The Military Intelligence Division was the military intelligence branch of the

United States Army The United States Army (USA) is the land warfare, land military branch, service branch of the United States Armed Forces. It is one of the eight Uniformed services of the United States, U.S. uniformed services, and is designated as the Army o ...

and

United States Department of War The United States Department of War, also called the War Department (and occasionally War Office in the early years), was the United States Cabinet department originally responsible for the operation and maintenance of the United States Army, ...

from May 1917 (as the Military Intelligence Section, then Military Intelligence Branch in February 1918, then Military Intelligence Division in June 1918) to March 1942. It was preceded by the Military Information Division and the General Staff Second Division and in 1942 was reorganised as the

Military Intelligence Service The Military Intelligence Service ( ja, アメリカ陸軍情報部, ''America Rikugun Jōhōbu'') was a World War II U.S. military unit consisting of two branches, the Japanese American unit (described here) and the German-Austrian unit based ...

History

World War One

* Corps of Interpreters * American Expeditionary Force * G-2 *

Corps of Intelligence Police The Corps of Intelligence Police (CIP) was founded by Ralph Van Deman in 1917 as an intelligence agency within the United States Army, and the War Department. In World War I, many of the intelligence disciplines still in use today were deployed fo ...

Inter-War Years

Army G2

Black Chamber The Black Chamber (1919–1929), also known as the Cipher Bureau, was the United States' first peacetime cryptanalytic organization, and a forerunner of the National Security Agency. The only prior codes and cypher organizations maintained by th ...

MI Officer Reserve Corps

Signal Intelligence Service The Signal Intelligence Service (SIS) was the United States Army codebreaking division through World War II. It was founded in 1930 to compile codes for the Army. It was renamed the Signal Security Agency in 1943, and in September 1945, became t ...

Devolution to G2 and S2 In the first half of 1941, Sherman Miles became a senior member of Army Chief of Staff General

George C. Marshall George Catlett Marshall Jr. (December 31, 1880 – October 16, 1959) was an American army officer and statesman. He rose through the United States Army to become Chief of Staff of the US Army under Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry ...

's general staff. Miles was assigned as "Assistant Chief of Staff G-2", i.e., the head of the Military Intelligence Division.Cullum, George Washington:
Biographical register of the officers and graduates of the U. S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y. since its establishment in 1802. Supplement vol. 9 (1940–1950)
". URL retrieved 2011-01-12. The MID greatly expanded during his time as G-2, but, as Miles put it, "always in a piecemeal manner".Finnegan, John Patrick:

', Center for Military History, U.S. Army 1998, CMH pub 60-13, here

. URLs retrieved 2011-01-14. Qualified cryptography personnel were scarce, and Japanese-speaking personnel were also hard to come by. Miles' suggestions to set up an

espionage Espionage, spying, or intelligence gathering is the act of obtaining secret or confidential information (intelligence) from non-disclosed sources or divulging of the same without the permission of the holder of the information for a tangib ...

service were ignored until June 1941,''

Life Life is a quality that distinguishes matter that has biological processes, such as Cell signaling, signaling and self-sustaining processes, from that which does not, and is defined by the capacity for Cell growth, growth, reaction to Stimu ...

'', Dec 2, 1940 issue, p. 94:
These are U.S. Army's six foremost Generals
, wrote even that "spies are considered un-American". URL retrieved 2011-01-14. when U.S. President

Franklin D. Roosevelt Franklin Delano Roosevelt (; ; January 30, 1882April 12, 1945), often referred to by his initials FDR, was an American politician and attorney who served as the 32nd president of the United States from 1933 until his death in 1945. As the ...

appointed

William J. Donovan William Joseph "Wild Bill" Donovan (January 1, 1883 – February 8, 1959) was an American soldier, lawyer, intelligence officer and diplomat, best known for serving as the head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the Bur ...

as Coordinator of Information. Donovan's unit would eventually become the OSS, but it was independent from the MID and needed time to mature, which made for a difficult collaboration (if not to say a rivalry) between the MID and the OSS from the beginning and continuing throughout the war. The attack on Pearl Harbor ended Miles' career in the General Staff. Casey, Richard Gardiner: ''A delicate mission: the Washington diaries of R.G. Casey, 1940–42'', , p. 214: "25 December 1941 ... Amongst the various heads that have been rolled in the dust has been that of General Sherman Miles (U.S. Military Intelligence)... General Raymond Lee (late U.S. Military Attaché in London) has taken Sherman Miles' place." MID very much relied on intercepted Japanese radio messages. The decoded "

Magic Magic or Magick most commonly refers to: * Magic (supernatural), beliefs and actions employed to influence supernatural beings and forces * Ceremonial magic, encompasses a wide variety of rituals of magic * Magical thinking, the belief that unrela ...

" messages were top-secret and circulated only in a very select circle of ten people comprising the General Staffs of the Army and the Navy, the Secretary of War, and the President.U.S. Congress, Joint Committee on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack,
Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack
U.S. GPO, 1946, here

p. 180, "Policy with respect to dissemination of Magic". URLs retrieved 2011-01-18. No coherent analysis of these messages was done. The warnings that the General Staff sent to Hawaii failed to stress the urgency because MID themselves did not consider the contents of the "Magic" intercepts received prior to the attack as particularly significant at that time.Congress of the United States, 79th Congress, 1st session:
Pearl Harbor attack: Hearings before the Joint Committee on the investigation of the Pearl Harbor attack
', U.S. GPO 1946; testimony of Gen. Miles on November 29, 1945: p. 794ff. In addition, communication channels in the U.S. military were convoluted due to the split commands of Army and Navy, each with their own intelligence branch,Congress of the United States, 79th Congress, 2nd session:

', U.S. GPO 1946; here in particular ttp://www.ibiblio.org/pha/pha/congress/part_5.html#252 Part V: Conclusion and recommendations p. 253. and the last message to Hawaii before the attack was delayed and was decoded at Hawaii only after the attack had already begun.U.S. Army Pearl Harbor Board:
Report of the Army Pearl Harbor Board
', U.A. Army, 1944, her

, p. 138ff, "December 7, 1941 Message". URLs retrieved 2011-01-18. Ten days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Miles was sent on an inspection tour through South America to survey installations there and to make recommendations for military assistance to the Latin American countries;Conn, Stetson; Fairchild, Byron:

', Center of Military History, U.S. Army 1960, CMH pub 4-1;

, p. 200ff. URL retrieved 2011-01-17. Brigadier General Raymond E. Lee became Acting Assistant Chief of Staff G-2 .Mercado, Stephen C.:
FBIS Against the Axis, 1941–1945 (U)
, ''Studies in Intelligence Fall/Winter 2001'', issue 11, pp. 33–43. CIA, 2001. Mentions on page 40 and in footnote 25 that Raymond E. Lee was Acting ACoS G-2 on December 26, 1941. URL retrieved 2011-01-17.

World War Two

In March 1942, the Military Intelligence Division was reorganized as the

(MIS). It was tasked with collecting, analyzing, and disseminating intelligence, and absorbed the Fourth Army Intelligence School. Originally comprising just 26 people, 16 of them officers, it was quickly expanded to include 342 officers and 1,000 enlisted men and civilians garrisoned at Camp Savage in Minnesota. Initially, the MID included: * an Administrative Group * an Intelligence Group * a Counterintelligence Group * an Operations Group In May 1942, Colonel

Alfred McCormack Colonel Alfred McCormack, CBE (1901-1956), was a trained attorney of Cravath, Swaine & Moore who during and after World War II served in the US Military Intelligence Service, where he proved crucial in developing military analysis of cryptographic ...

, established the Special Branch of MIS which specialised in

COMINT Signals intelligence (SIGINT) is intelligence-gathering by interception of '' signals'', whether communications between people (communications intelligence—abbreviated to COMINT) or from electronic signals not directly used in communication ...

References

{{Authority control Military intelligence agencies Military intelligence units and formations of the United States Army

History

World War One

Inter-War Years

World War Two

See also

References