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Mark Stout, "World War I and the Foundations of American Intelligence" (UP of Kansas, 2023)
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A
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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B
Welcome to New Books Network. Today we welcome Dr. Mark Stout. Mark Stout spent over two decades in the US national security community, serving in the State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research, in the CIA and in the Institute for Defense Analysis. He later directed the Johns Hopkins University Massachusetts in Global Security Studies and and its post baccalaureate certificate in Intelligence. He is a former historian and curator at the International Spy Museum and he was also founding president of the North American Society for Intelligence History. He is co editor of the Georgetown University Press Studies in Intelligence History series. Mark holds a PhD in history from the University of Leeds and has authored or edited multiple books on intelligence and security. For those who've listened to our previous episodes, Mark was also in the episode on the book Covert Action with Rory Cormack and Magda Long. Today we're actually talking about Mark's own book titled World War I and the Foundations of American Intelligence, published by the University Press of Kansas in 2023. Mark, thank you for being back on the show.
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A
Thank you. Thank you for having me. It's a real pleasure and a real delight. I went years fantasizing that someday I'd be on the New Books Network, and now I've done it twice in what, two months or something?
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B
Exactly, exactly. So let's start with the book. How did the book come about? And if I can be, I guess, more specific, why do you think the book tells the origin story of modern US Intelligence?
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A
Well, I'll address the first part of that. First, as you mentioned, I worked in the US intelligence community for a number of years, 13 years, specifically in the IC, and some of that time was at the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, and some it was at the CIA. Now, in both places, I was on the analytic side, primarily working on Russian military and politico military issues. But what I note, and when I, you know, when I, when I went from one agency to the other, what I noted was, even though the fundamental subject matter I'm working on is pretty much the same, that the places were different in certain ways. I mean, oh, there was a great deal of commonality, but, but also there were very noticeable cultural differences between intelligence in the State Department and intelligence at the CIA. And that struck me as interesting. It struck me as odd, despite the fact that both of them ultimately in some way, shape or form come out of the wartime Office of Strategic Services. So that piqued my curiosity. And I'd already become interested in intelligence history. My first love was military history, but I'd become interested in intelligence history too. So later on in my career, when I'm at the Institute for Defense Analyses, federally funded research and development center, and the opportunity came along to do a PhD which I was interested in because I was already sort of looking towards my second career, wanted to create options. I wanted to do something that was both about military issues and also about intelligence, intelligence history. And I was casting around for a topic, and one day I bought Professor David Alvarez, a wonderful historian, intelligence historian, drinks in exchange for his thoughts on what I might write about. And he suggested that I do something about American intelligence in World War I. And I remember distinctly thinking that that was a really stupid idea. Didn't say that, of course, but I remember thinking that. And I didn't, frankly, know much about World War I at that point, but I knew a good bit about World War II. And I knew the whole entire shelving units at the library and at the bookstore, for that matter, were filled with history of American intelligence in World War I, or World War II, rather. So I figured World War I must be the same, but actually it's not. And it turned out to be great advice, because certainly when I started this work, which was a lot longer ago than I'm going to tell you, almost anything you wanted to write on American intelligence in that war was new, aside from domestic intelligence, there'd been a lot of work on that that is less true, fortunately now, but it's still substantially true. It's a very much wide open field. So that gave me a lot of freedom. It was a great topic. And what I ultimately, after casting around some more to sort of narrow that topic down, what I ultimately became interested in is how World War I, to a substantial degree, is the origin story of what I call modern American intelligence. And I don't cast it in these terms. I don't have the training to do that. But really, ultimately, I think I'm making an argument about culture, going back to those differences I observed between the two American intelligence agencies. And I mean, ultimately, what my argument boils down to is that, look, if you're considering modern American intelligence and what you're interested in is the sort of the current legal structures and the current lineup of agencies that. All right, fine, that comes out primarily of the national security Act of 1947 that established the CIA and the Air Force and the National Security Council and so forth and so on, indirectly, the Defense Department and you, okay, you get honorable mention or, you know, that story has a preface of the Office of Strategic Services during World War II. Fine. I mean, that's all perfectly Reasonable. But if by modern American intelligence, what you're referring to is the various sub disciplines and general types of practices within the broad field of intelligence. So, you know, clandestine operations and signals intelligence and code breaking and exploiting open source materials and intelligence analysis and counterintelligence and even covert action. And if you're talking about an understanding of intelligence and why we do it Right. That primarily it's in order to enable decision makers back then, largely military leaders, though not exclusively enable decision makers to make better decisions, that that's all there by the end of World War I. Okay. And I basically suggest that, you know, a reasonably savvy American intelligence officer on November 11, 1918, could have a professional conversation with an American intelligence officer of 1945, or probably even of 1955. There would have obviously been some changes in technology you'd have to explain to that guy. But basically they would be speaking the same language. And that's ultimately what I argue in this book.
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B
Yeah, I mean, and I think that is very clear from the start. And even if the book and the title of the book and the book itself are centered around the First World War, actually the historical analysis starts somewhat earlier. You start with the Spanish American War and later on with the conflict in Mexico, and later on the punitive expedition into Mexico. What role do these previous events play in your story and in the emergence of these features?
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A
No, it's a good question. I'm glad you mentioned that. So the way I tell the story is that this really starts, albeit slowly, in about the late 1870s. And then there's just a really rapid acceleration during World War I or during America's participation in World War I. But you're absolutely right. So the first two enduring American intelligence agencies, they still exist were the Office of National Intelligence, sorry, the Office of Naval Intelligence, which was created in 1883, and then in the War Department, War Department Intelligence, which was created in 1885. And it's had a variety of names over time, even just in the period I'm writing about in this book. I'm just going to call it the Military Intelligence Division for short. They were established in 1885, and both of these were actually an outgrowth of a. A broader military reform movement in both the Navy and in the army and War Department. You know, the federal forces had done a lot of pretty sophisticated things with intelligence during the US Civil War, 1861-1865, but most of that was at the level of armies in the field, not at the War Department level in Washington. So when the War is over, there's a massive demobilization, all those armies in the field go away, and basically literally nothing is retained or really, really remembered. Pretty much of our intelligence experience from the Civil War. So the services fall into big doldrums after that war. And in the late 1870s, as I say, there starts to be a reform movement. And one of the things they do is they realize that, you know, hey, you know, some of the leading powers in Europe, notably the Germans, though certainly not exclusively the French, also have established these offices whose job is to acquire information about our potential adversaries and about the places we might fight. You know, fighting wars is becoming more industrial and thus of necessity, more sort of information centric or at least information is becoming more important to it. And we should have organizations like that. Now, ONI and the Military Intelligence Division were, were pretty light on analysis at the time. They did a lot more sort of compiling information and reference materials and all of that. But, but they existed and they, they took over the running of the military and naval attaches. So basically military diplomats attached to US Embassies overseas who were intelligence collectors, typically during this period, with some very minor exceptions, they didn't do anything clandestine, but they were acquiring what we would today call overt human intelligence and then also open source materials. So the seeds were planted there. I would also, and we may come onto him in different ways later, but I would also point to the sort of groundbreaking or foundational, maybe is a better way of putting it, intellectual work by an army officer named Arthur L. Wagner. So Wagner was a graduate of West Point, he was an infantry officer, and he spent some time fighting Native Americans out west. And in 1886, he's assigned to the infantry and Cavalry School at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, which today has evolved into the Command and General Staff College. And you might think that the infantry and Cavalry School would be a, you know, a great place for intellectual inquiry and learning at the time, but no, actually it was pretty much a wreck. Wagner discovered the curriculum was, was, was severely lacking. The teaching was horrible, and the, the army would, or, you know, regiments would be assigned to send officers to the school and they, regimental commanders would always choose their worst officers that they wanted to get rid of to send to the school. So Wagner, who, you know, is going to develop into one of these sort of soldier intellectuals and wants to improve things and he wants to put the army on a sound intellectual footing. He's not impressed with what he calls pressomaniacs, the idea that the US army should just slavishly follow everything that the Prussians are doing, though he's willing to learn from the Europeans. And instead he wants to learn. He wants to mine the lessons of the US Civil War, or in addition, he wants to mine the lessons of the Civil War. So this leads him to make some recommendations that lead to a revision in 1891 of the Infantry Drill Regulations. But then it's noticed that there's no intellectual foundation for these drill regulations. So the commandant of the school asks him to fix that. And he writes two books. The second one is called Organization and Tactics, which is published in 1894, kind of the closest analog to ADP3.0 today, or the earlier Field Manual 105 on Operations. But he also writes a book called the Service of Security and information in 1893, which is pretty much, as far as I know, the first American sort of how to book manual, if you will, on intelligence. Later on, he's going to head the Military Intelligence Division in the run up to the Spanish American War and in the early aughts, he's going to be the first head of the nascent Army War College before he dies prematurely. But this book of his Service of Security and Information is going to go through multiple editions. It's going to be in print until 1910. It's going to be used widely in the army and the various National Guards. And he does some pretty sophisticated things in there for the time. He talks about the need to have intelligence at the level of the War Department or the level of Washington gathered in peacetime. There's intelligence you will want in war that you can pretty much only easily acquire in peace. So be ready. And also we need intelligence at the level of the army in the field. Of course, he talks a lot about scouting and screening with cavalry and infantry and all of that, but he also talks about open source intelligence, signals intelligence, not at length, but he does espionage, counter espionage, deception operations, you know, acquiring intelligence from prisoners and deserters. His 1896 edition talks about reconnaissance with cameras from balloons, which is a pretty cutting edge idea at the time. And he's thinking many of the thoughts that are, well, let me rephrase this. Much of what's in there is going to become foundational at a very elementary level from our eyes today, but foundational to how the U.S. army approach the War Department and the army approach intelligence in the years to come. And I guess the other thing I'd say is, say quickly is that this is a period also in which the army and the Navy are pretty vigorously sharing ideas about intelligence, but also sort of other military reform related ideas with each other. I'm going to, I'm sure, talk much more here about the War Department in the army than ONI or the State Department, which is another player in my book. But they're, they're all very well, ONI initially and then later the State Department during the war itself are actually very much in the mix as well.
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B
During the Spanish American War and also in the Maximus Expedition, there is progressively more intensive work, as you mentioned, of intelligence collection and analysis. But I guess you know where this, my next question is going about the punitive expedition, because I guess it's the price to pay of having me as a host. In the punitive expedition, there is also the emergence of what today we would call covert action and specifically an assassination attempt by proxy. Can you talk us a bit about this episode?
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Yeah, I knew with moral certitude, Luca, that you were going to fixate on that one. Yeah. So punitive expedition, right. So in 1916, Pancho Villa, as you know, so just one symptom of the broad, you know, broad scale and long standing at that point, unrest and political turmoil in Mexico. Pancho Villa and his band raid Columbus, New Mexico, kill a bunch of Americans, and President Wilson and the, you know, American government decide that we need to send a p. Punitive expedition to bring him to justice. And John J. Pershing is a man you may have heard of, is put in command of this. And, you know, the punitive expedition is going to experiment with a lot of things that are going to be important to American intelligence in the American Expeditionary Force in France in 1917 and 1918. But to focus on the thing you asked about specifically, yes, covert action. So the punitive expeditions intelligence officers were using quite a number of Japanese, also Chinese, but ethnic Japanese, which there was a reasonable population in at least northern Mexico at that time as spies. And somehow or another, and it's not clear to me, but somehow or another, and I should also say that with regard to the punitive expedition I'm drawing here, I've done some original work here, but I'm drawing really heavily on the excellent work of Charles Harris and Lewis Sadler at the University of New Mexico. But at any rate, an officer in Pershing's command somehow comes up with $50,000 in gold. Now this is $50,000 in 1916. So this is an enormous amount of money. So one of his officers is obviously comes from a rich family and sort of quietly offers $50,000 in gold for Pancho Villa's head And Pershing again, very discreetly puts out the word. And his intelligence officers very discreetly put out the word. And four Japanese spies either offered or were recruited to try and do the job. And these spies actually were able to ingratiate themselves. So we're talking June, July here of 1916, gratiate themselves and get, you know, authorized access, if you will, to Pancho villa's camp. And two of them are actually able in July 1916, to poison Villa's coffee. Pancho Villa is suspicious of the possibility of poisoning, just as a general proposition. So he doesn't drink enough of the coffee to, to, to be killed. He gets sick. He doesn't die. Some time passes and a rumor of this got out to the Attorney General, guy named Thomas Gregory back in Washington. And he's troubled about this possibility that the United States would do something so, you know, unhanded and immoral. And so he asked the Secretary of War, Newton Baker, like, hey, what's going on? Baker apparently doesn't know anything about it. And he orders an investigation. And the investigation is sent down to General Frederick Funston, who's the senior army commander at the southern border, to whom Pershing reports. And Funston tasks Pershing to do the investigation. And after a suitable amount of time for doing the investigation, quote, unquote, Pershing reports back. No idea what at all you're talking about. Nothing happened here. In other words, Pershing just flat out lied. And you've got plausible deniability. Right? The folks in Washington are not in a position to say, well, no, no, we have independent evidence that this thing happened in rural Northern Mexico. They just have to suck it up and take it. So I think you can see not the first American covert action there, but an early one. And one, I think that particularly fits our present day model of it. Just minus a finding, I suppose.
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B
Always great to have the person, the individual or the institution suspected of the crime conduct the investigation about the crime.
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It's always very convenient.
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B
We talked about John Pershing, and he's a very prominent character in the book, as you said, he is in charge of the punitive expedition in Mexico, but he's also in charge of the American Expeditionary Force in World War I. Is there any lesson that he takes from his previous experience into World War I?
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A
Yeah. No, it's a good question. So I'd actually start by saying that before he became a general, Pershing was a cavalry officer. And in the American military in the US army system. That meant that in some ways, his head, whether he thought about it in explicitly these terms or not? In some ways, his head was in intelligence from the beginning of his career. The United States, unlike many Central and Western European countries at least the United States cavalry tradition was, was pretty much exclusively one of light cavalry whose job was, okay, some skirmishing and that sort of thing, but mostly screening and scouting as opposed to a heavy European tradition of a strong European tradition rather of heavy cavalry who are combat arms designed to win by shock and, you know, charging the enemy. That's not the, really the American way. Cavalry was, you know, long thought of as the eyes and the ears of a commander. Right. I'm an American commander, horse cavalry. And so he's already kind of been trained to be in a receptive mood for intelligence. And what you find is that a number of his top intel people, three at any rate from the punitive expedition, are going to end up in comparable positions in his intel staff in the American Expeditionary Forces. And in particular, I want to highlight an officer named Benjamin Fouloi, who was the commander of the 1st Arrow Squadron for Pershing in Mexico. The aircraft of the time were not up, were pretty flimsy devices just to begin with. We are talking 1916 here. You wouldn't want to actually get in one of these airplanes, I don't think. And furthermore, dry northern Mexico is a pretty inhospitable environment for those kinds of machines. So the aero squadron in the punitive expedition does good work in reconnaissance and also carrying messages, but particularly reconnaissance. Pershing is impressed with in the first month and by that time they have run out of flyable aircraft and they're withdrawn and he never gets any more airplanes. But he thinks very highly of their contribution and he speaks very highly of, of Benjamin Fouloi. And Fouloi becomes his first chief of air service in the American Expeditionary Forces. So he's learned that there's some utility to commanders of intelligence. He also, by the way, they also experiment with, not experiment, they engage in interception and code breaking in Mexico as well. So he's receptive to all these kinds of things. And I think he refined and broadened his appreciation of what intelligence could do for him as a, as a commander. And you see this in, you know, I think one particular thing, when he sets up his staff in France in the American Expeditionary Forces, he chooses a man named Major, later Brigadier General Dennis Nolan, to be his G2, his chief of intelligence. And Nolan will give him. During World War I, Nolan will give Pershing a one on one intelligence briefing every morning. And Nolan also is given the right to see Pershing any time of night or day that he wants to. A privilege not extended to all of the senior members of Pershing's staff. So I think he came into the punitive expedition of 1617 with some degree of appreciation for intelligence. Pershing did. He came out of it with even more, and you can see that in his personnel assignments and also his just general regard for intelligence as commander of the first army and of the GHQ of the American Expeditionary Forces.
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B
I mean, I think we spoke already about two very prominent characters in your book. One is Pershing and the other one is Arthur Wagner. I guess there is a third very prominent character which is Ralph Van Diemen. Can you tell us something about him and what was his role and why he's become so prominent, shall I say, also a bit controversial, perhaps?
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A
I think that's fair. Yeah, I think that's fair. Yeah. Ralph Van Diemen earned the moniker, which you will still hear today, of the father of American military intelligence. So he was born in Ohio, 1865, the year the Civil War ended, and served as an enlisted man for a little while in the Ohio National Guard, during which time he actually took part in suppressing labor disputes, which may have been, I hypothesized, may have been a formative experience for him. He goes on to get a bachelor's degree from Harvard in 1888 and gets an MD from the University of Cincinnati five years later. I should also note, of no particular importance, but I always thought it was amusing quite a few people would remark of him, and rightly, I think that he looked like Abraham Lincoln without a beard. So that's have that mental image in your mind. And so in 1891 was, while he's actually still in medical school, he gets commissioned into the US army, and eventually he ends up at the OR after a few years, rather, he ends up at the infantry and cavalry school at Fort Leavenworth, where he studies under Arthur Wagner. Then in 1897, he's going to come to the Military Intelligence Division and be with Wagner and that small office as they're making preparations for the Spanish American War. He'd also serve in intelligence capacity in the Philippine American War. So this is the insurgency counterinsurgency that kicked off in the Philippines after the US acquired them in 1918, nominally ended in 1902, but really trickled on until 1911. And there was a lot of effort put into the counterinsurgency effort, a lot of intelligence effort put into the counterinsurgency effort, intelligence effort in the Philippine War, and in particular, an important Innovation was the use of card files, 3 by 5, cards 4 by 6. I don't know what size they were, but which ONI and MID had already been using. But taking that to the Philippines. And the US Forces had divided the Philippines into a number of districts. And each district had an army commander that was responsible for security there. And the intelligence person in each of these districts would maintain a card file of insurgents that he could identify and prominent, I guess what we might call influencers in the region, a card file of, you know, data about these people to support the effort. And whenever new information would come in, that intelligence officer would add it to the card file, but he'd also send a copy of that new data up the chain to the next higher echelon, where they were also maintaining a duplicate set of card files of all of their subordinate commands. So you would have this. So, you know, the army units in the Philippines at all the different echelons would have the same intelligence picture and be able to see the, you know, see the AOR in similar sorts of ways. And so I think Van Diemen must have seen that. And any of that, it comes back to Washington and again, and he's assigned to the shreds, or what are, of what are left of the Military Intelligence Division after a reorganization that more or less inadvertently did away with it. And then when the United States enters World War I in 1917, or at least declares war, he's finally able to convince the Army Chief of Staff, Hugh Scott, who's not very interested in this stuff, thank you very much, that we really need to have a military intelligence effort here in Washington in the War Department. And also, by the way, General Pershing, when he goes to France, is going to need an intelligence effort. And so Ben Dieman is put in charge of the Military Intelligence Division that's created in the spring of 1917 in Washington, runs it for about a year, gets it up and running, and then he's sent to France to the American Expeditionary Forces, not as Pershing's intelligence officer, but it's kind of a senior roving intelligence troubleshooter. After the war, he's going to have a regimental command and one or two other things. He's going to retire, and then he's basically going to run a private investigative agency investigating leftists for businesses. And I think, don't quote me on this, but if I recall correctly, the government of California, for right up until more or less the beginning of World War I, and is very concerned about the Japanese and also the Bolshevik Communist threat to The United States.
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B
As we come up to World War I. I think one of the features that becomes prominent in your book, and which is unexpectedly somewhat more controversial than usual lately, is the need for the US to collaborate with its European allies. Can you talk to us a bit about what form this collaboration take? And I thought it was particularly ironic considering the past few weeks that Denmark seems to be playing a particularly prominent role in this intelligence collaboration.
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A
Yes, indeed. Thank you for that. So I'll kind of divide this into two sections. So the first is intelligence collaboration, or liaison, if you will, with the British and the French and to a genuine, though much less degree, the Italians. And this is widespread and pervasive. Okay. Now, as I've, you know, just suggested to you, from, you know, the early 1880s up through the punitive expedition, the United States has been learning a lot of lessons about intelligence. But we are still, you know, in April 1917, when the United States enters World War I, we are still far behind, you know, the leading practitioners of the, of the craft, the, the, the British, the Germans and the French, particularly the French, far behind. And so a couple of things, you know, happen. We, we, we embark basically on a, you know, breakneck, you know, education course on, on how this is done and how to do it. And so you find, for instance, that the British and the French bring to us the idea that it's really important to have robust aerial reconnaissance and make use of photography for intelligence purposes. Now, the United States goes on to be a very important player in that, both on the collection side and sort of on the technical developing and refining the technology side. Now in the rear area. But we are spurred to that by the Brits. By the Brits and the French, particularly the Brits, to be honest. Similarly, we are read the riot act by the British and the French on the need to have good counterintelligence and counter espionage inside the American Expeditionary Force that we're going to send to France. They're basically saying, unless you can guarantee us that your army is going to be free of German spies, we do not want them in France. They will be dangerous. And they help us get that up and going all the way down to at the training camps where army regiments and divisions are being raised and trained. Here in the continental United States, you routinely find British and or French instructors training lieutenants and sergeants on how to do this kind of stuff. So there's all that training aspect. When the AAF sets up a training school in France for intel, quite a number of the faculty are British or French. So there's the sort of, the training and education side and the sort of getting us motivated to, like, oh, have you thought about this? No. Have you thought about this? No. Have you thought about this? So there's that. But then also in the substance of intelligence, there's a whole lot of intelligence sharing and also joint operations among the Allies. So, you know, with regard to, say, frontline intelligence, or more properly, with regard to order of battle intelligence. So the strength and organization and lay down on the ground of the German and also Austro Hungarian armies. Right. Well, you know, a division that disappears from in front of the British front today may show up next week on the American front or vice versa. So it's good if we're, if the, you know, the British, the Americans, the French and the Belgians are sharing order of battle intelligence with each other. Similarly, German radio signals intercepted, say, in the. And decrypted in the French sector may well be using the same cipher system that different signals intercepted by the Americans or the British might be using. So it makes sense not only to share decrypts, to share actual, you know, decrypted messages from the Germans, but also to share cryptanalytic techniques with each other. So there's a lot of that that goes on. The French are by far the leaders in that, by the way. Similarly, farther away from the front, there's cooperation in counterintelligence and counter espionage. So, for instance, in Argentina, there's a lot of concern about potential German intelligence activities in Argentina and also acquisition of war materials. And just generally we want to mess with German activities in Argentina. And so the. So US ber, British, French and Italian intelligence form basically a working group in Buenos Aires, an intelligence working group under the chairmanship of the Italians to go after the Germans. On the intelligence front, there's cooperation among the Allies on vetting applications for visas for people to come to the United States, I suspect to the other countries as well, though I don't know that for a fact. So there's all kinds of cooperation among the Allies. There's even joint, in a few cases, some joint or at least cooperative espionage operations and at least one joint covert action that I can report to, or combined, I suppose would be a better word in a military context, combined covert action. This is in Sweden. Sweden is a neutral country, of course, in World War I, but they kind of generally lean pro British, unlike the Danes, who we'll get to in a minute. They kind of lean pro British or pro German, rather. They lean pro German. And the main Swedish news agency in particular leans pro German. And while it subscribes to the Associated Press and Reuters and another one that's escaping my mind at the moment from an Allied country, they tend to give, they tend to spike the stories that come across those news, those wire services that are kind of reporting good news about the Allies and they tend to emphasize the stories coming from the German service. And so the US Naval attache and the British decide that it would be a good idea to set up a new alternate kind of Allied leaning Swedish news service, which they jointly fund and they work together to find a retired senior Swedish military officer to be the head of it. And yeah, and they set up an alternate news service. And you know, as far as we know, nobody in Sweden, aside from the people like running it, had any idea that behind this was, were the, were the Brits and the Americans. So that's sort of the Allies, you know, the Allies and Entoden's liaison with them. But some of the neutral countries, and I'll highlight Denmark here, were also willing to engage in sort of under the radar liaison and cooperation with American and also Allied intelligence as well. The US Naval attache in Denmark, a guy named John Gade, who'd actually been in Sweden doing what I just mentioned before I before Denmark forged a really close relationship with senior leadership of the Danish navy, reporting on very much clandestinely, but reporting to him on German naval ships passing through the Danish Straits, which was useful information and also forged a close relationship with the Danish military intelligence service, whom he called, and I pulled the quote here, he called the Danish military Intelligence service the truest friends a fellow could ever wish for. And to a lesser extent, things like that would occasionally happen in some of the other neutral countries, but Denmark particularly.
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B
I think there are quite a few issues that still sound very relevant today in your book, even if we're talking about more now more than 100 years ago. Another one is certainly a, an early involvement of private businesses. They sort of become involved both as a sort of COVID for intelligence activities, but sometimes they conduct. They're also sort of independent or semi independent intelligence activities. Can you tell us how this emerges or. And why perhaps.
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A
Yeah. So a couple thoughts here. So first off, one of the things that I'm kind of backing up here, and I will get to explicitly answering your question, but one of the things that I observed in this period is that there is because there's this perception that the nature of war is changing and it's not just immediately directly about the troops and the artillery pieces on the front line. It's about everything behind that, you know, including defense industry and all the inputs that go into defense industry and morale in capitals or belligerent countries, rather not just capitals. And what's going on inside, you know, war ministries and, you know, foreign ministries and cabinets and that sort of thing. And there's a great worry about espionage as well. And so you need a variety of different ways of collecting this information. And it's not just now a matter of sort of observational intelligence, of, you know, sending your cavalry to look or even flying an airplane with a camera over the enemy's lines. It's also about acquiring, you know, I believe. I believe David Kahn called it verbal information. What's going on inside these bureaucracies, whether they're government ministries or mining businesses or, you know, ship factories or whatever it happens to be. Right. Stealing, if not documents, at least the information in documents or in people's heads out of those kinds of organizations. And so you need to have a variety of different human intelligence techniques to be able to do this. SIGINT can sometimes contribute, I think more so later on in World War II and Cold War, but it contributed to some of that. But particularly we're talking about human intelligence and espionage. And there are certain. So that's number one. So there are certain kinds of places that it is easier for people who are either civilians or at least who appear to be civilians to collect on than it would be for a military person or even a diplomat. Right. And so there's a great perception of this, and there's a variety of measures, most of which don't go too far. One, because, you know, some of them never get, you know, funded, you know, also because a lot of these ideas show up very late in the war and take time to implement it. Basically, the war ends before they get too far, you know, other sorts of reasons. But there's a variety of different efforts to use businessmen or even businesses. So during the war, General Dennis Nolan I referred to earlier, he was the G2, the intelligence officer per for Pershing in France, thinks about using businessmen, American businessmen operating out of neutral countries who knew both those countries but also knew Germany. And because, you know, the neutrals were able to carry on legitimate trade and business and whatnot with Germany, that's. That's a way into the country, right? So you, you, you, you, you find trustworthy businessmen who can be trusted with large amounts of, you know, money from the U.S. treasury and, and the ability to set up spy networks. And that really comes to. Not the military attaches, military and the naval Attaches both often use business people with similar kinds of access as sources directly. But also the Military Intelligence Division, Fairly late in the war, thinks of trying to recruit businesses themselves, not just individual business people, businessmen, because it was 1917, 18, they were businessmen, but actual businesses. And the idea here was if we recruit the senior executives to help us out, right, of companies that are operating in places where we have intelligence interests, if we recruit the senior executives to help out, the people lower down the chain in those companies don't even need to know that they're actually acting as collectors for the US Military or the US Government, right? So obviously we're talking primarily, so we're talking here about recruiting US Businesses to help. So obviously their US Businesses are not doing business in Germany or in Austria, Hungary. We're primarily talking here about intelligence in neutral countries, which is mostly focused on thwarting German activities. So they approach the chief executives of countries of companies, major companies, some of which are famous to this day, like United Fruit, US Steel, Standard Oil of New Jersey, the Singer Sewing Machine Company and others. And they had some difficulty persuading some of these people because the CEOs of these companies didn't necessarily like the Woodrow Wilson administration's antitrust policies, for instance. But they did get cooperation. And the way this would work would be if the headquarters could answer the. The military's questionnaires about what's going on in. I'm making this up, but Argentina or Brazil or whatever, great. And if not, they would task their lower level people in the business. And what they're looking for here is primarily political, economic and what they called psychologic, which would mean more today, more like cultural intelligence kinds of things from these companies. And I guess I'd also just sort of close with one or two other minor things. The Military Intelligence Division also had some success with literally hiring people who were to be under the COVID of traveling salesmen in various places. Except what they found was it was this worked best when you hired somebody who actually was a traveling salesperson. And MID even sent a filmmaker on an espionage mission to Japan, China and Siberia. But unfortunately he proved worse than useless. So a lot of different sort of experimentation, but some of these kinds of things are going to be developed more robustly in World War II and then in the Cold War.
- [44:39]
B
We talked earlier about cryptology and just now about businesses. What I found quite fun in the book was sort of professional, but also somewhat wacky. Riverbank Laboratories and which seem to sort of feature prominently in the history of US Cryptology. Can you tell us a bit about that.
- [45:00]
A
Yes, with pleasure. And you're right, wacky is an excellent adjective to describe this. I should say that this is something where I am not breaking any new ground. I mentioned earlier that so much of American intelligence in World War I was sort of wide open for historians, but there had been a lot of work done on domestic intelligence. I should have added, also a lot of work done on American code breaking and cryptology more generally in. In World War I. But yes, so the Riverbank Laboratories. So the Riverbank Laboratories was the creation of an eccentric millionaire American named George Fabian. And he set up a what I understand to be the first private research institution in the United States in a town called Geneva, Illinois. And this place did a lot of things. It did chemistry research, research in acoustics, which I think went on for a very long time. Some version of Riverbank Labs, I think still exists. They did work in genetics. Now, mind you, this is before we knew what DNA was. So, you know. But Fabian was also interested in Shakespeare, or from his point of view, I might put Shakespeare in scare quotes because Fabian believed that the works of Shakespeare had not in fact been written by William Shakespeare. They'd been written by Sir Francis Bacon. And furthermore, that Sir Francis Bacon had concealed in the Shakespeare works various coded messages that made this clear. And if only we could find those coded messages and decrypt them, we could prove that Shakespeare was a fraud. And it was really vacant. And so he had a staff of cryptanalysts pouring through the works of Shakespeare to do this. Now, you and I, we now know that this is just not the way that Shakespeare's works came into existence. But nonetheless, they actually had people who had or were trained to have real code breaking skills working on this. One notable one was Elizabeth Smith. And another one was a guy named William Friedman who was actually hired originally as a geneticist. But there turned out to be some intellectual commonalities between that and code breaking. And he was brought over to the Shakespeare code breaking side, ended up marrying Elizabeth Smith. They were William and Elizabeth Friedman. Elizabeth would go on to a notable but sort of rather publicly suppressed career breaking codes in the next two decades, two and a half decades for the Coast Guard, the Treasury. Trained army and Navy personnel put together a cryptographic system for the post World War II International Monetary Fund. And William Friedman, of course, headed the team that in the late interwar period would break into the Japanese Purple diplomatic cipher system and went on to a career in not only code breaking during World War II, but actually into the National Security Agency. Of the Cold War. So, yeah, so anyway, he's put these people to work and there's more to work on breaking codes in Shakespeare. But this makes them by far the largest collection of code breakers anywhere in the country. The army had three people at this time who did code breaking, none of whose jobs was to do code breaking. They just would do it as a hobby. So whenever the army would come across an enciphered message, often stolen somehow by the State Department that it wanted decrypted, it would send it to one of these three officers. But that was not something that would scale up. So when World War I came along, Fabian says, hey, I got all these code breakers here. You're going to need code breakers. He says to the War Department, Navy isn't really doing much of this. I'm happy to train them. And so the Riverbank labs actually trained a great number of code breakers who would go on to work either In Washington in MI8, the code breaking component of the War Department intelligence later after the war would become known as the American Black Chamber under Herbert Yardley, or go on to be code breakers in the American Expeditionary Forces intel staff. And actually, late on in the war, William Friedman gets detached from Riverbank and is actually able to go to France, also during the war here on the US Side. Sometimes materials needing decryption would be sent to Riverbank, though the War Department, as I say, was creating its own sort of internal ability to do this. Ultimately, Fabian proved a little too eccentric, a little too interested in publishing results in something that the US Government viewed as being, of necessity, highly secret. Also, he had strong relationships with the Japanese, who of course, were, you know, an Allied power during World War I, but already becoming rivals to the United States and the Pacific. And so eventually they cut him loose. But, yeah, George Fabian and Riverbank Laboratory is a very strange story, but also really, really important, as you noted in your question, to the development of American cryptology and of intelligence, you know, more broadly, for that matter, one is left.
- [50:22]
B
To wonder whether he ever found out who actually wrote Shakespeare.
- [50:25]
A
I doubt he was ever convinced, I would say that William and Elizabeth Friedman, in retirement in the 1950s, published a book in which they pretty definitively demolished the proposition that it was Bacon. But Fabian was dead by then.
- [50:40]
B
That's what they want us to think. I think we mentioned this, and we don't necessarily need to spend a lot of time on this, but we've also mentioned that a lot of intelligence or more properly, counterintelligence stuff was also going on within the United States in the book, you suggest that the existing views in the scholarship about how U.S. counterintelligence comes about are not entirely convincing. Can you tell us why they're not convincing and what you're suggesting instead?
- [51:14]
A
Yeah, I guess I would say not entirely convincing. I'd say not entirely satisfying. And I'm talking about two particular things here. So one is there's this notion out there of the. Of the boomerang effect that, you know, imperial practices abroad, you know, sort of boomerang back and get applied here domestically. I'm only interested in, for my purposes, in the intelligence components of that. But with regard to intelligence, these arguments have been made by people like scholars like Joan Jensen, particularly notably Alfred McCoy, Douglas Porch, and the idea that some of the counterinsurgency intelligence techniques that were used that I mentioned in the Philippine War, Philippine American War, rather, came back and were applied in the United States during World War I and then subsequently. And then the other is there's a lot of scholarship out there arguing that a great deal of the really pervasive, really pervasive domestic, you know, intelligence and surveillance during the First World War here in the US Was, Was aimed at oppressing, suppressing, you know, keeping down racial and ethnic minorities, labor unions, that kind of thing. Okay? So those are the two concepts that I have, you know, things to say about. I don't think either of these things is wrong. What I do think is they're incomplete. They're not fully satisfactory. So on the first one of this notion of the boomerang effect, I think too much of this on the intel side, really, what are we talking about here? We're primarily talking about Ralph Van Diemen, okay? That is the major intelligence influence in terms of a person who could be in a position to bring practices back to the United States. And so I'm perfectly willing to accept the hypothesis that. That the way that Ralph Van Diemen organized this system of pervasive domestic intelligence in the United States by the War Department owes a lot to what he learned in his previous intelligence career, notably in the Philippine American War. The problem is that it doesn't necessarily fully explain why the army not only. Or the War Department not only imposed this system on the US Public, but also on themselves, which seems a little, you know, perverse in the way one might immediately understand the boomerang effect. But also it doesn't really help explain why the Office of Naval Intelligence was every bit as active and, you know, for purposes of domestic intelligence, comparably large, but every bit as active in doing this. Domestically in the United States, as the War Department was. Yeah. Particularly given that the Navy played a, shall we say, modest role in the Philippine American War. And I'm not aware of any role of Naval intelligence intelligence at all in that. And there may have been some somewhere, but centrally, this was an army problem in the Philippines. So I think there were. I think there were other things going on there. And which kind of leads me to the other one about, you know, domestic surveillance being about racial, ethnic, minor racial and ethnic minorities, labor unions, that sort of thing. Again, I think that scholarship is all good, and I find it persuasive. But I also think that if when you're talking about what militaries, the War Department, the Army and the Navy are doing, you ought in the first instance to look for military explanations. And the understanding of war that the. I alluded to this briefly, I think, earlier, the understanding of war that the United States and indeed most major belligerents involved in World War I had, was that World War I was a clash not only of armies in the field and navies at sea, but of entire, you know, economies and industries, of entire populations, clashes of ideology, all this sort of thing. And that those other things, beyond just direct combat could potentially be decisive, at least in a negative sense. If morale collapses on the home front, you lose. No matter what happened on the battlefield was left, was the theory. And so I. And this is very well documented that the, you know, the military of the US and of other countries believe this. And you see, many of these themes actually show up in the speeches of Woodrow Wilson. His Flag day speech of 1917, and actually his request to Congress for a declaration of war cite a number of these factors. Right. So I argue that now you can disagree about whether this understanding of war at the time was accurate or not. I think that's a. That's a reasonable discussion to have. But it's pretty clear this is the understanding war they had. And given that, I argue it would have been strategic malpractice for the militaries not to have done domestically, you know, more or less what they did. So I think there's an addition, and I think that also has, you know, some explanatory power for the boomerang effect as well. Like if. If they hadn't brought it back from the Philippines, they would have needed to invent it anyway. So that's basically the crux of my argument here. I'm not disagreeing. I'm trying to augment. I'm saying, like, there's. There's a. There's there's missing pieces here.
- [56:42]
B
It's very interesting you mentioned Wilson in your, in your answer just now because for someone like me, who's generally used to reading post 1947 intelligence books on, on the CIA and so on, for one reason or the other, precedents always tend to play a very prominent part. Whereas in this book, especially when it comes to precedent's relations with intelligence, they do appear to be often either absent, sometimes uninterested in intelligence matters, and sometimes even hostile, perhaps as a matter of culture, like a gentleman, don't do this type of thing, and so on. Can you explain to us why this was the case or if this was the case?
- [57:25]
A
No, I think that's absolutely right. Up until World War II, when you get the creation of the Coordinator of Information, which soon sort of evolves into the Office of Strategic Services, which is a function of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Up until then, intelligence was largely a matter of cabinet departments, the War Department, the Navy Department during the period of American neutrality in World War I. The State Department gets into the business and in their own particular way, the Justice Department with a bureau primarily with the Bureau of Investigation, later the FBI, though other bits of it as well, during, during World War I. So it's primarily a departmental matter, not a national matter. On a few very modest occasions before World War I, presidents get involved. There's some sense that military and naval attaches abroad could play a part in the dollar diplomacy of the late 19th century, for instance. But broadly speaking, this is a departmental matter. World War I comes along, and because intelligence is a reasonably important part of World War I, at least in my view, you know, Wilson has, President Woodrow Wilson has some degree of awareness of it, and he's interested in certain very narrow aspects of it. We didn't get into it today, and it's a long story, but there's a State Department official actually who's running some penetrations of the German Navy out of Switzerland. And in the very late stages of the war, as Germanius, you know, wobbling, Wilson becomes interested in the reporting coming from him. But broadly speaking, President Wilson, as you sort of implied, finds this whole topic of intelligence, which he basically conflates with espionage, to be distasteful. And there's a number of important issues, and John Fox, who's the FBI's historian, actually has done some good work on this, among others. There's some important issues along the way where we really needed presidential decisions about who is going to be in charge of this particular thing or that particular thing that Sort of stuff where Wilson basically just chose to not make a choice. He just didn't. He just wanted. He wanted hands off of this. But one thing I will note is that I mentioned that During World War II, President Roosevelt, you know, creates intelligence organizations for himself. Basically. He. He had been Assistant Secretary of War. So. Sorry, sorry. Assistant Secretary of the Navy. So the number two civilian guy in the Department of the Navy during World War I. And during World World War I, he had been intensely interested in the activities of the Office of Naval Intelligence. And he, you know, I think he brought that forward with him. He always found it, near as I can tell, and I'm not a, you know, a Roosevelt scholar, but near as I can tell, he always. He always saw the business as rather romantic. And I think that is in many ways what appealed to him about it, at least early on, I'm sure During World War II, he probably developed a much more sophisticated understanding of it, but I think early on, pretty clearly, he loved it. Just for the concept of the intrigue and the romance.
- [60:50]
B
This is a very good way to connect. What is my final question actually, at. At the end of the book, you talk about the influence and the legacy of this period of American intelligence on the following decades, going up to the Second World War and sometimes even afterwards. How did this influence or this legacy play out?
- [61:15]
A
Yeah. So what I argue in the book. Well, the first part is not controversial. The book notes that at the end Of World War I, the United States massively downsizes its intelligence effort, as it downsized the military generally. And we're going to do a similar thing after World War II, for that matter. But U.S. intelligence did not go away. It endured to this day in the War Department and the Navy Department. And on the State Department side, it continued into the late 1920s. There were two different bits of State Department. They were engaged in intel during the interwar period. State would go back in that business in 1945. So we've got some institutional continuity on the War Department on the Navy side, albeit emaciated, but with the exception, I think, of COVID action. And there, even though I'm not entirely convinced, I think there may have been a few squirrely things going on in the interwar period that aren't well understood. But with the. I'll say with the exception of COVID action, all of the disciplines that I mentioned earlier, espionage and counterintelligence and code breaking and analysis and so forth and so on, all of those continue uninterrupted. Right. During the interwar period. In addition, you see Continuity in military organization and force structure, if you will. So not just offices at headquarters, but also after World War I, there will never be a time when the US government does not have a code breaking organization. Almost always two or more of them, at least until NSA comes along. But at least one we will never again be without them. There will never again be a time in which the army and actually for that matter the Navy, does not have at least some aerial reconnaissance capability, cameras and photo interpreters and all of that sort of good stuff. Also you see a certain degree of continuity in people carrying over. William Friedman is one I mentioned whose career went from World War in bringing World War I to the Cold War. Guy named Alan Dulles had a very minor role in intelligence collection on the State Department side during the war. I imagine listeners to this podcast don't need to be reminded who Alan Dulles was. A variety of people on the army aviation side who were in the aerial reconnaissance business went on, you know, to either, you know, lengthy careers in that business explicitly or as Air Force commanders or as commanders in the Army Air Force, or you have the core intelligence Officer for the 4th Corps in the U.S. army in France is a guy named Joseph Stilwell, who will go on to be a four star general and the commander in the China, India, Burma Theater. At a major consumer of intelligence during World War II. A variety of sort of not well known intelligence officers have enduring careers. Also you see it in enduring in concepts and doctrine. So the from 1906, if I recall correctly, the War Department or the army had been writing what it called field service regulations or you know, doctrinal publications. And the field service regulations from 1906 on had contained sections in them about intelligence and what kind of intelligence functions commanders are responsible for and like, where in their staff it's supposed to be and all that sort of stuff. And you can see those. And of course those ideas got broader and wider and other doctrinal publications spun off from that during World War I even more kept spinning off from all of those in the interwar period. But if you look at some of these doctrinal publications on intelligence from the eve of World War II, you can, you can see ideas, you know, in there that date all the way back like to, you know, 1918 or even before. And this is, you know, for obvious reasons in one sense, but also, you know, sort of directly in a way, this gets back to the personnel thing. In 1923, the US army sat down for its first big sort of lessons learned and rewrite of Doc of Doctrine now that we think we know what happened in World War I. And it was a very small committee, and the majority of people in it came out of Army Intel. Also right after the war, the Military Intelligence Division of the War Department decided that like a lot of other parts of the War Department, they were going to write a history of what we did during the war. And so they wrote a classified history, one copy, so that they said explicitly so that we can lay it all out there as a learning tool. And at least into the 1930s, new officers who got assigned to the MID were basically given this document when they arrived and said, go read it and come back when you're done and we'll put you to work. There were also a lot of continuity and discussion of ideas in things like professional journals and that sort of thing. And the last thing I note is that I don't want to overplay this. It speaks more to perceptions of the existence of an intelligence career or at least something approaching it, rather than being more tangibly useful. But you see the creation on both the army side and the Navy side of military intelligence reserve organizations and of private military intelligence reserve societies that are trying to, you know, keep the flame burning, to be honest, after not very long, these develop, evolve more to being primarily social organizations. But there is some sense that, like, hey, we are intelligence officers. We have, you know, we may be wearing infantry badges or artillery badges or whatever, but, you know, we know about intel and we are ready to serve the country again. Interestingly enough, one of the members on the army side of this is a guy named J. Edgar Hoover. But so I think. I think you see a lot of continuity in a lot of ways, which gets back to basically where I started this, is that I think that an intelligence officer in November 1918 would consider himself among peers with whom he could have real conversations if he spoke with an intelligence officer of World War II or the early Cold War.
- [68:07]
B
And on this mark, thank you so much for being on our show once again. The book is called World War I and the foundations of American Intelligence. Grab it. It's a great read and is still very relevant today more than 100 years later. Thanks again.
- [68:23]
A
Thank you.