ony Bowe begins his interview with Bill Bowe about his Army service by asking about his next assignment after graduating from the U.S. Army Intelligence School at Ft. Holabird in Baltimore, Maryland. Bill says that he found himself assigned to the 902nd Military Intelligence Group, part of the Army’s Office of the Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence at the Pentagon. He said that the Counterintelligence Analysis Division (CIAD) of the 902nd that he was assigned to had a world wide mission including espionage, counterespionage, and counter-sabotage functions. Oddly, given the times, among CIAD’s duties in this period was to keep track of faltering attempts to unionize U.S. troops.
At the same time the Vietnam War continued to rage on, the Army had recently been deployed domestically in peace-keeping role. With the called upon to supplement the role of police and national guard when civil disturbances spun out of control, Bill’s main functions were to provide intelligence assessments and briefings. His intelligence consumer was the Department of Defense’s newly created Department of Civil Disturbance Planning & Operations (DCDPO). Bill’s war room briefings on the likelihood of Regular Army troops being used to help control racial conflagrations or antiwar protests took place in the new Army Operations Center in a Pentagon basement. DCDPO had been created on the recommendation of former Deputy Secretary of Defense Cyrus Vance, whose Vance Report had urged the Army to prepare for a new domestic mission of dealing with civil disturbances after the 1967 Detroit riots. Bill also reports on the later scandals related to allegations of the Army spying on civilians and members of Congress. He reports how he later worked as an analyst for the task force set up to help the Secretary of the Army respond to Congressional Hearings on the subject.
In addition to discussing this part of his work, Bill discusses his assignment to undertake a counterespionage and counter-sabotage study of threats to the Army’s new Safeguard Antiballistic Missile System then under development. This work took Bill to NORAD Headquarters in Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado Springs, Colorado and faraway atolls in the Pacific Ocean west of Hawaii. Bill reports that on his way to Kwajalein Atoll’s missile test site, he had a most unusual stop at Johnston Atoll. This atoll was undertaking highly usual testing of exoatmospheric detonations of nuclear warheads.
Bill finishes his conversation with Tony by recalling his involvement with the 1971 Kent State University shootings and Army deployment to deal with demonstrations during a Black Panther murder trial near Yale University in New Haven Connecticut. Bill adds that immediately before he left the Army in May 1971, he was closely involved with the Army response to the “Shut Down the Government” antiwar protests in Washington, D.C.
