Truman, who was never reluctant to admit he`d made a mistake, had by the early months of 1946 decided he'd made one in killing off the OSS.
By then, Soviet intentions were already becoming clear, and the bureaucratic infighting of the newly "freed" inde-pendent intelligence services of the Army, Navy, and State Department had made it clear that the nation did indeed need a central intelligence agency, whether or not the var-ious Princes of Intelligence liked it or not.
Truman, in yet another Presidential Directive, gave it one. He "established" the Central Intelligence Group and the National Intelligence Authority. Then, in 1947, he pushed through the Congress a bill making it law. The Central Intelligence Agency was born. Possibly as a sop to the regular military establishment, and possibly because he was singularly qualified for the post, Rear Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, USN, was named first director of the CIA.
On March 5, 1946, in a speech at Fulton, Missouri, British wartime Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill said, "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent."
That was certainly true, but it wasn't Soviet Russia's only iron curtain.
There was another one in Korea, a peninsula extending into the Yellow Sea and the Sea of Japan from the Asian continent. It had been ruled, rather brutally, by Japan since 1895.
Almost casually, when the Soviet Union finally agreed to enter the war against Japan, it was decided that the Soviets would accept the surrender of Japanese forces in the north of Korea, and the Americans in the south. The 38th paral-lel divided Korea, just north of Seoul, into roughly equal halves, and the 38th parallel became the demarcation line.
Immediately upon moving into "their" sector of Korea, the Soviets put in power a Korean Marxist named Kim II Sung, and promptly turned the 38th parallel into an iron curtain just as impenetrable as the one in Europe.
The Soviet government expected that Japan would be di-vided as Germany had been, into four zones, each individ-ually controlled by the Four Powers-France, England, Russia, and the United States. But that wasn't going to happen.
The English and French presence in occupied Japan was negligible. Japan and the Japanese economy were in ruins. Japan could not be levied upon to support an occu-pation army, because they simply didn't have the where-withal. And the English and the French, themselves reeling from the expense of World War II, simply couldn't afford to pay for an Army of Occupation of Japan. The English were having great difficulty with India-which wanted out of the British Empire-and with the French, in what was known as Cochin-China and became known as Vietnam.
And, of course, the French and English had the expense of maintaining their armies in occupied Germany, now not so much to keep the defeated Germans in line as to prevent the Soviet Union from charging their armies through the Fulda Gap to take over continental Europe.
The British, additionally, were having a hard time sup-porting their forces in liberated Greece, where Communist forces-primarily Albanians supported by the Soviet Union-were trying to bring Greece into the Soviet orbit. In 1948, the British simply announced they could no longer afford to stay in Greece and were pulling out.
Truman picked up that responsibility, supplying the Greek army, and dispatching Lt. General James Van Fleet and an American military advisory group to Athens. The American anti-Communist battle in Greece-almost un-known to the American public-is considered by many to be the first "hot war" of the Cold War, and the American "advisors," many of whom fought in small groups "advis-ing" Greek units in the lines, as the precursor of U.S. Spe-cial Forces.
The absence of British and French forces in Japan made it easier for the Supreme Commander in Japan, Douglas MacArthur-who had no doubts of Soviet intentions, and didn't want his occupation of Japan facing the same prob-lems the Army of Occupation of Germany was facing vis-a--vis the Communists-simply to refuse to permit any Soviet presence in Japan.
The Soviets protested their being kept out of Japan to Truman, who ignored them.
Washington also ignored what was going on in Korea. The American commander, General John R. Hodge, in the absence of specific orders-in fact, any orders-from Washington, took matters into his own hands.
As early as late 1945, he began to establish, first, a South Korean police force, and then a South Korean army. To counter the Soviet surrogate, Kim II Sung, Hodge per-mitted an anti-Communist Korean, Syngman Rhee, then living in exile in the United States, to return to Korea.
By 1948, the division of Korea along the 38th parallel was complete. North and South Korea each had a presi-dent, a government, and armed forces, and each pro-claimed it was the sole legitimate government for the whole country.
The sole substantial difference between the two was that North Korea was far better armed-with captured Japa-nese and newly-furnished Soviet equipment-than South Korea. Fearing that the fiery Syngman Rhee would march against North Korea, the U.S. State Department prevailed upon Truman to deny South Korea heavy artillery, modern aircraft, and tanks, and ultimately to order all but a few hundred soldiers in a Greek-style "Korean military advi-sory group" out of the country.
Hostility between North and South Korea grew. In the eight months before June 1950, more than 3,000 South Ko-rean soldiers and border policemen died in "incidents" along the 38th parallel.
On January 12, 1950, Secretary of State Dean Acheson outlined President Truman's Asian policy in a speech at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. Acheson "drew a line" of countries the United States considered "essential to its national interests," a euphemism everyone understood to mean the United States would go to war to defend.
Acheson placed Japan, Okinawa, and the Philippines within the American defense perimeter. Taiwan and Korea were not mentioned.
Five months later, on June 25, 1950, the North Koreans invaded across the 38th parallel.
Chapter One
[ONE]
ABOARD TRANS-GLOBAL AIRWAYS FLIGHT 907
NORTH LATITUDE 36 DEGREES 59 MINUTES,
EAST LONGITUDE 143 DEGREES 77 MINUTES
(ABOVE THE PACIFIC OCEAN, NEAR JAPAN)
1100 1 JUNE 1950
"This is the First Officer speaking," the copilot of Trans-Global Airways Flight 907 said into the public-address system microphone. "We are about to begin our descent into Tokyo's Haneda Airport, and have been advised it may get a little bumpy at lower altitudes. So please take your seats and fasten your seat belts, and very shortly we'll have you on the ground."
Trans-Global Flight 907 was a triple-tailed, five-months-old Lockheed L-1049 Constellation, christened Los Angeles.
The navigator, who wore pilot's wings, and who would move up to a copilot's seat when TGA accepted-next week, he hoped-what would be the eighteenth Constella-tion in the TGA fleet, did some calculations at his desk, then stood up and murmured, "Excuse me, sir," to the man in the jump seat.
The man in the jump seat (a fold-out seat between and immediately behind the pilot's and copilot's seats) looked over his shoulder at him in annoyance, finally realized what he wanted, muttered, "Sorry," and made room for the navigator to hand a sheet of paper to the copilot.