Courtesy Photo | The American Magazine’s illustration for Gordon Gaskill’s article on the CIC in...... read more read more
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by Michael E. Bigelow, INSCOM Command Historian
On December 16, 1944, Brig. Gen. Robert H. Dunlop, the Army’s acting The Adjutant General, sent a copy of Gordon Gaskill’s article on the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) to Army theaters and commands worldwide. Published in The American Magazine’s January 1945 issue (which hit the newsstands in December 1944), Gaskill’s “G-Men in Khaki” provided an accurate account for the CIC for a broad, national audience.
Since 1942, the 31-year-old Gaskill had been a war correspondent for The American Magazine, a monthly periodical for the general reading public. Initially, he covered the Allied war effort in the Near East but began moving with the American forces in North Africa. On D-Day, he landed on Omaha Beach in Normandy and, for the rest of the war, reported on various aspects of the Army’s efforts. His January 1945 article provided his readers with an informative and down-to-earth piece on the CIC, its mission, and its men.
The CIC, Gaskill noted, “is a puzzling mixture of G-man and plain G-2.” He described the CIC agents’ successes from North Africa through Sicily and Italy and into France. He noted their combat roles as they often accompanied the first waves “by landing craft, glider, and parachute.” Moreover, they stumbled “across precious nuggets of information valuable to military commanders on the spot,” especially in the form of documents or interviews with civilians. Although Gaskill gave a nod to the undercover spy-catching investigations, he was quick to acknowledge the crucial but painstaking work in screening refugees and following up reports of suspicious activities. The article was largely laudatory, stating that “perhaps no other army unit has men of such consistently high caliber.”
The article came at the end of the on-going debate about how much—if anything—the public ought to know about the CIC. The first press release on the CIC’s existence and activities had come in January 1942. Nevertheless, the Army G-2 and the Office of the Chief, CIC, struggled with the amount and type of information to openly share. Up to 1943, the corps continued to remain cautious. However, war correspondents hungry for stories began to cover the CIC successes in the Mediterranean. Generally, these glamorized the corps’ thwarting of the plots of enemy agents.
The question of publicity came to a head in the fall of 1943 when Look, the popular national magazine, requested a picture story on CIC combat operations. Maj. Lowell J. Bradford, the CIC operations officer, believed it might do more harm than good. Col. Harold R. Kibler, the CIC chief, however, approved the story since it would give well-deserved credit to CIC agents, boost their morale, and educate Army officers on the corps’ work. In mid-October 1943, Major Bradford prepared a standing operating procedure for the release of CIC information. An important provision stipulated names of corps personnel and full-face photographs would not be published.
In writing his article, Gaskill closely adhered to these provisions; he never mentioned an agent’s name and only generally referred to the corps’ organization. It is clear too that the CIC gave him wide-spread support. Interviewing individual agents allowed Gaskill to provide specific instances of how the CIC assisted Army operations. At the same time, no set of interviews with agents could have provided some of his broader information, which indicated the corps supplied him with additional data on overall trends and numbers.
In the end, the CIC was well-served by Gaskill’s excellent article. It gave the American public an accurate and balanced description of the CIC. In fact, it was useful enough for General Dunlop to distribute throughout the Army to “inform intelligence and counter intelligence officers how CIC personnel [are] being used” and “act as a guide in the training of CIC personnel.”
| Date Taken: | 12.12.2022 |
| Date Posted: | 12.12.2022 10:54 |
| Story ID: | 434960 |
| Location: | FORT HUACHUCA, ARIZONA, US |
| Web Views: | 187 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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