Philippines Intelligence Agency Subordinated to War Department (18 JUN 1902)
On June 18, 1902, the Division of Military Information (DMI) in Manila was subordinated to the War Department’s Military Information Division (MID) in Washington, D.C. Established in late 1900 by General Arthur MacArthur, the DMI played a key role in identifying and tracking insurgents during the Philippine Insurrection and continued to keep Army officials informed of conditions in the islands for years afterwards.
As part of the peace treaty ending the Spanish-American War, the United States purchased the Philippine Islands for $20 million. An independence movement in the new American colony had already sparked, however, and American ground troops were deployed to the islands in July 1898. At that time, the MID, the War Department’s first peacetime intelligence organization established in 1885 under the Adjutant General, had little knowledge of the people, culture, terrain, or climate in its new accession. U.S. forces were essentially blind, with no real intelligence apparatus.
Early in the insurgency, a Bureau of Insurgent Records (BIR) had been created in Manila to handle thousands of captured documents. Woefully understaffed, the BIR was unable to translate and analyze the flood of materials, let alone provide critical intelligence to tactical commanders. Consequently, on Dec. 13, 1900, the BIR was expanded into the DMI within General MacArthur’s Headquarters, Division of the Philippines. By February 1901, Capt. Ralph Van Deman had been placed in charge of the DMI.
Early on, Van Deman struggled to centralize intelligence operations because regional commanders had established their own networks that they were loath to turn over to DMI. Eventually, by orders of the department commander, Maj. Gen. Adna R. Chaffee, who had replaced MacArthur in July 1901, all field commanders appointed intelligence officers to collect from their local sources and transmit all military information to the DMI. This helped dissolve the earlier resistance and, as the end of the insurrection drew near in 1902, the DMI was becoming a centralized system for collecting and disseminating intelligence throughout the Philippines.
The Manila-based DMI initially had no connection to the MID at the War Department in Washington, D.C. The two offices gradually forged a closer working relationship, however. Eventually, General Chaffee recognized the fiscal benefits to be gained by an even closer relationship between the two offices. The MID, as part of the War Department and also being physically near Congress, would be better able to procure congressional funds for intelligence activities in the Philippines. A flurry of “letter writing and other correspondence” ensued, in which a request was made to Col. William A. Simpson, chief of the MID in Washington, that the DMI be “annexed to and made a part of” his organization. As a result, the DMI become a branch of the MID effective June 18, 1902.
Just two weeks after this merger, on July 4, 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt declared the Philippine Insurrection officially over, although clashes between the U.S. Army and the native population would continue for many years. Still, the DMI would continue to provide intelligence to local commanders as well as senior leaders in Washington for the next decade. For example, in 1906, 1909, and again in 1911, officers from the DMI traveled to China to map transportation routes in the area of Peking and Tientsin. Even as the MID endured a series of organizational moves that ended with its disestablishment in 1908, the DMI survived “as a military information unit” collecting information on the Far East and forwarding its reports to the Army War College.
Article by Lori S. Stewart, USAICoE Command Historian. New issues of This Week in MI History are published each week. To report story errors, ask questions, request previous articles, or be added to our distribution list, please contact: TR-ICoE-Command-Historian@army.mil.
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