Burn After Reading

by Ladislas Farago

  On February 15, Tokyo cabled a “Ministerial Instruction” to Terasaki in Washington for immediate distribution to his network. The agents were instructed to drop everything, discontinue their propaganda operations and concentrate exclusively on intelligence work. The dispatch included a voluminous “shopping list” of diverse items in twelve major categories.

  On September 24, Tokyo asked Honolulu to divide the waters of Pearl Harbor into five separate sub-areas and to report the ships present in each of them separately, evidently to make possible the assignment of individual targets to the attacking squadrons. The message specified, “With regard to warships and aircraft carriers, we would like to have you report on those at anchor (these are not so important), tied up at wharves, buoys, and in docks. (Designate types and classes briefly. If possible, we would like to have mention made of the fact, when there are two or more vessels alongside the same wharf.)”

  On December 1, in Tokyo, the Cabinet Council formally approved the commencement of hostilities on the day proposed by Yamamoto—December 7. Tokyo also moved to wind up Terasaki’s apparatus which, Yamamoto apparently thought, would not be needed after the deadly blow. On December 2, Terasaki and his four chief lieutenants were ordered to leave by plane at once. This was a blow to the Ambassador who depended on Terasaki’s continuous intelligence to guide him in his negotiations with the White House and the State Department. He sent an urgent plea to Tokyo to let Terasaki stay, but back came the answer turning down his request. The modest Second Secretary was more important than the hapless Ambassador.

  In Honolulu, the activities of Japan’s last ditch spies were taking a new and melodramatic turn. The mysterious master spy Ichiro Fuji was making his last-minute dispositions. His scattered operatives were to communicate their final messages, no longer to him or to Kita at the Consulate, but directly to the approaching striking force via clandestine relay ships lying off shore. They were given a code of signals to indicate the preparedness of Pearl Harbor and to report any last-minute movements of American ships.

  The chief field agent of the Japanese, on whom they depended most, was functioning admirably. He had just told the Consulate that things looked promising down at the harbor: he had succeeded in identifying seven battleships, six cruisers, two aircraft carriers, forty destroyers, and twenty-seven submarines, the vast bulk of the Pacific Fleet.

  This formidable spy was not a Japanese at all. He was Jimmy, owner of Post Office Box 1476 at Honolulu, a source Tokyo had developed in 1936. Jimmy was sometimes referred to as Friedell, and he was in fact a German named Bernard Julius Otto Kuehn, an apparently well-heeled individual, with a house at Lanikai, another at Kalama, and a pleasure boat with a star on the sail. The pseudonym Friedell was derived from the first name of his wife Elfriede, whose nickname it was, spelled with one I.

  Kuehn must have performed well because he was able to deposit seventy thousand dollars in a Honolulu bank between 1936 and 1939. He told friends that the money had come from an inheritance in Germany, which was transferred to him by a Tokyo bank. In reality, of course, it came from the Japanese secret service. Kuehn bought his two houses and the boat from the money supplied by the Japanese. In 1940–41, Kuehn intensified his activities and was paid an additional sixteen thousand dollars. The last payment of fourteen thousand dollars more was delivered to him by Morimura virtually on the eve of Pearl Harbor.

  The Japanese spymasters usually communicated with Kuehn by mail, sending him postcards to P.O. Box 1476. On December 2, such a postcard alerted Kuehn to a rendezvous with Morimura. When they met the next day, they exchanged a system of codes and signals that was most ingeniously devised. It was based on Kuehn’s two houses and his star-studded sailboat. The house in Lanikai Beach was on the east coast of Oahu; the other was in a beach village one mile northwest of Lanikai. The houses were to show hourly lights, each light at each hour signifying a different prearranged message. For instance, one light in a certain window in the house at Lanikai turned on between midnight and 1 a.m. was to mean, “All carriers have departed.” A light in the attic window at Kalama between 7 p.m. and 8 p.m. was meant to say, “All battleship divisions have now departed.”

  They also arranged for still other methods of communications, just in case the light signals could not be made. Fuji sent agents to Maui Island to signal with bonfires visible far out at sea. Even this was topped with still another arrangement. Camouflaged want ads, placed on radio station KGMG in Honolulu, were to serve as coded signals.

  The Japanese were leaving nothing to chance.

  On December 4, the Japanese armada was closing in, receiving hourly intelligence. Fuji received the final query: “Please report comprehensively on the American fleet.” He sent reassuring words: “The fleet is in. Three additional battleships have just arrived.”

  Nothing escaped the attention of his anonymous little spies. A British gunboat sailed into the harbor with the diplomatic bag for the Consul. A Japanese spy followed the courier from the berth of the boat to the Consulate General, then back to the gunboat, and he watched from shore as she was leaving. Within the hour, his report was encoded and on its way to Tokyo. It was a bit of useless incidental intelligence, but it showed Tokyo that its coverage of the target was uncannily complete.

  On December 6, Kita put a last coded cable on the air, the complete list of all American warships present in Pearl Harbor, divided into the five strategic sub-areas. He identified eight battleships, three light cruisers, sixteen destroyers. The spies missed a few. In actual fact there were two heavy cruisers, six light cruisers, twenty-six destroyers and five submarines in the harbor, in addition to the eight battleships. But it did not matter. What the spies had missed, Yamamoto’s planes would find.

  Out at sea that night, the Japanese armada moved to its target. Its radios were silent. Its ships showed no light. Then came a message from Tokyo. It read (in English translation): “Climb Mount Niitaka.”

  It was the signal to attack.

  As the planes roared off into the dawn, there was in the cockpit of each a strange little map. The maps showed an aerial view of Pearl Harbor, divided into little numbered squares. Each bomber knew which square was his target and what ships he was likely to find there.

  The maps had been taken from an ordinary picture postcard, one of a so-called Laporello set. The cards show a panoramic view of the whole harbor from the air. One of Kita’s agents had bought them a few months earlier in a Honolulu gift shop.

  The price? One dollar, the set.

  17

  The Magic of the Black Chamber

  To many people, Pearl Harbor is not only a synonym for infamy, but also for the failure of American intelligence and the monumental triumph of Japanese espionage. This is by no means an accurate picture. On the eve of Pearl Harbor, the Japanese Intelligence set-up was enormous, to be sure, but, like Porgy, it had plenty of nothing. They knew minute details of the American and British order of battle, of the disposition and movements of the fleets, the tactical data a prudent commander must have on the eve of attack. At that point their wisdom ended. They gave Pearl Harbor their Sunday punch and expended on it all the intelligence they possessed.

  So deficient, indeed, was the vaunted Japanese secret service that on the morning after Pearl Harbor, it could not tell its High Command the full measure of the Japanese success. On the night of December 7, an American admiral was asked at Oahu, “Do you think they could come back with troops, land here and take the islands?”

  “Yes, damn it,” he answered, “but if they let us hold on for the next couple of weeks, we can make it.”

  The Japanese did not come back, because they did not have the strategic information to take advantage of their historic opportunity.

  The United States, on the other hand, was extremely poor in tactical intelligence about the Japanese. But on the strategic level it had a single secret service arm that was ingenious, technically competent, and reached into the very heart of the Japanese government. It was th
e world’s best cryptographic secret service; thanks to it the United States could read some, though by no means all, of Japan’s most confidential communications and acquire a general picture of her intentions and dispositions. Yet even this superb intelligence weapon could not overcome a mountain of deficiencies elsewhere.

  Cryptographic analysis had demonstrated its usefulness as far back as the Washington Naval Conference of 1922. The Japanese came to the conference with great expectations, but returned home sorely disappointed. Japan had to agree to a ten-year naval holiday, and to limit her naval strength to three hundred and fifteen thousand tons as against an aggregate of one million two hundred and fifty thousand tons of American, British and French warships. Japanese acquiescence in this arrangement was largely the result of the uncanny skill with which the American delegation had maneuvered the negotiations. Throughout the conference, the Americans appeared to be anticipating every move of the Japanese, defeating them at every step. How was that possible?

  The mystery was unexpectedly resolved in 1930 with the publication of a strange book. It was The American Black Chamber, by Major Herbert O. Yardley, a former crypto-analyst of the U.S. War and State Department. Yardley borrowed the phrase for the title of his book from the French cabinet noir, the name of a secret bureau that opened and read the mail of the king’s enemies. Yardley revealed that in 1922–23 the United States had had a Black Chamber of its own, conducting cryptographic espionage from an inconspicuous brownstone house in midtown New York. By this means, he said, American diplomats could read in advance the secret instructions which the Tokyo Foreign Office cabled to the Japanese delegation, giving them minimum and maximum terms for their difficult bargaining.

  When Yardley came out with his disclosures, his Black Chamber was dead. In 1929, Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson had closed it down, with the scandalized remark, “Gentlemen don’t read each other’s mail.” Stimson’s decision riled Yardley and, in his pique, he published his unauthorized exposé. His revelations enraged the Japanese. They moved promptly and virulently to denounce the treaty and began to prepare behind the scenes measures to pay back the loss of face.

  Countering the efforts of the Japanese secret service was an American set-up in the Department of State. In 1941, the Department had no specialized agency for diplomatic intelligence; rather, this was a collateral function of the Foreign Service as a whole. In Washington, the Department’s Far Eastern Division (headed by Maxwell M. Hamilton) had a Japanese Desk manned by brilliant experts, and the United States was equally fortunate in its diplomats at the Embassy in Tokyo. Those men, under Ambassador Joseph C. Grew, procured intelligence of the highest quality and significance.

  Other agencies not directly connected with the State Department also supplied it with material. They included:

  (1) Army General Staff, G-2 Intelligence, under Major General Sherman Miles, collected, evaluated and disseminated information pertaining to the war potential, topography, military forces and military activities of foreign countries, and the strategic vulnerability of the United States and its possessions. G-2 also performed some counter-intelligence functions, conducted military mapping and performed cryptographic duties.

  (2) Chief of Naval Operations, The Office of Naval Intelligence under Rear Admiral Theodore S. Wilkinson operated in two major branches. The foreign branch (headed by Captain William A. Heard) received, collated, analyzed and disseminated information. The domestic branch (under Rear Admiral Howard F. Kingman) dealt with internal subversion, espionage, and similar activities.

  (3) Military and Naval Attachés, with quasi-diplomatic assignments, actually represented G-2 or ONI respectively. In Japan, Lieutenant Colonel Harry I. Creswell served as Military Attaché after 1938. Until 1939, Captain Harold Bemis was Naval Attaché; he was then succeeded by Lieutenant Commander Henry H. Smith-Hutton.

  (4) The Federal Bureau of Investigation, directed by J. Edgar Hoover, with Robert L. Shivers as Agent-in-Charge in Hawaii, performed certain collateral intelligence functions of its own. It was primarily responsible for counter-intelligence and counter-espionage, but from time to time it also supplied positive intelligence obtained in the course of its own regular activities.

  Both the Military and Naval Intelligence units, of course, had their subsidiary combat intelligence organs in the field. Both also had their cryptographic arms. Army Signal Intelligence enjoyed the services as chief cryptographer of Mr. (later Colonel) W. F. Friedman, regarded as the world’s foremost expert in the field.

  The Office of Naval Communications, headed by Rear Admiral Leigh Noyes (Captain Joseph R. Redmond was Assistant Director), was organized in several sections. Captain L. F. Safford was in charge of Communications Security; the Translation Section was headed by Captain A. D. Kramer; and the Cryptographic Research Section was headed by Lieutenant Commander George W. Lynn, Senior Watch Officer. There were also Communication Intelligence Units attached to the scattered Naval Districts. In Hawaii, Commander Joseph J. Rochefort served as Officer in Charge. He also had jurisdiction over radio intercept stations at Oahu, Midway, Samoa and Dutch Harbor. Other direction finder and interception stations were located in Washington, Corregidor, and on the West Coast.

  In addition to all of these, the Federal Communications Commission also maintained a radio monitoring service.

  This, in bare outline, was the American organization on January 3, 1941. On that day, Admiral Yamamoto conceived the plan for Pearl Harbor. Although he communicated the plan only to a very small group of individuals, it spread nevertheless from the Nagato, his flagship, to Tokyo. Then, on January 27, 1941, Edward S. Crocker, First Secretary of the U.S. Embassy, was given an ominous bit of diplomatic gossip by his friend, Dr. Ricardo Rivera Schrieber, the Peruvian Minister, who had an exceptional circle of friends among influential Japanese. Crocker rushed the information to Ambassador Grew who at once sent the following message to the State Department :

  “The Peruvian Minister has informed a member of my staff that he has heard from many sources, including a Japanese source, that in the event of trouble breaking out between the United States and Japan, the Japanese intend to make a surprise attack against Pearl Harbor with all of their strength and employing all of their equipment. The Peruvian Minister considered the rumors fantastic. Nevertheless, he considered them of sufficient importance to convey this information to a member of my staff.” That same night, Grew also entered this strange rumor in his personal diary.

  The dispatch was routed from the State Department to the Office of Naval Intelligence for evaluation and comment. There a majority of the experts insisted that Japan would think twice before moving against the United States. O.N.I.’s evaluation carried this unequivocal comment: “The Division of Naval Intelligence places no credence in these rumors. Furthermore, based on known data regarding the present disposition and employment of Japanese Naval and Army forces, no move against Pearl Harbor appears imminent or planned for in the foreseeable future.” This note was dated February 1, 1941.

  The theory seemed to be supported by at least circumstantial evidence. The flower of Japan’s land forces, the much-vaunted Kwantung Army, was stationed in Manchuria, and its highly independent military politicians were said to be itching to take on the Russians in the Far East.

  However, by June, 1941, Russia as a possible or probable target for Japan should have been ruled out. The United States had come into the possession of some astonishing hard intelligence. It was a report the director of the Japanese secret service in Manchukuo (like Terasaki, himself a mere Second Secretary at the Hsinkiang Embassy) had sent to his chief in the Foreign Ministry. Reflecting the consensus of the Kwantung Army’s commanding generals, the man in Hsinkiang advised Tokyo to take German claims about an imminent collapse of the Soviet Union with a grain of salt. “Geographical vastness,” he wrote, “abundance of human material resources, and the approach of winter all require careful consideration when predicting the outcome. Since Russia is now thoroughly communisti
c, the possibility of a counter-revolution to overthrow Stalin is very slight.”

  He counseled that “Japan’s viewpoint regarding war should be cautious watchful waiting”; and bluntly advised against “joining the offensive against Russia.” On the contrary, he suggested, Japan should concentrate on a definitive settlement of the “China affair” so that she might turn with her total resources against the United States.

  How was it possible for such a delicate communication from one Japanese intelligence authority to another to fall into American hands? The answer lies in cryptoanalysis. The United States was again reading many of the diplomatic messages of Japan. Although hundreds of persons were involved in this activity, nothing about it leaked out that enlightened the Japanese. This was a remarkable feat of security, and completely misled the Japanese, despite the fact that in the cryptographic war nothing is taken for granted except that every country tries to break codes and ciphers.

  With the progress of radio, wars had become, as Fletcher Pratt remarked, conflicts of cryptographers. “From the day in August of 1914 when German-controlled radio stations all over the world flashed out the message ‘A SON IS BORN,’ the Imperial Army’s code-phrase for ‘War,’” he wrote, “there was no great event that was not preceded by feverish activity in the code-rooms of the nations; and in many cases victory or defeat was underwritten in those code-rooms before it took place on the battlefield or across the seas.”

  Cryptoanalysts, by the nature of their highly secretive work, form a mystic little band and live in almost complete seclusion. Describing his own time spent in Room 2646 of the Navy Departaient, Admiral Zacharias wrote: “Hours went by without any of us saying a word, just sitting in front of piles of indexed sheets on which a mumbo jumbo of figures and letters was displayed in chaotic disorder, trying to solve the puzzle bit by bit like fitting together the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.”