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Kim Il-sung had repeatedly sought approval from his Russian patrons for a military blitzkrieg on the South that, he confidently predicted, could seize control of the entire country in three days. With large stocks of weapons seized from the Japanese and a hundred-thousand-man army equipped with tanks and artillery, the North Korean army stood ready to carry out Kim’s plans. Stalin was wary of being drawn into a conflict, but in January 1950 he gave Kim his assent, believing that it was an inviting chance to chip away at American prestige and that the United States would be presented with a quick fait accompli that it could not or would not respond to.
In the event, the North Korean attack that began on June 25 brought surprise both to Washington and Moscow. Just as with the Berlin blockade two years earlier, Stalin fatally miscalculated American reaction; within hours, Truman, seeing the last hope for the collective security arrangements that the UN was supposed to bring to the postwar world about to crumble away, decided that the United States would come to the defense of South Korea’s government, and do so under the authority of the United Nations. “We can’t let the UN down,” he insisted to his advisers.23 A Soviet boycott of the Security Council at the time allowed a UN resolution authorizing the use of force to escape a Soviet veto. General Douglas MacArthur, who commanded both the military occupation of Japan and the U.S. Far East Command from his headquarters in Tokyo, ordered the Eighth Army under General Walton Walker rushed to South Korea to try to halt what was indeed becoming a juggernaut of Kim’s forces, who in three days had swept unopposed through the South Korean capital of Seoul. By July 31 the Eighth Army had been pushed into a small defensive perimeter surrounding the port of Pusan on the southeast coast, bounded by the Nakdong River to the west and a line of rugged mountains to the north.
For two weeks after the start of the war the U.S. intercept stations in the region kept their focus riveted on Russian radio traffic, so large did fears loom that the North Korean attack was but the initial gambit of a Soviet plan to launch a general war with the United States. (AFSA’s sense of where the greatest threat lay never really did change throughout the conflict: of its two thousand new military and civilian personnel added in response to the crisis, only eighty-seven would end up working on the Korean problem, even by the end of the war.) But that also reflected an almost total lack of translators to work on Korean material. None of the intercept units in Japan had a Korean linguist; after weeks of frantic search, ASA found only two Korean speakers in the entire Army available for duty in the theater. Both were teaching at the Army Language School in Monterey, California, where they were obviously needed to train new translators, but so great was the immediate need that both were shipped off to ASAPAC in Tokyo.24
But AFSA was quickly able to set up hourly delivery to Arlington Hall via teleprinter of North Korean intercepts from the monitoring stations in Japan, and by July 3 had made the first translations of North Korean military messages. Astonishingly, they had been sent in the clear. It would later be known that in the chaos of the rapid advance, exacerbated by equipment losses and poor technical training, the communication discipline of North Korean radio operators had all but collapsed, and even the most top-level messages discussing troop movements, battle plans, and daily situation reports were sent with little or no regard to security.
Eleven days later the AFSA cryptanalysts at Arlington Hall solved their first North Korean code, and by the end of July had deciphered one-third of all encrypted North Korean messages received. During the Eighth Army’s desperate forty-five-day fight from August to mid-September to hold the Pusan perimeter, intelligence reports from Arlington Hall’s codebreakers and translators repeatedly allowed Walker to shift his exhausted and greatly outnumbered troops to meet the North Korean thrusts: messages containing attack orders down to the battalion level, often specifying the exact objectives and weapons to be employed, were now flowing in at a steady pace. Other messages confirming the identity of North Korean units, revealing the location of airfields and artillery ammunition dumps, and reporting the state of supplies had also been read by the end of August. It was, in the words of an officer on Walker’s staff, an “utterly amazing” turnaround in the intelligence picture, and probably saved the UN forces from complete and swift annihilation in the first two and a half months of the war.25
AFSA also, in hindsight, would be seen to have acquitted itself well in the greatest debacle of the Korean War, MacArthur’s disastrous failure to anticipate the intervention of three hundred thousand Chinese troops who came careering across the border in human-wave attacks just when, to most American troops, the war seemed to be over. On September 15, in what is rightly seen as one of the great masterstrokes in military history, MacArthur launched an amphibious landing behind North Korea’s lines at Inchon, west of the South Korean capital. Seoul was recaptured two weeks later; the thirteen North Korean divisions besieging the Pusan perimeter retreated in disarray; and by early October MacArthur’s troops swept past the 38th parallel almost unopposed into the North. Stalin bluntly advised Kim Il-sung that he would have to evacuate his remaining forces from North Korea. Khrushchev recalled Stalin’s resigned acceptance that the war was all but lost, and that U.S. troops would soon be right across the Soviet border. “So what,” the Soviet dictator said. “Let it be. Let the Americans be our neighbors.”26
China’s Communist leader, Mao Zedong, had different ideas. For months a hastily expanded group at Arlington Hall under the direction of a twenty-nine-year-old Chinese linguist, Milt Zaslow, had been sending out reports calling attention to the movement of large numbers of Chinese forces. The information came from dozens of civilian telegrams sent in the clear, many of them personal messages to members of military units addressed to them at locations that proved to be stations along rail lines leading to Manchuria, near the North Korean border.
On July 17, based on thirty-one messages, Zaslow’s group reported that elements of the Fourth Field Army, considered to be the Chinese army’s most capable combat force, had deployed north just before the North Korean invasion. On September 1, based on forty-one more messages, AFSA reported additional Chinese units on the move in late June and again in late July, including a newly formed artillery division. By the beginning of October indications pointed to a massive deployment under way, with twenty troop trains heading to Manchuria. At the same time, AFSA’s deciphering of diplomatic cables sent by foreign embassies in Beijing revealed that Chinese foreign minister Chou Enlai had told the Indian ambassador and other foreign diplomats that China was prepared to intervene if American troops crossed the 38th parallel and entered North Korean territory.27
The subsequent military disaster would show MacArthur at his worst: his supreme refusal to accept facts that contradicted his prior assumptions; his inability to admit he ever made a mistake; and his reliance on a coterie of devoted sycophants who took pains to shield him from anything he did not want to hear or anything that might “disturb the dream-world of self worship in which he chose to live,” as one historian put it, in the splendid isolation of the Dai Ichi Building, his headquarters in downtown Tokyo. “If he did not want to believe something,” said General Matthew Ridgway, MacArthur’s successor at Far East Command, “he wouldn’t.” Once when speaking to General Marshall, MacArthur started to make a point by referring to “my staff.” Marshall interrupted him: “You don’t have a staff, General. You have a court.”
No one in that court outdid the devotion and sycophancy of MacArthur’s fifty-eight-year-old intelligence chief, Major General Charles Andrew Willoughby. Emigrating to the United States in 1910 at age eighteen, Willoughby eventually shed the name Adolf Charles Weidenbach that he used as a young officer in the U.S. Army but never lost the heavy German accent of his birth. An exponent of far-right-wing political ideas and Communist conspiracy theories—he was, among other things, an ardent admirer of the Spanish fascist dictator Francisco Franco—Willoughby cut a strange figure in MacArthur’s inner circle, where he he
ld the position of G-2 throughout World War II and after. MacArthur facetiously called him “my pet fascist,” but those under Willoughby loathed him for his haughty rages and imperious manner, referring to him behind his back as “our Junker general” or “Baron von Willoughby.”28
MacArthur had made effective use of signals intelligence in the Pacific campaign during World War II but had also insisted on rigidly controlling the information himself. When Carter Clarke tried to set up the usual secure liaison channels so that Arlington Hall could directly send Ultra intelligence to commanders in MacArthur’s theater, MacArthur issued orders forbidding the liaison units to send radio messages in any area under his command. In 1944, Clarke finally flew out to see the general personally, bearing a letter from General Marshall explaining the procedures that had to be followed. Clarke got as far as Hawaii before MacArthur’s headquarters ordered him back to Washington. In the first months of the Korean War, Willoughby had similarly denied General Walker direct access to ASAPAC’s intelligence reports and turned down his request to have an official AFSA liaison attached to his command to receive special intelligence directly from Washington. It was ostensibly out of concerns that the Eighth Army might be captured by the North Koreans, but it ensured that no one could upstage MacArthur’s brilliant feats of seemingly omniscient generalship that signals intelligence in fact provided. It also meant that no one would be in a position to challenge his delusional disregard of intelligence that contradicted his decisions until it was too late.29
Truman had become so concerned by intelligence pointing to possible Chinese intervention that on October 15 he flew to Wake Island to personally meet with his military commander and discuss the situation. MacArthur, who frequently boasted of his understanding of “the mind of the Oriental,” blithely assured the president that there was “very little” chance of the Chinese coming into the fight. “We are no longer fearful of their intervention.”30 Even after the first Chinese troops struck ten days later, Willoughby and MacArthur continued to insist that there was nothing to worry about. The general and his intelligence chief were personally briefed on the evidence coming from the Chinese signals by Lieutenant Colonel Morton Rubin, who had previously commanded ASAPAC and was now MacArthur’s signals intelligence liaison, but Rubin made no apparent impression on either man, who habitually received the colonel’s reports in stony silence. When the CIA station chief in Korea filed a cable to Washington reporting that he had personally interrogated Chinese prisoners captured in the fighting in the North, Willoughby promptly issued an order to the Eighth Army to “keep him clear of interrogation.”31
In their initial attack on October 25, the Chinese sent four full armies, 120,000 men, on the offensive; Willoughby asserted that only “battalion-size elements” had been involved. That first assault may have been intended as a notice of China’s determination to enter the war if the United States did not pull back to the 38th parallel. On November 6 the Chinese broke off their offensive, withdrew into the mountains facing UN positions, and waited. Throughout November signals intelligence indicators poured in pointing to Beijing’s preparations for full-scale war: a state of emergency was in effect throughout China, air defenses were being ordered onto high alert, troops were being vaccinated for diseases prevalent in North Korea, thirty thousand maps of Korea had been shipped to Shenyang, near the border.32
On November 24, MacArthur resumed his offensive push toward the Yalu River, which separated North Korea from China. “If they go fast enough, maybe some of them can be home for Christmas,” he grandly announced. Two days later thirty Chinese divisions counterattacked, crushing the Eighth Army’s right flank and trapping the First Marine Division near the Chosin Reservoir. With the Eighth Army in a headlong retreat that would carry it 120 miles in two weeks through bitter cold, MacArthur was at last forced to acknowledge, at least privately, the truth he had consistently ignored. “We face an entirely new war,” he informed the Joint Chiefs of Staff. To the press, however, MacArthur and Willoughby serenely maintained that they had known all along about the Chinese, explaining that the bring-them-home-by-Christmas final offensive was not in fact one of the worst miscalculations in American military history but a shrewdly successful “reconnaissance in force” that had unmasked the Chinese positions. “We had to attack and find out the enemy’s profile,” Willoughby told reporters in Tokyo.33 The Chinese advance would continue until January, when UN forces at last halted it on a line that once again ran south of Seoul.
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In July 1951 the North Koreans instituted their own version of Black Friday, making sweeping changes in communications procedures that brought an end to AFSA’s triumph in reading the enemy’s signals. The cryptologists at Arlington Hall had been decrypting more than 90 percent of North Korean enciphered traffic by the end of 1950, but all of these readily broken codes were now replaced with unbreakable one-time-pad systems. Mimicking Soviet radio procedure, call signs were encrypted and frequency changes made more often. The North Koreans’ careless transmission of high-level messages in the clear abruptly stopped. For the rest of the war, low-level intercept of voice and other tactical communications by U.S. Army and Air Force field units deployed close to the fighting would be the only significant source of useful signals intelligence other than traffic analysis.34
The effort even to find such a field unit that could deploy to Korea got off to a rocky, at times ludicrous start. During World War II the Army had created a large number of “signal service” or “Y” units that could move with ground and air forces to provide direct coverage of enemy signals sent in the clear or using low-grade code systems. This was traffic whose intelligence value was highly perishable, sent by voice or Morse code in the midst of battle, and had to be handled on the spot to be of any use at all. But at the outbreak of the fighting in Korea, ASA could find only one Y unit, the 60th Signal Service Company at Fort Lewis in Washington State, even close to being ready for deployment. It took them three months to arrive in Korea.35
The Air Force’s 1st Radio Squadron Mobile near Tokyo should have been in a better position to move quickly. But the unit was as green as they come. The jittery commander of the 1st RSM reacted to the news of the North Korean attack by ordering his men to park the unit’s vehicles in a circle, bumper to bumper, on the base football field and take cover behind them with whatever weapons they could find, in case the Communists attempted as their next move a surprise parachute landing in Japan. It was “like we were preparing for an attack by hostile Indians,” recalled a bemused intelligence officer in the unit.36 A USAFSS officer sent to take matters in hand, First Lieutenant Edward Murray, assembled a detachment of equipment, men, and several radio vans from the 1st RSM and flew to Korea on July 15, only to find that the Fifth Air Force had already set up its own renegade signals intelligence unit under a warrant officer named Donald Nichols, who had lived in Korea for a few years and was assigned to the Air Force Office of Special Investigations in Seoul when the fighting broke out.
Nichols had no known background in signals intelligence but cultivated a James Bond–like air, not entirely without foundation. During the chaotic first few days of the war, he led a small party on a daring foray behind enemy lines to destroy important documents left at Suwon Air Base, earning him the attention and commendation of the commander of Far East Air Forces, Lieutenant General George E. Stratemeyer. Nichols soon had carte blanche to run secret operations for the Air Force in Korea. Finding two Korean military officers to serve as translators, he quickly began supplying the Fifth Air Force with useful information from North Korean radio messages, even as his ad hoc signals intelligence system violated every established security procedure for handling special intelligence. Secure of his support in high places (Nichols would soon be promoted to captain, Stratemeyer commenting at the time, “This fellow is a one-man army in Korea”), Nichols airily rebuffed Lieutenant Murray’s attempt to bring the operation under the control of the signals intelligence professionals, simply clai
ming for himself the equipment Murray had brought and sending the lieutenant back to Japan. Murray tried again the next month, this time bearing a letter of authority from the intelligence director of Far East Air Forces. The Fifth Air Force responded by handing him an order to leave the country on the next plane out. Only with the arrival of additional trained mobile intercept detachments at the end of the year did the situation begin to resemble the professional, smooth-running Y operations of World War II. By that time Nichols had faded from the scene.37
In late March 1951, the 1st RSM, still operating in Japan, picked up Russian ground controllers in voice communication with Soviet MiG fighter aircraft operating over North Korea. It was an astonishing development that the Soviets were actively engaged in the fighting, but it was also a potential intelligence windfall, not only because of the number of trained Russian linguists already available to cover these communications but because Soviet air doctrine called for tight control of fighters by stations on the ground tracking the location of friendly and enemy aircraft on radar throughout the battle. By April, eight Air Force Russian linguists were operating out of a mobile intercept hut in central Korea, passing on information of approaching MiGs to the Air Force tactical air command center, which in turn relayed the warnings to U.S. pilots, disguising the information to make it appear that it had come from U.S. radar stations tracking enemy air movements. In fact, the radio intercepts extended the warning distance well beyond what U.S. radar stations could see. Additional teams at a variety of locations were soon intercepting Korean and Chinese ground-control-to-fighter voice channels and Chinese Morse traffic that continually reported radar tracks of both friendly and hostile aircraft to Chinese air defense units. Security rules as well as technical considerations of the best location for intercepting these different signals kept these operations at separate sites until September 1951, when a decision was made to centralize the processing of all of the air tracking signals at a single USAFSS facility set up on the campus of Chosen Christian College in Seoul.38
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