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  But diplomatic decrypts revealed that the position of the Chinese leadership changed dramatically following the amphibious landing at Inchon. The decrypted cables of the Burmese ambassador in Beijing, whose government also maintained generally friendly relations with China, warned that China now intended to become involved militarily in Korea.20A week later, decrypts of Ambassador Panikkar’s cable traffic to New Delhi revealed that on September 25, Chou En-lai had warned the Indian ambassador that China would intervene militarily in Korea if U.N. forces crossed the 38th parallel.21But Panikkar’s reporting was either discounted or ignored completely by policymakers in Washington because of his alleged pro-Chinese leanings.22

  But the Chinese were not bluffing. On October 1, South Korean troops crossed the 38th parallel and marched into North Korea. The next day, the Chinese Communist Party’s Politburo decided to intervene militarily in the Korean War, with Mao Tse-tung ordering 260,000 Chinese troops to begin crossing the Yalu River on October 15.23

  The Chinese leadership in Beijing made one last final effort to head off war with the U.S. Shortly after midnight on the morning of October 3, 1950, Chou En-lai called in Ambassador Panikkar and told him that if U.S. troops crossed the 38th parallel, China would send its forces across the Yalu River to defend North Korea. On the same day, the Dutch chargé d’affaires in Beijing cabled his foreign ministry in the Hague quoting Chou En-lai to the effect that China would fight if U.N. forces crossed the 38th parallel.24But Washington refused to pay heed to these warnings, which were dismissed in their entirety as being nothing more than a bluff. On October 5, the first American combat troops were ordered to cross the 38th parallel and advance on the North Korean capital of Pyongyang. By this singular act, General MacArthur committed U.S. and U.N. forces to a course of action that was to have dire consequences for everyone involved.25

  On the morning of October 15, Mao sent a cable to his military commander in Manchuria, General Peng Dehuai, ordering him to send the first Chinese army units across the Yalu River into North Korea. On the night of October 15–16, the 372nd Regiment of the Chinese 42nd Army secretly crossed the Yalu. The die had been cast. China had entered the Korean War.26

  Declassified documents confirm that AFSA failed to detect the movement of the more than three hundred thousand Chinese soldiers into Korea, largely because the Chinese forces operated in complete radio silence.27But SIGINT did pick up a number of changes in Soviet, Chinese, and North Korean military activities indicating that something significant was happening across the border in Manchuria. On October 20, the CIA sent President Truman a Top Secret Codeword memo (which the CIA has steadfastly refused to fully declassify) revealing that SIGINT and other intelligence sources indicated that the Chinese intended to intervene militarily in the Korean War to protect their interests in the Suiho hydroelectric complex in North Korea. According to the report, SIGINT “noted the presence of an unusually large number of fighter aircraft in Manchuria.”28The next day, October 21, AFSA reported that intercepts of Chinese radio traffic showed that during the first three weeks of October, three Chinese armies had been deployed to positions along the Yalu River. Also on October 21, AFSA reported that during the previous week, twenty troop trains carry ing Chinese combat troops had been sent from Shanghai to Manchuria and more were on their way.29

  Sadly, all of this intelligence data was again ignored or discounted because it ran contrary to the prevailing wisdom of the U.S. intelligence community. For example, the October 18, 1950, edition of the CIA’s Review of the World Situation stated, “Unless the USSR is ready to precipitate global war, or unless for some reason that Peiping leaders do not think that war with the U.S. would result from open intervention in Korea, the odds are that Communist China, like the USSR, will not openly intervene in North Korea.”30In Tokyo, MacArthur chose to ignore the SIGINT. One of MacArthur’s senior intelligence officers, Lieutenant Colonel Morton Rubin, remembered personally briefing the general and his intelligence chief, General Charles Willoughby, on the Chinese troop movements appearing in SIGINT, but the intelligence reports apparently did not convince either man that the Chinese threat was real. Lieutenant General Matthew Ridgway, who later was to replace MacArthur as commander of U.S. forces in the Far East, recalled that “the great fault over there was poor evaluation of the intelligence that was obtained. They knew the facts, but they were poorly evaluated. I don’t know just why that was. It was probably in good part because of MacArthur’s personality. If he did not want to believe something, he wouldn’t.”31

  The result was that when the Chinese launched their first offensive in Korea, it achieved complete surprise. Striking without warning, between October 25 and November 2, 1950, three PLA armies decimated the entire South Korean 2nd Corps and a regiment of the U.S. 1st Cavalry Division near the North Korean town of Unsan. The Chinese troops then quietly withdrew back into the hills to prepare for the next phase of their offensive.32

  After the Unsan fiasco, the entire U.S. intelligence community went into a state of denial, refusing to accept the fact that the Chinese military was in Korea. In Washington, the CIA’s intelligence analysts concluded, “There has been no definitive evidence of Soviet or Chinese intervention in Korea.” On October 30, the CIA’s Daily Summary opined that “the presence of Chinese Communist units in Korea has not been confirmed. CIA continues to believe that direct Chinese Communist intervention in Korea is unlikely at this time.” In Korea, the Eighth Army reported that despite the fact they held seven Chinese POWs, they were “not inclined to accept reports of substantial Chinese participation in North Korean fighting.”33

  What is curious is that all the assessments coming out of the intelligence staffs in Washington and Tokyo were directly contradicted by what the chatty Chinese POWs captured at Unsan were telling their interrogators, which was that whole Chinese combat divisions were then operating inside Korea.34When CIA officers in Korea had the temerity to cable Washington with the results of the interrogations of the Chinese prisoners, Willoughby barred CIA personnel from further access to the POW cages, telling the Eighth Army’s intelligence chief to “Keep him [the CIA station chief in Korea] clear of inter rogation.” It was the prototypical case of shooting the messenger.35

  In the weeks that followed, an increased volume of disquieting intelligence came out of AFSA indicating that the Chinese military was preparing to attack. In early November, AFSA reported that the Chinese had just moved three more armies by rail to Manchuria, and that the security forces guarding Beijing had just been placed on a state of alert.36On November 24, the CIA issued a report based on COMINT, which revealed that an additional one hundred thousand Chinese troops had just arrived in Manchuria and that the Chinese were shipping thirty thousand maps of North Korea to its forces in Manchuria.37 AFSA also produced intelligence indicating that MacArthur was looking for a fight with the Chinese. On November 11, Army chief of staff J. Lawton Collins sent a Top Secret Codeword “Eyes Only” message to MacArthur containing the text of a decrypted message from the Brazilian ambassador in Tokyo, Gastão P. Do Rio Branco, to his home office in Rio de Janeiro. According to the decrypt: “Speaking with . . . frankness, he [MacArthur] told the President that it would be better to face a war now than two or three years hence, for he was certain that there was not the least possibility of an understanding with the men in the Kremlin, as the experience of the last five years has proved. He felt, therefore, that in order to attain peace it is necessary to destroy the focus of international bolshevism in Moscow.”38

  The general got his wish. At 8:00 p.m. on the night of November 25, 1950, the Chinese army struck once again, this time with even greater force, decimating the combined U.S. and South Korean forces stretched out along the Yalu River, sending the allied forces reeling backward in retreat. The final word appropriately goes to MacArthur, who sent a panicky Top Secret cable to Washington on November 28 including the now-famous line: “We face an entirely new war.”39

  World War III Cometh


  On the night of November 30, General Walker’s Eighth U.S. Army broke contact with the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) forces along the Yalu River and began a two-week-long, 120-mile retreat south to the Imjin River, north of Seoul. During this critically important two-week period, there was no contact whatsoever between the Eighth Army and the pursuing Chinese forces, which resulted in the entire U.S. intelligence community being left almost completely in the dark concerning the PLA forces.

  Declassified documents show that during the Eighth Army’s hasty retreat southward, SIGINT was not able to provide much in the way of substantive intelligence information about the strength, locations, or movements of the three hundred thousand Chinese troops following them. Apart from exploiting intercepted low-level railroad traffic, AFSA had devoted virtually no resources to monitoring Chinese military communications prior to the Chinese intervention in Korea. Even if the U.S. military SIGINT units in the Far East were intercepting Chinese radio traffic, they didn’t have any Chinese linguists who could translate the intercepts. The result was that as of mid-December 1950, senior U.S. military commanders found themselves in the embarrassing position of having to admit that information from all sources was “vague and indefinite on the exact disposition of CCF [Chinese Communist Forces] in Korea.”40

  On December 23, Lieutenant General Walker was killed in a jeep accident. He was replaced by Lieutenant General Matthew Ridgway, one of the U.S. Army’s best field commanders, who flew in from Washington on December 26 and discovered that the intelligence situation map at his Eighth Army headquarters in Seoul showed only “a large red goose egg” north of his front lines, indicating an estimated 174,000 PLA troops—which was all that army intelligence then knew about the estimated strength and position of the Chinese forces. While American units had obtained some intelligence from two captured Chinese soldiers, everything else that Eighth Army G-2 believed to be true about Chinese PLA troop dispositions was pure speculation.41

  But while AFSA was producing no intelligence about the Chinese forces, it continued to generate vast amounts of data about the North Korean military forces because of its continued ability to read all major North Korean ciphers. According to a declassified NSA history, as of December 1950 AFSA was solving and translating 90 percent of the encrypted North Korean messages it was intercepting.42For example, SIGINT derived from these communications was instrumental in allowing the U.S. Navy to successfully evacuate by December 24 the entire U.S. Tenth Corps plus tens of thousands of refugees from the North Korean port of Hungnam. SIGINT also confirmed that the Chinese and North Koreans did not intend to disrupt the evacuation by air attack.43

  The Chinese January 1951 Offensive in Korea

  On New Year’s Eve, December 31, 1950, seven Chinese armies launched a major offensive across the 38th parallel, which shattered the Eighth U.S. Army’s defensive positions along the Imjin River. Seoul fell for a second time on January 4, 1951, the last U.S. forces having fled the city the night before.44

  As American forces struggled to keep a foothold in Korea, there was little SIGINT to offer by way of intercepts of Chinese military radio transmissions because of a lack of Chinese linguists, and also because almost all available radio intercept resources were focused on the more productive North Korean military target. As a result, the SIGINT organizations were producing virtually nothing in the way of usable tactical intelligence on the Chinese military at a time when U.S. field commanders in Korea were desperate for any tidbit of information.45

  Despite these inherent weaknesses, SIGINT performed brilliantly during the month of January, helping Lieutenant General Ridgway’s Eighth Army decimate the newly rebuilt North Korean Second and Fifth Corps as they strove to break through the American–South Korean defensive lines in the Korean central highlands. When the South Korean Second Corps collapsed, it was SIGINT that revealed the North Korean attack plans, with a decrypted January 2 message from the North Korean general staff in Pyongyang ordering the commander of the North Korean Fifth Corps to push through the breach and “pursue the enemy, not giving them time to rest.”46By January 15, Eighth Army G-2 was convinced from an accumulation of information derived from SIGINT that the Chinese and North Koreans were readying themselves for yet another major offensive. But SIGINT revealed that the enemy forces had taken murderously heavy losses in the fighting up to that point, and that certain key units were barely combat ready. Another critically important piece of intelligence provided by SIGINT was a January 23 decrypted message revealing that the entire Chinese Ninth Army Group was reforming near the North Korean port of Wonsan and would “take a rest until the end of February.” Ridgway now knew that three Chinese armies would not be taking part in the upcoming Chinese–North Korean offensive.47

  Acting on this intelligence, on January 24, Ridgway launched a counterattack called Operation Thunderbolt, which by January 31 had forced the Chinese forces back toward Seoul. By the end of January, SIGINT revealed that the Chinese and North Korean forces were exhausted, short of ammunition and supplies, and decimated by battlefield casualties and infectious diseases.48

  The Ides of March: The Russians Are Here!

  In late March 1951, an event took place that literally overnight changed the way the entire U.S. intelligence community thought about the war in Korea. According to declassified documents, on March 30 the U.S. Air Force radio intercept unit in Japan, the 1st Radio Squadron, Mobile, commanded by Major Lowell Jameson, “made one of the most important contributions to Air Force Intelligence in its history.” Intercepts of MiG radio traffic confirmed the long-held suspicion that the Russians were controlling the air defense of North Korea and Manchuria, not the Chinese or the North Koreans.49As a former air force Russian linguist stationed in the Far East recalled, “we were actually monitoring the Soviet Air Force fighting the American Air Force and we were listening to the Soviet pilots being directed by Soviet ground control people to fight the Americans. We were fighting our own little war with the Soviets.”50

  The decision was made to keep this revelation out of all widely circulated intelligence publications, such as the CIA’s National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs), in order to prevent the leakage of this highly sensitive intelligence to right-wing members of Congress, such as Senator Joseph McCarthy, who would no doubt have used (or misused) the information to drum up public support for war with the USSR at a time when the U.S. government was trying to prevent that from happening.51While President Truman had made a bold decision to resist communist aggression in Korea, the war effort (or “police action,” as he described it) was facing decreasing support from the public even as American paranoia about communist threats from abroad and subversion within began to create great difficulties for the administration. Amid this poisonous atmosphere at home and the fraught situation in the Far East, the U.S. military prepared for Armageddon.

  General MacArthur’s Dismissal

  On April 11, 1951, just as the U.S. Armed Forces reached a maximum state of readiness for nuclear war, without any prior public warning President Truman fired General MacArthur from his post as commander in chief of U.S. forces in the Far East.52

  The president’s decision stunned the nation. As it turned out, the AFSA code breakers at Arlington Hall had a great deal to do with Truman’s decision to fire America’s most popular military commander. Throughout 1950 and 1951, AFSA was intercepting and decrypting the telegrams of the various foreign diplomats based in Tokyo. Among the most prominent targets being exploited were the diplomatic cables of the ambassadors from Spain, Portugal, and Brazil.53Both MacArthur and Major General Charles Willoughby made the mistake of candidly disclosing their extreme political views on Russia and China to these three ambassadors. Among the comments that MacArthur made was that he hoped the Soviets would intervene militarily in Korea, which he believed would give the United States the excuse to destroy once and for all Mao Tse-tung’s communist regime in Beijing. MacArthur also told the foreign ambassadors that he thought war with Russia
was inevitable.54

  In mid-March 1951, Truman’s naval aide, Admiral Robert Dennison, handed him a batch of four decrypted messages sent the preceding week by the Spanish ambassador in Tokyo, Francisco José del Castillo, summarizing his private conversations with MacArthur. The late Ambassador Paul Nitze, who was then head of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, said in an interview, “From those communications, it was perfectly clear that what MacArthur had in mind was that either he would have a complete victory in North Korea or, if the Chinese Communists got involved, then the war would be spread to the Chinese mainland as a whole and the object of the game would then be the unseating of Mao Tse-tung and the restoration of Chiang Kai-shek. In the course of doing that you had your nuclear weapons if you needed them. This would then enable one to do what was strategically important and that was to defeat the Chinese Communists. That was clearly what was on MacArthur’s mind. Part of the reason he took these excessive risks was to create a situation in which we would be involved in a war with the Chinese Communists.”55

  Given the overwhelming preponderance of evidence that MacArthur was deliberately ignoring orders from Washington, and with the SIGINT intercepts indicating that he was secretly hoping for an all-out world war with the Soviets and the Chinese, Truman fired him. In retrospect, it was almost certainly the right thing to do. But it had a catastrophic effect on Truman’sstanding with the American people. His poll numbers sank like a stone in the months that followed. By mid-1951, his approval ratings had plummeted to 23 percent, the lowest ever recorded by the Gallup Poll for a sitting American president.

  General Ridgway’s Crisis

  The man chosen by the Pentagon to replace General Douglas MacArthur as commander in chief, Far East, was General Matthew Ridgway, who before moving into MacArthur’s office suite in the Dai Ichi Building in downtown Tokyo had commanded the Eighth U.S. Army in Korea since December 1950. The hard-nosed former paratrooper took command at a moment when the intelligence picture in the region was bleak— and would only become grimmer as the months went on.