific.
 
One of my distinguished friends, one of the last who was actually there, still takes FADM Chester Nimitz’ admonition not to speak ill (publicly) of Doug MacArthur’s staff as still being one of the general orders.
 
Clearly, such a structure of service stove-piped organizations was unaffordable, and Secretary McNamara was just the man to reduce costs and increase productivity.
 
DIA was a case in point. Rex must have been frustrated with the problems of providing navy people to the new organization from the Detailers office. The Office of Naval Intelligence was forced to contribute three-hundred and fifty people and key mission areas to the new organization that took over the old Army Splinterville at Arlington Hall Station, across the street from Big Pink.
 
The previous service infighting, restricted to the three services, promptly took on another major player. If the recent creation of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in modern times is any example, it must have been an interesting time for Rex. At BuPers, he was entrusted with the job of issuing orders to the people that Naval Intelligence decided it could shed without real damage.
 
He arrived at BuPers as Intelligence Assignment and Placement Officer from July 1962, and was managing the little Naval Intelligence officer community when RADM Lowrance was relieved by Rufus Taylor in June of 1963. The electricity between the new DNI’s Pentagon office and that of Rex in the Bureau was palpable. Taylor was the first designated intelligence specialist to rise to become Director of Naval Intelligence.
 
Previously, the Navy had a policy of making the DNI a line officer, with the working proposition that is was desirable to show a line officer’s face to the service to enhance the credibility of the intelligence products, and being sensitive to the operational reality of customer needs.
 
It was a complicated world in which the cold struggle was always leaking out in the warmest of ways.
 

(President Eisenhower and President Diem of the Republic of Vietnam)
 
Truth be told, in 1963, there was not just one assassination. President Diem was overthrown and killed in a military coup in Saigon just a few weeks after President Kennedy. Though a CIA officer named Lucien Conein had given limited financial support to those involved in the coup d’etat, the American policy-making community was distracted by the change in the chain of command.
 
Black helicopters aside, there is no evidence that the U.S. expected Diem, and his brother and closest political adviser, Ngo Dinh Nhu to be killed. To the contrary, Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. had offered him physical protection, though it didn’t work out that way.
 
The business of intelligence was getting more complex, and the reality was that only a specialist could understand the bewildering technical changes that were sweeping over the community.
 
I can’t tell you what anyone was thinking at the time- maybe my pal Mac could do that. But I do know that within the bastion of the OpNav Staff, there was the realization of the last of the old warriors that real, actionable operational intelligence was what was necessary to address a growing and worldwide challenge on the world ocean.
 
DIA, for example, was entrusted with one of the greatest secrets of the nation since the ULTRA breakthrough in the 1940s against the German code machines: Corona, the satellite photographic system that could never be shot down, never imprisoned, and never put on trial, was flying over the high value targets of the Soviet Union twice a day.
 
The Navy was in a period of unusual introspection. The first on-orbit capability that the nation had was a primitive but revolutionary ELINT collection satellite called GRAB, and later POPPY, launched shortly after Sputnik caught the attention of the world.
 

(VADM Rufus Lackland Taylor)
 
Admiral Taylor was one of the men who were assumed to be able to answer the challenge. He had fifteen years of operational experience as a line officer himself before transferring to the restricted line, and obviously saw the benefit of bringing line experience into the community- exactly the sort of operational credibility that Rex had earned in the destroyer and cruiser force.
 
1964 was a year of transition for him personally, and for the little Rectanus family in the larger sense. There was a hot war building in the aftermath of the Diem assassination in Saigon.
 
The right-thinking Secretary and the bellicose Texan President were determined to apply the might of America in a scientific method to rush the Communist-inspired insurgency, and they had every confidence that the effort could me managed with metrics and analysis.
 
Of course there are no obvious metrics for the human heart, and that was something we were all going to learn about presently about South East Asia.
 
It wasn’t the beginning of it in 1964. It had been going on for a long time. The first American casualty of the Vietnam War dates to 1957, when Capt. Harry G. Cramer Jr. was killed by explosion near Nha Trang, in what was the Republic of South Vietnam. There were to be so many more.
 
It was Rex’s destiny to try to do something about it, in support of a human force of nature named Elmo “Bud” Zumwalt, very poster boy for a Navy that needed to change.
 
More on that tomorrow.
 
Copyright 2009 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Subscribe to the RSS feed!
 
More errata: Alert readers kicked me in my already-sensitive shins about neglecting VADM Tom Wilson, the distinguished Director of DIA, who should be inserted in the list between VADMs Studeman and Jacoby. My apologies to Tom.

Also, in “Open Skies,” the codeword KEYHOLE is associated with the U-2 airborne manned reconnaissance program. That is incorrect, and it is the former, rather than the latter side of the two linked code-words that is applicable. For the security officers out there, I forget what it is, or was, and why.

* Editor’s note: The complete account of Great Grandfather Socotra’s Grand Tour of Lutheran Europe is contained at the website, in his own words.
 

 
Close Window