"Chief, that message we were talking about? I think it might be a good idea if you had a look at it yourself."
"I'm on my way. Thank you."
In the G-2's office, twenty minutes later, the G-2 read the message and reached for the red telephone on the G-2's desk. In twenty seconds, he had the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the secure line.
"Sir, I've got an Operational Immediate from Korea that I think you should have a look at right away."
"Okay."
"I think you might want to give the Secretary a heads-up, and with your permission, I'm going to do the same to mine."
"Okay. On my way. You're in your office?"
"Yes, sir."
"Meet me in the Ops Room."
"Yes, sir."
"And I'm in the car. You give the Secretary a heads-up."
"Yes, sir."
The G-2 telephoned, on the secure circuit, the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of the Army, in that order, and gave both the same message:
He had just spoken to the Chairman about an Opera-tional Immediate he had just received from Korea, and the Chairman was en route to the Ops Room to have a look at it, and had ordered him to relay that information to the Secretary.
The Secretary of the Army said he was on his way, and the Secretary of Defense said that it would take him ten minutes to shave and get dressed, and then he'd be on his way.
Before he left his home, the Secretary of Defense called the Secretary of State and said he had no idea how impor-tant it was, but there had been an Operational Immediate from Korea, and everybody was headed for the Ops Room to have a look at it, and maybe it might be a good idea for the Secretary to send somebody to the Pentagon, if not come himself.
The Secretary of Defense also called the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and on being told the Director would not be available for thirty minutes, got the Assistant Director and told him there was an Operational Immediate from Korea that he thought the Director should have a look at, and that everybody was en route to the Ops Room. The Assistant Director said he would leave word for the Direc-tor, and leave for the Ops Room himself immediately.
Less than an hour after that, having read the Operational Immediate in the Ops Room, and assessing other intelli-gence data available to the Ops Room, it was more or less unanimously agreed that the matter should be immediately brought to the attention of Harry S. Truman, President of the United States, and Commander-in-Chief of its armed forces.
The Assistant Secretary of State personally agreed that the President should be informed, but felt that he could not concur in the decision to do so until the Secretary of State had been brought up to speed on the situation and gave his concurrence.
It took another hour to get that concurrence, whereupon the White House Signal Agency was directed to put in a se-cure call to the President of the United States at his home in Independence, Missouri.
The President took the news almost stoically, and or-dered that he be kept up to date on any new developments, regardless of the hour.
The President was not surprised to hear from the Secre-tary of Defense that the North Koreans had invaded South Korea. He had been so informed three hours previously by the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, who had received a radio message from the CIA station chief in Seoul, and had immediately decided the President needed to be informed immediately, and had done so personally.
[TWO]
BLAIR HOUSE
WASHINGTON, D.C.
2205 25 JUNE 1950
"Unless someone can think of something else we can do tonight," President Harry S. Truman said, "I suggest we knock this off. I suspect we're all going to need clear heads in the morning."
The men at the conference table-the Secretaries of State and Defense, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Army and Air Force Chiefs of Staff, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Advisor, and several other high-ranking advisors, rose to their feet.
Although there was nothing wrong with the conference room in Blair House, it was not as large, nor as comfort-able as the conference room in the White House. If there was still a conference room across the street in the White House. In 1948, it had been discovered that the White House was literally falling down, in fact dangerous. Tru-man had made the decision to gut it to the walls and re-build everything. In June of 1950, the reconstruction was two years into what was to turn out to be a four-year process. The last time the President had looked into the White House, it was a gutted shell.
The President had cut short his vacation in Indepen-dence and flown back to Washington-in Air Force One, a four-engine Douglas DC-6 known as the Independence- early in the afternoon.
His senior advisors had been waiting for him in Blair House, the de facto temporary White House, where the Army Signal Corps had set up a teletype conference facility with General MacArthur in the Dai Ichi Building in Tokyo.
It was essentially a closed, state-of-the-art radio teletype circuit, where what was typed in Washington was immedi-ately both typed in Tokyo and displayed on a large screen so that everyone in the room could read it. And vice versa.
MacArthur had furnished the President what he knew- not much-about the situation in Korea, and the President had authorized MacArthur-after consultation with his staff, and through the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff-to send ammunition and equipment to Korea to pre-vent the loss of Seoul's Kimpo airfield to the North Kore-ans, and to provide Air Force and Navy fighter aircraft to protect the supply planes. MacArthur had also been au-thorized to do whatever he considered necessary to evacu-ate the dependents of American military and diplomatic personnel in Korea from the war zone, and to dispatch a team to Korea to assess what was happening.
Truman had also ordered the Seventh Fleet (which was split between the Philippines and Okinawa) to sail immedi-ately for the U.S. Navy Base in Sasebo, Japan, where it would pass into the control of Commander, U.S. Naval Forces Far East. COMNAVFORFE was subordinate to the Supreme Commander, Allied Powers, so what Truman had done was to take operational control of the Seventh Fleet from the Commander-in-Chief Pacific (CINCPAC) and give it to MacArthur.
Until they knew more about what was going on, there was nothing else that anyone in the room could think of to do.
Except for Admiral Hillenkoetter, the CIA Director, and he was considering his options to ask for a few minutes of the Commander-in-Chief's time-alone-when the Presi-dent seemed to be reading his mind.
"Admiral, would you stay behind a minute, please?" Truman asked.
"Yes, Mr. President," the Admiral said.
It is entirely possible, the admiral thought, that I am about to have my ass chewed for calling him when I got the Seoul station chief's radio. He didn't say anything, but it's possible the Chairman's heard about it, and he would con-sider it going over his head.
The Chairman gave the admiral a strange look as he left the room, leaving him alone with the President.
In William Donovan's Office of Strategic Services, the OSS had technically been under the command of the Chair-man of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Donovan had paid no atten-tion to that at all, deciding that he worked for the President and nobody else. Donovan had gotten away with that.
In the reincarnation of the OSS as the Central Intelli-gence Agency, the CIA was a separate governmental agency, charged with cooperating with the Defense and State Departments, but not under their command. None of the military services, or the State Department, liked that, and they tried, in one way or another, with varying degrees of subtlety, to insinuate that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs was really in charge. Hillenkoetter was, after all, an admiral detailed to the CIA, not a civilian, like J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.