explosives
on our positions first and the East German tanks will roll straight
into our barracks. We stand and fight, torching off every missile we
have so as to take out as many attacking aircraft as we have missiles,
and get the hell out of there. I could almost taste the thrill in my
mouth as I waited for Ike to get off the phone that day back in 1957.
Those were my memories this afternoon as I stood outside the
back door of General Trudeau’s office on the third floor of
the outer ring of the Pentagon. It was 1961, four years after I left
the White House and put on my uniform again to stand guard across the
electronic no-man’s-land of radar sweeps and photo sensors
just a few kilometers west of the Iron Curtain. Ike had retired to his
farm in Pennsylvania, and my new boss was General Arthur Trudeau, one
of the last fighting generals from the Korean War. Trudeau became an
instant hero in my book when I heard about how his men were pinned down
on the cratered slopes of Pork Chop Hill, dug into shallow foxholes
with enemy mortars dropping round them like rain. You
couldn’t order anyone up that hell of an incline to walk
those boys back down; just too damn many explosions. So Trudeau pulled
off his stars, clapped a sergeant’s helmet over his head, and
fought back up the hill himself, leading a company of volunteers, and
then fought his way back down. That was how he did things, with his own
hands, and now I’d be working directly for him in the Army
R&D Division.
I was a lieutenant colonel when I came to the Pentagon in
1961, and all I brought with me were my bowling trophy from Fort Riley
and a nameplate for my desk cut out of the fin of a Nike missile from
Germany. My men made it for me and said it would bring me luck. After I
got to the Pentagon - it was still a couple of days before my
assignment actually began - I found out right away I’d need a
lot of it. In fact, as I opened the door and let myself directly into
the general’s inner office, I found out how much luck
I’d need that very day.
“So what’s the big secret,
General?” I asked my new boss. It was strange talking to a
general this way, but we’d become friends while I was on
Eisenhower’s staff. “Why not the front
door?”
“Because they’re already watching you,
Phil, ” he said, knowing exactly what kind of cold chill that
would send through me. “And I’d just as soon have
this conversation in private before you show up officially. ”
He walked me over to a set of file cabinets. “Things
haven’t changed that much around here since you went to
Germany, ” he said. “We still know who our friends
are and who we can trust. ”
I knew his code. The Cold War was at its height and there were
enemies all around us: in government, within the intelligence services,
and within the White House itself. Those of us in military intelligence
who knew the truth about how much danger the country was in were very
circumspect about what we said, even to each other, and where we said
it. Looking back on it now from the safe distance of forty years,
it’s hard to believe that even as big eight-cylinder American
cars rolled off the assembly lines and into suburban driveways and
television antennas sprung up on roofs of brand-new houses in thousands
of subdivisions around the country, we were in the midst of a
treacherous war of nerves.
Deep inside our intelligence services and even within the
President’s own cabinet were cadres of career government
officers working - some knowingly, some not - for the Soviet Union by
carrying out policies devised inside the KGB. Some of the position
papers that came out of these offices made no sense otherwise. We also
knew the CIA had been penetrated by KGB moles, just as we knew that
some of our own policy makers were advocating ideas that would only
weaken the United States and lead us down the paths that served the
best interests of our enemies.
A handful of us knew the awful truth about Korea. We
on our positions first and the East German tanks will roll straight
into our barracks. We stand and fight, torching off every missile we
have so as to take out as many attacking aircraft as we have missiles,
and get the hell out of there. I could almost taste the thrill in my
mouth as I waited for Ike to get off the phone that day back in 1957.
Those were my memories this afternoon as I stood outside the
back door of General Trudeau’s office on the third floor of
the outer ring of the Pentagon. It was 1961, four years after I left
the White House and put on my uniform again to stand guard across the
electronic no-man’s-land of radar sweeps and photo sensors
just a few kilometers west of the Iron Curtain. Ike had retired to his
farm in Pennsylvania, and my new boss was General Arthur Trudeau, one
of the last fighting generals from the Korean War. Trudeau became an
instant hero in my book when I heard about how his men were pinned down
on the cratered slopes of Pork Chop Hill, dug into shallow foxholes
with enemy mortars dropping round them like rain. You
couldn’t order anyone up that hell of an incline to walk
those boys back down; just too damn many explosions. So Trudeau pulled
off his stars, clapped a sergeant’s helmet over his head, and
fought back up the hill himself, leading a company of volunteers, and
then fought his way back down. That was how he did things, with his own
hands, and now I’d be working directly for him in the Army
R&D Division.
I was a lieutenant colonel when I came to the Pentagon in
1961, and all I brought with me were my bowling trophy from Fort Riley
and a nameplate for my desk cut out of the fin of a Nike missile from
Germany. My men made it for me and said it would bring me luck. After I
got to the Pentagon - it was still a couple of days before my
assignment actually began - I found out right away I’d need a
lot of it. In fact, as I opened the door and let myself directly into
the general’s inner office, I found out how much luck
I’d need that very day.
“So what’s the big secret,
General?” I asked my new boss. It was strange talking to a
general this way, but we’d become friends while I was on
Eisenhower’s staff. “Why not the front
door?”
“Because they’re already watching you,
Phil, ” he said, knowing exactly what kind of cold chill that
would send through me. “And I’d just as soon have
this conversation in private before you show up officially. ”
He walked me over to a set of file cabinets. “Things
haven’t changed that much around here since you went to
Germany, ” he said. “We still know who our friends
are and who we can trust. ”
I knew his code. The Cold War was at its height and there were
enemies all around us: in government, within the intelligence services,
and within the White House itself. Those of us in military intelligence
who knew the truth about how much danger the country was in were very
circumspect about what we said, even to each other, and where we said
it. Looking back on it now from the safe distance of forty years,
it’s hard to believe that even as big eight-cylinder American
cars rolled off the assembly lines and into suburban driveways and
television antennas sprung up on roofs of brand-new houses in thousands
of subdivisions around the country, we were in the midst of a
treacherous war of nerves.
Deep inside our intelligence services and even within the
President’s own cabinet were cadres of career government
officers working - some knowingly, some not - for the Soviet Union by
carrying out policies devised inside the KGB. Some of the position
papers that came out of these offices made no sense otherwise. We also
knew the CIA had been penetrated by KGB moles, just as we knew that
some of our own policy makers were advocating ideas that would only
weaken the United States and lead us down the paths that served the
best interests of our enemies.
A handful of us knew the awful truth about Korea. We
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