PEARL HARBOR. The harbor in Hawaii, which is home base for the U. S. Pacific fleet, has the dubious distinction of being the place where Japanese military forces launched an attack on the United States on 7 December 1941. The name of the base, moreover, has come to be synonymous with surprise attack. Experts consider the event the first major American intelligence failure that fueled the reorganization of the national security apparatus after World War II and sparked the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 1947. As a result of the attack, the United States declared war on Japan on 8 December 1941.
In a postmortem assessment, a special commission appointed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt accused the army and navy commanders at Hawaii of dereliction of duty in a report on 24 January 1942. However, a congressional committee, formed in September 1945, absolved the army and navy commanders in a formal report on 16 July 1946, but censured the War Department as well as the Department of the Navy.
PENKOVSKY, OLEG VLADIMIROVICH (1919-1963). Oleg V. Penkovsky possibly was the most important spy for the United States in the Soviet Union during the Cold War. A Soviet GRU officer and mole within the Soviet High Command, Penkovsky provided information that revealed that Soviet missile capabilities were inferior to those of the United States and that Soviet premier Nikita S. Khrushchev was bluffing when he threatened nuclear war during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Moreover, Penkovsky’s information gave the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) a good idea of the time it would take to make Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba operational. Intelligence experts consider Penkovsky’s information to have been so critical during the crisis that they have dubbed him “the spy who saved the world.” Penkovsky also revealed that Moscow could not put pressure on Berlin during the Berlin Crisis of 1961.
Penkovsky was arrested on 22 October 1962, while the Cuban Missile Crisis was under way. He was tried on charges of espionage and was convicted. Soviet authorities executed him in May 1963.
PHILBY, HAROLD (KIM) (1912-1988). The privileged son of a British diplomat, Harold “Kim” Philby became one of the most famous spies of the 20th century when he defected to the Soviet Union in 1963, after a career in British intelligence. A student at Cambridge in the 1930s, Philby was drawn to Marxist ideas and was an associate of what came to be known as “The Cambridge Spies”—Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, and Anthony Blunt. Burgess, Maclean, and Philby were apparently recruited in the 1930s to be Soviet spies, possibly by Blunt. In the 1940s they began working for Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), quickly rising in the ranks, and in the early 1950s, Philby became the liaison officer in Washington with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). In 1951, Philby fell under suspicion and was recalled to London. There he successfully resisted interrogation. When the SIS refused to reinstate him, he went to the Lebanon as a freelance intelligence agent, under cover as a journalist.
In 1963, defector Anatoly Golitsyn named Philby as a Soviet agent, and a fellow SIS officer went to Beirut to persuade him to confess to his work for the KGB. Instead, Philby boarded a Soviet freighter and fled to Moscow, where he spent the rest of his life.
PHOENIX (OPERATION). The Phoenix operation was a counterinsurgency project undertaken by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the army during the Vietnam War to identify and root out the secret communist guerrilla infrastructure in South Vietnam. The operation called for the Americans to provide training, advice, weapons, and money to the South Vietnamese forces. It also authorized the Americans to help the South Vietnamese identify communists and communist sympathizers, who would then be neutralized by the South Vietnamese authorities. However, the operation quickly soured as indiscriminate raids were launched, villagers were rounded up and tortured, and those thought to be communists quickly executed.
World History
