World War I and the Invention of American Intelligence, 1878 - 1918 by Mark Stout Submitted in accordance with the requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. The University of Leeds School of History Leeds, United Kingdom June, 2010 The candidate confirms that the work submitted is his own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. Acknowledgements PhD. dissertations often blight the lives of their authors. Such was not the case here. Many people deserve credit for this fact. First among them is Professor David Alvarez for giving me the original idea. I would never have thought of it. Thank you. Secondly, of course, thanks to my adviser Professor John Gooch. It was an honor and a privilege to work under his tutelage. It has also been delightful to study at Leeds where I lived as an 8 year old while my father was a visiting member of the faculty. Thanks are also due to Dr. Wick Murray for repeatedly telling me to hurry up and for providing various other forms of help. Thank you also to Mark Whisler for pointing me toward important resources when I was just starting on this project. At various times Michael Warner, John Fox, and John Schindler also did the same. I further owe thanks to John Schindler for introducing me to Professor John Ferris. Schindler, Ferris and I, in various combinations, had several stimulating and useful discussions of intelligence, typically over beer. Thanks are due to Louis Sadler for helping me sort out some obscure points pertaining to the 1916 Punitive Expedition. In a variety of other ways Elizabeth Anne Nathan, Paul Manning, Jonathan Winkler, Shawna Cuan, and Jessica Huckabey provided thought-provoking discussions, suggestions for further reading, or encouragement and moral support. Kevin Woods, Jim Lacey, Sharon Moore, and Alec Wahlman were wonderful study partners, as was Maegen Gandy in the critical final phase. Thanks are also due to the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and in particularly Christian Ostermann and Mircea Munteanu of the History and Public Policy Project there for naming me a Public Policy Fellow for the last six 11 months of2009. The Wilson Center was the perfect quiet refuge in which to push this work over the finish line. Innumerable archivists and librarians helped in innumerable ways, which should come as no surprise to any historian reading this work. Among them are were Kathy Buker of the Combined Arms Research Library at Ft. Leavenworth, Evelyn Cherpak of the library at the Naval War College, David Keough of the US Army Military History Institute at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and several archivists at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. I would also very much like to thank Karl Lowe for his encouragement and support throughout this process. I have never worked for a finer man. At the beginning of this preface I said that the writing of this dissertation did not blight my life. Sadly, I fear that it did blight the life of my wife, Pam. Accordingly, I dedicate this work to her. Perhaps it will be useful as fire-starting material on a cold winter evening. 11l Abstract Intelligence changes as the nature of war changes. From the late 1870s, the United States military, as part of a broader reform process, began learning about intelligence in part from experience but more importantly by observing the practices of the great powers of Europe. The period of American involvement in World War I saw a rapid acceleration of this development, with the United States continuing to learn from the United Kingdom and France. The war also saw intelligence spreading into fields that it had seldom if ever entered in the American experience. During the nineteen months of American belligerency American intelligence agencies, notably the War Department's Military Intelligence Division and the Navy Department's Office of Naval Intelligence expanded greatly. In addition, the services started to adopt high technology tools such as aerial photography and signals intelligence. These new tools required the admission into the military departments and services of esoteric specialists who did not fit previous military stereotypes. The war also occasioned a vast expansion of domestic surveillance and intelligence, a result of the idea that the World War was a struggle not only of militaries but of entire societies. Espionage, too, grew in extent and sophistication and the moral stigma associated with it began to erode. Overseas, the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) in France grew its own large intelligence staff. All of these measures allowed General John J. Pershing, the AEF's commander, as well has other American leaders to be better informed than they had ever been during previous wars. IV Table of Contents Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................ i Abstract. ........................................................................................................................ iii Introduction .................................................................................................................. vi Note on Agencies and Organizations ......................................................................... xxi Chapter 1 To the Eve ofWar. ........................................................................................ 1 Chapter 2 Technology Reinvents Intelligence ............................................................ 57 Chapter 3 A New Kind of War: Intelligence at Home .............................................. 115 Chapter 4 Human Intelligence: From Scouting to Stealing Secrets .......................... 161 Chapter 5 Intelligence Support for Commanders .................................................... 2044 Conclusion ............................................................................................................. 26969 Abbreviations .......................................................................................................... 2999 List of Sources and Bibliography .............................................................................. 301 v LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1 MID organization ........................................................................................ xxii Figure 2 Select organizations of MID's Positive Branch ......................................... xxiii Figure 3 Selected organization of MID's Negative Branch ......................................... vi Figure 4 Selected AEF G-2 organizations as of November 1918 ................................ vi Figure 5 Organization of ONI as of May 1918 ............................................................ vi Figure 6 ONI Section A as of May 1918 ...................................................................... vi Figure 3 Selected organization of MID's Negative Branch ......................................... vi VI Introduction 'To each epoch-its own wars', Lenin wrote in the margin of his copy of Clausewitz.I In this, if little else, he was correct. It is now axiomatic that new economic or societal structures, cultural changes, and new technologies all lead to new forms of war. Less attended to, however, is the fact that new forms of war lead to new forms of intelligence. Though World War I had some similarities to wars that had preceded it, notably the American Civil War and the Russo-Japanese War, the feeling at the time was that it was an utterly new type of war and indeed there is much justification for that feeling. Scholars have already pointed out the role of the Great War in reshaping the intelligence practices of the belligerents. One scholar- practitioner has observed that 'total war needed total intelligence; foreign military power had corne to depend on factors of industrial capacity, demography and morale which fell outside the analysis of normal military and naval intelligence,.2 By the same token, as another scholar has observed, those countries which played only marginal roles in the war lacked the motivation and the insight necessary to reform their intelligence services.3 However, hitherto virtually all the scholarly attention given to this subject has involved assessment of the intelligence services of belligerents other than the United States. This dissertation, then, will discuss how the United States expanded and shaped its intelligence organizations and ideas to fit the new circumstances of World War 1. It will demonstrate that World War I saw America's invention of modem intelligence. Of course, 'invention' does not mean that the Americans were the first to 1 Azar Gat, A History of Military Thought: From the Enlightenment to the Cold War, (Oxford, 2001), p. 504. 2 Michael Herman, Intelligence Power in War and Peace, (Cambridge, 1996), p. 25. 3 Ken Kotani, Japanese Intelligence in World War II, (New York, 2009), pp. 8, 99. Vll invent intelligence. (The old joke, of course, is that intelligence is the second oldest professionl As newcomers to this activity, the Americans both could and did profit from the experience of others. Much of this work will therefore describe how and what the Americans learned from the Germans, the French, and the British. However, its central purpose is to demonstrate that the United States invented modem intelligence for itself, to analyse how it did so, and to show what Americans