JFK (10 page)

Furthermore, he had not been told that an element of the underground OSS, along with its British counterparts, had been working covertly with the Nazis and with Nazi sympathizers in Europe as early as September 1944 and that plans had been made to alienate the United States’s wartime ally, the Soviet Union, and to create a hostile, bipolar world. Harry Truman was not aware of, nor acquainted with, the reality of that invisible superpower elite that Winston Churchill called the High Cabal. He was told the details of the Manhattan Project on April 25, 1945, and learned about these other facts of public life through harsh experience.

Germany surrendered on May 9, 1945. The war against Japan had been accelerated, culminating in the costly battle of Okinawa. On July 19, 1945, Truman arrived in Potsdam, a suburb of Berlin, for his first meeting with the Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin, and the wartime leader of Great Britain, Winston Churchill. He had to deal with them as equal allies despite the widening rift being created clandestinely between them.

On July 25, 1945, exactly three months after he had first learned of the atomic bomb, Truman took the opportunity to tell Stalin privately that the United States had successfully developed a major new weapon. He did not tell Stalin that this new weapon was based on a harnessing of the atom for explosive purposes. In response, Stalin showed no interest whatsoever and gave no substantive reply. Truman was perplexed. Did Stalin already know about the success in New Mexico of the first atomic explosion, on July 16, 1945? Had he somehow known about things that Truman himself did not know, long before Truman knew them? We may never know; but this is the way of the clandestine world.

More importantly, was Stalin aware of the fact that the Cold War had already begun and that the Soviet Union would no longer be a full partner in the Western alliance? Stalin did not reveal his hand, but as we have later discovered, he ordered his own experts, under Igor Kurchatov, to accelerate the Russian nuclear program.

Truman’s low-key announcement about this new weapon to Stalin at Potsdam was, without a doubt, the starting point of the greatest and most futile arms race in history. The world had moved into the awesome era of nuclear power and clandestine operations.

For Truman, these Potsdam sessions were a rare education, if nothing else. On the one hand, he learned to deal with Stalin, and on the other hand, he saw his strongest and closest ally, Winston Churchill, depart abruptly when his party failed to win in the concurrent British elections. This placed another burden on Truman. He had first to meet and then to become acquainted with the new prime minister, Clement Attlee, and his newly assembled staff of British advisers during the course of a momentous series of meetings.

Of course, Truman was not alone. The President was surrounded by his military and diplomatic staff, a coterie of longtime political cronies, and one other man who went generally unnoticed.

This other man was Edwin Pauley, a prominent oilman from California, a bank director, and a construction company executive. His official position was head of the American delegation to the Allied Reparations Commission in Moscow. Pauley was the quiet representative of the world of finance, industry, and power. His job was to see that the new President adhered to the course already planned for the “Cold War” world.

“The first impression that one gets of a ruler and of his brains,” Machiavelli wrote, “is from seeing the men that he has about him.”

We may be sure this very point was not lost on that shrewd veteran of the Kremlin, Stalin, as he looked around the room at Truman and his staff. The Truman team was formidable, belying the Truman “country boy” image. The post—World War II era, it was clear, would be managed and guided by the demands and specifications of those financiers, industrialists, and Wall Street lawyers who were so well represented at Potsdam.

While in Potsdam in July, Truman received the news of the successful test-firing of an atomic device at Alamogordo, New Mexico. During the next week, there were countless discussions among the American staff and with the British concerning whether or not to use the atomic bomb in Japan. Truman had two principal options: He could modify the “unconditional surrender” terms of the Roosevelt policy toward Japan, which would permit the Japanese to retain their emperor, or he could refuse to modify the terms and give Japan no alternative but to continue to fight until the United States had used the atom bomb.

The consensus that guided Truman’s decision was that the bombs should be used, as much to impress the Soviets and the rest of the world with their overwhelming power as to further crush the hapless Japanese. The rationale was that the use of the bombs to bring about the abject surrender of the Japanese would save millions of lives—American and Japanese—by precluding a costly invasion of a kamikaze-indoctrinated country.

The first bomb was dropped on an already war weary Japanese population at Hiroshima on August 5 and a second over Nagasaki on August 9. The Japanese surrendered on August 14. During the final stages of the war, the Japanese had been unable to send aircraft up to attack American bombers, because they lacked essential parts and, quite frequently, fuel.

As a gesture of hospitality, the Japanese had opened the American prisoner-of-war camps in Japan weeks before the bombs were dropped, and hundreds of Americans wandered freely throughout Japan, waiting for the day when the first American transport aircraft would arrive to carry them away. I was a pilot of one of the first heavy transport aircraft to land at the only Japanese air base that had not been destroyed by bombs, near Atsugi, not far from Yokohama, during late August 1945.

As we flew down through the heavy cloud layers that were remnants of a major hurricane that had swept over the islands of Japan, we broke out into a rainy overcast over Tokyo Bay and saw the ships of the U.S. Navy at anchor, with the battleship
Missouri
in their midst. The air base at Atsugi was covered with new Japanese aircraft that had never seen combat. We saw some military trucks. They were operating on methane and were made entirely of wood, except for the most vital parts, which had to be made of steel.

Everywhere we looked, we found overwhelming evidence that the Japanese dream of empire had been shattered. It was clear that the longplanned invasion of Japan would have been unnecessary, even without the use of the two atomic bombs.

We took off from the Atsugi airfield after leaving a contingent of U. S. Marines there to serve with General MacArthur’s bodyguard and flew low over Yokohama and Tokyo. Although I had seen war-devastated cities in Russia, in Europe, and in the Philippines, I had never experienced anything to equal the “firebomb” destruction of Tokyo. It was total. More than fifteen thousand people had died by asphyxiation in a single city block where I rented a house during 1952-54, in the Shibuya-Ku district. Tokyo, that enormous city, had been so flattened that, from our low-flying aircraft, we had an unobstructed view of trolley cars operating from one side of the downtown area to the other. Almost every building had been destroyed, and the streets were a mass of rubble.

We flew quite low down the east coast of the main island, Honshū. In one of the most memorable and stark manifestations of utter surrender that can be imagined, the Japanese people had tied broad strips of white cloth to the ends of long bamboo poles. They had then bound these poles to the top branches of the ever-present pine trees. The whole country appeared to be flying the white emblem of surrender.

In the school playgrounds, the children stopped their games and stood frozen, with heads lowered, as our big aircraft flew over them. Fortunately for all of us, we were not on a bombing mission. Then we came to the ruins of what had once been the city of Hiroshima. As I have said, I have seen the destruction of warfare. I had always put the shell of the Russian city of Rostov at the head of my list of the most devastated cities. During the ebb and flow of the great battles in Russia, Rostov had been destroyed four times, twice by the attacking Germans and twice by the returning Russians. But here was Hiroshima just five hundred feet below us. On the coast, at the end of a small valley, what remained of that beautiful city looked like the ashes of a bonfire that, all of a sudden, had been blown out by a massive gust of wind. Nothing moved. Only the pattern of the streets and bridges preserved the identity of a once-proud city.

When President Truman returned to Washington following his meetings in Potsdam, he announced the results of the conference. At the same time, it was announced that a second atomic bomb had been dropped on Nagasaki. Japan surrendered, and the necessary documents were signed on September 2, 1945, by all parties on the deck of the
Missouri
. World War II was over. A historic era had ended—with implications that no one in the world fully grasped at that time. Never again would it be possible—or desirable—for those with the power over a nation or an alliance of nations to wage an all-out, unfettered, classic war on another group of nations with an expectation of victory that would include an assurance of their own survival. Nuclear weapons had changed all that.

That span of history, from man’s first use of clubs and spears to the mass destruction of World War I and World War II—with machine guns, tanks, artillery, ships, and aircraft—had ended with the advent of the atom bomb. If anyone in power was not convinced of this fact by 1945, he had only to wait for the results of the hydrogen bomb tests in the fall of 1952. That single blast, the Mike Shot on Eniwetok Atoll, blew a hole deeper than the height of the Empire State Building. Or he could have waited a bit longer, for the Bravo test shot of the lithium-deuteride “fission-fusion-fission” H-bomb of 1954, when fallout created lethal dosages of radioactivity for 140 miles downwind in a belt 20 miles wide, in addition to massive destruction far greater than that of the earlier test at Eniwetok.

During the postwar years, a number of important events took place as mankind was herded from the old era to the new. The Cold War, based upon a structured East-West confrontation, provided the basis for a new type of very lethal, global conflict that would depend upon large, invisible armies concealed under the benign cover of intelligence organizations. Almost immediately after the end of hostilities, the great armed forces that had fought World War II were dismantled and disbanded. Nearly all of their arms, ammunition, and other matériel were salvaged, sold, or given away to make way for new procurement.

The early creation of the Central Intelligence Agency and of the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) was an inevitable progression after World War II. With the decision already made to turn the Soviet Union, almost overnight, from a wartime ally to a “peacetime” adversary, it became necessary to create an organization that could, in time of “peace,” continue the eternal conflict using the networks of agents and spies in Eastern Europe that had been established by the Allies and by the Nazis during the war. The utilization of the World War II Nazi agent networks in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union became a major characteristic of the new Cold War strategy. The CIA was joined by “Allies” foreign and domestic, governmental and civilian.

In fact, “peacetime operations” became the new Orwellian euphemism for military-type covert operations, often on a mammoth scale. These “peacetime operations” were carried out whether or not they were secret and whether or not they could be disclaimed plausibly, without benefit of a declaration of a state of war among the adversaries. This was an important shift. Any country—whether it was the United States or the Soviet Union, or even a smaller country, such as Greece or Israel—that employed its undercover forces in peacetime, within the borders of another country with whom it was not officially at war, ignored and degraded the age-old concepts of the independence of nations and of national sovereignty.

On October 1, 1945, Truman directed the termination of the OSS. While the legislation for the new defense establishment and the CIA was being written and debated, the President established the Central Intelligence Group as an interim measure. The existence of the CIG made it possible to maintain the covert-agent assets of the wartime OSS wherever they existed and to provide organizational cover for former Nazi general Reinhard Gehlen and his intelligence staff, along with their voluminous files of former Nazi, anti-Communist agents and spies that were concealed in the undercover networks of Eastern Europe and in the USSR.

Allen Dulles had been instrumental in arranging, with Gehlen, for this most unusual conversion of one of Hitler’s most sinister generals into an officer in the U. S. Army, but the details of Gehlen’s personal surrender and subsequent flight to the United States—in General Eisenhower’s own VIP aircraft—were arranged by U.S. Army officers. The senior officer of this plan was Eisenhower’s chief of staff, Gen. Walter Bedell Smith, who served immediately after World War II as the U.S. ambassador to Moscow, and, upon his return from Moscow in October 1950, as the director of central intelligence. Also involved in this plan was Col. William Quinn, later Lieutenant General Quinn and head of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).
²

It is important to note the active role of these U. S. Army officials in this unprecedented move of Hitler’s own intelligence chief, Gehlen, directly into the U. S. Army as an officer by a special act of the Congress. This was not a casual incident. The move, planned before the end of the war with Germany and directed from the top, was a classic example of the work of the power elite.

Shortly after the passage of the National Security Act of 1947, the National Security Council met, on December 19 of that year, for the first time. The council had hardly waited for the ink to dry on the new law before it ignored its stricture—that the CIA limit itself to the “coordination” of intelligence—and rushed the fledgling agency into covert action. National Security Council Directive #4 directed the newly appointed director of central intelligence, Adm. Roscoe Hillenkoetter, “to carry out covert psychological warfare,” much against his own professional desires. To this end, a “special procedures group” was set up immediately, and, among other things, it became involved in the covert “buying” of the nationwide election in Italy.