How to Avoid Learning from Surprise Attacks, Courtesy Of the MSM and the CIA
Posted by Dutton Peabody Jun 22nd 2010 at 7:22 am in Featured Story, Military | Comments (17)
Last week, at the Truman Presidential Library in Independence, Mo., a conference on the Korean War saw the CIA release of a large volume of long-classified documents. One of them led to this revelation:
Declassified Documents Show CIA Blunders in Korean War
The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency committed two major blunders during the Korean War by underestimating the threat of a North Korean invasion of South Korea and failing to predict the intervention of Chinese communist troops until a day before it happened. . . . The revelations are contained in a set of CIA documents that were declassified on Wednesday, including a report entitled “Two Strategic Intelligence Mistakes in Korea, 1950,” which reviews the mistakes.
According to the report, a [CIA] paper dated on June 19, six days before the Korea War broke out, noted that “while [North Korea] could take control of parts of the South, it probably did not have the capability to destroy the South Korean government without Soviet or Chinese assistance,” adding “This belief caused them to ignore warnings of [North Korea’s] military buildup and mobilization near the border, clearly the ‘force protection’ intelligence that should have been most alerting to military minds.”
The CIA had been monitoring China’s moves from the start of the war, but even after the balance tipped in favor of South Korea with the success of [MacArthur’s] Inchon landing operation that choked off the communist advance, it saw no signs of Chinese intervention. On Oct. 12, it reported, “While full-scale Chinese Communist intervention in Korea must be regarded as a continuing possibility, a consideration of all known factors leads to the conclusion that such action is not probable in 1950” . . . But on the following day, 30,000 Chinese troops poured across the Duman (or Tumen) River followed by 150,000 more soldiers a few days later, leading to a full-blown battle with allied forces.
Pretty enormous mistakes, considering that the North Korean and Chinese offensives required mobilization and movement to launch-points of large military forces opposite RoK and U.S. units, something not easy for intelligence collection to miss in a tinder-box environment like the Korean peninsula at the time.
If you haven’t read in the MSM about these two enormous mistakes being revealed, it’s because this report comes from South Korea. Its source can be read in its entirety here. The New York Times has not bothered to report it. The Washington Post website contains a June 16 AP report, “CIA papers: US was caught off-guard in Korean War,” which softballs the revelations and fails to be specific about U.S. civilian and military leaders having relied in 1950 on two crucial CIA assessments that proved dead wrong, at the cost of many American and RoK soldiers’ lives.
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