by John Bryden
22. PHH, 39 at 314.
23. Wohlstetter, Pearl Harbor 242-46. Hull and Roosevelt knew the Japanese could not accept recognizing Chiang-Kai’shek because it would have been a huge loss of face both nationally and in the Far East. For the idea of Japan recognizing the Chinese leader emanating from Churchill, see Lamb, Churchill, 157, citing PRO FO 371/35957.
24. The minority report of the Joint Congressional Committee Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack (PHH) was highly critical of this “war warning” as being so ambiguous as not to be meaningful. The Naval Court of Inquiry found that Admiral Kimmel was entirely justified in thinking the Japanese were looking to the Far East rather than to Hawaii, based on the information he received from Washington. PHH, 39 at 314-15.
25. “… our battleships had suddenly become ‘targets.’” Wiloughby, MacArthur, 22.
26. Wilford, Pearl Harbor Redefined, 12, from PHH, 17, at 2479; and Kimmel, Kimmel’s Story, 46–7.
27. Bryden, Best-Kept, 91, citing documents obtained from the Canada’s Communications Security Establishment (author’s possession). See Notes 19–20 above. Mackenzie King Diary, 1 Dec. 1941, LAC.
28. Tokyo to Washington, 28 Nov. 1941, army decrypt trans. PHH, Hewitt Inquiry, 37, at 684.
29. Safford testimony, Hart Inquiry, Day 32. Kota Bharu was defended only by a brigade. Had the British commander at Singapore received this intelligence, he could easily have got enough troops up Kota Bharu to repel the invasion. The Japanese were only landing less than a division, and by means primitive in comparison to the amphibious landings later conducted by the Allies.
30. Reproduced in Clausen and Lee, Pearl Harbor: Final Judgement, 360.
31. Tokyo to Washington, 2 Dec. 1941, army trans. 12-3-41, Clausen and Lee, Pearl Harbor: Final Judgement, 339.
32. Wilford, Pearl Harbor Redefined, 99, citing from Seymour’s papers held in the St. Catharines Museum, St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada. Seymour was a distinguished Canadian, so his testimony must be considered reliable, and it is backed up by a statement from the wartime Canadian bureaucrat who got Canada started on code and cipher-breaking, Lester B. Pearson, later Canada’s prime minister: Ibid., 101, citing a letter from Pearson to Seymour, Jan. 31, 1972. Joseph Apedaile was attached to the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan.
33. OpNav to CINCAF, CINCAP, COM 14, COM 16, 3 Dec. 1941, Exhibit 8, Hart Inquiry; and Clausen and Lee, Pearl Harbor: Final Judgement, 69, 96.
34. John Toland, Infamy: Pearl Harbor and Its Aftermath (New York: Doubleday, 1982), 302 citing oral history tape recording done by the University of Hawaii.
35. Private letter to author quoted in Constantine FitzGibbon, Secret Intelligence in the Twentieth Century, (London: Hart-Davis, 1976), 255. There is no reason not to accept his assertion, especially as it is backed up by William Casey in The Secret War against Hitler (New York: Berkley, 1989), 7. As America’s CIA chief during the Cold War, Casey must be considered a reliable witness.
36. Christopher Andrew, “Churchill and Intelligence,” in Leaders and Intelligence, ed. Michael Handel (London: Frank Cass, 1989), 189.
37. Adolf Berle, Diary, 18 Dec. 1941, FDRL.
1. Don Whitehead, The FBI Story (New York: Random House, 1956), 182. The game was between the Washington Redskins and the Philadelphia Eagles.
2. Richard Gid Powers, Secrecy and Power: The Life of J. Edgar Hoover (New York: Free Press, 1987), 240. See also, PHH, Hewitt Inquiry, III, at 451–2, There was initially some confusion about who took the call. Apparently, it was actually Mr. Mori’s wife.
3. Ibid. The Americans received confirmation after the war that the Japanese were using a flower code to indicate the state of things in Pearl Harbor. The Operations Order of the task force gave “The cherry blossoms are all in their glory” as the code phrase for no warships in Pearl Harbor: PHH, Hewitt Inquiry.
4. Hoover to Early, 12 Dec. 1941, Steve Early papers, FDRL. Reproduced in Thomas Kimmel Jr. and J. A. Williams, “Why Did the Attack on Pearl Harbor Occur? An Intelligence Failure? FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover Thought He Knew,” Intelligencer, 17, No. 1 (2009).
5. Ibid., citing D.M. Ladd to Director, 12.11.41, from “Pearl Harbor documents from Mr. Hoover’s and Mr. Nichols Official files.” After the war Japanese airmen revealed that the final signal that launched the raid was the thrice repeated: “Tora, Tora, Tora!” for “Tiger, Tiger, Tiger!”
6. Shivers to Director, 26 Dec. 1941, NARA, RG65, WWII FBI HQ file “Julius Kuehn” (hereafter: “Shivers Report”) See also, Whitehead, FBI Story, 190–93. This author must have been allowed to see the Shivers report for his account matches it closely.
7. PHH, 37, Hewitt Inquiry, Exhibit 40 (Mayfield Report), at 912-13. Farnsley Woodward with J.J. Rochefort; PHH, 36, at 319–24, and 350–52. Their testimony should be read with PHH, 37, Hewitt Inquiry, Exhibits 55–56, at 982–3. Kahn, Codebreakers, 45 and Stinnett, Deceit, 112 say HYPO did have the PA code, having got it from a Registered Intelligence Publications circular, but the content of the circular in question has never been released. Also note Stinnett’s assumption that HYPO was reading PA-K2 because its chief, Joseph Rochefort, testified that HYPO could read most of the “simple stuff”: Deceit, 107. Even the Canadians could read the housekeeping LA code, but PA-K2 was not simple. See Note 15 below.
8. Shivers Report, Note 6 above; Mayfield Report, Note 7 above, 912. Also accurately reproduced in Whitehead, FBI Story, 190–91. Note that, according to Farnsley Woodward, the “lights message” in Exhibit 56 is not the HYPO version of Exhibit 40. It is the Op-20-G translation with deletions done in Washington.
9. PHH, 39, Army Board Report, at 100.
10. PHH, 1, at 231. The specific reference is to messages of 6 Dec. but it has been taken to apply to all Honolulu–Tokyo messages in PA-K2, including the lights message. Layton, And I Was There, 283.
11. PHH, 37, Hewitt Inquiry, at 701. This is not the copy referred to as being in Exhibit 13 when Safford commented on it. That is missing. The (5) in the lower right-hand corner indicates it was intercepted at Fort Shafter in Hawaii and therefore mailed to Washington. But Fort Shafter was only backup. The message would have been intercepted at any of the intercept stations in the continental United States and forwarded to the Washington code breakers the same day.
12. PHH, 37, Hewitt Inquiry, Exhibit 13, at 669.
13. PHH, 36, Hewitt Inquiry, Safford Report, at 66–7. One of the “urgent” messages he alludes to was the thirteen-part message that came in that day conveying Japan’s implied declaration of war. But it was sent in English. There was little other traffic. See next chapter.
14. Shivers Report, Note 6 above. The HYPO version of the message with this preamble is reproduced incidentally (probably accidentally) in PHH, Hewitt Inquiry, Exhibit 40. The version provided to the Joint Congressional Committee, however, is without the preamble. PHH, Exhibit 2.
15. PHH, 36, Hewitt Inquiry, Friedman, at 310–11.
16. PHH, 37, Hewitt Inquiry, Exhibit 56A, at 995–6. The description here applies to the transposition rules for “WA and WO (PA)” codes. It follows then that the analysis in Kahn, Codebreakers, 18–19. of the 4 Dec. message, “At 1 o’clock on the 4th a light cruiser of the Honolulu class hastily departed,” would appear to be that of a message in LA code, not PA. Considering the innocuous content of the message, this is not surprising.
17. PHH, 37, Hewitt Inquiry, at 1010–11. See also the preceding message of 13 Nov., also in PA. The content is highly revealing, and therefore must have been considered highly sensitive.
18. While members of the Joint Committee investigating the Pearl Harbor attack heard that the PA Code had been around for years, examples in the official record before 2 Dec. 1941, are rare. A comparison of American and British intercepts of the Japanese messages collected for the Clausen investigation shows that “PA=Chief of Consulate’s Code=Chef de Mission Cypher=In Government Code=CA.” The famous Tokyo to Washington 1 o’clock message is headed “Purple (Urgent-Very Important) #907, To
be handled in Government Code.” As all codes had been destroyed except PA and LA, this must refer to PA. See especially the message reproduced in Clausen & Lee, Pearl Harbor: Final Judgement, 313–93.
19. The point needs to be made because of the ubiquitous references in the literature to Kita’s messages being “cables.” The Japanese normally alternated month over month between the two services, MacKay the odd months and RCA the even: PHH, 36, at 331.
20. Stinnett, Deceit, 192. Interestingly, this made it unnecessary to get copies of Kita’s radiograms from RCA, according to the arrangement said to have been initiated by Roosevelt through RCA president David Sarnoff. For the same bomb-plot messages being intercepted in the Philippines (Station CAST/Fort Mills) and in the United States (San Francisco–Fort Hunt), see Stinnett, Deceit, 100, 103. This is proof that RCA/Mackay sometimes sent the same messages by both routes.
21. Not to belabour the point, but there is not a chance in the world Kita would have sent such messages in a weak code. He would be putting the entire surprise attack operation at risk.
22. Shivers Report.
23. PHH, 2, at 672; and PHH, 37, Hewitt Inquiry, Exhibit 57, at 998. The latter shows that the message had been intercepted by Station Two, San Francisco. Note that Captain Mayfield’s report to the Hart Inquiry uses the Shivers version.
24. L.F. Safford, “A Brief History of Communications Intelligence in the United States,” (1952), NARA, SRH-149. His ONI colleague Alwin Kramer may have been the source of this information. Apparently he participated in a “black bag” operation against the office of the Japanese consul in New York earlier in the year. Layton, And I Was There, 284. Also: Robert Hanyok and David Mowry, West Wind Clear: Cryptography and the Winds Message Controversy (Washington, D.C.: National Security Agency, 2011), 21–24.
25. PHH, 37, Hewitt Inquiry, at 486; and PHH, R1, at 229. I have substituted “barrage” for “observation” balloon because it is clear that is what was meant: PHH, 37, Hewitt Inquiry, at 01. Barrage balloons were the tethered blimp-like balloons used by the British over London and elsewhere during the Blitz. They were intended to deter low-flying aircraft.
26. PHH, 36, Hewitt Inquiry, Safford, at 66.
27. Fort Hunt normally intercepted the Tokyo–Washington diplomatic traffic but was also on the geodesic line Honolulu–San Francisco–Fort Hunt–Hartland Point (Halifax). For the Canadians intercepting Kita traffic at this time: Examination Unit decrypt D-180, KITA to Foreign Minister, Tokio, 22 Oct. 1941; CSE Archives (author’s possession). This was probably obtained from Hartlan Point which was then assigned to German clandestine and Japanese diplomatic traffic. Bryden, Best-Kept Secret, 45, citing, LAC, RG12, 2158. Hartland Point was connected by landline and undersea cable to Ottawa and to the Government Code and Cipher School in Britain. Since the Canadian code breakers were then only able to handle the low-grade LA code, the higher grade messages would have been forwarded to GC&CS. For proof the British were reading messages in Purple, J-19 and PA, compare British messages reproduced in Clausen and Lee, Pearl Harbor: Final Judgement, 353–93 with American versions.
1. Tokyo to Berlin, 30 Nov. 1941, JD-6943, ARMY, translated 1 Dec.; PHH, 37, Hewitt Inquiry, Exhibit 18, at 664. For Churchill seeing the British translation of the same message, see Note 27 below. The message makes a mockery of the time and energy invested by the various inquiries in trying to determine whether there had been a “winds execute” message in open code on Japanese broadcast radio indicating what countries Japan was intending to fight. On 1 Dec. Roosevelt knew the answer, as did Safford and Kramer, who definitely would have seen this message. The “winds” controversy appears to have been instigated by Safford to divert attention away from this and other more revealing messages.
2. PHH, 37, Hewitt Inquiry, at 999.
3. PHH, 4, 1746–47; PHH, 7, 3390-91.
4. PHH, 37, Hewitt Inquiry, at 983; and Chapter 16, Note 8. Notice the use of the word “attic” instead of “dormer” as used by the HYPO/Shivers version. Notice also his statement that Kramer’s dilly-dallying “slowed up the whole process” of translating and making MAGIC available: Layton, And I Was There, 284. This is hidden in the evidence presented at the Pearl Harbor inquiries because the messages submitted showed only time of translation, not decryption. British code-breaking agencies showed time of decryption.
5. Layton, And I Was There, 281–83. Notice he writes that Kramer did not give the lights message the attention it warranted because it was in “a low-grade consular cipher.” From Chapter 16 we know it was high-grade.
6. Because it arrived on an odd day, when it was the navy’s turn to decipher incoming intercepts, it can be assumed the army’s Signals Intelligence Service was unaware of it at that point.
7. PHH, 37, Hewitt Inquiry, Tokyo to Washington, 6 Dec. 1941, Army 7149, at 694.
8. Layton, And I Was There, 290.
9. The officer of the watch that began at 7 a.m. testified that the fourteenth part and the army translation of the one o’clock message were ready by 7:15, but Kramer did not come in until nine o’clock: PHH, 33, Naval Court, Alfred Pering, at 802–4. He also said Kramer had been phoned at home about the messages during the night, as certainly he would have been since the one o’clock message was sent in PURPLE and in “Government code,” a method reserved for the most urgent and most important messages. The middle watch officer, F.M. Brotherhood, was more circumspect, but did testify that at the end of his shift he left for Kramer “those dispatches which were supposed to be delivered to him.” These must have included the fourteenth part, which was in English, and a copy of the one o’clock message in Japanese, because Brotherhood said the “original” was sent to the army for translation: PHH, 33, at 839–44. Kramer claimed he had not been phoned and that he came in at 7:30: PHH, 33, at 858–61.
10. Arthur A. McCollum, “Unheeded Warnings,” in Paul Stillwell, Air Raid: Pearl Harbor! Recollections of a Day of Infamy (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1981), 85–87. McCollum’s recollections back up Pering’s statement that Kramer did not arrive in his own office until nine o’clock. See also PHH, 36 at 24-27.
11. PHH, 39, Army Board Report, at 93–5.
12. See the selection of decrypts, including some BJs, collected from the Government Code and Cipher School in 1944 and reproduced in Clausen and Lee, Pearl Harbor: Final Judgement, 353–93. Wartime cryptogapher Eric Nave, who was with the Australian section of the British Far East Combined Bureau, reported personally breaking a J-19 message in Nov. 1941, and states that the code was then well-known to the Government Code and Cipher School: Rusbridger and Nave, Betrayal, 25, 136. These claims are backed up by Ian Pfennigwerth, A Man of Intelligence, 174–75, citing documents in Australia’s National Archives.
13. Powers, Secrecy, 243.
14. The proof of this assertion is Popov’s questionnaire itself. However, Jebsen’s description in Spy/Counterspy, 142–44, of hosting a fact-finding visit of Japanese army and navy officers to Taranto in April appears also to be true.
15. Evidence obtained from Richard Sorge by the Japanese after his arrest and made available to the House Committee on Un-American Activities, Hearings on the American Aspects of the Richard Sorge Spy Case 82 Congress( 9, 22, 23 Aug. 1951). Sorge said he obtained this from the German Ambassador who, in this case, was a Canaris protegé.
16. “Herr Sorge sass mit zu Tisch,” Der Speigel, 3 March 1951.
17. H.C. on Un-Amercan Activities, Sorge Case; and David E. Murphy, What Stalin Knew: The Enigma of Barbarossa (New Haven, CT; and London: Yale UP, 2005), 86–86.
18. Murphy, What Stalin Knew, 87.
19. Ibid.
20. H.C. on Un-American Activities, Sorge Case, Testimony of Mitsusada Yoshikawa, (1946) He was the Japanese prosecutor who interrogated Sorge after his arrest.
21. West and Tsarev, Crown Jewels, 140; and Yuri Modin, My Five Cambridge Friends (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1994), 92. See also, Curry, Security Service, 259–60. Note the deletion on p. 260, which undoub
tedly refers to intercepting diplomatic bags. Herbert Yardley, Secret Service In America (London: Faber & Faber, 1940), 49–50, went into detail about how to open diplomatic mail, photograph its contents, and then reseal everything without leaving traces, so the practice was hardly a secret anymore.
22. West and Tsarev, Crown Jewels, 140; and Carter, Anthony Blunt, 274, citing an interview with Desmond Bristow. There was nothing new in what Blunt was doing. See next paragraph.
23. Liddell Diary, 14 Aug. 1941, and passim. See also, Curry, Security Service, 260, which specifically mentions BJs. A 1942 Soviet assessment of Blunt’s work during Oct.–Nov. 1941 reported him as having supplied data on the deployment of Japanese troops and being responsible for the liaison between MI5 and GC&CS and the “distribution of diplomatic decrypts”: West and Tsarev, Crown Jewels, 145–46.
24. For examples of British intercepts of pre-Pearl Harbor Japanese diplomatic traffic that was copied to MI5 — that is, for Blunt — see Clausen & Lee, Pearl Harbor: Final Judgement, 353–77. Up to this writing, only isolated Japanese decrypts from this period have been released at the PRO, so this collection, which Clausen obtained from GC&CS in 1944, is extremely valuable for what it can reveal of how closely Churchill could follow for himself the Japanese-American trajectories to war.
25. “Reinforced by the Siberian divisions which Stalin had risked moving from the Far East on the basis of reports, including Philby’s, it beat the Germans back.… ” Genrikh Borovik, The Philby Files (New York: Little, Brown, 1994), 195. As head of the Iberian desk, Philby was not then in a position to supply much intelligence useful to Stalin’s decision, so the other “reports” must have included Blunt’s. Stalin, who was chronically suspicious, would have needed to see at least some actual carbon copies of the decrypts to be convinced. See examples reproduced on the inside cover of Crown Jewels.
