Old-Fashioned Intelligence Practices Meet Modern Warfare in China
“We, the unwilling, led by the unknowing, are doing the impossible for the ungrateful. We have done so much for so long with so little, we are now qualified to do anything with nothing.” — Verses found in the official files of a U.S. military intelligence officer, undated file circa World War II.1
Although clearly intended as a joke, the verse quoted above could have described the work of far too many U.S. intelligence officials during World War II. Between 1940 and 1950, officials in America’s military and diplomatic organizations tasked with intelligence duties personally experienced the brunt of the growing pains as U.S. intelligence capabilities expanded. Today several important components comprise the so-called U.S. intelligence community: a variety of government agencies focused on national security, several of which are largely independent from the budgetary concerns of the military or civilian executive branch departments and concentrated solely on intelligence; a system of norms and regulations that govern interagency coordination and communication; and a cadre of expert personnel. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941, none of these components were operational in their present form. U.S. policymakers tasked with finding ways to cooperate with China in the fight against the Japanese experienced the shortcomings of the U.S. national security regime
particularly intensely.
1 From the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library, Papers of Forrest McCluney, Box 8: Printed Materials, Folder 7.
The folder holding the poem is labeled “Army Chair Force song,” applying a euphemistic joke term for the U.S. officials who served as intelligence officers for the Army Air Force during World War II.
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As policymakers at the highest levels of the American government attempted to negotiate a division of labor and appropriate roles and functions for intelligence officers in the early 1940s, they frequently made choices that instigated unproductive competition or duplication between offices and personnel and sidelined the expertise of officials who had been posted in China for decades. The decentralized structure of the U.S. national security bureaucracy limited
opportunities for the community of Americans stationed in China to offer objective advice as Washington DC-based policymakers created agreements with the Chinese during and after World War II, including some agreements that complicated operations in support of U.S. interests in China.2 As this and later chapters together will demonstrate, the lack of sufficient infrastructure for collecting and internalizing foreign intelligence information had significant implications for the ability of American leaders to craft U.S. foreign policy toward China in the 1940s. The inability for top policymakers to receive and absorb timely and objective intelligence information about China’s domestic politics affected U.S. strategic decisions about Asia,
potentially prolonging unproductive policies.
Well before the Pearl Harbor attack, the need for intelligence on China was particularly dire as U.S. policy in East Asia shifted over the 1930s from an isolationist policy to financial and material support for China through the Lend-Lease program and finally to actual military aid by 1941. The entire policy shift was orchestrated by top U.S. policymakers who had little first-hand knowledge of Chinese politics and who were relying on what advice they could glean from a small, insular cadre of American experts who had spent years in China. As of 1941, few
2 For example, see the detailed explanation of the process by which U.S. officials negotiated a treaty for intelligence
operations in China in the early 1940s in Maochun Yu, OSS in China: Prelude to Cold War (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1996), 77-170.
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normalized communication channels existed between the principals and the mid-level bureaucrats responsible for monitoring developments in China that affected U.S. interests.
Lack of centralized U.S. intelligence prior to the Second World War
Prior to the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the official U.S. entrance into World War II, the U.S. government had no independent agency dedicated to the collection and dissemination of strategic foreign intelligence, and many policymakers had opposed the creation of one. As the Japanese occupation of China and the spread of European fascism challenged U.S. foreign policy decision makers throughout the late 1930s, American intelligence collection and analysis were performed by various agencies within the U.S. executive branch, namely the State and War Departments, the Army, and the Navy.3 The United States also relied heavily on intelligence shared by the British, who had developed a modern national intelligence capability. U.S. leaders had been reluctant to foster American intelligence capabilities due to a long history of concern that support for “shadow warfare,” as strategic foreign intelligence was often called, would present a conflict of interest with liberal values and protections of civil liberties. The U.S. government in the 1930s lacked both any close counterpart to its current intelligence community and a discrete legal framework providing oversight and institutional boundaries.
Within the dozen government agencies that had responsibility or need for foreign intelligence, offices, branches, or in some cases, individuals, were tasked with the collection of
3 The best summaries of U.S. intelligence practices prior to World War II appear in studies seeking to explain how
World War II forced changes on the process, and particularly in studies of the creation of the OSS. The key studies on this topic include Bradley F. Smith, The Shadow Warriors: O.S.S. and the Origins of the C.I.A. (New York: Basic Books, 1983) and R. Harris Smith, OSS: The Secret History of America’s First Central Intelligence Agency (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1972). Both historians based these respective studies on some of the first documents about the creation of the OSS and CIA to be declassified and they remain the most important baseline explanations of these events that offer explanations of the systems OSS replaced. Studies that describe the epic debates about national security bureaucracy that occurred in the 1940s also illuminate the pre-war U.S.
intelligence regime (or lack thereof). For instance, see Jeffrey Dowart, Eberstadt and Forrestal: A National Security Partnership, 1909-1949 (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 1991).
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information in the field and its dissemination within the government ranks, typically as one duty among their broader job descriptions. For example, the State Department’s diplomats posted to embassies and consulates throughout the world would compose reports based on local contacts they met and news they overheard. They cabled reports back to the department headquarters. Senior State Department officials occasionally distilled important reports and shared them with the White House. Similarly, the Army, Navy, and War Department would dispatch military attachés to help staff U.S. embassies and consulates, making contact with local counterparts, monitoring situations that could affect the security of U.S. interests abroad, and composing reports on their observations for colleagues and superiors at their respective headquarters. The Army and Navy both maintained branches focused on intelligence, in the form of the Military Intelligence Division (MID) or G-2 and the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), respectively. These branches were focused on the type of intelligence the Army and Navy needed most, which tended to be tactical and operational intelligence rather than strategic intelligence.4 Peripheral to its main criminal justice responsibilities, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) maintained a branch responsible for domestic intelligence.
The role of U.S. military attachés in intelligence collection in 1930s China
Understanding the role and situation of military attachés in China in the 1930s is
particularly important for understanding the history of U.S. intelligence collection in China in the 1940s, so much of which occurred at the direction of the Army’s G-2 and the Navy’s ONI or by
4 Tactical and operational intelligence focuses on issues important to the successful use of military force including
intelligence regarding geography, weather conditions, appropriate military targets, and the strength and capabilities of opponents. Strategic intelligence typically refers to non-public foreign information that influences geopolitics and foreign policy, such as leadership intentions, political stability, economic affairs, and social issues within a foreign country. For current basic definitions of foreign intelligence, Jeffrey T. Richelson, The U.S. Intelligence Community, 6th Edition, (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2012), 1-14.
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personnel who had formerly been employed by those offices prior to being transferred or loaned to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II. The attaché’s duties and
functions changed surprisingly little over the course of the twentieth century. By definition, a military attaché is a military officer posted abroad and based in the embassy of his or her sponsoring country to serve as an overt intelligence officer, making contact with local counterparts, tracking intentions and resources of the host country and informing his or her sponsoring government about information learned that could have strategic significance. The attaché typically relies on all available sources, including reports and gossip from contacts in the host country, observations of host country events and exercises, review of host country mass media, and any other relevant information that can be collected. In the 1930s, U.S. attachés in China reported information through Army, Navy, and War Department channels via the
communications systems available at the U.S. Embassy (i.e., mostly via diplomatic mail pouch physically transported by official couriers).
Consistent with its inward-focused foreign policy and general lack of interest in
comprehensive foreign intelligence collection, the U.S. government did not send its first attachés abroad until 1894, to Japan and Mexico, respectively.5 The practice slowly expanded, and by the beginning of World War I, 23 army and 8 naval attachés were posted to U.S. embassies around the world—a significant increase by percentage but still a small global footprint. In the 1920s and 1930s, the attaché position tended to be held by officers of Lieutenant Colonel or Colonel rank. The position lacked prestige and rarely led to promotions, particularly for those who served in posts beyond Europe. According to historian John Hart, who recorded the memoirs of the first
5 For further on the traditional role of the U.S. military attaché and the history of the position, see Alfred Vagts, The
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commanding officer of the U.S. Observer Mission to Yan’an, Colonel David D. Barrett, prior to World War II, serving as an attaché “was commonly viewed as an escape from the army, and many in the army believed people to be chosen for it based on their good looks and social graces.”6 In the first few decades of the twentieth century, Asian posts were among the few that
did not require applicants to be independently wealthy because the cost of living was sufficiently low that officers could live on their salaries.7
Deficiencies in intelligence data and procedures become apparent
Although U.S. diplomats and attachés were reporting non-public information about foreign affairs to their sponsoring agencies within the executive branch that could be used for strategic planning, few regularized direct channels existed to convey the information to the White House or other relevant principals or agencies. Beyond the conversations that occurred at the White House, such as in cabinet meetings or informal meetings convened by the President, his aides, or his top officials, norms for communication between U.S. government agencies on matters of strategic intelligence and national security were often highly personalized (depending on the leadership at the time), malleable, and at times either caustic or nonexistent. Rather than collaborating on intelligence matters, the government agencies who were performing ad hoc intelligence-gathering duties tended to see each other as competition. Although U.S. foreign policy, defense, and military officials were ostensibly working toward the same goal of
protecting American domestic and foreign interests, they also operated out of a sense of loyalty
6 John N. Hart, The Making of an Army “Old China Hand”: A Memoir of Colonel David D. Barrett (Berkeley, CA:
University of California, Berkeley Institute of East Asian Studies, Center for China Studies, 1985), 4.
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to and pride in their own agencies and offices that was reinforced by the eternal competition for budgetary resources that exists within all bureaucratic governments.8
Although developing a collaborative modern national intelligence regime had not been a priority for top U.S. officials in the early twentieth century, executive branch departments and the military branches had recognized the value of developing personnel with the expertise required to understand foreign affairs. Relatively few American officials in the 1930s focused full-time on the collection, processing, or analysis of strategic foreign intelligence, but many officials had developed extensive skills in these areas as the world changed in the early decades of the twentieth century. For example, the second chapter of this study describes the network of U.S. officials who served in China in the 1920s and 1930s in the military and diplomatic
positions. Although they represented the U.S. government’s policies and cultural values of the time, they also developed considerable expertise in Chinese language, culture, and politics. Many of them had also lived in China as children of missionary parents. Similar small networks of American experts also existed in other parts of the non-Western world, such as the Middle East and Latin America.9
By the late 1930s and early 1940s, the changing global security environment had convinced some U.S. policymakers of the necessity to develop a more robust capacity for the collection and dissemination of strategic foreign intelligence, potentially including the creation of a new a strategic intelligence organization, but the politics and bureaucratic infighting that creating the new systems entailed frequently thwarted efforts to include expertise in field
8 Conflicts between the Army and Navy were particularly legendary. For further details, see Jeffrey Dowart,
Eberstadt and Forrestal.
9 For a detailed study of American officials’ interest in and expertise on the Middle East prior to World War II, see
“Part I: Pre-game, 1916-1947” in Hugh Wilford, America’s Great Game: The CIA’s Secret Arabists and the Shaping of the Modern Middle East (New York, Basic Books, 2013).
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operations and intelligence that already existed in the burgeoning U.S. intelligence community. Meanwhile, the quickly changing global security landscape required new participation from top U.S. leaders in strategic decisions about unfamiliar far-flung regions where U.S. interests were expanding, such as the Middle East and East Asia. The United States thus faced strategic
problems related to intelligence gaps worldwide. World War II, and the Pearl Harbor bombing in particular, highlighted the inadequacy and inefficiency of the U.S. intelligence practices of the 1930s, in which no officials pursued intelligence as a full-time job and agencies and
organizations routinely failed to communicate necessary intelligence information to each other in a timely manner (if they communicated at all).10
The challenge of Roosevelt’s personalized leadership style
Compounding the problem of systemic intelligence gaps facing the United States on the brink of World War II, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s leadership style and highly personalized approach to foreign affairs did not facilitate the creation of a cooperative and symbiotic U.S. intelligence bureaucracy. In the absence of a designated intelligence service and distrustful of status quo executive branch organizations, particularly the State Department, Roosevelt tended to bypass advice from within his bureaucracy and rely instead on a few key advisors and personal contacts. He regularly appointed such individuals to serve as his personal representatives or liaisons, bypassing the executive branch organizational protocols.11 This type
10 William R. Corson wrote one of the most effective and detailed analyses of Pearl Harbor as an example of an
early U.S. intelligence gap that led to a significant and dramatic intelligence failure. See William R. Corson, The Armies of Ignorance: The Rise of the American Intelligence Empire (New York: The Dial Press, 1977), 150-165.
11 The characteristics of Roosevelt’s leadership style are well known and well studied. Joseph E. Persico’s
Roosevelt’s Secret War (New York: Random House, 2001) is an excellent detailed study of the effects of
Roosevelt’s leadership on U.S. intelligence practices during his presidency. Christopher Andrew covers some of the same ground more succinctly in his chapter on Roosevelt in his book, For the President’s Eyes Only: Secret Intelligence and the American Presidency from Washington to Bush (New York: HarperCollins, 1995). For
discussion of Roosevelt’s leadership style as it pertained to China, see Michael Schaller, The U.S. Crusade in China, 1938-1945 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), 99, and Robert Messer, “Roosevelt, Truman, and China:
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of personalized approach to leadership has strengths and weaknesses. The main strengths are often speed and decisiveness in statecraft—two characteristics that were associated with FDR, to be sure. However, the value placed on high-profile outsiders to perform tasks for which those within government bureaucracies have been developing expertise through years of work can also be demoralizing for the workforce. Moreover, this leadership style can encourage excessive competition within the bureaucracy for the President’s attention, and because interagency communication is not necessarily valued under this type of leadership, duplication of efforts is common.
These drawbacks can have significant negative effects on intelligence work because the leader may not be receiving all the relevant information, and other decision makers who have a stake in statecraft may not be aware of all the information that the top leader knows. Bradley F. Smith cited this phenomenon as one reason FDR particularly enjoyed using emissaries.
According to Smith, “In both domestic and foreign affairs, Roosevelt delighted in skirting regular channels and establishing himself as the only person who had all the information on a given issue.”12 Biographers and historians have long recognized a tendency toward a
personalized approach to leadership in FDR’s actions and have noted its downsides. According to E. J. Kahn, Jr. writing in the 1970s about American bureaucrats in China in the 1940s, Roosevelt’s intention in sending his special emissaries to deal with difficult foreign affairs situations that emerged was “presumably to cut through red tape” but the ersatz ambassadors typically “ended up ensnarling all existing lines of communication.”13
An Overview,” in Harry Harding and Yuan Ming, eds. Sino-American Relations, 1945-1955: A Joint Reassessment of a Critical Decade (Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 1989), 64-66.
12 Bradley Smith, The Shadow Warriors, 27.
13 E.J. Kahn, Jr., The China Hands: America’s Foreign Service Officers and What Befell Them (New York: Viking
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One notable special emissary dispatched by FDR who assumed an important role in the