veteran’s corner

Les Bakke

Last week’s column explored military intelligence from our nation’s founding to WWI. This column continues with a couple more interesting items from WWI. The US continued to use horse cavalry for scouting and it was the last time Native American soldiers were used as horse mounted scouts. Airplanes became a new intelligence gathering method with both pilot reported observances and cameras mounted on the airplane.
The Army apparently had learned its lesson because after the war ended, as intelligence gathering did not completely disappear. This was due primarily to the fact that Pershing became Chief of Staff in 1921 and he knew the value of intelligence gathering. However, the US determined that during the peace time following WWI, we did not need as large an army so the size was reduced with corresponding reduction in the number of soldiers in intelligence. In 1930, the Army did create the Signal Intelligence Service (SIS) which established monitoring stations in the Philippine and Hawaiian Islands. SIS was responsible for cracking the Japanese diplomatic code machine, Purple in 1940. Following the US’s entry into WWII in 1941, intelligence gathering was again promoted. The US broke the military code used by the Japanese which was a major factor in US success at the Battle of Midway. In November 1941, the Fourth Army opened a Japanese language school to train interpreters. It produced 4,800 linguists during the war. Japanese and German prisoner of war interrogation centers were established. These interrogation centers provided some of the best intelligence during the war.
Following WWII, the US established the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 1947, the Armed Forces Security Agency, later the National Security Agency (NSA) in 1949 and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA in 1961. The Army combined its intelligence gathering into the Army Security Agency (ASA). The Navy created the Naval Intelligence Group and the Air Force created the Security Service. All of these agencies grew during the Cold War, Korea and Vietnam. The following is personal recollections of my service with the Air Force Security Service.
The Air Force security service provided intelligence gathering and analysis in several areas. The Air Force had four locations for language training; the Defense Language Institute in California, Yale University, Syracuse University and the University of Indiana. Each location provided intensive language training in several languages. Indiana’s language which I attended was Russian. Following language school, airmen went through radio intercept classes (learning how to use a radio to listen to foreign military broadcasts) geography, weather analysis cryptology and intelligence analysis. Since the Russians also used Morse Code for communications, some airmen completed course in Morse Code in Mississippi. The Air Force had listening posts throughout the world and copied and analyzed data from many foreign countries. We also had intelligence crews on C-130s flying near the Russian border. Reconnaissance aircraft would fly toward and into Russian airspace and we could determine how fast the Russians responded, getting fighter aircraft into the air. We were on a critical three-minute reporting timeframe to NSA. In other words, we had three minutes from an event happening to submitting an electronic report to NSA. To be continued.