Robert W. Grow Court-Martial: 1952 - Parts Of Diary Published

The public learned of the problem in a highly embarrassing way. A British defector, Richard Squires, reproduced photographs of parts of the diary in a book published in East Germany called On the War Path. Squires claimed that these photographs proved Grow was calling for immediate war against the Soviet Union. Squires highlighted such phrases as, "It seems to me the time is ripe for a blow this year," and the United States should "hit below the belt," to prove that Grow was part of an international conspiracy to unleash another world war.

American newspapers paid great attention to the story of the warmongering general, to the army's great embarrassment. The Pentagon, rather than dismissing the allegations as propaganda, added fuel to the fire when the army chief of information confirmed the diary's authenticity and declared it had been photographed in "an inside job." He did not reveal, and possibly did not know, that some of the excerpts were total fabrications, and that Squires had twisted others to give a false impression of Grow's views. After consulting the State Department, Lieutenant General Maxwell D. Taylor, deputy chief of staff for operations and administration, and Major General Alexander Bolling, assistant chief of staff for intelligence, decided to investigate. Eventually the army gave Grow the option of voluntary retirement or facing a court-martial. Grow, who did not believe that his diary contained any classified information, chose court-martial. He argued that the Soviets' publication of the extracts proved that the diary had no intelligence value. To Grow's way of thinking there was nothing in his diary not already well-known to Soviet State Security. Instead, he believed that publication was a ploy to get him out of Moscow because of his success as an intelligence observer.