STUDIES IN INTELLIGENCE [Vol. 4 No. 4, Fall 1960]
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CONFIDENTIAL
STUDIES
in
INItIL1,GENCE
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T ,L C w HEREIN -1
VOL. 4 NO. 4 FALL 1960
CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY
OFFICE OF TRAINING
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CONFIDENTIAL
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All opinions expressed in the Studies are those of the
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STUDIES IN INTELLIGENCE
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EDITORIAL BOARD
SHERMAN KENT, Chairman
LYMAN B. KIRKPATRICK
LAWRENCE R. HOUSTON
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CONTENTS
CLASSIFIED ARTICLES
Page
The Defections of Dr. John . . . . Delmege Trimble 1.
Review and analysis of a sensational case. SECRET
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A Fresh Look at Collection Requirements
Clyde R. Heffter 43
Approaches to the unsolved problem of priorities.
SECRET
The Computer-Capabilities, Prospects, and Implica-
tions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Joseph Becker 63
Breeder of imminent revolution in the community.
CONFIDENTIAL
Communication to the Editors . . . . . . . . . . . 77
Footnotes on interrogation. SECRET
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UNCLASSIFIED ARTICLES
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The Articulation of Babel . . . . . . Al
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An ideal intelligence program for language study.
Training for Overseas Effectiveness: A Survey
All
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Prophylactic non-government indoctrination for
the ugly American.
A Small South Pole . . . . . .
A23
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History of a 22-month Japanese radio deception.
Intelligence in Recent Public Literature
German Intelligence and Policy in World War II A29
British Wartime Operations . . . . . . . . . . . A34
Evasion and Escape .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . A36
Miscellany . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . .. . . A38
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CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS ISSUE
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Delmege Trimble is a CIA intelligence officer.
Clyde R. Heffter writes from his several years of experience as
a CIA requirements officer.
Joseph Becker is a member of the CIA Management Staff cur-
rently specializing in applications of automatic equipment.
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is a CIA intelligence officer with wartime
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is a polyglot scholar and veteran CIA officer.
a cultural anthropologist with service in
both government and non-government overseas programs,
is now with the ICA in Liberia.
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II
THE INTELLIGENCE LITERATURE AWARD
An annual award of $500 is offered for the most significant
contribution to the literature of intelligence submitted for
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outstanding.
Except as may be otherwise announced from year to year,
articles on any subject within the range of the Studies' pur-
view, as defined in its masthead, will be considered for the
award. They will be judged primarily on substantive original-
ity and soundness, secondarily on literary qualities. Mem-
bers of the Studies editorial board and staff are of course ex-
cluded from the competition.
Awards will normally be announced in the first issue (Win-
ter) of each volume for articles published during the preced-
ing calendar year. The editorial board will welcome readers'
nominations for awards, but reserves to itself exclusive com-
petence in the decision.
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A once sensational and myste-
rious intelligence betrayal is ex-
amined in the perspective of
time for motivation and key
circumstances.
THE DEFECTIONS OF DR. JOHN
Delmege Trimble
Rain streaked the streets of Berlin, splashed on darkened
houses, glistened in the light from an East-West border check-
point. A sedan rolled up, its tires singing on the wet pave-
ment. A customs guard sauntered out. For a moment there
was only the throb of the engine, a murmur of conversation,
the rhythmic click of the windshield wipers. Then the wave
of a hand, and the car rolled across the Sandkrug Bridge into
the darkness of East Berlin.
A simple incident on this warm, wet night of 20 July 1954,
the decennial of a more famous 20 July. Simple, but so
fraught with significance for Germany and the West that
Chancellor Adenauer called it "terrifying." Dr. Otto John,
president of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution,
had defected. He was the most important Westerner fallen
into Communist hands since the two British diplomats, Guy
Burgess and Donald MacLean, had vanished from London in
1951, and far more important than they in point of implica-
tions for intelligence.
The puzzle was-and to some still is-the reason why, the
causes behind the eastward flight of the Federal Republic's
internal security chief in the company of a trumpet-playing
gynecologist, a Dr. Wolfgang Wohlgemuth. The contempo-
rary explanations ranged the spectrum. The easiest one, that
Wohlgemuth was a Soviet agent who had drugged John and
abducted him, foundered on facts that gradually came to light.
Some said that John, a mixed-up idealist, had been spurred
across the border by a misguided concept of political morality.
Some regarded him as a victim of machinations on the part
of the neo-Nazis and clerical and other reactionary circles
around Chancellor Adenauer. His flight was pictured by
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SECRET Dr. John
others as that of a desperate man whose past was about to
catch up with him. Yet others called him a long-time traitor
and informer, even a secret Communist fanatic.
There were prejudicial grounds for some of the least pretty
interpretations. John's weaknesses for alcohol and the op-
posite sex were well known, his favorite sport when pixilated
being to snap the elastic of women's brassieres. It was per-
sistently rumored that he was a double agent or a homosexual,
and he certainly had an affinity for too many characters with
one or both of these qualifications. Aside from his companion
Wohlgemuth, who had connections with the East Berlin
Charite Hospital and made no secret of his Communist sym-
pathies, John was on good terms with Soviet agent Max Won-
sig, blown at the Willi Kucher spy trial, and more notably
with one Baron Wolfgang Gans Edler Herr von and zu Putlitz.
Von and zu Putlitz had been a prewar British agent in the
Nazi Foreign Office, whisked to the safety of England in 1938;
subsequently he worked in the United States for OWI until
he was fired and his valet had to support him by tending bar;
later he returned to British employ in Germany; and in 1950
he started working for the Communists in East Berlin.
Yet the stereotype of the weak man made vulnerable by
his lusts or corrupted by bad company is not one that fits
the Otto John picture. And all the other theses, each argu-
able, strike only tangentially at the truth. Erich Ollenhauer
may have come closer when he remarked, after John rede-
fected and began to show increasing signs of a persecution
and Messiah complex, "This is a case for the psychiatrists
rather than the politicians." We cannot even now arrive at
anything like a tidy analysis of the case, but we can achieve
some understanding of it by tracing John's propensities dur-
ing the Nazi and Nuremberg eras, reviewing the circumstances
of his unlikely appointment and ineffectual tenure as presi-
dent of the Bundesamt fuer. Verfassungsschutz, and examin-
ing in detail his behavior just before and after his defection
on that 1954 anniversary of the unsuccessful 20 July anti-
Hitler coup.'
1 Except as otherwise indicated, the authority for factual statements
in the following account rests in classified documents in U.S.,
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Role in the Anti-Nazi Underground
Otto John was born in 1909. Two friendships from his early
life remained of importance in his adult career and were to
play a part in the events of July 1954. During his school days
at Wiesbaden in the mid-twenties he became a close chum of
Wolfgang Hoefer, son of the school principal. The intensity
of German schoolboy friendships is reflected in the eventual
tragedy that flowered from this early acquaintance. Hoefer,
whose mother was Jewish, emigrated to the United States in
the late 1930's. He changed his name to Hoffer, became a U.S.
citizen and a soldier. In 1945 he was sent to Germany and
renewed his friendship with Otto John. In 1954, upon John's
defection, he committed suicide.
An emotionally more important relationship for Otto was
that with his brother Hans, another marked for tragedy.
Hans, the younger, brighter, and sturdier, was the extrovert
doer, Otto the troubled dreamer. Otto felt no fraternal jeal-
ousy; he adored the younger brother who, as long as he lived,
supplied the balance Otto needed. Hans was to be tortured
to death in the aftermath of the abortive July 1944 coup.
Otto studied for a career in the foreign service, mastering
Spanish, French, and English. But when Hitler came to
power membership in the Nazi Party became a prerequisite
for aspirants to the foreign service, and he shifted to interna-
tional law. Never a member of any political party (though
after the war he once referred to himself as a quondam So-
cialist), he said his convictions were a blend of monarchism,
old-fashioned liberalism, and anti-Nazism. He received the
doctorate in law from Frankfurt University in 1935.
By 1936 both John brothers were in Berlin. Hans was study-
ing law at Berlin University. Otto served for two years with-
out pay at Tempelhof Airdrome to qualify for final state law
examinations in the service of Lufthansa. In 1937 he became
assistant legal counsel, under Klaus Bonhoeffer, of the rapidly
expanding civil airline. He was now in a position to do some-
thing positive about his anti-Nazi convictions. Through Klaus
and his brother Dietrich, a Lutheran minister, he entered one
of the circles that later were to band in the conspiracy
against Hitler. An airline with routine flights into foreign
countries was a convenient front for a conspiracy against a
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SECRET Dr. John
totalitarian regime.`' Klaus Bonhoeffer assigned Otto to sev-
eral courier runs.
When World War II broke in September 1939 Hans John
went into the Luftwaffe as a lieutenant, but Otto remained
with Lufthansa. That autumn he established connections
with such anti-Nazis as the Social Democrat Wilhelm Leusch-
ner and Col. General von Beck. Prince Louis Ferdinand,
grandson of the Kaiser, had quit his job in a Ford plant in
the United States to work for Lufthansa, and Otto John, along
with Johannes Popitz, the Prussian Finance Minister, became
a chief promoter of the Prince's pretensions to the throne in
Carl Goerdeler's early schemes for a Hohenzollern restora-
tion.3 Louis Lochner, former chief of the Berlin Bureau of
the Associated Press, said that on several occasions he accom-
panied John to meetings in Berlin of the Goerdeler and Louis
Ferdinand groups.
Death was to sluff most of Otto's co-conspirators off the
stage long before his own desertion, whether through natural
causes, official executions, or the goon squads rampant at
Germany's last gasp. But Louis Ferdinand remained a mem-
ber of the cast through the last act. John cultivated him not
only because he and his wife Kira, a former Grand Duchess
of Russia, were very pleasant social companions but also be-
cause John, with his royalist inclinations, was flattered at
being allowed to address the Prince by his intimate family
nickname, "Lulu."
Beyond these contacts with conspiracy and his flights to
neutral countries, Otto's specific resistance activities during
this early period are unknown. In 1941 he passed consider-
able classified information about the Luftwaffe to U.S. corre-
spondent Lochner. Strained attempts have been made to link
him a little later with Rote Kapelle, the Communist radio-espi-
onage group active in Berlin in 1941-42. No evidence is avail-
Many clandestine interests capitalized on the advantages of this
airline's international flights: Admiral Wilhelm Can.aris' Abwehr
faction, carrying on its own intrigues against the Nazis, had planted
agents in it; Himmler's SS and the Gestapo had both infiltrated it;
and the Soviets are believed to have recruited a pilot on the Berlin-
Moscow run, a man named Radunsk.
Gerhard Ritter, The German Resistance, pp. 191-2.
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Dr. John SECRET
able to support any such connection, although it has been
taken for granted that his brother Hans had Communist af-
filiations.
When eyebrows were raised over the appearance of the
healthy Otto in mufti, he entered the Abwehr, likely on
Goerdeler's suggestion and through the good offices of Gen-
eral Oster, the activist conspirator under Admiral Canaris.
He was assigned to Abwehrstelle Stettin but told that his pri-
mary mission was to seek better surrender terms for Germany
once Hitler was removed, using his Abwehr commission simply
as cover. Threads linking the various opposition groups were
now being slowly knit, and John probably provided liaison
among those in the Abwehr, in the Army High Command,
around Leuschner and Julius Leber, Louis Ferdinand, etc.,
whose heretofore diffuse activity was manifest in the ineffec-
tual half-dozen different attempts to remove Hitler between
1939 and 1943.
The year 1942 was eventful for him. He was using business
trips to Madrid and Lisbon, ostensibly for the purpose of ac-
quiring more Lufthansa runways, to re-establish resistance
contacts with the British and try to activate the acquaintance
between Prince Louis Ferdinand and President Roosevelt, who
had once put the Prince up at Blair House. During this year
he was turned in to the Gestapo by an aging and jealous pre-
war mistress, Frau Ameliess Pabst, and was rescued by his
Abwehr connections. Also in 1942 Hans returned from the
Russian front badly wounded and was taken to the famous
surgeon Dr. Sauerbruch, who numbered among his assistants
at the Charite Hospital the fateful Wolfgang Wohlgemuth.
Otto soon learned to know the comrade of his future eastward
flight by his pet name, Wowo.
John's peace feelers were received with considerable suspi-
cion by the Allies, especially since he was unwilling at this
time to name any conspirators. On 20 February 1943 the
British intelligence service issued from London a statement
to the effect that the Abwehr or the Gestapo was possibly in-
spiring his activities as a deception. He persisted, however,
using as intermediary Juan Terraza, one of the principal diplo-
matic secretaries in the Spanish Foreign Office and a close
friend of Louis Ferdinand. His attentions were directed
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toward Graham of the British Embassy in Lisbon and Willard
L. Beaulac of the American Embassy in Madrid. Beaulac, on
instructions from Assistant Secretary of State Acheson, saw
John at his home but made no commitments. He, too, was
dubious of his sincerity.
John's sincerity as a representative of the military element
of the resistance, a role he was soon to assume, is in fact ques-
tionable. He was a dissenter among dissenters, thoroughly
disliking the generals and never believing they would act
against Hitler. He considered the military component of the
20 July group very weak and continually warned against it.
As 1943 wore along, his approaches became more definite.
In December he told his British contact in Madrid that he
represented an internal opposition group consisting of indus-
trialists, trade union leaders, churchmen, and generals, all
strongly anti-Nazi and anti-USSR. He ticked off names and
disclosed details of another plot to murder Hitler.4 In Feb-
ruary 1944 he again came to Madrid ostensibly on Abwehr
business. This time he said he was remaining in Spain as a
representative of the anti-Nazi generals. As cover he assumed
the directorship of the sister Lufthansa company there.
He later told the British that he performed no Abwehr mis-
sions on his trips to Spain. In early June 1944, however, the
British ascertained that he had transmitted information con-
cerning Allied military intentions to Berlin. The nature of
this information is not known; it was probably innocuous. In
any case the British and American embassies in Madrid, for
their part, got valuable data from him-on the results of Allied
bombings of Berlin, the German V-bomb and its launching
bases, and the experimental station at Peenemuende.
The current of events leading to the ill-fated Generals' Coup
was now quickening. Shortly after the Allied invasion of Nor-
mandy in June, John consulted in Madrid with Col. Georg
Hansen, who as Canaris' successor at the head of the Abwehr
was prospectively a chief negotiator with the Allies, specifi-
At about this time the report that John was a British agent being
handled by Major F. Landsdale and Cmdr. A. Fuller of the British
Embassy in Lisbon was conveyed from the Portuguese General Staff
to a German Lt. Col. von Auenrode (alias Karschof), who in turn
informed Admiral Canaris. Canaris, of course, took no action.
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cally General Eisenhower at SHAEF, once the revolt had suc-
ceeded. In early July he made arrangements that any mes-
sage from the conspirators would be passed immediately from
the American Embassy in Madrid to General Eisenhower. At
the same time he learned, to the dismay of the conspirators,
that the Western Allies would not consider negotiating a sep-
arate peace, and that the British and Americans would prob-
ably make no effort to get to Berlin ahead of the Russians.5
There is conflicting evidence about his activities at the time
of the attempted coup itself. According to his own story, he
was called to Berlin to confirm in person his bad news of the
unresponsiveness of the Western Allies, and arrived at Tem-
pelhof Airdrome on 19 July. He was at OKW Headquarters
in the Bendlerstrasse on the afternoon of 20 July when Col.
Klaus von Stauffenberg arrived from East Prussia to report
that the bomb had gone off and Hitler could be assumed dead.
He worked with the conspirators there until 9:30 that evening,
when it became evident that this attempt on Hitler's life had
also failed, pro-Nazi officers were regaining control, and con-
spirators were being summarily executed in the courtyard.
The next morning, according to his account, Johannes Popitz'
daughter told him of her father's arrest, and he went into
hiding. He escaped to Madrid on 24 July by signing on as a
mechanic on a Lufthansa manifest.6
John's story, however, is contradicted by the lists of appli-
cants for Spanish visas and travel manifests from Aerodrome
del Prat del Llobregat. They show him arriving in Barcelona
from Madrid via Lufthansa on 18 July and not departing for
Berlin until 22 July. Allied intelligence regarded the variant
embellishments of his account as probable fabrications and
was inclined to suspect that Otto credited himself with activi-
Ritter, op. cit., p. 282. The ultimate source is John himself.
That John was one of the pathetically few rebels to escape has been
cited to support.a theory that he was a Gestapo agent infiltrated into
the conspiracy. We have noted that he was out of sympathy with
the generals, and he seems not to have been intimately associated
with any resistance circle except Louis Ferdinand's; but the Gestapo
theory is untenable. He would hardly have betrayed his beloved
brother Hans. Moreover, two SS aids of Walter Schellenberg later
testified that the Gestapo had partially penetrated the 20 July
group, but not through Otto John.
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ties rightly belonging to Hans. One MI-6 interrogator re-
marked that John seemed to change the story to keep from
boring himself.
At any rate he turned up in late July or early August in
Madrid, where he lived in a hotel some three weeks.
I _J On 25 August they smuggled im to Lis on and hid
him at a safehouse, the Boa Vista, which was also used by
Spanish Communists. On 23 October the Portuguese police
raided this house and arrested John, the housekeeper Romero,
and seven of the Spanish Communists.?
John was jailed for several days at Caxias. Then the Por-
tuguese General Staff overruled the police and turned him
over to the British. He was flown to the UK on 3 November,
accompanied by Cmdr. Fuller, his contact at the British Em-
bassy in Lisbon.
In the British, Victor's Service
On John's arrival in the UK there was a wartime snafu as
to his identity, and he was interned as a high-ranking Nazi.
According to his own story, Churchill at this time called him
in for a consultation that lasted half the night. He was re-
leased from internment and transferred to the Political Intel-
ligence Department of the Political Warfare Executive on 11
December. He was turned over to Sefton Delmer, a top re-
porter for the London Daily Express and later for the Times,
who was wartime director of the Morale Branch of PID. Ac-
cording to Delmer, John lived with him for 10 months. Del-
mer is another person who will reappear before this drama
is acted out.
In 1945 and 1946 John worked for the British in various
capacities-with PID on intelligence matters, on the POW re-
orientation program at Wilton Park, and on research fort
' There are diverse accounts of this episode. One intelligence version
has it that John was arrested because of his friendship for Professor
Egaz Morriz, frequently referred to in Portugal as the unofficial
Soviet ambassador. Der Spiegel, ten years later, said that he was
arrested as a homosexual. Another section of the German press
insisted that he was arrested at a fiesta when he got into a brawl
over a woman.
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A tally o ons
fellow-Germans Dr. Honigmann, Eberhard
Koebel, Karl von Schnitzler, and Putlitz, the agent-baron dis-
charged by the OWI-is intriguing: all of them, like John,
were later to decamp to the East Zone of Germany.
After the surrender in May 1945, John did not return to
Germany with the bulk of the political exiles. He was working
for the British War and Foreign Offices, interrogating Ger-
man generals in the Kensington cage, and helping prepare
legal documents for the approaching Nuremberg trials. At
Nuremberg he worked as an adviser to the UK prosecution
staff, a fact omitted in his own curriculum vitae.
Up to this time he could lay valid claim to being a German
patriot. The cause which met catastrophe on 20 July had
been a worthy one, that of revolt against the Nazis, not trea-
son to the German nation. Its watchword was, "Against Hit-
ler, for Germany." But when he returned for the Nuremberg
trials, it was in effect as a German in British battle dress.
He revisited with the wrath of a prosecutor the country which
he had fled as a political persecutee. He kept aloof from other
Germans working at the trials, attempted to conceal his identity
and purpose, and spent his free time with his British col-
leagues, trying unsuccessfully to pose as an Englishman doing
historical research in the documents of the Tribunal. The
spirit of the trials themselves, in which righteous indigna-
tion at the Nazi horrors was not untainted by thirst for po-
litical vengeance, may have contributed further to the warp-
ing of John's character.
He was already showing psychoneurotic tendencies. In 1946
in London he attended a private War Office showing of a film
on the Belzen concentration camp. Shortly after the movie,
he told an intelligence officer five years later, the lower part
of his face began to discharge a pus-like fluid and he suffered
a species of nervous breakdown. His explanation was that
the movie brought home to him the terrible failure of the 20
July revolt and all it stood for; he had been condemned to
virtual inactivity since his flight to the UK and the accumu-
lated frustration was simply too much for him. John clearly
identified himself closely with the failure of the anti-Hitler
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resistance and had a strong guilt complex deriving probably
from his brother's painful death. This reinforced his obses-
sion with the July affair and his inability to compromise with
anything remotely identifiable with Nazis, right-wing poli-
ticians, or German military traditions. His excessive drink-
ing and other manifestations of emotional instability would
be symptomatic of such a state of mind.
He may have had woman-trouble, too. In 1949, after prac-
ticing law in London for a year, he married Frau Lucy-Mar-
leen Mankiewitz, the mother of the girl he had been expected
to wed. His new wife, a German Jewess whose father was an
old friend and adviser of Dr. Theodor Heuss, taught Wagnerian
singing at Hampstead. She has been described as making up
in charm and intellect for the greater beauty of her jilted
daughter Gisela, with whom John had worked in a wartime
British operation.
John's mistress, Frau Elsa Mueller Rudolph in Wiesbaden,
the widow of a German pilot killed in action in 1943, was an-
other who stood to be offended by this marriage. John wrote
in explanation that he was marrying an older woman because
of his need for balance, and moreover his bride had important
political connections in the new Germany through her family.
He hoped that he and Elsa could remain friends. They did.
It was Elsa who, as nearly as can be ascertained, enlarged
Otto's circle of acquaintances to include Ian Eland,
Owho was later helpful in exposing and eliminating one
of John's rivals for the presidency of the Verfassungsschutz-
amt.
In the fall of 1949, no longer trying to conceal his services
to the UK, John became openly the chief German assistant
to the British prosecution at the trial of General von Man-
stein in Hamburg. This time he apparently associated with
the German lawyers defending Von Manstein. But he irked
the defense, it is said, by deliberately twisting facts and evi-
dence to the advantage of the prosecutors, many of whom
relied heavily on him because of their unfamiliarity with the
German language and with the organization and practices of
the Nazi Reich. Several friends implored him at this time to
get out of the business of delivering his countrymen to the
Allied hangman, and their warning that he was alienating
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Dr. John SECRET
himself from his fatherland must have increased his emotional
stresses.
John was not doing awfully well financially in the UK. He
was employed by the London solicitors James Brodie & Com-
pany on reparation and restitution cases, but he could not
base a career on claims arising out of a past era. He suffered
from the lack of the British citizenship that had been ex-
tended to Putlitz and certain other Germans. (At times he
claimed that he had declined a proferred citizenship.) Ger-
many, on the other hand, was getting back on her feet eco-
nomically.
During 1949 and 1950 he made several trips to Germany to
see friends in the Bonn government about a job. Jakob
Kaiser, whom he had known as a leader of the Catholic trade
union resistance, offered him one in his Ministry of All-Ger-
man Affairs, but John declined on the ground that he deserved
a higher rank than Ministerialrat. Foreign Affairs had no
place for him because, he suspected, of his "anti-German" ac-
tivities in the UK and his role at the trials. He also tried
unsuccessfully for an appointment on the German delegation
to the International Ruhr Authority.
The Protector of the Constitution
In 1950 West Germany was passing through the interim
stage on the road from occupation to sovereignty, and an im-
portant question was that of preserving ideological rectitude
in the new state. The French did not want it to have any
political police. The British favored an adaptation of Scotland
Yard. The United States came up with an emasculated FBI
plan. The Germans wanted to return to the pre-Hitler
scheme, incorporating the political police as Branch 1A into
the national police. The eventual compromise was the wa-
tery conception of an Office for the Protection of the Con-
stitution, a police force with no power to arrest. It was sup-
posed to be a silent security service keeping tabs on the lunatic
fringes to the right and left.
How was it that Otto John, a man who already showed
signs of needing watching himself, almost an expatriate, whom
Chancellor Adenauer is said to have disliked from first sight,
was named head of the sensitive Bundesamt fuer Verfassungs-
schutz? Or, as the Germans put it in their rough peasant
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proverb, "Who put the goat in charge of the garden?" As as-
sets he had an influential friend in Jakob Kaiser, his connec-
tions by marriage with President Heuss, and most importantly
the gratitude of the British for his work for them during the
war and in the Nazi trials.
And it was not an easy job to fill, with its international
political implications. The German proposal to appoint a non-
political civil servant was vetoed by the Allied High Commis-
sioners. The United States suggested an excellent man in
Fabian von Schlabrendorff, but he refused on grounds of ill
health. The French nominated Colonel Friedrich Wilhelm
Heinz, information chief in the embryo defense ministry, but
John disposed of this rival by having Ian Eland, his mistress'
agent friend, put the fin er on Heinz as the source of his es-
pionage reports Finally, after 15 months, 12
rejected nominees, and 10 wrangling sessions of the High
Commission, the British quietly sponsored Otto John, for bad
luck the thirteenth man.
The German lawyers who had defended Von Manstein and
the Nuremberg accused were shocked. They complained to
Minister of the Interior Heinemann that John was unscrupu-
lous and altogether a bad choice. Heinemann replied that
the British trusted John, and anyway the job was unimpor-
tant: Germany was in no position to keep secrets from the
occupation powers.
U.S. approval was another Gordian knot. On 22 Novem-
ber 1950 High Commissioner McCloy cabled the Department
of State from Frankfurt that the Federal Republic had re-
quested HICOG to approve John's candidacy with all possible
urgency, and that only the results of the Department's name
check were needed to clear the way. A week later, at 1800
Washingon time, 29 November, a cable over Dean Acheson's
signature informed Frankfurt that conflicting information
regarding Otto John "necessitates thorough investigation by
Army G-2 of other sources. Results follow soonest." But
on 1 December, at 0909, McCloy wired back:
On basis of excellent data available here and in absence of any
derogatory information and in view of urgency of making a
decision and after approval by British and French, we approved
appointment of Otto John on 29 November, prior to receipt of
your telegram of 29 November.
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The newly installed BfV president was again the center of
discussions by the Allied Directorate when, on 7 March 1951,
they took up the appointment of Vera Schwart, formerly a
secretary of Admiral Canaris, as John's secretary. The
United States and the UK raised no objections. But the
French did, on the grounds that Vera, arrested by the Soviets
in 1946, had turned informer for them the following year.
The glandular dislike of French intelligence for John had been
reflected in the comment of a Surete chief on his appoint-
ment: he had exclaimed, in chorus with a Turkish colleague,
"C'est impossible!"
Just how impossible a choice John was became increasingly
apparent. Aside from his instability and his emotional po-
litical outlook, he was a poor administrator and lacked bal-
anced judgment. U.S. intelligence saw him muddling through
without the energy, imagination, or administrative ability to
put the BfV on its feet. He had no patience with the pains-
taking detail necessary to effective intelligence operations.
He was intrigued by special missions and fanciful projects
which usually wound up putting the Office and the govern-
ment in embarrassing, not to say ridiculous, positions.
One of the score of projects John laid on was Operation
Maerchenwald. The good fairy of this Fabulous Wood was a
buxom widow named Frau Baumann from Ansbach in Bavaria,
confessed guardian of a vast Nazi treasure trove from which
she was supposed to make monthly withdrawals to support
indigent Nazi leaders in Switzerland and South America.
The cache was somewhere in the Bavarian Alps, sometimes
at the bottom of a lake, a very deep lake, the Frau said. John,
taking her at her word, dispatched six green-jacketed BfV men
to escort her to the treasure. She took them up into the
Tyrolean mountains, where, according to an official report,
she found the right blazed tree and the secret path of white
pebbles, but was unable to find the stone slab covering the
lever that opened the way to the cache.
While John was waiting in his Cologne command post for
his men to report the find, U.S. operatives came to see him
and showed him documents proving that his good fairy was a
swindler, blackmail artist, public nuisance, and congenital
liar, once inmate of an insane asylum. Nevertheless John
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summoned Frau Baumann to Cologne to reveal more details.
Somewhat drunk, he had a two-hour seance with her.
By mid-1952 Bonn was rocking with gossip about his an-
tics. Report after report reaching Adenauer's desk indicated
that in his hatred of the Nazis John was not alert to the Com-
munist danger, that he maintained relations with Com-
munist sympathizers, that he was given to fits of melancholy
brooding, and that he was increasingly taking to drink. But
the Chancellor had no intention of lowering the boom on him
until Germany achieved her sovereignty.
The BfV's serious operations were apparently in the hands
of its de facto director, former General Staff officer Albert
Radke. He was a close associate of General Reinhard Gehlen,
who had headed the wartime General Staff's section for evalu-
ating Eastern intelligence and in postwar Germany bossed a
high-powered unofficial offensive espionage group. Gehlen dis-
trusted John because of his record of defection to the British.
John's four years in office were extremely unpleasant. He
was resented by senior police officials and other German civil
servants as an outsider, as a stooge of his British sponsors,
and as one who had deserted Germany in her hour of need.
Rumors were growing that his days in the BfV were num-
bered, that his office would be replaced by Gehlen's organiza-
tion. He may have brooded most over this prospect of being
supplanted by Gehlen, whom he regarded as one of the mili-
tary group responsible for the failure of the 1944 coup and
so for Hans' death by torture.
In May and June of 1954 he enjoyed the pleasant interlude
of a trip to the United States. He was brought to Washing-
ton and shown the courtesies normally accorded the head of
a foreign intelligence service. CIA officials dined him, and on
7 June he was briefed on general intelligence matters.
Details in a Defection
John returned to the Federal Republic in fine fettle. Dr.
Wohlgemuth, however, who visited him in Cologne on 9 July,
insisted he appeared run down and prescribed pills. John,
rather than argue about it, took them without visible effect,
though later he tried to use this incident in his defense. On
8 and again on 12 July he was visited by Michael Winch, a
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Dr. John SECRET
discredited British-Soviet double agent. The subject of their
conversations is not known. Frau John, who happened to be
in Cologne, objected to Winch, probably because he was cadging
meals and money.
John's twelve-year-old relationship with Wohlgemuth had
been a matter of concern for some time.
is reported to have warned him twice about friend Wowo, first
in March 1953 and again in July 1954. After the first warn-
ing John is said to have detailed a BfV man, Von Berge, to
watch him for a while, and on the second occasion to have
given an "embarrassed" and conflicting account of his `con-
tacts with him. Before John's visit to the United States, a
Berlin shopkeeper, Frau Anneliese Schroeder, showed police
notes of a conversation with one Helmut Salewski, a close
friend of Wohlgemuth's. Salewski told her Wowo kept a
tape recorder hidden in his room and persuaded John to talk
about secret matters when he visited him for evenings of
women and drinking.
On 15 July the Johns flew to West Berlin for the services
commemorating the decennial of the 20 July revolt. Begin-
ning with a reception given by Oberburgmeister Reuter on
the evening of 18 July, families and friends of the participants
in the plot against the Nazi regime met for the purpose of
unveiling a monument to the victims in the courtyard of the
former OKW in the Bendlerstrasse. John and his wife took
advantage of this opportunity to dine twice with his old
school friend of Wiesbaden days, Wolfgang Hoffer, now a cap-
tain in the American CIC. Hoffer said that the Americans re-
garded John as a British agent, and that he himself couldn't
stand the CIC any longer and wanted John to help him locate
a job in Germany. He wanted nothing more to ,do with in-
telligence services.
An intelligence officer who spent considerable time. with
John during this convocation said he "lamented several times
about the bad things people were saying about him and about
attacks against him coming from Minister Robert Lehr and
Herr Sauer. Shortly before he left Bonn to attend the Ber,
lin festivities, he was called into [State Secretary] Ritter von
Lex's office and was told they had just received a complaint
from the Federal Chancellery accusing him of secretly join-
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SECRET Dr. John
ing the SPD. John said he was sick and tired of these rumors,
and if a good opportunity presents itself he would seriously
consider rejoining the Deutsche Lufthansa when it starts
functioning again."
In this mood he came upon a newspaper account of how
Minister of the Interior Schroeder, his superior, planned dras-
tic changes in the Bf V as soon as West Germany obtained its
sovereignty. He was reported to appear visibly shaken. At the
commemorative exercises he made an exhibition of himself,
sobbing loudly and denouncing two other mourners as Gestapo
agents. Although the memories evoked of Hans' death ten
years earlier were undoubtedly depressing, he had always been
jovial and friendly at the memorial services of previous years.
Immediately after the ceremonies John declined to dine with
his old friend Prince Louis Ferdinand, saying that he was meet-
in with some East Zone people.
When Louis erc i-
nand then suggested a o drop y is hotel afterwards
for a nightcap, he gave a curt "No." This was about 1600 on
20 July.
John kept an engagement, however, with an elderly Ger-
man couple, in-laws of an American acquaintance, at his hotel.
In this interval between the memorial exercises in, the Bend-
lerstrasse and his appointment with Wohlgemuth, he also
saw Bonde-Henriksen, correspondent for the Danish paper
BerZingske Tidende, the man who after eighteen months was
to help him return from East Germany, and apparently ex-
pected to have a drink with him later in the evening.
A perhaps equivocal indication of his intention to come back
that night was the fact that when he changed clothes he left
papers and notes from his pockets in his hotel room. But he
also had reservations for a return flight from Berlin, and his
desk calendar in Cologne showed a future schedule of normal
activities. Driving from his hotel, he stopped in at the Maison
de France, a restaurant near Wohlgemuth's downtown office,
in order, according to Erich Ollenhauer, to pick up there an
answer to a proposal he had made Mendes-France that the
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Dr. John SECRET
Federal Republic's remilitarization plans be exposed to debate
at the forthcoming Geneva Conference. The answer was not
there.
For John's meeting and movements with Wohlgemuth
the evidence consisted until recently mainly of his own ac-
count given after redefection, which begins by omitting these
known preliminary activities, emphasizes a suspicious cup of
coffee served him at the Wohlgemuth apartment, and ends
in a theatrical invented scene wherein he awakens from a
drugged sleep in an abandoned house and is threatened by
Communists speaking with a Russian accent. But there were
three important facts from other sources. Item one, Wohlge-
muth telephoned the Charite Hospital in East Berlin that eve-
ning and said, "I shall come now with my good friend." Item
two, he apparently intended, like John, to come back: he left
in West Berlin his 10 suits of clothes, four apartments, five
mistresses, and third wife. Later we shall look at other evi-
dence of Wohlgemuth's intent made public in 1958 by the re-
lease of testimony given at John's treason trial. Item three,
the customs officer on duty at the Sandkrug Bridge that night,
Ernst Richard Hanke, who halted Wohlgemuth's sedan at
the border, peered inside and saw that both occupants were
awake and alert. When Hanke pointed out that the vehicle
was about to enter the Soviet sector, a man of John's descrip-
tion replied, "Aber dort wollen wir dock hin-Well, that's
where we want to go."
The Bonn Government insisted that John must have been
abducted. They offered a reward of DM500,000 for conclusive
information. A special Bundestag committee was established
to investigate the affair. A variant on the abduction explana-
tion was given by a U.S. intelligence cable:
John was a damned fool caught in a well-baited trap. ... He
very likely overestimated his own position to the extent of
believing that the Soviets would not dare harm him. He took
and miscalculated a risk in pursuit of bait set by persons who
evaluated correctly his psychology and his desire to score a
major personal coup following heavy attacks on his office in
recent Bundestag debates.
The suicide on 23 July of Otto's friend Hoffer, who had be-
lieved that the German secret police supposedly guarding
John had actually been holding him under arrest, made the
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mystery a double one. John claimed, in a statement broad-
cast from East Berlin, that his friend had been driven to des-
peration by the CIC's insistence that he spy on him. Part of
the German press said that Hoffer killed himself rather than
face an inevitable investigation. The U.S. Army officially de-
nied that he had been detailed to check up on John or on
Wohlgemuth. U.S. intelligence had him feeling that the de-
fection of his life-long friend shattered his whole intelli-
gence career.
The British, publicly at any rate, stood by John. They de-
nied on 5 August that any British official had been the source
of an Associated Press story to the effect that they had
dropped John ten months earlier; they considered such a re-
port to be "skillful sabotage." John continued to have a sur-
prisingly good British press
the other extreme were those who believed, on the
grounds of John's vulnerability and associations, that he
might have long since become a Soviet agent; and these in-
cluded
At least there were reports pointing to possible Com-
munist pressures and preparation. Baron Wolfgang von and
zu Putlitz, who first boasted and then denied having engi-
neered the defection of Burgess and MacLean and. who urged
John on 16 March 1953 that he at least confer with a Soviet
officer about saving Germany from being caught in an East-
West conflict, visited Bonn in the spring of 1954 and again
in July, and on at least one of these occasions he met with
John. Informed circles in East Berlin were reported in Au-
gust to consider John's defection and that of the Bundestag
deputy Karl Franz Schmidt-Wittmack to have been master-
minded by Soviet General Ivan A. Serov and run from KGB
headquarters in Karlshorst. 11 And a refugee who had worked
Peter Deriabin says that at the time of his own defection in Sep-
tember 1953 Soviet State Security was building up a file on John's
dealings with the Nazis, and he suggests John was blackmailed into
defecting by the Soviet threat to expose his pro-Nazi activities!
(The Secret World, p. 197.)
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Dr. John
for the East German Security Service claimed later to have
heard Colonel Beater of the Service remark that two of his
agents, Axel and Peter (the Rittwagens) were preparing in
46 West Berlin for the defection or, if necessary, the abduction
of Otto John, and that Beater had met at least once with
Wohlgemuth and with Wolfgang Homer of the CIC.
Except to doggedly suspicious minds the baited-trap, drug-
abduction, long-time-agent, and fleeing-wrongdoer theories
were disproved and the main mysteries of the case cleared
up by John's public appearance and a private conversation on
11 August. At a conference attended by 400 Western and
Communist reporters in the East Berlin press building on
Friedrichstrasse, he said that the West German government
had become a mere instrument of American European policy,
which was using Chancellor Adenauer to renazify and remili-
tarize Germany as a spearhead against the USSR, that there
were secret clauses in the EDC treaty in this connection,
that Adenauer and the militarists regarded the EDC as an
interim device for restoring German military hegemony in
Europe, that the Gehlen organization had stepped up its ac-
tivities in France to this end, and that the Americans, in their
hysterical fear of Communism, were preparing a new Hitler
Crusade against the East that would leave Germany a mass
of atomic ashes.
These standard theses of the Communist propaganda line
were probably consonant with John's own anti-Nazi and anti-
military obsession, reinforced in recent months by his grow-
ing feeling of being not appreciated in West Germany and not
wanted in the government, even deliberately persecuted under
the influence of the neo-Nazis. And if he felt guilt over his
earlier desertion to the British, he could now choose the anti-
Nazi East and still remain on German soil rather than "flee
for a second time," as he later told the Danish correspondent
Henrik Bonde-Henriksen.
After the press conference John had a 45-minute talk over
glasses of beer with Gaston Coblentz of the New York Herald
Tribune and two London paper correspondents, Karl Robson
of the News Chronicle and his one-time boss and benefactor
Sefton Delmer of the Daily Express. They were joined at the
table in a private dining room of the press building by four
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SECRET Dr. John
Communist members of the Council for German Unity, but
these made no attempt to control the conversation. They did
not need to, the three Western correspondents agreed: John
was saying of his own volition what they would have sought
to have him say. The three gave him many opportunities to
indicate by some sign that he was being held against his will,
but although the talk around the table was going in several
directions and it would have been easy, he did not do so.
John reiterated that he had crossed over voluntarily be-
cause of his long-smoldering unhappiness about renazifica-
tion in West Germany. In reply to a question about Dr.
Wohlgemuth's role, he said it was relatively unimportant-
"he only established my contact with the Communist re-
gime." John substantiated the theory that he had not in-
tended to remain in the Soviet Zone when he drove across
the Sandkrug Bridge with Wowo. Asked whether he had de-
cided in advance to stay, he replied: "No. My decision was
made only after my talks with the Communist authorities.
I came over to confirm that I would be able to stay on my
terms. I was able to do so. I would have been free to re-
turn if I had wanted to."
John's motives do at this point seem understandable, and
the main course of events clear. But as late as November
1958, perhaps because the picture was again confused by re-
defection, a senior U.S. intelligence officer in Germany was of
the opinion that, "barring an unforeseeable stroke of good
fortune, we doubt that we shall ever know the true circum-
stances which prompted Otto John's appearance in East
Berlin."
The Way Back
Shortly after his arrival in East Germany, John was re-
ported to have made contact with Dr. Erich Correns, head
of the National Front, and to have prepared for the Ministry
of Interior a list of some 50 West German government offi-
cials possibly susceptible to defection inducements. On 14 Au-
gust the West Berlin Telegraf reported his suggesting that
former Field Marshal Friedrich von Paulus, who surrendered
the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad, head a committee to
"unveil the aggressive machinations of the National Socialist
circles in West Germany."
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A few weeks later, the East German government announced
plans for a Ministry for German Unity to be headed by John.
Its proposed purpose was to establish contact with persons in
West German public life who were opposed to the Bonn gov-
ernment and thus encourage their opposition or provide them
with an incentive to defect. The ministry never material-
ized, although John wrote to a number of prominent West
German politicians urging them to take a stand against the
U.S.-Adenauer policies.
On 19 September 1954 John was reported to be working on
the All-German Committee of the East Zone government and
also on the German Committee sponsored by the GDR Press
and Information Office. It was learned later that he spent
several weeks that fall in the USSR. Reports received in
December 1954 indicated that he was planning to establish
permanent residence in Leipzig, that he was working with the
new East German Lufthansa, and that he was making prep-
arations for a propaganda offensive to re-establish a consti-
tutional monarchy in Germany and would soon make over-
tures to Prince Louis Ferdinand.
In March 1955 it was learned that he had been appointed
permanent adviser to the National Council of the National
Front and was touring the Soviet zone in official capacity, at-
tending conferences of regional committees and issuing special
directives for conducting anti-West propaganda. Late in Oc-
tober he was reported to be editor of a new publication, the
Berliner Politische Korrespondenz, directed against the poli-
cies of the Bonn government and intended mainly for dis-
semination in West Berlin and the Federal Republic. He was
also reported to be writing memoires.
But there had already been indications that John, disap-
pointed with East Germany and with having been given only
the position of "itinerant preacher for reunification," as he
wrote his wife, was toying with the idea of returning to the
West. This was the implication of a statement he made to
Bonde-Henriksen in June 1955 that he was free to leave at
any moment but hesitated because of fear of being arrested
in West Germany. In a three-hour interview with the Dan-
ish correspondent, John said he would not have stayed on in
East Germany if he thought the USSR desired war. Henrik-
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SECRET Dr. John
sen remarked, "It is a question of whether you would have
been permitted to say `Goodbye and thanks,' " and John re-
plied, "I guess I would have known ways and means . . ." He
concluded the interview by saying: "I am a human being with
the shortcomings and virtues of a human being. I can be
accused of many things, but I have not failed the ideals of
my youth. You may call me naive. Nevertheless, I am re-
alistic and developments will prove me right."
In less than six months, however, perhaps particularly
moved by a message from Prince Louis to the effect that if
John really believed the things he was saying he could no
longer be his friend, John arranged with Bonde-Henriksen to
be picked up on Unter den Linden in front of the University
at 1650 hours on 12 December 1955. At about 1635 he entered
the University from Dorotheenstrasse, telling his two guards
to wait at the gate since he had an appointment there. The
guards let him go in alone. He walked through the buildings
to where Henriksen was parked, waiting. Partially disguised
in a muffler and dark glasses, he drove with Henriksen in the
car bearing the Danish coat of arms through the Branden-
burg Gate to the Victory Column and then to Tempelhof Air-
drome.
Bonde-Henriksen and Wiechmann from the regional BfV office
flew with him to Wahn. From there he was driven to Bonn.
Post Mortem
His fears of being arrested after his redefection were soon
confirmed. He was charged on 18 January 1956 with treason-
able conspiracy and high treason for his East Zone activities.
His defense was that he thought it less damaging to West
Germany, once he found himself in Communist hands through
the drug-abduction routine, if he pretended to cooperate; if
he refused, he would be brainwashed and forced to reveal state
secrets of importance. He contended that he had had no
chance to speak freely with Sefton Delmer and the other
Western correspondents at his 11 August press conference or
to convey any hint to anyone during the entire eighteen
months that he was acting under compulsion.
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The court was unimpressed. After a painstaking review of
all the circumstances he was found guilty on two counts of
= treasonable conspiracy for his services to Eastern propaganda
organizations. He was acquitted of betraying state secrets,
but judged guilty of treasonable falsifications that would have
been secret if true-his allegation of secret clauses in the EDC
treaty and of activities of the Gehlen organization aimed at
European hegemony. Sentenced to four years' imprisonment,
he was released in July 1958 under an amnesty granted by
President Heuss.
Wohlgemuth was brought to trial on treason charges but
acquitted on 14 December 1958 by the West German Supreme
Court. The court proceedings in the Wohlgemuth case have
not yet been released, but the publication in 1958 of the of-
ficial Urteil from the trial of Otto John 10 confirms the general
outline of both men's motivations and actions drawn above
and fills in some details.
The testimony of witnesses established that by the spring
of 1954 John had become so apprehensive about attacks on
him and his Office that he secured the promise of a legal po-
sition with an industrial firm against eventualities. It was
clear to the court also that he had been genuinely, if unjusti-
fiably, troubled by the idea that National Socialism might re-
gain political power in Bonn. His political thinking, if some-
what vague, was certainly oriented toward the West and away
from totalitarian forms of government. He distrusted mili-
tary men, opposed remilitarization, and was shocked by the
very thought of another war.
Witnesses pictured him as almost pathologically disturbed
during his July visit to Berlin. He was convinced that the
newspaper story of changes planned by the Interior Minister
was aimed at him. At a lunch on 17 July, when someone re-
marked that only a war could resolve the current tension,
he "shot up out of his chair." At the BfV Berlin office that
afternoon he went to pieces, complaining with half-drunken
vehemence about the lack of confidence in him. On 19 July
10 Hochverrat and Staatsgefaerdung, Band II (Karlsruhe: C. F.
Mueller, 1958), pp. 77-150. The Urteil includes an exhaustive and
impartial summary of the evidence and arguments of both prose-
cution and defense.
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Dr. John
at lunch he bemoaned the "growing influence of the Nazis"
and went into a long reminiscence of the Third Reich and
his own misunderstood role at Nuremberg. The memorial
service on 20 July had an extraordinarily shattering effect on
him.
With respect to any premeditation of his 20 July defection
it was testified that he had booked a return flight to Cologne
for 22 July, that he had refused his secretary's request for
use of the official car on 21 July on the grounds that he would
need it himself, that he told his chauffeur after dinner on 20
July that he was through with the car for the day but would
call for it in the morning, and that as he left the hotel for
the last time,. although a clerk told him his wife was in the,
lobby, he did not say goodbye to her. His frequent letters to
her from the East Zone referred again and again to his "sud-
den" decision and entreated her for understanding.
There was evidence also that the East German security
service was unprepared for John's appearance in the East
Zone and uncertain about his motives: a West German woman
journalist whom it had imprisoned two years earlier on espio-
nage charges and whom it supposed knew a good deal about
John was brought before one of its officers in Halle just after
20 July and questioned as to whether she thought John's de-
fection bona fide. Another West German journalist was told
by John himself, in complete privacy on 13 May 1955, that
the "number two Russian" in Karlshorst to whom he had
offered his collaboration on 20 July was surprised, but made
a kind of gentleman's agreement not to demand any secrets
from him and to let him move about freely.
The testimony did not touch on the Hoffer mystery except
to show that John had been inflating a jest of Hoffer's when
he claimed the CIC had made him spy on him. From the
bits of evidence available here it appears likely that Hoff er was
disillusioned with intelligence intrigues, had made some in-
discreet contacts in East Germany, and was afraid that his
friend's defection would bring on an interrogation and ex-
posure. John's attempt to blame his suicide on the CIC prob-
ably reflected a feeling of guilt for it on his own part.
Wohlgemuth, who did not make himself available as a wit-
ness, was pictured in the testimony as politically far to the
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Dr. John SECRET
left, announcing to all and sundry his conviction that Com-
munism would come to power in western Europe within a few
years. Nevertheless he had apparently not engaged in any
legally actionable activities. With respect to his intentions
in driving John across the Sandkrug Bridge, it was testified
that when the two men left the office-apartment after the
end of the Doctor's office hours that night, he was still wear-
ing his white trousers and carrying only a trench coat, and
that in the wee hours of 21 July he came back, alone, very
much upset, and dashed to and fro through the house hastily
packing a trunk.
He told the night nurse that John, whom he had introduced
to some people in the East Zone, had unexpectedly decided
to remain there, and that he himself might be suspected of
wrongdoing and was therefore going back to stay at the
Charite until things quieted down. He left a note for the day
nurse to the same effect, and told her to take care of the
office and apartment. Between 4 and 5 a.m. he telephoned
his attorney, gave him the same excited account, and asked
him to take full powers over his property. Then he went to
his mistress' house in Lietzenburger street, where he main-
tained a one-room apartment, and called her down to the
street. Telling her what had happened, he suggested that
his apartment might be searched and asked her to remove
his camera, photographs, films, and books. At about five
o'clock he stopped at the Uhland garage for gasoline, where
the attendant noticed that he seemed to be in "even a bigger
hurry than usual."
None of these people informed the police or Frau John, how-
ever, who first got from intelligence sources the news of
John's probable defection, confirmed on 23 July by his own
announcement over the East German radio:
... I have taken a resolute step and made contact with the
East Germans. I have been deprived of any basis for political
activity in the Federal Republic. After I had been continually
heckled in my office by the Nazis again rampant everywhere
in political and even in public life, the Federal Minister of the
Interior has now made any further work in my official position
impossible for me by declaring to the press that with the coming
of sovereignty he would have a free hand and be able "to
entrust the protection of the constitution to persons who are
truly above suspicion." . . . German policy has run into a
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Dr. John
blind alley . . . yet there is still a possibility of reunifica-
tion. . . . I shall soon present my ideas and plans for German
reunification to the German public.
Some students of the case are still convinced, in spite of
the apparent adequacy of John's personal motivation, that he
must nevertheless have defected under Soviet or more likely
British control. To them the case can but remain a mystery;
for although acquaintances like Winch, Putlitz, and Wohlge-
muth may well have encouraged John's own obsessions, no
evidence has come to light on how a supposed definitive con-
trol was exercised, and it is difficult to arrive even at a per-
suasive theoretical reconstruction of British or Soviet purposes
consistent with the facts.
It seemed evident to the court, as it does to a reader of
the intelligence files, that John's decision to approach the
Communist authorities in the East Zone, made in a state of
heightened neurotic tension and perhaps alcoholic befuddle-
ment, derived from his frustration in what he considered
his mission to stem the renazification of Germany and was
precipitated by the imminent likelihood of his losing what
position and influence he still had in the Federal Republic.
When his initial Soviet contacts in Karlshorst. led him, it
seems probable, to believe he would be free of duress in the
East and might be able to accomplish there what he could
not in the West, he forthwith made his marriage of conven-
ience with the Communists, in which any real position and
influence yet escaped him and from which he eventually opted
to return to his Western wife and friends.
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An unsolved problem analyzed
in depth and some approaches
recommended to solution.
A FRESH LOOK AT COLLECTION REQUIREMENTS
Clyde R. Heffter
In the immediate post-war period, the word "requirement"
was seldom heard in intelligence circles, and what we now
know as collection requirements were managed in a very off-
hand way. Today this subject is well to the fore, its impor-
tance acknowledged by everyone. Looking back, it is possible
to see certain steps by which this reversal of things came
about.
First there was a time when many people, both collectors
and consumers, saw no need for requirements at all-when
information was believed to be there for the plucking, and the
field intelligence officer was considered to need no help in de-
ciding what to pluck. This period overlapped and merged
quickly into a second one in which requirements were recog-
nized as desirable but were not thought to present any spe-
cial problem. Perhaps the man in the field did, after all, need
some guidance; if so, the expert in Washington had only to
jot down a list of questions and all would be well.
A third phase began when it was recognized that require-
ments were an integral and necessary part of the intelligence
process and that they needed to be fostered and systematized.
Committees were set up, priorities authorized, channels es-
tablished, forms devised, control numbers assigned. Thus by
the early 1950's the formal requirements machinery of today
was mostly in place.
The fourth and most interesting phase, which is still with
us, might be called the phase of specialized methodologies.
The harsh difficulties of intelligence collection against the
Sino-Soviet Bloc have driven home the realization that the
way a requirement is conceived and drawn, the way it gets
at its ultimate objective, the details it includes, the alterna-
tives it provides, the discretion it permits, and a dozen other
features may largely predetermine its chances of fulfilment.
SECRET 43
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SECRET Collection Requirements
Specialists in many fields, intent on solving immediate, con-
crete problems, have created new types of requirements pe-
culiarly adapted to their own aims and circumstances. One
requirement may take its shape from an analytical technique,
Another may be cast in the mold
of a collection method-photography, ELINT, exploitation of
legal travel. Subjects, areas, sources, access, communica-
tions-all have put their mark on the writing of requirements.
If we turn from the past and speculate on the future, we can
hardly doubt that it will be one of intensified effort. For it is
more and more evident that the answers we get are intimately
conditioned by the questions we ask, and that asking the right
questions-the business of requirements-is no spare-time job.
But what direction should this intensified effort take?
Undoubtedly the healthy specialization and experimental-
ism of the present should and will continue. But by itself this
is not an adequate program. The problems of requirements
are not all special problems. Some of them are central to the
very nature of the requirements process. One cannot help
feeling that too little of the best thinking of the community
has gone into these central problems-into the development,
in a word, of an adequate theory of requirements.
It would be untrue to imply that nobody has been concern-
ing himself with the broad questions. Much expert thought
has gone into the revisions of guidance papers for the com-
munity at large or for major segments of it. But there is
often a conspicuous hiatus between these high-level docu-
ments and the requirements produced on the working level.
Dealing with general matters has itself become a specialty.
We lack a vigorous exchange of views between generalists and
specialists, requirements officers and administrators, members
of all agencies, analysts in all intelligence fields, practitioners
of all collection methods, which might lead at least to a clarifi-
cation of ideas and at best to a solution of some common prob-
lems.
It is the aim of this paper to incite, if possible, such an ex-
change of views. It offers as candidate for the title of Num-
ber One Requirements Problem the problem of priorities.
More exactly, it is the problem of how to formulate needs and
priorities in such a way as to facilitate the satisfaction of
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needs in a degree roughly proportionate to their priorities,
through the most effective use of the collection means avail-
able.
This problem is one which deserves and will probably re-
ward the most searching study that can be given it. The
present paper cannot claim to be such a study. Among its
limitations is the fact that the writer's personal experience
is confined to the clandestine collection field. It seeks, how-
ever, to demonstrate that there is such a general problem;
that it is amenable to general analysis; that it must be ex-
amined not merely as a problem in administration but as one
in analytical method; and finally that it is one with which the
individual intelligence officer can effectively concern himself.
The few specific proposals in the following pages are incidental
to these general aims.
We may begin with a provisional definition of a collection
requirement as simply "a statement of information to be col-
lected." Our next step is to examine the most important va-
rieties of such statements.
Kinds of Requirement
In the management of collection requirements there are
certain persistent tendencies that reflect the divergent in-
terests of the participants. There is the tendency of the
analyst to publish a list of all his needs in the hope that some-
body will satisfy them. There is the tendency of the theorist
and the administrator to want a closely knit system whereby
all requirements can be fed into a single machine, integrated,
ranged by priorities, and allocated as directives to all parts of
the collection apparatus. And there is the tendency of the
collector to demand specific, well-defined requests for informa-
tion, keyed to his special capabilities.
These tendencies are capable of complementing each other
usefully if brought into reasonable balance, but their co-
existence has more often been marked with friction.
It will be useful at this point to take a look at the word
"requirement" in ordinary English usage. For the divergent
tendencies just mentioned have a remarkable parallel in cer-
tain divergent but thoroughly ingrained connotations of the
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word itself. It is highly likely that these connotations, jum-
bled together loosely in the backs of our minds, help to create
our notions of what a requirement "really ought to be."
Though not mutually exclusive, they are sufficiently different
that as one or the other predominates, the character of the
resultant concept varies appreciably.
The first connotation is that of need. A requirement is
something needed, or a statement of that need. This mean-
ing does not necessarily involve the idea of authority. The
need is objective; it is determined by the facts of the case.
Thus food, water, and oxygen are requirements of the human
organism. And thus information on various subjects is a re-
quirement of the analyst, the intelligence organization, and
the Government itself. When we think of the intelligence re-
quirements of the Government, we are thinking not merely
of what has been authoritatively determined to be needed,
but of what actually is needed. This way of regarding require-
ments, which is basic and which we all share to some extent,
adds dignity to our conception of our work. To the analyst,
who thinks in terms of what he needs in order to do his job, it
is the dominant connotation, and in fact the only one he
cares about until experience forces him to look farther.
The second connotation for most people is that of compul-
sion or command, stemming from authority. As children we
are "required" to go to school. In college we must take cer-
tain "required" courses. In intelligence, many of us regard
a'requirement as essentially a directive from a higher echelon
to a lower one. In this view, the key question is not whether
the information is objectively needed but whether its procure-
ment has been directed by competent authority. It is a view
which commends itself to the administrator, who would, of
course, contend that certification by competent authority pro-
vides the best assurance that a valid need exists. This con-
notation, like the first, exists in varying degrees for everyone.
Where it dominates, it leads to an emphasis on machinery,
systems, channels, committees.
Finally, there is the connotation of request. Though "re-
quest" is no longer an active meaning of "require," both come
from the same root, along with "inquire," "question," and
"query." In intelligence this meaning has again come into its
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own. Under this interpretation, one equal (the "customer")
makes a request or puts a question to another (the collector),
who fulfills or answers it as best he can. There is a sort of
honor system on both sides-with a dash of mutual suspicion.
The requester vouches for the validity of the requirement,
though the collector is free to reject it. If he accepts it, the
collector gives an implied assurance that he will do his best
on it, and this the requester is free to doubt. In any event
the relationship is a mutual one, and in its pure form is free
from compulsion. The use of direct requests appeals particu-
larly to the collector, who finds that it provides him with more
viable, collectible requirements than any other method. It
sometimes appeals also to the requester-analyst, who if he
finds a receptive collector is able by this means to get more
requirements accepted than would be possible otherwise.
Again, it is sometimes disillusioning to both, if the collector
comes to feel overburdened or the analyst to feel neglected.
These three connotations of need, compulsion, and request
are embodied in three kinds of collection requirement, to
which we shall arbitrarily give names-the inventory of needs,
addressed to the community at large and to nobody in par-
ticular; the directive, addressed by a higher to a lower eche-
lon; and the request, addressed by a customer to a collector.
The Requirement as Inventory of Needs
An example of the inventory of needs is the series of
Periodic Requirements (recently relabeled Reporting) Lists
issued by the CIA Office of Current Intelligence. No collector
is directed ("required") to collect against these lists; the lists
are not addressed to any single collector. Some responsible
individuals in clandestine collection (branch chiefs and station
chiefs) have refused to handle the PRL's on the grounds that
they are "not really requirements," i.e., they are not requests to
the clandestine collector for information which only he can pro-
vide. In most cases, however, the PRL's are selectively utilized
for guidance despite their character as inventories. There are
several reasons for this. Revised three times a year, they are
the most up-to-date of requirements. Their main subject, cur-
rent affairs of chiefly political significance, is one which engages
the interest and competence of nearly all collectors and which
presents opportunities to nearly all. Many such opportuni-
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ties are sudden and gratuitous; they divert no effort from
other requirements, hence raise no issue of priorities.
Generally speaking, however, the inventory of needs does
not appeal to the busy collector. When he accepts it, it is a
sign that adequate requirements addressed to his particular
capabilities are lacking. But the collector's viewpoint is not
the only pertinent one. The inventory of needs can have great
value as an instrument of analysis within the intelligence pro-
duction office that originates it. The one thing it can not do
is to contribute significantly to the resolution of the priori-
ties problem.
The Requirement as Directive
The most broadly controlling document in the field of re-
quirements is the list of Priority National Intelligence Objec-
tives issued annually as a Director of Central Intelligence Di-
rective to which attention is given in the NSC itself. Tech-
nically not requirements, and certainly not collection require-
ments, the PNIO's establish general guidelines for both col-
lection and research. They are ranged in three priorities and
contained in four pages. They are comprehensive, authorita-
tive, and community-wide in their application. But because of
their extreme generality, the PNIO's provide no practical guid-
ance in settling issues of specific collection priorities. They
form a constitution which requires both laws and courts to
interpret it. To only a limited extent do present collection di-
rectives provide such "laws" or the USIB committee structure
such "courts." It is still common practice for individual cus-
tomer requirements (chiefly of the "request" variety) to
claim a priority derived directly from the master document.
If conscientiously applied, this practice is sound as a discipline
to the requester. But it has no more value in judging the
relative urgency of two specific collection requests than cita-
tion of the U.S. Constitution would have in settling a subur-
ban zoning dispute.
On the level of collection requirements proper, the directive
occurs in several situations. The clearest example is where
there is a command channel, as between a collection organi-
zation's headquarters and its field representatives. Any re-
quirement sent through such a channel is a directive if the
higher echelon chooses to make it one. (Paradoxically, by
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euphemism, the fact that command authority is being exer-
cised will often be indicated by the word "request.")
For purposes of this discussion, the most significant type
of directive is that which emanates directly or indirectly from
the authority of the DCI, or is issued in consequence of agree-
ments between two or more agencies. Typically, such require-
ments originate outside the collection organization-often
through the mechanism of an inter-agency committee-and
represent the coordinated interests of major customers.
Where requirements of this kind are traditionally and with-
out question accepted by the collection organization and is-
sued with command force to its components, it is reasonable
to classify them as directives without looking into the precise
authority of the committee concerned.
Directives are most practicable in the following circum-
stances: (a) where a command relationship exists; (b) where
there is only one customer, or where one customer is incom-
parably more important than the others; (c) where a single
method of collection is involved, and where this method has
very precise, limited, and knowable capabilities. The last of
these circumstances is most likely to occur in collection by
technical methods. In such collection, especially on the Sino-
Soviet Bloc, directives have been relatively successful. For
when it is perfectly clear, as it often is in technical subjects,
that it is possible to have this or that but not both, it becomes
both feasible and necessary to reach a binding decision. In
these circumstances, priorities have real meaning.
The situation is very different in some other fields where
the need for priorities and hence for directives is felt equally
keenly. One such field is the broad area of clandestine col-
lection. Clandestine collection, though distinguished by its
methodology, is not a single method but a congeries of diverse
methods. Its capabilities are limited, but for the most part
are neither precise nor knowable. The demands on it are fan-
tastic. It serves as many customers as there are members of
the intelligence community, but is under the command of no
customer office. In short, it combines a maximum need for di-
rection with a minimum of the characteristics that make di-
rection practicable. In these circumstances the Interagency
Clandestine Collection Priorities Committee, which is charged
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with determining priority requirements for collection by the
Clandestine Services of CIA, has an unenviable mission. The
lists of requirements and targets (IPC Lists) issued by this
body of USIB representatives since 1951 form a fascinating
record of attacks on the requirements problem, from the
highly selective, 18-target USSR list of 1952 to the encyclo-
pedic, 379-target list of 1956, the subsequent selective excerpts
from that list, and the worldwide list now in preparation.
The IPC Lists have served various important purposes: they
have established goals, provided a basis for planning, and re-
corded in small compass many of the most critical informa-
tion needs of the USIB agencies. The IPC has also addressed
itself continuously to the problem of priorities. Its primary
method has been to relate its requirements for clandestine
collection to the objectives set forth in the PNIO's, and to as-
sign each requirement the priority carried by the correspond-
ing objective. This method, and the variations on it, will be
discussed at a later point in this paper. It cannot be said to
have helped much in solving the concrete problem of deciding
what items, among all items that are probably collectible, are
most worth collecting at the expense of something else.
The Requirement as Request
Examples of the requirement as request can be found every-
where. Most requirements fall in this category, including a
large majority of those bearing RD numbers in the commu-
nity-wide numbering system administered by the CIA Office
of Central Reference. The fact that RD stands for Require-
ment Directive is historically interesting but not currently
significant.
A request may range from a twenty-word question to a
fifty-page questionnaire. It may ask for a single fact or a
thousand related facts. Its essence is not in its form or con-
tent but in the relationship between requester and collector.
An important variant on the request is the solicited require-
ment. Here the request is itself requested, by the collector.
The collector, possessing a capability on an existing general
requirement (of any of the types discussed), informs the ap-
propriate customer of the, capability and asks for specific re-
quirements "tailored" to it. The resulting requirement is
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drawn up with an eye to the nature of the particular sources
to be used, rather than merely to the presumed over-all capaci-
ties of the collecting organization. Through this interaction
of consumer and collector, requirements of great precision and
immediate practical value are developed.
In clandestine collection the solicited requirement is regu-
larly used for legal travelers, for defectors and returnees, and
for other sources whose capability or knowledgeability can be
exploited only through detailed guidance or questioning. It is
the cornerstone of the requirements system managed by the
Interagency Defector Committee.
The solicited requirement blends into the jointly developed
requirement. Here collector and consumer work out the re-
quirement jointly, usually on a subject of broad scope and
usually on the initiative of the collector. This too is a prac-
tical device of often considerable merit.
The possible variations on the request are innumerable.
The unsolicited or "spontaneous" request is the basic require-
ments tool of the community, the means by which all can
seek help from those they think able to help them. The so-
licited request is a precision tool for relating needs and capa-
bilities. If capabilities were ample enough to fulfill all needs,
no other form of collection requirement would be necessary.
But needs are infinite, capabilities limited, priorities therefore
essential, and some form of directive indispensable.
The Study of Priority
If this description of the kinds of requirement is valid, it is
evident that each of the three kinds answers a deep-felt need,
has a life of its own, and plays a role of its own in the
total complex of intelligence guidance. Since the focus of
this paper is on the problem of priorities, it must concern it-
self chiefly with the directive. But while the directive is the
only practical vehicle for priorities, requests are also very
much in the picture since priorities must govern their fulfil-
ment.
In approaching the priorities question, it is natural to think
first in terms of administration and system. Adequate ad-
ministrative arrangements are in fact essential, and will be
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discussed in some fullness. In themselves, however, they are
powerless to do more than make the wheels go round. If the
wheels are also to mesh, the question must be studied further
as a problem in intellectual discipline, involving analytical
method and an appropriate language. Finally, it must be
viewed in relation to the training and responsibilities of the
individual intelligence officer. Each of these approaches will
be examined in turn.
System and Administration
There exists no single, general requirements system. What
might be called the requirements situation has previously
been well described in this journal,' but a brief recapitulation
will be useful here.
A department or agency which engages in collection pri-
marily to satisfy its own requirements generally maintains
an independent requirements system for internal use, with
its own terminology, categories, and priorities, and with a
single requirements office to direct its collection elements on
behalf of its consumer elements. This pattern is characteris-
tic of the military departments. The same requirements of-
fice that performs these internal functions (or perhaps a
separate branch of it) represents both the collector and the
consumer elements in dealing with other agencies.
Where, as in CIA, the consumer components are dependent
on many collectors and the collection components are in the
service of consumers throughout the community, no such
one-to-one system is possible. Each major component (col-
lector or consumer) has its own requirements office. There
may also be requirements officers at division and branch
levels, as in the Clandestine Services.
Requirements offices differ in many respects, but in all cases
they are the official channels for the movement of require-
ments between agencies. Their personnel are middlemen, and
must have some understanding of the problems not only of
'By William P. Bundy in "The Guiding of Intelligence Collection,"
'in the Winter 1959 issue (III 1), and, in the narrower context of
clandestine collection, by Lowell M. Dunleigh in "Spy at Your
Service, Sir," in the Spring 1959 issue (III 2).
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those whom they represent but of those whom they deal with
on the outside. The consumer requirements officer must find
the best collection bargain he can for his analyst client; the
collector requirements officer must find the best possible use
for the resources he represents, while protecting them from
unreasonable demands; each must restrain his own side from
ill-advised intransigence.
Between agencies (or between major components of CIA)
the typical requirement moves officially from analyst to con-
sumer requirements office to the CIA Office of Central Refer-
ence to collector requirements office to collector. (Even this
is a simplified statement.) OCR's community-wide system
whereby such requirements are numbered and recorded makes
for convenient reference. In some cases OCR also performs
other functions normally performed by requirements offices,
such as checking to make sure that readily available sources
have been canvassed before levying a requirement on an ex-
pensive collection system.
Although the vast majority of requirements move offi-
cially through the channel just described, many of these, move-
ments are merely in confirmation of advance copies which
have previously passed directly between the two requirements
offices concerned. Matters of substance are regularly dis-
cussed by one requirements officer with another. And beyond
this there are many instances where one or both of the re-
quirements offices are unaware that a requirement has been
agreed upon between analyst and individual collector until a
confirmation copy comes through channels.
From the standpoint of the "free market," of bringing
analyst and collector together, this way of doing things works
well. Where the collection situation is such that effort on a
low-priority target does not actually detract from the effort
that can be made on a high-priority target, little harm can
be done. Or where analyst and collector are both highly
knowledgeable and responsible, the results can be excellent.
The former condition still prevails in some areas outside the
iron curtain; the latter has been attained in certain compo-
nents. But neither analyst nor collector nor yet require-
ments officer is competent to set priorities.
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Hitherto we have spoken of requests and directives as clear-
cut categories. But it is necessary to take account of a spe-
cial variety, the request-cum-persuasion, and its still more
vigorous relative, the request-cum-pressure. The intense ef-
forts which are often made informally to induce individuals
in the collection offices to give special emphasis to particular
requirements are a clear sign that there is a felt need for
priorities. But priorities are slippery. Let us see how a typi-
cal collection priority is handled on the working level.
The OCR form used for RD's has a place for the requester to
check "degree of need" as "standard," "great," or "urgent."
If the analyst checks this in a way that is grossly out of line,
his own requirements office will probably catch him up; if it
does not, the collector's requirements office will balk. But al-
though it may be assumed that the requesting requirements
office would not approve an "urgent" rating unless the re-
quirement deserved it in relation to other requirements
placed by that office on the same collection organization, no
such assumption can be made as to its priority relative to re-
quirements from other consumers. And it would be a very
self-confident collector who would try to settle the question
unaided.
If the collector should show no interest in a requirement
marked "urgent," the requester may try proof, persuasion, or
pressure. He may indeed, in anticipation of resistance, have
originally indicated a relationship between his requirement
and one of the Priority National Intelligence Objectives. He
is almost certainly right that a relationship exists, but there
may be question of its cogency. It is possible to tie a very
small requirement to a very big objective. Early warning is
important, but not everything described as early warning is
equally important. The collector may still be unimpressed.
There is no impartial arbiter, short of the USIB itself, for the
requester to appeal to.
Oddly enough, in requests addressed to the Clandestine
Services it is unusual for a requester to cite an IPC List. Yet
in theory there should be many such citations. The Lists are
designed to contain all the highest priority requirements for
clandestine collection. They carry priorities derived author-
itatively from the PNIO's. Moreover, taken together they
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are more than a hundred times longer than the PNIO's and
are crammed with specifics. It would be much easier to prove
that a request is significantly related to an IPC item than
that it is significantly related to a PNIO-provided it actually
is.
The chief reason for the paucity of citations seems to be
that only a small proportion of requirements received as re-
quests are actually on subjects specifically covered in the IPC
Lists. The Lists are not cited for the simple reason that they
contain nothing suitable to cite. On non-Bloc areas this is
not surprising, since the IPC Lists have scarcely begun to
touch them. But on Bloc areas it is astonishing, all the more
since the Lists are composed of requirements and targets origi-
nally submitted by the very analysts who now make these re-
quests for information. Is it possible that the preparation of
IPC Lists is regarded by some analysts as a formal, academic
exercise unrelated to the real expression of their keenest in-
terests? Or do the Lists contain only items of such rarity
and difficulty that on ordinary workdays nobody really hopes
to get them? Or is it that the day-to-day requirements deal
with matters so current that the IPC Lists have not caught
up with them? Or with matters too unimportant to merit
inclusion in the Lists?
Be the answer what it may, the fact is that the analyst in
our hypothetical situation would probably appeal to a different
source of authority in his effort to show the collector the im-
portance of his requirement. The chances are good that, if
he had a case capable of being pressed at all, he would draw
support from positions taken by one of the substantive USIB
committees that concern themselves with requirements.
Among these committees are the Economic Intelligence Com-
mittee, the Scientific Intelligence Committee, the Joint Atomic
Energy Intelligence Committee, and the Guided Missile and
Astronautics Intelligence Committee. Each of them is au-
thorized, among its other duties, "to recommend . . . intelli-
gence objectives within the over-all national intelligence objec-
tives, establish relative priorities on substantive needs, review
the scope and effectiveness of collection and production efforts
to meet these objectives, and make the necessary substantive
r% r,
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recommendations to the departments and agencies concerned."
Each is also authorized "to determine the deficiencies" in its
own category of intelligence, "to take appropriate remedial ac-
tions, and to recommend to the Intelligence Board remedial
actions" beyond its own cognizance. Such recommendations
have from time to time been made and approved, with the
result that priorities on very specific matters have been estab-
lished by the USIB. Priorities so established have, of course,
the force of directives. And such priorities have frequently
been cited effectively in the levying of requirements, although
the exact applicability of the priority in the context of a given
collector's responsibilities has not always been clear beyond
doubt.
It is the intent of this paper to illustrate rather than to
exhaust the questions it raises. The requirements situation
has many other significant systems and phenomena: the spe-
cial, closed requirements systems governing technical meth-
ods of collection; the Watch Committee with its General Indi-
cator List; and, to name but one more, the Critical Collection
Problems Committee, whose recommendations on specified
critical collection questions carry great weight with the In-
telligence Board. But enough has been said to give a sense
of the administrative question.
It would seem to involve at least the following aspects: (a)
a vast number of requests with no consistently effective way
of relating them to established directives and hence to pri-
orities; (b) directives all of which emanate directly or in-
directly from the USIB, but through different channels and
without sufficient coordination, so that their impact is often
disconcerting.
One sometimes encounters the view that all requirements
should be fed into a single mechanism, where the marginal
ones would be eliminated and the others properly related, sub-
ordinated, formulated, and allocated. The appeal of this
dream is that such a procedure would, at least theoretically,
deal head-on with the problems of priorities and capabilities,
and would ensure that all relevant considerations and in-
terests were taken into account simultaneously by a single re-
sponsible authority.
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There are a dozen reasons why such a scheme is impractical.
The group charged with this function would have to be dele-
gated an unprecedented amount of the authority of the USIB.
It would be unwieldy in size. Its staff would have to consist
mainly of substantive experts and experts on capabilities, yet
neither of these could be extensively spared from regular ana-
lytical or collection duties, and if away from such duties long
would lose their expertise. Such a group could not keep
abreast of current developments, and much of its output
would be stillborn. It is inconceivable that it should take over
direction of the self-contained collection systems, or that it
could do so successfully. If charged with processing all re-
quirements, its machinery would whir meaninglessly over the
many that present no problem and find it difficult to pause
for those that do. The priority system would probably be too
standardized to help with the really hard and painful deci-
sions. There would be a strong tendency to ratify the ob-
vious and sidestep the prickly.
To encounter these faults and dangers, to be sure, it is not
necessary to create this gigantic requirements mechanism.
We face most of them already; they are the hazards of all
centralized systems, whether large-scale or small-scale. But
since we have still so much to learn about how to make priori-
ties work, it would seem sensible to do our experimentation
on a scale where the strains are tolerable.
One such experiment might confine itself to requirements
for clandestine collection by CIA. These might be divided into
directives and requests. The directives would be issued-pos-
sibly by a strengthened IPC-under new procedures to be es-
tablished by the USIB. The issuing body would take advan-
tage of the specialized competence of the substantive intelli-
gence committees, and the latter would coordinate with the
issuing body any recommendations to the USIB affecting clan-
destine collection priorities. All directives and priorities pre-
sented to the Clandestine Services (except those received di-
rectly from the DCI) would reach them through a single chan-
nel and would constitute a single, interrelated body of guid-
ance. Frequency of revision would be essential. Special emer-
gency priorities established through command channels would
be possible as they are today. As for requirements of the
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request type, they would be served in much the present man-
ner except that on challenge they would have to be justified
by a demonstrable relationship with a directive.
Discipline: Method and Language
The more one reflects on it, the more one sees that the set-
ting of priorities is a singularly subtle and elusive task. Use-
ful priorities simply cannot be caught in the coarse nets of
authority, information, channels, and the division of labor.
These things are needed, but so also are a disciplined intellec-
tual approach to the subject, comprising a delicate analytical
method and, perhaps most important, an adequate language.
To illustrate problems in method, we may draw once more
on the experience of the IPC. That committee, as was noted
earlier, derives its priority system from the PNIO's. The sys-
tem consists of three priorities, based on the degree to which
the United States could be benefited by the achievement of
an objective or harmed by the failure to achieve it. All IPC
requirements and targets (the latter being institutions or in-
stallations on which information is needed) bear the same pri-
ority as the PNIO to which they are related. Since the PNIO's
on the Sino-Soviet Bloc are all of First or Second Priority, the
IPC requirements on those areas are too. The result is that
a list of 300 Bloc targets may have 100 of First Priority and
200 of Second Priority.
There are several difficulties here. One, which the IPC has
for some time recognized and tried to overcome, is that two
priorities simply do not provide enough span. By various de-
vices-arranging certain related targets in an internal order
of importance; describing certain targets as substitutes for
others; treating targets as subordinate to "basic require-
ments" which are sometimes expanded into several para-
graphs-the IPC manages to convey a somewhat more dis-
criminating sense of priority.
A second difficulty is that a requirement related to a First
Priority objective is really not necessarily more important in
itself than another requirement related only to a Second Pri-
ority objective. Everything depends on how significantly each
requirement is related to its objective-how far its fulfilment
would go towards achieving the objective. It is illogical to
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o ection equirements
suppose that every item of information (or every target) has
an importance strictly proportionate to the importance of the
objective on which it bears, however minutely. Here again the
IPC has recognized the difficulty and has tried to compensate
for it to the extent compatible with its system. Where a re-
quirement or target bears on both a First and a Second Pri-
ority objective, it is ranged under the objective to which it
would contribute more significantly. This still leaves a tre-
mendous unevenness in the importance of targets assigned
the same priority.
Still a third difficulty is that a requirement meriting a given
priority in the context of total U.S. security interests does
not necessarily merit the same priority in the context of a
particular collection method. The economic stability of a cer-
tain friendly country may be of great importance (Second Pri-
ority in the PNIO's), yet may not require clandestine collec-
tion at all. This difficulty also has been recognized, and where
it is agreed that a requirement can be satisfied by other meth-
ods it is omitted from the List.
Unquestionably the difficulties of the priority-allocating
process could be illustrated equally well from the experience
of other bodies, though perhaps none faces so baffling a task.
And the difficulties cited are only a few among many. These
are the kinds of matters which appear much simpler before
studying them than afterwards. The fact that they are no-
where near solution is one reason for keeping our experiments
in priority administration on a medium scale, rather than
magnify the problem by creating more grandiose structures.
In order to clarify and refine our method we need a better
language. Here the most pressing need is for a common vo-
cabulary in which such indispensable words as objective, re-
quirement, target, and request can be relied on to mean at
least approximately the same thing to everybody. This happy
state can not be attained by promulgating official glossaries,
but only through continued, careful discussion of common
problems by persons from all parts of the community.
As we probe the more subtle aspects of requirements theory,
we may find that language itself is putting blinders on us in
our search for method. For instance, in the parlance of intel-
ligence direction specific requirements are said to be "derived"
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from general ones which in turn are "derived" from the
PNIO's or a similar authority. Is it possible that this con-
cept of "derivation" is really no more than a convenient but
misleading fiction; that the specifics are actually thought up
independently and, at best, are then matched with the gen-
eralities? The same process is often described as "translat-
ing" requirements or as "breaking them down." It is not sug-
gested that we discard such expressions but that we analyze
their implications and limitations. Nobody literally believes
that a PNIO of fifty words somehow contains within itself
the hundreds of thousands of specific questions that will be
asked somewhere, sometime, in the effort to fulfill it. We
know that many of those specific questions are not inevitable.
Others could be substituted for them, perhaps advantageously.
There is indeed a relationship between the fifty-word PNIO
and the innumerable small questions, one which admittedly
can never be fully charted; but has it been adequately ex-
plored? In looking into this particular matter-and here we
are momentarily returning from the question of language to
the question of method-it would be useful to consider the
history of the recently suspended specialized annexes to the
PNIO's as well as of a stillborn experiment several years ago
by the Office of Current Intelligence in the articulation of a
body of intelligence requirements at a middle level of abstrac-
tion between the PNIO's and collection requirements.
The final aspect of the language question, and perhaps the
most important, is the skill with which requirements them-
selves are expressed. What is needed here is not different
words from those now used, but surer ways of communicat-
ing the essence of a matter from one mind (or set of minds)
to another. There is no formula for this but a trained alert-
ness to the perils of misunderstanding.
Training and Personal Responsibility
In the last analysis every action is performed by an indi-
vidual; and in intelligence it is clear that the individual cannot
expect to be helped more than half way by systems and meth-
ods. This is true in the field of requirements as elsewhere.
To adapt a hoary but still valid epigram., requirements are far
too important to be left to the requirements officers. In types
of collection requiring individual initiative and judgment,
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these qualities must be applied to ends no less than to means.
It is pertinent, therefore, to add a word about the role of the
intelligence officer through whom requirements are finally put
to work.
In the training of new case officers-the second lieutenants
of clandestine collection-substantial attention must continue
to be given to the interpreting, tailoring, questioning, solicit-
ing, and developing of requirements suited to their sources,
as well as to the training, briefing, debriefing, directing and
redirecting of sources in response to requirements. The case
officer must learn to study carefully the requirement which
comes from far-away Washington, to grasp its purpose as
well as its letter, to flesh it out with all the knowledge he has
or can get, to cable for clarification when necessary, to adapt,
it to the understanding and the access of his sources. He
must also learn to study the reporting as it comes in from
the source, and from it to develop his own immediate feed-
back of further questions without waiting for the customer's
reaction.
To illustrate the case officer's strategic position at the cross-
roads of outflowing direction and inflowing product, the usual
image of the intelligence cycle might be twisted into a figure 8,
the upper part representing all the paraphernalia of higher
echelons, the lower the collection situation for which the case
officer is responsible. He himself appears, not on the outer
periphery of a vast, impersonal, revolving wheel, but where he
feels himself to be-at the center, receiving and giving direc-
tion downward, receiving and submitting reports upward,
himself deriving and feeding back direction from the reports
he receives.
The symbolic crossroads of the figure 8 is equally applicable
to the analyst in a consumer office. He too is at the center;
he too must communicate upwards and downwards; he too is
no cog in a machine, but a mind at work. When the systems
and doctrines have been perfected, the job will still have to be
done by these two.
8
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CONFIDENTIAL
Intelligence negotiates for the
services of an obtrusive, de-
manding, but enormously com-
petent mechanical slave.
THE COMPUTER-CAPABILITIES, PROSPECTS,
AND IMPLICATIONS
Joseph Becker
Computers and auxiliary machines for the electronic proc-
essing of data are emerging as potentially revolutionary in-
telligence tools to extend and multiply the human skills of
the community. The intelligence agencies have already com-
mitted huge sums of money for research and development,
and the design of advanced systems. Eventually this action
is certain to produce radical changes in the ways intelligence
information is collected, transmitted, stored, and utilized.
There are two main classes of computers, digital and analog.
The analog computer, given measurements of a continuum,
notably time, direction, distance, or velocity, processes them
mathematically as desired and displays the results in some
measurable form. An automobile speedometer is a mechani-
cal form of very simple analog computer; it measures the ro-
tation of a car's wheels and continuously translates this into
a miles-per-hour reading on the dashboard. For electronic
computation the input measurements may be represented by
the voltages of electrical signals and processed by addition
and subtraction of these voltages. One fruitful application of
the analog computer is in a missile guidance system. It con-
verts measurements of wind and missile velocity, launching
angle, position, time, etc., into a chain of output signals for
adjusting the valves and control surfaces of the missile.
Through a feedback loop to the missile these make instantane-
ous correction of abnormal trajectory variations. They may
also be used to drive a data-plotter on the ground for chart-
ing the trajectory or displaying it on a TV screen.
Because they work with measurements, which can never be
infinitely precise, the analog computers are less accurate than
digital computers, which process discrete numbers. And since
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numbers may be used to represent the letters of the alphabet
or verbal symbols, the digital computer is the machine that
has the major promise for handling the verbal data of in-
telligence. It is possible, however, to pass the signal voltages
of the analog computer's output through a converter which
turns them into discrete numerical quantities in digital codes
that can be processed by a digital computer.
The Digital Computer
The abacus is a simple digital computer, using beads to rep-
resent numerical quantities and providing a place to add and
subtract these and one to store results. With practice a per-
son can do arithmetic on an abacus much faster than on pa-
per. Electronic computers like Remington Rand's UNIVAC or
IBM's 700 series provide essentially the same facilities; but
they process numbers at speeds measured in millionths of a
second, have an immense storage space or "memory," function
precisely and accurately, and can process letters of the alpha-
bet when these are numerically coded, treating them in-
ternally as if they were numbers.
The really unique feature of a digital computer is what is
called its "logic," its ability to choose for itself one of a num-
ber of alternative procedures according to the outcome of
previous computations. This feature is the one mainly respon-
sible for the notion that digital computers are endowed with
near-human or even superhuman qualities. The :Fancy is en-
couraged in the vocabulary used by the computer people: you
"instruct" and "query" the machine in its own "language";
it "accepts," "differentiates," "searches its memory," "ana-
lyzes," even "evaluates." A seasoned computer operator will
argue on occasion that the machine has a personality of its
own, and his emotional involvement with the machine is such
that research is being done in man-machine relationships to
arrive at the right mix of human factors for happy and ef-
ficient work with a machine as colleague or subordinate.
Nevertheless, although it is true that man can evolve ways
to make a digital computer perform operations that closely
resemble human thought, and although the machine can di-
gest more information than a man and process it faster and
more accurately, the parallel with human skills should not be
carried past the point of fanciful analogy. The machine does
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not "think"; it is driven through a predetermined set of op-
erations.
Digital computers are used for solving complex mathemati-
cal equations, for engineering calculations, for statistical anal-
ysis, for experiments in machine translation and information
retrieval, and for other precise processing of numbers or let-
ters as in business accounting and banking systems. They
also make it possible to run a wide range of tests on sophisti-
cated system simulations called mathematical models. Such
a model is a set of mathematical equations governing a sys-
tem, say an economic system. If the equations used are valid,
it is possible, by subjecting the synthetic model to variable
data representing impingements on the economy, to deter-
mine and analyze the effects of these, and thus to predict
what is likely to occur in a real situation. Whereas hand
calculations to simulate all phases of economic interaction
would not be feasible because of their sheer bulk, the job can
be done on a computer in a matter of minutes.
Major weapons systems can be and are similarly reduced to
mathematical models in order to help determine their stra-
tegic implications. The models, incorporated into computer
programs, are put through mathematical war games which
test variant opposing strategies, weapons, tactics, logistics,
etc., and make possible a rapid evaluation of war plans on a
scientific and realistic basis. This is the only comprehensive
peacetime test of the effectiveness of military forces, equip-
ment, and resources and of the way they are employed.2
The language of a digital computer is usually a binary num-
ber system, which substitutes the base 2 for the customary
10 of our decimal system. Instead of running from 0 to 9
before carrying over to a second digit, it goes only from 0 to 1
and then back to zero as it registers in the next position.
Instead of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, it counts 1, 10, 11, 100, 101, etc. It is
used in digital computers because their circuits, switches,
tubes, transistors, and other electronic components are most
efficiently designed to have only two alternate states-on/off,
1 Cf. "Developments in Air Targeting: The Military Resources Model"
by Robert W. Leavitt, Studies II 1, p. 51ff.
See "Developments in Air Targeting: The Air Battle Model" by
Robert H. Adams, Studies II 2, p. 13ff.
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transmitting/non-transmitting, magnetized/unmagnetized, etc.
There is a simple formula for converting from the decimal
system to the binary, but the computer user does not need it:
decimal and alphabetical data coded on input media such as
punched cards and perforated paper tape are automatically
converted to binary numbers on the way into the machine.
Electronic Data Processing
A complete EDP system based on a computer generally has
the following components:
Input equipment-devices such as key punch machines and
flexowriters for putting the data into acceptable form; ma-
chines that convert punched card and paper tape code to
binary numbers; and equipment, usually magnetic tape
units, to take data into the main storage area of the com-
puter.
The computer, performing all arithmetic and logical opera-
tions. Its flexible ability to accept, store, select, and com-
pare data, to calculate, follow logical rules, and release re-
sults makes it the heart of the EDP system.
A storage area, containing not only the data to be processed
but also the set of instructions-program-governing the
entire operation of the system and a place to hold inter-
mediate results for later use.
A control mechanism that electronically supervises and syn-
chronizes the operations of the several machines and pro-
vides for manual interruption of the program from the op-
erator's console.
Output devices, those carrying the final results. They may
produce punched cards or perforated paper tape, magnetic
tape, printouts on paper or microfilm, or TV displays.
Most present-day EDP systems use magnetic tape for input
and output. But storage on magnetic tape would entail scan-
ning a reel of it from the beginning to find any particular
stored item, and several EDP systems therefore use a differ-
ent storage medium, say a magnetic disk, in order to provide
random access to individual items. Every item on the disk
has its own electronic pigeonhole or "machine address," and
when the machine is given that address it can proceed di-
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rectly to the item without scanning any other data in the
file.
The conditioning of an EDP system to solve a particular
kind of problem or render a particular kind of processing is
the job of a programmer. He analyzes the problem, makes
certain it is well defined, redefines it if necessary, and at-
tempts to preconceive all eventualities. Then, step by step,
he meticulously prepares the machine's instructions, using a
special set of symbolic notations furnished by the manufac-
turer along with the list of operations the system will perform.
The program thus prepared contains not only the instruc-
tions for the computer but directions for moving the data
from machine to machine or place to place within the system.
Automatic programming, a recent innovation designed to
make programming simpler for the user, is illustrated in
IBM's FORTRAN. It supplies a small and rigid natural-lan-
guage vocabulary-FORTRAN contains only 38 statements
and some simple rules of usage-in which the user writes
his program. A prepackaged program called a compiler en-
ables the computer to convert these to machine language as
its own instructions.
The concept of automatic programming is being taken a
step farther by a committee of the Department of Defense.
This group is engaged in producing a compiler that can auto-
matically convert a program set up for one manufacturer's
equipment to the right form for another's. Each manufac-
turer of EDP equipment also sponsors a users' organization
aimed at pooling the experience and the programs of all for
mutual benefit. SHARE, for example, the organization of
IBM's 709 customers, maintains a library of programs writ-
ten by individual members but available for use by any one.
This kind of cooperation conserves costly programming man-
power and saves time.
Even though computer applications and programming have
only begun to scratch the surface of potential capability,
hardware technology continues to forge ahead. The main
trend is to design faster and smaller computers, an aim that
ultimately involves the use of cryogenic techniques-operat-
ing temperatures near absolute zero-and microminiaturiza-
tion of circuitry. The very low temperatures increase the
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computer's switching speeds to a point where the circuits op-
erate with almost no electrical resistance. Microminiaturiza-
tion is achieved by reducing circuits optically or electronically
to their smallest reliable size and depositing an image of the
network on the surface of a wafer-thin foil. Very complex
circuitry can thus be built into a cube of stacked wafers the
size of a lump of sugar.
Looking ahead, designers foresee the day when refrigerated
computers the size of a portable TV set will operate on wall
socket power. It is symptomatic that one of the serious de-
sign problems facing computer engineers is that of minimiz-
ing the length of connecting wires, which becomes more and
more critical as components get smaller and signal speeds ap-
proach the speed of light.
Intelligence Applications
It is clear that these machine capabilities can be applied
at a number of points in the intelligence process to improve
and accelerate it. Not that computers and other EDP ma-
chines constitute any kind of panacea for our ills; they are
not glamorous Aladdin's lamps to do our bidding while we re-
cline at ease. Properly applied, they merely provide exten-
sions of human skills, and the calibre of intellectual effort
that goes into these applications will determine the net value
of the changes now certain to be thus wrought over the next
few years in intelligence methods and procedures.
We cannot yet begin to catalog the future points of appli-
cation, much less describe in just what way machines are go-
ing to be used, but we can speculate about some of the intelli-
gence processes likely to be affected by them.
Reporting Media. EDP's first logical prerequisite is likely to
be felt in the reporting of collected information. If we are
to do any kind of large-scale electronic processing of intelli-
gence information, the natural-language cables and docu-
ments that convey it to Washington must be converted to
digital form. This could theoretically be done in Washing-
ton by manual copying onto punched cards or perforated pa-
per tape or by an automatic optical scanning machine; but
retyping is too monumental a task to be considered, and
character-recognition conversion machines have not yet been
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made practical. The realistic and efficient thing to do is to
capture a suitably coded version of reports as a by-product of
their original typing in the field.
Teletype equipment produces such a version on perforated
paper tape, and standard-keyboard typewriters can be modi-
fied to produce one; the best known tape-producing typewriter
is the Flexowriter, in use in many parts of the intelligence
community. Its tape can be used to drive automatic equip-
ment for duplicating itself, for producing hard copy, or for
telecommunications; and it can be used as input to an elec-
tronic data processing system. If such tape were the regular
by-product of report typing in the field, it could serve as the
medium for electric or physical transmittal to Washington,
as the means for automatic reproduction of hard copy for
dissemination, and, converted to magnetic tape, as input to an
EDP system for automatic indexing, abstracting, and analysis
in a central document repository. Experiments are already
being conducted in the intelligence community to develop pro-
cedures based on getting machine-usable versions of reports
directly from the field for immediate headquarters process-
ing.3
Dissemination. The fact that a machine program can be
designed to compare the words in the text of an article with
words in a table in the computer's memory suggests its po-
tential use with an intelligence analyst's "watch list." NSA
is experimenting with this notion and developing analyst
"profiles" consisting of select words and phrases. These are
compared by machine with incoming information, and the
matches therein are flagged for the analyst's attention. The
Air Force has also developed an automatic disseminator
which scans incoming information against analyst require-
ments in essentially the same way.4
Document Recovery. The intelligence officer depends on a
central library to supply him with documents he cannot keep
in his own files and with lists of documents bearing on any
'For the description of such an experiment see "Design for Jet-Age
Reporting" by William Earling, Studies IV 2, p. 7ff.
4 See "Developments in Air Targeting: Progress and Future Prospects"
by Kenneth T. Johnson, Studies III 3, p. 53ff.
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subject he may have under study. The provision of this serv-
ice is no mean task, with documents being acquired at the
rate of about 1500 per day to be indexed, stored as compactly
as possible, and made susceptible of rapid recovery in some
form suitable for use. Machines are a potential aid in all
these three phases of the library problem. The semi-mecha-
nized CIA Intellofax files are now being examined with a view
to conversion to a magnetic tape and photographic system,
and the Minicard installation in AFOIN uses advanced equip-
ment designed to meet a similar Air Force filing problem.5
It is hoped that successful machine development will reduce
the need for individuals to keep their own files by providing
better central service.
Specialized Files. A critical problem with the general docu-
ment files of a central library, one aggravated as size and
complexity require the use of machine methods, is the se-
mantic and projective difficulties in providing precise and
comprehensive indexing by subject matter. These difficulties
do not occur in some specialized intelligence files, like those
for air target data and for name checks, which can be in-
dexed according to unambiguous features like names, national-
ities, and locations; and these are the logical ones on which
to try the first EDP applications. Air Targets is already us-
ing EDP,5 and for CIA's millions of biographical records used
in name checks a special-purpose machine complex with ran-
dom-access storage and very large capacity is being built in
prototype under the code-name WALNUT. Smaller specialized
files can be processed with general-purpose EDP equipment
currently on the market, some of it accompanied by manu-
facturer's generalized programs which need be supple-
mented only by a few punched cards defining the data sought,
how it should be sorted, merged, or matched, and in what form
the answers should print out.
In these and other applications to alphabetical data one
should still not lose sight of the arithmetic capability of the
machines. On demand the computer can supply significant
statistical data for management planning and action-pre-
See "Developments in Air Targeting: Data Handling Techniques,"
by Outten J. Clinnard, Studies III 2, p. 95ff.
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dicting a file's rate of growth, detecting gaps which warrant
increased collection effort, revealing patterns of user interest,
etc. The answers can be rendered in a variety of formats
ranging from numbers on paper to graphs on a TV screen.
The complex reports accounting necessary in the management
of some collection systems may be particularly amenable to
such a dual attack by machine.
Abstracting. Beyond their evident applicability to the han-
dling of large files, machines have a less obvious potential
for performing a number of operations which now burden the
human analyst. One of these is the abstracting done as a
library service or by individual analysts for their own needs.
Computer programs have been written to do word frequency
counts of the text of an article, separate common words from
those of graded substantive significance-"notion words"-
and after some statistical analysis print out the four or five
sentences ranking highest in notion words. When perfected
such programs will produce automatic abstracts from texts
in any language. The Army's Project ACSIMATIC, among
others, is experimenting with machine abstracts of ACSI In-
formation Reports.
Translation. There has been a good deal of publicity for
the progress toward a machine solution of the bulk transla-
tion problem, particularly of Soviet scientific literature.
Somewhat sensational newspaper reports have described
"breakthroughs" and demonstrations leaving the impression
that all machine translation problems have been solved. It
is true that an ability to do a bulk output job intelligible to
the reader has been achieved. Smooth-prose translation by
machine is not yet a reality, however, and may not be for
many years to come. Considerable language research remains
to be done, and there are still serious questions concerning
an output quality adequate for intelligence needs. But prog-
ress is being made toward the day when large-scale machine
translation coupled with high-speed printing equipment will
give wide and rapid dissemination of foreign texts to research-
ers. The process could also be reversed and used to convert
English to other languages for propaganda and other objec-
tives.
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Statistical Analysis. Wherever there is a need to correlate
large samples of data involving many variables, statistical in-
ference techniques can be applied with good results, and com-
puters can be used to make the bulk manageable or to speed
and improve the work. The economic researcher, for example,
who may be loath to apply statistical methods to much of the
data he has because it is such a tedious and time-consuming
job, will find computers more and more useful in the future,
aiding him to reorganize his data quickly into different forms
for analytic review. Eventually he may even make a regular
practice of devising mathematical models of economic situa-
tions and using machines to help him forecast the effects of
anticipated changes in conditions.
Photo interpretation is a natural for machine handling be-
cause the interpreter usually begins by solving certain com-
plex mathematical equations used in photogrammetry. He
needs computations to obtain the precise geographic orienta-
tion of his photo and then to get accurate measurement of
objects on the ground. It is feasible to store programs in
a computer to solve any number of these equations and yield
rapid, exact results when given the parameters of the parti-
cular problem. Hand calculations may be economical and
fast enough while photo-intelligence ground coverage remains
limited, but the prospect of tremendous increases in coverage
through satellite reconnaissance programs suggests that ma-
chines are likely to play a dominant role in the PI process
in the future.
The several experimental applications of EDP thus far tried
show that the powerful tools of mathematics and statistics
can advantageously be used on verbal information through
machine processing, which guarantees not only speed but un-
precedented uniformity of product by ensuring that prescribed
rules are followed consistently and precisely. In time, par
ticularly if incoming intelligence information begins to arrive
in digital form, there is good reason to believe that more com-
plex analytic tasks can be undertaken by the machine through
the making and matching of logical combinations of words and
phrases. Machine correlations may give rise to new hypo-
theses not suggested by the uncorrelated data. And farther
ahead lies the possibility of using machines to perform ele-
mentary types of problem-solving.
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Warning Systems
For the past several years the Defense Department has been
developing tactical and strategic command control systems.
The most widely publicized of these is SAGE (Semi-Automatic
Ground Environment), an air defense system. Items received
by a machine and dealt with in some way in the SAGE system
include such things as aircraft availability, weapons availa-
bility, base capability, weather, and radar sightings. When
hostile aircraft have been detected a manual calculation of
the best distribution of weapons and interceptors to meet the
particular threat is almost impossible because of time con-
straints. The computer, however, can calculate distances,
compute intercept times, assess the number and kind of bogey
aircraft present, and make a weapons assignment within toler-
able time limits. In the present system, while the computer
handles most of the routine data processing, it is monitored
and assisted by personnel who also make the more important
decisions on threat evaluation and tactical action.
As in SAGE, other command control systems of the future
are being planned so that an array of the information, in-
cluding intelligence information, necessary for action can be
displayed in readily usable form at command centers. EDP
machines will be an integral part of such systems because the
volume of data with which a commander must deal is enor-
mous and its interrelations so complex that it can no longer
be correlated reliably and rapidly enough by manual means.
Vast collection programs will back up these new systems, pro-
viding intelligence data for their input from radar, ELINT,
and other reconnaissance programs, most of it reduced to
analog or digital form beforehand.
It seems reasonable to assume that data may some day
also be included from non-technical intelligence products such
as estimates, broadcast intercepts, communications activity
assessments, agent reports, etc.; but these would presumably
first have to be computerized to be compatible with the other
data displayed for the commander's evaluation. Otherwise
this intelligence contribution would be likely to follow rather
than precede action decisions. Ideally, the indications intelli-
gence channel should feed information directly and continu-
ously into the command control system to form an integral
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CONFIDENTIAL The Computer
part of the display pattern presented to the commander and
provide him with a reliable index of the enemy's immediate
intent to attack. Although it does not necessarily follow that
today's indications intelligence process should be fully auto-
mated to mesh smoothly with command control systems, there
is sufficient justification for serious exploration of the possi-
bilities. Since it is already evident that EDP machines are
destined ultimately to play the major role in command con-
trol, plans for an automatic intelligence relationship need to
be laid early in order to ensure smooth parallel development.6
Impact on the Community
If we profit by the experience of industry during the past
few years we should be prepared for some radical changes in
organizational structure as a result of the introduction of
machines. The literature is filled with reports of business
organizations being turned upside down getting ready to use
automatic equipment. There are problems of conversion,
parallel processing, work rearrangement, staffing, space, etc.
From a data-processing viewpoint, the objective is to achieve
a balanced flow of information through the whole organization,
and this invariably cuts across departmental lines. It is possi-
ble to prepare against problems of this kind in the intelligence
organization if it is examined as a total, integrated, functional
system. An examination of the necessary scope and the im-
plementation of a coordinated plan will require a time of from
five to seven years, an investment that may run into tens of
millions of dollars, and the probability of outside contractual
assistance.
Another kind of impact is that of machines on personnel.
People are wary of the prospect of the machine "taking over,"
and they set up defenses to prevent it. Perhaps they can
be reassured by the fact that the introduction of computers
in business, while speeding up information and improving man-
agement's control, has neither reduced personnel in number
nor replaced individuals: with no experienced pool to draw
on for EDP staffing, the pattern has been to do a great deal
0 For a description of the indications intelligence process see "The
Monitoring of War Indicators" by Thomas J. Patton, Studies III 1,
p. 55ff.
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of internal training of the old staff. But training takes time,'
and intelligence should be planning an enlightened training
program chronologically coordinated with the rest of the
change-over effort.
The next five or ten years will be the period for planning
and experimenting with machine processing of intelligence
data that will ultimately make magnetic tapes as common a
form of dissemination as paper. It will be a period of careful
and deliberate systems analysis, simulation, and testing. The
problem of organizing and manipulating information in intel-
ligence is far more complex than in business or scientific ac-
tivity. It stands in a class by itself and challenges solution.
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COMMUNICATION TO THE EDITORS
On Interrogation
Dear Sirs:
I believe that your recent and useful article by Stanley B.
Farndon, "The Interrogation of Defectors," 1 is marred by
some oversimplifications, questionable principles, and psycho-
logical anachronisms which should be brought to the atten-
tion of the unwary reader.
I am sure that many experienced interrogators would find
too sweeping Mr. Farndon's assertion (page 10) that the in-
terrogator can best accomplish his purpose "by achieving a
harmonious atmosphere and creating a close personal rapport
with the subject . . ." Certainly the methods of "unfriendly"
interrogation he describes (pages 26-27) are not designed to
build rapport. He seems unacquainted with recent scientific
research on the psychology of interrogation, in which evidence
is accumulating for the hypothesis that the essential pre-
requisite for interrogation (as distinct from the debriefing of
cooperative sources) is the deliberate, controlled regression
of the interrogatee. The suitable method for inducing regres-
sion varies from subject to subject; but no matter how the
effect is achieved or what depth is required to induce sub-
mission and dependency, it is this state, not rapport, which
the successful interrogator of resistant sources need to
create.
With respect to these "unfriendly" methods Mr. Farndon
also fails to make clear how CIA interrogators, at least, are to
employ them without violating the provision of the National
Security Act which stipulates that "the Agency shall have no
police, subpoena, law-enforcement powers, or internal-security
functions . . ." If, as seems probable, he is describing an in-
terrogation undertaken jointly with a liaison service empow-
ered with executive authority, another layer of complexity is
added which should be explained if readers are to benefit from
the article. This oversimplification is evident also in his state-
ment (page 11), "The fact that a defector is dependent on the
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1VOON T To the Editors
West's good will for his future well-being is a lever which the
interrogator can utilize to control him ..." If the interroga-
tion is such a joint one the person being interrogated may be
partly dependent on Western benevolence. But if CIA is in-
terrogating, and if the interrogatee is a hostile agent, he will
probably have been briefed by the adversary service about the
limitations on Agency powers. Adversary services are known
to have told penetration agents not infrequently that they
have only to resist-in other words, that they are not depend-
ent on the good will of the U.S. service.
The article draws a dangerously clean line between defec-
tors that have and have not been administratively stamped
"bona fide." Thus it says (page 20) that it "takes from one
to four weeks to establish the bona fides of a legitimate defec-
tor," whereupon (page 23) a positive interrogator "picks up
where the CI interrogator left off, and his task is made much
simpler by his being able to approach the source without sus-
picion." The fact is that the bona fides of a defector may re-
main in doubt indefinitely. "One to four weeks" is an admin-
istrative concept, not an intelligence concept, and although
interrogators eliciting positive intelligence commonly work
without displaying suspicion, they no more approach sources
without it than any other intelligence officer does. It is a
truism that scepticism is the handmaiden of intelligence.
"Phase I-suspect; Phase II-clean" would be a foolish postu-
late. Pursuing this unwisdom, the PI interrogator is admon-
ished (page 24 ) to be sure that each topic is "thoroughly ex-
plored and completed before going off into another area."
Methodical, step-by-step debriefing is a joy to the provocation
agent who has entered "Phase II." The chances are that he
learned his whole cover story in exactly the same fashion.
No interrogator, whatever his label, should proceed so me-
chanically that in effect he merely provides the agent with a
refresher course in his own legend.
Mr. Farndon's doctrine on the polygraph is one not univer-
sally accepted. He says (page 23), "The polygraph should not
be used, however, until the interrogator is certain that he has
obtained all pertinent information or has reached an im-
passe." In frequent practice, on the contrary, it is used as
soon as one or two interrogation sessions have provided the
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To the Edifors
information needed for the purpose. The lie-detector is basic-
ally an interrogator's short-cut anyway, and its use soon after
the defector's arrival is calculated to increase its reliability.
The purposes of substantiation can be served by a second test
at or near the end of the interrogation.
Finally, one wonders about the classification of Slavs into
"rational, vital, emotional, and tense" personalities that Mr.
Farndon adopts (pages 13-17) from the 707 ECIC's Guide for
Intelligence Interrogators. Are these concepts based upon
scientific and controlled inquiry into the Slavic personality?
Or are the four labels the 20th-century reflection of far earlier
philosophical speculation?
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Intelligence Articles IV 4
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Sketch of a rational plan for
language and area studies in
intelligence.
THE ARTICULATION OF BABEL
The diversity of opinions expressed in almost any discussion
of intelligence work about the extent to which operational
officers and analysts need to receive foreign language train-
ing reflects, it seems to me, an immaturity in our thinking.
Our concept of language training seems not to have kept pace
with the maturing of our contemporary American intelligence
service, which now has a twenty-year history of global op-
eration.
It is true we have done things about spreading language
skills. An observer is dazzled by the wide variety of language-
area programs set up by the defense agencies since World
War II. Viewed quantitatively, the proliferation is impressive;
but examined as to whether they promise to satisfy our long-
term, world-wide needs for communication with other peoples,
these many-sided efforts inspire serious doubts. The very va-
riety of the programs suggests that we have continued the
brushfire approach taken during World War II, when our des-
perate need for linguists dictated makeshift emergency meas-
ures like those of the Army Specialized Training Program.
At least it shows that we have arrived at no overall answer
to the challenge but rather a multiplicity of answers, condi-
tioned by the immediate needs of particular components and
by the training philosophy-or lack of it-of different admin-
istrators in the various echelons. Each answer can be seen
to have its own individual merits, but one searches vainly for
any underlying philosophy lending general purpose and direc-
tion to the aggregation.
To compound the confusion, particularly in the last two
years or so, an affliction that might be called the oriental syn-
drome has attacked many Americans, symptomized in their
belief that our language problem can be solved merely by en-
rolling as many people as possible in oriental language courses.
The application of this theory leads to a demonstration of a
Al
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Articulation of Babel
sort of linguistic Parkinson's law, in which ever diminishing
returns are reached by an increasing number of persons who
study complex oriental tongues for an ever briefer time. Al-
though we do have a tremendous need for skill in languages
outside the conventional West European groups, this need will
never be filled by having vast numbers of students dribble away
their time in short-term programs without ever reaching func-
tional proficiency in writing, speaking, or reading.
Planning is the answer to the language problem of the in-
telligence service, planning based on a long-range view of pre-
dictable requirements. No group of planners, to be sure, can
have the clairvoyance to predict, for example, exactly which
of the 800 languages of Black Africa will emerge from obscurity
to significance by the year 1980. The plan must therefore
have elements providing for flexibility with the changing geo-
political picture, as well as for emergencies. The main fea-
tures such a plan should ideally have are sketched below.
Concentration on Specialists
We assume at the outset that, although language teaching
in the American school system is now improving, thanks in
part to the National Defense Education Act, we are still far
from the day when we can recruit staff personnel in any num-
bers with prior real working knowledge of a second tongue.
This means that we must be prepared to impart linguistic
skills as necessary, but it does not mean that we must furnish
equal opportunity for linguistic education to all. For the
overwhelming majority of intelligence officers, while a mod-
erate amount of language knowledge may be desirable, even
that is not really essential. It is a minority group, the re-
gional experts, for whom language-area training in depth is
an absolute necessity. Language may be "good for everybody,"
but that doctrine as a principle of the training program leads
to our frittering away of time and money. Twenty years of
experience have demonstrated that the way not to build up
our linguistic firepower is to put anyone to studying Bulgar-
ian, Vietnamese, or Swahili merely because he "feels like it."
Let's begin our planning, then, with a two-way division of
our personnel, separating the area specialists from generalists
and others who have no particular geographical concentra-
tion. These latter our ideal Language Academy could be pre-
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Articulation of Babel
pared to furnish an intermediate-level working knowledge of
one of the major Western languages-German, French, Span-
ish, Italian, or possibly Portuguese. The regional specialist,
on the other hand, whether analyst or operational officer,
would be given all-out training, mainly in languages and cul-
tures outside Western Europe, to match and complement his
mastery as an analyst of one of the social or natural sciences
or his expertise in tradecraft as an operational officer.
The strength in which languages would be covered would
be determined through priority lists drawn up and periodically
reviewed by a committee administering the plan, which would
call in all the interagency and academic support it needed.
Among the highest priority languages at present would be
listed Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese, Burmese, Indo-
nesian, Hindustani, Arabic, and Swahili, along with the no
longer "exotic" Russian. At lower priority would be listed He-
brew, Pashto, Persian, Afrikaans, Hausa, and others. Staff
personnel would be given every opportunity to express their
preferences in language study, but service needs would be the
determining consideration; the individual might end up with
his second or third or even fourth choice of tongues. Any
principle short of this would create a surplus of skills in the
popular languages and a deficit in those which lack appeal.
Our present overly permissive practices in this respect tend
also to encourage a dilettante rather than a professional ap-
proach to language.
This clear differentiation between specialist and non-special-
ist would effect a redistribution of the language-learning ef-
fort. We would no longer, for example, conduct a one-year
Chinese class for four generalists and two specialists, in which
the combined work of the six does not add up to one usable
skill. Instead we would have two or three specialists in an
all-out language-area program of five to six years' duration,
part of it full time. Long before these specialists had com-
pleted the full program, they would have enough knowledge
and insight to be useful at their desks in Washington or out
in the field. At the same time the generalist without prior
language equipment could get his innings too, basic training
in a key Western tongue. Neither would the concentration
on specialists preclude ad hoc linguistic aids and training for
A3
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survival for personnel liable to find themselves stranded in
some obscure corner of the world.
From Linguistics to Cultural Command
The language instruction prescribed for the specialist would
be conducted according to advanced principles of scientific
linguistics, making use of the latest electronic equipment.
Oral-aural phases of communication would generally be
stressed at the beginning, wherein native or bilingual instruc-
tors for spoken drill would be indispensable. Reading and
then writing would follow. The area specialist should emerge
from this training with an advanced command, short of native
proficiency, of the spoken and written idiom.
His study in depth of the language itself would be vigorously
backed by intensive and semi-intensive sociological study at
the intelligence school, at academic centers in the United
States, and when possible in the country where the language
is spoken. He would learn to know not only the geography,
history, politics, economics, literature, and social institutions
of the country but also the informal beliefs, traditions, and
ideals which make up the psyche of the society. With this
profound exposure he should in time acquire the sort of em-
pathy which makes possible a maximum yield from dealings
with a people. He should come to penetrate their culture, an
objective unattainable via the mechanistic approach to lan-
guage exemplified in the tourist manuals, which teach you to
parrot such phrases as "Where is the railway station?" or "I
feel quite ill. Please call a doctor."
As an example of how this knowledge in depth might be
applied, let's take a graduate in Russian from our Academy.
A specialist in Soviet economics, he has an appointment to
see Comrade Serge Gosplanov, Vice Consul in Paris, on some
routine matter. Will he plan to concentrate the conversa-
tion, after the official amenities, on coal production statistics
in the Donets Basin? Decidedly not. He expects the Russian,
if he is true to his culture, to be hospitable rather than
brusque, opening the way for the establishment of some sort
of personal rapport. Our man will be prepared to chat about
how the Dinamo Soccer team is doing and discuss the current
chess match in Leningrad. He may compare a recent political
development in Western Europe with a similar phenomenon
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Articulation of Babel
during Russia's sixteenth-century Time of Troubles. As op-
portunities arise he can throw in a few Russian proverbs, so
dear to Russian hearts, or illustrate a point with lines from
the revered poet Pushkin. Gosplanov, amazed and pleased by
the American's feeling for things Russian, is likely to become
expansive and may even indulge in confidences about Soviet
policies from which he would ordinarily refrain. This kind
of communication across cultures can be brought about despite
opposing ideologies and national enmities.
Input of Effort
Our planned program will founder in the launching unless
there is general appreciation and acceptance of the amount
of time and effort a person must put into learning a language.
Our experience now enables us to state with some precision
how many months of study at a given intensity should on the
average be allowed for attaining a given proficiency in any
particular language. The romance and Germanic languages
of Western Europe are the easiest; they can be learned com-
prehensively (speaking, reading, writing) in half the time it
takes for the Slavic, Semitic, Finno-Ugric, African and other
alphabetically written languages, and in a third of that re-
quired for those of the Far East that use ideographs.
Out generalist can probably become moderately proficient
in German, say, in five months' time if he devotes all his work-
ing hours and three or four hours a night at home to it. Or
he can stretch it out over 15 months at about three hours of
class and study per working day. He will be able to under-
stand most ordinary conversations, make himself understood
while living or traveling among Germans, read fairly difficult
texts with copious help from the dictionary, and write ac-
ceptable personal letters. The specialist in one of the easy
languages, however, whom we wish to make as skilled as pos-
sible short of the virtually unattainable native proficiency,
would need seven or eight months of full-time study or almost
two years at part time, plus several months' residence in a
country of that language. The specialist in Russian needs
twice as long, and the specialist learning Chinese at a part-
time speed would take about-seven years, the last one spent
in China.
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That is not all. We shall need a considerable number of
specialists who in addition to their primary language can also
handle a cognate secondary language or one otherwise closely
related. Once the specialist is well advanced in his major
tongue the dean of our Academy ought to encourage him to
undertake the study of a minor. If he is a Russian specialist,
he might take Polish, Czech, Serbo-Croatian, or Bulgarian-
or even wander from the Slavic family into Hungarian or Ru-
manian-to broaden his usefulness in dealing with the Soviet
orbit. If he is a Mandarin expert, he might go into Can-
tonese, Wu, or one of the major Chinese dialects, or elect to
do Japanese, Indonesian, or Laotian. The Arabist might
choose Hebrew or another Middle Eastern language-Persian,
Turkish, Pashto, Kurdish, or Azerbaijani. The Hindustani
major could either take one of the other important Indic
tongues like Bengali or cross linguistic family lines into the
Dravidian Telugu or Tamil.
The aims of the minor could be quite modest, probably
limited to an intermediate reading knowledge for analysts or
an elementary speaking knowledge for operators, skills they
could acquire with six months to two years of part-time work.
To this should be added some mild exposure to the culture of
the people, in the form of a general survey of its history or lit-
erature. This minor program would help solve the problem of
providing expertise on secondary yet strategic lands such as
Tibet, Ceylon, Turkey, Hungary, Korea, Afghanistan, and even
Benelux. For young intelligence officers planning their careers
it would not require investing great blocks of time in exclu-
sive study of a minor country which might lose its strategic
importance as a result of international political vagaries.
How shall we find qualified and enthusiastic applicants for
our ideal Language Academy? Are there stout-hearted men
and women willing to volunteer for a rigorous, exacting, and
time-consuming program which is certain to interfere with
relaxed and pleasant living? Experience shows that just as
the armed services usually have a surplus of personnel volun-
teering for paratroop and other hazardous assignments, intel-
ligence agencies do not lack language-minded persons eager
to specialize in regional studies. Motivation for language
study is a many-sided and often imponderable thing. Some
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volunteers happen to feel an affinity for a certain language
and people; some are moved by ethnic origin or social or mari-
tal attachments; some simply want to throw themselves into
an off-beat specialty.
Applications for language training should be open to all,
regardless of assignment; but selection from them should be
rigorous. There should be a leisurely yet searching examina-
tion, partly through informal meetings, into the officer's long-
term career potential for his organization. Through a battery
of psychological and linguistic tests along with personal inter-
views it should be determined that he has the aptitude and
particularly the drive and motivation required. Time and
again the utter futility or at least the poor returns from com-
pulsory programs in which certain individuals are ordered
to study such and such a language are brought home to train-
ing officers. While the conscientious person, realizing the
value of language to his job assignment, may rally bravely
to the challenge, his performance is rarely a superior one
when brought about by fiat. Top results are most likely when
compulsion from outside gives way to motivation from within,
and the student adds that elusive third dimension of devotion
which makes for excellence.
Follow-Through
When we have carefully selected well-qualified candidates
and schooled them to the required proficiency, our work is
still not done. All too often the thousands of dollars spent
by a government agency on the training of a man in a much-
needed tongue like Russian or Arabic go down the drain for
lack of follow-up instruction or any opportunity to utilize the
knowledge gained. Although it must be realistically admitted
that it is not always possible to send a man to an area where
his linguistic training will be useful, it is poor management
not to provide at least enough refresher instruction to main-
tain his proficiency as part of the nation's reservoir of stra-
tegic language-area skills. Here our Academy could well bor-
row from a practice of the armed forces, which insist upon
refresher training, at specified intervals, in most military
specialties.
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No matter how splendid the training and how dedicated the
trainee, our linguistic master plan will still not work unless
it is backed by an enlightened personnel management. For
one thing, the trainee must have an assurance that he will
not be penalized for making the gigantic effort which lan-
guage-area work entails, that he will not be passed over in
promotions because he is a "narrow specialist." This would
of course require changing the practice, widespread in govern-
ment, of reserving the higher grades for generalists with a
supervisory knack. Every effort should also be made to create
a flexibility of assignment, to minimize the specialist's risk of
getting stuck in one geographical rut. In concrete terms, this
means that our Chinese specialist should not be doomed to
shuttle eternally between Washington and Taipei, but should
have opportunities to serve also in Buenos Aires, Rio de Ja-
neiro, London, Delhi, and other capitals where large colonies
of Chinese make his abilities fruitful for intelligence purposes.
As a corollary of this principle, the rotation planned for the
specialist should be aimed at breaking down rather than
perpetuating the distinction between analyst and operator.
The language-area expertise of our ideally trained operational
officer should make him useful also, for example, in the Office
of National Estimates or in area analysis in any of the com-
munity's research components. At its best the system could
produce some number of ambidextrous intelligence officers
equally at home in Washington writing a report on the man-
power problems of Szechwan province or handling a network
of agents from Taipei.
There is a partial historical precedent for the type of pro-
gram we are describing. In the twenties and thirties the gov-
ernment agencies and the armed services followed the prac-
tice of selecting a limited number of "language officers" to be
dispatched abroad to study where the language in question was
spoken. General Joe Stilwell became in this way a Chinese
specialist for the Army. The Department of State sent
Charles Bohlen and George Kennan to Paris to study Russian
at the Ecoles de Langues Vivantes and to rub shoulders with
the large Russian colony there. Dozens of other men were
assigned to foreign capitals, mostly in the Orient, for lan-
guage-area training in depth. It is significant that during the
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Articulation o a e
forties and fifties these men were able to use their expertise in
important substantive assignments and take a hand in the
making of national policy.
Without some such systematic training plan as herein sug-
gested we run the risk of finding ourselves short of first-rate
hands to cope with areas of emerging importance-Southeast
Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, Africa south of the Sahara.
During World War II and afterwards we were able to depend
on refugees and displaced persons to handle many if not most
of our language needs. This source has just about run dry,
and at the same time the sweep of contemporary nationalism
is creating new nations to be dealt with at the rate of a dozen
or so a year. Language planning has become a Herculean
task, but a necessary one: the spirit of "make do" and faith
in our ability to improvise cannot be accepted as a substitute
for a well-conceived training blueprint that allows sufficient
lead time for the development of multiple language-area skills.
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Lessons for U.S. intelligence in
non-government programs to
prepare Americans for selfless
or self-seeking missions over-
seas.
TRAINING FOR OVERSEAS EFFECTIVENESS:
A SURVEY
A ground-swell of public interest in giving greater efficacy
to American efforts overseas, an interest backed by leading
authorities in government, business, religion, and the aca-
demic world, has resulted in an outcropping of courses and
centers devoted to training for overseas service. More than
30 non-government organizations now sponsor enterprises of
this sort. A review of their activities may serve to provide
background, both in theoretical approach and in practical
methodology, for current attempts to solve the U.S. Govern-
ment's and in particular the intelligence: community's own
problem of making its personnel effective while living and
working in foreign societies.1
Efforts to do something about increasing Americans' profes-
sional as well as personal effectiveness abroad are being un-
dertaken with varying degrees of urgency by different kinds
of private groups. The missionary group, with its long-stand-
ing need to train for proselyting all over the world, remains
in the forefront, and some of its old programs are taking on
a new look. Business groups are beginning to show an inter-
est in overseas training, although with some exceptions
(notably Aramco in Saudi Arabia and the Creole Oil Company
in Venezuela) their efforts are still in the exploratory stage.
The philanthropic foundations, with sizable groups of Ameri-
cans going abroad constantly, are of course much concerned
with the problem, and each of them has set up its own pro-
gram. In addition, a number of academic centers and private
institutions are coming up with new courses tailored to the
specific needs of some of these groups and of government agen-
This problem was pointed up by a confidential OCB report of
July 1959 entitled United States Personnel Overseas.
All
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Overseas Effectiveness
cies. Inall this activity there is a veritable ferment of effort
to concoct formulas for rapid and effective training.2
These efforts are in diverse stages of development. Some
are merely plans on paper, for example a project to turn Ellis
Island into an amalgamated overseas training school for all
interested groups.3 Others, like the National Training Labora-
tories at Bethel, Maine, under Dr. Leland P. Bradford, have
been running for years. But all the newer programs in "over-
seasmanship" are a departure from the older courses taught
in academic centers for international affairs, which are de-
signed to produce the fully educated man and therefore take
years to complete. The new ones simply seek to implant in
a matter of weeks, by orientation techniques, a viewpoint or
perspective conducive to effective action. While the two are
not necessarily in competition, proponents of each often criti-
cize the other, and the "old guard" in each of the sponsoring
groups tends to look askance at the new method. Some of
the academic centers (Syracuse University, University of Pitts-
burgh, American University) have recently added new-type
overseas training sections to their traditional offerings in
recognition of the importance of both.
'Although this survey concentrates on training of Americans con-
ducted in the United States, it should be pointed out that the
phenomenon of cross-cultural training is not restricted to stateside
programs or to Americans. There is a growing interest in re-
orienting Americans already resident in foreign societies and in
training foreign nationals for work in other countries, including
the United States. Indiana University has a training program for
incoming foreign students and special visitors from abroad. The
Washington International Center of the American Council on Edu-
cation puts out a Handbook for Travelers to the U.S.A. and gives
some orientation to foreign visitors. The Instituto Mexicano de
Administration de Negocios gives a twelve-week orientation on
Mexican life for American businessmen in Mexico City. The British
Council of Churches and the Conference of the British Missionary
Societies present a one-week course at Moor Park College in England.
In Germany there is an Institut fur Selbsthilfe at KSln-Lindenthal
which trains students for work in foreign areas. :Many of the
peoples of the world are thus becoming increasingly aware of the
problems entailed in functioning in cultures and societies other
than their own.
Sponsored by the Committee for an International Institute, headed
by William Brennan.
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Overseas Effectiveness
The purposes of the various individual projects are basically
similar: all are concerned with producing effective Americans
for dealing with other-culture persons and societies. Within
this general purpose each group has its special emphasis-
the business group on training a profit-maker, religious or-
ganizations on creating an effective Christian, and so forth;
but all focus their attention on concepts, skills, or methods
that may make for better interpersonal relations abroad. It
must be noted that the underlying image of the ideal "over-
seasman" in all of these programs is suspiciously like the suc-
cessful person in our own society as portrayed for example by
Dale Carnegie-a generally aggressive person with empathic
understanding and a hard core of know-how in the manipu-
lation of other persons. This concept, unidealistic as it is, is
certainly well received by the American trainee, who can read-
ily refer its role-image to his own experience in American
society.
Philosophies of Approach
While the goals of the various programs are thus similar,
their ways of arriving at the desired ends differ considerably.
Four philosophies of approach, overlapping more or less, are
distinguishable, each emphasizing the viewpoint of a particu-
lar behavioral-science discipline or combination of disciplines.
The viewpoint (and discipline) is usually that of the leader
of the program, which in turn reflects the interests of the
group it serves.
One such approach is built upon concepts derived from pub-
lic administration theory, aided by formulae from the behav-
ioral sciences generally. It seeks to answer the question,
"What kind of enterprise management is suitable for foreign
cultures, or a given foreign culture, and how does one go about
setting it up?" The International Operations Institute spon-
sored by DACOR (Diplomatic and Consular Officers, Retired),
the pioneer Maxwell Institute of American Overseas Opera-
tions under the direction of Dean Harlan Cleveland at Syracuse
University, the Johns Hopkins Institute on Development Pro-
gramming for mid-career ICA officers, and a program for de-
veloping overseas executives at the University of Pittsburgh's
Graduate School of Public and International Affairs are guided
by this institution-building approach.
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Overseas Effectiveness
.A more directly "people-to-people" approach stresses the de-
velopment of an individual's skills in interpersonal relations,
largely a matter of communication. The missionary programs
and the work of Dr. Edward R. Hallo with the Government
Affairs Institute in Washington, D.C., take the communica-
tions approach, and the Bethel National Training Laboratories
program, which seeks to produce the "effective innovator" in
various types and sizes of American groups, is a variation on it.
The Bethel program uses, the concepts and methods of educa-
tion, sociology, and psychology to train for effectiveness in
our own society; the missionary and other groups preparing
personnel for work in foreign societies lean to the concepts
of anthropology and anthropological linguistics. The one
stresses psychological universals in human behavior; the other
points up cultural relativism and area patterns of behavior.
Each has something to learn from the other.
Here a word should be said about language training pro-
grams, which although not covered in this survey are an
obvious aspect of the communications approach. Most lan-
guage programs to date have been devoted too nearly exclu-
sively to training in verbal communication, ignoring other
media of interaction between persons. But some are begin-
ning to interject value and behavioral concepts, embracing
the broader training objective of proficiency in the whole cul-
ture of the foreign society in which one is to operate.
A somewhat different perspective from these two is offered
by a value-premises approach, which concentrates on the basic
differences in the attitudes and values that underlie the be-
havior patterns of Americans and those of persons in other
cultures. Anthropology, social psychology, and sociology pro-
vide its conceptual materials, which include "cultural relativ-
ism" and "modal personality," sometimes called "national
character." Professor John Fayerweather of the Columbia
University Graduate School of Business considers this to be
the approach of his program in training business executives
for work in Latin America.5 He argues that foreign institu-
See his book The Silent Language, reviewed in Intelligence Articles
111 3.
See his book The Executive Overseas, reviewed in Intelligence
Articles IV 2.
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Overseas Effectiveness
tions may be similar in structure to American ones but differ
greatly in the attitudes and values which lie behind the struc-
tural facade. Dr. Benjamin Paul at the Harvard School of
Public Health, whose Social Science Division trains public
health workers for community projects in the United States
and abroad, reasons that the directives for training in person-
to-person communications and institution building follow
from an understanding of the value systems involved. Most
functionalist anthropologists, including Bronislaw Malinow-
ski (The Dynamics of Culture Change), Clyde Kluckhohn
(Mirror for Man), Cora DuBois (People of Alor), and Ruth
Benedict (The Chrysanthemum and the Sword), make value
premises fundamental in their analyses.
From a psychiatric point of view, making oneself effective
in a foreign society can be approached as a personal adjust-
ment problem. A booklet published by the Group for the Ad-
vancement of Psychiatry, Working Abroad: A Discussion of
Psychological Attitudes and Adaptation in New Situations,e
typifies this viewpoint. Dr. Lawrence Hinkle's group study-
ing human ecology at the Cornell Medical Center is similarly
concerned with individual adjustment problems, especially
their pathological aspects. Both contribute a useful biological
orientation by showing the importance of physical factors-
nerves, muscles, viscera-and relate the adjustment problem
overseas, the "culture shock," to that at home, the "nervous
breakdown."
Other differences among the training programs result from
differences in the needs of the organizations supporting them.
The foundations usually have personnel overseas, for one tour
only, and a short one. Their preparation therefore consists
of brief orientations to acquaint the trainee with a specific
country. Business, on the other hand, usually places its per-
sonnel in one foreign area for a protracted period of time.
On-the-job training in the field is most important here, and
this is what Aramco and the Creole Oil Co. emphasize. Mis-
sionaries, however, like government workers, are often shifted
from one area to another after a few years, and hence have
in common with them the problem of training to become a
"universal man" skillful at adjusting to any environment on
"Report No. 41, New York, Dec. 1958.
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Overseas Effectiveness
short notice (not so incidentally a favorite American self-
image).
Variations in. Methodology
The training programs differ greatly in method as a result
of these differences of approach. As to duration, for example,
the Ford Foundation orients in a few days; the Hopkins ICA
Institute takes 21 weeks. The interdenominational Meadville
Missionary Training Conference at Allegheny College devotes
half of its six-week summer course to applied linguistics, on
which the Hopkins Institute gives one lecture during its 21
weeks. The missionary programs are strong in emphasizing
the other-culture viewpoint, the typically anthropological ap-
proach which has been weak or lacking in most of the others.
Most programs, however, are now attempting with varying
degrees of emphasis and of success to incorporate this "cul-
tural relativity" view.
Some programs, for example the United Presbyterian
Church's Institute on Overseas Churchmanship at Stony
Point, N.Y., and most business groups' courses, rely entirely
on lectures by specialists and supplementary discussions.
Others are primarily "laboratory" courses: the Bethel Na-
tional Training Laboratories organize students into "T-groups"
for practical exercises, skillfully blended with lectures. If the
lecture courses are presented by academicians (and they often
are because of the importance of the behavioral sciences in
this training field) they can be successful only to the extent
that the academic lecturers are able to apply their scientific
theories to the practical field of the supporting organization.
Often they have difficulty doing this, lacking knowledge of the
practical field. This is no problem, of course, if the specialist
is also a member of the practicing profession, as Dr. Eugene
Nida and Dr. William Smalley of the Meadville missionary
training center are also missionaries, and Dr. John Fayer-
weather at Columbia is a business professor in addition to
being an overseasmanship specialist.
Most of the program directors recognize the embryonic state
of overseas training and approach their problems experimen-
tally. The Bethel National Training Laboratories, who have
had most experience in the interpersonal relations method,
are constantly seeking to improve their programs by a system
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Overseas Effectiveness
of staff critiques and by using their classes as research. labo-
ratories in teaching methods.
However divergent in approach and method, the programs
are based in common on the faith that it is possible to in-
culcate a new, effective perspective in the minds of the
trainees, and this new frame of mind which will enable the
trainee to analyze his past experience and better interpret
his future experience abroad is regarded as their most impor-
tant product. This gaining of insight, like religious conver-
sions, can be achieved in a relatively short time, and in fair-
ness to the quickie system it must be said that much of tra-
ditional pedagogy of the best sort has relied on sudden flashes
of wisdom rather than the laborious accumulation of knowl-
edge, although ideally the two go together and "knowledge
increaseth wisdom."
The directors, queried as to what factors are most impor-
tant in developing the new perspective, collectively emphasize
three principal ones. First, the personalities of the teaching
staff are regarded as of prime importance in firing the minds
of the trainees, communicating the desired image to them.
Second, the duration of the course seems to them less impor-
tant than having the concentration of full-time training for
whatever period in an environment segregated from the work-
a-day American world. Third, methods for inducing the stu-
dents to grasp actively the new perspective should go beyond
mere participation in discussions to include role-playing and
other devices for emotional involvement. The critical ele-
ments thus appear to be forceful personalities like Dr. Eugene
Nida of the Meadville program, special training areas such
as the United Presbyterians' center at Stony Point or the
Cheyenne Village used in a Montana University program for
ICA personnel, and involvement techniques such as those of
the T-group at the Bethel workshop. It seems that a course
of training overseas in the foreign society, bringing all of
these elements together, would be the best of all.
Overseas Follow-Up
Many of the programs viewed their pre-departure orientation
as the major or only step in producing the effective American,
who then should be tossed into the maelstrom of the foreign
society to sink or swim as he had learned his lesson well or
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ill. Several, however, see the training as including at least
some instruction after arrival overseas. The post-arrival
orientation efforts of the International Educational Exchange
Service (the Fulbrighters) with the help of local nationals
point the way toward development of continued guidance in
the field. Emulating the language and area schools conducted
by the State Department overseas, for example in Beirut and
Tokyo, the University of Syracuse is also currently setting
up a training school in Italy.
A glance at the quarter-century history of the Arabian-
American Oil Company's training of personnel for working
and living in Saudi Arabia shows changes that may take place
in overseas programs as they mature. At first, when Aramco
was recruiting many employees who had no area knowledge,
it gave them their initial training in an "Arab village" erected
for the purpose on Long Island. This school was later re-
moved to Saidon, Lebanon, and then to Dahran, where on-
the-job orientation is now given in Arabic language and cul-
ture. At present, however, with recruiting at a relatively low
level, staff vacancies can often be filled by persons with a prior
knowledge of the Middle East. The current emphasis is there-
fore on an intensive postgraduate course given at Hofof, Saudi
Arabia, where students selected from the elite of the company's
staff speak only Arabic and live entirely in an Arab culture
for ten hours a day over a 14-week period. The classrooms
here are real-life laboratories of cultural orientation-the mar-
ket place where the student learns to buy and sell Arab-style,
the tent where he becomes familiar with the elaborate code
of Arab hospitality, and the council gathering which shows
him the traditional local patterns of decision-making. He also
studies written Arabic and does research papers on aspects
of the Saudi Arabian social and political scene.
Popularity and Effectiveness
A comparison among the courses as to number of students
shows the missionary programs with large enrollments but
most of the business and academic ones poorly attended. Two
programs scheduled for the summer of 1959 for business per-
sonnel were postponed for lack of students. The key reason
for this contrast seems to be that the missionary programs
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form an integral part of their students' career development:
both interdenominational Meadville and Presbyterian Stony
Point are screening centers as well as training areas. At
Stony Point the students remain only candidates for overseas
positions pending satisfactory completion of the course. The
Johns Hopkins Institute also has a potential effect on the
careers of its ICA students in that it sends the ICA personnel
office reports on their capabilities to adjust to the foreign
situation.
The most effective program from the standpoint of student
interest and large enrollment is not a missionary one, how-
ever, but the Bethel workshop of the National Training Labora-
tories. It is well organized, and we have noted its balance
of conceptual material in lectures integrated with the device
for emotional involvement and case role training represented
by its T-groups. A major factor in its popularity is that the
students are required to study a fascinating subject-them-
selves-in interpersonal relations. According to Dr. Bradford,
the Bethel plan has laboratories in ten universities, Standard
Oil of New Jersey is putting a million dollars into the method
for the next 10 years of training, and other organizations
like General Electric and Red Cross are working with it. The
present program is not useful content-wide for overseas train-
ing-it would train persons going to foreign societies for effec-
tiveness in America-but its methods could be used in a for-
eign area frame of reference. The T-group also promises to
be useful as a device for conducting research on small group
interactions in any society.
None of the programs has data on record to validate the
efficacy of its methods. Even the Bethel laboratory, with a
dozen years of experience, has only anecdotal material to offer
in support of its system. Many of the groups are beginning
to take interest in getting feedback from the field and are
instituting systems for continued contact with their trainees
abroad, but none has approached the problem of evaluation
scientifically, devising controlled studies of overseas Americans.
More generally, there is a decided lack of scientific data any-
where on the overseas American and on the possibilities of
training for effectiveness in another culture. A research or-
ganization will probably have to be set up eventually to study
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Overseas Effectiveness
what happens to the American in new environments and to
keep abreast of changing foreign patterns of culture.
Although we are properly concerned here only with train-
ing, some mention should be made of the parallel problem of
screening for effectiveness abroad. It is recognized that cer-
tain American personality types, with traits often stemming
from ethnic group and area background, as well as the per-
sonal experience of the individual, are better fitted for work
in one foreign area (say the Middle East) than in another
(say Southeast Asia) ; and it may be more efficient to utilize
the talents and capabilities an individual has acquired over
the years than to try to remake him in a period of a few
weeks. The screening systems of the missionary programs
and especially of the Hopkins ICA Institute are quite rudi-
mentary, and their effectiveness is a matter of conjecture at
this stage in the development of overseas training. Ideally,
screening for effectiveness should precede assignment to an
area, and training should follow.
Implications for Intelligence Training
Although intelligence training can profit from continued
contact with these private programs, their diversity in the-
oretical approach and methodology, reflecting differences in
the needs of their sponsoring organizations, suggests that in-
telligence should not rely on outside organizations, but con-
tinue to develop its own overseas effectiveness training. The
Foreign Service of the State Department, the ICA, the USIA,
and the MAAG administration have similarly instituted in-
tensive courses in overseas effectiveness. The area courses
and training centers established overseas, however, whether
by non-government groups or by government agencies, are
a most important asset in which we could profitably become
interested.
The intelligence program, like these others, will continue
for some time to be an experimental one, and it should main-
tain an open-minded flexibility in training methods. It should
borrow useful concepts from all the various philosophical view-
points, the institutional approach of the public administration
groups, the communications and value-premises theories of the
anthropologists, and the personal adjustment bias of the psy-
chiatrists, rather than confine itself to the terms of any single
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academic discipline. Beginning with introductory courses and
pre-departure orientation, it should aim at a follow-through
in the field and additional training upon return from field duty.
A number of techniques used with success in other programs
might be adopted in the intelligence courses-the emotional
involvement of students through self-analysis in action situa-
tions, as in the Bethel T-groups; a problem-game technique
used by DACOR's International Operations Institute and the
Hopkins ICA workshop; Meadville's use of foreign nationals
for research and class demonstrations, but broadened to in-
clude not only language but all communications as in the
advanced Aramco course; the special training environment
and full-time concentration provided in most programs; and
an evaluation of individual capabilities and problems in a
screening function. As we have seen, the successful programs
with high enrollment and enthusiastic support are those that
make this training obligatory for personnel assigned to over-
seas duty. Putting the intelligence program on such a basis
would be a step toward ensuring its success.
Finally, although the need for research into the nature of
the overseas effectiveness problem may be filled in part by
the activities of other organizations, the intelligence program
requires a concomitant research and validation activity of its
own. Methodical study in depth will demand close cooperation
between the field and the conductors of the training program,
and a great deal of scientific data-collecting will be necessary
before we are on firm ground. This doesn't mean that train-
ing programs should wait until the data is in, but rather that
research should go hand in hand with teaching.
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The Japanese successfully play
back a radio agent from down
under.
The history of hasty Allied blunders that made the obscure
and innocuous Portuguese colony of eastern Timor a victim
of World War II 1 has an appropriately dismal sequel in the
hitherto untold story of an intelligence operation attempted
by the Allies after their invasion of the neutral zone had led
to Japanese occupation. Apparently none of the participants
has ever set down his recollections of the ensuing Japanese
counterintelligence coup and its exploitation for almost two
years, but an account of the main events can be pieced to-
gether from official records.
In mid-1942 the Japanese were in control of the Timorese
capital, Dili, and the coasts; but westward., toward the border
with Dutch Timor, remnants of the Australian and Dutch
invading forces were still holding out with guerrilla operations.
To work with these and to provide intelligence on the occupa-
tion forces, a party code-named LIZARD was introduced on
17 July by the Inter-Allied Services Department, a reconnais-
sance group which had been formed the preceding March and
had just come under MacArthur's control as part of the Allied
Intelligence Bureau, created on 6 July.2 By February 1943,
however, what remained of the Dutch troops had surrendered,
and the last of the Australians, along with LIZARD, were
evacuated by submarine. In April the ISD was liquidated.
A new body called first Special Operations Australia and then
Services Reconnaissance Department was formed.
Birth of Lagarto
Among those evacuated on 10 February 1943 by the U.S.
submarine Gudgeon were a sergeant of the 2/4 Australian
Independent Company (commandos), A. J. Ellwood, and a Por-
See Thomas F. Conlon's "Portuguese Timor: An Estimative Failure"
in Intelligence Articles IV 1, p. 91ff.
3 See Allison Ind's Allied Intelligence Bureau, reviewed in Intelligence
Articles III 1, p. 135.
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tuguese army pilot who had been the administrator of a large
Timorese province, Lt. M. de J. Pires. Early the following
summer Lt. Pires was placed in charge of a four-man team
under the auspices of the SRD to go back to Timor with the
mission of arranging the evacuation of a group of 100-odd
refugees, of maintaining morale among the Timorese and the
Portuguese not evacuated, of establishing an informant net
to cover enemy movements, and of reporting by radio on all
enemy activities. As radio operator he had a civilian who
had run the Dili radio station before the war, Patricio Luz.
The other two members of his team were Portuguese NCO's.
Code-named LAGARTO, Pires' team was landed by American
submarine on 1 July 1943, with the assistance of some of the
refugees awaiting evacuation, at the mouth of the Luca River.
A heavy sea was running, and three radio sets were lost; but
on the following day Luz nevertheless established the contact
with SRD in Melbourne that was regularly maintained there-
after. In about a month LAGARTO's first mission, the evacu-
ation, had been arranged, and 87 Portuguese, Timorese, and
Cantonese men, women, and children were taken out. The
rest joined the espionage team.
At this time Sgt. Ellwood also joined the team as a sort
of Australian liaison officer. A communications man, he had
his own ciphers to communicate independently with the SRD,
and Lt. Pires was directed to consult him on all matters and
to clear all messages with him. Pires, anxious to minimize
Australian participation in his proud services to Portugal and
resentful of the authority given a sergeant, ignored this direc-
tive. SRD initiated a commission for Ellwood, but his lieu-
tenancy came through too late to be of any use, when he and
Pires had long since been separated. It was only by striking
up a friendship with Luz that Ellwood could keep track of
Pires' messages to Melbourne.
The natives in the area turned out to be unfriendly and
assisted the Japanese, so from the very beginning LAGARTO
was continually harassed and forced to keep on the move.
Moreover, Ellwood reported, the team had grown to the un-
wieldy size of 34, including Pires' mistress and the pregnant
comrade-in-arms of another Portuguese. Melbourne repeat-
edly asked Pires to cut the party down, but it was not until
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late September, when the team had gradually lost all its ra-
tions and spare arms and ammunition, that he got it down
to eight, still including his mistress. When things became
critical he requested an evacuation, but too late; the Japanese
were now closing in.
On 29 September 1943 natives completely surrounded the
party and stood guard until the Japanese came up. Ellwood,
without dry matches, couldn't burn his cipher and other
papers, but he scooped out a hole in the sand and buried them.
Luz and two others managed to get away, the latter for only
a few days, Luz for the duration; SRD heard from him
through Portuguese consular channels in December 1945. The
rest were loaded into a truck and taken to Dili to a military
jail. There Ellwood, kept tied and handcuffed, could hear the
cries and screams of the others, but he never saw any of them
again. He himself was alternately questioned and beaten by
four Japanese.
Nippon Takes Over
The Japanese first got hold of Pires' emergency cipher. On
6 October they sent a message to SRD saying Luz had run
away from LAGARTO. The same day, however, having found
Ellwood's buried papers, they beat him into agreeing to operate
his set. He was in such bad shape that a Japanese operator
had to guide his hand to the transmitting key. His message
gave a plausible position for LAGARTO and said they had been
without food for three days. Melbourne replied with arrange-
ments for a food drop and asked whether it was true that
Luz had disappeared and who was operating. On 7 October
Ellwood confirmed that Luz had run away and said that he
was operating for Pires, who had also lost his cipher book.
SRD, all innocent of suspicion, thus began a series of supply
drops that was to go on for 22 months. The Japanese would
take Sgt. Ellwood to the drop zone and have him aim the
signal lamp while they operated it from cover close by. For
his cooperation Ellwood was finally allowed two sets of cloth-
ing, his mail, and one magazine per month from the drops.
The flow of messages from LAGARTO from this time on
gave the impression that it was gradually getting on a friendly
basis with the natives and establishing itself in the country.
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It reported the team moving about for a time and then finally
settling some 20 miles east of Dili, where it remained ostensibly
unmolested until July 1945. A careful study of these pur-
ported early movements might have raised an eyebrow in Mel-
bourne: the team was said to have retraced its steps into
the very area where it had previously reported the natives
most unfriendly and unwilling to help in any way. But SRD
never even inquired how LAGARTO had managed to get itself
out of the crisis it had reported just before capture.
Cobra Entrapped
With LAGARTO apparently well established, SRD used it
to protect the insertion of additional teams. Arrangements
were made for the first of these, code-named COBRA, to be
sent in on 29 January 1944. The Japanese took Ellwood with
them to the entry point. Having obtained dry matches and
materials to make a flash lamp, he intended to escape and
warn the new team before it landed. He made a break, but
his guard shouted to attract the attention of the other Japa-
nese and he was soon recaptured, being ill with beri-beri. After
a severe beating he was blindfolded, gagged and bound, and
left without food or drink in the open for forty-eight hours.
Then he was returned to Dili and put on a starvation diet
that brought back his malaria and dysentery. He learned
that the incoming team had been captured within an hour.
Melbourne, asking LAGARTO what happened to COBRA,
gave it the code word COBRA was to use if it was in difficulty
and the authenticator that would indicate it was safe and free
of enemy control. With the help of this information the Japa-
nese got the use of COBRA's communications and in a few
days began sending messages over that channel also. A third
team, sent in ten months after LAGARTO's advice about the
entry point was asked, was apprehended within a few hours.
The Play Ends
At the end of 1944 control of the teams passed to a Group D
in SRD, established in Darwin at the Lugger Maintenance
Station. The turnover was accompanied by no word or hint
that anything might be wrong. A full counterintelligence re-
view by Group D would not have been possible anyway: the
message files of LAGARTO and COBRA were incomplete with
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respect to the early months of both. Melbourne, although
asked to supply copies of the full files, would not or could
not do so.
In April 1945, however, intercept intelligence reported that
a copy of an AIB questionnaire dropped to both teams in Jan-
uary and February was in Japanese hands on Timor. A plan
for relief of LAGARTO, which it was now suspected might
also be known to the Japanese, was changed without inform-
ing the team, and the relief team leader was parachuted into
the area two days before a scheduled supply drop. When the
drop was made he observed from concealment that Ellwood
was under guard at the drop zone. But it was now July, and
by the time he made his way back to Australia the war was
over.
On 21 August Ellwood was removed from his solitary con-
finement and taken to another prison, where he was housed
with the leader of ill-fated COBRA, a Lt. Cashman. On 1
September 1945 all the surviving SRD prisoners were moved
to Flores, Soembawa, Java, and Bali, where they were picked
up by aircraft of the RAAF and flown to Singapore. on 2
October.
The last messages had been sent over the COBRA and
LAGARTO links on 12 August 1945. They read respectively:
FOR ACB FROM NIPPON. THANKS FOR YOUR INFOR-
MATION THIS LONG WHILE. NIPPON ARMY.
NIPPON FOR LMS. THANKS YOUR ASSISTANCE FOR
THIS LONG WHILE. HOPE TO SEE YOU AGAIN. UNTIL
THEN WISH YOU GOOD HEALTH. NIPPON ARMY.
This operation carried out so successfully by the Japanese
was on a much smaller scale than the similar North Pole
deception achieved by the Germans at the other end of the
world.3 There is no evidence available that any information
passed to the Australians by the Japanese over the compro-
mised circuits did any lasting harm. Nevertheless, it meant
the total cancellation of effective reconnaissance in this par-
ticular area and the fruitless expenditure of considerable
equipment and personnel tied up in supporting the teams.
3See Herman J. Giskes' London Calling North Pole (New York, 1953).
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INTELLIGENCE IN RECENT PUBLIC LITERATURE
GERMAN INTELLIGENCE AND POLICY IN
WORLD WAR II
THE HOUSE BUILT ON SAND: The Conflicts of German Pol-
icy in Russia 1939-1945. By Gerald Reitlinger. (New
York: The Viking Press. 1960. Pp. 459. $6.95.)
Mr. Reitlinger might more accurately have made his sub-
title The Lack of a German Policy in Russia, for his book
documents in detail the want of any Nazi master-plan for
the conquered areas and peoples of the Soviet Union. Hitler
had some vague thought of germanizing European Russia with
colonists and moving most of the heterogenous nationality
groups to Siberia. Goering, in his capacity of economic and
manpower czar, sought from occupied Russia only tremendous
exports of food and the exploitation of skilled labor. Himm-
ler's SS was devoted to the task of executing all Soviet officials
as well as exterminating the Jews, and its Einsatz Kommandos
did both with appalling ruthlessness. Rosenberg's impotent
Ministry for Occupied Territories had no particular policy and
was constantly at odds with both the civilian and the military
administrators. The Wehrmacht was mainly interested only
in getting on with the war; few of its senior officers opposed
the inhuman treatment of the conquered peoples. And lastly,
the intelligence components of the Wehrmacht, Abwehr, and
SS played a considerable role. The result of the combined
activities of all of these agencies and factions: chaos.
Reitlinger devotes the major part of his work to what he
calls the "colonialism" with which the occupied territory was
administered, and what seems an excessive proportion of this
is concerned with the feud between Rosenberg and Erich Koch,
Commissar for the Ukraine. Partisan and anti-partisan activ-
ities are mentioned throughout, but there is a disappointingly
brief section devoted exclusively to the partisans. The last
quarter of the book deals with the "political crusade"-the
formation of national legions, the recruitment of eastern troops
for the German army, and the institution of the Vlasov Army.
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A good research job, Reitlinger's study will be a valuable
secondary source on German efforts in political warfare, guer-
rilla warfare, and intelligence operations in the USSR from
1941 to 1944. It presents cogent object lessons illustrating
the fact that unconventional warfare of all types must be
closely aligned to a national policy and consistent objectives
if it is to have any chance of success. Although Germany,
even if it had sought to make the Russian people its allies
from the start, did not have the military or industrial strength
or the leadership needed to defeat the Communist regime, the
record of its performance here forms a magnificent case his-
tory showing how not to govern occupied areas and revealing
a national mis-estimate of the Soviet Union. Reitlinger's ex-
tensive footnotes will assist those who desire to delve deeper.
LIFE AND DEATH OF THE LUFTWAFFE. By Werner Baum-
mach, General of the Bombers. Translated by Frederick
Holt. (New York: Coward-McCann, Inc. 1960. Pp. 224.
$4.50.)
Werner Baumbach was one of the Luftwaffe's original
bomber pilots who lived to become General of the Bombers
when there were very few bombers left. He survived not only
the hazards of air action but also those entailed in the many
sharp criticisms of the Luftwaffe's high command which he
apparently did not hesitate to make as the tide of the air
war turned against Germany. He was a close friend of Ernst
Udet, World War I pilot and Air Quartermaster General in
World War II, of Jeschonnek, Luftwaffe Chief of Staff, and
late in the war of Production Minister Albert Speer. After
the war he emigrated to Argentina, where he was killed in
a plane crash in 1952.
This book, a posthumous combination of history, autobiog-
raphy, and philosophy unskilled in all three fields, is less than
the Luftwaffe deserves. The factual quotations from the au-
thor's diary are mingled with others that range from flowery
philosophizing to comment on Goering's decadent entourage.
Yet quite a few items of interest to the intelligence officer
can with diligence be found in these haphazard reminiscences.
Chapter II, "Pre-War Strength of the Air Powers," purports
to be a German General Staff analysis of the air strength
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of the United States and the European powers. Among the
interesting historical footnotes in the book is the revelation
that when Hitler returned to the Rhineland in 1936, Germany
had a single unarmed squadron of biplane fighters! The mass
production of planes soon began, but as early as 1940, by Goe-
ring's own decision, experimental work in new aircraft was
practically stopped, reduced to such a level that in 1945 the
German fighters were outclassed by those of the Allies.
In Chapter XVI, "Where Were Our Fighters?" there is a
brief report on the debate whether Germany should emphasize
the production of jet fighters such as the Me 262. Fortu-
nately for the Allies, Hitler's insistence that production con-
centrate on bombers, even after it was obvious that fighters
were needed to defend Germany, resulted in a lack of any
decision and a dissipation of aircraft production. Udet in
1941 warned that if the fighter arm was not strengthened the
war would be lost. But "the heads of the armed forces re-
garded the air arm as an auxiliary weapon in the land and
sea war," and "it was widely believed that the protection of
the home country could be left to the anti-aircraft guns in
conjunction with a few fighter wings." Hitler was so obsessed
with the idea of an offensive war that he ignored the threat
of the allied strategic bomber offensive.
But these poor estimates with respect to defense were not
compensated in offensive strength. The air war against Eng-
land failed, says Baumbach, because British fighters were su-
perior to German bombers, because the German fighters could
not provide cover, and because the aircraft, bombsights, and
armament were inadequate for the job. "German air-sea war-
fare," moreover, "was a system of expedients, expedients im-
posed by the enemy." In the production of the guided missile,
"the wildest confusion prevailed. . . . We had a fully developed
weapon but could not produce it in quantity and employ it."
Baumbach implies that after a visit to the Soviet Union
in 1940 he made the statement that Russia could not be con-
quered on land; he is imprecise as to whether that was really
part of his report or a post-war afterthought. He goes on
to say that the Air Staff always rejected or minimized intelli-
gence reports on Soviet air strength. Radar in the Luftwaffe
was also "the affair of intelligence," but Goering's deputy
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Milch did not like General Martini, the head of intelligence,
and neither of them paid attention to the development of
radar; the Allies left them far behind.
It remains for some scholarly historian to shape this and
other material into a real "life and death of the Luftwaffe."
But here is enough to warn any nation of the fate invited
by a divided command, dispersed authority, the personality
cult, and the ignoring of intelligence.
BLACK SATURDAY: THE DEATH OF THE ROYAL OAK.
By Alexander McKee. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and
Winston. 1960. Pp. 211. $3.95.)
On October 14, 1939, less than six weeks after the outbreak
of World War II, the British battleship Royal Oak was sunk
with the loss of 833 men while at anchor in the supposedly
impregnable naval base of Scapa Flow in the Orkneys. Al-
though it was of the ancient Royal Sovereign class built in
1913-1914, the loss of the Royal Oak was a severe one to the
British Home Fleet, hard pressed as it was to contain the
efforts of the German commerce-raiders both above and below
the surface. Almost immediately after the sinking the Ger-
mans announced that it had been the U-47, commanded by
Gunther Prien, that had penetrated Scapa Flow and done the
job, and shortly after the war a story appeared describing
how the feat had been made possible by a German agent in
the Orkneys who informed Berlin of weaknesses in the sub-
marine defenses of the naval base.
Mr. McKee's book is an attempt to discredit this generally
accepted version of the sinking and show that there was no
German submarine and no agent, that the Royal Oak sank
as a result of internal explosions. He bases his case on inter-
views with a number of the survivors and an analysis of Ger-
man naval records, including Prien's exaggerated report. He
did not gain access to British Admiralty reports and presumes
that these files are still kept secret in order to conceal the
sabotage or accidental explosions.
His arguments are unconvincing. His sources, interviewed
when many years have blurred their memories of what must
have been at best a bewildering experience, are largely rather
low-rank survivors; the ranking officers who lived apparently
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either didn't know much or weren't talking. The firmest
pertinent evidence on the case is first, that the submarine
defenses were in fact weak-another blockship was en route
to fill a known gap-and second, that the greatest fear was
an air raid. The base had been subjected to German aerial
observation, and on October 17 it was actually raided.
Until the Admiralty opens its files there may be some mys-
tery about this event. But Winston Churchill, who has a
fair reputation as a historian, says on page 489 of The Gather-
ing Storm, "A German U-boat . . . sank the battleship Royal
Oak as she lay at anchor."
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BRITISH WARTIME OPERATIONS
THE GREATEST RAID OF ALL. By C. E. Lucas Phillips.
(Boston: Little, Brown and Company. 1960. Pp. 270.
$4.95.)
On the night of March 27-28, 1942, British commandos and
naval elements raided the port of St. Nazaire, which was heav-
ily fortified and guarded by German ground, air, and naval
forces. At a loss of 169 killed, the raiding party-611 men
in small, virtually unarmed vessels-succeeded in putting out
of action for the duration of the war (in fact for a full ten
years) the giant "Normandie" dry dock, the on:iy repair fa-
cility on the Atlantic coast that could handle the German
battleship Tirpitz. This action, as had been planned, forced
the recall of the Tirpitz to northern waters, where she was
eventually caught and sunk. The exploit was called by Lord
Louis Mountbatten the war's finest and most profitable com-
bined operation, by Winston Churchill "a deed of glory in-
timately involved in high strategy."
Mr. Phillips' account of the St. Nazaire raid is an excellent
study in intelligence and paramilitary action. He describes
at length the meticulous care with which it was planned on
the basis of sound intelligence. It encountered only a few
unexpected gun emplacements. A fine example of the combat
use of good basic intelligence, pertinent current intelligence,
and-perhaps most important of all-a sound estimate of
enemy reactions, the audacious gamble succeeded because of
this kind of preparation and planning, because the security
precautions were excellent, because of good provisions for cover
and deception, and of course because it was carried out with
magnificent aggressiveness and courage-five Victoria Crosses!
Although not written for the instruction of combat intelli-
gence and paramilitary officers, The Greatest Raid should be
required reading for them.
PIN-STRIPE SABOTEUR. By C. Wighton. (London: Od-
ham's Press Ltd. 1959. Pp. 256. 18/-.)
This the story of "Robin," an important British agent in
France and Switzerland from 1940 until 1944. Although the
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author does not tell all, his book still contributes signifi-
cantly to the history of covert intelligence and intelligence-
related operations during the war. Robin's activities ranged
the clandestine keyboard from intelligence collection in the
early years to major sabotage and paramilitary operations
toward the end. Although all of his important cohorts were
eventually captured, Robin himself was never taken by the
Germans. A good case could be made for the view that this
remarkable "luck" was a product of his mental brilliance,
flinty courage, and well-developed sixth sense rather than
any fortuitous gift apart from these qualities. Most of his
activities were well organized, reflecting his wise devotion to
the principle of economy of force. His major accomplish-
ments included important breakthroughs in the collection of
intelligence linking the German long-range rockets to Pee-
nemunde and the procurement of secret timetables for mili-
tary trains on the critical railroads of northern France.
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EVASION AND ESCAPE
THEY CALLED ME ALFRED. By Friedrich Wetzel. (Lon-
don: George Ronald. 1959. Pp. 237. 15/-.)
The author was a German who in the early 1930's partici-
pated in the formation and activities of an anti-Hitler under-
ground movement in and around Stettin. As the Nazis made
their drive for power the opposition was relatively strong in
numbers but weak in unity, leadership, and purpose, all too
prone to adopt a "let George stop Hitler" attitude. Wetzel
was among those who realized that it would not do to wait
for leadership and believed that a grass-roots movement of
millions of determined people could stop Hitler. Those who
shared these views were too few and too late, unfortunately.
Captured by the Gestapo and tortured, he escaped and made
his way to freedom, narrowly missing recapture when the
Germans took over Czechoslovakia in 1938. His book includes
a good description of his covert cross-country march from
central Czechoslovakia over the Beskids to Poland, a route
that led ultimately to London and a new life.
FROM CAPRI INTO OBLIVION. By Adrian Gallegos. (Lon-
don: Hodder and Stoughton. 1959. Pp. 256. 16/-.)
This well-written World War II book is the story of a Brit-
ish Naval Reserve officer, Chief of the Advanced Naval Sec-
tion of Special Force No. 1, who was captured by the Germans
in Italy and regained his freedom after spending some 13
months behind enemy lines. The account of his evasion in
Italy treads book-saturated ground, but other parts of the
story are unique, for not many men escaped from Germany
via Austria and Italy. More important than any other factor
in the author's successful escape was his command of foreign
languages. This skill also enabled him while serving in North
Africa to capture three escaped German POW's by detecting
their slightly foreign French accent. His own escape enabled
him to bring back much valuable intelligence on German war
plants, military installations, partisan movements, etc. He
could have brought back more if he had been briefed: he notes
that he did not realize how many aspects of life in enemy
territory were of intelligence interest.
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Recent Books: Evasion and Escape
SEQUEL TO BOLDNESS. By Richard Pape. (London: Od-
ham's Press Ltd. 1959. Pp. 256. 18/-.)
This rambling, disjointed, sometimes moving book follows
up the author's earlier account 1 of his World War II escape
and evasion experiences in Europe. Although it contains a
good deal of data in the escape and evasion category and on
clandestine activities in general, much of the material is
merely a warmover from his original account or has been
covered in greater detail in other works. The author's pur-
pose in Sequel is to trace the fortunes and misfortunes of
those who aided his evasion and in several cases paid dearly
for their kindness. "Can I and should I forgive and forget?"
is the question around which the story follows an erratic
orbit. Slowly and painfully, after talking to many who forgave
and forgot with little reason for doing so, Pape finds the answer
to be "yes."
OFFICIAL SECRET. By Clayton Hutton. (London: Max
Parrish. 1960. Pp. 195. $3.75.)
The subject of this book is the development and production
of evasion and escape aids for British military personnel dur-
ing World War II. More precisely, it recites the author's
role in this program.
Useful as many of these items were at the time, there is no
longer anything novel about maps printed on silk, miniature
compasses, condensed rations, flexible saws, and the like. As
the author admits, even the methods used to conceal these
items have long since been revealed and thereby compromised
for future use.
Containing nothing of value to present-day intelligence, the
book is also a tiresome one: the author's main purpose seems
to be the establishment of his bona fides as a 24-hour-a-day,
seven-day-a-week genius. You don't have to take his unblush-
ing word for this; he also supplies testimonials.
The title "Official Secret" is intended to be ironical. The
author devotes the last 36 pages to describing his frustrations
in getting official clearances to tell his story. We agree with
him that no security is breached in the telling.
1 Boldness Be My Friend. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1954.
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CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE. By P. Eaton and J. Leasor.
(London: Angus and Robertson Ltd. 1960. Pp. 239.
18/-.)
An interesting rundown on two of the great misplaced treas-
ures of World War II, one consisting of Yugoslav bullion from
the vaults of a Zagreb bank and the other, the so-called "Rom-
mel treasure," comprising gold and jewelry collected by
German forces in North Africa. If the facts assembled by
the authors are approximately correct, the movements of the
two weave fantastic patterns of misfortune, coincidence,
treachery, and puzzling silence. The Rommel treasure mov-
ing northward and the Yugoslav generally westward, they
seem incredibly to have been lost at approximately the same
place along the east coast of Corsica, although no one in-
tended this place as a destination for either hoard. Many
people who could supply missing pieces of the puzzle are now
dead, but the mystery is far from dead; further searches will
be made and more lives lost and more books written ere it is
laid to rest.
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CONFIDENTIAL
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Articles and book reviews on the following pages are un-
classified and may for convenience be detached from the classi-
fied body of the Studies if their origin therein is protected.
The authors of articles are identified in the table of contents
preceding page 1.
The editors gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Mr.
Walter Pforzheimer, Curator of the CIA Historical Intelli-
gence Collection, in scanning current public literature for in-
telligence materials, and of the many intelligence officers who
prepared book reviews for this issue of the Studies. Most
noteworthy in this respect are those in the following cate-
gories:
German intelligence and policy ...... LYMAN B. KIRKPATRICK
Evasion and escape ....
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