The importance and value of a good, independent intelligence man in wartime can hardly be overemphasized. A great intelligence officer studies the unknown and works in the darkness, trying to see the shape of future events. He covers the sensitive ground where prejudice, or instinctive cultural bias, meets reality, and he must stand for reality, even if it means standing virtually alone. Great intelligence officers often have the melancholy job of telling their superiors things they don't want to hear. A great intelligence officer tries to make the unknown at least partially knowable; he tries to think like his enemy, and he listens carefully to those with whom he disagrees, simply because he knows that he has to challenge his own value system in order to understand the nature and impulse of the other side.
In all ways, Charles Willoughby not only failed to fit this role, but was the very opposite of it. He would have been considered a buffoon, thought Carleton Swift, then a 31-year-old intelligence officer, if the impact of his acts had not been so deadly serious. Swift, a C.I.A. man (who had come out of the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the C.I.A.), operated with State Department cover as a consul in the U.S. Embassy in Seoul and so was beyond Willoughby's reach. "There was an arrogance to Willoughby that was completely different from the uncertainty—the cautiousness—you associate with good intelligence men," he recalled. "It was as if he was always right, had always been right. Certitude after certitude poured out of him." Swift had been in Kunming during the Chinese civil war and had come away with a healthy respect for the military abilities of the Communists. He still had some good sources in China, and in dealing with your sources in those days, he believed, it was all about instinct and trust. He knew that the Chinese were gathering along the Yalu in huge numbers, and that their leadership had said they were going to enter the war. Best to take those promises seriously—especially since everything he picked up from his agents indicated that they were going ahead with their plans to enter the war. But Swift knew something else as well. "None of this was going to affect Willoughby. The Chinese were not going to come in. He knew it. And he was never wrong!"
In fact, Willoughby was not only stopping the combat-level intelligence machinery from sending its best and most consequential material to the top in Korea, he was also blocking other sources of intelligence, and keeping a careful eye on the small, bare-bones C.I.A. operation that in 1950 existed in Tokyo. It was being run by a man named William Duggan, an intelligence operative who had worked previously in Europe. From late September well into October, Duggan was receiving some exceptional information from his colleagues in Taiwan on what the Chinese Communist Army was up to. Some of the old Nationalist units, now incorporated into the People's Liberation Army, still had their radios. Sometimes they would manage to slip away at night and make contact with Taiwan to describe where they were and what they were doing. The messages all had a theme: we are all heading north to the Manchurian border; the field-level officers believe the decision has already been made to cross the Yalu. A young C.I.A. operative on Taiwan named Bob Myers was also picking up these reports from some of the Nationalists he was working with and passing them on to his superiors, and he knew that they had reached Duggan in Japan. What he did not learn until later was that Willoughby had found out about this and had threatened to close down Duggan's tiny shop and run him out of Japan unless he stopped trying to notify anyone higher up about the intelligence he had.
Meanwhile, within the Eighth Army, a fierce bureaucratic battle over the intelligence was taking place. The unfortunate man caught between Willoughby above and the growing doubts among intelligence men working on the ground in North Korea was the Eighth Army's G-2, Clint Tarkenton. "He was a Willoughby man … and you must not underestimate the importance of that. You must remember the enormous power that Willoughby had in that overall command structure," said Bill Train, the young officer in the First Cav's G-3 shop, who was convinced that the Chinese had entered the country in force, and that a major tragedy was in the making. "It was MacArthur's command, not a U.S. Army command, and if you crossed Willoughby it was not just a ticket out of there, it was probably a ticket straight out of your career." So Tarkenton followed the line from Tokyo that, as Willoughby had reported in an intelligence estimate on October 28, three days after the capture of the first Chinese prisoner in the Unsan area, "the auspicious time for such intervention has long since passed; it is difficult to believe that such a move, if planned, would have been postponed to a time when remnant NK forces have been reduced to a low point of effectiveness."
Train, however, was quite alarmed about what had happened at Unsan. Technically, intelligence was not even Train's area, but how could you do plans as a G-3 if you did not know who or where the enemy was? He had been pulled into some of the intelligence work because the G-2 section was shorthanded. Now he saw undeniable evidence of what appeared to be a large-scale Chinese entry into the war. It was not something that you scoffed at, as Willoughby's shop was doing; it was something that sent a chill through you and made you want to come up with even more information.
But whatever they came up with in terms of the Chinese presence, Willoughby had an answer for. If the roks reported killing 36 Chinese during a battle, and the bodies were still on the battlefield, then the answer came back that it was all just an Oriental way of saving face, that the roks had fought so poorly they had to claim a certain number of dead Chinese as a matter of pride. If Train came up with evidence that seemed to point to the presence of five or six Chinese divisions in a given area, the answer was invariably that these were different, smaller units from different Chinese divisions, now attached to a North Korean unit.
A Deadly Discrepancy
On October 30, after the attack at Unsan, Everett Drumright, in the Seoul embassy, reflecting the G-2 position quite precisely, cabled State that two regiments' worth of Chinese, perhaps 3,000 men, were probably engaged in the North. That was his honest attempt to answer what was the burning question of the moment for his superiors. The next day he cabled again, giving a smaller figure of only 2,000 Chinese troops. By November 1, after lower-level interrogators showed that there were troops there from several different Chinese armies, Tarkenton, following the Willoughby line, said that it was because smaller units from those armies but not the full armies themselves had showed up.
On November 3, as the reality of Unsan gradually set in, Willoughby upped his figures slightly. Yes, the Chinese were there in country, minimally 16,500 of them, at a maximum 34,000. On November 6, Tarkenton placed the total figure of Chinese aligned against both the Eighth Army and 10th Corps at 27,000. In reality, the number in country was already closer to 250,000, and growing. On November 17, MacArthur told Ambassador John Muccio that there were no more than 30,000 Chinese in the country, while the next day Tarkenton placed the number at 48,000. On November 24, the day the major U.N. offensive to go to the Yalu kicked off—instead of sensing how large the Chinese presence was and getting into strong defensive positions—Willoughby placed the minimum number at 40,000, the maximum at 71,000. At the time there were 300,000 Chinese troops waiting patiently for the U.N. forces to come a little deeper into their trap. It was, as Train put it, "the saddest thing I was ever associated with because you could almost see it coming, almost know what happened was going to happen, those young men moving into that awful goddamn trap."
It was as if one vast part of the army, the part not commanded by Douglas MacArthur, knew that trouble was imminent as the other part kept moving forward. On Thanksgiving Day, General Al Gruenther visited Dwight Eisenhower, his old boss from Europe, at Eisenhower's residence at Columbia University, of which Eisenhower, biding his time for a run at the White House, was then president. Gruenther's oldest son, Dick, class of 1946 at West Point, had a company in the Seventh Division, some of whose men were very far north and headed for the Yalu. On November 17, four days before his senior officers reached the Yalu and pissed in it, Dick Gruenther (who had been sure they were already fighting the Chinese) was severely wounded in the stomach in one of the small battles that preceded the main Chinese offensive. Al Gruenther, Eisenhower's former chief of staff, had just finished a tour as director of the 100-man Joint Chiefs staff, which meant that he was aware of all the warning signals that MacArthur was now ignoring.
At first General Eisenhower's 28-year-old son John thought it odd that Gruenther was there for Thanksgiving, because Gruenther had a family of his own. But later he decided that Gruenther was there because Eisenhower was still the man you talked to—he had that special status—when something this serious was going wrong at so high a level. John remembered that a shadow hung over that Thanksgiving Day meal, something that he himself did not entirely understand. Gruenther had told his father that the American forces were simply too exposed and far too vulnerable. When Gruenther left, the general turned to his son and said, "I've never been so pessimistic about this war in my life." John was teaching at West Point at the time, and when he left his father's residence to drive back to the academy, he turned on the car radio and heard a report about how MacArthur was promising the war would be over by Christmas.
In late November, the Chinese and North Koreans launched a major offensive, driving the U.N. forces south and eventually taking back Seoul. General MacArthur was removed from command for insubordination by President Truman in April, causing an uproar in the U.S. The front line would shift back and forth until the conflict became a stalemate in July, with the front eventually settling around the 38th parallel. Peace negotiations began, but major combat operations, including large-scale bombing of the North and its population, continued. In 1952, President-Elect Dwight Eisenhower, who had pledged in his campaign to end the war, visited Korea to assess the situation. On July 27, 1953, a cease-fire agreement was reached. By that time 36,940 Americans had died and about 92,000 had been wounded.
David Halberstam was a Vanity Fair contributing editor.
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