Now It Can Be Told by CIC
Though the article above is Lt. Ralph N. Hill's debut in the MAGAZINE as official spokesman for the Dartmouth CIC men, it is not his first appearance in our pages. While at Dartmouth, he was the MAGAZINE'S undergraduate editor and has contributed, latterly to the Girdled Earth columns. He was also associate editor of The Dartmouth and a prize winner in one of the original play contests sponsored by the Experimental Theater. He is a '39 man.
The time has come at last when those of us in the ClC—Counter Intelligence Corps—can speak up. We have been so unmentionable for several years that even our families didn't know what we were doing, to say nothing of about 99 per cent of the US Army to which we belong.
From about 1940 when a certain gag has it that we started up with a colonel, a sergeant, and a typewriter, anybody who joined this outfit simply dropped out of circulation and whenever any mention was made of us it was by a series of dots. Recently a CIC Agent with a full beard appeared on the scene with Terry and the Pirates, so the other night in Paris several of us Dartmouth CIC's decided it was time to set the record straight.
We are not a cloak and dagger group. We are not male Mati Hari's. We do not lurk in the bushes behind false beards. One Jerry put it recently that whereas the Gestapo used to draw a cordon about the suspect's house, "closing in" over driveways and hedges, our agents simply walk up the front steps, ring the doorbell and ask if the Subject is there. He usually is. Inasmuch as we have the goods on him beforehand, five times out of ten, there remains only the arrest which is accomplished by saying, "Kommen-sie mit," or simply motioning. The fact that we are not mysterious mystifies the Germans for some reason.
The CIC was designed as the American Army counterpart of the British Field Security Police, the French 2me Bureau, and the German Abwehr, but we lay no claim to being a thoroughbred agency in the sense of completeness that the Army Finance Office, for example, deals with finances. H-Hour before D-Day found CIC boys trailing through the Normandy murk in gliders with the para- introops—mission, reconnaissance and knocking out certain installations. At the moment we are rooting out and jailing war criminals, the SS, miscellaneous politicos and other wanted characters. We have sorted displaced nationals (and there are 29 different kinds), governed towns from Casablanca to Pilsen, Czechoslovakia, as temporary mayors, acted as security control for visiting dignitaries, operated as personal bodyguards for generals, vetted ships' passengers, written political surveys, issued passes at ports, monitored division telephone systems, undercovered in labor gangs, PW camps, and factories (no full beards), acted as senatorial escorts, searched enemy CP's, quelled riots, handled security functions of airborne operations, conducted surveillances, vetted foreign civilian employees for hire by the US Army, and become involved in numerous hush-hush projects. That the original mission of the Counter Intelligence Corps, which was not actively spying or blowing up bridges but preventing the enemy from doing the same, has altered perceptibly is not particularly obscure.
The Corps, though not large, is composed of almost everybody. We have detectives, journalists, travelling salesmen, musicians, dock workers, professors, florists, telephone executives, undertakers, politicians, brokers, accountants, artists, radio announcers, golf pro's, bankers, theatrical agents, school principals, night club operators, architects, truck drivers, band leaders, bakers, lawyers, pilots, editors, street car conductors, police captains, illustrators, roust-abouts, missionaries, treasury agents, floor walkers, photographers, dancers—and they can speak 27 different languages. This assortment can be counted on to provide an effective if sometimes curious solution to a problem—always the fresh approach.
There's no typical CIC career—we've been shuffled and reshuffled over here so that everybody has a bushel of experiences and they're all different. Major Robert H. Doyle '34 has been doing the shuffling, a job the proportions of which in an outfit like this, can't be reduced to black and white in a few words, or in fact reduced to print at all. Other Dartmouth CIC's still in the ETO are Lt. Lindsey Brigham '35, Agent Dick Spong '36, John Manlev '40 and Frank Hall'41.
We're spread all over the Pacific and the ETO. Some of the boys never left England during the war, some are still in Africa, and some never left the States. Some CIC's sweated the war out in a Palm Beach suit, others in fatigues. I went through four campaigns with the 39th regiment of the 9th Infantry Division; the next guy you talk to may have ridden supply trains over the trans-Iranian Railway.
Just over a year ago the above-named regiment had taken the towns of Lammersdorf Germany, undistinguished except that it was one of the first. To two CIC's fell the job of rounding up whatever Jerries were left hiding in basements in civilian clothes. After probing around for awhile with no results we directed our newly-appointed mayor to decree that all German soldiers in civilian clothes appear at the Burgermeister's office by three that afternoon or be shot. Four showed up at 2:30; an incident somewhat revealing of the German mind.
A month ago we entered backstage in the Casino at Deauville, France, where one "Lupercio," magician, was putting on grease paint for the Saturday night show. We had to take Lupercio along with us, replete with his suitcase of tricks. He was a former German soldier who spoke French fluently and had, by a pseudonym and fraudulent means, gotten a job with a US Army Special Services road show entertaining GI's.
Right now we're adding up points and scanning the shipping lists. It isn't particularly amusing to be the CIC Detachment in the Le Havre area watching all the boats pull out. Besides it's been a long time since most of us have had a chocolate malted or smelled the paint on a new car. Summing up, I would add my voice to the others in affirming that we have certainly won a smashing military victory over here—just what else isn't too clear as yet. As for intelligence operations in particular and the US Army in general, I think we have learned to play the game the way they play over here, and often beat them at it. By this I mean that it is by virtue, of a certain directness of approach that we damnyankees often seem to shortcircuit the many considerations, political, pecuniary and otherwise which inter- pose themselves between the desire of many Europeans for doing something and actually getting it done. At the same time I think we should have learned from the Europeans that we might well, as a nation, become a little more preoccupied (even after we graduate from College) with such among the verities, for example, as the arts.
As for the CIC, general agreement was reached in Paris the other night that our experiences have been sometimes a little nerve- wracking, occasionally vexing, often amusing, most always interesting.
There was one other point upon which we reached agreement in Paris—not one of us ha ever heard of a CIC Agent on company time or off, with a full beard.
