Officer and Gentleman: Steering Through Naval Intelligence

By Jeffrey Hart | Friday, October 31, 2008

The North Korean army smashed across the thirty-eighth parallel on June 25, 1950. I had just finished my junior year at Columbia. By the time I graduated in June 1952, MacArthur had carried out his brilliant landing at Inchon, the seaport for the South Korean capital at Seoul, and then had cut off and largely destroyed the North Korean army. But his plunge northward toward the Chinese border had brought China into the war, disastrously for MacArthur’s army.

It became clear that I would become subject to the draft before graduating from Columbia in 1952. Mark Flannigan, president of Phi Kappa Psi, was planning to enlist in the Navy and suggested I look into that. It seemed a good idea so I decided to visit the New York headquarters downtown near Wall Street, intending to ask questions, maybe pick up some literature. Things moved quickly, to put it mildly. Almost immediately I found myself in my underwear, standing in line, taking a physical examination. Then, still in my underwear, I was taking some sort of IQ test.

Allowed time to dress—while the IQ test wasgraded—I found myself in another line passing between some desks. It turned out that my test scores had been high enough to qualify me for naval aviation or naval intelligence. A student I had known at Dartmouth had enlisted in the Army Air Corps and, crashing his jet trainer in Florida, had burned out an acre of swampland.

Not surprisingly, I chose naval intelligence. But that meant regular Officer Candidate Training at Newport, Rhode Island, along with the regular candidates for commissions as line officers. I would have a line officer designator of 1105 until my intelligence designator (1635) came through while I was at Newport OCS. With a 1635 designator, I would be assigned to Naval Intelligence School at the naval base in Anacostia, Maryland.

Things had progressed so quickly since I had gone to that navy office building to ask questions and pick up literature that it hardly seemed possible that I had buttoned myself into about four years in the Navy, a three year enlistment plus time at OCS and at Naval Intelligence School. So it was then, in January 1953, that I found myself on a chartered Greyhound Bus full of other OCS enlistees headed with false bravado for the Navy base in Newport, Rhode Island.

Learning Your Manners

Upon arrival at the OCS section of the Newport naval base, we were given assorted shoes and issued enlisted men’s sailor suits, bell-bottom pants, and blouses with a bib in the back. Newport is frigid in the winter, so we were issued pea-jackets. When we graduated in the spring, we would wear officers’ summer whites.

I found myself in K (“King”) company. We were assigned to double deck wooden barracks, and two-man rooms with two desks for study and double-decker beds. My roommate had graduated from Williams, but most of the others had engineering backgrounds from such places as MIT. This was important for the Navy since the Navy consists in large part of millions of tons of steel that must be moved, sometimes at high speeds.

Lt. Cmdr. Husted, in charge of K Company, had a very short blonde crew cut that made his head look like a bowling ball. Sitting behind his desk in the Company office, he regarded us with sovereign contempt. He had played football at the Naval Academy and had a ribbon on his chest indicating a very distinguished Navy medal. As I understood it, he had won it for an extraordinary feat as a Navy SEAL in Korea.

Intelligence had determined that senior North Korean and Chinese officers were to meet in a former one-room schoolhouse in the near future. Unfortunately for them, the schoolhouse was near a river. Intelligence understood that this being winter, the school house would probably have a wood stove. So it prepared high explosives that looked like logs. With the “logs” packed in a knapsack and wearing a wetsuit, Husted swam up the river, found the schoolhouse and the stove, and left the logs in it. The officers must have been pleased by such thoughtfulness. Then the schoolhouse evaporated.

The Navy taught you how to walk, talk, and present yourself to others while on Navy business. Even if you were going down the company street to drop a letter in the mailbox you were supposed to walk purposefully. “Out for a stroll, sailor? Five demerits.”

Fifty demerits flunked you out of OCS and deposited you in enlisted men’s training at Bainbridge, Maryland: sailor suits forever.

Since we were training as officers, we were required to speak with authority: stand erect, shoulders back, look the other man in the eyes and speak in clear declarative sentences. Ordinarily, on Navy business, you are cordial but not friendly. And the Navy is clean, probably because the confined life aboard a ship requires it.

Every Saturday morning we had an inspection. Our shoes had to be polished until they were almost mirrors. Our sailor hats had to be chalky white. Lt. Cmdr. Husted actually went around our room with white gloves, testing surfaces for dust. He found a thread on our floor, and we each got five demerits for “rope on the deck.”

Husted and the Chief Petty Officer doing the inspection seemed to have magnifying glasses for eyes. One of them actually bounced a quarter on the bare sheets covering our beds. Fortunately, the quarter bounced twice. To produce that tension you bend the mattress up by both ends and stretch the sheet over them so that when the mattress straightened out, it is like the head of a drum. The take home message was that life on a ship is crowded, and the Navy is clean.

At first I thought some or a lot of us were on our way to Bainbridge. I gradually realized that the Navy had made an investment in us and wanted us to succeed. Only one man went to Bainbridge, and that was voluntarily. He decided that two years as a sailor was preferable to three as an officer—that is, three with OCS, plus whatever other schools were added on. I hoped that my 1635 intelligence designator would come through so I would go to Intelligence School.

“We’ve never lost anyone on this.”

Frequently during classroom work in engineering, navigation, or gunnery, the officer running the course would relax a bit and talk about World War II. Our navigation instructor had been on a cruiser off Okinawa when the Kamikaze raids came in for the kill. He said there had not been a clean set of underwear on the ship.

He had commanded a submarine in the Pacific. His name was actually Commander Fish, and he was a “mustang,” meaning a man who had begun as an enlisted man and worked his way up. He was proud of the silver submarine pin on his chest. He had a blonde crew-cut, a somewhat pointed head, and if you squinted—I’m not kidding—he actually looked like a torpedo. He was enthusiastic about the devastating job the submarines had done on Jap shipping.

By the end of the war, he said, the Japs were moving their supplies on rafts. He was joking, I suppose. Commander Fish did tell us an important thing about over-complexity in weaponry. Our submarines had periscopes that were raised and lowered pneumatically. This mechanism sometimes failed, a serious matter for a submarine. German U-Boats were simpler. Their periscope was raised mechanically by a large cogwheel, operated by a lever. A sailor operated this manually, and up went the periscope. It never failed.

When not in class, we did damage control exercises at the bottom of the Newport harbor. The Navy had simulated steel ship compartments on the bottom. We climbed down a steel ladder through a vertical steel tube and into the compartment. We had been told what would happen. Down in the compartment there awaited some 2x4s and some large steel plates. We were told that suddenly a substantial aperture would open in the side of the compartment. Our job was to “jump to,” show teamwork, grab the steel plate and the 2x4s, and cover the hole while the harbor poured in. Before going down that ladder, the Petty Officer running the exercise said, “We’ve never lost anyone doing this one.”

I got used to that sentence: “We’ve never lost anyone on this.” I don’t suppose I was the only one who thought silently, “There’s always a first time to become toast.” The Navy’s attitude was “If you do this right, it will work.” But: “If you don’t do it right, don’t blame the Navy.”

The Combat Information Center

Before my term was to start at the Intelligence School, I had a three week empty period and was assigned to training in the CIC (Combat Information Center). An intelligence officer might well be assigned to sea duty and be responsible for a CIC. The training facility was located in the headquarters building of the First Naval District, called the Fargo Building, a tall office building that stood on the southern edge of Boston Harbor. The smallest warship with a CIC was the destroyer; larger ships had larger and more elaborate CICs.

The basic CIC, a darkened room below deck, contains a radar screen on which you see whatever the ship’s radar sweeps above. Since this is only a training exercise, a recording is what we saw. The sweep shows up on the screen below as a line moving clockwise around the screen and indicating the objects picked up in the sky.

You learn to report sightings in a standard way, for example: “Incoming. 275 degrees. 8 thousand feet. 300 knots.” “Incoming” is a particularly scary word. You have to learn to distinguish between planes and a flock of birds. The CIC has another screen that receives results from the ship’s sonar device. This sends out underwater impulses that bounce back and refract on the screen with blips on a graph. You have to distinguish between a whale, a school of fish, and a submarine. I learned an esoteric fact: a whale farting can produce the same track as a torpedo.

While at CIC training I lived in the Fargo Building at the Bachelor Officers’ Quarters (BOQ) and ate in the officers’ dining room. No more fried baloney, like at OCS. On that point alone, not a minor one, as well as on many others, OCS had been worthwhile.

Then it was on to Anacostia and whatever was offered at Intelligence School.

Intelligence School in Anacostia

At Intelligence School we heard lectures from a variety of experts, senior intelligence officers as well as civilians from the FBI, CIA, and State Department. We got down to the serious business about how the Cold War was being waged. A regular lecturer also taught at nearby Johns Hopkins University, another at the Georgetown school of Foreign Service. The lectures introduced me to another realm of knowledge beyond what I had been studying in college.

Completion of our program carried six hours of graduate school credit at Johns Hopkins and other universities. Through those courses, I first heard about and read George Kennan’s “long telegram” to President Truman, later published in Foreign Affairs by “Mr.X.” The telegram analyzed the sources of Soviet conduct and advocated the containment policy that ultimately won the Cold War. My own opinion of Truman rose sharply. He had put in place the elements that would carry the Cold War forward, with divided Germany the prize. Berlin was the key to Germany and therefore to Western Europe as a whole.

For a research project, I studied the fascinating example of the Institute of Pacific Relations and its guiding spirit Owen Lattimore, who also edited its magazine Pacific Affairs.

Senator Joseph McCarthy had called Lattimore the leading Soviet agent in Pacific matters. “Agent” sounded like “spy.” If McCarthy had called him “ a major agent of Communist influence,” he would have been correct. This was demonstrated in the investigation by the “McCarran” Committee, the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee.

This Senate committee evidently had an able staff and legal team, which exposed, on evidentiary basis, Lattimore’s ties to communism. Lattimore and his close associates shared the Communist worldview and assiduously promoted the Communist line on Asian issues. Communist authors were always reviewed favorably in Lattimore’s magazine Pacific Affairs, even when elsewhere reviewed critically or ignored. Lattimore was adept at turning Communist boilerplate into acceptable prose. Experts in his field had little respect for him, and though he later defended himself in Ordeal by Slander, he did not deserve to be regarded as a martyr, as he was by many liberals.

Strange Bedfellows

A startling and disgraceful episode involving Lattimore is little known, and is recounted by Marvin Liebman in his autobiographical Coming Out Conservative. Marvin Liebman is little known today. After the war, he had been a Zionist, serving on the passenger ship Ben Hecht to run Jews into Palestine despite British restrictions. He was remarkably talented: a movie director, a publicist, and an author. He also seemed to know a wide range of celebrities, including movie stars.

He was also agreeable, intelligent, suave and excellent company. He was a longtime friend of the Buckleys and National Review. He pioneered political mass mailing, which later became a small industry as developed by Richard Viguerie and others.

Liebman launched “The Committee of One Million Against the Recognition of Red China.” Marvin also published a Chilean newsletter about the new Chilean regime of General Augusto Pinochet, who had led the coup that overthrew the Marxist government of Salvador Allende.

Marvin organized my own trip to Chile in 1982 and during the Reagan administration had a post in the National Endowment for the Arts as the organizer of receptions, cocktail parties and other such activities for friends of the Endowment.

During that period I visited Liebman at his Washington apartment and learned for the first time that he was gay, which was the subject of Coming Out Conservative. By that time he was worried about the influence of the religious right in the Republican party, especially its hatred of gays. It was then that I first heard from Liebman about this episode involving Lattimore.

Elinor Lipper, a friend of Liebman, was a Russian who, accused of counter-revolutionary activities, had been imprisoned for eleven years in the Soviet slave labor camp Kolyma in Siberia, a freezing and primitive place where the attrition rate was about 70 percent each year. Because of Lipper’s medical training, she was assigned to the camp hospital. She told Liebman that during the war, a rumor swept the camp that the president of the United States would visit. The prisoners were driven at a frantic pace to clean the place up, repair it, paint it—it was a Potemkin Village.

It wasn’t the president who visited but Vice President Henry Wallace. The inmates were gathered together to smile, wave and greet him. Wallace himself waved and smiled as he walked surrounded by Soviet dignitaries. The dignitaries told Wallace that this was a camp for the incorrigibly mentally ill. “Suddenly,” Liebman writes in his book, “a woman ran from the ranks and threw herself at Wallace’s feet. She screamed in Russian how the prisoners were being treated, how they were dying, how they were innocent, as innocent as the snow at his feet.

“Please,” she sobbed, “please help us.” She was taken away of course, while Wallace’s translator told him that she was mentally ill. Wallace’s translator was Owen Lattimore. In 1952 Marvin phoned Wallace in New York and was surprised to find how easy it was to make an appointment to see, along with Elinor Lipper, a former Vice President.

Marvin writes: “She told him what actually had happened that day in Siberia. As she spoke, his face paled. ‘I didn’t know,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know—please believe me—I didn’t know.’ I saw in him the sense of betrayal that was engulfing many of us who had worked with the Communists.”

Lattimore was more than a fellow traveler. He probably did not belong to the Communist Party, even the underground party, but was all the more valuable for that reason.

Setting Sail

At the completion of our course at the Intelligence School, we were given a variety of assignments. Some of us went to sea duty as intelligence officers now able to run a CIC. Others went to stations abroad. Our Rhine River Patrol stationed in Wiesbanden was a desirable post. Our Embassy in Paris would not have been bad either.

But I was delighted to be assigned to the Intelligence Office in the First Naval District located in the Fargo Building, Boston, familiar to me from my recent CIC training. I decided to live in Cambridge, maybe make use of the Harvard library, and commute to work in Boston. I was as near to being at graduate school as my circumstances permitted.

I was lucky to find an apartment at 48 Boylston Street (now renamed for John F. Kennedy), the building a former Harvard dormitory. About two blocks north was Harvard Square. In the other direction Boylston Street led to the Lars Anderson Bridge over the Charles River and to the Harvard football stadium, Soldiers Field. For the next three years, I attended the Harvard home games there.

I enjoyed wandering around the Harvard campus, particularly on the lawns and among the trees in front of Eliot House, and reading by the Charles as the Harvard crews practiced. This was not at all a bad way to serve in the military.

Officer and Gentleman: Steering Through Naval Intelligence

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