Piercing the Fog - Air Force Historical Studies Office

Piercing the Fog
procedures basically followed those the British were already practicing. Signals
containing ULTRA material could be sent over only the most secure communications
channels and handled solely by the SCUs with secure, mostly one-time,
cipher pads. Access to raw (undisguised) ULTRA would be restricted to
individuals who had been indoctrinated in its special value and who had a
definite need to know. Finally, the agreement provided for liaison officers who
would handle ULTRA to be assigned to all major Allied air and land commanders."
While these negotiations were underway in Washington, Col. Alfred
McCormack,* Deputy Chief of Special Branch, Military Intelligence Service
(MIS); Maj. Telford Taylor,? General Counsel of the Federal Communication
Commission, recently brought into the MIS Special Branch; and William
Freidman, who had been instrumental in breaking the Japanese diplomatic
codes, were in the United Kingdom to study the SIGINT organization and
procedures at BP. With the formal agreement between the two nations, Taylor,
promoted to lieutenant colonel, remained in the United Kingdom to serve as the
senior American MIS representative for ULTRA.'*
*Col. Alfred McCormack (1901-1956) was Deputy Chief of the Special Branch
of the MIS from May 1942 to June 1944 before becoming Chief of the Directorate
of Intelligence, MIS. In January 1942, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson
appointed McCormack as his special assistant, assigning him to study the way the
War Department handled SIGINT and to recommend improvements. McCormack,
a lawyer in civilian life, entered the Army commissioned as a lieutenant colonel. He
eventually attained the rank of colonel. It was his recommendation that led to the
establishment of the Special Branch within MIS in May 1942. Special Branch was
a unit staffed, in part, by lawyers and highly educated civilians who received
commissions as Army officers and whose job it was to analyze, evaluate, interpret,
process, and disseminate SIGINT systematically for the War Department. Upon his
discharge from the Army in 1945, McCormack worked with the State Department
on intelligence matters until April 1946, when he returned to his private law
practice. For an account of Colonel McCormack's wartime experiences and for his
personal War Department files see SRH-185 and SRH-141, pts 1,2, NA, RG 457.
+Col. Telford Taylor (1908- ) was in charge of the London Branch of MIS,
headquartered at the American Embassy at Grosvenor Square. He entered the Army
as a major in 1942 after attending Harvard Law School and serving as a lawyer from
1933 to 1942 for federal agencies and congressional committees. From 1945 to
1955 he served as a prosecutor in the Nuremberg war crimes trials. He was
promoted to brigadier general in 1946 and remained with the Army for three more
years. He later practiced law in New York City and became a professor of law at
Columbia University. Among his books are Sword and Swastika: Generals and
Nazis in the Third Reich (New York, 1952), Nuremberg and Vietnam: An American
Tragedy (New York, 1970), and Courts of Terror: Soviet Criminal Justice and
Jewish Emigration (New York, 1976). His most important book was Munich: The
Price of Peace (New York, 1979).
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