{"id":29651,"date":"2010-10-15T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2010-10-15T03:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/WP-IMPORT\/2010\/10\/15\/fifty-stars\/"},"modified":"2010-10-15T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2010-10-15T03:00:00","slug":"fifty-stars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/fifty-stars\/","title":{"rendered":"Fifty Stars"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n
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(Main Navy and Munitions, Washington, DC. Official navy Photo)
<\/strong>
The rescue of the Chilean miners seemed to be going like clockwork, and the whole thing was a marvel. It appeared they would all be out of the hole by midnight. Peter glided by the cocktail nook and topped up my glass. Mac sipped on his ginger ale. He continued his account of meeting all nine of the men who were selected to five star rank.<\/p>\n

\u201cOf course, I got a chance to meet all of them because I went to Guam in 1945.\u201d Mac had veered back into the conclusion of the world war to explain the degrees of separation between the highest ranking men to ever serve in the American military, and whose like will never, God help us, be seen again.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe ramp-up for the invasion of the Home Islands was going to be the last act of the war, and everyone came out to see the preparations. It was all over everywhere else.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou actually met General MacArthur,\u201d I said in wonder.<\/p>\n

Mac nodded. \u201cI was one of the briefers in Fleet Admiral Nimitz\u2019 morning meeting, so there they would all be in the front row when they visited.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHow many stars would that be?\u201d I asked. \u201cWhen I did that at PACFLT HQ for the monthly component meeting we sometimes had seventeen or so, between the four star commanders and their deputies. We thought it was a pretty big deal.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mac contemplated the number of stars in the briefing room on Nimitz Hill. \u201cMaybe fifty, depending on which delegations were on the rock. It was pretty remarkable.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd you met Dwight Eisenhower, my favorite president? Did he come to Guam from Europe?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNo, I met him when I was at CINCNELM at Ike\u2019s old headquarters on North Audley Street in London years later. By then, the Navy had taken over the building. Ike himself came back from his crusade in Europe in November of \u201945 to be Army Chief of Staff in the Pentagon.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWas the Pentagon all Department of War and the Army then?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYep. Army and War moved out during the war and turned the Munitions Building over to the Navy. That is Constitution Gardens now, where that and Main Navy were, right where the Vietnam Memorial is now. That is where I ran into Admiral Forrest Sherman when I came back to Washington from Hawaii. His advise to apply for the Naval Intelligence board and the big selection to Lieutenant Commander is what convinced me to stay in the service.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSo you made two-and-a-half stripes after six years in the Navy? That is fast, I said, sipping some of the cool pale wine in my glass.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Navy selected just about every Lieutenant on active duty for 04 on the October board of 1945. Biggest selection list in the history of the service. Then they divided it in half, the upper part being \u201cpermanent\u201d and the lower half \u201ctemporary.\u201d We were all \u201ctemporary\u201d ranks during the war. You know where they drew the line?\u201d<\/p>\n

I looked at him quizzically. \u201cFour number below me. That permanent promotion is what turned the trick,\u201d he said with a note of amused satisfaction.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat sounds like more of the pure luck that got you orders to Pearl instead of Manila and capture by the Japanese, or that idiot in Counter-intelligence who didn\u2019t want you and sent you to work for Jasper Holmes and Joe Rochefort. Or Jasper canceling your orders to USS Wahoo <\/em>where you would have been killed on her last patrol.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOr running into Admiral Sherman that day in the passageway. I suppose it is a little remarkable, he said. \u201cBut that is just the way it happened.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThere were so many things that were in flux then, it boggles the mind.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cTrue. I was working for Captain Sam Frankle, the guy who relieved Eddie Layton as the Fleet Intelligence Officer at Pearl. Sam didn\u2019t want to be there. He said the place where all the action was happening was back in Washington. He wanted to get into the Central Intelligence Group, the organization that absorbed Wild Bill Donovon\u2019s Office of Strategic Services.
\u201cThat became the CIA in 1948, right?\u201d<\/p>\n

The Admiral nodded. \u201cBut that is getting a little ahead of things. I came back in 1946, and Sam had found a billet in the Office of Naval Intelligence. After I was selected for special duty, he gave me the choice of three jobs, The first was at the Intelligence School at Anacostia, across the river, a job with him in ONI, or a job at the Pentagon working on the Diplomatic Summary.\u201d
\u201cWhich did you choose?\u201d I asked, scribbling frantically.<\/p>\n

\u201cI had no interest in the school, and ONI did not sound that interesting. I picked the DIPSUM job, and reported to the Pentagon to work with Willard Mathias and Brewer Miriam as the Navy editor. Brewer represented State Deparrtment, and Willard was an Army civilian. Both of them had been Army officers during the war, but they were demobilized but doing the same jobs. It was a great job. We took COMINT decrypts and published the summary every week. We were collecting successfully on just about everyone.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSo that was essentially the prototype of the Directorate for Intelligence at CIA?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cPrecisely. I got frozen in rank forever as an Lieutenant Commander. I was seven-and-a-half years in that grade. With all the changes going on in town, I only stayed in the Pentagon for about a year, and then transferred to main Navy to work at Y-Branch in ONI.\u201d The Navy was trying to figure out what it was going to be in the post-war world.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat did you do there?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWell, it was 1948. I reported to CDR Bob Hudson, who had the Pacific Area Desk for Operational Intelligence. The former Pacific Strategic Intelligence Section of Fleet Admiral Ernie King\u2019s COMINCH staff had migrated to become a part of ONI, and re-named the Special Section, since we dealt with Communications Intelligence.<\/p>\n

\u201cHudson had been Eddie Layton\u2019s deputy during the war, and he gave me a month\u2019s leave to marry Billie in June of that year. He later was medically retired, and I took over publication of the weekly report, which included sensitive reporting on what the French were up to against the Viet Minh insurgency in their former Colony.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe remember Korea as the conflict of the decade, but Mao was taking the mainland away from the Kuomantang, and the politicians were in an uproar about who lost China.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mac smiled. \u201cNobody lost China. It stayed right where it was. But there was something else going on in Main Navy. Something very secret.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat was that?\u201d I asked.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe had a secret we called RUNRA. I am not sure I am going to go into it, here at Willow, but I will tell you that is the reason I started spending so much time at Naval Security Group Headquarters up on Nebraska Avenue.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThat is where the Redman Brothers got so much wrong on interpreting the Japanese codes during the war, right?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cTimes change. I spent so much time going over what we got on the Russians that CAPT Jack Frost- he later made three stars and became Director of NSA- decided to give me an office right there at the old girl\u2019s school. I worked there until they decided to establish the Armed Forces Security Agency to consolidate the Army and Navy code-breakers. We relocated to the first floor of \u201cB\u201d building at Arlington Hall Station.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSo you worked right across the street from Big Pink,\u201d I said. \u201cWould have been a great commute.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mac leaned back and smiled. \u201cThen we moved out to Fort Meade when AFSA became NSA.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNo such Agency,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n


(Admiral Forrest Sherman. Official Navy Photo).<\/p>\n

\u201cNope.\u201d Mac finished his ginger ale. \u201cForrest Sherman became Chief of Naval Operations in \u201949, and he had a keen interest in intelligence as you know.\u201d He fished a piece of paper out of the pocket of his sport coat and handed it to me. \u201cThis is a quote that Captain Wyman Packer attributed to Sherman in his \u2018A Century of Naval intelligence.\u2019 It sounds a lot like what Colin Powell said about intelligence.\u201d<\/p>\n

I knew what he was talking about. \u201cTell me what you know,\u201d I quoted from memory. \u201cTell me what you don\u2019t know, and tell me what you think, but never confuse them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mac grinned. \u201cShorter and more succinct. But I think Sherman summed it up pretty well.\u201d<\/p>\n

I lookd at the paper and read the words that the CNO had addressed to then-CDR Rufus Taylor:
\u201cI want to know what you really know when you have solid evidence to back it up, and I am going to hold you responsible for that. Then I want to know what you suspect, and what you think is probably and so on\u2026and then, I want to know anything you have in the way of hunches or guesses. I can put it all those things together, and you\u2019ll be held responsible only for that information one which you say you have solid evidence\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThat was a man who understood OPINTEL, wasn\u2019t he?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThat is what I did my whole career, or at least until I came back to the Defense Intelligence Agency from the Pacific years later. I was in a rut.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThat is a rut a lot of people envy you for. Let\u2019s talk a little more about that soon. Maybe you will explain how it all developed into the Cold War and Vietnam.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSure,\u201d said Mac. \u201cAnd it was OPINTEL that led to my meeting with Ike Eisenhower. But I will tell you this about everything that happened later,\u201d leaning forward and lowering his voice. \u201cLBJ did it.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/em><\/strong> Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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(Main Navy and Munitions, Washington, DC. Official navy Photo) The rescue of the Chilean miners seemed to be going like clockwork, and the whole thing was a marvel. It appeared they would all be out of the hole by midnight. Peter glided by the cocktail nook and topped up my glass. Mac sipped on his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29651","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daily-socotra"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29651","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29651"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29651\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29651"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29651"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29651"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}