The Korean War (51 page)

‘I was very homesick,’ he said. ‘By February 1952, I was on the verge of a mental breakdown. The only letter I had sent to my family was returned undelivered. I was missing them desperately.’ That month, he was given leave to Seoul. He reached the capital determined not to go back to the front. He contacted some of his old schoolmates, and in April was able to arrange to return to school – a school without books or desks. His only asset was a strong command of the English language which he had acquired on the hills behind the Imjin.
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The men of the UN forces sometimes behaved with dreadful callousness towards South Koreans. Eighth Army was compelled to issue a forceful Order of the Day in the summer of 1951:

Many soldiers seem to take a perverse delight in frightening civilians by driving very close, and then suddenly blaring their horns at the unsuspecting. Others make repeated attempts to drive the Koreans off the roads and into ditches. Americans are notably impatient, and too often drivers direct vile and belittling profanity towards those who slow their progress. Swearing at the driver of an oxcart will not make the ox move faster. It will cause the owner of the cart to resent the impertinent discourtesy of the soldier who curses him. We are not in this country as conquerors. We are here as friends.
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Some of these ‘friends’ were extraordinarily gentle and generous to Koreans, adopting and educating orphans, raising large sums for Korean charities, giving all the food and clothes they could spare from their units. Yet many never overcame their chronic suspicion of the ‘gooks’, and carried this to savage limits in moments of stress. One morning in February 1951, Private Warren Avery of the 29th Infantry was out on ‘chicken patrol’ with a handful of other men in a local town, searching for fowls for the platoon pot. They were stopped at a Korean military police checkpoint: ‘One of them said something to Gibson, and they all put a
round in the chamber. We didn’t know whether to believe they were South Koreans or North Koreans. When I heard a bolt snick, I just turned around with the BAR and wiped them off the f***ing crossroad.’
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There is no reason to doubt the truth of the story, for such episodes were commonplace. ‘Unless you were an anthropology student,’ said Marine Selwyn Handler, ‘Koreans were just a bunch of gooks. Who cared about the feelings of people like that? We were very smug Americans at that time.’
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Talking of Eighth Army’s treatment of refugees approaching the UN lines, Lieutenant Robert Sebilian of 5th Marines said: ‘We probably shot some people who were innocent – but how could you know which side they were on? The military problem was simply: Do you let these people filter through?’
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The answer, very often, was a ruthless negative.

UN soldiers’ sense of alienation from the Koreans was intensified by observing their brutality towards each other. ‘One had a hard time thinking of them as civilised human beings,’ said Major Gordon Gayle, executive officer of 7th Marines. ‘I was impressed by their absolute absence of Christian spirit. The ROKs thought it was funny to see some other guy over the hill being shelled.’
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Americans were told not to interfere when the ROK CIC were interrogating prisoners. ‘We found it hard to watch a man being beaten to death,’ said Major Ed Simmons of 1st Marines.
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When Sergeant William Norris was sent to join the KMAG training mission, he was horrified by the Korean army’s discipline: ‘I saw a deserter shot; a kid who lost a rifle – an $87 rifle – was made to stand in a barrel of water all day in January. Men were beaten with pine saplings. Whole cities were roped off to collect people for the draft. And Americans could do nothing about it. You have to understand the Asian way.’
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The young Canadian Chris Snider complained about one of the Korean Katcoms in his platoon who persistently fell asleep on duty. The Korean liaison officer came down from battalion headquarters to deal with the matter. Snider was awoken to be told by one of his men that the visitor, along with a Korean senior NCO, had taken the offender out and ordered him to dig a grave. The man was shot before the Canadians could
intervene. The liaison officer and NCO were replaced, but the episode had a traumatic effect on the whole platoon. The Canadians were astounded that men of any society could behave in such a fashion to each other. Yet almost every UN veteran of Korea saw South Koreans do such things. Indeed, arbitrary execution appeared the foundation of ROK army discipline. The South Korean army officer, wrote a KMAG adviser – Lieutenant Colonel Leon Smith of I ROK Corps – in a scathing report to the Pentagon,

in almost all cases has no love or respect for his superiors – only homage – and no love, respect, nor sense of responsibility for his subordinates. He will browbeat his juniors, steal from all. He spends his time and effort on ‘eyewash’, rather than the actual correction of conditions. He works hard at building his own ego to the point where he believes himself infallible, but when times really get rough, he comes back to his adviser for strength and decision.
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Upon such a foundation of mistrust and contempt for the nation in whose interests the war was being fought, did the UN seek to make the ROK army an effective instrument, and South Korea a viable political entity.

13 » THE INTELLIGENCE WAR

In the aftermath of World War II, it was not merely America’s uniformed armed forces that were abruptly run down and demobilised. William Donovan’s intelligence organisation, the Office of Strategic Services, built up almost from scratch over five years of intensive wartime activity, was reduced to a tiny bureaucracy in Washington, operating a handful of field agents. In the summer of 1950, this was the extent of the renamed Central Intelligence Agency and its resources. ‘The Company’ maintained a small office in Tokyo, but its operations in the Far East were chronically crippled by the hostility of MacArthur. Ever since World War II, when he had refused to allow clandestine activities by any of the intelligence ‘private armies’ in his theatre, the general cherished a distaste for such practices. Only in May 1950 was the CIA allowed to set up its first Tokyo station. And only later that summer, under the desperate pressure of work, was this expanded into an active operational network. William Duggan’s Office of Special Operations was responsible for Far East intelligence-gathering. George Aurell maintained liaison with SCAP’s headquarters with some difficulty. An outlandish Danish-American named Hans Tofte, whose enthusiasm for behind-the-lines adventuring took him into the OSS in the last stages of World War II, set up a new unit named the Office of Policy Co-ordination to organise covert activity. Meanwhile, back in Washington, as the Administration became brutally aware of the consequences of attempting to conduct foreign policy with inadequate intelligence about enemies actual and potential, the Director of the CIA, Admiral R. H. Hillenkoetter, was sacked. On the strong recommendation of General Marshall, Truman
replaced him with General Walter Bedell Smith, Eisenhower’s wartime Chief of Staff in north-west Europe. Bedell Smith’s appointment gave the CIA almost overnight a credibility and claim upon resources in Washington that provided the motive power for the Agency’s massive expansion in the next three years.

Yet throughout the war, the United Nations’ intelligence about Chinese and North Korean strategic intentions remained very poor. There is still no evidence to suggest that Washington possessed any highly-placed agent in either Pyongyang or Peking. By far the most important and effective sources of operational intelligence, as in World War II, were decrypts of enemy wireless transmissions by the signals organisation established outside Washington for the purpose. But the available quantity of ‘sigint’ was restricted by the enemy’s shortage of sophisticated communications equipment. From 1950 onwards, a variety of organisations were established in South Korea to provide ‘humint’ – intelligence based upon agent observation behind the communist lines – and to sponsor covert guerrilla operations. None were notably successful, and all paid a frightful toll in lives – most of these Korean. But their efforts have a place in any portrait of the war.

When America entered the Korean conflict, a CIA station was hastily established in the peninsula, initially at Pusan, under the direction of a veteran paratroop commander from World War II, Ben Vandervoort. But Vandervoort had little special operations experience, and seemed unhappy in his role. He was replaced by a big, formidable ex-FBI man who had spent many years in South America, Al Haney. Jack Singlaub was an ex-World War II paratrooper who had served with the Office of Strategic Services in Indochina, and thereafter in OSS’s successor organisations, the Special Services Unit, the Central Intelligence Group, and finally the newly created Central Intelligence Agency. Until the Nationalists were driven out of mainland China, Singlaub was CIA Station Chief in Mukden. When the Korean War began, he was a lieutenant-colonel, building a Ranger organisation at Fort Benning. He volunteered for Korea in the hope of being given a
battalion command. Instead, he was seconded to the CIA, to serve as Haney’s deputy Station Chief.

A complex chain of command was established to preside over intelligence-gathering. At its summit stood JACK – Joint Advisory Commission, Korea, which was in turn part of CCRAK – Combined Command Research and Activities in Korea – controlled from Tokyo by Willoughby, MacArthur’s G-2. They were primarily concerned with the parachute insertion of parties of locally trained Koreans to gather intelligence behind the lines. The accident rate was high. The recovery rate was low. Yet in the customary empire-building contest between service bureaucracies, a multiplicity of covert operations groups developed in Korea. The US Navy was sponsoring coastal raiding parties of its own. The British were landing Royal Marine hit-and-run assault groups. There were outposts on the offshore islands controlling escape and evasion organisations for downed pilots, or monitoring enemy movement. By a characteristic irony, the only interested body not known to be sponsoring intelligence operations in the North was the government of South Korea. Syngman Rhee’s intelligence organisation confined its attentions to keeping a close watch on its own society.

The CIA was determined to maintain its independence of CCRAK, and was largely successful in doing so. A strict edict was issued that no Americans were to be dispatched into the North. But the Seoul station, based upon the Traymore Hotel, rapidly expanded to a strength of more than a hundred officers, training Koreans to land in enemy-held territory by small boat from the coast. In the first year of the war, some 1,200 recruits were trained at Yong-do, an island off the southern tip of Korea where a marine named Colonel ‘Dutch’ Kraemer ran the programme.

Initially, the purpose of putting agents into the North was to discover whether there was any basis upon which a local resistance movement might be built up. A few Koreans were sent for long-term training. Most were merely given the most rudimentary instruction before being pitched ashore on a hostile coast with a radio set. Some, perhaps to their controllers’ surprise, sent back
remarkably optimistic messages giving rendezvous at which more agents and supplies could be dropped. It was many months before the Americans began to perceive that almost all these operators had been captured, ‘turned’, and were transmitting under communist instruction. Slowly and reluctantly, the CIA recognised the ruthless efficiency of the communists’ control of their own countryside. North Korea was simply too small, too overcrowded with troops, militia, and police, to make covert movement readily possible.

But the lesson was learned the hard way, at tragic cost in lives. There were fewer stranger stories of behind-the-lines operations in Korea than that of Major William Ellery Anderson of the Royal Ulster Rifles. Anderson, an Englishman, played a major role in one of the early attempts to wage war behind the lines in Korea, under the auspices of the US Army. He was an architect’s son, commissioned into the British Army in 1940. He saw considerable service as a paratrooper, was wounded in Sicily, and in 1944 survived for some weeks in occupied France, having being dropped after D-Day with a Special Air Service party, to support the Resistance. When the war ended, Anderson spent some months as a war crimes investigator, then accepted a regular commission in the Ulsters because he had a friend in the regiment. He found the routine of peacetime soldiering intolerable, and by 1950 when the battalion was sent to war, he was barely on speaking terms with his colonel. As soon as they arrived in Korea, Anderson was sent off to a ‘Battle Training Team’, and it was made clear that the colonel hoped not to see him back.

Anderson was a natural adventurer, and he was bored. There was an exciting rumour that the SAS were to send a squadron to Korea, which he hoped to join. But then it was learned that MacArthur, with his intense dislike of special operations, above all foreign ones, had quashed the idea. One day in early 1951, Anderson was complaining to the correspondent René Cutforth about
the lack of imagination of the High Command in failing to organise guerrilla operations behind the communist lines. Cutforth said he had heard something of that kind was in the wind. Anderson at once asked for an interview with General Van Fleet. He got as far as seeing the Eighth Army commander’s G-1. He was then passed on to Colonel John Magee of Eighth Army’s Operations staff. Magee welcomed Anderson’s enthusiasm, and invited the Englishman to join the embryo organisation, Combined Command for Intelligence Operations, Far East. Indeed, Anderson found himself running his own little section of it. From a quonset hut in a reinforcement depot, Anderson began to recruit Koreans. ROK officer cadets were invited to volunteer, with the promise of commissions if they survived. Within a few days, Anderson had twenty recruits. One of them was Lee Chien Ho, the chemical engineering student who had escaped from Seoul as a refugee, and become an interpreter with the 5th Marines. Jimmy Lee, as he now called himself, developed great respect for Anderson’s skills as a special operations officer, and indeed contrasted them favourably with those of some American officers with whom he subsequently served.
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With the aid of an American Ranger officer, one British and two American NCOs, Anderson began to put the Koreans through classic commando training. At a simple ceremony, Colonel Magee presented the Koreans with their parachute wings, on completion of their jump training. In March 1951, Anderson felt ready to lead their first simple operation. They were to blow up a railway in a tunnel.