Intelligence is as essential to modern armies as ammunition." Brigadier General Joseph E. Kuhn. When stripped to its minimum basics, intelligence would be defined as the methodical or organized efforts to gain an advantage over a competition (mostly in war) using covert or secret means. Intelligence entails four basic kinds of interrelated activities: firstly, gathering information, mostly in secret; secondly, carrying out secret or covert operations, thirdly, shielding, or safeguarding the parent organization from compromise, along with examining the findings, and the outcomes (what has been discovered). Intelligence has been a major dynamic in the American history ever since the times of the revolutionary war. Today’s intelligence community, which employs sophisticated methods to produce profound types of data, is essentially the product of an extended evolution.
During the Revolution, such a thing like the "community" of the present day was not in existence; in fact, an organization in the usual or convectional understanding was also nonexistent. Intelligence work, or spying, as it were, was principally a freelance industry. For instance, Paul Revere's traverse in April 1775 to alert the colonists to a British attack from Boston (an archetypal case in point of forewarning intelligence) was an individual enterprise1. More often than not, military generals operated spying networks directly as an element of their scouting services. This was the relation between the British General Henry Clinton along with his agent Major John André, in addition to that of George Washington, and secret agent John Honeyman along with Joshua Merserau2, as well as spies such as Knowlton's Rangers (Nathan Hale, perhaps the best celebrated revolutionary war undercover agent, used to be a volunteer from the unit). This outlook went on all through the Civil War, at which point witnessed the starting of a different kind of intelligence operation. In the period between 1861 and 1862, General George S. McClellan depended on the Allan Pinkerton's organization known as the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, for intelligence and counterespionage operations. A majority of the Pinkerton reports overstated Confederate might and for that reason, McClellan's successors ended the Pinkerton association, but intelligence work nonetheless turned out to be much more methodical. There was no official arrangement for intelligence work on the Confederate side, although there, too, secret agents were habitually used.
Intellectuals during that age have identified over four thousand individuals who worked as secret agents, informants, scouts, and guides. It is thought that President Abraham Lincoln's assassin, a certain John Wilkes Booth, without a doubt a Confederate backer, might have been a southern spy3.
Following the Civil War, the U.S. armed forces started to gather intelligence information on overseas militaries more methodically and scientifically. In 1866 Gustavus Fox, the Assistant Secretary of the Navy, took a trip to the Russian federation on an official information-collecting mission4. Almost two decades later, in 1882, the Bureau of Naval Intelligence was made the earliest official U.S. intelligence outfit.
In 1885, the army formed an information agency that developed to be the Military Intelligence Division in 1918. The First World War encouraged the development of the two units along with the formation of the Cipher Bureau that was contained in the State Department on June 17, 1917. The latter ran a code-breaking department or unit which gained infamy (exposed in the 1930s) for decoding the Japanese government instructions to their foreign representatives at the Washington Naval symposium between 1921 and 1922, a point of the function of intelligence. This code-breaking unit was done away with in 1929, although State kept on playing a harmonizing role amongst U.S. agencies in the turf of intelligence right through the Second World War.
At the commencement of World War II, the US was the only world’s great power that did not have a systematically organized intelligence service. As demonstrated above, a number of agencies gathered information of a kind or another, secretly or even otherwise, but there was no outfit in charge of the whole of American intelligence. In comparison for instance, the Great Britain had a lengthy custom of flourishing intelligence operations, and they had successfully been able to break into the topmost echelons of German communications and communication networks with the aid of the expert cryptanalysts that were situated at Bletchley Park. British dominance in the field of communications intelligence field all over Europe and by extension the world went on all through the war. The British recommended to President Franklin D. Roosevelt to form a federal or centralized strategic intelligence agency and even though Roosevelt did like the idea, he did not do so immediately but took his time to design one. The call for harmonization, however, rose when President Roosevelt ordered the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), beforehand wholly concerned with crime resolution, to run counterespionage operations in Latin America. He, in addition, formed a propagandist body that had quasi-intelligence duties in 1941, the Office of Coordination of Information.
Roosevelt at last signed the executive order of June 1942 saw the establishment of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) – the foremost America’s federal intelligence outfits. The OSS evolved to have both the analytical, operational facets, significantly profiting from the foundations of intelligence that started before the Second World War. When the OSS was done away with in 1945, its spying (along with counterespionage) operations were moved to the War Department, whereas its analytical element was moved to the State Department, finally developing to be the present day’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. The other formerly OSS elements, in the meantime, had a hard time in the War Department, wherein the counterespionage operations from the OSS were seen to be competing with the military's Counterintelligence Corps while the espionage nets had very little to add. The OSS was reincarnated in 1947 as the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)5.
The contributions of the U.S. Army intelligence during the Second World War were bigger in the Pacific Theater, although the European war hard a bigger effect on the final set up of the army intelligence. The majority of the US military resources in the intelligence field were focused in the battle against Germany, along with the most of military intelligence possessions. In the Second World War, cryptanalysis, (defined as the science of cracking codes), played a significant part in the victory for the Allies. This was owed to the contribution of science to the Battle of Midway and that of the North Atlantic, along with the annihilation of the Japanese merchant ships, as well as a number of land battles in Europe between 1944 and 19456. Joint intelligence agencies and operations were set off at national and theater planes in this war. These efforts amplified gathering, improved production, and accelerated distribution of vital intelligence to commanders, as well as national makers of policy. Joint intelligence efforts played a part in Allied operations, in practically all theaters. Joint intelligence blossomed between 1943 and 1944 as U.S.A military shifted from self-protective to offensive approach. Island skipping in the Pacific, along with Allied operations in the Mediterranean, in addition to Europe, highlighted sweeping joint operations that needed joint intelligence.
The Second World War combatants used highly refined ciphers. The cipher machine called the Enigma was employed to code, as well as decode secret communication of the uppermost security. The Enigma had been utilized commercially ever since the early 20th century and was only taken on by the military, as well as by the governments for other services in many countries, including the Nazi Germany prior to the Second World War. It was posited at the time that it would take at least ten centuries to crack the Enigma machine. Working with smuggled components of the Enigma machine, the messages encrypted by this machine started to be decoded by the Joint forces code breakers. The intelligence attained using this method, code-named Ultra, turned out to be a momentous help to the Allied war endeavors. It has even been posited by historians that a year or so speeded up the conclusion of the European division of the conflict owing to the decoding of German ciphers7.
Cryptology, however, was not only utilized in the European Theater of this war. In the first half of the 30s, the Japanese Navy bought a commercial edition of the German Enigma, and customized it by the addition of several security elements. The resultant system turned out to be among the most secure cryptographic appliance globally. "Purple" was the cipher employed by the Japanese in this war to encrypt diplomatic messages to different embassies along with consulates all through the globe. The U.S. endeavored to decode the messages they intercepted from the Japanese and one time successfully produced a ‘shadow machine’ (their version of Purple machine), therefore, enabling them to decode the Japanese messages. The intercepted signals were made up of a wealth of vital information regarding Japan's strategies for war, as well as their planned places of attack. Consequently, the United States of America stunned Japan in the middle, and American triumph there came to be significant. All through the war, the U.S. dramatically executed a number of surprise raids on Japan, owing to the information they got from Purple ciphers.
Navajo Code Talkers
The suggestion to employ Navajo Indians to communicate in a secure manner came up in the early phases of the Second World War. Philip Johnston, the son of a messenger to the Navajos was very fluent in their language. He was a Second World War veteran who was aware of the military's exploration for a code that could resist all decoding efforts8. Native American languages were also employed in attempts to encrypt messages. Navajo is an undocumented language of great difficulty. It is almost incomprehensible to anybody devoid of broad contact, as well as training. The language does not have any alphabet or signs and is used exclusively on the Navajo areas of the American Southwest. Navajo code breakers participated in all attacks the U.S. Marines carried out in the Pacific between 1942 and 1945.
Intelligence during the Korean War
The U.S. Signal intelligence field following the Second World War saw departing labor, as well as funds reductions. When the war was over, a huge number of the U.S. military personnel most wanted to go back to civilian lifestyle. Consequently, the U.S. Congress significantly downsized the U.S. military in the subsequent few years. The military cut back from over twelve million men and women as at August in 1945 to roughly one million as at the July of 1947. All SIGINT operations underwent a loss of the work force and suffered a lot. What’s more, a huge number of employees left cryptology following the ending of the Second World War. There were too far-reaching cuts in budgets. From 1945 to the break out of the Korean War, President Harry S. Truman cut down the U.S. military spending to aid the paying off the shortfall caused by the conflict, and to fund overseas aid.
Marine Photo Intelligence
Five years to the start of the Korean War, the attention of the U.S. SIGINT focused on the Soviet, as well as Communist Chinese issues. That was due to rising tensions of the Cold War and the collapse of China to the Communists. Sufficient funds were availed to cater for those issues, while, as it appeared, such less important issues like the North Korea were only given a little less attention. The Korean War was the foremost-armed conflict in the Cold War period. The war stretched the Cold War, which, at that point in time, had been for the most part concentrated in Europe.
The gathering of North Korean signals began accidentally in April of 1949 when a U.S.A Army intercept post started to collect them. Nonetheless, out-and-out North Korean intelligence gathering was not stated up prior to April of 1950. Just about two hundred messages were intercepted before the armed conflict had even started. The communications intelligence was hindered by shortages of supplies, as well as equipment and gear that were not apposite for everyday transportation over rough topography. During war, another communications intelligence apparatus was found out and used. It was found out that detection appliances planted close to opponent bunkers were able to intercept phone calls. Chinese and Korean phone interchange was intercepted, and was called ‘"ground-return intercept.’ This war ended on early August 1953, following over three years of warfare, after the signing of a ceasefire and the swap of prisoners of war. Throughout the armed conflict, as well as in after war inquiries, there were numerous accusations that U.S. intelligence did falter in the Korean War after not being able to give warnings of the first North Korean assault that occurred on June 1950 and again when the Chinese came into the warfare in October of 1950. In contrast with the outcome of the Second World War, Allied forces did not realize a military conquest in Korea, they ended up at the negotiation desk.
In conclusion, the main shortfall of U.S. intelligence in the Second World War was that it was spread amongst different units of the military; whatever harmonization it had occurred on President Roosevelt's desk. However, the office of the OSS was created to correct this. Roosevelt's successor, Harry S. Truman, set up the Central Intelligence Group (CIG) to harmonize intelligence collected by other departments and agencies. The Congress passed the National Security Act, in 1947. This act created the civilian National Security Council (NSC) under whose authority was the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Intelligence collection was now firmly under the management of civilian instead of military authorities. In the Post-Korean War period and to the early 60s, the CIA was the nation's safeguard against the growth of communism, as well as Soviet power. The CIA did a great job in revealing Soviet missiles in Cuba, in the 1962 Cuban Missile conflict10. At present, the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) is a joint federation of sixteen detached government agencies. They operate separately and jointly to carry out intelligence activities thought to be necessary for foreign relations along with the safeguard of the national security. Constituent agency members of the IC include intelligence agencies, civilian intelligence, and military intelligence along with analysis bureaus in the federal presidential departments. The Director of National Intelligence who also heads the IC reports directly to the President of the U.S.
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Coll, Steve,.Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the
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Kahn, David. The Code-Breakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from
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O'Toole, G. J. A. Honorable Treachery: A History of U.S. Intelligence, Espionage, and Covert
Action from the American Revolution to the CIA. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press,
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O'Toole, G.J.A. Honourable Treachery: A History of Intelligence, Espionage, and Covert Action
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