Alfred McCormack


Colonel Alfred McCormack, CBE, was a trained attorney of Cravath, Swaine & Moore who during and after World War II served in the US Military Intelligence Service, where he proved crucial in developing military analysis of cryptographic intercepts in Operation Magic.

Background

Alfred T. McCormack was born on January 13, 1901, in Brooklyn, New York. In 1921, he graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Princeton University and in 1925 received a law degree from Columbia University.

Career

In 1926, McCormack clerked for Supreme Court Justice Harlan Fiske Stone. Later that year, he joined a Wall Street law firm of Cravath, de Gersdorff, Swaine and Wood, where he became a partner in 1935.
In January 1942, five weeks after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Secretary of War Henry Stimson tapped McCormack to head up a new intelligence branch whose central purpose was to collect, digest, and swiftly disseminate deciphered code messages from the enemy, principally Germany and Japan. Stimson was convinced that all of the necessary information to anticipate, and even prevent, the attack on Pearl Harbor had been in American hands, but that the military intelligence system had failed to analyze or use it properly.
This information was the work product of Operation Magic, the enemy message traffic decryption program. McCormack immediately put in place an entirely new system for interpreting and distributing intercepted communications to the departments that needed them.
According to author Bruce Lee:
In June 1942, McCormack received a commission as colonel in the US Military Intelligence Service, known as the Military Intelligence Corps as part of the US Department of War's general staff.
McCormack advocated that attorneys were ideal candidates to conduct cryptographic analysis, and he set about hiring many whom he knew. According to Henry Clausen, another investigator who worked closely with Stimson:
McCormack worked closely with British intelligence on procedure and in exchanges of personnel, formation, and intelligence. , head of the British communications intelligence On July 1, 1944, he became Director of Intelligence for the Military Intelligence Service.
McCormack was involved in The Pond.
McCormack opposed the use of Black. Among others, he suspected that the British were reading the dispatches in the American "Black" code, not the Germans. He concluded that was not the case, but considerable ill feeling had been aroused.
McCormack resigned on April 23, 1946, in a memo to Dean Acheson, then acting Secretary of State, with the following explanation:
In its obituary, the New York Times later stated that McCormack had resigned in October 1946 "after a sharp difference in opinion over the organization of the department's intelligence functions." Henry Clausen's summary was: "Army bureaucracy got him in the end. Poor McCormack never got the thanks he deserved."
He returned to Cravath in 1946.
In January 1952, McCormack reported to the Secretary of War "to study certain aspects of military intelligence."

Personal life and death

On May 31, 1930, McCormack married Winifred Byron Smith and had three sons.
McCormack served as chair of the Board of Visitors for Columbia Law School. In his law practice, he "devoted much of his time to the affairs of the late Maj. Edwin H. Armstrong, prominent inventor in the radio field."
Alfred McCormack died age 55 on January 12, 1956, of cancer at Greenwich Hospital in Greenwich, Connecticut.

Awards

Columbia Law School as a chair named the "Alfred McCormack Professor of Law" in his honor, whose recipients include Robert E. Scott and E. Allan Farnsworth. The Redding Land Trust includes a "Col. Alfred McCormack Preserve" near Danbury, Connecticut.

External sources

Category:World War II intelligence services personnel
Category:20th-century American lawyers
Category:United States Department of State officials
Category:Cravath, Swaine & Moore partners
Category:United States Department of War officials
Category:1901 births
Category:1956 deaths