STUDIES IN INTELLIGENCE, Vol. 21 No. 4, Winter 1977
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CONTENTS
Page
Anatomy of PRM-8 ................................................................ Allen E. Goodman 1
Options for the policy maker (CONFIDENTIAL)
Parapsychology in Intelligence .......................................... Dr. Kenneth A. Kress 7
An untapped collection possibility (SECRET NOFORN WNINTEL)
Intelligence and the General Staff .................................................... David Kahn 19
Military information becomes institutionalized (UNCLASSIFIED)
Intelligence in Recent Public Literature ................................................................ 31
MORI/HRP THIS PAGE
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NOFORN
Options for the policy maker
ANATOMY OF PRM-8
Allan E. Goodman
This article describes the life of a "PRM"-short for Presidential Review
Memorandum. To date, the Carter administration has used the PRM process of
inter-agency study and debate to design strategies for implementing new foreign
policy initiatives. PRM-8 focuses on U.S. initiatives in international economic
negotiations with developing countries, especially those which will assure the
cooperation of key LDCs on such "new agenda" issues as North-South relations,
nuclear proliferation, and human rights. This article reviews the origins of PRM-8,
describes how CIA organized to handle a "new agenda" issue, and discusses the
implication of the experience for future intelligence support to policy.
Historical Background
Three weeks before the 1973 oil embargo, at the Algiers summit meeting of Non-
Aligned Nations, the developing countries called for a special session of the UN
General Assembly devoted to the problems of development. This special session was
held (April-May 1974) against a backdrop of growing unity and assertiveness on the
part of the lesser-developed countries (LDCs) spurred by the prospect of "one,
two, ... many OPECs." The result was the "adoption"-i.e., no formal vote was taken
and 200 reservations of record were submitted by industrialized countries-of a
"Declaration and Action Programme on the Establishment of a New International
Economic Order" (the NIEO) that, in part, called for the participation of LDCs as a
bloc in all decisions affecting the international economy.
This act marked the beginning of what is called today the "North-South
dialogue" between industrialized and developing countries, over the distribution of
both wealth and political power in international affairs.
U.S. concern with the NIEO and the increasing assertiveness of the LDCs' UN
caucusing group (the "Group of 77" which by 1974 included more than 100 countries)
initially stemmed from concern over security and stability of raw materials supplies.
But even when it became clear that other "OPEC-style" LDC commodity cartels were
unlikely (especially in the midst of a world recession), and that the major OPEC states
would not endorse the use of oil as a political weapon outside the Middle East context,
the state of North-South relations remained a high priority concern. This was largely
due to Secretary Kissinger's belief that the structure of power in international affairs
was changing and that, especially in multi-lateral diplomacy, the support and active
cooperation of the LDCs was essential to the success of U.S. foreign policy. And
throughout the government it was recognized that while individually and collectively
LDCs probably did not have the leverage to extract any of their basic demands against
the will of the United States, they had polarized a number of key global issues along
"North-South" lines.'
' For details, see Political Perspectives on Key Global Issues (RP 77-10055), March 1977,
Confidential.
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CONFIDENTIAL Anatomy of PRM-8
PRM-8 was assigned on 21 January 1977. It dealt explicitly with North-South
relations. Of the first 24 PRMs assigned by the NSC, however, fully 15 dealt at least in
part with "southern" matters-e.g., human rights, military base rights in key LDCs,
Southern Africa, and nuclear weapons proliferation prospects in such countries as
India, Pakistan, Brazil, Argentina-an indication of the importance accorded issues
al fecting U.S. relations with the LDCs by the new administration. In terms of specific
policy preferences, moreover, President Carter made clear that his administration
would not endorse aid programs that "taxed poor people in a rich country for the
benefit of rich people in poor countries." A key purpose of the PRM-8 exercise,
consequently, was to examine proposals aimed at re-orienting aid programs away
from serving, in effect, as subsidies for foreign governments and toward attacking the
problem of world poverty by improving the livelihood of the poorest people in
developing countries.
Another purpose of PRM-8 was to complement administration policy on human
rights. Initial reaction to U.S. human rights initiatives by key developing countries
stressed, as does the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, that political liberties
and economic and social justice go hand in hand. Some LDC spokesmen maintained
that it was hypocritical of the Carter administration to press for human rights in the
political sphere at the same time that the U.S. was making relatively little effort in
responding to equity-inspired demands for a new International Economic Order.
CONSUMERS AND THEIR REACTIONS
PRM-8 was originally intended to impact on the discussions in the Economic
Policy Group (the "EPG," consisting of Vice President Mondale, five Cabinet
Secretaries, and the heads of five units in the Executive Office of the President) on
prospects for the May London Economic Summit.
The first draft (known as "Track I"), however, was not satisfactory for several
reasons. The most proximate probably was the very short period of time available to
propose and study new options. But the most significant reason for dissatisfaction was
that "Track I" did not look far enough into the future. This, in turn, stimulated senior
NSC staff members to wonder if the full range of U.S. options would come into
sharper view when the issues were examined from a political economy perspective
and over a longer time frame. Especially after the EPG meeting that discussed the
London Summit, the President, according to one NSC staff member, "was itching to
see what a range of choices would look like over the next 4 to 8 years. He recognized,
of course, that he couldn't spend enough time thinking about the issues involved
himself, so he wanted to see what options might be developed by a group of experts
that could take the time to project the North-South dialogue into the future. "Hence,
the impetus behind PRM-8 "Track II."
"Track II" was designed to analyze the longer-term and essentially non-economic
aspects of North-South relations. Particular emphasis was placed on reaching a better
understanding of the diplomatic, strategic, humanitarian, and institutional issues
raised by the present and projected state of the North-South dialogue and U.S.
relations with the key LDCs who shape that dialogue. The exercise was to identify
initiatives the United States could make in the North-South dialogue to elicit a
constructive, cooperative response from the LDCs not only on key economic issues,
but also on such other global issues as human rights, nuclear proliferation, and law of
the seas.
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Anatomy of PRM-8
To lead the Track II effort, Dr. Brzezinski recruited a distinguished economist,
Dr. Roger Hansen, who has once been a Deputy Special Trade Representative and
who at the time was a Senior Fellow of the Overseas Development Council. Hansen
served as a consultant to the NSC "cluster" of regional specialists on North-South
relations and organized and chaired the "Track II" Working Group.
PROCESS
Starting in early April, the Group met every other week for two hours at the
White House and included representatives who were also substantive experts at the
Assistant or Deputy Assistant Secretary level from the Departments of State, Treasury,
and Defense, the Office of Management and Budget, AID, the NSC, and CIA.
Some 18 issue-oriented background papers were prepared and discussed over a
three-month period. Both the informal, memo-like nature of most of these papers and
the Chairman's stricture that no person speak for his or her agency during the bi-
weekly "seminars" made for an atmosphere in which there was a free and frank
exchange of views on many bureaucratically sensitive issues. Track II offered, in
essence, a chance for its participants to step outside day-to-day decision-mak~ng roles
and, most important, to consider the political as well as the economic trlade-offs
involved in U.S. policy toward North-South relations
So far,' the PRM-8 experience suggests that policy in the Carter administration
proceeds from certain axioms-usually cast, as in the case of aid policy, in terms of
what the United States will no longer do--and personal predilections of the President.
The NSC staff then converts these preferences into terms of reference for inter-agency
study and debate. This process produces not an inquiry into what our policy should be,
but an identification of the issues requiring resolution at the Policy i Review
Committee (PRC) level' before a Presidential Directive can be framed. The debate at
PRC meetings is less on options than on the institutional arrangements necessary to
implement a new directions in foreign policy and on the trade-offs that such c ieeations
may involve. The PRM process-at least to this observer-thus assures that what
drives the system of inter-agency study and debate is not just what can be done (i.e.,
the options) but what should be done to operationalize the President's foreigi t policy.
"North-South" Relations, Track II, and CIA
Until mid-summer of 1976, intelligence support on North-South relations had
been limited to covert collection and reporting of LDC positions at key international
economic conferences. Most of the finished intelligence was based on economic
analysis and appeared in OER publications (Economic Intelligence Weekly and
International Oil Developments). The Office of Current Intelligence also considered
the North-South dialogue largely about economics, not politics, though several
excellent analyses of the political divisions within the LDC bloc appeared in 1974 and
1975. The Office of Political Research, the Agency's in-house think tank, di conduct
some research on North-South relations as a means of developing new nalytical
frameworks for the study of ther political dynamics of "small state" leverage.
As an issue clearly requiring multidisciplinary (i.e., political as well as economic)
intelligence analysis, North-South relations was born with the request of Candidate
"Track III," launched in the fall of 1977 and still on-going, will be analyzed in a future Studies.
The "Track III" exercise is focused on US policy options for 1978.
3 The PRC is a creature of the President. He determines when and on what issues the, committee
should meet and who, among Secretaries Vance and Brown and Dr. Brzezinski, should chair it. The
Chairman selected then determines who among the government's most senior officials should attend the
meeting.
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CONFIDENTIAL Anatomy of PRM-8
Jimmy Carter for a briefing in early July 1976. What was surprising at the time was
not that Mr. Carter had asked for the briefing but that, like PRM-8 itself, it was one of
the first he requested. He did so at the same time that he asked for briefings about
SALT, the Middle East, and other high-priority (and more traditional) concerns. The
inter-office (OER, OCI, OPR) Task Group created to prepare that briefing later
facilitated support for PRM-8 Track II. The Task Group, under the chairmanship of
the Director, OER, served the vital functions of bringing together nearly all those
working on aspects of North-South relations and of legitimizing the subject for future
priority research and political analysis.
Due to the press of the campaign, the briefing on North-South relations (along
with several others) was never given. But the task group never formally disbanded; if
anything, by the fall of 1976 its membership had expanded, promoting continued
communication across office lines.
Other developments also contributed to the growth of North-South relations as a
subject for political analysis within CIA. Probably most important-next to the
concern of the new administration itself-was the decision to incorporate into the
Office of Regional and Political Analysis (created in December 1976) an "Interna-
tional Issues Division" (IID). III) was asked to continue the research on leverage done
by the International Functional Staff (IFS) of OPR. This decision assured continuity in
terms of both personnel and on-going analyses of key political aspects of the North-
South dialogue.
The momentum of the North-South dialogue itself was another major factor in
stimulating political analyses on North-South relations. More than half a dozen
international conferences and negotiations between September 1976 and April 1977
were politicized by LDC demands for an NIEO. These events, coupled to feedback
from policy makers on earlier analyses, generated (between August 1976 and the
launching of PRM-8 Track II) more than 30 requests from policy makers for follow-on
studies designed to illuminate the political/diplomatic aspects of North-South
relations.
CIA was called upon to provide three types of papers to the PRM-8 exercise. One
paper, Political Perspectives on Key Global Issues, focused on examining the impact
of selected global issues (energy dependence, LDC demands for an NIEO, food and
population, terrorism, and nuclear proliferation) on general trends in international
relations as well as on specific U.S. interests. In response to the discussion of this report,
CIA was asked to prepare a second paper for one of the three sessions of the Track II
Working Group devoted to major strategic options for the United States in North-
South relations. A third paper, prepared in OER, provided the Chairman of the
Working Group some new data on what, by 1980, key developing countries would
probably achieve with their modernization drives.
In retrospect, the paper that proved most useful to the PRM process, Key Global
Issues, provided what unidimensional studies of North-South relations most notably
lacked; namely a review of the other problems and issues affected by the North-South
dialogue. In general, papers focusing on such linkages appear to be of great value to
policy makers because they cannot easily study all dimensions of the foreign policy
environment, given their personal time constraints and the preoccupation of their
institutional analytical resources with what we would call current intelligence.
The simple explanation for the apparent lack of competition with CIA for
multidisciplinary, projective analysis-and one usually preferred by academic writers
on foreign policy-is that policy makers tend to be too caught up in crisis
management (international or bureaucratic) to formulate the questions that would
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Anatomy of PRM-8 CONFID NTIAL
illuminate the linkages between the issues with which they deal. Nothing ' ould be
farther from the truth in the case of the issues involved in PRM-8. At the 'ery first
meeting of the Track II Working Group, the policy makers developed just sich a list
of key questions that had more or less been constantly on their minds. At le st to this
observer, what the policy makers lacked were the research and analysis resources that
could have charted out the linkages among the issues of concern. In-house research
organs were literally choked with daily requests for background on current issues.
Projective analyses, especially ones that cut across functional areas of responsibilities
and academic disciplines, proved to be in short supply in the line foreign policy
agencies.
Implications for Intelligence
PRM-8 was submitted to the President on 17 July 1977, and the options, outlined
discussed at several subsequent PRC meetings. In part, the Track II document called
for the establishment of a permanent, interagency group to organize and monitor the
implementation of U.S. policy in North-South relations, Such a group was created and
has become-along with the PRC itself-a valuable focal point for coordinating the
collection, analysis, and dissemination of intelligence information and for the planning
of intelligence community research on North-South relations.
At the most immediate level, the Track II experience demonstrated the benefits
(derived through feedback) of a close working relationship to the policy review
process. Track II was a fertile ground for uncovering new subjects for intelligence
analysis and for identifying new consumers whose responsibilities cut across both
regional and functional lines.
At the more general level, the PRM-8 experience highlighted the degree to which
the intelligence community has been presented with a rather new set of subjects for
political analysis-including not only North-South issues, but issues and problems in
the fields of energy, nuclear proliferation, human rights, food and population. On
many of these issues the policy-maker is unable (often due to the complexity of the
linkages between these issues and problems) to serve effectively as his or her own
"analyst."
In a previous issue of this journal, moreover, a report from the Center for the
Study of Intelligence on "CIA Intelligence Support for Foreign and National' Security
Policy Making"' concluded, in part, that "analysis of unfamiliar or particularly
complex material ... is coveted by policy-makers." PRM-8, and the half-dozen other
PRMs whose subjects are the political/diplomatic implications of economic, techno-
logical, and scientific problems, offer just this kind of opportunity for' political
analysis. As such, the experience confirms the judgment of the study mentioned above,
and suggests that the capability to do multi-dimensional analytical work elsewhere has
not expanded nearly at the rate that issues requiring it have arisen in U.S. foreign
policy.
* Studies, XX/1, Spring 1976
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NOFORN
An untapped collection possibility
PARAPSYCHOLOGY IN INTELLIGENCE:
A PERSONAL REVIEW AND CONCLUSIONS
The Central Intelligence Agency has investigated the controversial phenomenon
called parapsychology as it relates to intelligence collection. The author was involved
with many aspects of the last such investigations. This paper summarizes selected
highlights of the experiences of the author and others. The intent is not historical
completeness. Files are available for those interested in details. Instead the intent is to
record some certainly interesting and possibly useful data and opinions. This record is
likely to be of future benefit to those who will be required to evaluate intelligence-
related aspects of parapsychology.
The Agency took the initiative by sponsoring serious parapsychological research,
but circumstances, biases, and fear of ridicule prevented CIA from completing a
scientific investigation of parapsychology and its relevance to national security.
During this research period, CIA was buffeted with investigations concerning
illegalities and improprieties of all sorts. This situation, perhaps properly so, raised the
sensitivity of CIA's involvement in unusual activities. The " Proxmire Effect," where
the fear that certain Government research contracts would be claimed to be ill-
founded and held up for scorn, was another factor precluding CIA from sensitive areas
of research. Also, there tend to be two types of reactions to parapsychology: positive or
negative, with little in between. Parapsychological data, almost by definition, are
elusive and unexplained. Add a history replete with proven frauds and many people
instantly reject the subject saying, in effect, "I would not believe this stuff even if it
were true." Others, who mostly have had personal "conversion" experiences, tend to
be equally convinced that one unexplained success establishes a phenomenon. These
prejudices make it difficult to evaluate parapsychology carefully and scientifically.
Tantalizing but incomplete data have been generated by CIA-sponsored research.
These data show, among other things, that on occasion unexplained results of genuine
intelligence significance occur. This is not to say that parapsychology is a proven
intelligence tool; it is to say that the evaluation is not yet complete and more research
is needed.
Attention is confined to psychokinetics and remote viewing. Psychokinetics is the
purported ability of a person to interact with a machine or other object by
unexplained means. Remote viewing is akin to clairvoyance in that a person claims to
sense information about a site or person removed from a known sensory link.
Anecdotal reports of extrasensory perception (ESP) capabilities have reached
U.S. national security agencies at least: since World War II, when Hitler was said to
rely on astrologers and seers. Suggestions for military applications of ESP continued to
be received after World War II, For example, in 1952 the Department of Defense was
lectured on the possible usefulness of extrasensory perception in psychological
warfare.' Over the years, reports continued to accumulate. In 1961, the reports
' A. Puharich, "On the Possible Usefulness of Extrasensory Perception in Psychological Warfare"
delivered to a 1952 Pentagon conference, The Washington Post, August 7, 1977.
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Parapsychology
induced one of the earliest U. S. Government parapsychology investigations when the
chief of CIA's Office of Technical Service (then the Technical Services Division)
became interested in the claims of ESP. Technical project officers soon contacted
Stephen I. Abrams, the Director of the Parapsychological Laboratory, Oxford
University, England. Under the auspices of Project ULTRA, Abrams prepared a
review article which claimed ESP was demonstrated but not understood or controlla-
ble.2 The report was read with interest but produced no further action for another
decade.
Two laser physicists, Dr. Russell Targ and Dr. Harold E. Puthoff, re-awakened
CIA research in parapsychology. Targ had been avocationally interested in parapsy-
chology for most of his adult life. As an experimentalist, he was interested in scientific
observations of parapsychology. Puthoff became interested in the field in the early
1970s. He was a theoretician who was exploring new fields of research after extensive
work in quantum electronics.
In April of 1972, Targ met with CIA personnel from the Office of Scientific
Intelligence (OSI) and discussed the subject of paranormal abilities. Targ revealed that
he had contacts with people who purported to have seen and documented some Soviet
investigations of psychokinesis. Films of Soviets moving inanimate objects by "mental
powers" were made available to analysts from OSI. They, in turn, contacted personnel
from the office of Research and Development (ORD) and OTS. An ORD Project
Officer then visited Targ who had recently joined the Stanford Research Institute
(SRI). Targ proposed that some psychokinetic verification investigations could be done
at SRI in conjunction with Puthoff.
These proposals were quickly followed by a laboratory demonstration. A man was
found by Targ and Puthoff who apparently had psychokinetic abilities. He was taken
on a surprise visit to a superconducting shielded magnetometer being used in quark
(high energy particle) experiments by Dr. A. Hebbard of Stanford University Physics
Department. The quark experiment required that the magnetometer be as well
shielded as technology would allow. Nevertheless, when the subject placed his
attention on the interior of the magnetometer, the output signal was visibly disturbed,
indicating a change in the internal magnetic field. Several other correlations of his
mental efforts with signal variations were observed. These variations were never seen
before or after the visit. The event was summarized and transmitted to the Agency in
the form of a letter to an OSI analyst' and as discussions with OTS and ORD officers.
The Office of Technical Services took the first action. With the approval of the
same manager who supported the ESP studies a decade previously, an OTS project
officer contracted for a demonstration with the previously described subject at SRI.
For a cost of $874, one OTS and one ORD representative worked with Targ and
Puthoff and the previously mentioned man for a few days in August, 1972. During
this demonstration, the subject was asked to describe objects hidden out of sight by the
CIA personnel. The subject did well. The descriptions were so startlingly accurate that
the OTS and ORD representatives suggested that the work be continued and
expanded. The same Director of OTS reviewed the data, approved another $2,500
work order, and encouraged the development of a more complete research plan.
By October, 1972, I was the Project Officer. I was chosen because of my physics
background to work with the physicists from SRI. The Office of Technical Service
funded a $50,000 expanded effort in parapsychology.' The expanded investigation
' S. I. Abrams, "Extrasensory Perception", Draft report, 14 December 1965.
' H. E. Puthoff; Stanford Research Institute; Letter to K. Green/OSI, June 27, 1972.
' Office of Technical Service Contract 8473, 1 October 1972 (CONFIDENTIAL).
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included tests of several abilities of both the original subject and a new one, Curious
data began to appear; the paranormal abilities seemed individualistic. For example,
one subject, by mental effort, apparently caused an increase in the temperature
measured by a thermistor; the action could not be duplicated by the second subject.
The second subject was able to reproduce, with impressive accuracy, information
sealed inside envelopes. Under identical conditions, the first subject could reproduce
nothing. Perhaps even more disturbing, repeating the same experiment with the same
subject did not yield consistent results. I began to have serious feelings of being
involved with a fraud.
Approximately halfway through this project, the SRI contractors were invited to
review their results. After careful consideration of the security and sensitivity factors,
the results were shared and discussed with selected Agency personnel during that and
subsequent meetings. In February, 1973, the most recent data were reviewed;
thereafter, several ORD officers showed definite interest in contributing their own
expertise and office funding.
The possibility of a joint OTS/ORD program continued to develop. The Office of
Research and Development sent new Project Officers to SRI during February, 1973,
and the reports which were brought back convinced ORD to become involved.
Interest was translated into action when ORD requested an increase in the scope of the
effort and transferred funds to OTS.5 About this time, a third sensitive subject, Pat
Price, became available at SRI, and the remote viewing experiments in which a
subject describes his impressions of remote objects or locations began in earnest. The
possibility that such useful abilities were real motivated all concerned to move ahead
quickly.
The contract required additional management review before it could be
continued or its scope increased. The initial review went from OTS and ORD to Mr.
William Colby, then the DDO. On 24 April, Mr. Colby decided that the Executive
Management Committee should pass judgment on this potentially sensitive project. By
the middle of May, 1973, the approval request went through the Management
Committee. An approval memorandum was written for the signature of the DCI, then
Dr. James Schlesinger.1 Mr. Colby took the memorandum to the DCI a few days later.
I was soon told not to increase the scope of the project and not to anticipate any
follow-on in this area. The project was too sensitive and potentially embarrassing. It
should be tabled. It is interesting to note that OTS was then being investigated for
involvement in the Watergate affair, and that in May, 1973, the DCI issued a
memorandum to all CIA employees requesting the reporting of any activities that may
have been illegal and improper. As Project Officer, clearly my sense of timing had not
been guided by useful paranormal abilities)
During the summer of 1973, SRI continued working informally with an OSI
officer on a remote viewing experiment which eventually stimulated more CIA-
sponsored investigations of parapsychology. The target was a vacation property in the
eastern United States. The experiment began with the passing of nothing more than
the geographic coordinates of the vacation property to the SRI physicists who, in turn,
passed them to the two subject, one of whom was Pat Price. No maps were permitted,
and the subjects were asked to give an immediate response of what they remotely
viewed at these coordinates. The subject came back with descriptions which were
apparent misses. They both talked about a military-like facility. Nevertheless, a
C/TSD; Memorandum for Assistant Deputy Director for Operations; Subject: Request for Approval
of Contract; 20 April 1973 (SECRET).
6 W. E. Colby; DDO; Memorandum for Director of Central Intelligence; Subject: Request for
Approval of Contract; 4 May 1973 (SECRET).
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striking correlation of the two independent descriptions was noted. The correlation
caused the OSI officer to drive to the site and investigate in more detail.
To the surprise of the OSI officer, he soon discovered a sensitive government
installation a few miles from the vacation property. This discovery led to a request to
have Price provide information concerning the interior workings of this particular site.
All the data produced by the two subjects were reviewed in CIA and the Agency
concerned.
The evaluation was, as usual, mixed.' Pat Price, who had no military or
intelligence background, provided a list of project titles associated with current and
past activities including one of extreme sensitivity. Also, the codename of the site was
provided. Other information concerning the physical layout of the site was accurate.
Some information, such as the names of the people at the site, proved incorrect.
These experiments took several months to be analyzed and reviewed within the
Agency. Now Mr. Colby was DCI, and the new directors of OTS and ORD were
favorably impressed by the data. In the fall of 1973, a Statement of Work was
outlined, and SRI was asked to propose another program. A jointly funded ORD and
OTS program was begun in February, 1974.8 The author again was the Project
Officer. The project proceeded on the premise that the phenomena existed; the
objective was to develop and utilize them.
The ORD funds were devoted to basic studies such as the identification of
measurable physiological or psychological characteristics of psychic individuals, and
the establishment of experimental protocols for validating paranormal abilities. The
OTS funds were to evaluate the operational utility of psychic subjects without regard
to the detailed understanding of paranormal functioning. If the paranormal function-
ing was sufficiently reproducible, we were confident applications would be found.
Before many months had passed, difficulties developed in the project. Our
tasking in the basic research area proved to be more extensive than time and funds
would allow. The contractors wanted to compromise by doing all of the tasks with less
completeness. The ORD scientists insisted that with such a controversial topic, fewer
but more rigorous results would be of more value. The rigor of the research became a
serious issue between the ORD project officers and SRI, with myself generally taking a
position between the righteousness of the contractor and indignation of the research-
ers. Several meetings occurred over that issue.
As an example of the kinds of disputes which developed over the basic research,
consider the evaluation of the significance of data from the "ESP teaching machine"
experiments. This machine was a four-state electronic random number generator used
to test for paranormal abilities. SRI claimed the machine randomly cycled through
four states, and the subject indicates the current machine state by pressing a button.
The state of the machine and the subject's choice were recorded for later analysis. A
subject "guessing" should, on the average, be correct 25 percent of the time. SRI had a
subject who averaged a statistically very significant 29 percent for more than 2,500
trials.
I requested a review of the experiment and analysis, and two ORD officers
quickly and skeptically responded. They first argued that the ESP machine was
' K. Green; LSD/OSI; Memorandum for the Record; Subject: Verification of Remote Viewing
Experiments at Stanford Research Institute; 9 November 1973.
(SECRET)
8 Office of Technical Service Contract, FAN 4125-4099 Office of Research and Development
Contract, FAN 4162-8103; 1 February 1974 (CONFIDENTIAL).
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possibly not random. They further argued the subjects probably learned the nonran-
dom machine patterns and thereby produced high scores.' During this review, it was
noted that whether the machine was random or not, the data taken during the
experiment could be analyzed to determine actual machine statistics. The machine
randomness was then unimportant, because the subject's performance could then be
compared with actual machine performance.1? The ORD Project Officers, however,
did not believe it would be worth the effort to do the extra analysis of the actual data.
I disagreed. I had the Office of Joint Computer Services redo the data analysis.
The conclusion was that during the experiment "no evidence of nonrandomness was
discovered" and there was "no solid reason how he was able to be so successful."', I
further ordered the subject retested. He averaged more than 28 percent during
another 2,500 trials. This information was given in written and oral form to the ORD
Project Officers, who maintained there must be yet another flaw in the experiment or
analysis, but it was not worth finding. Because of more pressing demands, the issue
could not be pursued to a more definite conclusion.
Concurrent with this deteriorating state of affairs, new Directors of ORD and
OTS were named again. Since neither Director had any background or experience in
paranormal research, the new Director of ORD reviewed the parapsychology project
and had reservations. I requested a meeting in which-he said he could not accept this
reality of paranormal functioning, but he understood his bias. He said that inasmuch
as he could not make an objective decision in this field, he could simply follow the
advice of his staff. The ORD Project Officers were feeling their own frustrations and
uncertainties concerning the work and now had to face this unusual kind of skepticism
of their new Director. The skepticism about the believability of the phenomenon and
quality of the basic research adversely affected the opinions of many people in OTS.
Support for the project was vanishing rapidly.
As these pressures mounted, the first intelligence collection operation using
parapsychology was attempted. The taget was the Semipalatinsk Unidentified Re-
search and Development Facility-3 (URDF-3, formerly known as PNUTS). The
experimental collection would use our best subject, Pat Price. From experience it was
obvious that Price produced bad data as well as good. Borrowing from classical
communication theory concepts, this "noisy channel" of information could neverthe-
less be useful if it were characterized. An elaborate protocol was designed which
would accomplish two characterization measurements. First, we needed assurance the
channel was collecting useful data. I reviewed the photos of URDF-3 and chose two
features which, if Price described them, would show the channel at least partially
working. Referring to Figure la, these features were the tall crane and the four
structures resembling oil well derricks. It was agreed that if Price described these
structures, I would be prepared to have him sign a secrecy agreement, making him
witting, and collect more relevant intelligence details. Secondly, after a working
channel was thus established, a signal-to-noise or quality characterization was
required. This would be done by periodic tests of the channel-that is, periodically
Price would be asked to describe features of URDF-3 which were known. The
accuracy of these descriptions would be used to estimate the quality of the data we
had no obvious way of verifying.
6 L. W. Rook; LSR/ORD; Memorandum for OTS/CB; Subject: Evidence for Non-Randomness of
Four-State Electronic Random Stimulus Generator; 12 June 1975 (CONFIDENTIAL).
10 S. L. Cianci; LSR/ORD; Memorandum for OTS/CB; Subject: Response to Requested Critique, SRI
Random Stimulus Generator Results; 12 June 1975 (CONFIDENTIAL).
11 G. Burow; OJCS/AD/BD; Memorandum for Dr. Kress; Subject: Analysis of the Subject-Machine
Relationship; 8 October 1975 (CONFIDENTIAL).
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The experiment began with my branch chief and me briefing Targ and Puthoff
in a motel. Later, at SRI, Price was briefed by Targ and Puthoff. Since Targ and
Puthoff presumably knew nothing about URDF-3, this protocol guarded against
cueing and/or telepathy. Initially Price was given only the geographic coordinates, a
world atlas map marked with the approximate location of URDF-3, and told it was a
Soviet RD&E test site. Overnight, he produced the drawing on the bottom right of
Figure lb. Price further mentioned this was a "damned big crane" because he saw a
person walk by and he only came up to the axles on the wheels (note sketch on left,
Figure 1b). This performance caught my attention; but with two more days of work,
we never heard about the derricks. Eventually, a decision was needed. Because the
crane was so impressive, my branch chief and I decided the derricks description
requirement should be relaxed and we should continue.
When the decision was made to make Price witting, I decided to test him. My
branch chief and I sat in a conference room while Targ and Puthoff brought a smiling
Pat Price into the room. I was introduced as the sponsor, and I immediately asked
Price if he knew me.
Yes.
Name?
Ken Kress.
Occupation?
Works for CIA.
Since I was then a covert employee, the response was meaningful. After having Price
sign a secrecy agreement, and some discussions, I confronted him again. I rolled out a
large version of Figure la and asked if he had viewed this site.
Yes, of course!
Why didn't you see the four derricks?
Wait, I'll check.
Price closed his eyes, put on his glasses (he "sees" better that way) and in a few
seconds answered- "I didn't see them because they are not there any more." Since my
data were three or four months old, there was no rejoinder to the implied accusation
that my data were not good. We proceeded and completed a voluminous data
package.
In a few weeks, the latest URDF-3 reconnaissance was checked. Two derricks
were partially disassembled, but basically all four were visible. In general, most of
Price's data were wrong or could not be evaluated. He did, nevertheless, produce some
amazing descriptions, like buildings then under construction, spherical tank sections,
and the crane in Figure 1b. Two analysts, a photo interpreter at IAS12 and a nuclear
analyst at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratories agreed that Price's description of the
crane was accurate; the nuclear analyst wrote that "one: he, the subject, actually saw it
through remote viewing, or two: he was informed what to draw by someone
knowledgeable of URDF-3."'g But, again, since there was so much bad information
mixed in with the good, the overall result was not considered useful. As proof of
remote viewing, the data are at best inconclusive. The ORD officers concluded that
It W. T. Strand; C/ESO/IAS; Memorandum for Director, Office of Technical Service; Subject:
Evaluation of Data on Semipalatinsk Unidentified R&D Facility No. 3, USSR; 20 August 1974 (SECRET).
's D. Stillman; Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory; An Analysis of a Remote Viewing Experiment of
URDF-3"; 4 December 1975 (CONFIDENTIAL).
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Figure 1: Comparison of Target Site and Drawing by Remote Viewer
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since there were no control experiments to compare with, the data were nothing but
lucky guessing.
I began to doubt my own objectivity in evaluating the significance of paranormal
abilities to intelligence collection. It was clear that the SRI contractors were claiming
success while ORD advisors were saying the experiments were not meaningful because
of poor experimental design. As a check on myself, I asked for a critique of the
investigation from a disinterested consultant, a theoretical physicist with broad
intellectual background. His first task was to evaluate the field of parapsychology
without knowledge of the CIA data. After he had completed this critique, I asked him
to acquaint himself with the CIA data and then to reassess the field. The first
investigation produced genuine interest in paranormal functioning as a valid research
area. After being acquainted with CIA data, his conclusion was, " a large body of
reliable experimental evidence points to the inescapable conclusion that extrasensory
perception does exist as a real phenomenon, albeit characterized by rarity and lack of
reliability."" This judgment by a competent scientist gave impetus to continue serious
inquiry into parapsychology.
Because of the general skepticism and the mixed results of the various operational
experiments, a final challenge was issued by OTS management: OTS is not in the
research business; do something of genuine operational significance. Price was chosen,
and suggestions were solicited from operational personnel in both OTS and the DDO.
An intriguing idea was selected from audio operational applications: the difficult and
dangerous job of targeting and installing audio collection systems. A test to determine
if remote viewing could help was suggested. The interiors of two foreign embassies
were known to the audio teams who had made entries several years previously. Price
was to visit these embassies by his remote viewing capability, locate the coderooms,
and come up with information that might allow a member of the audio team to
determine whether Price was likely to be of operational use in subsequent operations.
Price was given operationally acceptable data such as the exterior photographs and the
geographical coordinates of the embassies.
In both cases, Price correctly located the coderooms. He produced copious data,
such as the location of interior doors and colors of marble stairs and fireplaces that
were accurate and specific. As usual, much was also vague and incorrect. Regardless,
the operations officer involved concluded, "It is my considered opinion that this
technique-whatever it is-offers definite operational possibilities."
I'his result was reviewed within OTS and the DDO, and various suggestions for
potential follow-on activities were formulated." This package of requirements, plus
the final results of the current contract, were reviewed at several meetings within OTS
and ORD. The results of those meetings are as follows:
L According to the ORD Project Officers, the research was not productive
or even competent; therefore, research support to SRI was dropped. The Director
J. A. Ball; "An Overview of Extrasensory Perception"; Report to CIA, 27 January 1975.
C/AOB/OTS; Memorandum for the Record; Subject: Parapsychology/"Remote Viewing"; 20 April
1976 (SECRET).
16 Chief/Division D/DDO; Memorandum for C/D&E; Subject: Perceptual Augmentation Tech-
niques; 24 January 1975 (SECRET); AC/SE/DDO; Memorandum for C/D&E; Subject: Perceptual
Augmentation Testing; 14 January 1975 (SECRET); C/EA/DDO; Memorandum for Director of Technical
Service; Subject: Exploration of Operational Potential of "Paranormals"; 5 February 1975 (SECRET);
C/Libya/EL/NE/DDO; Memorandum for OTS/CB; Subject: Libyan Desk Requirement for Psychic
Experiments Relating to Libya; 31 January 1975 (SECRET); CI/Staff/DDO; Memorandum for the Record;
Subject: SRI Experiment; 12 December 1974 (SECRET).
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of OTS felt the OTS charter would not support research; therefore, all Agency
funding in paranormal research stopped.
2. Because of the mixed results, the operational utility of the capability was
considered questionable but deserved further testing.
3. To achieve better security, all the operations-oriented testing with the
contractor was stopped, sand a personal services contract with Price was started.
4. Since I was judged to be a positively biased advocate of paranormal
functioning, the testing and evaluation of Price would be transferred to a more
pragmatic OTS operations psychologist.
The OTS psychologist picked up his new responsibilities and chose to complete an
unfinished DDO requirement. The origin of the requirement went back to the fall of
1974 when several OTS engineers became aware of the parapsychology project in OTS
and had volunteered to attempt remote viewing. They passed initial remote viewing
tests at SRI with some apparent successes. To test these OTS insiders further, I chose a
suggested requirement to obtain information about a Libyan site described only by its
geographic coordinates. The OTS engineers described new construction which could
be an SA-5 missile training site." The Libyan Desk officer was immediately
impressed. He then revealed to me that an agent had reported essentially the same
story. More coordinates were quickly furnished but were put aside by me.
The second set of Libyan geographic coordinates was passed by the OTS
psychologist to Price. A report describing a guerrilla training site was quickly
returned. It contained a map-like drawing of the complex. Price described a related
underwater sabotage training facility site several hundred kilometers away on the sea
coast. This information was passed to the Libyan Desk, Some data were evaluated
immediately, some were evaluated only after ordering special reconnaissance cover-
age. New information produced by Price was verified by the reconnaissance. The
underwater sabotage training facility description was similar to a collateral agent's
report. The Libyan Desk officer quickly escalated the requirement to what was going
on inside those buildings, the plans and intentions, etc.18 The second requirements list
was passed to Pat Price. Price died of a heart attack a few days later, and the program
stopped. There have been no further CIA-sponsored intelligence collection tests.
Since July, 1975, there has been only modest CIA and Intelligence Community
Staff interest in parapsychology. The Office of Scientific Intelligence completed a
study about Soviet military and KGB applied parapsychology. 19 During November of
1976, Director George Bush became aware that official Soviets were visiting and
questioning Puthoff and Targ at SRI about their work in parapsychology. Mr. Bush
requested and received a briefing on CIA's investigations into parapsychology. Before
there was any official reaction, he left the Agency. Various intelligence community
groups, such as the Human Resources Subcommittee on R&D, have exhaustively
reviewed parapsychology in CIA, DOD, and the open research, but have failed to
conclude whether parapsychology is or is not a worthwhile area for futher investiga-
tion. Several proposals from SRI and other contractors were received by CIA but none
were accepted. There are no current plans for CIA to fund parapsychology
investigations.
" OTS/SDB; Notes on Interviews with F. P., E. L., C. J., K. G., and V. C., January 1975 (SECRET).
'B DDO/NE; Memorandum for OTS/BAB; Subject: Experimental Collection Activity Relating to
Libya; 8 October 1975 (SECRET).
'B T. Hamilton; LSD/OSI; "Soviet and East European Parapsychology Research," SI 77-10012, April
1977 (SECRET/NOFORN).
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PostScript
At this point, I have traced the action and reaction of various elements of CIA to
what is certainly an unconventional and highly controversial subject. Also of interest
are the concurrent reactions of other agencies to parapsychology. In August, 1973,
parapsychology was discussed with several members of DIA. The DIA people were
basically interested in the Soviet activities in this area, and expressed considerable
interest in our own fledgling results. Numerous meetings have occurred during the
past several years. DIA remains interested on a low priority basis.
The Army Materiel Command learned of CIA interest in the paranormal. We
discovered the Army interest was generated by data which emerged from Vietnam.
Apparently certain individuals called point men, who led patrols into hostile territory,
had far fewer casualties from booby traps and ambushes than the average. These point
men, needless to say, had a loyal following of men and, in general, greatly helped the
morale of their troops under a brutal, stressful situation. The Army gave extensive
physical and psychological tests to a group of unusually successful point men and
came to no conclusion other than perhaps that paranormal capabilities may be the
explanation! The Army was most interested in CIA results and wanted to stay closely
informed. After a few more follow-up meetings, the Army Materiel Command was
never heard from again.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) reported that they
had not only a showing of interest but a hostile response as well to the subject area. At
one time, we felt we had the strong interest of some people at DARPA to discuss our
data. The SRI contractors and I went to a briefing where we had a several-hour
confrontation with an assemblage of hostile DARPA people who had been convened
especially to debunk our results. After a long, inconclusive, emotional discussion, we
left. Contacts with DARPA stopped for several years.
The Navy reviewed part of the work and became interested. Some groups
developed strong interest, and minor funding was provided to SRI by Navy to
replicate one of SRI's earlier experiments under more controlled conditions. The
experiment was replicated. Then the Navy asked SRI to repeat the same experiment
under different conditions. An effect was observed, but it was not the same as the
previous observations. About this same time, the Navy became very concerned about
this research being "mind warfare"-related. Funding was stopped.
The active funding for parapsychology now has shifted to the Air Force's Foreign
Technology Division with the addition of modest testing being completed by another
group at DARPA. These investigations are not yet completed, but a second phase is
funded by the Air Force. The Air Force project is attempting to evaluate whether
signals and communications can be sent and received by paranormal functioning. Also
aircraft and missile intelligence which can be verified is being gathered and
evaluated. To date the results are more consistent than those seen during the CIA
research, but still they are mixed. Some simple experiments seemed very impressive
and conclusive. The more complex experiments are difficult to assess.
In the non-government world an explosion of interest in unclassified parapsychol-
ogy research occurred after the first publication of CIA-sponsored projects. Books have
been written, prestigious professional societies have had sessions on parapsychology,
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and several national news reports have been broadcast and printed.," Director Turner
revealed publicly that CIA has had operational interest in parapsychology." The open
publication of these investigations is generally healthy and helpful. It shows a
reduction of associated emotionalism and bias. These publications will also stimulate
other scientific investigations into parapsychology.
There is a less positive aspect to open interest and publications. Before adequate
assessment was made by CIA and others, we may have allowed some important
national security information out into the public domain. It is my opinion that, as it
relates to intelligence, sufficient understanding and assessment of parapsychology has
not been achieved. There are observations, such as the original magnetic experiments
at Stanford University, the OSI remote viewing, the OTS-coderoom experiments, and
others done for the Department of Defense, that defy explanation. Coincidence is not
likely, and fraud has not been discovered. The implication of these data cannot be
determined until the assessment is done..
If the above is true, how is it that the phenomenon remains controversial and
receives so little official government support? Why is it that the proper assessment was
never made? This state of affairs occurs because of the elementary understanding of
parapsychology and because of the peculiarities of the intelligence and military
organizations which have attempted the assessments. There is no fundamental
understanding of the mechanisms of paranormal functioning, and the reproducibility
remains poor. The research and experiments have successfully demonstrated abilities
but have not explained them nor made them reproducible. Past and current support of
parapsychology comes from applications-oriented intelligence and military agencies.
The people managing such agencies demand quick and relevant results. The
intelligence and military agencies, therefore, press for results before there is sufficient
experimental reproducibility or understanding of the physical mechanisms. Unless
there is a major breakthrough in understanding, the situation is not likely to change as
long as applications-oriented agencies are funding parapsychology. Agencies must
commit long-term basic research funds and learn to confine attention to testing only
abilities which at least appear reproducible enough to be used to augment other hard
collection techniques (example: use parapsychology to help target hard intelligence
collection techniques and determine if the take is thereby increased). Parapsychology,
like other technical issues, can then rise or fall on its merits and not stumble over
bureaucratic charters and conjectures proposed by people who are irrevocably on one
side or the other in the controversial area.
Q0 R. Targ and H. Puthoff; "Information Transfer Under Conditions of Sensory Shielding"; Nature,
CC LII, 602-607 (October 18, 1974); H. Puthoff and R. Targ; "A Perceptual Channel for Information
Transfer Over Kilometer Distances; Historical Perspective and Recent Research"; Proceedings of the IEEE,
LXIV (March 1976, Number 3, 329-354); R. Targ and H. Puthoff; "Mind-Research Scientists Look at
Psychic Ability"; Delacarte Press (1977); J. Wilhelm; "The Search for Superman"; Dell (1974); IEEE
Conference on Man; Systems and Cybernetics; Washington (1976 and 1977); NBC Nightly News; 4 and 5
August 1976; NBC Today; 9 August 1976; J. Wilhelm, "Psychic Spying?"; The Washington Post, Outlook
Section, August 7, 1977.
Q' J. O'Leary, "Turner Denies CIA Bugging of South Korea's Park," The Washington Star, 9 August
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How military information became
institutionalized
INTELLIGENCE AND THE GENERAL STAFF*
For eight years Hannibal, the Carthaginian military genius, had laid waste to the
Roman provinces in the southern part of Italy. His father had made him swear eternal
hatred to Rome, and Hannibal, in the second Punic War between Rome and Carthage
to rule the Mediterranean, had beaten the Romans at Cannae and other battles and
now ravaged their wheatfields and pastures. He was awaiting the arrival of his brother
Hasdrubal, who in the spring of 207 B.C. had crossed the Alps with 48,000 foot, 8,000
horse, and 15 elephants. Their forces would unite and rout the Romans.
Soon after his arrival in the north of Italy, Hasdrubal drafted a message to his
brother in the south. It said that he would meet Hannibal in Umbria, on the eastern
coast of Italy. He dispatched four Gallic and two Numidian horsemen to carry the
letter to Hannibal. They traversed the length of Italy without finding him, then
turned around to follow him as he moved northward. Uncertain of the roads, they
were captured by a party of Roman troops and brought before the praetor. At first
they evaded his questions, but under threat of torture they acknowledged that they
were carrying a letter from Hasdrubal to Hannibal.
The praetor sent it, still sealed, to one of the consuls of Rome, Gaius Claudius
Nero (not the notorious emperor), commanding nearby. Nero had an interpreter read
it. He recognized at once the danger if the two brothers combined forces. Sending the
letter to the senate with a request for more troops, he at once marched north against
Hasdrubal. At the Metaurus River, his legions attacked Hasdrubal., who was
unsupported by his brother and outnumbered by the Romans. They decisively
defeated him. The victory erased forever the threat of a Carthaginian conquest, and
Rome advanced to become the mistress of the western world.
Early Role of Intelligence
The battle of the Metaurus holds a unique place in military history. It is the only
one of Edward S. Creasy's Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World: from Marathon to
Waterloo that had intelligence as a precondition of victory. In the 4,000 years from
the dawn of civilization to World War I, military intelligence had little effect on
warfare.
To be sure, it had always been an essential element. In the biological struggle for
survival, even a protozoan must have mechanisms to receive stimuli and to judge
whether they are good or bad for it. An animal must see or feel its quarry to kill it. But
intelligence was like breathing: vital to the functioning of an organism, but not to its
dominance. To the animal capacity for deriving information from the observation of
physical objects, man then joined the ability to derive it from words. The addition of
time- and distance-conquering verbal intelligence to physical expanded information's
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Intelligence and the General Staff
range and powers. But even these did not at first enable intelligence to win many
victories. In the main, there were not many to win. Strategies for conquering a
country in ancient and medieval times were so vague, so imprecise, that information
about them would bring only vague and diffuse benefits to the target nation.
Intelligence had little opportunity to concentrate one's own strength enough to
overcome enemy brute force.
This is not to say that tribes and nations spurned it. Often they gathered and used
it. The primitive Jibaro of Ecuador crept into enemy villages to count houses and
estimate the number of fighting men they had. The ancient Egyptians interrogated
prisoners of war. Julius Caesar dispatched scouts to reconnoiter enemy forces.
Medieval rulers paid spies. The Mongols flung out mounted patrols to scour the land.
Codebreakers in Renaissance Venice solved the esoteric dispatches of foreign
diplomats. And sometimes the intelligence produced victories. When Caesar learned
from a prisoner that an enemy barbarian had assembled 6,000 infantry and 1,000
cavalry for an ambush, he counterplanned and defeated the chieftain. When spies told
Richard the Lion-Hearted about a caravan bringing supplies to the Saracens, he
concentrated his cavalry and raided it.
But most often intelligence did not control the course of events. The Pharaoh
Ramses II won at Kadesh despite having dribbled away the advantage gained from a
prisoner interrogation. Venice's knowledge, derived from an intercept, that the
commander of the army of the Holy Roman Empire was requesting either 20,000
ducats or the presence of the emperor did not help her win any victories. Cannae, the
classic victory of warfare in which Hannibal encircled a larger Roman force and
defeated it, owed nothing to intelligence. Nor did the innumerable sieges, successful
for one side or the other, of the Middle Ages. Nor did Creasy's 14 other decisive
battles, such as Marathon, in which the Athenian hoplites defeated the Asiatic armies
of Xerxes; Tours, where Christendom turned back the Moorish tide of Islam; Hastings,
in which William of Normandy conquered England; Blenheim, which undercut the
designs of Louis XIV for European domination; Saratoga, which all but decided the
American Revolution, and the others. In these and all the other cases that comprise the
vast majority of engagements in the long history of warfare, the issue was decided not
by intelligence but by tactics, resolution, and strength.
Intelligence only began finding the opportunities and the powers it needed to
become a significant factor in war in the industrial and the French revolutions. They
created railroads, the telegraph, good maps, mass armies, and a general staff. These
made it necessary and possible to draw detailed plans for the mobilization of an army
and the invasion of an enemy. At the same time, industrialization made new aspects of
society factors of importance for intelligence. The ancient Greeks did not care how
much coal and iron a nation's mines could produce; it was a question of vital
importance to a modern country-and to its enemy. At last intelligence had a chance
to play a major role in war.
The same revolutions also furnished intelligence with the tools that would enable
it to gain more knowledge of another country. A daily press emerged. Diplomacy
evolved the military attache. Bigger armies yielded more prisoners for interrogation,
more documents for seizure. Tapping telegraph wires, and later intercepting radio
transmissions, provided far greater volumes of enemy messages than the occasional
waylaying of couriers. The balloon, the Zeppelin, and the airplane saw more and
faster than the deepest-driving cavalry. The camera fixed fleeting impressions in
greater detail than the eye and reproduced them for others. In all of these ways,
intelligence amplified its ability to gather information.
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At the same time, it was enhancing its evaluation of information. The proximate
cause of this was the evolution of the general staff.
Beginnings of the General Staff
Though commanders of ancient times and feudal lords had called their
lieutenants into council for military advice, these bodies were ad hoc and dissolved
upon completion of their service. A permanent staff began to develop when the rise of
capitalism enabled monarchs to cease relying on foraging and to supply their
professional armies themselves, with the greater flexibility that this brought. In the
1600s, the Great Elector of Brandenburg assigned his quartermaster and some
assistants to plan ahead for the next day's march and encampment-to reconnoiter
and draft orders. In this planning lay the germ of a general staff.
During the next century, as the operations of war grew more complex,
commanders gathered groups of specialized assistants around them to serve
throughout a campaign. They channeled to the commander the information he
needed to make his decisions, and they then elaborated these broad decisions in the
detailed orders for march and supply needed to realize them. "Attack on the right
flank," orders the commander, and his chief of staff barks out commands for the 2nd
Regiment to advance, for the 3rd to change its direction of march from the left flank
to the right and to go into reserve, for the artillery chief to begin firing, for the supply
officers to bring up ammunition, and so on. Staffs vary as do commanders. Frederick
the Great had a small staff, Napoleon a large and rather badly organized one. The
generals of the newly created division of combined arms soon had small staffs of their
own, called a "general's staff."
But these were all temporary wartime organizations. It remained for Prussia, in
1803, to establish the first permanent general staff-a body to plan for war even in
peace.
Prussia's general staff constituted a separate corps, like, for example, the
engineers. Originally it had its own uniform, which was later abbreviated to dark red
stripes on the trousers of the army's field gray. It consisted of officers of the Prussian
army who had been admitted to the War Academy on the basis of brains and who,
after graduation, had been called to the general staff by its chief. Only about 2
percent of the officer corps attained this eminence-some 200 men in 1870, 600 in
1914. They divided their staff time between the central headquarters in the red brick
building at Berlin, the Great General Staff, and the smaller staffs at corps, division,
and fortress headquarters, known collectively as the Troops General Staff. At any one
time, somewhat more than half were working in Berlin. In addition, at regular
intervals they suspended their staff service to command troops in the field. This
alternation sought both to keep them in contact with practical problems and to
disseminate the concepts and the control of the general staff throughout the army.
Their basic intellectual ability, their training, their selection, and their rapid
advancement made the staff into an elite. Its reticence ("General staff officers have no
names," said one chief), the secrecy of its work, the seeming mechanical unrolling of
its victories over Austria in 1866 and over France 1870, the German awe of the
military-all these combined to create the legend of mysterious invincibility, of dark
control of the cords of destiny that has always enveloped the German general staff.
Intelligence Joins the General Staff
The basic task of the Great General Staff was to prepare the plans that the
German army would follow in case of war with a particular nation. This naturally
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required a modicum of information, just as on the individual level: a country has to
"see" its enemy to strike it. "The work of the department [meaning the general staff],"
stated the opening words of an 1816 order on the staff's basic duties and organization,
"must aim at the most exact knowledge of this country and of the other European
states in military matters and must prepare all that is necessary in an emerging war."
Because this staff was permanent and its functions uninterrupted, it gave intelligence
a continuous institutional existence for the first time in its history. This enabled it to
improve its abilities in evaluation.
Nevertheless, intelligence in the Great General Staff did not crystallize as a
separate activity. It blurred into planning. Raw data about a foreign country went to
one of the two war-plans sections-one for the eastern theater, one for the western.
Officers there blended it with all other factors in devising their strategy. The Great
General Staff in Berlin did not create a permanent separate section for the general
evaluation of intelligence. Likewise, no officer in the Troops General Staff worked
solely on it.
The reason was a basic antagonism to intelligence that paralleled the opposition
to any technical innovation. The aristocratic officer corps feared that it would lose its
quasi-monopoly of commanders' jobs to the new technicians. Such concerns frightened
Germany's officer corps more than those of other European countries. Consequently,
while France had a G-2 section for the general evaluation of intelligence and England
set up an Intelligence Division, Germany had neither.
She did bow slightly to the new realities, however. With the outbreak of hostilities
in 1866 and 1870, the army mobilized. The Great General Staff converted into a
General Headquarters. Its duties compelled it to organize, not geographically like its
peacetime parent, but functionally. It thus included, for the only times during the
existence of the Great General Staff up to 1914, a section for the general evaluation of
intelligence. The job of this Intelligence Branch mainly consisted of receiving the
immense flow of data, which is far greater in war than in peace, of picking out the
important items, of judging their probable veracity, of assembling them into overall
reports, and of passing them to the Operations Branch, which issued the orders of the
chief of the general staff of the field army. With the return of peace, the objections to
intelligence resumed their sway. The Intelligence Branch was dissolved, and
intelligence reverted to its indeterminate and subaltern status.
In one area, however, it preserved in peace the gains made just before the start of
Prussia's war with Austria. The area was espionage; the organization became the
forerunner of World War II's legendary Abwehr.
On 25 March 1866, Helmuth Count von Moltke, chief of the general staff of the
army, established an Intelligence Bureau on an emergency basis to get information he
lacked about his prospective enemy. At the end of May, a few days before hostilities
began, the bureau received from a young south German officer then in Vienna news
that Austria was setting up a Northern army under the command of Ludwig von
Benedek. This suggested to Moltke that the Austrians would advance in a unified force
in a single direction, not in any encircling or pincers movement. He perfected his own
plans. A couple of weeks later, another agent brought to Berlin the order of battle of
the Austrian army, together with some profiles of its more important commanders.
This agent was destined to become the greatest in Germany's history.
He was Baron August Schluga, 25, slim, blond, blue-eyed. Born in Zsolna,
Hungary (now Zilina, Czechoslovakia), he had studied at the Polytechnical Institute in
Vienna, had joined an Austrian infantry regiment, and had fought "very bravely" at
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Magenta and Solferino in 1859. He had been described as a capable officer suited for a
general staff post. But he resigned in 1863 just before taking the examination for the
Austrian War School, saying he wanted to marry and to manage personally the estates
he would gain. His credentials apparently enabled him to penetrate the Austrian
headquarters as a journalist and obtain the information he brought to Berlin. After
Moltke thrashed the Austrians in a seven-weeks' war, he made the Intelligence Bureau
permanent and placed it directly under him.
During its first half-century, the Intelligence Bureau bounced back and forth
from one unit of the Great General Staff to another. In 1889, with the creation of a
layer of deputy chiefs of the general staff called, in an apparent historical allusion,
"Oberquartiermeister," it went to the IIIrd Oberquartiermeister, or O. Qu. III.
Thenceforth it carried the designation by which in World War I it became famous-
III b. The constant rise in its funds during those same years to an amount greater than
any European country except Russia enabled what had been a tiny office to enlarge.
By 1901, 124 officers and men directed agent activities from war intelligence posts in
Belgium, Switzerland, England, Italy, Spain, Luxemburg, Denmark, and Sweden, and
Rumania.
They aimed above all at the most secret enemy documents-those disclosing his
deployment plans to concentrate his armies for the first, decisive battle. And with
France, Germany's chief enemy, they partly succeeded.
Schluga had, after the war of 1866, gone to Paris, where he delivered information
to the Prussian military attache before the Franco-Prussian War. III b designated him
"Agent 17."
He came to be regarded by the Germans as "the ideal of a major agent." A
charming, well-educated, aristocratic man whose head resembled Bismarck's, he
remained somewhat of a mystery to III b, who never knew his sources, his other
activities, or even whether he lived in Paris under his own or another name. He
fended off such inquiries, arguing that III b could be concerned only with his
performance. During the 40 years of peace between the wars of 1870 and of
1914, III b kept him virtually on ice. Though he continued to report, often amusingly,
the agency spoke to him only once a year, preserving him from suspicion, and for
service in a catastrophe.
World War I
The plan worked to perfection. Some time before the outbreak of World War I,
Agent 17 furnished Germany with a document of which spymasters dream. It detailed
how the French would deploy some of their forces on the fifth day of their
mobilization. With this coup, one of the greatest in the history of espionage, III b
seemed to justify its existence and all the money that it had spent, for it had provided
Germany with what appeared to be a key for the defeat of the counterattacking
armies of France in a cataclysm that was sure to come.
A pistol shot in Sarajevo in 1914 detonated the cataclysm.
The German Army's Field Service Regulations of 1908, in force when World
War I began, declared-as previous editions had done-that the most definite
intelligence comes from visual observation and that obtaining this falls chiefly to the
cavalry. But the army's 10 cavalry divisions failed to push deeply beyond the enemy
foreposts at the start of the war and find out what was going on behind his front.
Trench warfare then quashed any new hopes for it.
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During such warfare, the bulk of enemy intelligence was acquired-as it always
had been-by the visual observations of the fighting troops. Most of it was physical
evidence. The men in the trenches reported the digging of new trenches and the
installation of machine-gun nests. They sent out patrols to look more closely, to
capture prisoners, and perhaps to obtain documents. And during the battle i:Lelf, they
could spot new enemy positions, detect new tactics, take prisoners, capture new
weapons.
Their basic information was supplemented by new sensing devices. Sound- and
light-ranging units, for example, fixed the location to an enemy gun, enabling the
German artillery to bombard and destroy it.
The tool of reconnaissance that made the most spectacular progress during World
War I was, of course, aircraft. This activity expanded so rapidly that it had to be
centralized at General Headquarters after only eight months of war. Where speed was
paramount, as in artillery spotting and during the progress of a battle, reconnaissance
was visual. The observers radioed in the fall of shot, or dropped notes about enemy
actions.
But it was photography that gave aerial reconnaissance its greatest meaning. The
introduction of vertical photographs during 1915 made it evident that they could yield
far more information than the naked eye. By 1918, German cameras were
photographing from the air each week an area larger than Connecticut. Aerial
photography became Germany's chief means of military reconnaissance. The
enormous influence that this new source of intelligence had on the operations of both
sides was shown most dramatically in a single datum. After 1917, both Allied and
Central powers so feared its apperceptions that neither dared move troops in daylight
hours.
Communications Intelligence
In the opening days of the war, the radio station of the German fortress at
Konigsberg, in East Prussia, intercepted several Russian army radiograms in the clear.
They disclosed the intentions of the Russian forces moving ponderously into East
Prussia in such detail that the German commander in the east, Paul von Hindenburg,
and his chief of staff, Erich Ludendorff, gained a knowledge of enemy intentions
unprecedented in the whole of military history. With it, they enveloped, cut up, and
destroyed an entire Russian army in the battle of Tannenberg, one of the few decisive
victories of the war. It gave Russia its first great push toward defeat. And it opened
German eyes to a form of intelligence they had never really considered.
After Tannenberg, the high command established radio intercept posts. The new
source of information was nurtured mainly by Captain Ludwig Voit, the father of
communications intelligence in the German army. When, at the end of 1914, aged 32,
he became chief of the General Headquarters radio station, he set up the
Cryptanalytic Station West within it. Though it could never quite overcome France's
superiority in this area (France solved German diplomatic codes, for example, though
the Germans never solved the French), in the east radio intelligence played a role of
high importance. "We were always warned by the wireless messages of the Russian
staff of the positions where troops were being concentrated for any new undertaking,"
said one high German commander. And with the help of these warnings, the Germans
defeated Russia.
More verbal intelligence came from enemy trench telephones. Early in 1915, a
32-year-old telegraph inspector, Otto Arendt, devised an apparatus to overhear these
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conversations by picking up and amplifying the return earth current. By 1918, 292
such apparatuses were in service, pouring out floods of frontline intelligence.
Espionage
Major Walther Nicolai, an energetic, blondish general staff officer of medium
height, in his mid-thirties, headed III b throughout World War I. He ran the spy
agency exactly as he would have led a regiment in the field, for he was a Prussian
officer, who did his duty wherever he was assigned. He was far from being a
mysterious spymaster, and indeed he claimed, "I myself have never seen a spy and
never spoken to one." It was his way of saying that he believed his own main job was
less in supervising espionage than in advising his superiors of its results.
By 1917, he commanded about 150 officers. Many served directly under him at
General Headquarters, but others worked in Berlin, in regional posts, at lower
headquarters on the western front, and in the headquarters for the eastern and
southeastern theaters. Most of the agents were run by the nine regional War
Intelligence Posts. Of these, Antwerp's headed from early 1915 by Dr. Elsbeth
Schragmuller, the famous "Fri ulein Doktor," was perhaps the most effective. In mid-
December 1915, Antwerp controlled 62 of III b's 337 agents in the west; three months
later; Dr. Schragmtiller had almost doubled her number and had raised the fraction of
active agents from two-thirds to three-quarters.
III b's best-known spy was, of course, Mata Hari. The idea of using the famous
dancer came from a III b officer stationed in Kleve, Baron von Mirbach. Nicolai met
her in the Domhotel in Cologne, apparently early in 1916. He put her up in the hotel
Frankfurter Hof in Frankfurt-am-Main for her training. Captain Roepell, then leader
of the War Intelligence Post Dusseldorf, who prudently stayed in a different hotel,
instructed her in political and military matters. Dr. Schragmuller laid out her trip for
her and taught her how to make observations and write reports. Herr Habersack of the
Antwerp post showed her how to use invisible ink. Then, designated Agent H-21, she
vanished into enemy territory. Roepell received two or three letters in secret ink from
her at cover addresses; they contained nothing important. Early in 1917, the French
intercepted and solved a message from the German military attache in Madrid
requesting that she be paid. They caught her, and shot her at dawn in the courtyard of
the forbidding fortress of Vincennes.
Though Mata Hari became an eponym for "spy," the most successful German
agent of the war remained undetected throughout his lifetime and unknown for years
afterward. This was Agent 17-Schluga. It was he who, before the outbreak of war,
had delivered to the German high command information on the deployment of some
French forces on the fifth day of mobilization. This information had not realized the
great hopes placed in it by Germany's master spy, for the German commanders were
unclear as to whether or not a suspected variant of France's Plan XVII had been
activated, and this worry prevented them from exploiting Schluga's intelligence.
Disappointment over the failure of his supreme effort may have contributed to
the break in health that Schluga, then 73, suffered soon afterward. He went to
Germany for a rest, but by May of 1915 was back in Paris in full activity. He sent in
reports every second day through a messenger system tailored to the weaknesses of the
border controls between France and Switzerland; they usually reached III b's Report
Collection Station South at Ltrrach, in southwestern Germany just across the border
from Switzerland's Basel, within 48 hours. His report of 9 June 1915, which arrived on
the 11th, disclosed: "English complaining over lack of munitions. They regret that the
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promised support of the French attack of north of Arras is not possible on account of
munition insufficiency."
Schluga's sources consisted mainly of members of the legislature and personnel in
the war ministry. But their information was incomplete, mainly because Joseph Joffre,
the commander in chief, and Alexandre Millerand, the war minister, kept their plans
secret from the legislators. In general Schluga could throw light only on tactical
matters. Moreover, his reports were sometimes true, sometimes false, reflecting his
lags in reporting the constant changes of view in high French quarters. On the
political, economic, and psychological situation, however, Schluga was well informed.
His reports seemed accurate, as far as they went. And this very accuracy nearly bred
disaster.
The presence of so veteran, so reliable, and so well placed an agent as Schluga
overimpressed the then chief of the general staff of the field army, Erich von
Falkenhayn. He insisted upon seeing Schluga's reports himself. He then read them,
not as contributory, as part of the whole intelligence picture, but as determinative.
And Schluga, whether consciously or not, repeatedly emphasized French weaknesses
in character and in government. This reinforced Falkenhayn's inclination to
underestimate the French will and ability to attack. Consequently, in the summer of
1915 he discounted clear indications of a threatening offensive: the bringing up of
troops, the construction of installations for an attack, even the definite statements of
prisoners. The inactivity of the Allies in midsummer and Schluga's report confirmed
his view of the general situation as hopeless for the Allies. Had he continued to rely
solely on Schluga, he might have suffered a serious defeat. But finally the
authoritative tone of the heavy guns overruled the spy. Falkenhayn moved to repel the
Allied advance.
Schluga continued in his work until ill health forced him to quit. His final report
arrived 5 March 1916. He then went to Germany, where, after a year of receiving his
pension from III b, he died, regarded by his chiefs as "the most important
phenomenon in the entire history of espionage, so far as that history is known to us."
But if III b succeeded with Schluga, it failed in three critical areas. One was the
United States. Nicolai held the astonishing view that it was "no business of the
intelligence service" to obtain information about U.S. strength that might be brought
to bear in Europe. III b did not even begin to prepare espionage against its new enemy
until several months after the entry of the United States into the war. And in the end,
its total espionage effort against the nation whose efforts would eventually defeat
Germany consisted of the massive total of seven agents.
III b's second failure lay in inadequate economic espionage, during a war in
which economics increasingly determined the outcome. Third, it failed to learn in
advance and warn the troops and the high command of the frightening appearance on
the battlefield of a new and epoch-making weapon-the tank.
The Imperial German Navy naturally utilized intelligence as well. The Admiralty
Staff had four sections in it: an Intelligence Branch for reconnaissance and agents, an
Observation and Cryptanalytic Service, a Military-Political Branch, and a Foreign
Navies Branch to evaluate the material. Communications intelligence in particular
evolved into an effective organization. Lieutenant Martin Braune, a north German in
his early forties, recognized the importance of the work. He created a 458-man
organization with headquarters in Neumtinster, the north-German site of a major
radio station, and supplemented by almost two dozen intercept and direction-finding
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posts along the German coasts and inland and by floating units aboard German naval
vessels. During the Battle of Jutland, his code-breakers fed the High Seas Fleet
information on the position and movements of the British Grand Fleet, and in mid-
October 1917, a team aboard the cruiser Brummer solved parts of an English message
that disclosed the sailing of a convoy from Norway to Scotland guarded only by two
destroyers. The Brummer and another cruiser sank both destroyers and 9 of the 12
merchantmen.
The Screening Function
No commander had the time to read all the intelligence that came in. The first
half of 1917 produced 32,000 prisoner-of-war interrogation reports from just a single
post in Berlin. Sometimes 800 Arendt reports (trench telephone intercepts) reached an
army headquarters in a day. To pick out the useful reports, to fill in an incomplete
picture from one source with material from another, to build up an image of the
enemy forces and predict what they would do-this was the task of the agencies that
evaluated intelligence.
Since no intelligence officers had existed in peacetime at the Troops General
Staff, wartime commanders found it necessary to assign this work. At the level of
division, army, and army groups, which had not existed in the prewar army, their
designations varied widely: I e, I d, M.S.O. (for Melde-Sammel-Offizier, or Report
Collection Officer), I b. Only at corps, which had existed in peacetime, did some
uniformity appear: I c. (The roman numeral I indicated the staff's first, or command,
section; the appended small letter designated a subsection.) All these officers focused
mainly upon the enemy unit at the corresponding level opposite them.
The general evaluation of operational and strategic intelligence for the entire
German army fell upon the Intelligence Branch of General Headquarters, formed
upon mobilization and renamed after 20 June 1917 the Foreign Armies Branch. From
shortly after the beginning to the end of the war, Major von Rauch, "an experienced
and careful General Staff officer," headed it. The branch's staff of 5 officers and 2
officials plus clerks at the start of the war rose to 21 officers and 10 officials at, the end.
They sifted the enormous mass of incoming data to determine the enemy's activities
and capabilities and possibly his intentions.
Some of Foreign Armies' reports served background purposes: studies of the
English and French replacement situations, a 23-page overview of the war
organization of the French army. More valuable to the high command were its
predictions of Allied moves. One dealt with the mighty Allied offensive on the Somme
in the summer of 1916.
As early as the end of February, German pilots had observed the construction of
new barracks and other offensive installations in the area. Soon thereafter the number
of British divisions increased. Patrols and other reconnaissances showed that these
divisions stayed at the front only briefly; apparently they were being blooded for
future use. By the end of April more than eight British divisions stood opposite four
German in a certain sector. Air reconnaissance showed that the offensive would not be
limited to the British forces but would also include French. On 23 June the Allies
began to shell German batteries. The next day a more general heavy fire began. Allied
mining activity increased. A prisoner reported that an infantry attack would begin in
a few days. And at 8:30 a.m. on 1 July, after the drumf ire preparation, the storm broke
"in full accord with the observations, expectations, and reports."
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But Foreign Armies could also err. When the French mounted their great
offensive in July of 1918, they were stronger by almost a fifth than the Germans knew.
And the attack succeeded.
Intelligence Comes into Its Own
World War I, a watershed in so many ways, proved one in intelligence as well. In
her previous wars, Germany had distracted the chiefs of the Intelligence Branch with
secondary duties: political matters in 1866, political and press in 1870. In World War
I, after a single blunder at the start of the war, the branch chief concentrated strictly
on his work. In 1870, Prussia had employed-outside of the cavalry-only a handful
of men in intelligence: some balloonists, a 20-man field photography detachment,
III b's spymasters. Between 1914 and 1918, Germany assigned thousands of men to
intelligence. She evidently found them more useful doing this work than firing rifles
from trench parapets.
The reason for this new importance of intelligence lay in the rise of verbal
intelligence to preponderance over physical. An understanding of this and its effects
requires making the distinction between the two clear.
Basically, verbal intelligence derives from words, physical intelligence from
things. If the object of intelligence is a stolen order, a report on troop morale, or an
intercepted order-that is, if it is words-the intelligence is verbal. If the object of
intelligence is not words but other entities, the intelligence is physical, Among the
objects of physical intelligence are bodies of troops, aerial photographs of
fortifications, the noise of tank motors.
It is important to note that the difference between the two does not rest on how
the stimulus is acquired: the eye both reads a report and sees enemy troops. Nor does it
rest on the method of gaining the information: a spy or prisoner can verbally report on
the presence of tanks or an enemy plan. Nor, finally, does it rest on the method of
transmission: the presence of tanks can be passed by telephone, an enemy plan, by
photography. The difference rests solely on the objects of intelligence itself. Verbal
objects mean verbal intelligence; nonverbal mean physical. This distinction has
perhaps little value in intelligence operations. But it is the key to understanding how
intelligence evolved, why some forms are superior to others, and consequently why
countries who exploit these forms best enjoy intelligence supremacy.
The explanation starts from the observation that war has both a physical and a
mental component. All actions of war, therefore, affect the combatants physically or
mentally or both. Artillery can kill or demoralize. Because war is, as Clausewitz said,
"an act of force," the elements of "physical force"-men and guns-exert the most
influence on the outcome. Killing is more decisive than demoralizing. The
psychological elements, such as morale and tactics, though "among the most
important in war," are less determinative. The best disciplined company cannot stop
an army. As with artillery, the impact of intelligence takes two forms, depending upon
whether the physical or the mental component transmits it.
In the physical realm, intelligence magnifies strength. Knowing where an enemy
will attack enables a commander to dispose his men more efficiently. Psychologically,
intelligence improves command. Knowing that a town ahead is free of the enemy
relieves a commander of anxiety and facilitates his direction of his advancing troops.
These are the ultimate purposes of military intelligence.
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It might seem that verbal evidence should serve the mental component of war
and physical, the physical. But in fact they cross. To begin with, war is a physical
encounter. The men, guns, supplies, and so on must be present, waiting to kill the
enemy and occupy his land, for the encounter to take place at all. The presence of
these objects of physical intelligence affirms the likelihood of the encounter with
greater probability than a plan, for men cannot move guns or troops as easily as they
can rewrite orders. This relative certainty helps the commander make better decisions.
Thus, physical evidence serves the mental component of war.
The plans and orders that are objects of verbal evidence, on the other hand,
cannot kill. The enemy must realize them in physical form first. This step gives the
commander who obtains verbal intelligence time. With this time he can shift his
soldiers into the most endangered sectors, in effect adding to his forces. Thus, verbal
evidence serves the physical component of war, and because the component is the
more important, verbal evidence possesses greater importance than physical.
The time that verbal intelligence gives a commander puts his knowledge of the
enemy ahead of the present situation-in effect, it foretells what the enemy will do.
Physical intelligence, on the other hand, just reports on the present situation. The
fundamental difference between them is that physical evidence merely confirms
enemy intentions, while verbal evidence predicts them.
For the first 4,000 years of warfare, physical intelligence supplied nearly all
information. World War I changed this. The conditions of the war fostered the new
kinds of verbal information-gathering engendered by the French and industrial
revolutions-many prisoner interrogations, a daily press, above all radio and telephone
intercepts. Verbal intelligence became more important than physical. It gave enough
commanders enough time in enough cases to win perceptible numbers of victories. It
awarded Germany its greatest triumph-.Tannenberg-and contributed substantially
to the defeat of Russia. Largely because of it, intelligence became what it had never
been before: a significant instrument of war.
At last it convinced the German generals of its value. They finally acknowledged
this in the single most important event in the history of German military intelligence.
In contradistinction to their disbanding of the intelligence branches of general
headquarters at the end of the 1866 and 1870 wars, in 1919 they set up a permanent
unit for the general evaluation of intelligence for the first time. Intelligence had
arrived.
It had done so in the pattern of World War I, and it persisted in this pattern.
Almost all the sources of information of World War II had existed in World War I,
and the German army of 1939 reproduced many of the organizations for exploiting
these sources that were operating in 1918. In the same way, the heightened
acquisitiveness of intelligence, its potential for victory, its recognition (though
reluctant) by the generals as an essential factor in war-these characteristics, forged in
the original total war, endured in its successor. The First World War shaped German
military intelligence in the Second.
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THE MAN WHO BROKE PURPLE: A LIFE OF THE WORLD'S GREATEST
CRYPTOGRAPHER, COL. WILLIAM F. FRIEDMAN. By Ronald W. Clark
(Little, Brown, Boston, 1977).
In describing the career of the late William F, Friedman (1891-1969), the author
does a creditable job where he bases his statements on information provided by
Friedman's wife, Elizabeth. She collaborated with her husband in practically all of his
unclassified cryptologic work' and, in her own right, is well known as a cryptologist.
The first five chapters of the book are its best. These tell how the Friedmans
became involved in cryptology. They describe the more important cryptologic studies
conducted by the Friedmans while working for a wealthy eccentric, Colonel George
Fabyan, the head and financial sponsor of the Riverbank Laboratories. They also
explain how Friedman's exceptional talents in cryptanalysis came to the attention of
the War Department.
Friedman's work during World War I as a cryptanalytic officer in the Radio
Intelligence Section of the American Expeditionary Force was outstanding. At the end
of the war he returned to the Riverbank Laboratories. There he solved two machine
ciphers, claimed to be indecipherable by other experts, which were under
consideration for adoption by the U.S. Signal Corps. These accomplishments led to his
employment in 1921 in the Office of the Chief Signal Officer, Washington, as the
chief cryptanalyst in charge of the War Department's code and cipher production
program.
In the mid-twenties, when the U.S. Navy became interested in the Hebern
electro-mechanical cipher, Friedman questioned its security. He accepted a challenge
to solve a set of messages enciphered by it. He not only recovered the clear texts of all
the messages, but also reconstructed, in full detail, the wiring arrangement of the
complex electrical commutating system employed in the device for its enciphering
and deciphering functions.
It was these achievements that established Friedman's reputation among his
contemporaries as America's ablest machine cipher analyst.
When Yardley's "Black Chamber" was abolished by the State Department in
1929, the stage was set for the War Department to undertake the development of its
own code-breaking operations. War Department G-2 had been receiving intelligence
produced from coded messages of certain foreign governments and, in return, had
been supplying a portion of the funds for the Black Chamber operation.
The responsibility for peacetime interception and analysis of foreign code and
cipher messages for military intelligence purposes now was given to the Chief Signal
Officer. G-2 retained its responsibilities for establishing priorities and for the
intelligence processing of message translations produced by the Signal Corps. The
Signal Intelligence Service was formed, and in 1930 Friedman's duties were expanded
to include the recruitment of additional personnel to be trained in all the processes
' Several of Friedman's early (1919-1935) handbooks on cryptography, long out of print, have recently
been republished by Aegean Park Press, Laguna Hills, Calif., as parts of a cryptographic series. Ed.
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and techniques of code-making and code-breaking known to him. G-2 released to the
Chief Signal Officer funds previously provided to the Black Chamber, and this
permitted the early employment of a small staff, so that Friedman was able to start his
training program by late spring of 1930. This activity survived the tight military
budgets of the depression years and was expanded to several dozen employees by the
end of 1940.
The author, Ronald Clark, has been severely handicapped by the fact that from
the time Friedman took on the job of developing the Army's Signal Intelligence
System cryptologic capability in 1930, his official duties were conducted in secrecy.
Knowledge of his work was limited to those individuals in the U.S. Army and Navy
who were actually involved in cryptologic activities or who were responsible for their
management. Very little authentic information about Friedman's work has been made
public, except for a few isolated facts revealed during the Pearl Harbor inquiry and in
special reports to the U.S. Congress by the War Department (in support of the 1956
award of $100,000 to Friedman in payment for inventions he could not exploit
commercially because they were held in secrecy status by the U.S. Government). Even
Mrs. Friedman was not allowed to have knowledge of her husband's classified duties.
Some of those who have written about the cryptologic operations of the U.S. have
allowed themselves, either through speculation or outright fabrication, to enlarge upon
the few facts available. They have generated a considerable body of misinformation
which now forms the popular concept of code-breaking operations. Clark has drawn
upon this body of misinformation for almost all that he has written about Friedman's
official accomplishments. In so doing, he has painted a distorted picture of the more
important aspects of Friedman's career.
The Pearl Harbor inquiry revealed that the U.S. Army and Navy cryptanalysts
were collaborating closely in the exploitation of Japanese diplomatic code and cipher
systems. They could promptly decrypt all Japanese diplomatic messages intercepted
during the months before the Pearl Harbor attack. The Purple was the most important
of these systems, and it was broken by the group responsible for the Army's work on
Japanese diplomatic intercepts. Its recovery was too great a task for one person to
accomplish.
The reconstruction of the Purple cipher machine and the keying system used
with it took approximately 18 months. It was the result of a concerted effort by a team
made up of proficient Japanese linguists, a topflight electronics engineer, accounting
machine experts (computers were not then available), and cryptanalysts specially
skilled in machine cipher analysis. Friedman personally contributed to the breaking of
the Purple system, notably in the selection and assignment of personnel to the Purple
team as well as in his part-time participation in the diagnosis and analysis of the
system.
Those familiar with Friedman's work consider that his greatest contribution to
U.S. cryptology was his influence on the joint Army-Navy development and
production of the cipher machine used extensively by both services during World War
II for high-level classified communications. The consequences to our war effort if our
high-level cryptographic systems had been broken or even partially exploited by the
enemy are terrifying to contemplate.
Although Clark discusses Friedman's work on this machine, his remarks are
mostly directed at Friedman's difficulties in obtaining monetary compensation for his
inventions. He tends to ignore the fact that Friedman's part in the development and
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production of the machine in time for World War II was his most significant and
praiseworthy cryptologic achievement.
The Man Who Broke Purple is certainly not the best, and in some respects may
be one of the worst of the recently published books on secret government operations.
The career of William F. Friedman and his contributions to the security of the nation
deserve fairer treatment.
Frank B. Rowlett
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VERY SPECIAL INTELLIGENCE, by Patrick Beesly (Hamish Hamilton, London,
1977). [An American edition is to be published by Doubleday & Co., Garden
City, N.Y., in spring 1978.]
Very Special Intelligence is the first complete account of the decrypting and
operational use by the British of German naval ciphers, particularly those used with
the German U-Boats. The author, Patrick Beesly, was Deputy Chief of the U-Boat
Tracking Room at the Admiralty during the period from 1939 to 1945, and was,
therefore, at the very heart of British Naval Intelligence. With that personal
background, and with access to most of the pertinent naval records, Beesly has
produced a clear and well-balanced account of the Admiralty's wartime Operational
Intelligence Centre (O.I.C.), in the Office of Naval Intelligence.
The basic German naval cipher was generated by the "Enigma" keyboard
machine, comprising a system of rotors, levers, and wires whose combinations
extended into the sextillions (an integer followed by 21 zeros). The German naval
cipher was the most secure of the Services. The German Army and Air Force ciphers
were broken early in the war, but the Navy cipher was not broken until 1941 with the
capture on 8 May of the submarine U-110 and an Enigma machine complete with
instructions.
The wartime British Code and Cipher Centre was located in Bletchley Park, or
"B.P.," an estate outside of London. Through the acquisition of the Enigma machine
and the development-initially by the Poles-of electronic computers, plus some of
the keenest British and American brains, B.P. for four years produced the most
priceless source of enemy intelligence. The full story of that cryptographic operation,
however, must await publication of the official history of British wartime intelligence
now being prepared by Prof. F. H. Hinsley.
It was Group Captain Winterbotham who first openly used the word "Ultra" in
his book The Ultra Secret. In naval communications, "Ultra" was used as a designator
to indicate decrypted material in a dispatch or other communication. The breaking of
the German naval ciphers was the most carefully guarded secret of World War II. As
recently as 1973 Admiral Doenitz was still unaware of the Allied success. The British
use the term "Special Intelligence" to designate this type of material, and it is so used
in Beesly's book.
During the critical period of the Battle of the Atlantic from 1941-1943, the
Germans also were reading much of the British naval ciphers. It was only the
incredible foolishness of the German U-Boat Command itself that finally convinced
the British that their naval messages were being decrypted by the Germans. A signal
to U-Boats actually revealed that information being transmitted was derived from
British dispatches. The subsequent changes in the British codes and ciphers brought to
an end this profitable field of German radio intelligence.'
' Students of these matters are referred to Dr. Juergen Rowher, The Critical Convoy Battles of March
1943 (Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, Md., 1977). Beesly describes Dr. Rowher as having "unrivaled
knowledge of the German Navy and the Battle of the Atlantic." When Dr. Rowher originally published his
book in Germany, the Ultra secret had not yet become public knowledge. In the American edition cited
above, however, Rowher has added a scholarly and fascinating Appendix 10, "Notes. on the Security of the
German Decoding Systems," which is important reading. It specifies that for a time the Germans were
indeed reading British instructions to convoys. Ed.
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Historians generally consider that the turning point in the Battle of the Atlantic
came during the summer of 1943 following the sinking of more than 90 U-boats. The
spring of that year had been disastrous in Allied ship losses, with tonnage exceeding
any previous period. The U-boat fleet was at its prime, while the Allies had not yet
attained the necessary strength in long-range aircraft, surface escorts, and carriers.
Also, timely radio intelligence had been sparse. After that period, the Allies certainly
had the distinct edge, especially because the Germans had lost so many of their
experienced U-Boat captains and crews. Beesly notes: "The U-Boat men never gave up
the fight right up to the last day of the war. They were always ready to believe
Doenitz's promise that, if only they would hold on, new weapons and new U-Boats
would turn the tide; they never ceased to make the sacrifices which he called for, and
this despite the fact that, out of 39,000 members of the U-Boat Arm engaged on
operations throughout the war, fatal casualties reached the dreadful total of 28,000."
In the background, however, a whole new ball game was emerging: a fleet
working up of highly sophisticated Type XXI 1600-tonners and smaller Type XXIII
U-Boats, with snorkels permitting underwater speeds exceeding most of our escorts.
Once these boats became operational, it would be touch-and-go all over again.
In addition to these technical advances, including a new high-speed torpedo, the
Germans were improving their surface radar and radar detection (search receivers),
and introducing a revolutionary communication method of "flash" transmission-an
entire message sent in seconds rather than minutes by the usual hand key method.
Such brief radio transmissions would have literally scrapped our system of high-
frequency (HF/DF) bearings and fixes, and could have cut seriously into the
interception of U-Boat radio traffic-the very grist of the Ultra mill.
It was imperative, therefore, that the Allies crush German seapower before these
ominous developments became operational. Here is where Ultra intelligence did
yeoman service, for it enabled the Allied so to weaken the German Navy after 1943
that we could hasten the European victory while there was still time. It was
providential that the periscope vibration problem of the new U-Boats delayed
development so long that only one Type XXI 1600-tonner became operational before
the German surrender.
One factor, often overlooked in the breaking of the Enigma cipher, was the sheer
volume of U-Boat radio traffic stemming from Doenitz's direct control of U-Boat
tactics, especially those involving U-Boat attack concentrations, such as the "Wolf
Packs." He not only insisted on complete information from his commanders, but also
would himself personally direct individual U-Boat tactics. No such volumn of radio
traffic-so urgently needed by cryptanalysts-would have been available in normal
submarine operations. But then, Doenitz's methods almost succeeded!
Beesly lays great stress on the unusual ability of Commander Roger Winn, the
brilliant London barrister, who headed the Admiralty's U-Boat Tracking Room-and
rightfully so. This reviewer, as Winn's opposite American number, worked closely
with him during the years 1942-1945, and came to recognize and appreciate Winn's
great contribution to the winning of the Atlantic Battle.
In evaluating Special Intelligence, Beesly balances its contribution against other
factors: Anti-submarine technical breakthroughs; the growing skills of escort personnel
and their tactics; the availability of adequate planes and ships; and the brilliant
analyses of the Admiralty's Operational Intelligence Centre. As Beesly clearly shows,
there were many lapses in the flow of Ultra intelligence, and, even when the German
naval ciphers were being broken, the time delays of even a few days were frequently
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critical in terms of operational usefulness. For example, the sinking of the Bismarck
resulted from HF/DF and clear analysis by O.I.C., not from Special Intelligence
sources. On the other hand, Scharnhorst's sinking resulted from excellent and timely
radio intelligence. Incidentally, Beesly gives graphic and gripping play-by-play
accounts of these actions.
Coming down to the bottom line: How valuable was Special Intelligence in the
winning of the Battle of the Atlantic? Beesly puts it this way:
"The U-Boats were defeated in 1943 because, at long last, the Allied forces were
supplied with the right weapons and, above all, with 10 cm. radar. But without Special
Intelligence the victory might not have been achieved until much later and at a far
greater cost. Who can say what the consequences would have been if such a delay had
prevented, as it certainly would have done, an invasion of France in 1944? Would
Russia have remained in the war? Would the V-weapons have knocked out Britain?
Would the new types of U-Boats have arrived in time to turn the tide in the Atlantic?
"Wars, in the end, have to be won by men in ships, aircraft, tanks or trenches.... The
author would like to think that Special Intelligence and the way in which O.I.C.
handled it at least made the task of the Allied seamen and airmen less difficult."
Perhaps the most significant lesson of intelligence that came out of the Battle of
the Atlantic was the focusing of all intelligence sources, including Ultra, in an
Operational Intelligence Centre in the case of the British, and in a Tenth Fleet of
COMINCH in the case of the Americans.' Both organizations had the full intelligence
and operational picture and could, therefore, act with knowledge and decision as no
other naval activity or command could act. The Tenth Fleet not only combined
intelligence and operations, including Convoy & Routing, but also Operations
Research that gave scientific guidance of a high order in developing and improving
anti-submarine weapons and tactics.
Kenneth Alward Knowles, Capt. U.S. Navy (ret.)
2 See Studies VII/2 p. A19, review by Kenneth A. Knowles of Ladislas Farago, The Tenth Fleet (Ivan
Obolensky, New York, 1962).
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DULLES: A BIOGRAPHY OF ELEANOR, ALLEN, AND JOHN FOSTER DULLES
AND THEIR FAMILY NETWORK. By Leonard Mosley (Dial Press, New
York, 1978).
This book is an engaging, gossipy, slipshod, and frequently inaccurate piece of
work.
The British author, Leonard Mosley, set out early in 1976 to write a biography on
John Foster Dulles, Allen Welsh Dulles, and their sister Eleanor, and how their lives
intertwined. He started with good credentials for the job: almost 20 volumes of
biography, and other non-fiction largely dealing with Europe, the Middle East, and
Far East. Three, including Dulles, have been Book-of-the-Month Club selections.
When he began his latest work, he had just published Lindbergh: A Biography
(Doubleday & Co., New York, 1976), which was on its way to being a best-seller and
has recently appeared in paperback. He had dealt with intelligence work before in
The Cat and the Mice (Harper and Brothers, New York, 1958) about John Eppler, a
World War II spy in Cairo for General Rommel. Mosley also had extensive journalistic
experience, including service as war correspondent for the London Sunday Times.
In this biography, Mosley has tried to entwine the lives of the three "Dullest," but
more often it presents three parallel lines. The author will describe John Foster's and
Eleanor's or Allen's activities at a given point in time, indicating where they may have
touched each other. Thus, the book is somewhat chopped up by date sequences. In this
review, I do not propose to discuss those portions of the book which deal with Mrs.
Eleanor Dulles (who resumed her maiden name after.the death of her husband), or
with John Foster Dulles (although the latter's conversation with the President in the
spring of 1960, described on p. 465, must have been difficult inasmuch as the
Secretary died in May 1959). It should be noted, however, that Mosley thought most
highly of the sister ("Readers of the narrative will have gathered that of all the Dulles
clan, she is the one I most admire"). As a journalist, Mosley had often covered John
Foster Dulles in various world capitals and had met him on occasion; Allen he scarcely
knew. He spent much time with Mrs. Eleanor Dulles, interviewing her for this book,
and many of the family details and much other material apparently came from her.
Mrs. Dulles is very unhappy with some of the inaccurate results and has written
Mosely telling him so. It is also obvious that Mosley had a considerable dislike for John
Foster Dulles and is highly critical of most of his work as Secretary of State, praising
only his negotiation of the Japanese Peace Treaty before he became Secretary. On
Allen Dulles he is more ambivalent, showing neither the dislike he felt for the brother
nor the high praise he bestowed on the sister. Beyond the foregoing remarks, I restrict
my comments to the aspects of this volume I can best assess-those parts dealing with
Allen Dulles and the Central Intelligence Agency.
It is very hard to summarize Mosley's view of CIA or of the accomplishments of
Allen Dulles as DCI. One has the impression, from the author's use of Harold
A. R."Kim" Philby's letters to him (which Mosley includes as an appendix), that he is
inclined to accept Philby's evaluation of Dulles as "bumbling" and "lazy"-not quite
up to "the post he held;" certainly not as tough-minded as General Walter Bedell
Smith, his predecessor as DCI. On the other hand, Mosley on occasion tends to cloak
Allen Dulles, in operational matters, with an omniscience which may be as overdrawn
on one side as Philby's derogatory comments are on the other. And, of course, Mosley
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is obsessed with Allen's apparent bias for covert action operations-partly because
they have loomed so large recently in the media, and partly because the author has no
real knowledge of Allen Dulles' work on the many clandestine collection operations in
which CIA was engaged at the time under his supervision and direction as DCI
(although the Berlin Tunnel is mentioned).
One also receives the impression, however, that were Mosley to have had an
evening over drinks with Allen Dulles, he would have enjoyed it hugely. It is also
obvious that Mosley much prefers the extroverted nature and more liberal views of
Allen Dulles to those of this brother; John Foster Dulles always suffers by comparison
in this book.
Happily, Dulles is not another volume in the field of "attack literature" against
the Agency. Rather, in those portions dealing with CIA, it is almost a disconnected
series of anecdotes as they pop up in a given time frame. The Agency also gets some
praise for its role in U-2 and other overhead reconnaissance development. But this
book is hardly detailed enough or accurate enough to be a good history of CIA in the
Dulles regime. Those who are searching for a more definitive look at the Agency will
have to await another day and author.
For source material, Mosley has relied in part on many personal interviews. He
also made extensive use of the oral histories on file with the John Foster and Allen
Welsh Dulles papers at the Princeton Library-oral histories made by former
associates who knew the Dulles family well. Mosley's sourcing thus appears
authoritative, but I must urge this readership to use the book with the greatest caution
as far as facts, dates, and events are concerned. Of many of the personal interviews,
the kindest thing one can say is that the author could not have been listening very
well. There are errors in names, dates, and events, even though those who were
present tried to describe them precisely. Some of these sources say they never made
many of the statements attributed to them.
This reviewer speaks from personal experience; Mosley first came to see me on 6
April 1976, and over the next few months we met several times, including once at his
villa in the south of France. I know I tried to use meticulous care in keeping various
details straight as to time and events, but as shall become apparent in the rest of this
review, identification by Mosley as a primary source for many things that appear in
this book is at best a dubious honor which I and a number of my colleagues are anxious
to disclaim. As I read the book, I found nothing classified that I or any of my fellow
alumni told the author; in this connection we were very cautious; but Mosley fails to
reciprocate in turn with equal caution in reporting what we did tell him. The high
hopes which many of us had for the book have been sorely disappointed. As with other
Mosley books, it is well written and sounds plausible. It will probably sell quite well. It
doesn't deserve it.
Let us start with the "Prologue: The Man Upstairs." This describes a party
allegedly given at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Allen Dulles on Christmas Eve, 1968. In
the "Source Notes," the information is attributed, inter alia, to Lawrence R. Houston,
CIA's longtime General Counsel, and this reviewer. Mosley describes the arrival at the
party of Larry Houston and his wife, who is quoted directly as asking Mrs. Allen
(Clover) Dulles: "Where's Allen?" On being told that he was upstairs, she was
disturbed and whispered to her husband, "I'm worried. I think you should go upstairs
and find out what's happening to Allen." Mr. Houston went upstairs and allegedly
found Allen deathly pale, covered with sweat, and half choking as if he could not
swallow. Mr. Houston is then quoted as saying tp his colleague James Hunt, whom he
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had brought upstairs with him, "He's sick all right." They dispersed the guests and
called an ambulance to take Allen off to the hospital. Mrs. Dulles climbed into the
ambulance, with Mrs. Houston running after her to give her a hat and coat. I do not
know whether such a party actually took place or not, although I am cited as one of
the sources; what I do know is that I was not there; my records show quite clearly that
I was in Rye, New York, at that time. What is more important is that Larry Houston
tells me neither he nor his wife were at the party, and, therefore, could not have said
what they were quoted as having said. Mrs. Houston tells me she was never in the
Dulles home on Q Street until after he died, and she never called him "Allen." James
Hunt has told this reviewer he cannot recall whether there was such a party on that
date, or, if so, whether he was there, but he is certain that the events and conversations
described never happened at such an occasion.
At the top of page 10 in this "Prologue," Mosley describes Houston as having
been present during World War II when they fished the body of one of his agents out
of Salonika Harbor. Houston tells me this never happened, that as OSS Deputy Chief
for the Middle East Theater he never "ran" any agents; that he has no recollection of
any such person; and that he did not visit Salonika during the war. There are three
more errors on page 9 of the "Prologue:" (a) The statement that "No one knows the
head of KGB..." is, of course, arrant nonsense. (b) It is stated that after his retirement
Allen Dulles had started "compiling anthologies of fictional spy stories." This is unfair;
Dulles' first anthology was Great True Spy Stories (Harper and Row, New York,
1968); his only fictional anthology appeared a year later: Great Spy Stories from
Fiction (Harper and Row, New York, 1969). (c) Mosley notes that Allen Dulles, after
submitting his resignation to President Kennedy following the Bay of Pigs, "made a
recommendation about his successor. It was ignored and another man chosen.'
Whether Allen Dulles made any such recommendation I do not know. What I do
know is that President Kennedy proposed a name (Fowler Hamilton) for the
directorship which was bruited about in the press, and that Allen Dulles had sufficient
clout to kill this suggestion as totally unsuitable; it sank without further trace. The
inaccuracies of the "Prologue" to Dulles give some indication of what is to be found in
the rest of the book.
On pages 108-109, Mosley notes that General William J. Donovan "had risen
from private to the rank of colonel in the famous Fighting Irish 69th Division... " in
World War I; actually, Donovan entered service as a Captain in the New York
National Guard. Mosley goes on to say that "Donovan, though a Republican, had
always had close relations with Franklin D. Roosevelt." I do not think anybody who
knew the situation would describe the realtionship as "close." They had been
Columbia Law School classmates, but Donovan always realized that the patrician
Roosevelt had little use for the young man who had come from the wrong side of the
tracks in Buffalo. Even when he became Director of OSS, Donovan's relations with the
President were cordial but not "close"; he was never a member of the inner circle.
FDR, although greatly appreciative of Donovan's support for the President's pre-Pearl
Harbor foreign policy, was always a little leery of the Republican who had been the
candidate to succeed him as Governor of New York in 1932 and who, he feared, might
still have a post-war political career ahead of him. Nor, as Mosley suggests, was
Donovan's former law partner John Lord O'Brien the main link between the President
and the General; Donovan's chief sponsor in that regard was Secretary of the Navy
Frank Knox. Elsewhere on these same two pages Mosley describes a conversation
between Donovan and Allen Dulles on the day in late June 1940, when Wendell
Willkie received the Republican presidential nomination. According to Mosley,
Donovan revealed to Allen Dulles that "he had just returned from Europe, where he
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had been on a secret mission for the President." Donovan did not even start on that
mission until mid-July, so the conversation in that context could hardly have taken
place in late June.
Writing of 1949 on page 222, Mosley states that "Not many people, even in the
government, knew that Allen Dulles was part of the new Central Intelligence
Agency...." Dulles at the same time was not part of the CIA; he was still a partner in
the law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell in New York. Dulles had, in fact, in company
with two other New York lawyers, William H. Jackson and Mathias Correa, made a
survey of CIA before the 1948 election, at the request of the President conveyed
through the National Security Council, but he was not "part" of the CIA.
On page 239 Mosley says that President Truman "reluctantly agreed to the
creation of the CIG . . . " and that Truman had to be persuaded to create the Central
Intelligence Group and to go forward with its statutory base in the National Security
Act of 1947. Actually, it was President Truman's insistent demands on the Secretaries
of State, War, and Navy that led to the final creation of CIG and its subsequent
statutory embodiment as CIA. Truman had abolished OSS by Executive Order
effective 1 October 1945, but the only problem before him from then until he issued
his CIG directive on 22 January 1946 was the form that CIG would ultimately take. It
is almost certain that without Truman's insistence such an organization would not
have been established at that time.
Another error perhaps worth noting is Mosley's statement that the German
intelligence unit of General Gehlen "became an operating arm of OPC" (Page 274).
The Gehlen organization would have been under the general control of our collection
mechanism, then known as the Office of Special Operations-never OPC.
One also reads with interest Mosley's description of the ultimate recall of the
British SIS liaison officer in Washington, "Kim" Philby. I am not aware of what, if
any, role Allen Dulles may have played in Philby's recall following the defection of
Burgess and Maclean in May 1951. In dealing with this matter Mosley notes (on page
284) that "Four months after Allen Dulles returned to the official world of espionage,
William Jackson at last resigned ..." and Dulles became DDCI. He adds that "Just
before leaving, Jackson sent out an instruction that in the future Philby was to have
certain information withheld from him. . . ." What is certain is that the British
recalled Philby from Washington at the insistence of the then DCI, General Smith,
and Philby actually returned to England within the first 10 days of June 1951. At that
time Dulles was the DDP. He did not succeed Bill Jackson as DDCI until 3 August
1951-by which time any instructions about passing information to a long-gone
Philby would have been moot.
Mosley devotes several pages (318-323) to CIA's occasional problems with Sen.
Joseph R. McCarthy and, in particular, my efforts on 9 July 1953 in my role as CIA's
Legislative Counsel to protect William P. Bundy, a senior DDI official, from
McCarthy's demands that Bundy should appear to testify on two hours notice that
very morning before the Senator's subcommittee and explain his donation of $400 for
the defense of Alger Hiss. I remember describing these events meticulously to Mosley
on at least two occasions, but some errors still crop up, e.g., Senator McCarthy's
Permanent Investigations Subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Government
Operations becomes the Un-American Activities Committee, which existed only in the
House of Representatives. Later Mosley, quoting Bundy, says that because of CIA's
stand "nobody from the Executive Branch ever went before McCarthy again"-which
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is, of course, an error, as anyone knows who remembers the Army-McCarthy hearings
of 1954.
On page 346 Mosley talks of Frank Wisner's travels (when he was DDP)
including a boat trip into China and "a mysterious rendezvous in Prague." It is more
than doubtful that Security would have allowed Wisner, with his clearances and
knowledge, to go anywhere near China or Prague. Nor did Richard Bissell, then a
Special Assistant to Director Dulles, have anything to do with the Berlin Tunnel
operation, and Bissell has also assured this reviewer that he was not "in joint charge"
of the Guatemala operation with Tracy Barnes.
In describing Allen Dulles' succession to General Smith as Director of Central
Intelligence in 1953, Mosley has some events out of sequence, which gives this
reviewer the opportunity to add an historical footnote. Mosley is quite correct in
stating that there was some infighting over General Smith's successor between those
favoring General Donovan-who wanted the job very much-and those who wanted
the appointment of Dulles. President Eisenhower, before the administration changed
hands, had announced his desire to appoint General Smith Under Secretary of State.
What happened thereafter was told to me by John McCormack, then the Majority
Leader and later Speaker of the House of Representatives. General Smith went to see
President Truman and advised the President that General Eisenhower had offered
him the position at State. Smith told Truman that if, as an official of the Truman
Administration, his taking another position in the Eisenhower Administration would in
any way cause embarrassment to President Truman, he would, of course, reject the
offer immediately. President Truman told General Smith to accept. Truman later told
this to McCormack, who in turn told me that there were tears in Truman's eyes when
he told McCormack the story, so touched was the President at the loyalty displayed by
General Smith.
Smith became Under Secretary on 9 February 1953, and it was only then that
President Eisenhower had the DCI vacancy which permitted him to forward to the
Senate the nomination of Allen Dulles. Dulles became the Director on 26 February.
Among many others, he would have been horrified by Mosley's book.
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SPIES AND SPYMASTERS: A CONCISE HISTORY OF INTELLIGENCE. By Jock
Haswell (Thames and Hudson, London, 1977).
Major C. J. D. Haswell, a retired British army career officer, is employed by the
Ministry of Defence School of Service Intelligence as a "Retired Officer Grade 2
(Author)," in which capacity he writes texts for intelligence schools, one of which
(British Military Intelligence, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, London, 1973) was
previously reviewed here.' This time, he has written a pleasant little layman's book
possibly intended for the utter neophyte but more probably for your Aunt Susan when
she asks you what you really do at that place.
More than half of the book is devoted to an entertaining recital of the uses of
intelligence for and by such varied individuals as Julius Caesar, King Harold of Saxony
(who learned William the Conqueror's Order of Battle), Genghis Khan, Sir Francis
Walsingham, Cardinal Richelieu, Ben Franklin, Wellington, Napoleon, and Allan
Pinkerton. Barely a quarter of the book covers World War II, the Cold War, and the
present, with "Lucy," Dusko Popov, Moravec, Sorge, Cicero, Donovan, Dulles,
Gehlen, Penkovskiy, Kim Philby, and a cast of hundreds.
Haswell makes the usual obeisance to Moses in the Wilderness of Paran and
Joshua before Jericho for professional operations, but cites as his candidate for earliest
recorded intelligence a clay tablet dated about 2,000 B.C. in which one Bannum,
commanding a desert patrol, advised his "lord" in Mari by the Euphrates that the
border villages of the Banjamites were exchanging fire signals, the significance of
which was not yet determined.'
There are interesting sections on lesser-known figures such as Karl Schulmeister,
an agent for Rene Savary and Napoleon, and Wilhelm Stieber, described as
"Bismarck's King of Sleuthhounds." The book of 166 pages, plus bibliography and
index, is highly readable, but at $10.95, you have to be fond of your Aunt Susan.
Clinton B. Conger
'Studies XVII/4 p. 81.
2 The reviewer prefers Noah, who launched a subsonic dove from the Ark which brought back
meteorological and terrain intelligence, and-considering the location of Ararat-quite probably SOVMAT
as well.
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