Arthur L. Boyd - Operation Broken Reed: Trumans Secret North Korean Spy Mission That Averted World War III

For the want of a nail, begins Benjamin Franklins refrain on the loss of a shoe, a horse, a rider, and, eventuallythe battle. Yet in war, it is not nails but intelligence that decides battles. Indeed, it is accurate, correctly interpreted intelligence, or the lack thereof, that leads to war.

Tragically, the often quoted phrase history repeats itself couldnt be closer to the truth with respect to world leaders blatant, wanton disregard of the need for intelligence that has led to tens of thousands of battle deaths. The strange paradox is that lessons learned have been lessons forgotten.

From June 1950 until July 1953 the United States waged war in Korea; though there were 33,686 battle deaths and over 100,000 wounded, it is Americas forgotten war, a war so forgotten that 8,100 U.S. servicemen from that time are still unaccounted for.

It took fifty years for a monument to be erected to honor those who fought and died.

After the war, Korea existed on the periphery of American politics until only recently. Today it moves relentlessly closer to center stage, though for Americans its history remains obscure, riddled with misunderstanding. More than a million American soldiers served in Korea, and billions of dollars have been spent occupying South Korea over the last five decades, but most Americans know nothing of a country where so many of its youth died, and where many more might die someday.

The Vietnam War is vivid in the collective memory, but the Korean War era is shrouded. When people today think of the United States during the early 1950s, they conjure up a time of peace and prosperity, one long before war protests, and certainly before the threat of international terrorism, of which North Korea is a significant part. The early fifties evoke a slumberous period of tranquillity, roller rinks, and drive-in movies, yet the reality was very different: during those years, the United States, China, and the Soviet Union teetered on the brink of World War III; atomic war threatened annihilation.

The Korean War era was one of fear and suspicionpossibly greater than at any other time in American history. The cold war dominated all events; it was a period of atomic terror, the Red Scare, and blacklists. Americans were afraid during those years, and their fear was realthe world did teeter on the verge of atomic war.

Few Americans knew then, or realize now, that a hair-trigger nuclear scenario played out in Washington and Moscow during this time. In 1951, President Harry S. Truman faced a fearful decision: should he follow the advice of those who wanted to escalate the Korean War and defeat the Communist threat, or should he accept a stalemate, with the United States not winning a war for the first time since 1812?

Truman had undergone one of the most stressful presidencies in history. He himself would have started his litany of troubles on April 12, 1945, when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt died, thrusting the weight of a world at war on Trumans shoulders. The most improbable of vice presidents was not prepared. Roosevelt had been president for twelve years, longer than anyone, winning a fourth term even while desperately sickcollapsing the very day of his nomination, caught by his son at the convention, the event hushed up.

Truman, picked at the last moment from near obscurity in the U.S. Senate to be the vice presidential candidate, after a career as a haberdasher and ward politician, had been as surprised as anyone. In eighty-three days as vice president, the shortest of anyone ascending the presidency, he had met with Roosevelt exactly twice, and those were photo ops. He was virtually clueless about the course of the war in Europe and the Pacific, and had never even heard about the atomic bomb until a few months before he ordered it dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ushering the world into the atomic age and an arms race of which Albert Einstein and others had forewarned him. Nevertheless, he had no regrets or second thoughts about the decision to drop the bombs.

In March 1947, Truman proposed a new foreign policy for the United States: the country would intervene wherever necessary to prevent the subjugation of free peoples by communist totalitarian regimes, beginning with those in Greece and Turkey. His target was the Soviet Union, which he felt was undermining the foundations of world peace, threatening the security of the United States, and violating the Yalta Agreement in Poland, Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria.

This new foreign policy placed the United States on a collision course with Russia that culminated in Korea in 1950.

For Truman, 1948 was his only good year. Hed won election to the presidency in his own right, defeating the heavily favored Republican Thomas Dewey; FDRs former vice president Henry Wallace (the man Truman replaced) running as a Progressive; and Senator Strom Thurmond, who bolted the Democratic Party because of its civil rights plank to run as a Dixiecrat.

Before that, there had been other great accomplishmentsthe United Nations, the European Recovery Programnamed the Marshall Plan after Secretary of State George C. Marshallthe North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the Berlin airlift, integration of the armed services, and the formation of Israel.

But those halcyon days were over by 1951, when newspapers blared awful stories of Americans dying in Korea, spies in government, and corruption at the door of the Oval Office (seven members of Trumans administration, including some of his closest aides, would eventually go to jail).

Everything soured after 1948. The following year brought terrifying news that the Soviet Union had developed the atomic bomb, a full decade earlier than expected. A month before that, a State Department white paper revealed that China, the worlds most populous country, had fallen to the communists. On October 1, 1949, Mao stood on the Tian An Menthe Gate of Heavenly Peace in Beijingto proclaim the Peoples Republic of China, warning that The Chinese people have stood up... nobody will insult us again.