by John Bryden
12. Thomas Troy, Wild Bill and Intrepid (New Haven, CT: and London: Yale UP, 1996), 98–108. See also, Joseph E. Persico, Roosevelt’s Secret War: FDR and World War II Espionage (New York: Random House, 2001).
13. Connelley to Director, 20 Aug. 1941. Hoover was required to go through Astor on intelligence matters involving the army and navy: James Strodes, Allen Dulles: Master of Spies (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 1999), 204.
14. Laboratory Report re Dusan Popov, 3 Sep. 1941, Lanman, “Synopsis of the Facts,” 17 Sep. 1941. The lab only reported on eight microdots, even though Lanman collected eleven from Popov. The omitted three were the two comprising the English-language “Exhibit C” and Popov’s wireless transmitting instructions, “Exhibit B.” As these were in English, Lanman apparently saw no reason to send them to the lab. See also, “Brief Synopsis of the Case,” 15 Jan. 1944 (above).
15. John Bratzel and Leslie Rout, “Pearl Harbor, Microdots, and J. Edgar Hoover,” American Historical Review, 87, No. 5 (December 1982). The illustrated text shows that Hoover sent Photo #2 from Q1 of the FBI lab report. These were the general queries of the questionnaire, beginning with “All information regarding the American air defense …” and ending with the paragraph on Canada’s air training plan: FBI Laboratory Report, 3 Sep. 1941. The particular example may also have been chosen simply because it was the first item in the report.
16. Shivers to Hoover, Report, 26 Dec. 1941, NARA, RG65, FBI WWII HQ file, “Julius Kuehn.”
17. Robert B. Stinnett, Day of Deceit: The Truth about FDR and Pearl Harbor (New York: Free Press, 2000), 85–86. Hoover’s rationale is inferred by the present writer, not by Stinnett. The issue of normal/acceptable espionage came up at various times during the post-attack Pearl Harbor inquiries.
18. Hoover also long prided himself on simply laying out the facts in his reports to higher authorities, leaving it to his political or military clients to draw what inferences they would: Richard Powers, Secrecy and Power: The Life of J. Edgar Hoover (New York: Free Press, 1987), 238.
19. Phillips did not last long as Donovan’s spy chief. He left Donovan’s employment shortly after the Pearl Harbor attack on 7 Dec. It is not known under what circumstances.
20. Strodes, Allen Dulles, 203.
21. Liddell Diary, 20 Nov. 1941. Churchill could also send messages directly to Roosevelt by this means.
22. The collection of British-supplied German Police Decrypts for 1941 found in the U.S. National Archives at College Park surely got to the United States by this route. See NARA, RG457, HCC, Box 1386. The Americans were not intercepting and decrypting this traffic at this time.
23. Cowgill to Robertson, 19 Aug. 1941, PRO, KV2/849, Doc. 204b; and Luke to Cowgill, 22 Aug. 1941 Doc. 206a. The texts of the two questionnaires are next in the file, the German-language one being a carbon copy on onion-skin paper, suggesting that the English version on the microdots had been on onion skin, as well. Cowgill could not turn this over to MI5 because it was either in Roosevelt’s possession or still on the Prince of Wales.
24. PRO, KV4/64.
25. Ibid. An internal reference to Masterman’s Double-Cross System makes it certain that the W-Board summary in KV4/70 and probably the minutes were written after 1972, probably by Ewan Montagu from memory or personal notes.
26. This assertion is based on the assumption that if after nearly seventy years no one has found mention of the Pearl Harbor questionnaire in the wartime archives of these bodies, they were not informed. Note that the Wireless Board and XX Committee understood that the “junior” Joint Intelligence Committee in Washington was only to deal with questions dealing with Britain and the Commonwealth.
27. According to his diary, Liddell was on leave the week of 19 Aug. when Cowgill sent MI5 the questionnaire, which theoretically would give him an excuse if his 17 Dec. statement were ever challenged. However, surely he would have read his files on his return and surely the questionnaire would have been at the top in his in-basket. In any case, he was at the Wireless Board meeting.
1. “His first communication in secret writing containing the information requested by the Germans was sent on August 22, 1941. Further communications were sent on September 15, 16, October 7, 8, 9, and 10, 1941, containing information prepared by the Army and Navy in response to questions contained in Popov’s questionnaire.…” Brief Synopsis of the Case, 1/15/44 collected in “Espionage (World War II)”; NARA, RG65, WW II, FBI HQ file, Box 11(17), Dusan Popov.
2. Effective 17 Jun. 1941, Coast Guard decrypts were distributed to MID, ONI, State Department, and FBI. NARA, RG457, SRH-270. For background on Canada’s code- and cipher-breaking agency that started up in Ottawa that spring, see Bryden, Best-Kept Secret, passim.
3. FBI, Memorandum re TRICYCLE, 5 Oct. 1943, PRO, KV2/854, 662B. It is not clear whether this is a translation of Portuguese into Englishmen’s English, or whether Mady was a fifteen-year-old English-language prodigy. “Uncle” could well be Canaris. Notice the use of “chap,” a middle- to upper-class British word. For the lower classes, the word “bloke” would have been used instead. Apparently obtained from FBI files.
4. Popov appears to have been alluding to “Dickie” Metcalf, a.k.a. BALLOON.
5. “I went over to see Valentine Vivian and found him with Dick Ellis who had just flown over from New York.…” Liddell Diary, 3 Nov. 1941; PRO.
6. Quoted in Caffery to Berle re CEL espionage ring, 5 Sept. 1942; NARA, RG457, SRIC.
7. Foxworth to Director, 16 Dec. 1941. See: Max Fritz Ernst Rudloff with aliases (ND 98), NARA, RG65, WWII FBI HQ File: 65-37233-4.
8. A source inside Spain reports that there is “now in America” a Spanish-speaking German spy close to Franco who travels on an Argentinian passport. Siscoe to Hoover, 14 Aug. 1944; IWG Box 153, 65-37193-237(1). FBI reaction to this news cannot be determined because Hoover’s messages in the Mosquera file after that date are heavily redacted.
9. “Synopsis of Facts,” 4 Dec. 1944, 22. See: Max Fritz Ernst Rudloff, NARA, RG65, WWII FBI HQ File, 65-37233 (above).
10. NARA, RG242, T-77, 1569, card 1549. See also, Farago, Game of Foxes, 648–49, who states categrically that Canaris saw the report, but without citing his sources. They must have existed, however, because the quotation he attributes to von Roeder echoes the information asked for in Popov’s March questionnaire (which Farago would not have seen).
11. Hewlett and Anderson, The New World, 13–25.
12. Bush to Conant, 9 Oct. 1941; Records of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, U. S. Atomic Energy Commission. Hewlett and Anderson, The New World, 45–46, 611.
13. ”Synopsis of Facts,” 4 Dec. 1944, 22, See: Max Fritz Ernst Rudloff, NARA, RG65, WWII FBI HQ File, 65-37233 (above). According to the cover sheet to this report, at least five copies were made and considering the novelty and importance of the content, especially the reference to microdots, one must have been sent to the White House, to the attention of the vice-president, Henry Wallace, if not directly to Roosevelt.
14. Arthur H. Compton, Atomic Quest (Oxford University Press, 1956), 61–64.
15. Robertson to Cowgill, 17 Sept. 1941. PRO, KV2/849. Liddell Diary, 14 Aug., 15 Nov. 1941.
16. Gwyer to B1A, 10 Oct. 1941; PRO, KV2/849. JHM was Marriott, the lawyer.
17. Liddell Diary, 3 Aug. 1941, PRO.
18. Masterman, Double-Cross, 3, 59, 85. Curry, Security Service, 252. MI5 took the proof to be the intercepted Abwehr wireless traffic (ISOS) that dealt with its double agents.
19. “Order of Battle GIS (Hamburg),” prepared for GSI(b) HQ 8 Corps. Dis., 20 Jan. 1946, 1; NARA, FBI HQ file, IWG Box 133, file 65-37193-EBF352.
20. NARA, T-77, 1529. Index file cards on A-2057 DELPHIN and F-2368 NOLL; NARA, T-77, 1549. The “F” before a number indicates someone whose job it was to find and recruit spies.
21. B1A TATE case summary, 15 June 1942; PRO, KV2/61, Doc. 300a. Only a handful remain of the hundreds of documents that were once in this file. Also see: KV2/1333.
22. Memo by Gwyer and Marriott, 17 Nov. 1941; PRO, KV2/451, 1360b.
23. See, for example, “Major Ritter’s Final Report of the SNOW Case (Translation) — Berlin 31/7/1941”; PRO, KV2/451, Doc. 1360b, undated and unattributed but probably an attachment to Gwyer and Marriott, 17 Nov. 1941. This peculiar document is a fictitious scenario in which the MI5 officers who wrote it imagine how Major Ritter might have come to the conclusion that CHARLIE, GW, and TATE might not be compromised despite SNOW’s confession and the fact that Karl Richter had never reported back on his mission to contact TATE. It is useful in that it confirms that MI5 did not know Dicketts went to Germany a second time, and that Owens did not operate the SNOW transmitter.
24. Masterman, “Note on Memorandum, ‘Dr. Rantzau’s meeting with SNOW and CELERY in Lisbon,’” 26 Nov. 1941; PRO, KV2/451, Doc. 1368b. It is in reply to the scenario analysis described in the previous note.
25. See Chapter 8, note 7.
26. “… during TATE’s illness in Nov. 1941 his transmitter was operated by one of our own men who had learnt successfully to imitate TATE’s style; since that date, although TATE continued to draft the messages in his own words and assist in encoding, he has never been allowed actually to operate himself.” B1A/JV memo “TATE,” 21/8/42. See also: R.T. Reed, “TATE,” 12 Nov. 1941. Both in KV2/61–62.
27. Montagu, Beyond Top Secret U, 69.
28. Stephens, Camp 020, 166.
29. Ibid., 164–66. See also Liddell Diary, 7 Nov. 1941, PRO. We only have Liddell’s word for it that Hinchley-Cooke did the persuading.
30. For the man who would have saved him: Captain R. Short, Note to File, 29 Nov. 1941, PRO, KV2/61. In his diary Liddell argued the opposite and attributed to Lord Swinton the position that a reprieve would be “detrimental to B1A.” Liddell Diary, 7 Nov. 1941.
31. Liddell Diary, 3, 15 Nov. 1941.
32. Liddell Diary, 1 Oct. 1941, PRO.
33. Montagu, Top Secret U, 78.
34. Popov, Spy/Counterspy, 190–91.
1. The Army Pearl Harbor Board and the Naval Court of Inquiry, both of which reported in early 1944, are the most honest sources of what happened for they were non-partisan politically and their questions were well-informed and well-aimed. The Naval Court found so severely against Admiral Stark — that “he failed to display the sound judgement expected of him” — that, had it been made public, the president would have had to fire him. PHH, 39 at 329.
2. Kimmel, Kimmel’s Story, 28–29; and Layton, And I Was There, 115. Likewise, a shortage of aircraft and aircrew precluded continuous, around-the-compass air reconnaisance out to the potential strike distance. Kimmel sensibly husbanded these resources on the expectation that ONI would warn him of an approaching threat. Ibid., 75, citing PHH.
3. The chief of the army and later the air force, General Henry “Hap” Arnold, felt that the discussions he was involved in were only “window dressing” to some “epoch-making” secret accord between the president and the prime minister: Layton, And I Was There, 133, citing Arnold’s wartime diary held by the Library of Congress.
4. Roberta Wohlstetter, Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision, (Redwood City, CA: Stanford UP, 1962) 176–82. Wohlstetter notes conflicting testimony at the hearings into the Pearl Harbor attack, but provides proof that withholding MAGIC from the two commanders did, indeed, begin in Aug. and is skeptical that it had anything to do with security concerns that arose the previous May. As it would have had to have been a decision of both General Marshall and Admiral Stark, and they were aboard the USS Augusta by at least 4 Aug., and 2–3 Aug. was a weekend, it seems safe to conclude that they made the move after the conclusion of the Atlantic meeting on 12 Aug. See also, Layton, And I Was There, 91, 119, 137. He confirms Kimmel was cut off from all MAGIC after July.
5. PHH, 12, at 261. The (S) means it was intercepted at the navy’s Station SAIL at Seattle and forwarded to Washington. It, and the reply (following note) were also intercepted by Station CAST in the Philippines, Station Two at San Francisco, and Station Seven at Fort Hunt outside Washington: Stinnett, Deceit, 102–05. It was also taken down by the army at Fort Shafter, Hawaii: Rusbridger and Nave, Betrayal, 130–31.
6. Stinnett, Deceit, 104.
7. Compare the testimony reported in the Joint Committee Report on the Pearl Harbor Attack, 1946, (PHH) with the observations made in the attached minority report and the views of Frank B. Keefe. Later, Kimmel wrote: “These Japanese instructions and reports pointed to an attack by Japan on ships in Pearl Harbor. The information sought and obtained, with such painstaking detail, had no other conceivable usefulness from a military viewpoint”: Kimmel, Kimmel’s Story, 87. This is obvious even to a lay person. See also, Stinnett, Day of Deceit, 105; and Toland, Infamy, 58–60. Of the many decrypts of Japanese messages reporting on American warships in harbour in the Pacific, only those involving Pearl Harbor dealt with the berthing positions: PHH, passim.
8. Charles Willoughby, MacArthur 1941–1951 (London: William Heinemann, 1956), 22, quoting a staff report of the period. The “grid system” is an allusion to the coded map-reference message mentioned above. Notice how he stresses that these reports were made “daily,” which suggests there were more bomb-plot messages than reported to the inquiries. “Cable” was common usage for telegram. Also from Willoughby: “As Pearl Harbor approached we got many of the intercepts of that period; there was a considerable time lag as they all came via Washington; we set up our own plant during the war and eventually cut the decoding time of all the local items.” Confirmed by Stinnett, Day of Deceit, 112. See also: Edward Drea, MacArthur’s ULTRA: Codebreaking and the War Against Japan, 1942–1945 (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1992), 11, citing several NARA, RG457 files.
9. Colonel Rufus Bratton, in charge of distributing the army decrypts, testified that he received the order from Marshall on or after Aug. 5: PHH, 9, at 4584. As by that date Marshall was aboard the Augusta, he must have issued the order immediately on his return to Washington. For the navy, see the testimony of Captain Alwin Kramer. PHH, 33, at 849.
10. Wohlstetter, Pearl Harbor, 176–80. Also, Kramer, PHH, 33, at 849. MAGIC decrypts were separately produced by both army and navy code breakers, pooled, and distributed by safe hand to a shared list of recipients, the army normally looking after those in the war and state departments and the navy, the navy and the White House. For the figure of “26 a day,” see PHH, 33, at 915. MAGIC summaries were resumed in Mar., 1942.
11. Layton, And I Was There, 167.
12. Clausen and Lee, Pearl Harbor: Final Judgement, 46; and Stinnett, Deceit, 169. Built-in “deniability” is a common ploy of elected leaders expecting to have to answer awkward questions. Roosevelt began receiving “raw intercepts” again on Nov. 12.
13. Timothy Wilford, Pearl Harbor Redefined (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2001), 8, citing Minoru Nomura, “Japan’s Plans for World War II,” Revue Internationale d’Histoire Militaire, 38 (1978): 210–17. Japan was 90 percent dependant on American oil.
14. The Government Code and Cipher School then had the capacity to break PURPLE and the Consular J-codes, including J……19: Rushridger and Nave, Betrayal, 136. Ian Pfennigwerth, A Man of Intelligence: The Life of Captain Theodore Nave (Kenthurst, NSW, Austalia: Rosenberg, 2006), 175–6, mentions the Australians breaking the J-19 “Winds Message” of Nov. 19 and Tokyo’s code-destruct orders on information supplied by Far East Combined Bureau, Britain’s regional cryptanalysis agency based in Singapore. Proof that the British were reading the same codes is the selection of decrypts Henry Clausen obtained from GC&CS in 1944 and reproduced in Clausen and Lee, Pearl Harbor: Final Judgement, 353–93. Also note that the British had wireless listening stations that could pick up signals sent by Mackay Radio and RCA in Honolulu, most notably Hartland Point in Nova Scotia (see Chapter 17). For example: Canadian Examination Unit decrypt, D-180: KITA to Foreign Minister, Tokio, Rec’d Oct. 28, 1941 (Author’s possession).
15. The South Afric
an prime minister, Jan Smuts, recognized the ships were being endangered. When they put in at Capetown, he cabled Churchill: “If the Japanese really are nippy there is an opening here for a first-class disaster.” Notice also that Churchill throughout the previous year had steadfastly refused to send to the Far East any tanks or modern aircraft and he knew that the Japanese were likely in possession of captured British documents indicating that Britain’s chiefs of staff considered Singapore impossible to defend: Richard Lamb, Churchill as War Leader (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1993), 151; and Rusbridger and Nave, Betrayal, 97–104.
16. “Information received from the Orient,” MID to ONI, FBI, etc., 3 Nov., 1941, NARA, RG65, IWG Box 229, 65-9748-17. The document is only marked CONFIDENTIAL, which suggests it was sent out routinely. I could find no reference to it in the Pearl Harbor histories I consulted.
17. Speech at Mansion House, 10 Nov. 1941. Eade, ed., War Speeches of the Rt. Hon. Winston Churchill, Vol. II.
18. Persico, Roosevelt’s Secret War, 141, citing William Donovan to Roosevelt, 13 Nov. 1941, in PSF, Roosevelt Library. This was a great find because one of the strongest and longest-running arguments against Roosevelt luring Japan into war to help Britain has been that he could not have counted on Hitler coming in on Japan’s side. Apparently, he could.
19. Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs (UK) to Secretary of State for External Affairs (Canada), “For your Prime Minister,” Most Secret, 20 Nov. 1941, LAC, RG25, Box 5742, 28-C(s). This is a summary of Hull’s personal description of his meeting with Kurusu given to “His Majesty’s Minister” on Nov. 18.
20. Ibid. The same message was sent to Australia and New Zealand.
21. Wilford, Pearl Harbor Redefined, 11, citing OPNAV to CINPAC, no. 181705, 18 Nov. 1941, in “The Role of Radio Intelligence...”, NARA, RG457, SRH, 190/36/9/2 Entry 9002, Box 9. The Vacant Sea Order is also covered in Stinnett, Day of Deceit, 144–46, who cites the testimony of Rear-Admiral Richmond Turner of the navy’s war plans division (a primary recipient of MAGIC) before the 1944 Navy Hart inquiry: “We were prepared to divert (ship) traffic when we believed war was imminent. We sent the traffic down by the Torres Strait, so that the track of the Japanese task force would be clear of any traffic.”
