Code-Breaker?

Wisconsin's Senator Joe McCarthy, who has been bombarding Columnist Drew Pearson, last week thought he had finally zeroed in on his target. In Pearson's column of Dec. 30 in the Washington Post, said McCarthy on the Senate floor, Pearson had quoted, apparently verbatim, four messages to the Joint Chiefs of Staff from Major General Charles Willoughby, General MacArthur's intelligence chief. The messages gave exact figures on the strength of Chinese troops in Korea, and, wrote Pearson, the figures were much smaller than those publicly released by MacArthur. Charged McCarthy: an enemy who had both the coded and decoded Willoughby messages could break the U.S. code.

Pearson promptly retorted that he had been assured by the Pentagon that no security was involved in the messages, and that, anyhow, he had changed enough words and dates to protect the code.

Not at all satisfied, McCarthy fired off a list of questions to Army Secretary Frank Pace. Was it enough, as Pearson claimed it was, to change a few words to protect the U.S. code? Had the Pentagon cleared the messages for publication, and if not, how had Pearson gotten them? Pace replied that the messages were classified material, and that the Army had not approved them for publication. But for technical reasons, Pace wrote, "cryptographic security has not been violated." Nevertheless, the Army had started a special investigation to find out how Pearson got the messages (six days before McCarthy had raised the issue).

Washington newsmen pretty well know how Pearson, a useful tool in the throat-cutting that is always going on in Washington, got the messages. They apparently came from someone in the Pentagon with the knife out for MacArthur. But in printing classified material, Pearson had pulled a journalistic bonerif the Army wanted to be tough about it.

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