Ike’s Spies: Eisenhower and the Espionage Establishment, by Stephen E. Ambrose

Here are five of my observations after reflecting on this great read:

1. It was ULTRA not the Enigma from U571 German sub the US captured that provided the bulk of German code breaking across radio traffic that made such a difference in the War. The English had over 10,000 people at Bletchley Park (BP) cracking communications.

As Marshall put it, “Their primary responsibility will be to evaluate Ultra intelligence, present it in usable form to the Commanding officer, assist in fusing Ultra with intelligence derived from other sources, and give advice in connection with making operational use of Ultra intelligence in such fashion that the security of the source is not endangered…”

The two easy errors, isolation from other sources and the conviction that Ultra will provide all needed intelligence, are indeed the Scylla and Charybdis of the representative. Ultra must be looked on as one of a number of sources; it must not be taken as a neatly packaged replacement for tedious work with other evidence.”

2. WWII was likely a tie until FORTITUDE which was Operation Overlord’s other operation succeeded. The deception reinforced where Germany believed the Allies would invade and kept eyes off Normandy.

FORTITUDE (code name for the OVERLORD deception plan). In fact, Kreml was exactly like FORTITUDE in one especially crucial aspect—both aimed to make the enemy believe the attack would come at the most logical spot. That is, in the spring of 1942, Moscow was a more sensible target than Stalingrad, just as in 1944 the Pas de Calais was a more sensible target than Normandy.7 The Pas de Calais was the obvious choice for the false target for Normandy because the Germans were already inclined to believe that it would be the landing site. The task was to reinforce that belief, strengthen it, harden it until it became a dogma with both Hitler and the German General Staff.

OVERLORD pitted the best Germany had to offer against the best the United States and the United Kingdom had to offer. It was Churchill and Roosevelt vs. Hitler, Eisenhower vs. Rundstedt, Bradley vs. Rommel, American sergeants and British privates vs. their German counterparts. In a sense, OVERLORD pitted the German educational system against the democratic educational system. The Allies won. They won most of all because of the success of FORTITUDE and OVERLORD, which in turn depended on a culture, a political system, a tradition, a belief, an understanding of what democracy is and what it means. That kind of understanding and commitment come only when the threat to democracy is real and perceived, but when it does come, it is an awesome thing…

FORTITUDE required trust among the participants, up and down the line, a kind of trust that simply did not exist in Nazi Germany. Nearly every general in the Wehrmacht knew of the various plots to kill Hitler, while dozens of the generals were actively involved. Not a single one of them went to Hitler with the information. Such a situation in the Allied world is unimaginable. People who do not trust each other, or believe in the cause they are fighting for, cannot equal the effort made by the people in Bletchley Park, at Strong’s G-2, among the French Resistance and the British Secret Service, and throughout Ike’s command. FORTITUDE and OVERLORD were triumphs for Western democracy. I think that is what Ike had in his mind when he would grin that wonderful grin and slap his thigh and exclaim, “By God, we really fooled them, didn’t we!”

3. Ike’s plan was to bankrupt the USSR into spending more on the war machine while the US invested mainly in big weapons not traditional tanks and armies as much. Regan executed on this economic strategy to bankrupt the USSR, but it was Ike’s idea. There was, however, not an arms race until Kennedy started it. Ike kept even Kennedy in the dark about what the U2 program was finding out about how much the USSR really had for missles, and secretly we had more than enough fire-power than they did.

As a statesman, however, he had long ago concluded that the greatest threat was that the Russians would frighten the United States into an arms race that would lead to unmanageable inflation and ultimate bankruptcy. He believed that America’s greatest strength lay in her economic productivity, not in bombs and missiles. He believed further that a sound economy depended on a balanced federal budget, which he thought was the key to stopping inflation. To balance the budget, he had to cut back on defense spending. To do that, he cut back on conventional arms, reducing the Army and the Navy, while relying increasingly on nuclear weapons for massive retaliation. As a result, Ike was able to hold Defense spending to an annual expenditure of around $40 billion throughout his eight years in office. This figure was some $10 billion under what Truman had proposed, and what the Democrats were advocating be spent. By holding down the defense costs, Ike was able to balance his budget more often than not, with one result being an annual inflation rate of 1.25 percent, or a total of 10 percent for his whole eight years in office…

Ike’s fundamental insight, in short, was that in the nuclear age, Clausewitzian strategy, with its emphasis on the destruction of the enemy’s fighting forces, no longer applied. The United States and the Soviet Union were in exactly the position Oppenheimer had said they were, two scorpions in a bottle…

“Let us not forget that the Armed Services are to defend a ‘way of life,’ not merely land, property or lives.” The President said he wanted to make the JCS accept the need for a “balance between minimum requirements in the costly implements of war and the health of our economy…”

One remarkable aspect of Eisenhower’s involvement with the U-2 was that he never revealed his sources, even after Powers was shot down, when it would have been greatly to his personal advantage to do so. Throughout 1960, Kennedy and the Democrats cried “missile gap” again and again, until it became almost the central theme of JFK’s presidential campaign. Ike contented himself with responding that it simply was not true, without indicating how he knew…

Kennedy won the election. As President, he began a crash program to build ICBMS. When Ike left office, the United States had about two hundred ICBMS. When Kennedy was assassinated, the number was one thousand and growing daily. Four years later Kennedy’s Secretary of Defense, Robert S. McNamara, confessed that there never had been a “missile gap,” or if there had, it was in America’s favor. By then it was too late; the modern arms race was under way…

Lockheed called the plane the U-2. It was built in a separate little hangar in California called the “skunk works,” because no one not working on the craft was allowed near the hangar…

altitudes of better than 70,000 feet for cruising. From that immense distance, the cameras were so good they could take a picture of a parking lot and the PI could actually count the lines for the stalls or the number of cars parked in the lot…

Had the Russians been equally farsighted, Open Skies might well have put a lid on the arms race. It certainly would have lowered tension. Ike told the conference, to the astonishment of everyone present except for Eden and a half-dozen top advisers, that the United States was prepared to exchange military blueprints and charts with the Soviets. He was making the offer, he said, to show American sincerity in approaching the problem of disarmament. The world’s great fear was a surprise nuclear attack. An exchange of all military information would ease that fear…

The President said he was willing to go further. He invited the Russians to build airfields in the States, from which their people could freely fly over American military installations to reassure themselves that no surprise first strikes were in the offing.

4. Naziism could not spread and had no appeal, but communism did had appeal.

“The Nazis had a limited ideological appeal outside Germany, while the Communists could and did appeal to entire classes of people in France, Italy, Germany, and throughout the world. The Nazis had been forced to buy their spies, and even then could not trust them, while the Communists could and did receive invaluable information—the best being how to set off an atomic bomb—from out of the blue, a gift from true believers who managed to convince themselves that giving Stalin military secrets would speed the coming of the inevitable socialist utopia.

5. In college we studied the Nixon-Kennedy debates as the first televised presidential debates (not that I saw them live, of course, I was decades later :-). Kennedy was tan and Nixon washed out. Nixon lost the debates, and his unwittingly true prophecy on Cuba that night was what actually would happen.

On October 20 the New York Times headline ran, “KENNEDY ASKS AID FOR CUBAN REBELS TO DEFEAT CASTRO. URGES SUPPORT OF EXILES AND ‘FIGHTERS FOR FREEDOM.’ ”22 Nixon later wrote that, when he saw the headline, “I could hardly believe my eyes.” He checked with Dulles, who said he had informed Kennedy about the training operation in Guatemala and Bissell’s plans. Nixon, furious, felt that Kennedy had jeopardized the operation while winning votes from the millions of Americans who wanted Castro toppled and who thought the Republicans too weak to do it. But despite his anger, Nixon believed that “the covert operation had to be protected at all costs.” He therefore went to the other extreme, attacking Kennedy’s proposal “as wrong and irresponsible because it would violate our treaty commitments…”

In his campaign debate with Kennedy the following night, Nixon predicted that if the United States supported the Cuban exiles in a military adventure, it would be “condemned in the United Nations” while failing to “accomplish our objective.” It would be “an open invitation for Mr. Khrushchev … to come into Latin America.”23 The irony, of course, was that precisely what Nixon predicted would happen—although he never really believed it himself—did happen. The United States did fail, it was condemned, and the Bay of Pigs operation was an invitation for the Russians to move military forces into Cuba, an invitation Khrushchev quickly accepted.