The Reds charge: “All American military officers are spies!”
Actually, “spy” is a narrow term, defined by Webster as “to observe secretly.” So, let us broaden the accusation by substituting “intelligence officers” for “spies,” and then cheerfully concede that, thus modified, the Red estimate is correct. Let us even raise the ante by admitting that not only are all naval officers intelligence operatives, but so are their wives and children.
Take as an example your own personal actions on receiving orders to a new station. You collect maps to check the location, study routes and distances. You want to know the living conditions, availability and types of quarters, rental costs, school conditions for children, the climate, what uniforms to bring, health conditions. What are the local people like? The shopping facilities and local price scales? In many of these things your wife and children are equally interested. You put your collection agencies to work; you and your family write letters to your agents (oops! I mean friends) in the area. Perhaps you even make a clandestine personal reconnaissance. Your intelligence operation will be thorough because of high personal interest on your part.
Alas! All too often it is that intensive intelligence activities of the U. S. naval officer end with the above. Such activities fall far short of the flattering evaluation of Moscow and Peking that “all American military officers are spies.”
But wouldn’t a mass amateur intelligence effort simply clog the machinery with junk and befog the important facts? To a degree, perhaps yes—sometimes it will even provide a chuckle for the evaluators. Take the case of the young attaché en route to wartime Moscow who was anxious to be able to report by which rail line he had come. Knowing no Russian, he painstakingly transcribed in his notebook the names of the railway stations. (Some, he sagely observed, were repeated several times—no doubt this was to confuse German infiltrators who might be parachuted behind the lines.)
“You must have had a fascinating trip!” commented the Embassy interpreter. “You have passed through Hot Water, Keep Out, Snack Bar, No Smoking, and Women’s Toilet!”
To what extent can the average naval officer usefully engage in amateur intelligence activities?
Four decades ago, area evaluators in the miniscule (16 officers) Office of Naval Intelligence sat at cluttered desks inscribing in national monographs the bits and pieces of information drifting in from the 18 naval attaches we then had around the world. It would have been physically impossible to have coped with a voluminous intake.
The naval attaches were amateurs at intelligence. They were run-of-the-mill naval officers whose only formal encounter with the trade of gentleman spy would have been a couple of weeks in ONI browsing through the files before departure for their post abroad. With the exception of those officers who had completed the Japanese language course, very few were repeaters in the assignment or spoke any foreign language. Clandestine operations were taboo. Most of the material the attaches furnished ONI was on an exchange basis with the host navy ministry, or clipped out of local publications, or gossip picked up at cocktail parties. The attaches performed a useful collection function, but real scoops were rare.
In some countries, such as Turkey and the Soviet Union, the attaches were sealed off from the people and their movements restricted. In others, they were surrounded by professional liaison officers whose suavity and cleverness were such as sway the objectivity of any but the most astute attachés.
Even in the wartime Soviet Union, our officers were faced with a deep and inherent reluctance to furnish information, which if not vital, would have been at least highly useful in the joint war effort. This was once pointed out in a most spectacular way by our naval attaché, Captain Jack Harlan Duncan. In 1942, Winston Churchill flew to Moscow to break the sad news to Stalin that the Second Front had to be postponed a year—from 1943 to 1944. Stalin was furious. The fact that Winston showed up for the final banquet in his “siren suit,” a kind of baggy coverall, did nothing to improve the mood of General Stalin, who was in a marshal’s full dress uniform. During the course of the dinner, Stalin offered a toast, “to the intelligence officers, unsung, but vitally important!” He then launched himself into a long dissertation on a specific case, where he claimed wretched intelligence work had botched a vital operation—Gallipoli, in World War I. Churchill’s face turned a deep purple as Stalin continued to tear apart the plan that Churchill had masterminded almost 30 years before.
At Stalin’s concluding, Captain Duncan rose to his feet. “I would like to point out, Mr. Stalin,” said Duncan, “that I am an intelligence officer, but since I have been here I have been unable to accomplish anything in the way of getting information important to our joint war effort!”
The hush that fell was absolute. All eyes turned to Stalin.
Stalin rose, held up his glass and said enthusiastically while looking pointedly at Churchill, with whom he had been conferring since breakfast: “I congratulate you, Mr. Captain! That is the first really honest statement I have heard the entire day!” Then he walked around to the far end of the table where Duncan stood and clinked glasses with him. “/will be your intelligence officer!” said Stalin. “If in the future you find lack of cooperation, come to me!”
Needless to say, there was little change in the rate of information flow in the days and months that followed. But Duncan, not a professional attaché—just a quick-witted Irishman, was henceforth looked upon with greatly increased respect by his Soviet contacts, as the Man Who Had Stood Up To Stalin.
When World War II broke, ONI’s files were not only wholly inadequate to the task of supplying global war coverage; they contained nothing about our own territory which had been occupied by the Japanese.
For example, such was the paucity of information that when the plans were being written for the recapture of Guam, frantic searches were made in photograph albums of officers formerly stationed there, to find some impression of what might be the character of the beaches and the land. In 1942, the sole information available on several key atolls had been wrung from the dim memories of an elderly beachcomber and a retired missionary. As late as 1945, Okinawa, about to be invaded, was seriously believed to be swarming with a highly lethal species of serpent. This alarming and wholly false information most probably dated back to Commodore Matthew C. Perry’s mid-19th century sojourn on the island, when rum was a conspicuous item on the sailor’s daily ration.
It is an almost incredible fact that as late as the 1930s, the Commander in Chief of the U. S. Fleet had no billet for an intelligence officer on his staff.
The Navy budget for the ten years before 1933 averaged only 390 million annually, scarcely enough for pay, paint, and fuel oil, let alone such exotic luxuries as attaches and agents. Nor was the case for intelligence benefited when President Herbert Hoover’s Secretary of State Henry Stimson, horrified at discovering the United States to be engaged in cryptanalysis, closed the activity with the moralistic dictum that, “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail!”
For a thumbnail summary of our pre- World War II naval intelligence apparatus, let us simply say that ONI didn’t know, the Fleet didn’t care, and the High Command neither knew nor cared. The Navy’s interest lay elsewhere; 15 battleships steamed in line at exactly the right interval and distance, the correct shade of light brown haze issuing from their stacks, bright work gleaming. This was enough. Until Pearl Harbor.
My own amateur efforts at information gathering, around the world and through a full career, commenced at the U. S. Naval Academy, where at that time French and Spanish were the only languages taught. As a first classman, with more whim than prescience as to the shape of things to come, I bought a Russian grammar and commenced to study the language on my own. (The grammar was not easy to find; no Russian language texts were published in the United States until 1944.) Concurrently, I wrote to the chaplains of the French, Dutch, and Turkish naval academies requesting their help in finding me a pen pal. There was no answer from France or Turkey, but the highly enthusiastic Dutch reply came via official Dutch government channels only a notch or two below Queen Wilhelmina herself. The immediate net result for me was a sharp rebuke by the Commandant of Midshipmen for communicating informally with representatives of foreign governments. The ultimate and happier development was the establishment of a lively correspondence in fractured French with a Dutch midshipman who was to become a dear and lifelong friend of mine.
In 1934, assignment to the Russian language course in China brought me for the first time into direct association with the sponsor, ONI. Thus, as a member of the fraternity, so to speak, I became more and more widely acquainted with the relatively small group which rotated between normal duty afloat and intelligence duty ashore. It was the practice of some of these officers when on duty in ONI to maintain informal contacts with friends in the field, to augment the modest flow of information from foreign areas.
During my first summer of language study, in Tsingtao, the Russian family with whom I boarded made it clear that they entertained doubts that I was simply a student. On my preparing to shift to Manchuria for the autumn, “Popichka,” my landlord, who, over the daily vodka and herring, had become a fast friend, pressed me to visit his relatives in Harbin, where the population of some 50,000 was mostly emigre Russian with a sprinkling of Soviets. To insure my carrying through, Popichka gave me a large ham to deliver personally to his cousin.
In Harbin, the ham and I were warmly received, and I was taken to the family bosom. When the day came to return south, a ham was ready for me to transport to Tsingtao. “Tell Popichka I want to prove my hams are better than his!” my Harbin friend instructed. “And be sure to tell him that my ham weighs exactly three-and-a-half kilograms.”
In both directions the greasy hams had been a nuisance. I was soon to learn they had paid their way, and that keys sometimes come in strange forms.
“That ham I sent up with you” said Popichka, “was the go-ahead to accept you fully. I wouldn’t have dared to write such a thing via the Japanese controlled mail.” He hefted the ham. “And you say Cousin mentioned his ham weighed just three-and-a-half kilograms? The ham he sent me is his okay bn you and on the information he gave you. But you must divide all the figures by three-and- a-half. It was done this way in case you had been foolish enough to write anything down, and the Japanese had rolled you—or pushed a few burning matches under your toenails to improve your singing voice. The figures as they were given you were so far off that the Japanese would have considered you and your contacts quite harmless.”
Needless to say, ONI was pleased with the unsolicited windfall.
Near the place where I grew up there ran a railway line which was checked daily by a trackwalker who was always happy to have company on his rounds. In the many summer vacation hours we walked the track together, my friend passed on to me the practical points of his trade. Consequently, after riding the breadth of the Soviet Union via the trans- Siberian Railway in 1935, I was able to supply the U. S. military attache in Warsaw with a detailed account of the Soviets’ vital lifeline to the Far East—condition and character of ballast, cross ties, rails, switches, splices, signals, sidings—all the things from which a good estimate can be made of a railway’s capacity for war.
“We have had similar reports from other sources,” the attaché told me. “Now, I not only have a report I can depend on, but by comparing those other reports with yours, I can more accurately evaluate the reliability of those other sources in other matters.”
Officers returning to the United States from the Far East in the 1930s were allowed 30 days leave and 30 days travel time. By returning via trans-Siberian, one arrived in Europe in half the time it took the steamer via Suez. Thus, I had a full month to roam the continent before my ship left Le Havre for New York. I worked my leisurely way down through Prague, Vienna, Budapest and Athens, then via ship to Istanbul, Haifa, Rhodes, Cyprus, and Italy via the Corinth Canal. A U. S. vice consul in Venice joined me in renting a small Fiat and we drove over the Alps and through Switzerland to the French naval bases on the Bay of Biscay.
In Paris, the American Express Company handed me my steamship ticket to New York and a telegram from the Navy Department: “Previous orders to USS Dickerson cancelled. Proceed to Riga, Latvia, for further language duty.”
Warsaw was off the route to Riga, but the Military Attaché’s invitation to return had been so warm and his daughter so pretty that I accepted his suggestion to come back to Poland and visit the principal naval port of Gdynia.
“I don’t know anything about ships,” the Colonel said, “and besides, I am kept busy reporting on the doings of the Polish cavalry. Cavalry is as dead as Hannibal’s war elephants, but the War Department is still on horseback. I have to keep them posted on the latest treatment for spavin and any new developments in weapons to attack the manure pile.”
It was bad logic to have no U. S. naval attaché accredited to Poland. Poles liked Americans; they all had happy cousins in the United States. They had a small navy, but they kept a close watch on their hereditary enemies, the Germans and the Russians. They poked around the Baltic, recovered errant Nazi torpedoes and adrift Soviet mines. Furthermore, they had a navy that was a floating laboratory of heterogeneous ships—modern submarines and destroyers built in England and France. It must be remembered that in 1935, the French and British still considered the Americans to be country cousins not generally to be taken into full confidence on the latest developments in their navies. The Poles had no such scruples about discussing with an American drinking companion the merits and demerits of the various foreign products they found in their fleet.
Polish officers all spoke fluent Russian or French. I listened carefully as they described the new German acoustic torpedo that homed on propeller noise and on the Soviet airdropped mines, lowered gently by parachute. I am sorry to have to admit that the Navy Department viewed these reports with a skepticism which was not to be shaken until more painful proof was forthcoming. Nevertheless, the many confidential Baltic charts the Poles happily passed on to me were material evidence that small navies do not necessarily mean small sources of information.
There was no naval attaché accredited to the Baltic States, and for good reason. Latvia’s navy, two pocket-sized submarines, had no operable torpedoes and on the rare occasions when they went to sea, took the sensible precaution of staying on the surface. Estonia’s handful of small craft were relics of World War I. More pragmatic Lithuania had no warships at all.
Riga was a magnificent rumor factory on things Soviet, but otherwise the city was expensive and somewhat dull. I spent as much time as possible in gay Estonia or Finland and made a winter trip to Leningrad, where one of the world’s best naval museums is located. After five years out of the United States, I was ready to go home by the time the sun finally broke through the heavy Baltic spring overcast.
I was back in Europe almost immediately with the Summer Practice Squadron from the Naval Academy. A good example of the misleading possibilities of amateur intelligence soon presented itself: Midshipmen came back from side trips to Germany to report excitedly that the Nazi Air Force must be immense! They personally had seen thousands of pilots walking the streets. The Nazi eagle worn on the right breast of all military tunics had fooled the young reporters.
Striking for admiral by operating all week off the Virginia capes, with weekends in Norfolk, somehow soon commenced to be less appealing than I had imagined from afar. The Department was happy to accept a volunteer for a second Asiatic cruise. I dropped in on ONI for a farewell visit. “After you get out there,” a senior officer told me over a cup of coffee, “send me a personal letter from time to time. Don’t report through the system. By the time the information grinds through the Asiatic Fleet Staff and gets back here—if it ever does—it is cold turkey, two months old.”
Hong Kong bound, I entered Yokohama harbor on board the SS President Taft. We passed not far from the great Japanese naval base of Yokosuka. (It would have been sheer fantasy then to have seen myself commanding that same base 20 years later, but such was to be the case.) With high-powered binoculars one could see Japanese naval aircraft parachuting torpedoes from a height of about 1,000 feet. Chaser boats followed down the wakes to pick up the spent “fish.”
This will be a good opportunity to test Commander X’s theory on how much gets through Asiatic Fleet staff, I thought. My information was turned over to the flagship in Hong Kong two weeks later. True to Commander X’s prophecy, subsequent inquiry revealed that no report of high dropped torpedoes ever reached ONI. I would henceforth deal direct.
On reaching Shanghai in the Taft, we noted that one of Japan’s most modern cruisers lay moored between buoys in the Hwangpoo River. This was unusual. Japan rarely exposed her new ships to close scrutiny. We passed very close aboard. From the top deck of the Taft, I photographed the cruiser from stem to stern in 16-mm. color. Japanese crew members spotted me at work. Whistles blew and men ran this way and that, pulling canvas covers over equipment. The excitement on His Japanese Majesty’s Ship was such that I didn’t discount the possibility of their sending a party to confiscate the film.
The film was soon on its way to ONI. Two months later, a letter from ONI said in part: “The Director of Naval Intelligence desires to commend you for your interest and alertness. The pictures are of considerable value to this office.” My amateur standing had been established and my enthusiasm whetted.
Assigned to the South China Patrol gunboat USS Mindanao, I watched from her deck on an early October 1937 dawn the first this- is-no-drill air raid I had ever witnessed. Columns of black smoke poured up over the city. Air raid sirens continued their shrieking like the cries of wounded animals. The roar and concussion of bombs shook the little gunboat’s thin superstructure.
In a very short time, a half-dozen American correspondents, out of breath and wide-eyed, sampanned out to the Mindanao to file their stories. We were the only radio link to the outside. “Blood deepruns streetwise. Fighters lowswoop strafing civilians. Thousands die.” It was my first experience with journalese.
“Is this the same raid I’ve just been watching?” I inquired. “Why, those guys were up there 10,000 feet!” I said. “There were no fighters at all!”
“Come on Tolley, old boy! Get cracking!” said a correspondent. “If we don’t ladle out the gore, the Shanghai rewrite man will!”
The gist of their reports was that the Japanese were opening up a new phase of the South China warfare, engaging in wanton mass destruction and terror tactics. This was the American man-in-the-street’s (and our Navy Department’s) only source of information on a question of wide diplomatic and military significance.
Just what were the facts?
A day’s work inspecting via ricksha and on foot pinpointed all of the 70 or 80 bomb hits. Plotted on a transparent sheet placed over a map of Canton, the bomb pattern could be moved about to see if a logical set of targets could be covered. It soon became clear that almost certainly the Japanese had planned on hitting military objectives. In the early morning twilight, flying hundreds of miles from airfields on Taiwan, they had miscalculated some aspect of the data to be cranked into the bombsights. My report was in Commander X’s hands in a week, via the pilot of the newly established China Clipper flying boat. Acknowledgement was quick: MSG LT TOLLEY YOURS OF 5 OCT EXCELLENT.
A month later, the boom fell with a thud. “This is a very nice letter,” said the Skipper. “But can you tell me what it is all about?” There were butterflies in my stomach as I read that, “The Chief of Naval Operations desires to commend Lieutenant (jg) Kemp Tolley, USN, for his excellent report dated 5 October 1937. ...” The bold signature below was that of Admiral William D. Leahy himself. Over CinCAF Admiral Harry Yar- nell’s signature appeared a short endorsement that he was “ . . . pleased to note this evidence of excellent performance of duty.” The mild innuendo as to “what performance of duty” clearly reflected the annoyance of the obviously bypassed Fleet Intelligence Officer, whose staff number appeared in the fine print at the top as drafter. When the Skipper heard my explanation, his frown changed to a wide grin. “The hell with the Fleet Intelligence Officer! He’s too full of himself anyway!” said the Skipper. And that was the end of it; my letters continued to go to Commander X as before.
In the mid-Thirties, there was not the close military liaison which now exists between the Americans and the British. In Hong Kong, they were building additions to the fortifications in face of the growing Japanese threat. We were much interested, but found the British reluctant to allow us to have a look. Consequently, I borrowed a shipmate’s wife and dog for the afternoon, put on a proper sahib’s pith helmet and long stockings with my tropical shorts, walked up to the gates of Fort Stanley, signed the guest book with an impossible squiggle and walked in for a thorough casing of the place. It was as simple as brass could make it. MSG LT TOLLEY YOUR TARE 36 EXCELLENT soon came from Washington.
One of the favorite targets for Japanese bombers was a small aircraft factory assembling Curtiss Hawk pursuit planes for the Chinese Air Force. The plant was about 100 miles from Canton, at the confluence of two rivers which made locating it from the air quick and foolproof. It was a veritable laboratory for the study of Japanese bombing tactics, accuracy and effect against an undefended target. I spent a week plotting bomb hits, watching raids, recording altitudes and approach directions, collecting bomb fragments and photographing craters, and splatters on concrete and the chance victims. Only some years later did I learn accidentally that the material was considered highly useful. It was the first voluminous report on Japanese air bombing capabilities. I recall wrapping 50 pounds of bomb and fuse fragments in four-pound packages. That was the top limit on which the Navy Department would pay the postage. (It was fortunate for the American intelligence effort that Japanese bombs fragmented into such small pieces!)
In looking back, much of what has been set down here may strike one as the chance ramblings of a child’s game, or as a lament of the shortcomings in the common sense of those in high command. Yet from those small beginnings of 40 years ago—from the amateur doings of less than a couple of hundred people all told—has sprung the vast U. S. intelligence apparatus of today, with an annual budget many times greater than the total annual defense budget of 1930.
In 1930, the potentially powerful tool of Intelligence lay neglected. Today, Intelligence is so big that its omniscience is too casually taken for granted. But mere bigness is no greater guarantee of security than was the flimsy intelligence apparatus of 1930. Indeed, this very bigness, with its danger of detachment, can engender a false sense of security. The disasters which befell our armed forces in the early days of World War II were greatly magnified by lack of co-operation and joint effort by the Army and Navy. Any tendency toward less than total, cooperative understanding between Intelligence and the Armed Forces which are its prime customers, can, in any future conflict, be equally costly.1
The officers of the Fleet, the Army and the Air Force should be the masters of their own Intelligence—not the reverse. The potentialities here are enhanced in that Intelligence is no longer a professional dead end. In the past seven years, three intelligence specialists, SK(l), have been selected for flag rank. One, Rufus Taylor, is now a three-star admiral, the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency,
The computers hold a wealth of knowledge, ready to be spewed forth at the push of a button. But Intelligence, like the sea itself, is never static; the store of Intelligence must constantly be checked and amplified. Those small strands that each individual can train himself to find on the high seas and in the ports of the world, when woven all together, can help make a strong rope.
Let us tear a page from the book of that super-pragmatist, Joseph Stalin. During the war, he told a group of visiting Allied leaders that “The scientists sometimes think they are the masters and we are the servants. We must tell the scientists what we want and they must give it to us!” The U. S. Armed Forces, on whom the national safety ultimately depends, must not only tell Intelligence what they want, but must help Intelligence get it.
Above all, Intelligence should never become an ivory tower, shrouded in clouds of mystery and isolation. It must be a confidence-inspiring machine of great strength, built with common effort and common understanding, totally fulfilling its part in the axiom that, “Out of Knowledge Comes Power!”
1. See Kemp Tolley, “Divided We Fell,” U. S. Naval Institute Proceedings, October 1966, pp. 36-51.