World War II confronted the U.S. Army with the problems of fighting a global conflict across enormous distances. The beginnings were not easy During the first six months of fighting in the Pacific, the United States suffered an unprecedented string of military reverses. German Uboats in the Atlantic ravaged the sea lanes until early 1943, creating a serious shortage of shipping that threatened America's capacity to project its power overseas. However, the military problems were manageable. America's vast industrial base allowed the United States to equip a mobilized Army of 8 million men, with 89 divisions and over 1,000 squadrons of aircraft. By the end of 1943 much of this vast force had been deployed overseas. Following preliminary operations in North Africa and the Mediterranean, the invasion of Normandy in June 1944 allowed the U.S. Army to bring its main forces to bear against Germany on the decisive battlefield of continental Europe. In the Pacific, the secondary theater of war, America eventually launched a two-pronged attack on the Japanese Empire from bases in Australia and Hawaii. By August 1945 the war had been brought to a triumphant close.
The history of Military Intelligence in the war was paradoxical. Largely because of the success of British and American cryptanalysts in exploiting enemy communications, the Army ultimately was provided with better intelligence than it had ever enjoyed in its history Yet all during the war, there was a constant drumfire of criticism directed against Military Intelligence. In late 1943 Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson agreed with his colleague, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, that "our two intelligence services are pretty bum."1 The same year Admiral Ernest King complained of "overlaps and wasted effort in the various activities" of Army and Navy Intelligence.2 In retrospect, the Army's World War II deputy chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Joseph McNarney, stated that Army G-2 "was always a headache for the War Department and was reorganized con-
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tinuously and unsuccessfully throughout the war." 3 Although the intelligence end product was superb, the machinery that produced it was beset by disorder. The situation was not improved by a high rate of turnover in MID's leadership: between 1941 and 1944, the Army had four different assistant chiefs of staff, G-2.
The onset of the war led inevitably to major changes in Army Intelligence. Pearl Harbor provided an obvious spur to greater efforts at interservice coordination on intelligence matters. A Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) that brought together working-level representatives of MID and the Office of Naval Intelligence had a belated first meeting on 11 December, a month after it was first authorized. Once the Joint Chiefs of Staff were in place, a new JIC was formed, consisting of the heads of MID and the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI). Membership in the committee was expanded to include representatives of the Coordinator of Information, the Department of State, and the Board of Economic Warfare. The JIC had the dual mission of providing intelligence advice to the joint Chiefs of Staff and representing the United States in combined Military Intelligence matters with its British counterparts. The principals on the JIC were supported by a larger working group known as the joint Intelligence Survey Committee. With the growing independence of the Army Air Forces, the AAF's principal intelligence officer, the assistant chief of air staff, intelligence (A-2), was added to the JIC in May 1943, and the subordinate body became known as the joint Intelligence Staff. 4
This joint structure did accomplish some useful purposes by fostering interservice cooperation. Under its supervision, a joint prisoner-of-war interrogation center was set up at Fort Hunt, Virginia, in May 1942 to process high-ranking German prisoners. A similar facility was organized at Byron Hot Springs, California, in December to handle Japanese prisoners. By the fall of 1942, joint Army-Navy Intelligence Studies were being published, and small joint Intelligence Collection Agencies were later fielded in North Africa, the Middle East, IndiaBurma, and China to acquire nontactical information of potential use to Washington. At the end of 1942 there was even a serious proposal to merge MID with ONI, creating a joint intelligence agency. However, this idea ran into too many practical difficulties, since MID performed broader functions than ONI, and the two organizations were not parallel. MID, for example, was an element of a larger staff but ONI was not, since the Navy had no such body
The exchange of information between Army and Navy Intelligence was also hampered by tradition. Both service intelligence agencies had long been conditioned to operate independently and departmentally Communications intelligence was particularly sensitive: until November 1944 the Navy did not share all information derived from this source with the Army, and no joint organiza-
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tion to coordinate activities in this field was put in place until 1945.5 The lack of secure telephone links between MID and ONI, even at the end of the war, reflected the limits on cooperation between the armed services in the intelligence field.
Although MID was willing to work with its Navy counterpart, it regarded cooperation with other players in the intelligence arena with distaste. Both military services distrusted the civilians, especially Donovan's organization. This rivalry did not abate even after the Office of the Coordinator of Information, shorn of its propaganda functions, was placed under the joint Chiefs of Staff in July 1942, redesignated the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), and given a heavy fill of military personnel, with Donovan himself ultimately receiving general's stars. MID never allowed OSS intelligence analysts any access to high-grade communications intelligence (COMINT).6 One of the motives behind the proposal for creating a joint intelligence agency was to strip OSS of most of its intelligence functions. Moreover, when plans began to be made for Operation TORCH, the invasion of North Africa, the Joint Intelligence Committee was carefully cut out of the picture. Instead, intelligence support to the operation was provided by a Joint Security Control group with its membership restricted to representatives from Army and Navy Intelligence. Later the Joint Chiefs of Staff used this body to coordinate deception operations.
The Reorganization of Military Intelligence
At the same time that Army Intelligence was beginning to embark on intelligence collaboration with other elements, it was also undergoing reorganization. The first change came about as a result of a wholesale shakeup of the Army staff system in March 1942. Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall and his top planners decided to sharply cut back the Army staff and to centralize control of operations in a War Department Operations Division, which would become a Washington command post for the chief of staff. Administrative duties previously performed at the staff level were to be delegated to new subordinate commands. The staff would become a body engaged exclusively in planning and supervision.
This change, which divided the Army into the Army Ground Forces, the Army Air Forces, and the Services of Supply (later redesignated as the Army Service Forces), had a major impact on the structure of Military Intelligence.
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Each of the components had its own intelligence staff. Initially, Army Ground Forces took over responsibility for combat intelligence training. The intelligence organization of the Army Air Forces (AAF) devoted itself to studying the technical and tactical aspects of the air-related threat, while the War Department G-2, in which AAF personnel were well represented, continued to have responsibility for strategic air intelligence. The Services of Supply, in addition to exercising supervision over counterintelligence operations in the United States, took over responsibility for the intelligence activities of the seven Army technical services: the Chemical Warfare Service, Corps of Engineers, Medical Corps, Ordnance Corps, Quartermaster Corps, Signal Corps, and Transportation Corps. Among other things, this meant that the Services of Supply now had jurisdiction over the Signal Intelligence Service, a step which had important adverse implications, since it placed the Army's most productive intelligence arm under a service organization with no background in intelligence and with low priorities for obtaining personnel and resources in this area.
The organization most affected, however, was the Military Intelligence Division itself. At the time the reorganization went into effect, it was by far the largest single element in the Army Staff, containing 50 percent of all officers on the staff and 60 percent of all other personnel. The March 1942 reorganization reduced the division to just 26 people, 16 of them officers. To carry out all the operating functions-collecting, analyzing, and disseminating intelligence-the new and theoretically separate Military Intelligence Service (MIS) was set up. Initially, MIS included an Administrative Group, an Intelligence Group, a Counterintelligence Group, and an Operations Group. By April 1942 the new organization already consisted of 342 officers and 1,000 enlisted men and civilians, and it continued to expand.
On paper, the separation of the Military Intelligence Division from its operating arm, the Military Intelligence Service, was a drastic change. In practice, it proved otherwise. The head of MID at the time was the rather imperious Maj. Gen. George V Strong. Although charged with responsibility for carrying out the plan, Strong emphatically did not believe in it and effectively frustrated its implementation. He justified this bit of institutional sabotage on the grounds that he was still responsible for providing intelligence advice to the chief of staff and needed to retain command and administrative control over the assets required to accomplish his mission. As a result, until the general departed in early 1944, the separation between MID and MIS remained essentially a paper arrangement. By the end of Strong's tenure as assistant chief of staff, G-2, there were two organization charts for the Military Intelligence Service, one drawn to please the reformers on the General Staff, and the other reflecting actual command arrangements.
Although Army planners had an impact on Military Intelligence organization at the War Department level, the imperatives of the war itself were greater. At the time of Pearl Harbor, MID's production unit, the Intelligence Branch, was
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internally divided into traditional geographic sections, and the organization still derived the bulk of its intelligence, apart from MAGIC, from the attache system. The involvement of the United States in actual overseas combat changed both the sources of intelligence and the information-gathering process. Intelligence production was now assigned to the Military Intelligence Service. MID's former Intelligence Branch became the Intelligence Group of the MIS and was reorganized to reflect the various theaters of war. In addition, new functional elements sprang up beside the area elements as the needs of wartime expanded the scope of MIS's interests.7
Perhaps the most important organizational change within the MID/MIS organization was the development of an element charged with exploiting sensitive communications intelligence. This occurred as a result of the weaknesses in handling such sources at Pearl Harbor. The restrictions on dissemination that had been placed on the MAGIC intercepts had left Army intelligence oblivious to the Japanese threat. Immediately after the Pearl Harbor attack, Secretary of War Stimson called upon a prominent Chicago lawyer, Alfred McCormack, to examine the implications of the problem. McCormack recommended the creation of a branch within the Military Intelligence Service to deal with the processing of communications intelligence. The Special Branch was established in May 1942 with Col. Carter W Clarke as its head and with McCormack, now commissioned as a colonel, as his deputy. To acquire the necessary highcaliber personnel to staff the new organization, McCormack drew heavily on lawyers from elite firms, who were given reserve commissions.8
The Special Branch was an important step in the rationalization of the Army's handling of communications intelligence. For the first time, analysts in sufficient numbers would have access to the material in ways that would allow them to exploit it properly for evaluation. MAGIC could now be viewed in its entirety and used to build up an intelligence picture. However, although the Special Branch was a step in the right direction, it was not the final answer. The rest of the Military Intelligence Service, cut off from compartmentalized intelligence, was forced to operate in a vacuum. Additionally, even though the branch received its intelligence from the Signal Intelligence Service, it did not control the operations of the SIS, which still remained under the direction of the Chief Signal Officer.
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The Special Branch was not the only organizational innovation introduced into the MIS. The Military Intelligence Service had inherited from MID small branches located in New York City San Francisco, and New Orleans. In April 1942 a new branch was established in Miami, Florida, to counter the threat of Axis penetration and subversion in Latin America. In August the entire Latin American Section of the Military Intelligence Service moved to Miami. Successively redesignated the American Hemisphere Intelligence Command, the American Intelligence Command, and the American Intelligence Service, the unit became what one historian described as a "huge, semi-independent military intelligence agency." 9 It engaged in both counterintelligence activities and positive collection, controlling subordinate field offices in the Canal Zone and in Brazil, and operating its own intercept system to locate possible agent transmitters throughout Latin America. Additionally MIS expanded its overseas operations further, setting up a small secret intelligence service in 1942 and a Military Intelligence Research Section, with offices in London and Washington, D.C., for exploitation of captured documents in January 1943.10
The Military Intelligence Division also ventured into areas rather far afield from pure intelligence work. For a brief time, one was psychological warfare. The Special Studies Group that had previously dealt with the subject became the Psychological Warfare Branch of MID shortly after the declaration of war. However, one year later the joint Chiefs of Staff assigned the Office of Strategic Services responsibility for conducting all activities in this field, and the Army's Psychological Warfare Branch was discontinued. Nevertheless, MID eventually reassumed responsibility for the Army's remaining efforts in this area, setting up the Propaganda Branch in 1943. In a move that took the Military Intelligence Division even further afield from purely intelligence-related concerns, in April 1943 the organization was given responsibility for conducting the Army's World War II historical program.11
A function more pertinent to intelligence was that of training intelligence personnel. The Army had decided rather belatedly that intelligence training was an intelligence responsibility. The Army Air Forces had led the way in this area, opening up an AAF Intelligence School for their own personnel in February 1942. Classes were held at the University of Maryland until April, when the Army Air Forces acquired a more permanent facility at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. In June 1942 the Military Intelligence Service activated its own
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Military Intelligence Training Center (MITC) at Camp Ritchie, Maryland, a former National Guard installation.
The Camp Ritchie center trained order of battle specialists, photo interpreters, some linguists, and general intelligence personnel. After August 1944 the center also offered counterintelligence training. Intelligence personnel proceeded from Camp Ritchie to a staging area at Camp Sharpe, Pennsylvania, where they received additional combat training, were formed into teams, and assigned directly to theater control. Over 19,000 students passed though Camp Ritchie's gates during the course of World War II. The training offered at Ritchie may not have been perfectofficers in the European theater would later complain that members of their military intelligence specialist teams showed "a lack of basic military training and a certain ineptness about caring for themselves"but it was a more extensive effort than the Army had ever before undertaken in this arena. 12
To meet the special needs of the Army in the Pacific, the Military Intelligence Service also took over the direction of a separate school for Japanese linguists, with a student body composed primarily of second generation Japanese Americans known as Nisei. This school had been established originally at the Presidio of San Francisco, under Fourth Army control in the days before Pearl Harbor. In May 1942 it became the Military Intelligence Service Language School, moved to Camp Savage, Minnesota, and was greatly expanded. To acquire better facilities, the school moved once more to Fort Snelling, Minnesota, in August 1944. By the end of the war, it had graduated over 4,800 Japanese-language specialists, most of whom served in the Pacific theater as members of interpreter-interrogator-translator teams.13 The Army also sponsored instruction for smaller numbers of Japanese, Chinese, and Russian linguists at selected universities, and the MIS itself trained 1,750 Army censorship personnel at Fort Washington, Maryland, until February 1944, when the Army Service Forces assumed the function. Army counterintelligence personnel assigned to MIS had their own separate school in Chicago until 1944.
Not all intelligence training was directly under the auspices of the Military Intelligence Service. The Signal Security Agency (SSA), SIS's wartime successor, provided cryptologic and language training for military and civilian personnel at Arlington Hall Station, Virginia, and maintained a school for officers and enlisted personnel at Vint Hill Farms Station, Virginia. Intelligence personnel for the Army Air Forces continued to attend the AAF facility in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, until this school was relocated to Orlando, Florida, in the spring
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of 1944. Finally, the responsibilities for training soldiers assigned to tactical signals intelligence units were peculiarly fragmented. Units were organized and trained both by the Army Ground Forces and the Army Air Forces, while advanced training was administered under SSA supervision at its own facilities and at Signal Corps installations at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, and Camp Crowder, Missouri. 14
The ULTRA Breakthrough
Events of the spring of 1943 would reshape the entire structure of Military Intelligence. In April Army cryptanalysts scored their first success against Japanese military codes. A month later, a party of officers from MIS and from the Signal Security Agency visited the British Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park. For the first time, American Military Intelligence became aware of the dimensions of the British success against high-level German communications. British efforts in breaking the German Enigma and other ciphers used on command links had laid bare many of the most important secrets of the Nazi high command. The intelligence derived from this source, known as ULTRA, was disseminated by the British under rigidly controlled conditions. Although such intelligence had been provided to Eisenhower during the invasion of North Africa, U.S. Army Intelligence had not been fully aware of its origins. Now the British agreed to share this intelligence with the U.S. Army on an unrestricted basis, in exchange for reciprocal access to American communications intelligence on the Japanese.
These twin developments confronted Army Intelligence for the first time with the problem of disseminating communications intelligence to the field. The previous American success against the Purple machine, although providing valuable background information to Washington during the course of the war, had not had tactical implications. In contrast, ULTRA could be of immediate operational value. The problem was now to transmit this extremely sensitive combat intelligence from central processing centers in the United States and Great Britain to theater commanders thousands of miles away in a fashion that would avoid any compromise of the source of intelligence.
In response, the Special Branch adopted the existing British system of handling communications intelligence. New security classifications were introduced. At first, high-level communications intelligence was termed ULTRA DEXTER, lowerlevel material designated DEXTER. Later, ULTRA was reserved for the results of highlevel cryptanalysis, while intelligence derived from breaking simpler systems was
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termed CIRO PEARL or PEARL, and information produced from radio-direction finding was labeled THUMB. Ultimately, in order to mesh Army and Navy practice, PEARL and THUMB were merged into a single category, PINUP. Meanwhile, in April 1944 the U.S. Army at last adopted a "top secret" classification to provide a satisfactory equivalent to the British "most secret."
Terminology was only one aspect of the new procedures. The actual dissemination of ULTRA in the field was handled by special security officers (SSOs) selected and trained by the MIS Special Branch and operating under its direct command using special cipher systems. This was both faster and more secure than the usual practice of sending intelligence through successive layers of command channels. Again, this followed British practice. The first three American SSOs went out to commands in the Pacific in the fall of 1943. The British agreement that ULTRA supplied to American commanders in the European theater would henceforth be disseminated through American channels led to the procurement of eighty additional special security officers in December 1943.
At first, the SSOs were attached only to the highest level of commands. They had the dual mission of securing the vital ULTRA material and of explaining its significance to commanders and intelligence officers unfamiliar with the uses and limitations of high-grade communications intelligence. However, by July 1944 the decision had been made to disseminate ULTRA directly to field armies and equivalent AAF commands and even down to independently operating Army corps. This necessitated recruiting 172 more SSOs in August 1944. In addition, 65 enlisted men were brought into the system to operate communications, thus relieving SSOs from the necessity of deciphering their own messages. By the end of the war, the elaborate dissemination system was headed in each theater by a senior special security representative. 15
The Army's own increasing successes in communications intelligence, combined with the new availability of the British COMINT product, helped bring about a general reorganization of the Military Intelligence Service. Because of the growth of its responsibilities, the Special Branch expanded to the point where it constituted the largest component of the MIS Intelligence Group. This created a situation in which much of the analysis performed at the War Department level was undertaken by individuals without access to the single most important intelligence source exploited in the war. Only a "very select few" top production officials had been granted access to the whole picture. 16
General Strong's departure in February 1944 paved the way for an institutional readjustment. In April a committee headed by Assistant Secretary of War
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John J. McCloy recommended that "extreme compartmentation" be eliminated.17 As a result, the War Department completely reorganized its Military Intelligence organization. The Special Branch was abolished as a totally separate compartmented entity, although a new Special Branch was formed to handle dissemination of ULTRA to the field. A Military Intelligence Service separate from MID was reestablished and its internal structure realigned, with the organization ultimately reaching a peak worldwide strength of 1,500 officers, 2,000 enlisted men, and 1,100 civilians in October 1944.
The timing of the reorganization, however, demonstrated all too clearly that the nation's strategic decision makers still looked upon Army Intelligence as "a kind of reference service for data rather than for professional judgments."18 The new arrangements went into effect in early June 1944. As distinguished historian and intelligence analyst Ray Cline later described the situation, the "G-2 [staff] was so little geared into high-level strategic decisions that it was engaged in a colossal struggle for office space when D-Day for the Normandy invasion came along: all of G-2's files were locked up sitting in safes in the halls waiting for moving crews when frantic requests for data on the landing zone situations began to descend on the hapless Army intelligence officers, who hardly knew each others' phone numbers, let alone what was in the files."19
The new-model Military Intelligence Service differed substantially from its predecessor. Internally, it was organized into three directorates: Administration; Intelligence; and information, which supervised collection and dissemination. It now functioned independently of MID and was freed from some of the excessive compartmentation that had hobbled previous operations. Moreover, at last it could concentrate almost exclusively on the production of foreign intelligence. As a result of decisions made earlier in 1944, responsibility for counterintelligence and censorship had been allotted to the Army Service Forces, a move which rather explicitly downgraded the importance of these functions in the Army, and the MIS Counterintelligence Group that had previously exercised staff supervision over this area was thus abolished.
In addition, certain activities previously carried out at dispersed locations in the United States were now centralized in Washington, D.C. The American Intelligence Service operating from Miami, Florida, had been terminated in January 1944. Now that the war had been carried to the shores of Europe, America was no longer worried about Axis subversion in Latin America. Similarly, the branches previously established in San Francisco, New Orleans, and New York City had lost most of their usefulness as the war progressed and other sources of intelligence became available. By June 1944 the first two
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of these branches had been shut down, and the New York branch would cease operations that December. However, it should be noted that the Corps of Engineers, which had its own intelligence office in New York City, continued to find the data bases available there to be essential in producing strategic Engineer Intelligence.
Unfortunately, while the new MIS was a changed organization, not everyone agreed that the changes had been for the better. The new Intelligence Directorate at the heart of MIS was organized on lines that soon proved to be confusing, with a layer of geographic "specialists" superimposed upon branches organized along functional lines.20 It seems to have been envisaged that the specialists, who had no operating responsibilities, would act as a group of "wise men," producing a unified intelligence picture from the myriad details coming from the functional operating echelons. However, the geographical specialists questioned how they could produce cohesive results without controlling any assets, and the chief of the Military Intelligence Service felt they should be on MID's organization chart, not his own. In practice, functional areas of responsibility proved to be overlapping, the new arrangements separated the researchers from the report writers, and MIS found itself organized on different lines from any other intelligence organization with which it dealt.
Two months after the new reforms had been implemented, the chief of the MIS declared the new system "slow and cumbersome."21 Col. Alfred McCormack, now director of Intelligence, was equally unhappy: the Special Branch he had painstakingly assembled was now dispersed throughout "53 separate branches, sections, and subsections," and he felt MIS was now under "about as impracticable a scheme of organization as could be devised."22 Additional tinkering with the system went on until the close of the war, but a postwar study of intelligence organization at the General Staff level concluded that from the point of view of producing timely intelligence, the 1944 reorganization was "a total failure." 23
Whatever its continuing internal weaknesses, MIS took a major institutional step forward. Since 1943 communications intelligence, MIS's main source of intelligence, had been under the control of the chief signal officer or of theater commanders.24 In December 1944 MIS at last secured operational control over the Signal Security Agency, and was able to give direction to the Army's most important COMINT asset. This step also positioned MIS to take over this whole field of intelligence when the war came to a close.
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The Counter Intelligence Corps
The Military Intelligence Service was not composed solely of collectors and analysts. For most of World War II, it also included personnel of the Army Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC), formed on 1 January 1942 as the successor to the Corps of Intelligence Police. The new organization had both a more appropriate name and initially a more centralized organization than its predecessor. In January the War Department took over control of all background investigations of prospective counterintelligence agents and in April centralized the issue of credentials. The CIC would be an elite force, picking its enlisted personnel from the cream of Selective Service inductees. As Maj. Gen. George V Strong, the assistant chief of staff, G-2, put it, "the personnel of this Corps is of officer caliber." 25
The question of overall control was not resolved finally, however. The service commands, as the corps areas were redesignated in March 1942, were the primary users of CIC agents in the first part of the war, and local commanders naturally wanted the convenience and flexibility of procuring their own counterintelligence personnel. For example, the commanding general of the New York Port of Embarkation began to recruit his own agents for the Transportation Corps in March 1942 and, although these individuals were issued Military Intelligence Division credentials, it was not until early 1943 that part of the contingent was assimilated into the Counter Intelligence Corps.
The scope of the CIC's responsibilities was vastly increased in March 1942, when the Army expanded its existing countersubversive program and gave it new guidelines, modeling it after the similar Army program of World War I. The new countersubversive operation latticed the nation's military establishment with "an elaborate and fine network of secret agents."26 Intelligence officers secretly recruited informants within each unit, on an average ratio of one informant to every thirty men, resulting in a program of enormous proportions. By the summer of 1943 there were 53,000 operatives in just one of the nine service commands in the continental United States and over 150,000 such reports were being filed monthly once the system became fully operational. Although the countersubversive program was administered by unit and installation commanders, not by the Counter Intelligence Corps, CIC agents were assigned to follow up reports of subversive activity. At the War Department level, the process was monitored and coordinated by the Counterintelligence Group of the Military Intelligence Service, which exiled those suspected of sedition to special holding units in the remoter parts of the country
Inevitably, the new work load led to the expansion and restructuring of the Counter Intelligence Corps. Expansion itself generated an additional work load,
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since the official CIC history later estimated that the Counter Intelligence Corps in the continental United States allotted half its man-hours to investigate its own applicants. By July 1943 the Corps was authorized a strength of 543 officers and 4,431 enlisted personnel. Officers previously detailed to the organization were now formally transferred and additional officers allotted from officer candidate schools. In the past, all CIC enlisted men had held the rank of sergeant; now corporals and privates were added to the corps. This permitted functional differentiation. Sergeants served as special agents with full investigative powers, and corporals and privates held subordinate positions as agents and counterintelligence clerks. The new arrangements allowed some relaxation in the Counter Intelligence Corps' appointment standards. For a period in late 1942 and early 1943, service commands once more were allowed to procure and transfer agents and clerks, while Washington retained full control over special agents and officers. In line with the renewed authority given to the field, the Counter Intelligence Corps School in Chicago, previously responsible for training all CIC personnel, now confined its activities to providing advanced courses, allowing the service commands to provide introductory counterintelligence training.
Meanwhile, the Counter Intelligence Corps was forced to relocate its headquarters. At the end of 1942 the War Department, concerned that too many fit young officers were serving in staff assignments in Washington, stipulated that no more than one-third of the officers assigned to any element in Washington, D.C., could be below thirty-five years of age. This "Child Labor Law" literally drove the CIC out of town. In January 1943 the chief of the Counter Intelligence Corps and his staff moved to a dormitory of Goucher College, a fashionable girls' school in Baltimore, Maryland, that had been taken over by the government for the duration of the war.
While these developments were taking place, the Counter Intelligence Corps was beginning to find a new role with the fighting forces. Heretofore, almost all its duties had been concerned with security in the service commands or in base areas overseas. Special agents in civilian clothes had operated from offices, essentially working in much the same fashion as their civilian counterparts in the FBI. In some cases, CIC agents had been recruited and assigned without completing basic military training. However, when plans were drawn up for the American invasion of North Africa in the fall of 1942, it was decided that CIC personnel would be attached to tactical units in the field. The initial CIC experience with field service was not completely happy The commander of the training camp to which the first group was assigned labeled them "a citizen army of misfits."27 Nevertheless, the CIC personnel attached to the North African task force ultimately demonstrated their value in a tactical support role.28
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Tactical employment gave the Counter Intelligence Corps a whole new raison d'etre. By the middle of 1943 the Army at last began to deploy a sizable portion of its strength overseas. The CIC was affected by this shift. With deployment of tactical CIC detachments to combat situations imminent, the CIC School in Chicago put its students in uniform and placed a new emphasis on counterintelligence operations under battle conditions. The same concern for making counterintelligence personnel ready for combat led to the creation of a Counter Intelligence Corps Staging Area in the summer of 1943 to better prepare units about to go overseas. The staging area, initially located at Logan Field in Baltimore, Maryland, soon moved to nearby Camp Holabird, beginning a long association between Military Intelligence and what would become known as "The Bird."
By the fall of 1943 the Counter Intelligence Corps appeared to have solved its initial problems and to have become an established part of the Army. Its organization manual finally had been approved, and the new tactical emphasis placed it in step with the rest of the Army. Agents increasingly served in uniform with the troops rather than working as anonymous "spooks" on the fringes of the military establishment. Finally, the War Department transferred control of CIC personnel from the Military Intelligence Service to the using agencies, again bringing the Counter Intelligence Corps into conformity with the rest of the military establishment.
However, the activities of the Counter Intelligence Corps still managed to generate criticism from both within and outside the Army, placing the corps in a bureaucratically vulnerable position. From the viewpoint of the wartime military, the CIC absorbed a disproportionate percentage of high-quality personnel and used them to accomplish what many regarded as a marginal mission. Tradition-minded Army officers disliked the whole business of counterintelligence operations, especially when they involved enlisted personnel investigating officers. The CIC's investigations of leftist individuals and groups were not universally popular with politicians, particularly since the War Department's Counterintelligence Group had used the results to exclude some well-connected young men from Officers' Candidate School. Moreover, some investigations were conducted with more zeal than prudence. In early 1943, for example, the White House discovered that CIC agents had installed listening devices in the hotel suite of the president's wife in an attempt to monitor the activities of individuals suspected of Communist leanings.29
Accumulated resentments eventually found official expression, leading to the temporary eclipse of the Counter Intelligence Corps. In July 1943 Lt. Gen. James J. McNarney the Army deputy chief of staff, directed the Army inspector general to launch an investigation of the CIC. On 5 November 1943, all CIC agents were ordered out of Washington, D.C., and a day later the inspector gen-
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eral submitted a devastating critique of the corps' operations and organization. Charging that many CIC investigations were "superficial, and unproductive of positive results except in rare instances," the inspector general found that the only thorough investigations were those made of applicants for CIC or of military and civilian personnel suspected of subversion. However, these categories were overly thorough, since they dragged on after all immediate allegations had been resolved. Moreover, when officers were investigated, CIC procedures resulted in the indiscriminate dissemination of reports containing unverified derogatory information "based on hearsay, gossip, and innuendo," all of which was "directly contrary to the inherent right of a commissioned officer of the U.S. Army to be advised of imputations and allegations as to his character." In any case, the countersubversive program that had generated much of the work load was nearly worthless, since the million reports submitted in the first part of 1943 had identified only 600 suspects, and it was possible that many reports had been made on the same individual.30
The inspector general's report equally criticized the organizational concepts that underpinned Counter Intelligence Corps operations in the continental United States. In the security field, he found, the activities of the Counter Intelligence Corps at least partially duplicated what was being done by the investigators assigned to the Provost Marshal General's Office. In addition, the existing counterintelligence system undermined the concept of command responsibility, since the G-2s in the service commands had to answer both to their commanding generals and to the Counterintelligence Group of the Military Intelligence Service.
The inspector general's report led to the immediate unraveling of the Counter Intelligence Corps. The countersubversive program was terminated, and most CIC agents in the continental United States were merged with the criminal investigators of the Provost Marshal's Office to form a new Security Intelligence Corps that operated under the control of the service commands. Although CIC detachments continued to serve with the Army Air Forces, the Manhattan Project, and tactical units, the presence of the Counter Intelligence Corps on the home front was effectively eliminated. The CIC School was transferred to the provost marshal general, its staging area closed, and the position of chief, Counter Intelligence Corps, abolished. The outgoing chief, Col. Harold R. Kibler, blamed the fall of his command on the enmity of the White House, specifically "Harry Hopkins and the Secret Service." 31 A little later the Counterintelligence Group of the Military Intelligence Service was also eliminated. For the moment, the Army had decided to practically abandon the field of domestic counterintelligence, limiting the CIC to a tactical support role overseas.
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This role, however, proved substantial. CIC detachments rolled up nets of enemy agents in Italy, landed in Normandy with the first wave of paratroopers, screened civilians in France, and arrested Nazi officials as U.S. forces overran Germany. In the Pacific, Counter Intelligence Corps units secured enemy documents on the remote islands of Micronesia and worked with local guerrillas rounding up collaborators in the Philippines. To be sure, some distrust of CIC continued throughout the war. Writing in 1946, two experienced Army intelligence officers noted that "the Counterintelligence [sic] Corps (CIC) in World War II was in many ways a peculiar organization, whose personnel (chosen hurriedly and under pressure for their educational rather than military qualifications) frequently got in everybody's hair." 32 However, counterintelligence support was essential for American units operating in the midst of an alien population, and 241 CIC detachments would serve in overseas theaters during the course of World War II.
In turn, success overseas revitalized the CIC at home. By the summer of 1945 it was clear that the evisceration of the Counter Intelligence Corps had deprived the Army counterintelligence function of essential institutional support just as needs were increasing. The Army's role in the occupation of a defeated Germany had placed new demands on the depleted CIC detachments in the European theater, and the pending expansion of military operations in the Pacific to the Japanese mainland threatened to pose even greater potential counterintelligence problems. But the Army now lacked any effective mechanism either to procure new counterintelligence specialists or to redeploy those it already had. Although the Military Intelligence Training Center at Camp Ritchie had begun training counterintelligence personnel in August 1944, the Camp Ritchie program stressed combat intelligence rather than counterintelligence. Moreover, there was no rotation base for the Army's counterintelligence personnel, since any members of the Counter Intelligence Corps shipped back to the United States were reassigned as individuals to the Army general replacement pool and were lost to their specialty.
These considerations led to the reestablishment of the Counter Intelligence Corps in the continental United States. In July 1945 the Office of Chief, Counter Intelligence Corps, was restored, a new CIC Center and School organized, and both elements placed under the control of the Intelligence Division of the Army Service Forces. Originally located at Fort Meade, the school soon moved to Camp Holabird. In August the Security Intelligence Corps was released from the control of the provost marshal and reassigned to the Intelligence Division, paving the way for its eventual merger into the CIC.
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The Signal Security Agency
The development and expansion of the Army signals intelligence and communications security organization was governed by dynamics quite different from those affecting the structure of Army counterintelligence. Although the growth of the Counter Intelligence Corps was a function of the expansion of the countersubversive program and the need to create new units to give tactical support in the field, the Signal Intelligence Service and its successor organizations evolved largely as a result of increasing success in accomplishing the cryptanalytic mission.
The United States' entry into World War II naturally imposed new demands on the Army's Signal Intelligence Service. Up to this point, the SIS had achieved its main successes against intercepted diplomatic communications provided by its 2d Signal Service Company, which manned seven small fixed sites located at Fort Hancock, New Jersey; Fort Hunt, Virginia; Fort Sam Houston, Texas; the Presidio of San Francisco, California; Corozal, Canal Zone; Fort Shafter, Hawaii; and Fort McKinley, Philippine Islands. At the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Signal Intelligence Service had a strength of 331, almost equally divided between the field sites and its headquarters in the old Munitions Building, a World War I-vintage structure in downtown Washington, D.C.
The shift from peace to war transformed the nature of the Signal Intelligence Service, for it now had to provide military as well as diplomatic intelligence. Initially, the organization concentrated on deciphering Japanese Army cryptosystems, since the Japanese posed the immediate military threat to U.S. forces. To do this, the SIS analysts had to master the elaborate and intricate system of Japanese military codes, which worked on cryptologic principles completely different from those used in the Purple machine of the Japanese Foreign Office. This required not only the expansion of the SIS headquarters, but also the reconfiguration of its intercept network, especially since its most advanced outpost, Fort McKinley, would soon be overrun.33
In March 1942 the Military Intelligence Division recommended to the chief signal officer that the SIS move from the Munitions Building into new quarters with greater security. MID also recommended that the Signal Intelligence Service establish two new primary monitoring stations, one on each coast of the United States. Under wartime conditions, these suggestions met a quick response. In June 1942 the Army took possession of Arlington Hall, a former girls' school in Arlington, Virginia, and transformed it into SIS headquarters. That same month, personnel of the 2d Signal Service Battalion, as the 2d Signal
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Service Company was now designated, began operations at Vint Hill Farms in Warrenton, Virginia, which had been selected as the site for Monitoring Station No. 1. A second major field station was soon organized at Two Rock Ranch near Petaluma, California.
Paradoxically, as the duties of the Signal Intelligence Service became more important, its relative organizational position within the Signal Corps began to sink steadily lower as the structure of the Signal Corps itself grew more elaborate. By July 1942 the SIS was separated from the Office of the Chief Signal Officer by four organizational layers. As a result the organization was realigned, and since the term "signal intelligence" was thought to be too revealing, it was also redesignated as part of this process, becoming the Signal Security Service in 1942 and the Signal Security Agency (SSA) in 1943. Meanwhile, the positions of chief, Signal Security Service, and commander, 2d Signal Service Battalion, had been merged in 1942, effectively converting the battalion into a personnel center for the enlisted ranks at Arlington Hall and for both officer and enlisted personnel in subordinate detachments manning intercept stations worldwide.34
During the first part of the war, the performance of the Army's signals intelligence organization was somewhat disappointing. In July 1942 it received responsibility for all intercept of diplomatic communications, a mission previously shared with the Navy, thus becoming the sole producer of MAGIC. However, despite its continuing successes in the diplomatic field, it found its main task-coping with the mysteries of Japanese military communicationsintractable. No cryptologic continuity on Japanese military communications had been built up before Pearl Harbor, principally because of the impossibility of intercepting the existing Japanese military nets either in the home islands or on the mainland of East Asia. It was not until April 1943 that an initial entry was made into one of the principal Japanese Army systems, and General MacArthur's own cryptologic center in Australia made the discovery simultaneously. Even so, Arlington Hall was not able to read enough of the code to produce any intelligence until June of that year.
The summer of 1943, however, proved to be something of a watershed for the Signal Security Agency. Once cryptanalysis of Japanese messages proved to be possible, SSA expanded enormously, recruiting a largely civilian work force. There were 395 persons at agency headquarters at the beginning of 1943 and 3,455 by the end of the year. Although two large temporary buildings had been hastily constructed at Arlington Hall in the winter of 1942 to provide additional office space for this work force, the influx of new personnel still made for cramped quarters. However, in 1943 the War Department gave the British primary operational responsibilities for code breaking in Europe, which freed the SSA to concentrate most of its energies on the Japanese military problem.
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The year 1944 saw the full maturation of SSA's activities. In January Australian forces captured the codes of the Japanese 20th Division at Sio on New Guinea. The find led to full exploitation of Japanese military communications and triggered another period of growth. By June 1944 over 5,100 civilians, most of them female, were working at Arlington Hall, assisted by 2,000 more military personnel. In the spring of 1944 the intercept facilities of SSA's 2d Signal Service Battalion were also extended when new fixed stations were established at New Delhi, India; Asmara, Eritrea; Fairbanks and Amchitka, Alaska; and Fort Shafter, Hawaii. In the fall the steady advance of American forces in the Pacific allowed another fixed site to be established on the island of Guam. Additionally, the 2d Signal Service Battalion assumed control over former Office of Strategic Services "listening posts" at Bellmore, New York, and Resada, California, converting them into security monitoring stations.35
Arlington Hall thus became the center of an enormous web of collection activity Intercept was provided not only by the fixed stations of the 2d Signal Service Battalion, but also by Signal Corps tactical units under theater control in the field. By the end of the war, 26,000 American soldiers were involved, one way or another, with the intercept and processing of signals intelligence. In addition, U.S. Army collection efforts were supplemented by material forwarded to Arlington Hall by MacArthur's multinational center and by British, Canadian, and Indian sources. To process the material, which came by courier pouch and through fortysix teletype lines at Arlington Hall, the Signal Security Agency's military and civilian work force of 7,000 was supported by a battery of 400 IBM punch-card machines.
All this was conducted under the tightest secrecy, which would be maintained for thirty years. The stringent security measures that cloaked the Army's signals intelligence organization, however, denied it the credit and stature it deserved. That the positions of chief of the Signal Security Agency and commander of the 2d Signal Service Battalion continued to be combined under one colonel throughout most of World War II indicates something of the nature of the problem. Col. Preston W Corderman, who had commanded the agency since 1943, finally received a brigadier general's star in June 1945.36
The assumption of operational control over the Signal Security Agency by MIS in December 1944 made sense for both organizations. By this time, the agency had become the Army's most significant producer of high-grade intelligence. The Military Intelligence Service now had control of targeting and could rearrange operational priorities. In addition, the change benefited the Signal Security Agency. As long as the agency had been simply a part of the Signal
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Corps, its request for increased personnel allotments had to pass through the chief signal officer and the general commanding the Army Service Forces, neither of whom were indoctrinated for communications intelligence or knew the true importance of the agency's mission. Col. Alfred McCormack of MIS's Special Branch believed that this factor had delayed the breaking of Japanese codes by a year.37 The new arrangement ended this anomaly Although the chief signal officer still retained administrative control of the SSA, the action was a significant first step toward the postwar integration of all Army communications intelligence under G2 control.
A second step soon followed, precipitated by the growing, if belated, collaboration between the Army and the Navy in the communications intelligence field. At one point the Army had maintained closer COMINT working relationships with the British than with the U. S. Navy. In February 1945 Admiral Ernest King, Commander in Chief, United States Fleet, and Chief of Naval Operations, agreed with Army Chief of Staff General George Marshall to create the ArmyNavy Communications Intelligence Board (ANCIB) to direct a joint effort in this field. The board would report directly to the two service chiefs, not to the joint Chiefs of Staff, and would use as its staff support the existing Army-Navy Communications Intelligence Coordinating Committee (ANCICC), a workinglevel group set up on an informal basis in early 1944 by the Signal Security Agency and its Navy opposite number, OP-20-G. However, the new head of the Military Intelligence Division, Maj. Gen. Clayton Bissell, vetoed the idea on the grounds that "the Army cannot participate on an inter-service project of this sort as long as its own signal intelligence efforts remain as decentralized as they now are." 38 The Navy Bissell claimed, had a monolithic communications intelligence organization, while MID controlled only the Signal Security Agency
Bissell's bureaucratic ploy spurred the deputy chief of staff and the all-powerful Operations Division into relooking at the entire structure of Army signals intelligence. In May 1945 the War Department requested that the three senior Army commanders engaged in the war against Japan-Lt. Gen. Albert J. Wedemeyer, commanding general of the China Theater, Lt. Gen. Daniel I. Sultan, commanding general of the Burma-India Theater, and General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, commanding general of Army Forces, Pacific-submit their views regarding the desirability of unifying the whole Army communications intelligence effort under a single War Department agency. Only MacArthur opposed the idea, and even he agreed that he had no objections once the fighting had stopped. The stage thus had been set for a postwar reorganization of signals intelligence.
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Communications Security
The Signal Security Agency was shield as well as sword in World War II, since the agency had the duty of protecting Army communications in addition to exploiting those of other nations. Here, the agency's performance was smoother since much spade work had been done before Pearl Harbor. Army communications security had already been enhanced by the development of various kinds of cipher machines. The problem of distribution was overcome successfully. By mid1942 the Army had replaced its older M 134s and M134As with the M 134C, more commonly known by its short title, SIGABA. Issued down to division level, the SIGABA served as the backbone of the Army's secure high-level communications throughout the war. The handy little M209, designed for use at lower command echelons, was in the hands of American troops before the first American landings in North Africa in November 1942.
Technological advances in this area continued throughout the war, expedited by the streamlining of the developmental process. Until early 1942 responsibilities in the area of communications security had been fragmented. The Signal Intelligence Service had worked out the cryptologic principles for the cipher devices, the Signal Corps Laboratories had prepared the engineering plans, and private firms had done the actual manufacturing. Wartime needs for greater security and compartmentation made this arrangement obsolete, and the Signal Security Agency was assigned all developmental work, introducing numerous innovations in the process. New crypto-communications devices produced by the Signal Security Agency allowed direct on-line encryption of teletype messages as well as speech. By June 1943 the agency had developed a secure telephone apparatus used for transatlantic conversations between Roosevelt and Churchill and later employed to link theater commanders with Washington. The SIGSALY, as it was called, afforded high security although with the device weighing ninety tons, its use was obviously confined to major headquarters. Smaller voice "scrambler" devices offering less security were made available to lower echelons of command.
In addition to producing and distributing various types of cipher machines, the Signal Security Agency supplied the Army with huge quantities of codes, strip ciphers, and key lists. It also monitored military communications to guard against security violations and disguised major military movements by creating false patterns of message traffic. The multifaceted communications security (COMSEC) operation absorbed the efforts of a sizable portion of agency personnel.39
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The Electronic Battlefield
In addition to its traditional cryptologic functions, the Signal Security Agency assumed new responsibilities in the fields of electronic warfare and electronic intelligence. After Pearl Harbor the Signal Corps had transferred its Air Warning Service radar companies to the control of the Army Air Forces, ultimately turning over all responsibilities in radar development to the air arm. However, the Signal Corps continued to exercise staff supervision over Army radio countermeasures and "radio or radar deception" through a newly formed Protective Security Branch, which was reassigned to the Signal Security Service at Arlington Hall in December 1942. The transfer was made for administrative convenience, in an attempt to sidestep the provisions of the same "Child Labor Law" that had forced the move of CIC headquarters to Baltimore. It seemed easier to relocate the unit than to replace its trained and specialized personnel. However, the Protective Security Branch remained semi-autonomous.
Although the initial concern of the Protective Security Branch was to protect the Army's own communications from enemy jamming, it began to consider a more positive role as the balance of the war started to shift. In June 1943 the branch laid down the first guidelines for the use of countermeasures in the field. Only theater commanders could authorize the use of radio or electronic countermeasures, although task force commanders might be delegated this authority when actually engaging the enemy. At the same time, Army Ground Forces fielded two provisional countermeasures detachments to provide support in the 1943 summer maneuvers. In practice, however, American forces did not attempt communications jamming to any extent in World War II, since it would risk interfering with the vital flow of communications intelligence. The Americans made one significant attempt to disrupt enemy communications circuits during the Ardennes campaign, using electronic jamming equipment mounted in aircraft to interfere with the radio transmissions from German tanks.40
In other areas, the activities of the Protective Security Branch were more fruitful. The branch supported the Signal Security Agency's communications security program by monitoring traffic patterns on the Army's radio teletype links to ensure that pending military operations would not be compromised by a sudden surge of message traffic between two points. Additionally, the branch played a role in Army radio deception operations, training personnel, procuring equipment, and providing technical data. The 3103d Signal Service Battalion, activated in December 1943 for deployment in the European Theater of Operations (ETO), could simulate the communications nets of large formations. It
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played an important role in diverting the Germans from the real locations of American troop concentrations before the invasion of Normandy A smaller deception unit, the 3153d Signal Service Company, went to the Pacific in 1944.41
The branch's activities in electronic intelligence and electronic countermeasures-jamming enemy radars-were of even greater future significance. The rapid developments of radar technology in World War II and the employment of radar by both Germany and Japan meant that the new device became both an important new intelligence target and an object suitable for electronic countermeasures. In this exotic war, the Protective Security Branch, along with the rest of the Army's ground elements, played only a small role. The civilian Radio Research Laboratory of the National Defense Council conducted the initial research on methods of blinding enemy radar. The Army Air Forces generated the requirements in this field, since the threat posed by the early-warning and gun-laying radars of the day was against aircraft. Similarly, the Army Air Forces initially employed the first radar jammers and engaged in the first electronic intelligence operations from aircraft.
However, there proved to be a role for ground-based electronic countermeasures also. Under the aegis of the Protective Security Branch, a provisional unit, the 1st Signal Service Platoon (Special) was organized at Arlington Hall in July 1943 to find and jam enemy radar and moved almost immediately to Amchitka in the Aleutians. Since the Army could find no Japanese radars in the area, the unit subsequently redeployed to the island of Corsica in the Mediterranean and operated against German targets. Additional specialized companies and detachments were formed later, operating mainly in the Pacific.42 The Signal Security Agency continued to exercise staff supervision over such units until April 1945, when most of the functions of the Protective Security Branch were transferred to other Signal Corps agencies. It would take another decade for electronic warfare and electronic intelligence to be reintegrated into the Army's communications intelligence organization.
Summation
The institutional evolution of the Military Intelligence structure in the continental United States during the World War II was slow and painful. Many factors hindered this process: the low resource baseline from which it had to begin; misplaced priorities; rivalry between Regular Army officers and the elite group of civilians who eventually received commissions and managed much of the effort; and the historical accident that had placed the Army's most important
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collection arm, the Signal Security Agency, under the control of the Signal Corps rather than the Military Intelligence Division. In retrospect, some of the effort seems to have been misspent. Both the countersubversive program and the early focus on developments in Latin America may have diverted needed assets from more urgent areas. And it is clear that without British help in the way of example and assistance, the system would not have attained whatever efficiency it did. In the estimate of one official historian, the War Department's intelligence apparatus did not become effective until late 1944. Even then, serious defects remained in the internal organization of the Military Intelligence Service and in the degree of interservice cooperation in the communications intelligence field. It was not until May 1945 that the War Department developed a mechanism for setting intelligence priorities. It is perhaps unsurprising that the evolution of Army collection capabilities in the field would reflect the same pattern of awkward and uneven development.
1 Troy, Donovan and the CIA, p. 317.
2 Ibid., p. 316
3 Ibid., p. 211.
4 For a further discussion of AAF intelligence in World War II, the reader is referred to John F. Kreis, ed., Piercing the Fog: Intelligence and Army Air Forces Operations in World War II (Washington, D.C.: Air Force History and Museums Program, 1996).
5 Ray Cline notes that "Neither the JIC [Joint Intelligence Committee] Weekly nor any component of the OSS ever used signal intelligence in its reporting. I know from Navy experience that this source was essential for all authoritative all-source intelligence, and it was a serious limitation that OSS had only minimal exposure to intercepts." The CIA under Reagan, Bush, and Casey, p. 78.
6 Army-Navy rivalry over communications intelligence was conducted almost at the level of the Cold War. At one point a senior Army Intelligence officer wrote: "It is now apparent that the Navy proposes to do business at arm's length. We should accept that attitude and act accordingly." Memo for General Bissell, sub: Army-Navy Agreement Regarding ULTRA, in Listening to the Enemy, ed. Ronald H. Spector (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 1988), p. 199.
7 Among the diverse elements of the Military Intelligence Service were MIS-Y, which ran an interrogation center for high-level German officers, and MIS-X, which was involved in making arrangements for procuring intelligence from captured Army Air Forces flight crews, as well as for implementing escape and evasion measures. Both organizations operated from a secret headquarters at Fort Hunt, Virginia. See Lloyd R. Shoemaker, The Escape Factory (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990). Maj. Gen. Otto L. Nelson later commented, "Organizationally, G-2 was a mongrel, with many uncertain strains mixed in and not always recognizable." National Security and the General Staff (Washington, D.C.: Infantry Journal Press, 1946), p. 526.
8 A detailed history of the organization is contained in "History of the Special Branch, MIS, War Department, 1942-1944," Listening to the Enemy, pp. 171-94.
9 Bruce W. Bidwell, History of the Military Intelligence Division, Department of the Army, vol. 5, unpublished Ms, U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1963, pp. 52-53.
10 On the War Department's World War II secret intelligence service, see National Security Act of 1947. Hearing Before the Committee on Expenditures in the Executive Departments, 80th Cong., 1st sess. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1982), pp. 7-8, 53-54. Further references to this organization can be found in the footnotes to Christopher Felix (pseud.), A Short Course in the Secret War (New York: Dell Publishing, 1988), pp. 168-69.
11 Stetson Conn, Historical Work in the United States Army, 1862-1954 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1980), pp. 83-114.
12 Rpt of the General Board, U.S. Forces, European Theater, Study no. 12, The Military Intelligence Service in the European Theater of Operations, p. 8, copy in CMH files.
13 An account of Nisei accomplishments in intelligence is provided by Joseph D. Harrington, Yankee Samurai: The Secret Role of Nisei in America's Pacific Victory (Detroit: Pettigrew Enterprises, 1979). For a firsthand account of one individual's experience, see lnterv, author with Mr. Harry Fukuhara, pt. 1, 5 Jun 90, INSCOM History Office files.
14 These intercept units, an officer of the Signal Security Agency commented, were "organized and trained by the ground forces in a rather `hit-or-miss' manner without any particular reference to their ultimate employment." SRH 169, Centralized Control of U.S. Army Signal Intelligence Activities, p. 14.
15 See "History of the Operations of Special Security Officers Attached to Field Commands, 1943-1945," Listening to the Enemy, pp. 199-204.
16 Bidwell, History of the Military Intelligence Division, vol. 5, p. 221. Bidwell's treatment of the full implications of the reorganization is necessarily unsatisfactory, since he wrote before the ULTRA secret-and the exact duties of Special Branch- had been decompartmented and released.
17 Ibid., p. 19.
18 Cline, The CIA under Reagan, Bush, and Casey, p. 81.
19 Ibid., p. 111.
20 Nelson, National Security and the General Staff, p. 526.
21 Bidwell, History of the Military Intelligence Division, vol. 5, p. 20.
22 SRH 185, War Experiences of Alfred McCormack, pp. 29-30.
23 Bidwell, History of the Military Intelligence Division, vol. 5, p. 21.
24 SRH 141, Papers from the Personal Files of Alfred McCormack, pt. 2, pp. 316-17.
25 U.S. Army Intelligence Center, History of the Counter Intelligence Corps, vol. 5, unpublished Ms, 1960, p. 39.
26 Ibid., p. 127.
27 U.S. Army Intelligence Center, History of the Counter Intelligence Corps, vol. 11, unpublished Ms, 1960, p. 8.
28 Powe and Wilson, The Evolution of Military Intelligence, p. 53.
29 Joseph P. Lash, Love, Eleanor: Eleanor Roosevelt and Her Friends (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and Co., Inc., 1982), p. 492.
30 History of the Counter Intelligence Corps, vol. 5, app. 2.
31 FBI memo quoted in Lash, Love, Eleanor, p. 492. A more melodramatic but less accurate version of the imbroglio can be found in Richard G. Powers, Secrecy and Power: The Life of J. Edgar Hoover (New York: Free Press, 1987), pp. 265-66. "Supposedly, the President had been so furious he had disbanded CIC and ordered its members sent to the South Pacific to `fight Japs until they were killed."'
32 Stedman Chandler and Robert W. Robb, Front-Line Intelligence (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Marine Corps, 1986), p. 113.
33 The fate of the SIS intercept post at Fort McKinley and of its survivors is detailed in "Reminiscences of Lieutenant Colonel Howard W. Brown," Listening to the Enemy, pp. 43-76, and in Michael Maslak, "Signalman's Odyssey," Military Intelligence: Its Heroes and Legends, pp. 133-61.
34 A conscientious, if pedestrian, account of the unit can be found in SRH 135, History of the 2d Signal Service Battalion.
35 The OSS had originally used these stations to monitor Axis propaganda and news broadcasts.
36 A short account of the SSA's code-breaking activities in World War II can be found in SRH 349, Achievements of the Signal Security Agency in World War II, pp. 1-38.
37 SRH 141, pt. 2, pp. 221-22.
38 Memo, Maj Gen Clayton Bissell for Deputy Chief of Staff, 2 Mar 45, sub: Army Navy Communications Intelligence Board-Establishment of, Army Cryptologic Records.
39 SRH 349, Achievements of the Signal Security Agency, pp. 39-50. This document does not mention, however, that the Army suffered one major compromise and one near disaster in its cryptographic program. In early 1942 the Axis Powers read the coded messages of Col. Bonar Fellers, the Army attache assigned to Cairo. This provided them with an inside view of British preparations in North Africa. Kahn, Kahn on Codes, p. 105. In 1945 an unguarded truck that contained a SIGABA belonging to the 28th Infantry Division disappeared in France. An investigation disclosed that the farmer responsible for the theft had only been interested in the truck. Thomas M. Johnson, "Search for the Stolen SIGABA," Army 12 (February 1962): 50-55.
40 Alfred H. Price, The History of U.S. Electronic Warfare, vol. 1 (Westford, Mass.: Association of Old Crows, 1984), pp. 177-78.
41 Deception operations, along with radar countermeasures, are covered in Thompson and Harris, The Signal Corps: The Outcome, pp. 315-16.
42 For a thorough discussion of electronic warfare in World War II, see Price, The History of U.S. Electronic Warfare. Operations in the Aleutians are discussed on page 134.
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