Piercing the Fog - Air Force Historical Studies Office

Piercing the Fog
The exception to the integration of Anglo-American intelligence involved
the handling of ULTRA. Until May 1943, the interception, translation, evaluation,
and dissemination of ULTRA remained solely a British responsibility, and
at that, it occurred only in England and North Africa. Even at American
headquarters such as WIDE WING (Eighth Air Force) and FWE TREE (VIII
Bomber Command), British-manned special liaison units controlled ULTRA
material. Knowledge that ULTRA even existed was limited to a mere handful of
individuals consisting of senior commanders and key staff officers.*
While Eighth Air Force and the RAF worked closely in the acquisition and
evaluation of intelligence, differences in operational objectives and methods
precluded the mere imitation of British information, analysis, procedures, or
organizations. These differences, the requirements which arose from them, and
the responses by American commanders and their staffs reflected the intimate
relationship among strategic objectives, intelligence, and operational planning
and execution.
As originally configured, the office of the Eighth Air Force A-2 was an
umbrella agency whose responsibilities included intelligence about enemy OB,
capabilities, and potential targets. To eliminate an overlap in the targeting
process between A-2 and A-5 (the Assistant Chief of Staff for Plans), in
December 1942, Lt. Col. Richard Hughes and his Target Branch were moved
from A-2 to A-5.Y3 With this reorganization, Eighth Air Force A-2 retained two
primary responsibilities. The first was to keep the commanding general and
operations officer up to date through the collection and collation of intelligence
regarding the enemy. This included OB and technical data on enemy aircraft,
matkriel, tactics, and vulnerabilities. The A-2 evaluated this intelligence to
assess its accuracy and significance in explaining enemy capabilities and the
relative importance of enemy activities and objectives.
A-2’s second principal task was to disseminate appropriate intelligence
material throughout the staff and to higher, adjacent, and lower air units through
estimates of the situation, map updates, periodic and special intelligence reports,
and regular intelligence summaries. A-2 also prepared and distributed maps,
aircraft and ship recognition material, and weather data.y4 Sources for this
information included the British Army, Royal Navy, and Air Ministry
Intelligence and various War Department agencies in Washington, the OSS,
Office of Naval Intelligence, G-2 of the U.S. Army’s European Theater of
Operations, intelligence agencies of other Allied nations (including the Free
French and the Polish government-in-exile), photointerpretation reports, POW
interrogation reports, and combat crew observation^.'^ In the fall of 1942,
*Chapter 2 contains a more detailed discussion of the organizational structures,
technical aspects, and handling of ULTRA penetration of German and later Japanese
cryptology, as well as the MAGIC intelligence derived from American intercepts of
Japanese high-level diplomatic codes.
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