Carter's troop withdrawal decisions-the role of intelligence

[2RHPZ]

The role of intelligence in president Jimmy Carter's troop withdrawal decisions

Military Intelligence Professional Bulletin
Jan-March, 2002
by Fred Hoffman

In early 1975, candidate Jimmy Carter declared that, if elected president, he would order the withdrawal of all U.S. ground forces from the Korean peninsula. Less than a week after his inauguration, President Carter vigorously moved to keep his campaign pledge. For two and a half years thereafter, in the face of increasing opposition, President Carter remained steadfast in his determination to withdraw all U.S. ground forces from Korea by 1981. In July 1979, however, after only 3,600 U.S. troops had been withdrawn, President Carter grudgingly announced the suspension of further troop withdrawals. This article examines the role intelligence played in his support in 1975 for the complete withdrawal of U.S. ground forces, his 1977 policy decision as President to carry out this withdrawal, and his reluctant decision in 1979 to scuttle the plan.

President Carter's intention to withdraw U.S. ground forces from Korea was first publicly enunciated in January 1975, during the early days of his candidacy; one should consider it within the context of events and circumstances during the period between his candidacy and inauguration. In April 1975, communist forces captured Saigon. In addition to wrestling with morale, race, and substance abuse problems, the U.S. military at the time suffered from low public esteem and consequent recruiting difficulties. In the wake of the Vietnam conflict, the U.S. economy continued to reel from the long-term effects of our "guns and butter" policies, a situation exacerbated by the 1973 oil crisis. In the mid-1970s, given the sad experience of Vietnam and economic problems at home, most of Congress and the electorate supported a U.S. retrenchment in Asia. A May 1976 poll conducted by the Foreign Policy Association revealed majority support for the gradual removal of U.S. Forces in Korea. (1) Six months later, the Washingto n Postbroke the news that the U.S. Government was investigating an alleged influence-peddling campaign conducted by the South Korean Government against elected U.S. officials, further reducing popular support for the U.S. military presence in South Korea. (2) "Koreagate," as the press quickly labeled bribery scandal, only worsened the tamished image of a South Korean Government already repeatedly lambasted for human rights abuses. (3)

Another significant factor contributing to support for reduction of the U.S. military presence was the changing balance of military and economic power on the Korean Peninsula. After peaking at 360,000 during the Korean War, U.S. troop levels hovered around 60,000 throughout the 1950s and 1960s. During those two decades, rapid growth in South Korean economic and military strength caused some U.S. officials to favor reducing U.S. forces there. In 1970, President Richard Nixon withdrew one of the two divisions then based in Korea, reducing U.S. military personnel from 60,000 to 40,000. (4)

Despite the initiation of an inter-Korean dialogue in 1972, military tensions remained high on the peninsula throughout the early- to mid-1970s. North Korea seized a U.S. naval ship, the USS Pueblo, in 1968. In late 1974, the first North Korean tunnel was discovered underneath the demilitarized zone (DMZ) between the Koreas and a second tunnel a few months later. In April 1976, intelligence reports revealed that Chinese officials had cautioned Kim II Sung, then President of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea), against launching an attack on South Korea. (5) In August 1976, North Korean troops attacked and killed members of a U.S. military work party in the DMZ.

As Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) in the outgoing Ford Administration, George Bush made several trips to Plains, Georgia, in 1976 to brief candidate (and then President-Elect) Carter on intelligence issues. Mr. Bush found President Carter to be attentive, but distrustful of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). (6) Given the tenacity with which President Carter later clung to his troop withdrawal policy, one might have expected him to demonstrate a keen interest in any intelligence regarding Korea. Surprisingly, this was not the case. In fact, Don Oberdorfer writes that President-Elect Carter turned down a proposed CIA briefing on Korea, and during his administration rarely attended National Security Council (NSC) discussions regarding Korea. (7) Not only did intelligence play little or no apparent role in President Carter's decision to withdraw U.S. ground forces from South Korea, neither former President Carter nor any of his advisors have ever identified an intelligence basis for the withdrawal d ecision. (8)

Troop Withdrawal Decision

On 26 January 1977, six days after his inauguration, President Carter issued Presidential Review Memorandum 13 (PRM 13) Korea. In response, Richard Holbrooke, President Carter's newly designated Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, formed the interagency East Asia Informal Group (EAIG) to conduct this review. Members of the EAIG were shocked when Secretary of State Cyrus R. Vance soon passed on guidance from the White House that the group should not study whether to withdraw ground forces, but merely how to do so. William Gleysteen, an EAIG member who later became Carter's ambassador to the Republic of Korea (ROK), writes:

Angered by this news, we ended the first meeting with a mutinous agreement about how to deal with this White House dictate. Some participants threatened to refuse to cooperate; others threatened to publicize the issue, perhaps by way of Congress. The angry, fractious session ended in bureaucratic chaos. (9)

The ripples from the shock first felt by the EAIG quickly extended not only to dismayed U.S. military and intelligence officials but also to U.S. allies Japan and the ROK. Neither country had been consulted by any U.S. officials before President Carter's decision.

As a candidate running in the first presidential election since Watergate, Jimmy Carter clearly benefited from his independence from the Washington establishment. As President, however, his lack of connections inside the Washington "Beltway," in particular among defense and intelligence professionals, turned his much-touted outsider status into a liability. Despite having graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy, Jimmy Carter did not have close ties to the military establishment. Sam Sarkesian observed during the latter part of the Carter presidency, "National security remains the prime province of military experts and civilian specialists who tend to develop a legitimacy because of their expertise--an expertise, it might be added, upon which most Presidents depend." (10) Throughout his presidency, he held both his DCI and the intelligence community at arm's length. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski effectively neutralized President Carter's DCI, Stansfield Turner, by limiting his access to the Pres ident. (11) When the Carter Administration announced the withdrawal plan, Mr. Turner was to air his misgivings about the plan at a special NSC meeting. President Carter was unmoved by his DCI's pleas. (12)

Despite strong misgivings even among his closest advisors, Jimmy Carter doggedly pressed ahead with his troop withdrawal plan.

From the beginning of the Carter Administration in 1977 until mid-1979, the conduct of American policy toward Korea was encumbered by fundamental opposition within the bureaucracy (both civilian and military) and the Congress (both Republicans and Democrats) to the president's efforts to withdraw all U.S. ground forces from Korea. (13)

Examining President Carter's decision-making style, Vincent Davis in 1979 made three observations that partially explain this phenomenon: (14)

* He preferred written briefings, which reduced the ability of staffers to plead their cases before him.

* He tended to rush into decisions without any long-term plan or vision.

* He placed a premium on personal loyalty, and preferred working with just a handful of trusted advisors.

Carter's inner circle tightly controlled who, and what, the President saw. The critical players involved in formulating policy toward the ROK during the Carter years were Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, Secretary of Defense Harold Brown, National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, and the EAIG. Years later, Secretary Vance, Secretary Brown, and Advisor Brzezinski all professed to have personally opposed the withdrawal plan, but at the time they all loyally carried out the president's instructions with respect to it. (15) By contrast, when Major General John Singlaub, the Chief of Staff of U.S. Forces in Korea, told a reporter in May 1977 that the withdrawal plan would lead to war, President Carter promptly fired him. (16) This event galvanized congressional opposition to the plan, opposition which steadily grew during the next two years.

While his advisors agonized over how to dissuade the President without appearing disloyal, the intelligence community continued to exploit newly available satellite imagery capabilities to examine the North Korean ground force strength more closely. As early as May 1975, John Armstrong, a West Point graduate and Vietnam veteran working as a civilian imagery analyst at Fort Meade, Maryland, observed the existence of many more North Korean tanks than had previously been reported.

Within a few weeks, Armstrong identified an entirely new tank division (about 270 tanks and 100 armored personnel carriers) in a valley about fifty miles north of the DMZ. Before Armstrong's involvement, there had been little effort to compare the overall strength of North Korean units in the latest pictures with those of previous months or years. Armstrong's first intensive study, completed in December 1975, reported that the North Korean tank forces were about 80 percent larger than previously estimated. Armed with this alarming finding, he persuaded the Army to assign six more full-time analysts to his project. During the next two years, his team documented the development of North Korean special forces units--which were training on mock-ups of South Korean highways and terrain-and a major increase in the number and forward deployment of North Korean artillery. (17)

By mid-1978, U.S. imagery analysts had not only concluded that North Korean tank forces were 80 percent larger than previously believed but also determined that North Korean maneuver battalions actually outnumbered South Korean forces by an alarming two-to-one (2:1) ratio. In January 1979, these classified findings were leaked to the media. Within ten days, Democratic Senators Robert C. Byrd, Gary Hart, and Samuel A. Nunn, Jr., of the Senate Armed Services Committee, joined with their Republican colleagues Senators William S. Cohen and John Tower to endorse suspension of further troop withdrawals. (18) On 20 January 1979, President Carter issued PRM 45 U.S. Policy Toward Korea, calling for a new policy review of the withdrawal plan. On 20 July 1979, he grudgingly announced the suspension of all further troop withdrawals until the completion of a review of the military balance on the Korean Peninsula. Ronald Reagan's defeat of Jimmy Carter in the 1980 presidential election put the final nail in the coffin of P resident Carter's stubbornly defended troop withdrawal plan.

Conclusion

This case study demonstrates that even the most timely, accurate, and compelling intelligence information can be of limited value if policy-makers choose to ignore it. The study also underlines the critical importance of communications and trust between the President of the United States, his advisors, and Executive Branch intelligence agencies. If a president distrusts his intelligence advisors and their subordinate organizations, his receptivity toward the information they provide will be limited. An abundance of intelligence information on Korea was available to Jimmy Carter when he was both President-Elect and President. However, due to the combination of his leadership style, personality traits, outsider status and innate distrust of the intelligence community, intelligence information played a minor role in his decision-making on the troop withdrawal issue. The extent of President Carter's reluctance to abandon his withdrawal plan, and the depth of his distrust for the intelligence community, are reveal ed in a 1999 statement he made to long-time Washington Post correspondent Don Oberdorfer. Fully two decades after scrapping his plan, Carter voiced suspicion to Oberdorfer that the 1978 intelligence community findings on North Korean military strength had actually been manipulated by the Defense Intelligence Agency. (19) Had the United States removed all ground troops from South Korea during Carter's presidency, especially so soon after the U.S. defeat in Vietnam, it is conceivable that North Korean leader Kim II Sung could have interpreted this as a green light to reunify the Korean Peninsula by force of arms.

CPT Fred Hoffman, a Human Intelligence Officer is assigned to the Joint Reserve Unit, Defense Intelligence Agency, holds a Master of Arts in Asian Studies (Chinese) from the University of Michigan ('83). He is a recent graduate of the Postgraduate Intelligence Program for Reservists (PGIP-R) from the Joint Military Intelligence College. In his civilian capacity, CPT Hoffman works as a contractor providing analytical support to a Department of Defense agency. You can contact CPT Hoffman by e-mail at: fredhof@home.com.

Endnotes

(1.) Jan, George P. "The United States, china and Japan," in Defense Policy and the Presidency: Carter's First Years, Sarkesian, Sam C., Editor (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1979), page 293.

(2.) Oberdorfer, Don, The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History (Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley, 1997), page 92.

(3.) Gleysteen Jr., William H., Massive Entanglement, Marginal Influence: Carter and Korea in Crisis (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1999), page 3.

(4.) Bandow, Doug, "Korea: The case for Disengagement," Cato Institute Policy Analysis, Number 96, 8 December 1987, URL <http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa096.html>, accessed 8 January 2000.

(5.) Davis, Zachary S., et. al., Procedural and Jurisdictional Questions Regarding Possible Normalization of Relations With North Korea," CRS Report for Congress, 94-933S (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress, 29 November 1994), page 5.

(6.) Andrew, Christopher, For the President's Eyes Only: Secret Intelligence and the American Presidency from Washington to Bush (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1995), page 426.

(7.) Oberdorfer, The Two Koreas, page 85.

(8.) Oberdorfer, The Two Koreas, page 85.

(9.) Gleysteen, page 23.

(10.) Sarkesian, Sam C. "Introduction," in Defense Policy and the Presidency," page 13.

(11.) Andrew, page 430.

(12.) Oberdorfer, Don, "Carter's Decision on Korea Traced Back to January, 1975," Washington Post, 12 June 1977, page A15.

(13.) Gleysteen, page 6.

(14.) Davis, Vincent, The President and the National Security Apparatus," in Defense Policy and the Presidency, pages 66-67.

(15.) Oberdorfer, The Two Koreas, page 90.

(16.) Wilson, George C. House Panel Begins 'Frontal Assault' on Korea Policy," Washington Post, 26 May 1977, page A1.

(17.) Oberdorfer, The Two Koreas, pages 101-102.

(18.) Wilson, George C. "Troop Withdrawal from South Korea Too Risky at Present, Senators Say," Washington Post, 24 January 1977, page A3.

(19.) Oberdorfer, The Two Koreas, page 103.

[Jedburgh]

This case study demonstrates that even the most timely, accurate, and compelling intelligence information can be of limited value if policy-makers choose to ignore it.

...or simply view it in light of their own preconceived biases, thus misinterpreting it - or choose to selectively use only portions of the intel that agrees with their personal political agenda, etc. ad nauseum. The classic text on this specific topic is Knowing One's Enemies: Intelligence Assessment Before the Two World Wars. The book goes far beyond being merely a professional, scholarly analysis of the past and is easy to see as a deliberately constructed set of case-studies with important lessons for today’s policy makers - and others interested in such things.

The book consists of sixteen essays that illuminate intelligence collection, analysis and decision making at the national level in various countries at critical junctures in their history (Austria-Hungary, Germany, Russia, France, Great Britain and Italy before WWI and Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Japan, and the US before WWII).

In many ways, the essays spin a cautionary tale, warning that even when a nation is in possession of sufficient intelligence of a quality to make effective policy decisions, it can all come to disaster due to the inherent biases, proclivities and abilities of key policy makers. The harmful effects of internal disputes within intelligence agencies, and turf battles between competing agencies, are also laid out in careful detail.

I highly recommend this one for anyone wishing a clearer understanding of the use and impact of intelligence on the decision process at the national policy-making level.