By M.M. Leroy
This time of year one gets the chills. Too many bad memories, maybe. Like Pearl. Like cousin Maurice being shot full of holes near the Komandorski Islands. I don’t know.
Maybe it’s the darkness that reminds me cousin Billy spent six years in a tobacco cloud hundreds of feet below a rock in the Mediterranean deciphering Enigma — or was it Ultra? Is that why cryptoanalysis has been on my mind? Magic. And Pearl.
Or maybe it’s recent examples of intelligence failure across the globe, which readers may recall and I needn’t name, that explain why I’ve been thinking: Magic. Pearl. And failure.
Lack of knowledge, failure to act or refusal to act?1
Cousin John, before his mysterious death in 1995, endeavored to answer. “On the evening of December 7, Edward R. Murrow kept a supper invitation with the President. ‘Maybe you think it didn’t surprise us?’ A weary Roosevelt remarked cryptically in the small hours of the next day.”2
The attack was a surprise “because of a breakdown in communications within the service organizations in Washington and the U.S. failure to transmit the complete intelligence situation to the Hawaiian command . . . Even if Roosevelt had been provided, as there is evidence to suggest, with twelve days’ advance warning that Japan was going to war, it is impossible to accept that he would knowingly have conspired in the loss of 2,353 American lives, 19 ships, and 150 aircraft to ensure that the nation entered the war united in moral outrage.”3
“The much more intriguing questions still to be answered concern such issues as: Why did the FBI not take more notice of the [intelligence] report from August 1941? What became of the confidential book of military plans that Kilsoo Haan, the front man for a Korean espionage group, stole from Japanese naval officers staying in a Los Angeles hotel? And who placed the cryptic December 7 warning in the November 26 issue of The New Yorker magazine?
“‘Achtung, Warning, Alerte!’ headlined a drawing of a bunker with figures playing a dice game called the Deadly Double under a double-headed German Eagle emblem. ‘We hope you’ll never have to spend a long winter’s night in an air raid shelter, but we were just thinking . . . it’s only common sense to be prepared’ ran the strange copy on page eighty-six. Yet even more intriguing is the small box ad on page 100 showing two dice, with a XX and the numbers on other faces arranged so that they appear to spell out ‘0’ hour for a ‘double cross’ on the 7th day of the 12th month at the 5th hour out of 24.
“After the Pearl Harbor attack the FBI investigated this curious coincidence. They discovered that the suspicious advertisement for the non-
existent game made by a Monarch Trading Company (a dummy corporation) had been placed by a white caucasian male who had delivered the printing plates and paid in cash. Still more curious was the fact that the man they identified as the suspect apparently met a sudden death a few weeks later under circumstances that were typical of the way British secret agents had disposed of Nazi operatives in New York. Was The New Yorker warning genuine and were the Germans responsible for trying to raise the alarm? . . .
“Intriguing pieces of evidence continue to surface that suggest that Washington knew — or ought to have known — of the impending attack in the mid-Pacific. A recently released diary of the Dutch army commander in Java indicates that a Japanese army signal was intercepted which apparently revealed that Hawaii, as well as Malaya and the Philippines, was a target for Japan’s first strike. But there is no hard evidence that the warning was indeed specific enough or that it reached the President and his military chiefs five days before Pearl Harbor. . . .
“Whether the British were similarly taken in is perhaps a more important question to be asked in light of new evidence provided in the hitherto secret American archives. None of Britain’s intercepted Japanese radio messages has yet to be released — yet the U.S. records show that from April 1941 the Purple decoding machine at Bletchley Park was spewing out decrypted diplomatic traffic. We still do not know how Britain’s eavesdropping compared with Washington’s Magic because none of it has been released. Still more significant are the hints given in the official history of British wartime intelligence which states that from September 1939 the Royal Navy cryptoanalysts had been able to penetrate Japan’s Fleet cypher — the operational code traffic that defied the Americans until after Pearl Harbor. Moreover, we know that not only was there a massive British signals intelligence operation mounted in Singapore, but the Far Eastern Combined Bureau of the three services was continuously evaluating Japan’s war preparations. . . .
“If Churchill was indeed forewarned, it might explain his extreme touchiness over the subject of the Pearl Harbor attack and his repeated denials that Britain was privvy [sic] to Japan’s diplomatic communications. It would also explain the continued reluctance of the British government to release so far any of their Japanese Ultra intelligence files — and why key reports dealing with Japan in the Prime Minister’s records have been removed and remain closed for seventy-five years. . . .
“The fascination of the subject is that for every answer new questions arise. One of the most curious is raised by recent testimony of a former U.S. Navy intelligence officer which was released only last year.
“Captain George W. Linn, a former officer on the wartime staff of Naval Intelligence, added yet another twist to the enigma with the testimony provided thirty-nine years later of a most curious request that was made in the Op 20 G staff only a matter of hours after the Japanese planes had struck:
“‘Early in the afternoon GZ came into the watch office and motioned me to one side. I was floored when he asked if we could encrypt a message in the Purple System for transmission. This was a requirement I had never considered and had to do some fast thinking before saying we could, but that it would be a very slow process. Next, I can remember saying something along the following lines (probably needlessly) I hope that whatever this message is supposed to accomplish is of the highest importance. Ultimately the Japanese will discover our ruse and certainly will re-evaluate all of their crypto-systems, including military. Years of work will go down the drain and we may not be reading Japanese traffic for months or years. GZ nodded and left, saying he would let me know. Although I cannot recall it, he must have returned sometime and said it was off. I sense it was not GZ’s idea; it came from higher up. I did not question GZ about it then or later. I doubt he would have told me — I had no need to know.’
“To learn of Lieutenant-Commander Kramer’s curious request, which ‘came from higher up,’ is as startling today as it must have been for Linn. What was the purpose of sending a signal to the Japanese after war had broken out — could it have been an attempt to cover up the intelligence record? We may never know, since the man who made the request is now dead. But, had the ploy been tried and the enemy discovered the extent to which the Americans had penetrated their most secret channels of communications, a timely revision of their codes might have deprived the U.S. Navy of the intelligence that made their victory at Midway possible — and the whole course of the Pacific War might have been altered.”4
1 “Man knoweth not the price thereof; neither is it found in the land of the living.” Job 28:13.
2 John Costello, Pacific War 1941-45 (NY: Rawson, Wade 1981).
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid.
