If MacArthur’s staff was always unified against any challenge from the outside, then within it there were many factions always struggling to gain special favor from the general; Willoughby and Courtney Whitney, another MacArthur favorite, who being a lawyer as well had helped do some legal work for him on the side, were continually battling to be best boy. Whitney had been especially helpful in the Philippine years with his connections to the upper levels of Manila society, but Willoughby had a great ear for what MacArthur wanted to hear and tended to place him atop the pedestal of history. In 1947, he wrote MacArthur: “There is no contemporary figure comparable to yours…. Ultimately[people]have been attached to a great leader, to a man and not an idea, to a Malbrough [sic], to a Napoleon, to a Robert E Lee. Underneath it all, these are age old dynastic alliances…. A gentleman can serve a grand-seigneur. That will be a good ending to my career…and as I scan the world, the grand-seigneurs are leaving the arena, fighting a bitter rear guard action against the underman, the faceless mob driven by Russian knouts.”
That Willoughby existed at all was proof to many senior officers in Washington that MacArthur ran an army of his own, largely outside the reach of the chief of staff. To them Willoughby was a leftover from the other side of World War I, “so much the Prussian type that all he needed was a spiked helmet,” in the words of Clayton James, MacArthur’s biographer. The intensity of his ideological biases made even others on the MacArthur staff uneasy. In the internal staff struggles over the future of Japanese democracy, Willoughby was an unusually passionate player, trying to rid headquarters of the New Deal liberals whom he tended to see as fellow travelers or Communists. He was also a kind of self-appointed journalistic censor, always on the alert for any journalistic transgression against either the occupation or MacArthur personally. “There were several of us who reported on the struggles within the bureaucracy in those days—serious and very interesting stuff for these were battles over which direction the new Japan would take. That meant reporting about the two main forces in the MacArthur headquarters, the reformers, and the traditionalists,” said Joseph Fromm of U.S. News & World Report. “Willoughby was absolutely convinced that because I was doing a good deal of original reporting on those divisions, reporting what neither he nor MacArthur liked, that I was a Communist. I remember one day he called me for a special one-on-one meeting, and it was a truly crazed scene. All he wanted to do was talk about Lenin and Marx, man to man, like we both knew what the game was, he the anti-Communist and the man of the law and me, in his mind, the Communist, and thus the outlaw, and we would be equals in this sparring, sophisticates about it, men of the world, but in the end his view of Communism would trump mine.” Years later, Fromm got hold of his security file through the Freedom of Information Act. What stunned him was the amount of garbage in it about him, all of it collected by Willoughby and his people in the G-2 section, almost all of it ugly, reams and reams of it, much of it incredibly inaccurate, “the kind of thing that could ruin a person’s career if it was taken seriously. What it told about the man who was in charge of collecting it, the waste of time involved, and the inability of that headquarters to deal with reality, was staggering.”
Like comparable ideologists on both sides of the spectrum, Willoughby was conspiratorial. What had happened on the Chinese mainland was not an epochal event in which the long suppressed forces of history found a modern political means of expression, but the work of plotters. In a letter to the House Un-American Activities Committee in May 1950, a month before the war began, he claimed that “American Communist brains planned the communization of China.” These were fellow travelers, he wrote, who had “an inexplicable fanaticism for an alien cause, the Communist ‘Jehad’ of pan-Slavism for the subjugation of the Western world.” As such, he was closely aligned with some of the more extreme people working on issues of subversion back in America. As early as 1947 he had started his own investigations of Americans operating in Japan, investigations that were not, as Bruce Cumings pointed out, unlike those to come three years later from McCarthy. Willoughby was in constant touch with HUAC, and with Alfred Kohlberg, the man generally viewed as the central figure in the China Lobby, as well as the FBI, passing on raw information about people he thought were dangerously left wing, among them people in the State Department who had taken a dim view of Chiang’s chances. Some of what he sent in was eventually passed on to McCarthy for use in his investigations of the wartime China Hands. Later in life, after MacArthur was relieved, Willoughby surfaced with major connections to the extreme right wing in the United States, and began writing ever more virulent, racist, and anti-Semitic articles. When Eisenhower was about to get the Republican nomination in 1952, Willoughby told MacArthur that this proved the Republicans were part of a “clever conspiratorial move to perpetuate the vampire hold of the Roosevelt-Truman mechanism.”
That was the intellectual prism through which all critical intelligence would pass in Tokyo. The key to the importance of Willoughby was not his own self-evident inadequacies; it was that he represented the deepest kind of psychological weakness in the talented, flawed man he served, the need to have someone who agreed with him at all times and flattered him constantly. Willoughby was despised by a vast number of other military men in the command. “I was always afraid he would be found murdered one day, because if he was, I was sure that they would come and arrest me, because I hated him so much, and had been so outspoken about him,” Bill McCaffrey once said. “MacArthur did not want the Chinese to enter the war in Korea. Anything MacArthur wanted, Willoughby produced intelligence for…. In this case Willoughby falsified the intelligence reports…. He should have gone to jail,” said Lieutenant Colonel John Chiles, Tenth Corps G-3, or chief of operations, and one of Almond’s most trusted deputies.
Never had his role been more important than in late October, as more and more reliable reports flowed in about the arrival of Chinese troops into the extreme northern reaches of Korea. It was at this moment that Willoughby set out to prove that they were either not there, or, if they were, that they existed only in small numbers as volunteers. He did all he could to minimize the overwhelming evidence that the Chinese had been the ones who struck the ROKs and the Eighth Cavalry near Unsan in the late October–early November assault. A good many men who fought there came to believe that his refusal to act quickly on the evidence presented by the first captured Chinese prisoners, his unwillingness to add a serious note of caution to his intelligence briefings, was directly responsible for the devastation inflicted not just on the Cav at Unsan but upon the Eighth Army soon after, for the loss of so many buddies, and in some cases, for their own long tours in Chinese and Korean prisons. To them, what he represented came perilously close to evil, someone who blustered about the dangers of Communism and the Chinese, but then ended up making their work so much easier by setting the UN forces up for that great ambush. He was, thought Bill Train, a bright, young, low-level G-3 staff officer who fought against his certitudes in those critical weeks, “a four flusher—someone who made it seem like he knew what he was doing—but in the end what he produced was absolutely worthless, there was nothing there at all. Nothing. He got everything wrong! Everything! What he was doing in those days was fighting against the truth, trying to keep it from going from lower levels to higher ones where it would have to be acted on.”
The importance and value of a good, independent intelligence man in wartime can hardly be overemphasized. A great intelligence officer studies the unknown and works in the darkness, trying to see the shape of future events. He covers the sensitive ground where prejudice, or instinctive cultural bias, often meet reality, and he must stand for reality, even if it means standing virtually alone. Great intelligence officers often have the melancholy job of telling their superiors things they don’t want to hear. A great intelligence officer tries to make the unknown at least partially knowable; he tries to think like his enemy, and he listens carefully to those with whom he disagrees, simply because he knows that
he has to challenge his own value system in order to understand the nature and impulse of the other side.
In all ways, Charles Willoughby not only failed to fit this role, but was the very opposite of it. He was not harmless, some American Colonel Blimp, long retired, boring the other geezers at some second-rate club with the sad lament that nothing was as good as in his youth, the young no longer as brave as when he had been a recruit. He would have been considered, thought Carleton Swift, a thirty-one-year-old intelligence officer, a buffoon if the impact of his acts had not been so deadly serious. Swift, a CIA man (who had come out of OSS), operated with State Department cover as a consul in the U.S. embassy in Seoul and so was beyond Willoughby’s reach. “There was an arrogance to Willoughby that was completely different from the uncertainty—the cautiousness—you associate with good intelligence men. It was as if he was always right, had always been right. Certitude after certitude poured out of him. It was as if there was an exclamation point after all of his sentences. If he said something wouldn’t happen, then it wouldn’t happen—it couldn’t happen. He would say things like, ‘We know that they are going to do this, and we know they are not going to do that.’ Worse, you couldn’t challenge him. Because he always made it clear that he spoke for MacArthur and if you challenged him you were challenging MacArthur. And that obviously wasn’t allowed. So that made it very hard for intelligence in the field to filter up to higher headquarters on something that he had made up his mind on.” Swift had been one of the young OSS officers who had dealt with Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam during World War II, when the United States was still friendly with him, and then he had been in Kunming during the Chinese civil war, and had come away with a healthy respect for the military abilities of the Communists. He still had some good sources in China, and he had been very aware of the massive movement of Chinese troops to the Manchurian border. In dealing with your sources in those days, he believed, it was all about instinct and trust. He knew that the Chinese were gathering along the Yalu in huge numbers, and that their leadership had said they were going to enter the war. Best to take those promises seriously—especially since everything he picked up from his agents indicated that they were going ahead with their plans to enter the war.
Then, in mid-to late October, Swift started receiving reports from his agents about Chinese troops crossing into Korea. These agents were all Chinese or, in the racist vernacular of the moment, “slopies” (for slope-eyes). The reports varied in quality, but there was enough good stuff to make any intelligence officer pay heed. Nor was Swift alone, for he was hearing similar tales from some of his friends in military intelligence, which he later believed reflected their awareness of the Chinese prisoners taken and being interrogated by General Paik and American headquarters in the Unsan region. But Swift knew something else as well. “None of this was going to affect Willoughby. The Chinese were not going to come in. He knew it. And he was never wrong!”
IN FACT, WILLOUGHBY was not only stopping the combat-level intelligence machinery from sending its best and most consequential material to the top in Korea, but he was blocking other sources of intelligence as well, and keeping a careful eye on a small, bare-bones CIA operation that in 1950 existed in Tokyo. By prearrangement with the Navy, a small CIA shop had been set up inside the Seventh Fleet, at its base in Yokosuka, and was being run by a man named William Duggan, an old OSS operative who had worked previously in Europe. From late September well into October, Duggan was receiving some exceptional intelligence from his colleagues in Taiwan on what the Chinese Communist Army was up to. Some of the old Nationalist units, now incorporated into the People’s Liberation Army, still had their radios. Sometimes they would manage to slip away at night and make contact with Taiwan to describe where they were and what they were up to. The messages all had a theme: we are all heading north to the Manchurian border; the field level officers believe the decision has already been made to cross the Yalu.
Then, suddenly, in late October, the radios went silent, perhaps because they were by then in North Korea and there was greater control over who had the radios. But there was no doubt that the earlier reports represented very real warnings. A young CIA operative on Taiwan named Bob Myers was picking up these reports from some of the Nationalists he was working with and passing them on to his superiors, and he knew that they had reached Duggan in Japan. What he did not learn until later was that Willoughby had found out about this and had threatened to close down Duggan’s tiny shop and run him out of Japan unless he stopped trying to notify anyone higher up about the intelligence he had.
Meanwhile, within the Eighth Army a fierce bureaucratic battle over the intelligence was taking place. The unfortunate man caught between Willoughby above him and the growing doubts among intelligence men working on the ground in northern Korea was the Eighth Army’s G-2, Clint Tarkenton. “He was a Willoughby man, not a Walton Walker man, and you must not underestimate the importance of that. You must remember the enormous power that Willoughby had in that overall command structure,” said Bill Train, who as a young officer in the First Cav’s G-3 shop, was convinced that the Chinese had entered the country in force, and that a major tragedy was in the making: “It was MacArthur’s command, not a U.S. Army command, and if you crossed Willoughby it was not just a ticket out of there, it was probably a ticket straight out of your career.” So Tarkenton followed the line from Tokyo that, as Willoughby had reported in an intelligence estimate on October 28, three days after the capture of the first Chinese prisoner in the Unsan area, “the auspicious time for such intervention has long since passed; it is difficult to believe that such a move, if planned, would have been postponed to a time when remnant NK forces have been reduced to a low point of effectiveness.”
Train, however, was quite alarmed about what had happened at Unsan. He had been pulled into some of the intelligence work because the G-2 section was shorthanded. Now, as he paid more and more attention, he saw undeniable evidence of what appeared to be a large-scale Chinese entry into the war. It was not something that you scoffed at, as Willoughby’s shop was doing; it was something that sent a chill through you and made you want to come up with even more information. Technically, intelligence was not even Train’s area, but how could you do plans as a G-3 if you did not know who or where the enemy was? Even before the Chinese struck at Unsan, he felt himself putting together a jigsaw puzzle in which the newest pieces gave an ever clearer picture. American soldiers moving north were moving into an area filled with ghosts, but gradually those ghosts were beginning to have an outline. Train was no less struck by the way the intelligence people above him were systematically minimizing or openly discounting the same information. At the very least they should have been pushing harder for more information. Instead they were visibly shrinking the numbers on the enemy, and making it clear that they did not want better information. Whenever Train and his boss in G-3, John Dabney, spotted something that seemed to indicate a serious Chinese presence, Willoughby’s people minimized it.
What made the struggle so unequal was that Clint Tarkenton was not an ally. He was not quite an opponent either, but he was caught in a squeeze between a dogmatic, authoritarian boss and an intrusive, unwanted reality. “Tarkenton was in an impossible situation,” Train said years later. “Willoughby was his boss and he was a bully and he knew his power and he liked using it, and he controlled that shop both in Tokyo and, because Tarkenton was his man, in the Eighth Army G-2 as well, and he could dominate any intelligence estimates he wanted. Tarkenton, no matter what his real thoughts, was very much under his shadow.” Later Dabney also said that Tarkenton was unduly influenced by Willoughby. Whatever they came up with in terms of the Chinese presence, Willoughby had an answer. If the ROKs reported killing thirty-six Chinese during a battle, and the bodies were still on the battlefield, then the answer came back that it was all just an Oriental way of saving face, that the ROKs had fought so poorly they had to claim a certain number of dead Chinese as a matter of pride. If Train came
up with evidence that seemed to point to the presence of five or six Chinese divisions in a given area, the answer was invariably that these were different, smaller units from different Chinese divisions, now attached to a North Korean unit.
A most dangerous game was being played out, by one part of the Army, safely quartered in Tokyo, at the expense of another part that would have to fight that very dangerous enemy under terrible conditions. For example, on October 30, after the first attack at Unsan, Everett Drumwright in the Seoul embassy, reflecting the G-2 position quite precisely, cabled State that two regiments’ worth of Chinese, perhaps three thousand men, were probably engaged in the North. That was his honest attempt to answer what was the burning question of the moment for his superiors. The next day he cabled again, giving a smaller figure of only two thousand Chinese troops. By November 1, after lower-level interrogators showed that there were troops there from several different Chinese armies, Tarkenton, following the Willoughby line, said that it was because smaller units from those armies but not the full armies themselves had showed up.
On November 3, as the reality of Unsan gradually set in, Willoughby upped his figures slightly. Yes, the Chinese were there in country, minimally 16,500 of them, at a maximum 34,000. On November 6, Tarkenton placed the total figure of Chinese aligned against both the Eighth Army and Tenth Corps at 27,000. In reality, the number in country was already closer to 250,000, and growing. On November 17, MacArthur told Ambassador Muccio that there were no more than 30,000 Chinese in country, while the next day Tarkenton placed the number at 48,000. On November 24, the day the major UN offensive to go to the Yalu kicked off—instead of sensing how large the Chinese presence was and getting into strong defensive positions—Willoughby placed the minimum number at 40,000, the maximum at 71,000. At the time there were 300,000 Chinese troops waiting patiently for the UN forces to come a little deeper into their trap.
The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War Page 52