by John Bryden
By Saturday, Kramer had been holding on to the message for a dangerously long time. He had portrayed himself to his staff as being terribly disorganized and a chronic perfectionist, so they were used to decrypts being stalled on his desk. Since the lights message foretold a Japanese air attack the next day, however, it was too hot to keep any longer. That morning he put it into the in-tray of Mrs. Dorothy Edgers, a former schoolteacher who had joined his staff only the week before and whom he knew would be working only until noon. The header, “Secret Military Message … By Chief of Consulate’s Code,” had been removed.4
Mrs. Edgers, as it happened, was an exceptional Japanese linguist, having lived in Japan and taught Japanese to high-school-level children for two decades before returning to the United States. She saw immediately that the message appeared important and drew it to Kramer’s attention. He gave it only a glance and shrugged it off. She went back to her desk, but instead of leaving at 12:30, worked up a rough translation, which she left for Kramer before going home around 3:00 p.m.5
Kramer was an intelligence officer of long experience and he had handled MAGIC for months. He was fluent in Japanese. It was his specific task to see to it that the most important decrypts were recognized, translated, and passed on as quickly as possible. With the navy code- and cipher-breakers in a room down the hall, and having read all the previously decrypted Japanese messages leading up to the verge of war, it is just not plausible for him not to have read the lights message as soon as decrypted, or not to have read it before passing it on to Mrs. Edgers. He gave the message no more than a glance when she showed it to him because he already knew what it said.
The lights message sat on his desk the rest of the weekend.6
Meanwhile, before it closed up shop, the army sent over a Tokyo–Washington decrypt that told the ambassador that Japan’s formal reply to Secretary of State Hull would be coming shortly. It was to be long, with thirteen parts sent first and the fourteenth to follow later. The embassy was to hold on to the completed statement until given a specific time to present it to the United States government, preferably to Hull himself. With his staff translators gone, Kramer could expect to be working on the thirteen parts well into the next day. Then, unexpectedly, when the first part began arriving in mid-afternoon, it was found that the text was in English.7
It caused considerable excitement. Op-20-G’s cryptographers were not accustomed to unravelling a Japanese encipherment into readable English. Both Captain Safford, head of Op-20-G, and Commander McCollum came in to have a look. The Foreign Office in Tokyo was so determined that nothing in the message be misunderstood that it had translated it itself. The list of grievances it contained and the rejection of Hull’s conditions made it obvious to everyone that it amounted to a declaration of war.
McCollum now found out that Kramer had no translators on hand. It seems not to have worried him unduly. Kramer could translate any further decrypts that came in while he waited for the first thirteen parts to be processed. Once these were typed up, he was to deliver them to his usual MAGIC clients immediately, returning to the office to await the promised fourteenth part and the time-of-delivery message. McCollum undertook to come in early the next morning. An off-duty army translator was called in to fill in as needed.
As most government offices in Washington are grouped together within a half mile of the White House, and the army was in a building nearby, it normally took Kramer less than an hour to do his round. At midnight, he telephoned McCollum at home to say that he had made the deliveries, including to the army and the White House, but was unable to find Admiral Stark. He then returned to his office on finding the expected remaining messages had not yet arrived, but instead of camping down to await them, he went home to bed.
Roosevelt read the thirteen parts in his study, along with Harry Hopkins, his trusted aide and confidant. “This means war,” he is said to have muttered.8
Kramer arrived back at the navy building shortly after 7:30 a.m. on Sunday. Although he was later to claim otherwise, he had been phoned by the officer of the watch during the night and told that two important messages were now available. One was the fourteenth part in English, and the other, a single sentence in Japanese instructing the ambassador to deliver the full fourteen parts to Hull precisely at 1:00 p.m. Kramer, however, instead of going directly to his office, stopped at McCollum’s on his way in.9
The two chatted about the ramifications of the thirteen parts that Kramer had delivered on his rounds the night before. When the director of Naval Intelligence, Captain Wilkinson, arrived and was told that Admiral Stark had been skipped on the thirteen-part delivery, he said they should make up for it immediately. They put a call in to Stark’s office and learned he was on his way in — a surprise, since it was Sunday. Wilkinson and McCollum headed for his office with the thirteen-part message. It was now about 9:00 a.m.10
Meanwhile, Kramer went on to his own office, there to find the fourteenth part and the one o’clock messages. Taken together, they indicated unmistakeably that a state of war would exist between Japan and the United States the moment the whole fourteen parts were delivered to Hull.
Kramer put duplicate copies of the fourteenth part of the message into his dispatch pouch and set out for the White House, the State Department, the army building, and Stark’s office. He did not take the one o’clock message, apparently because it was still in Japanese. Consisting of only one sentence, he could have scribbled it into English in seconds.
When he got back to Stark’s office, McCollum and Wilkinson were still talking with the admiral. Instead of interrupting, he left the fourteenth part of the message with an aide. At 10:20 he was back at his own office. The formal translation of the one o’clock message, done by the army, was on his desk. This, along with some other decrypts, he took on another delivery round that included the White House and the State Department. He retraced his earlier route. McCollum was still in Stark’s outer office when he arrived there. Wilkinson had gone. Kramer mentioned the one o’clock message.
There was a time-zone map of the world on the wall. McCollum glanced at it: 1:00 p.m. Washington time would be 7:30 a.m. Hawaii time — dawn.
Captain McCollum became very, very excited. He called Wilkinson back in, and he, too, saw the significance of the time. The Japanese were likely to attack Pearl Harbor in less than three hours. They all but forced their way back into Stark’s office. The Pacific Fleet must be warned!
Admiral Stark was unperturbed. The Pacific Fleet was on the alert, he assured them. Wilkinson urged him to pick up the telephone anyway and call Admiral Kimmel direct. He could be on the line in minutes. Stark demurred. He had a call put in to the White House. The president was unavailable. There was further toing and froing as senior naval staff came in and out of the room. At last Admiral Stark reached General Marshall. The general also nixed using the telephone. The hands of the clock stood toward 11:00.
General Marshall agreed to send the warning on behalf of both of them. It would go to General Short only, and only by commercial radio-telegraph, the slowest means. He should also have sent it over the army and navy radio nets, duplication being the standard practice for an urgent message. He chose not to. His message said:
Japanese are presenting at one p.m. Eastern Standard Time today what amounts to an ultimatum also they are under orders to destroy their code machine immediately STOP Just what significance the hour set may have we do not know but be on alert accordingly STOP Inform naval authorities of this communication.11
When the “flimsy” bearing this warning reached Hawaii’s General Short, he crumpled it into a ball and threw it aside.
The bombs and torpedoes had already exploded.
His details were fuzzy, but the army’s chief of counter-intelligence, Colonel Bissell, had been right. The government had known in advance the Japanese were going to attack Pearl Harbor, and it had come from “radio intercepts.” However, Kramer, Safford, Stark, and Marshall — evidently with some co-conspirators
in the Signals Intelligence Service — had ensured that Hawaii would not be warned.
Why did they do it? Duty comes first to mind. Like soldiers of any of the advanced nations of the twentieth century, they had been trained unflinchingly to follow orders, to obey their commanding officers without question. Under the U.S. Constitution, the head of state, the president, is also commander-in-chief. If Roosevelt told Admiral Stark and General Marshall, and they in turn told Safford and Kramer that the Pacific Fleet had to be sacrificed in the interests of grand strategy, it would have been their duty to help make it happen. To refuse would have been to disobey orders — unthinkable, except in the most dire of circumstances.
Still, they must have been troubled. Roosevelt, however, had the means to ease their consciences. Throughout September and into December the messages decrypted by the British describing the SS atrocities in Russia had continued to accumulate. Innocent civilians, especially Jews, were being cut down in swaths by the extermination squads. The tally was well into the thousands. The secure transatlantic cable connection between the Government Code & Cipher School and Washington ensured that messages reporting the horrors reached the White House, which could then distribute them to those entitled to MAGIC. That included Safford and Kramer as well as Stark and Marshall.
They all must have deeply believed that withholding the relevant messages from the Hawaii commanders was worth the American lives it was going to cost. Stark, especially, walked the thinnest of tightropes: If at any time in the previous forty-eight hours Admiral Kimmel had got the wind up and had put the fleet to sea, all the battleships would have been sunk in the open ocean, along with most of the attendant warships. Upwards of fifteen thousand sailors’ lives would have been lost. It would have been one of the greatest naval defeats in history, for there would have been no losses to speak of on the other side. It is hard to imagine, though, how Stark managed to keep his composure when Wilkinson and McCollum were pressuring him to phone Admiral Kimmel.
After Pearl Harbor, Kramer, Stark and Safford were marginalized for the rest of the war, Kramer to a back desk in Op-20-G with nothing to do, and Stark to England, also to a desk, charting the paper course of the naval build-up for the future Allied landings in Europe. Safford was promptly reassigned to a section dealing with code and cipher security, an enormous demotion.As for the British, it was surely a different story still to be told. The Canadian listening station at Hartlen Point, Nova Scotia, was in direct line from Fort Hunt in Virginia and was linked to Britain and the Government Code & Cipher School by undersea cable. The British could read the same Japanese consular codes and ciphers as the Americans. They had all along been breaking many of the same messages. They certainly saw the Honolulu consulate messages that pointed to an unhealthy Japanese interest in the Pacific Fleet. After more than seventy years, Britain still has not released the pertinent Japanese diplomatic decrypts it definitely has.12
And what of Hoover? On December 29, the FBI director was the object of a vicious lashing from a columnist with the Washington Times-Herald who claimed that the commission of inquiry that Roosevelt had immediately set up was about to pin the blame for Pearl Harbor on the FBI.
Long-time Capitol Hill foes of FBI Chief Hoover have been whetting up their snickerness, itching to take a crack at the detective hero as far back as the days of kidnappers and gangsters. Leaders are holding them back with the promise that the report of the Roberts Board of Inquiry will provide the ammunition for an all-out drive to oust Hoover from his seat of tremendous power.13
That same day, Roosevelt sent a note to Hoover saying that he still had full confidence in him. This must have come as a great relief. Roosevelt really did have the power to fire him, and Hoover was the object of so much envy and hate that had the president fired him, Hoover was certain the coyotes would be yelping.
Hoover could relax. He had done his duty. He had drawn the president’s attention to evidence of major failures on the part of the army and navy. Now, true to his style, he left it to the White House to make the decision on how to proceed — if at all, considering there was a war on. Hoover’s job was only to inform, and so he had.
He did not quite let everything go, however. He sent a copy of his December 12 memorandum to Supreme Court Associate Justice Owen J. Roberts, then heading the first of what would be a set of eight inquiries into Pearl Harbor, and urged him to try to get to the bottom of when the alleged messages were sent to Washington, when they were decoded, when the information was sent back to Hawaii, and so forth. Roberts did not follow up.
Hoover was never called to testify at any of the inquiries. That was probably merciful, for it would have disclosed how little he knew, how much he was not told. It would have been embarrassing. He must have had gloomy thoughts as the postwar congressional investigation reeled off the bomb-plot messages and spy report after spy report, all of which someone in high authority deemed him not fit to see. He would surely have connected them to Popov’s questionnaire.
Hoover, of course, had to be left out. He was a civilian, not a soldier. He could question or refuse an order from the commander-in-chief. While loyal to the Office of the President, he answered to the Department of Justice. During the gangster days he had earned for himself and the Bureau a stellar reputation for incorruptibility. In short, Hoover could not be counted upon to lie.
In the summer of 1941, when the Japanese navy’s study of the feasibility of attacking Pearl Harbor was well advanced, the ambassador, attachés, and other military advisers at the German embassy in Tokyo enjoyed a privileged relationship with Japan’s senior military leadership. They certainly learned that the Japanese had, indeed, noted the lesson of the British raid on Taranto and were considering the possibilities of carrier-launched attacks themselves.14 Pearl Harbor was a logical target.
This does not mean that Canaris assumed that Japan had already decided that it was going to war with the United States and that there would be a surprise first-strike against the Americans. By the end of July, he knew only that Japan’s military and political leadership had pretty well decided that Japan’s best prospects lay to the south, toward British and Dutch territories in the Far East. If these could be seized without direct confrontation with the Americans, so much the better.15 The Japanese navy was only drafting its plans against Pearl Harbor in case of war with the United States.
That summer, Russia’s ace spy in Tokyo, Richard Sorge, also reported that the Japanese were looking south not north, but Stalin discounted it. It was too good to be true. The Red Army was just then taking a severe beating from the Germans in western Russia; it made more sense for the Japanese to attack in the east, in Siberia, forcing Stalin into a two-front war. For all Stalin knew, Sorge’s intelligence could have been planted on him by the Japanese in a bid to get Soviet troops withdrawn from the east.
It turns out the information was planted on Sorge, except not by the Japanese. It was coming from Canaris.
The forty-five-year-old Sorge was one of the truly professional spies of the Second World War. He was born in Russia — his mother was Russian, his father German — and brought up in Germany. He was awarded the Iron Cross for valour during the First World War, but converted to communism while recovering from his wounds in hospital, apparently thanks to the intellectual ministrations of a left-wing nurse. He went on to university, and then to Moscow in the 1920s for training. He was a brilliant linguist, and the Soviets used him in England for a short while, in Germany, in China, and then sent him to Japan in 1933 expressly to set up a spy network. He succeeded admirably, establishing clandestine wireless contact with Moscow and acquiring a number of highly placed informants.
Sorge’s cover was that of a journalist for several German newspapers, and he had an office in the German embassy itself. This not only facilitated contact with Japanese officials, but also put him in daily touch with key embassy personnel — the air, army, and naval attachés, and the ambassador. He met the latter over breakfast every morning, and the ambassad
or was candid to the extent that their conversations often took in the day’s secret dispatches from Berlin.16
It was through these daily chats that Sorge was able that spring to keep Moscow informed on the build-up of German forces in eastern Europe. Then, on May 5, he came up with a copy of a message to the ambassador from von Ribbentrop, the Nazi foreign minister, advising that “Germany will begin war against the USSR in the middle of June.” Since the German Foreign Office enciphered its communications with unbreakable one-time pads, Sorge must have obtained this from the ambassador.
On May 10, Sorge reported that the ambassador and naval attaché were of the opinion that the Japanese would not attack the British in the Far East “as long as Japan continued to receive raw materials from the United States.”17 Canaris would have received this assessment and, considering the denial of essential commodities was the tactic Roosevelt used to provoke Japan, he may have passed it on to Menzies, who in turn gave it to Churchill.
On May 15, Sorge correctly reported that on June 22 the Germans would launch Operation Barbarossa, the surprise invasion of the Soviet Union. He even correctly stated the number of divisions to be deployed — 150.18
On the face of it, it would appear that the embassy was being incredibly reckless with its secrets. Stalin must have thought so, too, for he rejected the warnings. He is said to have suspected Sorge of being a double agent, and that he was party to a British plot to foster distrust between him and Hitler. When intelligence came in from other sources confirming the massive German build-up in Poland and the east, he chose to believe Hitler’s explanation that German troops were concentrating in Eastern Europe so that they could exercise and rearm out of range of British air reconnaissance. Churchill’s last-minute alert, thanks to Dicketts, that the Germans were about to invade, merely bolstered Stalin’s conviction that it was all deception.19
