Attachés were expected to report on political-military developments. The Pentagon, the State Department, and other agencies asked attachés to answer a whole range of political questions such as the military’s support of civilian government or the likelihood of a military coup. Because in some countries the military actually ruled the country, the military attaché was often the closest contact the U. S. embassy had to the president and his advisors. The attaché became more involved in reporting day-to-day political events rather than his traditional job of reporting military capability.

These new reporting requirements required a new set of skills that attachés had not needed earlier. In the pre-war period, if the attaché had limited language skills he could still judge the combat effectiveness of militaries through simple observation such as attending military maneuvers or observing actual wartime operations. In the political-military realm however, attachés needed fluency in a foreign language, an appreciation of the history and culture of their host country, and diplomatic skills to establish relationships of trust and confidence with foreign officers. Such skills of course were helpful to the pre-war attaché as well. However, the exceedingly complex environment of political-military questions demanded these new skills to a much greater degree.

The current literature on the subject of U. S. military attachés during the Cold War is scant and often referred to only tangentially in other works because of the difficulty of getting Cold War era documents declassified. ⁶ The indexing and filing system for Cold War military intelligence documents located at the National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, is non-existent or at best disorganized and confusing. There are thousands of boxes in Record Group 319.12, Records of the Office of the Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence (OACSI), with no finding aids. ⁷ Thus, the researcher who wishes to request declassification of certain documents under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) does not know what specific boxes or documents to request. In the boxes which do have indices and on which FOIA requests could be filed, most researchers avoid the hassle. The average time after filing a request for declassification is about three years. Because researchers cannot view documents before the FOIA process is completed, there is no way of knowing if they would be of any use. As a result, most scholars when addressing intelligence matters have relied on memoirs or books from former intelligence officers or government officials, personal interviews, congressional investigation testimony, and various declassified documents in the National Security Archive, the Declassified Document Quarterly Series (DDQS), or the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and State Department FOIA services. ⁸

In this study, several of the above-mentioned difficulties in obtaining

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