Last week, at the Truman Presidential Library in Independence, Mo., a conference on the Korean War saw the CIA release of a large volume of long-classified documents. One of them led to this revelation:
Declassified Documents Show CIA Blunders in Korean War
The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency committed two major blunders during the Korean War by underestimating the threat of a North Korean invasion of South Korea and failing to predict the intervention of Chinese communist troops until a day before it happened. . . . The revelations are contained in a set of CIA documents that were declassified on Wednesday, including a report entitled “Two Strategic Intelligence Mistakes in Korea, 1950,” which reviews the mistakes.
According to the report, a [CIA] paper dated on June 19, six days before the Korea War broke out, noted that “while [North Korea] could take control of parts of the South, it probably did not have the capability to destroy the South Korean government without Soviet or Chinese assistance,” adding “This belief caused them to ignore warnings of [North Korea’s] military buildup and mobilization near the border, clearly the ‘force protection’ intelligence that should have been most alerting to military minds.”
The CIA had been monitoring China’s moves from the start of the war, but even after the balance tipped in favor of South Korea with the success of [MacArthur’s] Inchon landing operation that choked off the communist advance, it saw no signs of Chinese intervention. On Oct. 12, it reported, “While full-scale Chinese Communist intervention in Korea must be regarded as a continuing possibility, a consideration of all known factors leads to the conclusion that such action is not probable in 1950” . . . But on the following day, 30,000 Chinese troops poured across the Duman (or Tumen) River followed by 150,000 more soldiers a few days later, leading to a full-blown battle with allied forces.
Pretty enormous mistakes, considering that the North Korean and Chinese offensives required mobilization and movement to launch-points of large military forces opposite RoK and U.S. units, something not easy for intelligence collection to miss in a tinder-box environment like the Korean peninsula at the time.
If you haven’t read in the MSM about these two enormous mistakes being revealed, it’s because this report comes from South Korea. Its source can be read in its entirety here. The New York Times has not bothered to report it. The Washington Post website contains a June 16 AP report, “CIA papers: US was caught off-guard in Korean War,” which softballs the revelations and fails to be specific about U.S. civilian and military leaders having relied in 1950 on two crucial CIA assessments that proved dead wrong, at the cost of many American and RoK soldiers’ lives.
It gets worse. The paper mentioned by the South Korean report, “Two Strategic Intelligence Mistakes in Korea, 1950,” by a CIA officer called P. K. Rose, is not new. It first appeared nearly ten years ago in the unclassified edition of Studies in Intelligence, a journal published by CIA’s Center for the Study of Intelligence. It got little or no attention from the MSM at the time. You might think such revelations about missing two calamitous surprise attacks in 1950 would get attention given when this issue of Studies in Intelligence came out: in the Fall/Winter 2001 issue, just a few months after 9/11.
You would think this might strike Times and Post reporters covering intelligence matters as interesting, if they could spare time from disclosing current national security secrets to see what was in the professional literature. Apparently not, or perhaps it was news not fit to print.
As far as the Times and Post search engines can be trusted, the Rose paper was noticed only by the Washington Times, whose writers Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough opened a January 18, 2002, report as follows: “The CIA released an embarrassing report this week in its in-house journal, showing once again, how CIA analyses of China are not only flawed today but were wrong in several aspects during the Korean War.” A veteran CIA officer, Thomas J. Patton, authored in response an in-house “personal perspective” on the Rose essay, explaining away CIA failure to warn against both surprise attacks in 1950 while saying: “Were I Bill Gertz or Rowan Scarborough, I would indeed have jumped at the opportunity it presented to excoriate the Agency. And I am sure that there are others who were disturbed by the presence of this article in a CIA public journal.”
But Mr. Patton need not have worried overmuch about the CIA’s blunders being exposed in the Washington Times. No one of significance in Washington’s official and political life reads the Washington Times. It is the right-wing “Moonie” paper, and to be seen with a copy under your arm inside government offices or in Georgetown cafés is to have your judgment questioned and your name removed from cocktail party invitation lists. Serious people in Washington read the Post or Times, and so have had no knowledge of CIA’s long incapacity to detect surprise attacks in the making–not in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 when the Rose article appeared, and not today when such matters are discussed only at musty historical conferences out in the provinces like Independence, Missouri.
I’ll bet Harry Truman rolled over in his grave in Independence, though. Perhaps we need to subscribe to South Korean newspapers to learn what else the CIA is incapable of.
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