Chapter 1: National Intelligence Estimates
With care sift through your gleaning clause by clause
Detaching tendrils of effect from cause
Detaching tendrils of effect from cause
NOTE: The text covering material on the Central Intelligence Agency, Pilgrim in the CIA, was cleared for publication by the Publications Review Board of that Agency pursuant to CIA Public Affairs Regulation HR 6-2: Non-official Publications and Oral Presentations by Employees and Former Employees (Revised 7 August 1984). Such clearance for security reasons does not, of course, imply any official Agency endorsement of this manuscript.
PAB
Fall 1986
PAB
Fall 1986
On occasion, choosing the early hours, I again make my way toward the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Leaving the capital beltway at Exit 14, I have barely three miles to go. Free of the traffic later to come, the drive itself, high off the south bank of the Potomac, skirts scenes of primitive splendor totally at odds with the huge marble monuments that house the bureaucracy of the Nation's capital only a few miles away.
And, clouded by the mists of nostalgia, I am drawn to years now past, viewed through the prisms of my memory.
Where gone are colleagues of those days? Some have died, and I have stood with others on dark days when we have said our last farewells. Others have retreated to quieter steads. Still others are about and chance or plan at times permits of handclasps yielding special thoughts.
Each of us had come to the Agency by different roads, roads built by what we were and did before either institution or individual had awareness of the other. If common bond there was, it probably lay within our common experience during WW II.
How did a nice fellow like you get mixed up with CIA? was seldom asked rhetorically of a colleague.
In my case, the proximate cause of the association stemmed from a decision not to make a career of naval service after having spent six years on active duty wearing the blue and gold during the period that included World War II. I had been called to active duty as an ensign in the supply corps one year before Pearl Harbor. Now, one year after war's end, I was a commander of the line with special training and experience in military government and civil affairs. I was not an Annapolis graduate nor had I had sea duty. And I valued more freedom than is customarily afforded those in uniform. An easy option was to return to Phillips Petroleum Company where I enjoyed leave status. But, having missed six years of technical advances in the petroleum industry and having developed a thirst for international affairs, I paused.
My commanding officer, Captain Robert L. Dennison (later Supreme Allied Commander Atlantic), interrupted my negotiations with the United Nations and with the Foreign Service. "Why not stop by and talk to a new outfit in town, the Central Intelligence Group, the successor to OSS?" he asked. "I know they are looking for people. Here's the name of a man to see. I'll call him if you like."
So it happened. After several meetings with various people, I cast my lot with CIG, reporting, as estimates officer, to James S. Lay, who in turn reported to Ludwell Lee Montague, chief of the intelligence staff.
But first I had to wait for a security clearance, my naval clearances not being acceptable to CIG. This FBI investigation was said to take three months, but often took six. In the event, it took just over a month, which itself was fortuitous. In the interim I reported having been notified by the Department of State of my acceptance there, causing CIG to promote me even before I started.
I reported to CIG in February 1947, a few days after the birth of a third daughter, Julie. The attending physician, noting that at the time of her birth I was, strictly speaking, unemployed, reduced his charges by $50. A good omen. I was to remain with the Agency for 25 years.
By early 1947, CIG had been organizing for about a year, under a directive by President Truman. At the end of WW II, OSS had been abolished. Its analysis division had been transferred to State and its secret operations had been placed in the War Department. The head of CIG, Lt. Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg, Army AF, was busy regrouping, and many of his employees were then on loan from other departments pending their transfer to his rolls.
CIG was housed in the odd assortment of buildings previously occupied by OSS, primarily located in Foggy Bottom in the vicinity of the old gas plant and the old Watergate restaurant. Kennedy Center is now the main landmark of this area. In those days, the principal structure in this area was the Christian Heurich brewery, its tall red brick tower dominating the adjacent skating rink and temporary WW II structures at the foot of the hill. On the hilltop stood permanent buildings where portions of the Navy's Bureau of Medicine and Surgery had once been housed.
I soon found myself right at home in my new environment. Official contacts with those with whom I worked were reinforced by motorpool arrangements. Ben Haynes, the administrative officer of the office of research and estimates, lived across the street from our Arlington home at 101 North Granada. Jim Lay, Ludwell Montague and George Jackson all lived in the same general area. Jackson had been hired as an editor and was indeed skilled in the literary arts, having once been a professor at Washington and Lee. Lay and Monty had had war experience with the Joint Intelligence Committee of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They were indispensable sources of instructive information for one whose only previous exposure to intelligence had been as user.
But change was rapid. Within a few months the staff arrangements were altered. Concurrently, Lay was off to the White House to become executive secretary of the National Security Council. The formal changes came when Congress passed the National Security Act of 1947, creating the Defense department, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Air Force and CIA.
I was put in charge of Staff Intelligence, being the area into which estimates, situation reports and general staff work fell. The other two staffs handled, in the case of one, Current Intelligence – the immediate reporting via daily and weekly briefs of important, evaluated information. The other area was Basic Intelligence – the systematic and comprehensive organization and publication of encyclopedic studies on countries of national interest.
Over some months I was able to recruit former naval colleagues who had impressive credentials. Robert Long became my planner; Walter Moberg, my coordinator. These with George Jackson and Richard Mallett as editors made for a strong team.
Selection of good people apart, the main problems were to develop procedures whereby we could get timely and high quality responses by the production units, for estimates were to be the product of the collaborative efforts of the entire intelligence community. My staff, based on a request or in anticipation of need, initiated the production of an estimate – say, the outlook for stability in French Indo-China. We formulated the key questions that the estimate would attempt to answer – called terms of reference. We sent these to State, Army, Navy, Air Force and, in some cases, our own CIA people, the AEC, the FBI, soliciting their contributions to the designated areas of their responsibility. Deadlines for receipt of the written contributions were set. We met with representatives from each agency to finalize questions and deadlines. The contributions came in, and our production divisions turned out as good a draft as they could based thereon, and upon their own competence. Our staff then reviewed the draft and, having edited it, met with contributors to ascertain the degree of agreement on the judgments made. By definition, an estimate is a judgment going beyond the evidence at hand. Sometimes we had to send the draft back for more work. Where major disagreements persisted they were made note of in the published estimate stating why. In many cases collection requests of needed information were sent to field collectors in an effort to fill recognized gaps in the information we had on hand. Where speed was of the essence, the entire process was condensed by gathering the knowledgeable analysts from various contributing departments for oral contributions.
The early days found us short of expertise, of vital information, of procedures, of contact with the policy officials whom our work was designed to help. But we worked, and worked hard. By doing we became better: found out what information we lacked and filled the gaps; got our colleagues to trust us; got our product to users who became appreciative of what we could do for them; and generally institutionalized procedures that our colleagues in State, Army, Navy and Air began to accept.
Our top consumers – those for whom we wrote – were the President and the secretaries of State and Defense. We viewed ourselves as the intelligence arm of the National Security Council, fulfilling one of CIA's primary reasons for being: to produce national intelligence.
The formal organization of CIA under the Security Act of '47 brought a new director, Rear Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, whom I had met in Paris in 1946 when I attended the Peace Conference and he was the naval attache. Vandenberg became the first chief of staff of the Air Force and Forrestal the first secretary of defense. The push in government to avoid another Pearl Harbor and growing disenchantment about our ability to deal with Russia except as an adversary did much to bring these things about. The U.S. was no longer able to avoid its responsibilities as a peacetime world power.
Our work reflected this involvement. It was exciting to be part of this. The atomic age was having its impact. For example, one day I was told to meet with a special committee of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. We sat, some five of us as I recall, the group chaired by an air force lieutenant general, to see what CIA could do to help. He had been charged with deciding what priority to assign to Soviet targets should a decision at some time be made to drop one of the very, very few A-bombs then in the U.S. arsenal. Here we were able to come up with a study of the Soviet industrial complex and its areas of vulnerabilities which the JCS found helpful in making up their priority targets for plans in case of war.
We often worked at night and on weekends. There was no grumbling, but rather a fine spirit of camaraderie. We were proud to be of use in an undertaking we felt worth the while.
By the spring of 1949, certainly in major part as a consequence of studies conducted by an outside group that included Allen Welsh Dulles, there were rumors of a change to come at the top. At the same time I was assigned to the National War College as the Agency's representative among the 120 future ambassadors, generals and admirals selected by the agencies for whom the government's top school had been created. NWC is located in Washington at Fort McNair, and there I reported in August 1949 for a ten-month course in world politics and grand strategy.
It was a great year, during which the family also joined in. The commandant's wife did much to make the wives of the students feel a part of the entire experience. We also enjoyed the club, the swimming and the nine-hole golf course where we picnicked to the occasional consternation of players, and where, in later years, I introduced my sons to the game.
The early postwar period also brought us riches in speakers to supplement the ministrations of a splendid faculty, among them General George Marshall, Eleanor Roosevelt, Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, George Kennan, Dean Acheson, Margaret Mead. On our spring field trip we split up the class to cover various areas, I in the group going to Panama, Puerto Rico and Trinidad. There we met with top government people having responsibility for U.S. security interests in Latin America, where the Panama Canal remained of special concern.
With graduation in June class members were busy in their respective departments when the turbulent period of U.S. involvement in Korea was ushered in. On my return to CIA I was assigned to Montague's Global Survey Group. Almost immediately a special staff was formed to concentrate on Korea, which staff I served as executive secretary. To this staff were assigned some eight people from various production offices who were particularly adept at writing intelligence estimates.
Within a short time the changes in administration foreshadowed earlier came to pass. General Walter Beedle Smith, who had been Eisenhower's wartime chief of staff, was named director of central intelligence (DCI) by President Truman. "Beetle" Smith decided to upgrade the entire estimative process and formed the office of national estimates (ONE). Smith got Professor William Langer of Harvard to head the office. Most of our special staff was moved to constitute the nucleus of the ONE staff. Langer asked me to become his assistant and to be executive secretary of a newly formed Board of National Estimates, of which he was chairman.
Thus was formed, with the arrival of distinguished professors, an ambassador, a general, an admiral, a senior team of historians, political scientists, economists and military strategists a board of no mean skills. The staff, soon to be organized on a regional basis, brought together the best to be had. Professor Sherman Kent of Yale, author of the seminal work Strategic Intelligence for American World Policy, was named Langer's deputy.
Those were marvelous years. We turned out some fifty estimates a year on all manner of subjects: Soviet capabilities and intentions, China trade, Iran's revolution, middle east wars, developments in third world countries, sustaining Berlin's economy, atomic threats. Some were requested by the White House in considering policy alternatives. What would happen if the U.S. rode through the Berlin blockade? General Smith's advent and our improved performance combined to lift the estimative process to new heights.
We programmed ahead and left room for work we knew would come but could not anticipate. We did post-mortems to ascertain how good or bad our past efforts had been and why. We identified the gaps in our intelligence and worked with collectors and researchers to improve our subsequent efforts. We kept ourselves up to date through our access to intelligence information and research produced anywhere in our government, plus other materials available from foreign governments. We listened to anyone who might help: returning ambassadors, consulting university professors, and our customers, the policy-makers themselves.
In all we had but 50 people in our office: 10 on the Board, 20 on the staff and 20 in support. But we were the top of the mountain of the thousands upon thousands making up the intelligence community.
They were busy years for us all, including myself. In addition to my work, I had, in 1947, followed the lead of my friend Allen Moreland and begun the study of law at the George Washington University. This, of course, was at night. Having had to skip the year I was at the war college, I had to finish up while preoccupied with my main job. This I did, graduating in May 1951. Then came study for the bar examination, which I took and passed in December. On occasion too, a priority project would result in a telephone call during the night letting me know that the galleys of an estimate were ready for proofreading. The CIA printing service was then in an old warehouse on Duke Street in Alexandria. So I would hustle over there, read with the typesetter and give final approval for publication. And by mid- 1952 there were six active youngsters at home. Yes, as my wife Miriam well knows, we had no lack of things to keep us busy.
In early 1952, Langer returned to Harvard, and Kent became board chairman and office director. Professor Raymond Sontag became his deputy, and I deputy for administration. A year after that, when Sontag returned to Berkeley, I stayed on as Kent's deputy, with General Bull, who had been Eisenhower's G-3 and NWC commandant when I was a student, acting as Board vice chairman. Additionally, I served as secretary of the Intelligence Advisory Committee formed by the heads of the various intelligence agencies (State, Army, Navy, AF, NSA, FBI, AEC) chaired by Allen Dulles, and through which he performed yet another function assigned to him by law; namely, to coordinate the foreign intelligence programs of the U.S. It was to this committee that national estimates were brought and the views of members sought before the director gave them the final stamp of approval.
In 1955, as my children will remember, the family was practically on the way to Germany, where I was to have served. We had our shots, we had our passports, the house was rented but the lease not signed. But Mr. Dulles, currently on a visit to Germany, concluded that my assignment there would be premature. So the trip was postponed – indeed never came off. William Bundy had already succeeded me in my old job, and I was studying German. With Dulles' approval, Kent invited me to serve on the Board of National Estimates, and this I did for the next two years.
In the spring of 1957, I was detailed to serve as intelligence officer on a subcommittee of the National Security Council, conducting a so-called net evaluation of U.S. capabilities versus those of the Soviet Union. Our offices were in the Pentagon. The staff director was an eminent retired four star marine general named Thomas.
Part of our preparations for this work consisted of consultation with various defense contractors. We took an extensive trip which included stops at CONV AIR's Denver and San Diego plants where the Atlas and Titan missiles were being produced and at Boeing's Seattle plants to view bomber production.
Shortly after our return I was called in by Robert Amory, deputy director for intelligence. A vacancy had just occurred, and he offered me the job as head of the office in which the Agency's general and special library collections were housed. He said I didn't have to take it, but if I wanted it he would arrange for General Thomas to release me. An opportunity to run my own show in a brand new environment was too good to pass up.
Excerpts from book review by P.A.B. published by CIA in Studies in Intelligence Volume VI, Number 4, Fall 1962
THE GUNS OF AUGUST. By Barbara W. Tuchman. (New York: MacMillan. 1962. Pp. 511. $6.95)
* * * * * *
For the intelligence officer The Guns of August has all the attractions it offers the student of history and the pleasure reader and many besides. History differs from estimative intelligence only by point of reference in time. Identifying and analyzing the forces at work in international affairs and providing information and judgments are intelligence functions. When this is done for the past, with the advantage of hindsight, it becomes history. Like Churchill's The Gathering Storm for the period before World War II and Bruce Catton's The Coming Fury for that before the Civil War, this is an artistically executed analysis of events of world importance and the role played by certain men and nations in the evolution and devolution of these events.
The book is replete, moreover, with examples of intelligence successes and failures, both tactical and strategic. The failures are attributable to a variety of causes – lack of information, available information not transmitted, information transmitted but not received, information received but overlooked or misinterpreted, and even information correctly interpreted but deliberately disregarded.
* * * * * *
On occasion the need for information was known and a capability to get it existed but was not used. Once when Lanrezac – and the British – needed information about the enemy's units and line of march, Sir John French refused to release for this task fresh British cavalry units that were available (p. 220). There were breakdowns in communications, as when Samsonov's VI Corps marched in obedience to orders which had been cancelled (p. 297). Information was withheld from higher authority; in one instance GQG failed to pass on information that would have spared the French
Government moving out of Paris (p. 406). Sometimes lack of coordination was the fault of, or stubborn adherence to decisions reached on the basis of earlier intelligence, as when General von Kuhl suppressed doubts that the French were beaten because "all orders for the new movement had already been given" (p. 419). Or the significance of events plainly observed was missed entirely; a Captain Lepic witnessed the historic swerve of the German column away from Paris toward Compiegne but was "more interested to report that the Uhlans had discarded their distinctive helmets and were wearing cloth caps" (p. 402).
For every intelligence failure there was an intelligence success (often the reverse of the same coin). Most outstanding was the German interception of Russian orders sent by wireless during those first thirty days. General Rennenkampf’s order of August 20 for the Russian corps commanders to halt was sent "in a simple code which a German professor of mathematics attached to the Eighth Army as cryptographer had no difficulty in solving'' (p. 274). On August 24, the Germans intercepted Samsonov's orders for the next day. On the next day, in the prelude to the Battle of Tannenberg, even more valuable messages were intercepted – these sent in the clear – giving marching distances for the First Army which revealed that it would not move far enough to threaten the Germans from the rear. In Mrs. Tuchman's words, "No such boon had been granted a commander since a Greek traitor guided the Persians around the pass at Thermopylae" (p. 291). The only problem was whether such ill-protected information could be believed. It could, and it was, with great loss to the Russians.
* * * * * *
Intelligence is in any case likely to be left in the position of offering its wares with the uncomfortable knowledge that happenstance and miscalculation will continue often to combine weirdly to surprise the decision-maker. So much can be learned by listening to the echoes of decisions past.
Leaving the capital beltway at Exit 14, I have barely three miles to go. Free of the traffic later to come, the drive itself, high off the south bank of the Potomac, skirts scenes of primitive splendor totally at odds with the huge marble monuments that house the bureaucracy of the Nation's capital only a few miles away.
And, clouded by the mists of nostalgia, I am drawn to years now past, viewed through the prisms of my memory.
Where gone are colleagues of those days? Some have died, and I have stood with others on dark days when we have said our last farewells. Others have retreated to quieter steads. Still others are about and chance or plan at times permits of handclasps yielding special thoughts.
Each of us had come to the Agency by different roads, roads built by what we were and did before either institution or individual had awareness of the other. If common bond there was, it probably lay within our common experience during WW II.
How did a nice fellow like you get mixed up with CIA? was seldom asked rhetorically of a colleague.
In my case, the proximate cause of the association stemmed from a decision not to make a career of naval service after having spent six years on active duty wearing the blue and gold during the period that included World War II. I had been called to active duty as an ensign in the supply corps one year before Pearl Harbor. Now, one year after war's end, I was a commander of the line with special training and experience in military government and civil affairs. I was not an Annapolis graduate nor had I had sea duty. And I valued more freedom than is customarily afforded those in uniform. An easy option was to return to Phillips Petroleum Company where I enjoyed leave status. But, having missed six years of technical advances in the petroleum industry and having developed a thirst for international affairs, I paused.
My commanding officer, Captain Robert L. Dennison (later Supreme Allied Commander Atlantic), interrupted my negotiations with the United Nations and with the Foreign Service. "Why not stop by and talk to a new outfit in town, the Central Intelligence Group, the successor to OSS?" he asked. "I know they are looking for people. Here's the name of a man to see. I'll call him if you like."
So it happened. After several meetings with various people, I cast my lot with CIG, reporting, as estimates officer, to James S. Lay, who in turn reported to Ludwell Lee Montague, chief of the intelligence staff.
But first I had to wait for a security clearance, my naval clearances not being acceptable to CIG. This FBI investigation was said to take three months, but often took six. In the event, it took just over a month, which itself was fortuitous. In the interim I reported having been notified by the Department of State of my acceptance there, causing CIG to promote me even before I started.
I reported to CIG in February 1947, a few days after the birth of a third daughter, Julie. The attending physician, noting that at the time of her birth I was, strictly speaking, unemployed, reduced his charges by $50. A good omen. I was to remain with the Agency for 25 years.
By early 1947, CIG had been organizing for about a year, under a directive by President Truman. At the end of WW II, OSS had been abolished. Its analysis division had been transferred to State and its secret operations had been placed in the War Department. The head of CIG, Lt. Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg, Army AF, was busy regrouping, and many of his employees were then on loan from other departments pending their transfer to his rolls.
CIG was housed in the odd assortment of buildings previously occupied by OSS, primarily located in Foggy Bottom in the vicinity of the old gas plant and the old Watergate restaurant. Kennedy Center is now the main landmark of this area. In those days, the principal structure in this area was the Christian Heurich brewery, its tall red brick tower dominating the adjacent skating rink and temporary WW II structures at the foot of the hill. On the hilltop stood permanent buildings where portions of the Navy's Bureau of Medicine and Surgery had once been housed.
I soon found myself right at home in my new environment. Official contacts with those with whom I worked were reinforced by motorpool arrangements. Ben Haynes, the administrative officer of the office of research and estimates, lived across the street from our Arlington home at 101 North Granada. Jim Lay, Ludwell Montague and George Jackson all lived in the same general area. Jackson had been hired as an editor and was indeed skilled in the literary arts, having once been a professor at Washington and Lee. Lay and Monty had had war experience with the Joint Intelligence Committee of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They were indispensable sources of instructive information for one whose only previous exposure to intelligence had been as user.
But change was rapid. Within a few months the staff arrangements were altered. Concurrently, Lay was off to the White House to become executive secretary of the National Security Council. The formal changes came when Congress passed the National Security Act of 1947, creating the Defense department, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Air Force and CIA.
I was put in charge of Staff Intelligence, being the area into which estimates, situation reports and general staff work fell. The other two staffs handled, in the case of one, Current Intelligence – the immediate reporting via daily and weekly briefs of important, evaluated information. The other area was Basic Intelligence – the systematic and comprehensive organization and publication of encyclopedic studies on countries of national interest.
Over some months I was able to recruit former naval colleagues who had impressive credentials. Robert Long became my planner; Walter Moberg, my coordinator. These with George Jackson and Richard Mallett as editors made for a strong team.
Selection of good people apart, the main problems were to develop procedures whereby we could get timely and high quality responses by the production units, for estimates were to be the product of the collaborative efforts of the entire intelligence community. My staff, based on a request or in anticipation of need, initiated the production of an estimate – say, the outlook for stability in French Indo-China. We formulated the key questions that the estimate would attempt to answer – called terms of reference. We sent these to State, Army, Navy, Air Force and, in some cases, our own CIA people, the AEC, the FBI, soliciting their contributions to the designated areas of their responsibility. Deadlines for receipt of the written contributions were set. We met with representatives from each agency to finalize questions and deadlines. The contributions came in, and our production divisions turned out as good a draft as they could based thereon, and upon their own competence. Our staff then reviewed the draft and, having edited it, met with contributors to ascertain the degree of agreement on the judgments made. By definition, an estimate is a judgment going beyond the evidence at hand. Sometimes we had to send the draft back for more work. Where major disagreements persisted they were made note of in the published estimate stating why. In many cases collection requests of needed information were sent to field collectors in an effort to fill recognized gaps in the information we had on hand. Where speed was of the essence, the entire process was condensed by gathering the knowledgeable analysts from various contributing departments for oral contributions.
The early days found us short of expertise, of vital information, of procedures, of contact with the policy officials whom our work was designed to help. But we worked, and worked hard. By doing we became better: found out what information we lacked and filled the gaps; got our colleagues to trust us; got our product to users who became appreciative of what we could do for them; and generally institutionalized procedures that our colleagues in State, Army, Navy and Air began to accept.
Our top consumers – those for whom we wrote – were the President and the secretaries of State and Defense. We viewed ourselves as the intelligence arm of the National Security Council, fulfilling one of CIA's primary reasons for being: to produce national intelligence.
The formal organization of CIA under the Security Act of '47 brought a new director, Rear Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, whom I had met in Paris in 1946 when I attended the Peace Conference and he was the naval attache. Vandenberg became the first chief of staff of the Air Force and Forrestal the first secretary of defense. The push in government to avoid another Pearl Harbor and growing disenchantment about our ability to deal with Russia except as an adversary did much to bring these things about. The U.S. was no longer able to avoid its responsibilities as a peacetime world power.
Our work reflected this involvement. It was exciting to be part of this. The atomic age was having its impact. For example, one day I was told to meet with a special committee of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. We sat, some five of us as I recall, the group chaired by an air force lieutenant general, to see what CIA could do to help. He had been charged with deciding what priority to assign to Soviet targets should a decision at some time be made to drop one of the very, very few A-bombs then in the U.S. arsenal. Here we were able to come up with a study of the Soviet industrial complex and its areas of vulnerabilities which the JCS found helpful in making up their priority targets for plans in case of war.
We often worked at night and on weekends. There was no grumbling, but rather a fine spirit of camaraderie. We were proud to be of use in an undertaking we felt worth the while.
By the spring of 1949, certainly in major part as a consequence of studies conducted by an outside group that included Allen Welsh Dulles, there were rumors of a change to come at the top. At the same time I was assigned to the National War College as the Agency's representative among the 120 future ambassadors, generals and admirals selected by the agencies for whom the government's top school had been created. NWC is located in Washington at Fort McNair, and there I reported in August 1949 for a ten-month course in world politics and grand strategy.
It was a great year, during which the family also joined in. The commandant's wife did much to make the wives of the students feel a part of the entire experience. We also enjoyed the club, the swimming and the nine-hole golf course where we picnicked to the occasional consternation of players, and where, in later years, I introduced my sons to the game.
The early postwar period also brought us riches in speakers to supplement the ministrations of a splendid faculty, among them General George Marshall, Eleanor Roosevelt, Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, George Kennan, Dean Acheson, Margaret Mead. On our spring field trip we split up the class to cover various areas, I in the group going to Panama, Puerto Rico and Trinidad. There we met with top government people having responsibility for U.S. security interests in Latin America, where the Panama Canal remained of special concern.
With graduation in June class members were busy in their respective departments when the turbulent period of U.S. involvement in Korea was ushered in. On my return to CIA I was assigned to Montague's Global Survey Group. Almost immediately a special staff was formed to concentrate on Korea, which staff I served as executive secretary. To this staff were assigned some eight people from various production offices who were particularly adept at writing intelligence estimates.
Within a short time the changes in administration foreshadowed earlier came to pass. General Walter Beedle Smith, who had been Eisenhower's wartime chief of staff, was named director of central intelligence (DCI) by President Truman. "Beetle" Smith decided to upgrade the entire estimative process and formed the office of national estimates (ONE). Smith got Professor William Langer of Harvard to head the office. Most of our special staff was moved to constitute the nucleus of the ONE staff. Langer asked me to become his assistant and to be executive secretary of a newly formed Board of National Estimates, of which he was chairman.
Thus was formed, with the arrival of distinguished professors, an ambassador, a general, an admiral, a senior team of historians, political scientists, economists and military strategists a board of no mean skills. The staff, soon to be organized on a regional basis, brought together the best to be had. Professor Sherman Kent of Yale, author of the seminal work Strategic Intelligence for American World Policy, was named Langer's deputy.
Those were marvelous years. We turned out some fifty estimates a year on all manner of subjects: Soviet capabilities and intentions, China trade, Iran's revolution, middle east wars, developments in third world countries, sustaining Berlin's economy, atomic threats. Some were requested by the White House in considering policy alternatives. What would happen if the U.S. rode through the Berlin blockade? General Smith's advent and our improved performance combined to lift the estimative process to new heights.
We programmed ahead and left room for work we knew would come but could not anticipate. We did post-mortems to ascertain how good or bad our past efforts had been and why. We identified the gaps in our intelligence and worked with collectors and researchers to improve our subsequent efforts. We kept ourselves up to date through our access to intelligence information and research produced anywhere in our government, plus other materials available from foreign governments. We listened to anyone who might help: returning ambassadors, consulting university professors, and our customers, the policy-makers themselves.
In all we had but 50 people in our office: 10 on the Board, 20 on the staff and 20 in support. But we were the top of the mountain of the thousands upon thousands making up the intelligence community.
They were busy years for us all, including myself. In addition to my work, I had, in 1947, followed the lead of my friend Allen Moreland and begun the study of law at the George Washington University. This, of course, was at night. Having had to skip the year I was at the war college, I had to finish up while preoccupied with my main job. This I did, graduating in May 1951. Then came study for the bar examination, which I took and passed in December. On occasion too, a priority project would result in a telephone call during the night letting me know that the galleys of an estimate were ready for proofreading. The CIA printing service was then in an old warehouse on Duke Street in Alexandria. So I would hustle over there, read with the typesetter and give final approval for publication. And by mid- 1952 there were six active youngsters at home. Yes, as my wife Miriam well knows, we had no lack of things to keep us busy.
In early 1952, Langer returned to Harvard, and Kent became board chairman and office director. Professor Raymond Sontag became his deputy, and I deputy for administration. A year after that, when Sontag returned to Berkeley, I stayed on as Kent's deputy, with General Bull, who had been Eisenhower's G-3 and NWC commandant when I was a student, acting as Board vice chairman. Additionally, I served as secretary of the Intelligence Advisory Committee formed by the heads of the various intelligence agencies (State, Army, Navy, AF, NSA, FBI, AEC) chaired by Allen Dulles, and through which he performed yet another function assigned to him by law; namely, to coordinate the foreign intelligence programs of the U.S. It was to this committee that national estimates were brought and the views of members sought before the director gave them the final stamp of approval.
In 1955, as my children will remember, the family was practically on the way to Germany, where I was to have served. We had our shots, we had our passports, the house was rented but the lease not signed. But Mr. Dulles, currently on a visit to Germany, concluded that my assignment there would be premature. So the trip was postponed – indeed never came off. William Bundy had already succeeded me in my old job, and I was studying German. With Dulles' approval, Kent invited me to serve on the Board of National Estimates, and this I did for the next two years.
In the spring of 1957, I was detailed to serve as intelligence officer on a subcommittee of the National Security Council, conducting a so-called net evaluation of U.S. capabilities versus those of the Soviet Union. Our offices were in the Pentagon. The staff director was an eminent retired four star marine general named Thomas.
Part of our preparations for this work consisted of consultation with various defense contractors. We took an extensive trip which included stops at CONV AIR's Denver and San Diego plants where the Atlas and Titan missiles were being produced and at Boeing's Seattle plants to view bomber production.
Shortly after our return I was called in by Robert Amory, deputy director for intelligence. A vacancy had just occurred, and he offered me the job as head of the office in which the Agency's general and special library collections were housed. He said I didn't have to take it, but if I wanted it he would arrange for General Thomas to release me. An opportunity to run my own show in a brand new environment was too good to pass up.
Excerpts from book review by P.A.B. published by CIA in Studies in Intelligence Volume VI, Number 4, Fall 1962
THE GUNS OF AUGUST. By Barbara W. Tuchman. (New York: MacMillan. 1962. Pp. 511. $6.95)
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For the intelligence officer The Guns of August has all the attractions it offers the student of history and the pleasure reader and many besides. History differs from estimative intelligence only by point of reference in time. Identifying and analyzing the forces at work in international affairs and providing information and judgments are intelligence functions. When this is done for the past, with the advantage of hindsight, it becomes history. Like Churchill's The Gathering Storm for the period before World War II and Bruce Catton's The Coming Fury for that before the Civil War, this is an artistically executed analysis of events of world importance and the role played by certain men and nations in the evolution and devolution of these events.
The book is replete, moreover, with examples of intelligence successes and failures, both tactical and strategic. The failures are attributable to a variety of causes – lack of information, available information not transmitted, information transmitted but not received, information received but overlooked or misinterpreted, and even information correctly interpreted but deliberately disregarded.
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On occasion the need for information was known and a capability to get it existed but was not used. Once when Lanrezac – and the British – needed information about the enemy's units and line of march, Sir John French refused to release for this task fresh British cavalry units that were available (p. 220). There were breakdowns in communications, as when Samsonov's VI Corps marched in obedience to orders which had been cancelled (p. 297). Information was withheld from higher authority; in one instance GQG failed to pass on information that would have spared the French
Government moving out of Paris (p. 406). Sometimes lack of coordination was the fault of, or stubborn adherence to decisions reached on the basis of earlier intelligence, as when General von Kuhl suppressed doubts that the French were beaten because "all orders for the new movement had already been given" (p. 419). Or the significance of events plainly observed was missed entirely; a Captain Lepic witnessed the historic swerve of the German column away from Paris toward Compiegne but was "more interested to report that the Uhlans had discarded their distinctive helmets and were wearing cloth caps" (p. 402).
For every intelligence failure there was an intelligence success (often the reverse of the same coin). Most outstanding was the German interception of Russian orders sent by wireless during those first thirty days. General Rennenkampf’s order of August 20 for the Russian corps commanders to halt was sent "in a simple code which a German professor of mathematics attached to the Eighth Army as cryptographer had no difficulty in solving'' (p. 274). On August 24, the Germans intercepted Samsonov's orders for the next day. On the next day, in the prelude to the Battle of Tannenberg, even more valuable messages were intercepted – these sent in the clear – giving marching distances for the First Army which revealed that it would not move far enough to threaten the Germans from the rear. In Mrs. Tuchman's words, "No such boon had been granted a commander since a Greek traitor guided the Persians around the pass at Thermopylae" (p. 291). The only problem was whether such ill-protected information could be believed. It could, and it was, with great loss to the Russians.
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Intelligence is in any case likely to be left in the position of offering its wares with the uncomfortable knowledge that happenstance and miscalculation will continue often to combine weirdly to surprise the decision-maker. So much can be learned by listening to the echoes of decisions past.
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