Ike's Spies Read Online Free PDF

capabilities and intentions against an estimate of America’s capabilities. An overall view was absent because the CIA was responsible for gauging the Russian threat, while the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS ) were responsible for estimates of the American ability to respond. The two had to be brought together.
    What Ike wanted was a “net” evaluation, or what the military called a “commander’s estimate,” the kind of effort General Kenneth Strong produced throughout World War II. In 1954 the President asked Allen Dulles and Admiral Arthur Radford, Chairman of the JCS , to prepare such a commander’s estimate on the probable outcome of a war between the U.S.S.R. and the United States. 1
    Dulles delegated Cline to do the CIA side of the study, while Radford chose Rear Admiral Thomas Robbins, whom Cline characterized as “a brilliant but somewhat lackadaisical” officer. Robbins, in the best military tradition, delegated two staff assistants to represent him. These young officers, Cline wrote, “had not a clue as to what we were supposed to do,” so Cline took over.
    He immediately discovered the tremendous power of themilitary in the Washington bureaucracy. Cline could invoke Admiral Radford’s name “and have things happen instantaneously.” There was a vast vacuum-tube first-generation computer filling the basement of the Pentagon. He also learned that the only experienced war-gaming staff the services had was outside Washington. Cline mentioned this to Radford on Friday; on Monday, he had full-time use of the computer, and the war-gaming staff was on station in the Pentagon. Cline then prepared to play a computerized war game and, for the first time, make it part of a net estimate. 2
    In that second year of the Eisenhower administration, at the height of the Cold War, the Pentagon was full of tension and fear. It was commonly said that communism was bent on “world domination” and that the “time of greatest danger” of attack was two years hence. The Russians would march across the Elbe River into West Germany and on to France, while the Chinese would march across the Yalu River into Korea and launch an amphibious assault against Formosa. The unexamined assumption was that the Communists had both the capability and intention of carrying out such ambitious offensives.
    But when Cline played his war games on that giant computer, he made some fascinating discoveries, the chief being that “it was a pretty desperate move for the U.S.S.R. to attack us with their substantially inferior long-range air force.” U.S. radar tactical warning systems in Europe and Asia were good enough to preclude the possibility of the Communists achieving surprise. An incidental discovery was that the characteristics of defense radar made it more profitable to attack at low levels, where “ground clutter” confused the radar, than at the high altitudes for which American bombers were designed. This discovery led to a revision of U. S. Air Force bombing tactics, a fortuitous revision as the development over the next few years of Soviet ground-to-air missiles made it imperative for the United States to go to low-level attack. 3
    With the results of the war game before him, Cline then wrote the commander’s estimate for 1954. He prepared a briefing on the subject, complete with the usual visual aidsand charts. The military insisted on pride of place and Admiral Robbins, not Cline, made the oral presentation at the White House. Ike insisted that all the top officials in the Defense Department attend this special briefing.
    â€œThe encomiums were great,” Cline wrote with justifiable pride. What Ike had suspected all along was confirmed—using such terms as the “ultimate” intention of “world domination” was a poor indicator of specific near-term military action. * The Communists were neither ready nor able to resort to direct military