The raw material from which these men worked was, of course, supplied by the radio interception stations. Everything that was intercepted on an odd date of the month was handled by the Navy; on the even dates the Army received all the material. Each service would then decrypt the material (this work was often done by men who could not speak Japanese!), translate it, and prepare fourteen copies, which were shared with the other service, the White House, and the State Department.
By this means, an extraordinary flow of information of the highest quality was streaming upwards from the intelligence men to the policy makers. Once again it must be emphasized that intelligence officers can only supply information; they have not the power to act upon it. Moreover, I must repeat that the men who evaluate information are often puzzled by seemingly contradictory bits and pieces and, in their bureaucratic desire never to be wrong, will often make evasive and vague recommendations.
Finally, the man at the very top, President Roosevelt, was no Churchill with a burning interest in, and understanding of, intelligence. Could a Churchill in the White House have averted—or at least mitigated—the Pearl Harbor disaster? We can only speculate.…
At all events, on December 2, 1941, what should have been an iron-clad tipoff was intercepted. A message from Tokyo instructed the Embassy in Washington to begin the destruction of codes, a certain indication that Japan was preparing for war.
The message read: “No. 867. Strictly Secret. 1. Among the telegraphic codes with which your office is equipped burn all but those now used with the machine and one copy each of ‘O’ code (Oite) and abbreviating code (L). (Burn also the various other codes that you have in your custody. )
“2. Stop at once using one code machine unit and destroy it completely.
“3. When you have finished this, wire me back the one word ‘Haruna.’
“4. At the time and in the manner you deem most proper dispose of all files of messages coming and going and all other secret documents.
“5. Burn all the codes that Telegraphic Official Kosaka brought you. (Hence the necessity of getting in contact with Mexico mentioned in my No. 860 is no longer recognized.)”
The message went up the ladder of the U.S. government. There is no indication that anything was done about it.
Aside from the information obtained from such direct sources in which Japanese intentions were actually spelled out, crucial tactical and operational information was obtained by the various Radio Intelligence Units which monitored the traffic of the Japanese Navy. Up to that time, all attacks on the Japanese naval codes had been in vain, but even though American cryptographers could not read the verbatim contents of the Japanese naval messages, they could still make significant deductions from them. These were inferences drawn from analysis of Japanese radio traffic and from changes in its regular procedure, from deviations from norm.
The most important Unit was the one attached to Admiral Claude C. Bloch’s 14th Naval District in Hawaii, headed by Commander Joseph J. Rochefort, one of the most remarkable personalities of the secret war. He was virtually unknown, even within the Navy, beyond a small circle of superiors and co-workers, although he was undoubtedly the Navy’s foremost cryptographic expert. In addition, he was also a student of the Japanese language, thus able to make his own translations and evaluate for himself the various intercepts. He was stationed in Pearl Harbor.
At the time of Pearl Harbor, the high quality of Rochefort’s work was especially remarkable, in view of the fact that his equipment was obsolescent, that he was short on qualified personnel, and that his electronic snooping had to be done over enormous distances. Energetic efforts to obtain more modern equipment failed, but this did not discourage Rochefort. In the summer of 1941, with the support of Admiral Bloch, he overhauled his equipment at Pearl Harbor and put up additional direction finder sets in the Midway and Palmyra Islands, using material which he had to swipe from the Pearl Harbor pool.
Much of the tactical and operational intelligence which Lieutenant Commander Edwin T. Layton, the Fleet Intelligence Officer, handed up to Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, the commander-in-chief of the Pacific Fleet, was based on the output of Rochefort’s unit. It was both voluminous and persuasive, and became increasingly so as Pearl Harbor day approached.
Throughout November, Rochefort kept in touch with the striking force of the Japanese by monitoring its traffic and drawing his conclusions from its hectic, erratic, and spasmodic nature. Frequent changes in call signals and other signs hinted at an elaborate maneuver and persuaded Rochefort that something big was in the air. His daily verbal reports to Bloch and his daily written summaries to Kimmel mirrored this conviction.
Around November 1, Rochefort first observed unusual, feverish, and ominous Japanese activities. Early in November, the Japanese introduced an entirely new set of calls for their units afloat. A series of high priority signals, sent from the main Yokosuka naval base to fleet commanders, was also discovered. On November 3, Communication Intelligence summarized its observations in these significant words: “General messages continue to emanate from Tokyo communications. Such an amount is unprecedented and the import of it is not understood. A mere call change does not account for activities of this nature. The impression is strong that these messages are periodic reports of a certain nature to the major commander.”
On December 1, Communication Intelligence indicated that the Japanese were to commence some kind of operation on a large scale. It was definitely established that a striking force was on the move. “Summing up all reports,” Communication Intelligence concluded, “it is believed that the large fleet made up of Second, Third and First Fleet units has left Empire waters.”
Most ominous of all was the complete radio silence of Japan’s aircraft carriers; consequently, they were listed as missing. It was this apparent disappearance of the carriers that made Kimmel most apprehensive. When his Fleet Intelligence Officer failed day after day to account for them, the admiral asked: “What, you don’t know where the carriers are? Do you mean to say that they could be rounding Diamond Head [the southeast corner of Oahu on which Pearl Harbor is situated] and you wouldn’t know it?”
“I hoped they would be sighted before now,” was all the Fleet Intelligence Officer could answer. Nothing was found out about those missing carriers, nothing, that is, until the morning of December 7.
Much has been made of the military and naval unprepared-ness that made that day so disastrous. However, this unreadiness was by no means confined to the military establishment and the policy makers. During those days, the Department of Justice was as much a part of America’s first line of defense as was the Pacific Fleet. In a sense it was America’s first line of defense. The armies and the navies were not in action as yet, but the spies were.
Before the war the responsibility to defend the United States from foreign espionage was widely scattered; no central counter-espionage agency existed to deal with the problem. It was mainly the job of the F.B.I., but both the Navy and the Army maintained their own counter-intelligence organizations. Though they had no power of arrest, they regarded themselves nevertheless as the senior guardians of military, naval, and industrial secrets.
After the outbreak of the war in Europe, on September 6, 1939, President Roosevelt issued a directive in which he designated the F.B.I. as the central Federal agency in “charge of investigative work in matters relating to espionage, sabotage, and violations of the neutrality regulations.” Under his limited powers, Roosevelt could do no more. He could not give orders to law enforcement agencies maintained by the states, counties or municipalities, or by private industry. He could merely request them to pass on to the F.B.I. any information they dug up about subversion.
Despite the Presidential directive, confusion and conflict remained, enabling foreign agents to operate with something approaching impunity. Nowhere was the situation more deplorable than in Hawaii. In December, 1941, when the F.B.I. had a total of two thousand six hundred and two agents, Hoover assi
gned only nine of them to its field office in Honolulu. The Navy’s District Intelligence Office, which functioned mainly as a counter-intelligence agency, had about a hundred officers, interpreters and translators. The Army was also engaged in counter-intelligence, but the number of people assigned to the function was negligible.
There was superficial co-operation between the various agencies, but under the surface bickering was rampant. Important operations were conducted at cross purposes. Surveillances had to be abandoned when agents of the various American security organs ran into one another. Promising projects were discontinued when rival agencies fought each other on petty jurisdictional matters.
In November, 1941, for instance, the F.B.I. tapped the telephone of the Japanese Consulate General in Honolulu, which was rightly suspected of being the general headquarters of Japanese espionage in Hawaii. That single tap was yielding substantial results when the F.B.I. was forced to discontinue it. Competitive agencies, Naval Intelligence and the Federal Communications Commission, found out about the tap and chased the Bureau away from it. Then a jurisdictional quarrel sprang up between the F.C.C. and Naval Intelligence. The dispute was finally settled by the withdrawal of both agencies from the scene, leaving the Consul General’s hot wire uncovered on the very eve of Pearl Harbor.
Discouraged by this fratricidal war and unable to run the show as he wanted to, Hoover retired from energetic prosecution of the espionage war with Japan in Hawaii. In December, 1940, he told Robert L. Shivers, the Special Agent in charge of his Honolulu field office, that “the Bureau does not consider it advisable or desirable at this particular time for your office to assume the responsibility for the supervision of all Japanese espionage investigations in the Territory of Hawaii.”
The list of Japanese suspects which the Bureau kept up-to-date included seven hundred and seventy individuals, a formidable force in aggressive espionage. The F.B.I. knew who they were and what they were doing, but was able to do little, if anything, to render them harmless.
Among those suspects was a certain Tachibana, a commander in the Japanese Navy, sent to the United States on a semi-official detail as a language officer. In May, 1941, the Bureau came into the possession of conclusive evidence that Tachibana was an espionage agent. Hoover advised the State Department of the facts and inquired whether the Department would approve his arrest. On May 27, the Department notified the F.B.I. that there was no objection. The commander was taken into custody in Los Angeles.
On June 14, Ambassador Nomura called on Secretary Hull and besought him “in the interests of promoting friendly relations between our two Governments” to let Tachibana go home without a trial. “I went carefully into this case,” Hull wrote, “and decided to grant Nomura’s request.”
It was not easy to develop a major espionage case like that of Tachibana. The F.B.I. was understandably chagrined when it thus saw its trapped bird fleeing the cage with the approval of the State Department. Under the circumstances, it is apparent that Pearl Harbor was not exclusively a military and naval disaster for which only generals and admirals must bear the responsibility. It was also a disaster of America’s internal security establishment.
During the post mortems, it became a popular pastime to ask high-ranking army and navy officers where they were when the bombs began to fall. Much was made of the fact that General George C. Marshall could not recall exactly what he was doing at that exact moment and said he thought he was out on a constitutional. But if the Army and the Navy were thus off guard, expecting nothing in particular to happen on that fateful Sunday, so was the Department of Justice.
Attorney General Francis Biddle was away in Detroit. Hoover was in New York. His ranking aides, including Assistant to the Director Edward A. Tamm, filled a box in Griffith Stadium watching the pro football game between the Washington Redskins and the Philadelphia Eagles.
America’s internal security organs had a Pearl Harbor of their own. They were so preoccupied with fratricidal strife that they had too little energy or interest left for an effective campaign against alien foes on American soil.
Once the war had begun there was no reason to question the FBI’s ability to deal energetically with foreign espionage agents and saboteurs. The efficiency at this end was somewhat aided by a strange inefficiency in the enemies’ camp. After the war, General von Lahousen, one of the surviving executives of the Abwehr, told me that this was so because his organization never really had their hearts in planting spies and saboteurs on Uncle Sam’s back. However, the astonishingly clumsy German effort was not substantially different from the general pattern and quality of the Abwehr’s activities elsewhere. They were good only in countries where domestic dissension existed, where Nazism was popular with key segments of the population and where the Abwehr or the Kaltenbrunner-Schellenberg organization could subvert the natives.
As early as 1941, the FBI managed to break up what appeared to be the major ring of Nazi spies in the United States, headed by one Kurt Frederick Ludwig, a native of Ohio, presiding over a quaint assortment of Sad Sacks. The Ludwig ring of second-raters was set up here by an itinerant German Abwehr-man moving about on a forged passport made out to Julio Lopez Lido. He was actually Ulrich von der Osten, an old-timer in German espionage, a sort of traveling sales manager covering an enormous territory from Shanghai to New York. His sudden death in a traffic accident on Times Square in New York led the FBI to Ludwig and from him to the other members of the ring.
In 1940, the FBI scored a tremendous victory of lasting significance, when it succeeded in penetrating, through exceptionally smart detective work, one of the Abwehr’s greatest secrets, the microdot system used in the transmission of secret messages. In the early summer of 1942, the FBI arrested a group of German would-be saboteurs Canaris had sent to this country in two U-boats. This was the pathetic Pastorius Operation, arrogantly code-named after the first German ever to immigrate to the United States. The idea behind the ill-fated mission was to sabotage the American aluminum industry. Had it succeeded, it could have seriously slowed down aircraft production.
With the aid of a double agent still known only as ND98 (a mercenary spy who sold his services to the U.S. Legation as soon as he arrived at his overseas outpost in Montevideo), the FBI also participated in a carillon concert of its own. ND98 was supposed to forward information collected by three German agents in the United States from a clandestine radio somewhere in Uruguay. When he was safely in FBI hands, he asked the Abwehr’s permission to transfer his activities to New York. There the FBI established him at a cozy hideout on Long Island with a radio transmitter. He began to send his baited messages on December 4, 1941, and kept at it until May 2, 1945, when the British captured the Abwehr’s radio center near Hamburg. A total of two thousand eight hundred and twenty-nine doctored messages were thus sent to the Abwehr and eight hundred and twenty-four were received from the Germans. ND98 reached the height of arrogance, and maybe also absurdity, on June 1, 1944, when he advised his employers that D-Day had to be delayed “by a breakdown in the production of invasion barges” and that the troops in England, which Luftwaffe reconnaissance could not fail to detect, were being rerouted to the Mediterranean.
The FBI covered the whole waterfront, North as well as Central and South America. It succeeded in thwarting several major resident directors of the Abwehr, Major Ludwig von Bohlen in Chile, and also his successor, Bernardo Timmerman; Josef Jacob Johannes Starziczny and Otto Uebele in Brazil; and a number of lesser fry in other Latin lands. It also broke up a large-scale smuggling operation, which supplied the eager Germans with such rare strategic materials as platinum from Colombia and industrial diamonds from Venezuela, by catching the head of the operation, a bogus British banker named Harold Ebury, at his palatial California home on Monterey Peninsula.
An interesting sideline of the FBI’s big manhunt on spies and saboteurs was its campaign to recapture German prisoners of war who managed to escape from prison camps maintained in this country by the U.S. Army. A
t the height of the season, there were some four hundred thousand such prisoners in the United States, and they kept escaping at a rate of about seventy-five a month. All told, such escapes totaled two thousand eight hundred and three during the war years and the FBI managed to bring all of the Germans back alive, except three : Kurt Rossmeisl, Georg Gaertner and Curt Westphal. They are still at large.
J. Edgar Hoover directed the huge spy hunt with unprecedented finesse. Far from promoting it, he vigorously resisted the spy hysteria that was rampant in the early stages of the war. He was firmly, even bitterly, opposed to the mass evacuation of one hundred and twenty thousand Japanese-Americans on the West Coast to so-called “relocation centers.” He was appalled, not only by the inhumanity of this mass deportation, but also by motives that had little, if anything, in common with the needs of national defense. The sour taste that the “relocation” left in Hoover’s mouth was reflected in a passage in Don Whitehead’s authoritative book, The FBI Story. He wrote: “With the hysteria, there were the cold calculations of men who wanted the Japanese moved for economic reasons and because of racial prejudices. The decisions for the movement were made in the upper reaches of the Administration. And so it was that tens of thousands of loyal Japanese-American citizens made the sad journey from their homes after a directive was issued giving the Army authority for the roundup.”
Hoover knew that those one hundred and twenty thousand Japanese-Americans represented no clear and present espionage danger. His own pre-war efforts had already located the seven hundred and thirty-three Japanese aliens he suspected as actual or potential spies. He had every one of them safely in custody.
The absence of large-scale German, Italian, and Japanese espionage and sabotage efforts in the United States was one of the miracles of the war. Aside from the FBI’s energetic measures to plug every loophole, two major events aided in foiling any such enemy effort. The first occurred in June, 1941, five months before Pearl Harbor, when the Treasury Department moved to freeze all German and Japanese assets in this country and in most Central and South American countries. The lifeblood of espionage and sabotage is money. Not even the best secret service can operate without it.
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