The Secret Sentry (6 page)

The decision was made to keep this revelation out of all widely circulated intelligence publications, such as the CIA’s National
Intelligence Estimates (NIEs), in order to prevent the leakage of this highly sensitive intelligence to right-wing members
of Congress, such as Senator Joseph McCarthy, who would no doubt have used (or misused) the information to drum up public
support for war with the USSR at a time when the U.S. government was trying to prevent that from happening.
⁵¹
While President Truman had made a bold decision to resist communist aggression in Korea, the war effort (or “police action,”
as he described it) was facing decreasing support from the public even as American paranoia about communist threats from abroad
and subversion within began to create great difficulties for the administration. Amid this poisonous atmosphere at home and
the fraught situation in the Far East, the U.S. military prepared for Armageddon.

General MacArthur’s Dismissal

On April 11, 1951, just as the U.S. Armed Forces reached a maximum state of readiness for nuclear war, without any prior public
warning President Truman fired General MacArthur from his post as commander in chief of U.S. forces in the Far East.
⁵²

The president’s decision stunned the nation. As it turned out, the AFSA code breakers at Arlington Hall had a great deal to
do with Truman’s decision to fire America’s most popular military commander. Throughout 1950 and 1951, AFSA was intercepting
and decrypting the telegrams of the various foreign diplomats based in Tokyo. Among the most prominent targets being exploited
were the diplomatic cables of the ambassadors from Spain, Portugal, and Brazil.
⁵³
Both MacArthur and Major General Charles Willoughby made the mistake of candidly disclosing their extreme political views
on Russia and China to these three ambassadors. Among the comments that MacArthur made was that he hoped the Soviets would
intervene militarily in Korea, which he believed would give the United States the excuse to destroy once and for all Mao Tse-tung’s
communist regime in Beijing. MacArthur also told the foreign ambassadors that he thought war with Russia was inevitable.
⁵⁴

In mid-March 1951, Truman’s naval aide, Admiral Robert Dennison, handed him a batch of four decrypted messages sent the preceding
week by the Spanish ambassador in Tokyo, Francisco José del Castillo, summarizing his private conversations with MacArthur.
The late Ambassador Paul Nitze, who was then head of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, said in an interview, “From
those communications, it was perfectly clear that what MacArthur had in mind was that either he would have a complete victory
in North Korea or, if the Chinese Communists got involved, then the war would be spread to the Chinese mainland as a whole
and the object of the game would then be the unseating of Mao Tse-tung and the restoration of Chiang Kai-shek. In the course
of doing that you had your nuclear weapons if you needed them. This would then enable one to do what was strategically important
and that was to defeat the Chinese Communists. That was clearly what was on MacArthur’s mind. Part of the reason he took these
excessive risks was to create a situation in which we would be involved in a war with the Chinese Communists.”
⁵⁵

Given the overwhelming preponderance of evidence that MacArthur was deliberately ignoring orders from Washington, and with
the SIGINT intercepts indicating that he was secretly hoping for an all-out world war with the Soviets and the Chinese, Truman
fired him. In retrospect, it was almost certainly the right thing to do. But it had a catastrophic effect on Truman’sstanding
with the American people. His poll numbers sank like a stone in the months that followed. By mid-1951, his approval ratings
had plummeted to 23 percent, the lowest ever recorded by the Gallup Poll for a sitting American president.

General Ridgway’s Crisis

The man chosen by the Pentagon to replace General Douglas MacArthur as commander in chief, Far East, was General Matthew Ridgway,
who before moving into MacArthur’s office suite in the Dai Ichi Building in downtown Tokyo had commanded the Eighth U.S. Army
in Korea since December 1950. The hard-nosed former paratrooper took command at a moment when the intelligence picture in
the region was bleak— and would only become grimmer as the months went on.

Intelligence reporting convinced Ridgway that a storm was about to break on his forces. All intelligence, including that extracted
from POWs as early as February 1951, indicated that the Chinese and North Koreans were about to launch their massive Spring
“Fifth Phase” Offensive in Korea. SIGINT revealed that there had been two major conferences attended by all Chinese and North
Korean army and corps commanders, as well as Russian military advisers, to work out the details of the offensive. Additional
intelligence reports received in March indicated that D-day for the Chinese–North Korean offensive was expected to be some
time in April. Then on April 1, the North Koreans changed their codes, a sure sign that something dramatic was in the offing.
But thanks to the efforts of the U.S. Army code breakers in Korea, within a week the new North Korean ciphers were solved.
⁵⁶

Over the next two weeks, the SIGINT analysts in Washington and Tokyo laid bare the plans for the upcoming Chinese–North Korean
offensive. Thanks in large part to SIGINT, Ridgway was able to discern weeks in advance that the brunt of the offensive would
come in the mountainous central portion of the front, and not along the flat west coast of Korea north of Seoul. SIGINT also
provided a fairly complete picture of the enemy forces committed, specifically four newly arrived Chinese armies plus two
North Korean corps. And most important, it provided relatively clear indications about when the offensive would start. SIGINT
also detailed the massive buildup of Russian, Chinese, and North Korean combat aircraft in Manchuria, plus attempts by the
North Koreans to repair their airfields. When the enemy offensive finally commenced on April 22, Ridgway knew virtually everything
about it except the exact time that it was due to begin.
⁵⁷

By the middle of June, SIGINT intercepts of North Korean radio traffic would reveal that the Chinese–North Korean offensive,
which had sputtered to a halt earlier that month, had cost the communists a staggering 221,000 Chinese and North Korean casualties.
COMINT also provided hard evidence of the communists’ substantial logistical difficulties, which required that tens of thousands
of frontline PLA forces be employed behind the lines to keep supply lines open, and documented the severe food shortages being
experienced by Chinese forces at the front, which the Chinese commanders blamed for the collapse of the offensive.
⁵⁸

The War Clouds Darken

The shocker came on April 25, three days after the Chinese–North Korean offensive in Korea began, when SIGINT revealed that
Soviet air force flight activity throughout the USSR and Eastern Eu rope had ceased completely. American and British radio
intercept operators around the world began cabling urgent reports to Washington and London stating that they were picking
up virtually no radio chatter coming from any Soviet military airfields in Eastern Eu rope or the Soviet Far East. Alarm bells
sounded all over Washington. Soviet air force radio silence was regarded as one of the key indicators that the Soviets were
preparing for a military offensive.
⁵⁹

This ominous silence convinced General Ridgway that the Russians were about to launch their much-anticipated air assault against
his forces in Korea and Japan. SIGINT showed that the enemy had 860 combat aircraft in Manchuria, 260 of which were modern
MiG-15 jet fighters. SIGINT also showed that 380 of the 860 combat aircraft were “controlled” by the Soviet air force, including
all of the MiG-15 jet fighters. And SIGINT confirmed that there had been a significant increase in radio traffic between Moscow
and the headquarters of the three Long Range Air Force (LRAF) air armies; that there had been an increase in operational flight-training
activities by LRAF TU-4 Bull nuclear-capable bombers in the Euro pean portion of the USSR; and that a new Soviet air defense
fighter interceptor command headquarters had just been established at Vladivostok and Dairen.
⁶⁰
Fortunately, the Soviet air attack never took place.

The Lights Go Out

In the first week of July 1951, just as cease-fire truce talks were getting started at Kaesong, disaster struck the American
cryptologic effort in Korea yet again. In a massive shift in their communications and cipher security procedures, the North
Korean military stopped using virtually all of the codes and ciphers that the Americans had been successfully exploiting since
August 1950, and they replaced them with unbreakable one-time pad cipher systems on all of their high-level and even lower-level
radio circuits. Radio frequency changes were now made more often, radio call signs were encrypted, and unencrypted plaintext
radio traffic virtually disappeared from North Korean People’s Army (NKPA) radio circuits. Moreover, the North Koreans shifted
a significant portion of their operational communications traffic to landline circuits that blocked it from being intercepted.

This move by the North Koreans effectively killed off the sole remaining productive source of high-level COMINT that was then
available to American intelligence in the Far East, leaving AFSA and the service cryptologic organizations with only low-level
tactical voice communications left as a viable source of intelligence. Today, NSA officials believe that this move was prompted
by Soviet security advisers with the North Korean forces, who were alarmed at the shoddy communications security (COMSEC)
procedures utilized by the North Korean forces.
⁶¹

The Good, the Bad, and the Really Ugly

On the positive side for the COMINT community, during the first and most perilous year of the Korean War, AFSA and the military
COMINT units in the Far East were virtually the only source of timely and reliable intelligence for American field commanders
in Korea about North Korean military activities. But the agency’s cryptanalysts were never able to solve any of the high-level
ciphers used by the Chinese military in Korea, which meant that American commanders in the Far East never truly understood
their principal enemy’s intentions or capabilities.

A former NSA historian concluded, “There were successes, there were failures, but the failures tended to overshadow the successes.”
⁶²
The net result was that SIGINT did not provide anywhere near the quantity or quality of high-level strategic intelligence
that it had during World War II. According to a declassified NSA study, there were numerous successes during the Korean War;
“to most intelligence consumers, however, the results still looked extremely thin, especially with the lack of COMINT from
[high-level] communications.”
⁶³

CHAPTER 3

Fight for Survival

The Creation of the National Security Agency

And what rough beast, its hour come round
at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

—W. B. YEATS, "THE SECOND COMING"

The Dog Has Teeth: The Arrival of
General Ralph Canine

Among those inside the U.S. intelligence community who were privy to AFSA’s secrets, the announcement of fifty-five-year-old
army major general Ralph Canine’s appointment as AFSA director in July 1951 came as a huge surprise, but it didn’t cause even
a ripple in the newspapers because few members of the press or public had any idea of what the agency did. Not only was General
Canine (pronounced keh-NINE) not a West Point graduate, but he also had very little prior experience in intelligence (he had
only served as the deputy chief of Army G-2 for ten months before being named to the post at AFSA), and he knew nothing whatsoever
about codes and ciphers.
¹
He was promoted to lieutenant general and became the second— and last—AFSA director.

Intelligence insiders had expected that Brigadier General Carter Clarke, a veteran intelligence officer with long experience
with SIGINT, would be appointed to the position. But Clarke, then commanding a logistics unit in Japan, wanted nothing to
do with the deeply troubled AFSA and nixed his own nomination, as did virtually every other senior army and air force intelligence
officer qualified for the post. So Canine got the job by default. He told friends that he had initially been “violently against”
becoming the head of AFSA, preferring instead to take retirement after thirty-five years of military service, including combat
duty in two world wars. But he had been convinced by colleagues in Army G-2 to take the job against his better judgment.
²

Canine was “old army”—a tough and efficient chief of staff of a corps in General George Patton’s Third Army, where he was
famous for “kicking the ass” of recalcitrant division and regimental commanders. And that is exactly what Canine did at AFSA.
In much the same way that his counterpart at the CIA, General Walter Smith, rebuilt and reinvigorated his dormant intelligence
organization, so too did General Canine. In the six years (1951 to 1956) that he served as the director of AFSA and then the
National Security Agency, the hard-charging Canine made his organization a force to be reckoned with inside the U.S. intelligence
community.
³

But even the resourceful Canine could not overcome the myriad problems that bedeviled his organization. Among other things,
SIGINT produced by AFSA still did not provide U.S. forces in Korea and its other customers with the intelligence (in quantity
and quality) they needed. The squabbling and feuding within AFSA itself was causing no end of problems for the agency’s managers,
who were struggling to help win the war in Korea as well as handle a series of potentially explosive international crises.
Senior army and navy officers at AFSA fought vicious internal bureaucratic battles with one another as well as their air force
counterparts. And all three of the military services refused to cooperate with the agency’s civilian customers at the FBI,
CIA, and State Department. To say that AFSA was dysfunctional would be an understatement.
⁴

Canine had a real fight on his hands. Internally, he made sweeping changes in the agency’s management in January 1952. One
of those who would leave in the middle of this reorganization was Frank Rowlett. Like many of his colleagues, he found this
radical house cleaning to be the proverbial final straw. Angry and frustrated, in a fit of spite Rowlett accepted the offer
of a job helping the CIA build its own SIGINT organization.
⁵

Canine fought off attacks from the military services and tried to defend the agency against the increasingly hostile criticism
of its customers, but ultimately he lost the battle. In November 1951, CIA director Smith struck a mortal blow. Smith knew
that the armed services would try to seize their shares of control of SIGINT if AFSA were to be dismantled, and he believed
that SIGINT had to be consolidated in the form of an entirely new entity. His bureaucratic masterstroke was instigating the
creation of an “outside” committee to evaluate and, hopefully, doom AFSA. The committee was headed by George Brownell, a New
York corporate lawyer and a good friend of the CIA’s deputy director, Allen Dulles. The military services were completely
shut out. The only representa -tion on the Brownell Committee the military got was Canine, who held the nominal position of
consul tant but was not a voting member. From the makeup of the committee, senior military officials knew that they were not
going to like what came out of its work.
⁶

Rain of Devastation: The Brownell Committee Report

At ten forty-five a.m. on the morning of Friday, June 13, 1952, President Truman welcomed CIA director Smith and James Lay
Jr., executive secretary of the National Security Council (NSC), into the Oval Office at the White House for a regularly scheduled
meeting. Smith, however, was the bearer of bad tidings. He reached into his briefcase and gave Truman a copy of a 141-page
Top Secret Codeword report on the state of health of the U.S. national SIGINT effort. It was the much-anticipated Brownell
Report on AFSA.
⁷

It is clear in reading between the lines of the Brownell Committee’s report that all of the managerial sins of the agency’s
leadership would have been forgiven if AFSA had been producing decent intelligence. But it was not.

The Brownell Committee called for a complete overhaul and reorganization of AFSA. In effect, Brownell and his fellow committee
members recommended scrapping it in its current form because it was unsalvageable. Instead, they recommended replacing it
with a new unified SIGINT agency that would possess greater authority to operate a modern, centralized global SIGINT effort
on behalf of the U.S. government.

Not surprisingly, Smith and Secretary of State Dean Acheson enthusiastically endorsed the committee’s recommendations. Secretary
of Defense Robert Lovett also approved the report’s findings. By September 1952, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the military
services, under intense pressure from the Office of the Secretary of Defense, reluctantly accepted most of the recommendations.
Throughout October, Canine tried unsuccessfully to negotiate some changes in the wording of a draft directive to be signed
by Truman; that would have given the new agency more power to do its own analysis, but this proposal was summarily shot down.
Canine was told in no uncertain terms that the deal was done and that it was time for him to take his seat and let events
take their course.
⁸

The Birth of the National Security Agency

At ten forty-five a.m. on Friday morning, October 24, 1952, Smith and Lay returned to the White House to meet with Truman
only four months after Smith had given him his copy of the Brownell Report. After the usual handshakes and brief pleasantries,
Lay placed on Truman’s desk a buff file folder with a “Top Secret” cover sheet stapled to its front. Inside the folder was
an eight-page document titled “Communications Intelligence Activities,” which had a tab at the rear indicating where the president’s
signature was required. We do not know what, if anything, was said among the three men. All we know for certain is that Truman
signed the document, and ten minutes later Smith and Lay walked out of the Oval Office with the file folder. Except for Truman,
Smith, and Lay, very few people in Washington knew that the president had just presided over the creation of the National
Security Agency (NSA).
⁹

The eight-page directive that Truman had signed made SIGINT a national responsibility and designated the secretary of defense
as the U.S. government’s executive agent for all SIGINT activities, which placed NSA within the ambit of the Defense Department
and outside the jurisdiction of the CIA. Truman gave NSA a degree of power and authority above and beyond that ever given
previously or since to any American intelligence agency, placing it outside the rubric of the rest of the U.S. intelligence
community. Truman also ordered that the new agency’s powers be clearly defined and strengthened through the issuance of a
new directive titled National Security Council Intelligence Directive No. 9 “Communications Intelligence.”
¹⁰
The creation of NSA got in just under the wire. November 4, 1952, was Election Day in America. That evening, Dwight Eisenhower
won in a landslide, decisively beating Adlai Stevenson to become the next president of the United States.