Code Warriors

by Stephen Budiansky

  More troubling, in the view of Admiral Richard S. Edwards, the vice chief of naval operations, was what all of this implied for the postwar order. “I do not think we should ‘gang up’ with one ally against another ally,” he advised:

  In the troubled times that lie ahead we shall have to side with one or another of our friends as differences of interest arise, but for the sake of the peace of the world we should do so openly and frankly. If we secretly join the British in this project, the secret is virtually certain to leak out in the course of time with results disastrous for our relations with USSR. The possible gain is not worth the probable cost.45

  But the Army held firm to its view that it would be equally foolish simply to pull the plug on so fruitful a collaboration, and in the end what tipped the balance in the Navy was a pessimistic assessment that, based on all past experience of American peacetime parsimony and idealism, budgets were sure to be slashed and intelligence operations reined in, while the more cynical and worldly-wise British would carry on as usual; however far ahead the United States might now be in knowledge and ability, the British were going to forge ahead once again and the United States would need to stick with them not to be left in the dust.

  On June 2 the British representative broached the question of working together on the Russian problem, and three days later Admiral King and the Army chief of staff, General George C. Marshall, approved, but with the stipulation that the exchange of information remain informal, that a statement drawn up by the Army-Navy Communications Intelligence Board outlining the agreed-upon terms “be shown but not given” to the British representative, and that their own memorandum to the board giving the go-ahead be burned immediately upon reading.46

  Although the British had a long history of success in attacking Soviet cipher systems and were well positioned around the world to intercept Russian communications, GC&CS had not only stopped all of its active work on Soviet military and diplomatic signals upon the Soviet Union’s entry into the war in June 1941 but had also subsequently discarded “a room full” of accumulated Russian one-time-pad traffic that it considered unsolvable. “We weren’t sorting it, couldn’t do anything so we just threw the lot away,” recalled Brigadier John Tiltman, a legendary GC&CS cryptanalyst who had worked on Russian codes in India in the 1920s and later made the crucial break in the Nazi teleprinter cipher machine. When Kim Philby’s spying for the USSR became known in the 1950s, Tiltman briefly came under suspicion that he had destroyed the Soviet material to cover for Philby, and he was interrogated by MI5, the British counterintelligence service; but there was certainly nothing to that idea. Tiltman, who would later serve as the British liaison to the National Security Agency, would forever regret the missed chance to expose the Soviets’ most damaging mole inside British intelligence.47

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  Whether America had the money or the stomach for conducting any foreign espionage in peacetime was the more salient question than what form its intelligence cooperation with the British might take. It was a deep-seated American belief, as the historian Eric F. Goldman wryly put it, “that foreign policy was something you had, like measles, and got over with as quickly as possible.” The total global war that had wrested the United States from its splendid isolation had done little to alter the American feeling that war was something aberrant and exceptional, that once it was over the best thing for the country was to get back to “normal” as quickly as possible, which meant leaving the world once again to its own troubles.

  In the months following the Japanese surrender, thousands of GIs dissatisfied with the pace of demobilization staged rowdy mass protests—some were described by local commanders as “near mutiny”—in Paris, Manila, Guam, Yokohama, Honolulu, Vienna, and Frankfurt, chanting, “We want to go home!” A colonel with the American occupation force in Japan dismissed the riots as the work of “a lot of Communists and hotheads,” but the slogan caught on like wildfire and newspaper columnists noted that it reflected the widespread feeling of American troops, who were singularly unimpressed by “pleas about our duties in the world at large” or America’s newly acquired “international commitments.”48

  Yet even the decidedly internationalist-minded men who had been working since literally the moment the war started to draw a plan for the postwar world, those whose whole premise was that America’s past isolationism had contributed to the calamity that had engulfed Europe and Asia in six years of horrific bloodshed, believed that peace this time would be a real peace: new international institutions would guarantee a long era of stability and the growth of global democracy that would make the aggressive realpolitik and crude balance-of-power politics that had governed the relations between states in the previous intervals between wars no longer necessary.

  “We have profited by our past mistakes,” Franklin D. Roosevelt assured the American people in 1942. “This time we shall know how to make full use of victory.” There could be no return to America’s prewar isolationism, but FDR and his aides had no notion of a future dominated by perpetual American interventionism or open-ended military commitments. Rather, peace as most Americans understood and expected it could be safeguarded at home precisely by extending America’s most deeply held principles to the world at large: openness, democracy, the rule of law, economic justice. The collective security system of the new United Nations and the promotion of self-determination would remove the major causes of war; new international monetary institutions would stabilize the world’s economies to lift peoples out of poverty and prevent a repetition of the global depression that Hitler had ridden so effectively on his demagogic path to power.49

  Even the most patriotic supporters of the war would have been forced to acknowledge that America’s four years of total mobilization had deeply compromised many of those American principles. Conscription, censorship, rationing, wage and price controls, regimentation of industry, and other government intrusions into daily life were seen as justifiable wartime emergency measures but had no place in most Americans’ conception of a decent place to live in the long run. When word leaked in February 1945 of a proposal that had been drawn up by William J. Donovan to transform his wartime OSS into a single permanent, civilian-run peacetime spy agency, it triggered outraged denunciations in Congress and the press—led by the anti-interventionist, anti–New Deal, anti-FDR, anti-UN Chicago Tribune—about an “American gestapo,” and the plan’s hasty withdrawal from consideration by the Joint Chiefs of Staff.50

  The leak had probably come from the Joint Chiefs themselves; like the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover, the military services loathed Donovan and wanted to stake their own claim to controlling any postwar foreign intelligence operations. But they had a point. Shortly before his death, Roosevelt asked his military aide, Colonel Richard Park Jr., to conduct an informal investigation of the OSS’s activities, and Park’s findings, passed on to the new president, confirmed many of the worst fears of Donovan’s detractors. Park was scathing about the OSS’s recklessness, amateurism, sloppy security, and lavish expenditures with little to show for it. Donovan’s organization was “hopelessly compromised” and completely under the thumb of the British intelligence service; it had carried out many “badly conceived” and unauthorized operations that had resulted in grave embarrassment to the State Department and “interference with other secret intelligence agencies of this government.” The latter was a pointed reference to a clumsy OSS breakin of the Japanese embassy in Lisbon in 1943 that had infuriated the U.S. Army codebreakers: for a while it looked like the Japanese might react by changing all of their diplomatic code systems, undoing Arlington Hall’s crowning successes in breaking Purple and the Japanese military attaché codes.

  The credulity that OSS officers had shown in paying dubious sources for even more dubious information almost defied belief. For over a year the OSS station in Rome, including its counterintelligence chief, James Jesus Angleton, had staunchly defended one of its prized agents, a shadowy character who professed to have inside political i
nformation from the Vatican; even as his reports became more and more ludicrous (at one point he reported a secret plan to construct an airfield within the Vatican garden), the OSS passed them on to Washington, firmly vouching for their reliability. In fact, the agent had simply made everything up. Park concluded that “if the OSS is permitted to continue with its present organization, it may do further serious harm to the citizens, business interests, and national interests of the United States.” Within weeks after V-J Day, one of the first acts of a White House committee charged with liquidation of wartime agencies was to abolish the OSS and transfer to the State Department the one part of the organization that Park thought worth saving, its Research and Analysis Section, which had done “an outstanding job.”51

  And in the summer of 1945 the idea that the United States might be swiftly plunged into a new global confrontation even requiring the cloak-and-dagger skills of an outfit like the OSS seemed remote, even to American foreign policy experts who thoroughly knew the Soviet Union and who had been growing increasingly concerned by Stalin’s swift and brutal moves to eliminate democratic opposition in Poland, Romania, and other Eastern European territories under Soviet military occupation. It would have seemed fantastic to most ordinary Americans, for whom the Russians were still gallant military allies who had borne the bloody brunt of the fight to defeat Nazism, and for whom the whole justification for this epic struggle that had sent millions of American boys into battle far from home was to bring about a safer world free from the terrors that had caused such suffering and turmoil. Harry S. Truman was a straightforward man, not a naturally eloquent one, but the brief speech he delivered upon arriving in Berlin in July 1945 for the last meeting of the wartime allies movingly expressed the faith of Americans that this time the terrible sacrifices of war would not be in vain:

  We are here today to raise the flag of victory over the capital of our greatest adversary….We are raising it in the name of the people of the United States, who are looking forward to a better world, a peaceful world, a world in which all the people will have an opportunity to enjoy the good things of life, and not just a few at the top.

  Let us not forget that we are fighting for peace, and for the welfare of mankind. We are not fighting for conquest. There is not one piece of territory or one thing of a monetary nature that we want out of this war.

  We want peace and prosperity for the world as a whole….If we can put this tremendous machine of ours, which has made victory possible, to work for peace, we can look forward to the greatest age in the history of mankind.52

  Truman had been thrown into the presidency with no foreign policy experience—Roosevelt had literally never spoken to him about the war or foreign affairs or his plans for the postwar world—but he was a quick study and had spent night after night in the secure Map Room on the ground floor of the White House reading files of correspondence between Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin, long cables from the American ambassador in Moscow, Averell Harriman, intelligence assessments of Soviet actions in Poland, enough to leave little doubt that the Soviets’ true intentions and interests in Eastern Europe had little in common with America’s, or with the promises Stalin had made for free elections. Truman accordingly needed little convincing when Harriman, hastening back from Moscow to confer with the new president, urged a firm line with the Soviets based on a tough and realistic assessment that they simply could not be trusted. But Harriman still believed that the USSR, devastated by a war that had left twenty-seven million of its citizens dead and its economy in ruins, needed the United States and would not risk an outright break in relations, and that enough give-and-take was possible to keep the alliance intact. Truman replied that he understood that “100 percent cooperation” from the Soviets was not possible, but would be happy with 85 percent.53

  Truman was also a thorough pragmatist who believed in swift decision making and delegating authority. On August 22, 1945, one week after the Japanese surrender, the Joint Chiefs drafted a letter for the secretaries of war and navy to forward to the president urging in the strongest possible terms that the wartime communication intelligence programs—which, they pointed out, had been vital to the defeat of the U-boats, the discovery and countering of German secret weapons, and detailed foreknowledge of Japanese troop movements and plans—be continued, with the same absolute level of secrecy that applied to atomic weapons.54 Truman responded with a one-sentence order on August 28: there was to be no public release (“except with the special approval of the President in each case”) of “information regarding the past or present status, technique or procedures, degree of success attained, or any specific results of any cryptanalytic unit acting under the authority of the U.S. Government or any Department thereof.” Two weeks later he equally swiftly approved a proposal from Marshall and King that “in view of the disturbed condition of the world,” the “present collaboration” with the British GC&CS be continued “by formal agreement.” Truman left it to the secretaries of state, war, and navy to determine whenever “the best interests of the United States” required the arrangement to be extended or discontinued.55

  Two arguments had carried the day in Truman’s mind. One, as Captain Wenger presciently observed in a thoughtful memorandum he prepared on the future of signals intelligence, was that the advent of atomic weapons meant that peacetime intelligence was no longer merely a source of long-term strategic assessments of potential enemies and their military and political developments, but the only protection against an annihilating surprise attack that could come at any time, without any other warning. The example of World War II repeatedly proved that “effective intelligence…means, in a large measure, communications intelligence.” Even in a world of collective security arrangements and international law, there was ample recent proof, too, that inside information gleaned from deciphering the diplomatic cables of allies and foes alike conferred a priceless advantage that it was hard to give up. Secretary of State James F. Byrnes had sent a worried memorandum to the secretary of war immediately following V-J Day seeking assurance that the Army’s codebreakers would continue to supply his department with “the product of its cryptanalytic activities in the diplomatic field,” whose value, Byrnes said, “will be equally great, if not greater, as we face postwar problems.” One of its most notable recent contributions “in the diplomatic field,” as Byrnes and Truman surely were aware, was the precise details of the advance negotiating positions of the fifty nations attending the conference that met in San Francisco in April 1945 to draft the UN Charter. Especially valuable were cables revealing the French delegation’s efforts to secure the support of smaller countries, which allowed the United States to skillfully outmaneuver France’s attempt to rally opposition to the U.S. insistence that the major powers hold a veto in the Security Council.56

  The other consideration that made Truman’s decision to approve the secret continuation of the Army’s and Navy’s “special intelligence” activities an easy one was the very fact of its secrecy. All of the experts repeatedly emphasized the grave danger that might be done were any hint of the work to leak out; that secrecy in turn meant that there was simply no need to justify it to the American public or Congress, or to risk the kind of newspaper debates in which the plans for a postwar OSS had become embroiled. That cut two ways, however. As NSA would find time and again, it was a little late to start trying to secure public support only after a scandal had broken that brought its activities to notice, usually in the most unfavorable light.

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  Even with support from the top, there were powerful forces of bureaucratic inertia, plus some inexorable facts about the difficulty of trying to re-create the wartime successes of cryptanalysis in peacetime, that were threatening to unravel the whole enterprise through the fall of 1945. Upon receiving Admiral King’s instructions in May to increase attention to the Russian problem, Op-20-G had ordered a huge increase in personnel assigned to the section, from 106 to 743, but throughout the fall the numbers kept going the other w
ay after peaking at a little under 200. The Navy codebreakers were fighting both the tide of demobilization of officers and enlisted men eager to get out of the service and the basic lack of career opportunities for those who stayed in: specializing in communications intelligence was never the way to get ahead in the U.S. Navy.

  “The place is beginning to look like a deserted barn,” Wenger glumly observed at the end of the year. At Arlington Hall, where a majority of the workforce was civilian, the same thing was happening; everyone who had been added to the Russian section in the spring, briefly swelling the staff to 91, promptly left after V-J Day. “This falling off can be traced to their feeling of insecurity in the face of a dim and tentative personnel policy on the part of higher authority,” Rowlett acerbically noted in his annual report on the General Cryptanalytic Branch that fall.57

  Yet a huge amount of effort was being expended on trivial targets: that was where bureaucratic inertia came in with a vengeance. In the absence of important intelligence results, the Army and Navy codebreakers just kept filling their reports with unimportant ones. The “Magic Daily Summary” that went to top officials in the State Department and White House, which had once brimmed with decrypts of high-level Japanese and German messages, now devoted page after page to desultory scraps about the future of French schools in Syria, the impending marriage of the Belgian regent, and the Vatican’s views on upcoming elections in Colombia. “As a matter of fact, we have been getting disappointingly little of real value from C.I. [communications intelligence] since V-J day,” Rear Admiral Thomas B. Inglis, the head of naval intelligence, complained in January 1946. Arlington Hall was reading the diplomatic codes of forty-five governments, including Saudi Arabia, Liberia, Luxembourg, Denmark, Ireland, and Panama, but though it was now intercepting more than fifty-five hundred Russian messages a month it had nothing yet worth reporting from that effort.58