The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (58 page)

In no other American headquarters could Willoughby have reached so important a post, and the higher he rose, the more Prussian he became. On occasion, he even wore a monocle, although, as one fellow officer put it, he was more like Erich von Stroheim, the movie director, than Gerd von Rundstedt, the head of the World War II German General Staff. There was something pathetic about Willoughby’s manner, Gibney thought, his self-conscious attempt to seem more aristocratic than he was. “He’d be out there at the Tokyo Club, ready to
play tennis accompanied by his claque, the colonels from his shop, on some very hot day. He would look over and see you, and say, ‘Gibney, good show, good seeing you out there playing today, Gibney—well, they say that only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the noon day sun, but here I am too.’ And the awful thing was that the claque of colonels would all laugh as if he had said something funny, and you suddenly feared for the intelligence coming into the Tokyo command and headed towards Washington.”

There was some debate about his origins. His claims that he was descended from an aristocratic German father and an American mother were generally believed to be false, and most people believed he was a self-invented nobleman. Certainly, he did little to clear up any mysteries about his past. In
Who’s Who in America
and in the biography he gave to the Army, Willoughby said he was born in Heidelberg, Germany, on March 8, 1892, and was the son of Freiherr (Baron) T. von Tscheppe-Weidenbach and Emma von Tscheppe-Weidenbach (née Emma Willoughby of Baltimore). But the Heidelberg registry for that date records only the birth of Adolf August Weidenbach, sired by August Weidenbach, a rope maker, and Emma Langhauser, a German. According to Frank Kluckhohn of
The Reporter
magazine, a search of German documents showed no grant from anyone in power of the right to have the “von” in Willoughby’s name. One of Willoughby’s friends from his early days confirmed that both of his parents were German and that the name Willoughby was a rough translation of Weidenbach, which means “willow brook” in German. Kluckhohn questioned Willoughby about this and thereupon was told that he had actually been an orphan, had never known his father, and was sticking with the
Who’s Who
version. Apparently he came to America as an eighteen-year-old in 1910 and entered the Army as Adolf Charles Weidenbach. In three years he made sergeant, left the Army, went to Gettysburg College, did some graduate studies at the University of Kansas, and then taught languages at girls’ schools in the Midwest. In 1916, he reentered the Army, served on the Mexican border, and eventually went to France but did not see combat. After the war, he served for a time as military attaché in Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador, where Ned Almond first ran across him and, according to Bill McCaffrey, came to hate him. Eventually he became a self-styled military historian and intelligence officer. Somehow in the mid-1930s he connected with MacArthur while he was teaching at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, a place where the Army sent its most promising mid-career officers for extra training, and in 1940 he joined MacArthur in the Philippines, soon becoming the intelligence expert on his staff. From then on, one of his chief jobs was as amplifier of the MacArthur myth, and he worked all through World War II as well as in the Tokyo and Korean years on a monumental study
of MacArthur’s military career, said to be three thousand pages long, although the book he finally published was of normal length.

If MacArthur’s staff was always unified against any challenge from the outside, then within it there were many factions always struggling to gain special favor from the general; Willoughby and Courtney Whitney, another MacArthur favorite, who being a lawyer as well had helped do some legal work for him on the side, were continually battling to be best boy. Whitney had been especially helpful in the Philippine years with his connections to the upper levels of Manila society, but Willoughby had a great ear for what MacArthur wanted to hear and tended to place him atop the pedestal of history. In 1947, he wrote MacArthur: “There is no contemporary figure comparable to yours…. Ultimately[people]have been attached to a great leader, to a man and not an idea, to a Malbrough [sic], to a Napoleon, to a Robert E Lee. Underneath it all, these are age old dynastic alliances…. A gentleman can serve a grand-seigneur. That will be a good ending to my career…and as I scan the world, the grand-seigneurs are leaving the arena, fighting a bitter rear guard action against the underman, the faceless mob driven by Russian knouts.”

That Willoughby existed at all was proof to many senior officers in Washington that MacArthur ran an army of his own, largely outside the reach of the chief of staff. To them Willoughby was a leftover from the other side of World War I, “so much the Prussian type that all he needed was a spiked helmet,” in the words of Clayton James, MacArthur’s biographer. The intensity of his ideological biases made even others on the MacArthur staff uneasy. In the internal staff struggles over the future of Japanese democracy, Willoughby was an unusually passionate player, trying to rid headquarters of the New Deal liberals whom he tended to see as fellow travelers or Communists. He was also a kind of self-appointed journalistic censor, always on the alert for any journalistic transgression against either the occupation or MacArthur personally. “There were several of us who reported on the struggles within the bureaucracy in those days—serious and very interesting stuff for these were battles over which direction the new Japan would take. That meant reporting about the two main forces in the MacArthur headquarters, the reformers, and the traditionalists,” said Joseph Fromm of
U.S. News & World Report
. “Willoughby was absolutely convinced that because I was doing a good deal of original reporting on those divisions, reporting what neither he nor MacArthur liked, that I was a Communist. I remember one day he called me for a special one-on-one meeting, and it was a truly crazed scene. All he wanted to do was talk about Lenin and Marx, man to man, like we both knew what the game was, he the anti-Communist and the man of the law and me, in his mind, the Communist, and thus the outlaw, and we would be equals in this sparring, sophisticates about it, men of the world,
but in the end his view of Communism would trump mine.” Years later, Fromm got hold of his security file through the Freedom of Information Act. What stunned him was the amount of garbage in it about him, all of it collected by Willoughby and his people in the G-2 section, almost all of it ugly, reams and reams of it, much of it incredibly inaccurate, “the kind of thing that could ruin a person’s career if it was taken seriously. What it told about the man who was in charge of collecting it, the waste of time involved, and the inability of that headquarters to deal with reality, was staggering.”

Like comparable ideologists on both sides of the spectrum, Willoughby was conspiratorial. What had happened on the Chinese mainland was not an epochal event in which the long suppressed forces of history found a modern political means of expression, but the work of plotters. In a letter to the House Un-American Activities Committee in May 1950, a month before the war began, he claimed that “American Communist brains planned the communization of China.” These were fellow travelers, he wrote, who had “an inexplicable fanaticism for an alien cause, the Communist ‘Jehad’ of pan-Slavism for the subjugation of the Western world.” As such, he was closely aligned with some of the more extreme people working on issues of subversion back in America. As early as 1947 he had started his own investigations of Americans operating in Japan, investigations that were not, as Bruce Cumings pointed out, unlike those to come three years later from McCarthy. Willoughby was in constant touch with HUAC, and with Alfred Kohlberg, the man generally viewed as the central figure in the China Lobby, as well as the FBI, passing on raw information about people he thought were dangerously left wing, among them people in the State Department who had taken a dim view of Chiang’s chances. Some of what he sent in was eventually passed on to McCarthy for use in his investigations of the wartime China Hands. Later in life, after MacArthur was relieved, Willoughby surfaced with major connections to the extreme right wing in the United States, and began writing ever more virulent, racist, and anti-Semitic articles. When Eisenhower was about to get the Republican nomination in 1952, Willoughby told MacArthur that this proved the Republicans were part of a “clever conspiratorial move to perpetuate the vampire hold of the Roosevelt-Truman mechanism.”

That was the intellectual prism through which all critical intelligence would pass in Tokyo. The key to the importance of Willoughby was not his own self-evident inadequacies; it was that he represented the deepest kind of psychological weakness in the talented, flawed man he served, the need to have someone who agreed with him at all times and flattered him constantly. Willoughby was despised by a vast number of other military men in the command. “I was always afraid he would be found murdered one day, because if he was, I was sure that they would come and arrest me, because I hated him
so much, and had been so outspoken about him,” Bill McCaffrey once said. “MacArthur did not
want
the Chinese to enter the war in Korea. Anything MacArthur wanted, Willoughby produced intelligence for…. In this case Willoughby falsified the intelligence reports…. He should have gone to jail,” said Lieutenant Colonel John Chiles, Tenth Corps G-3, or chief of operations, and one of Almond’s most trusted deputies.

Never had his role been more important than in late October, as more and more reliable reports flowed in about the arrival of Chinese troops into the extreme northern reaches of Korea. It was at this moment that Willoughby set out to prove that they were either not there, or, if they were, that they existed only in small numbers as volunteers. He did all he could to minimize the overwhelming evidence that the Chinese had been the ones who struck the ROKs and the Eighth Cavalry near Unsan in the late October–early November assault. A good many men who fought there came to believe that his refusal to act quickly on the evidence presented by the first captured Chinese prisoners, his unwillingness to add a serious note of caution to his intelligence briefings, was directly responsible for the devastation inflicted not just on the Cav at Unsan but upon the Eighth Army soon after, for the loss of so many buddies, and in some cases, for their own long tours in Chinese and Korean prisons. To them, what he represented came perilously close to evil, someone who blustered about the dangers of Communism and the Chinese, but then ended up making their work so much easier by setting the UN forces up for that great ambush. He was, thought Bill Train, a bright, young, low-level G-3 staff officer who fought against his certitudes in those critical weeks, “a four flusher—someone who made it seem like he knew what he was doing—but in the end what he produced was absolutely worthless, there was nothing there at all. Nothing. He got everything wrong!
Everything!
What he was doing in those days was fighting against the truth, trying to keep it from going from lower levels to higher ones where it would have to be acted on.”

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, often meet 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 was not harmless, some American Colonel Blimp, long retired, boring the other geezers at some second-rate club with the sad lament that nothing was as good as in his youth, the young no longer as brave as when he had been a recruit. He would have been considered, thought Carleton Swift, a thirty-one-year-old intelligence officer, a buffoon if the impact of his acts had not been so deadly serious. Swift, a CIA man (who had come out of OSS), 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. It was as if he was always right, had always been right. Certitude after certitude poured out of him. It was as if there was an exclamation point after all of his sentences. If he said something wouldn’t happen, then it wouldn’t happen—
it couldn’t happen
. He would say things like, ‘We
know
that they are going to do this, and we
know
they are not going to do that.’ Worse, you couldn’t challenge him. Because he always made it clear that he spoke for MacArthur and if you challenged him you were challenging MacArthur. And that obviously wasn’t allowed. So that made it very hard for intelligence in the field to filter up to higher headquarters on something that he had made up his mind on.” Swift had been one of the young OSS officers who had dealt with Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam during World War II, when the United States was still friendly with him, and then he 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 he had been very aware of the massive movement of Chinese troops to the Manchurian border. 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.