Korean crisis stemmed from bad intelligence

SIR – We are faced with the two worst crises since the Cold War, both caused by the pressure on intelligence officers to tell their political and military masters what they wanted to hear.

The situation in the Middle East, exacerbated by Isil, was caused by the cumulative results of the decision to attack Iraq, which would not have been made without the intelligence reports on weapons of mass destruction, which proved incorrect.

Today’s problems with North Korea can be traced to the intelligence reports to General Douglas MacArthur in 1950.

In October of that year, I accompanied General Sir John Harding, Commander-in-Chief British Far East Land Forces, to visit MacArthur, commander of the UN defence forces then protecting South Korea from attack by the North. The question was whether the Allies should continue on into North Korea.

My chief was in one room with MacArthur and Colonel Charles Willoughby, MacArthur’s chief of intelligence, who was saying: “There is no question about it, the Chinese will not come in.”

I was in the next room with MacArthur’s own staff, who explained to me that three power stations on the Yalu river, all on the Korean side, sent two thirds of their power to Manchuria, which contained vital Chinese industry. Therefore, if we went up to the Yalu river, the Chinese would be forced to come in as they could not afford to allow the Americans to control their electricity supplies.

Thus MacArthur, on the advice of Willoughby, was saying the exact opposite to his own staff.

What his staff said was exactly what happened. We were forced back to the original border in Korea and no peace deal has ever been signed. Lord Digby Minterne, Dorset