Fighting to Lose (39 page)

December 18:
Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle noted in his diary:

(Re. PH investigation) Since the Secretary (Hull) as far back as November 27 had been telling the War Cabinet that hostilities might start at any time when the Japanese replied to his last proposals his record is clear. In the evening of the 6th when I came in with the children for a moment, we knew that the forces (Jap) were already started for somewhere, though we did not know where.

All this info was in the hands of the navy — indeed, most of it came from the navy. But there seems to have been no effective orders sent to Pearl Harbor.37

None indeed.

16

December 7–31, 1941

It was an oft-told story around the FBI about how Hoover first heard of the Japanese surprise attack. He was in New York that Sunday at a baseball game when the FBI switchboard patched the call from Hawaii through to his private box. Amid the hissing and static came the voice of Special Agent Robert Shivers: “The Japanese are bombing Pearl Harbor. There’s no doubt about it — those planes are Japanese. It’s war. You may be able to hear the explosions yourself. Listen.” Shivers put the phone to the window. Hoover could.1

Of all those in leadership positions within the U.S. government and military who had seen Popov’s questionnaire, the director of the FBI was probably the only one who was surprised by the surprise. As far as he knew, everyone who needed to know that the Japanese had their sights on Hawaii did know. He had seen to it.

On the other hand, he had not been on the list for MAGIC. None of the decrypted spy messages reporting on the disposition of the warships in Pearl Harbor had crossed his desk. He had no idea that more than a dozen such reports had passed through the hands of army and navy cryptographers over the previous ten weeks, and beneath the eyes of the army and navy chiefs of staff. America’s civilian chief of counter-espionage had been kept in the dark in his own field.

Anxious to please, anxious to show that the FBI was on the ball, the next day — December 8 — Hoover sent the president two memos, one outlining the war measures the FBI was taking and the other informing him of a two-hour telephone conversation intercepted by the FBI on December 5 between a Mr. Mori and someone in Tokyo. There had been probing questions about the defences of Pearl Harbor and Hawaii, plus some irrelevant ones that looked to be in open code. The one that sounded most suspicious had asked what flowers were in bloom. “Hibiscus and poinsettia,” was the reply.2

On December 12, Hoover followed up with another memo that developed the theme. He said the Honolulu special agent in charge (Robert Shivers again) had been convinced the flowers reply indicated a direct and urgent threat to Hawaii, but Navy Intelligence (ONI) had “scoffed” at the suggestion and had failed to refer the matter to higher authority. Although Hoover did not specifically state it, one can see what made Shivers so certain: The hibiscus was the territory’s official flower and it normally blooms in February, not December.3

Hoover was on the hunt. Someone had messed up, and it was not him. Americans were outraged that the mighty U.S. Pacific Fleet had been caught napping, and that many of their “boys” had been killed. Heads were going to roll, and hungry eyes were already on America’s Dick Tracy. No one cared a whisker that the FBI had ceded counter-intelligence leadership for Hawaii to the navy. Hoover well appreciated that occasionally the innocent get the electric chair.

The second half of his memo to Roosevelt was even more accusatory. From Japanese wireless messages intercepted by military authorities in Hawaii and decoded in Washington, the Military Intelligence Division “discovered the messages contained substantially the complete plans for the attack on Pearl Harbor as it was subsequently carried out.”

Hoover continued:

The messages contained a code Japanese word which would be sent by radio to the Japanese fleet as the signal for the attack when the word was repeated three times in succession. Military authorities in Washington sent by Army radio to the Hawaiian Islands the entire plan for the information of the authorities in Hawaii. On Friday morning, December 5th, the code word previously identified as the signal for the attack was intercepted, which indicated the attack was to be made on Saturday or Sunday, and this information was sent by military radio to the Hawaiian Islands….4

Hoover concluded by observing that either “army radio” had failed to get through, or the authorities in Hawaii had failed to act.

The director of the FBI did not disclose it just then, but he had a very solid source. His information came from none other than Colonel John T. Bissell, the army’s MID chief of counter-intelligence, the very same officer who had screened answers to parts of Popov’s questionnaire earlier in the fall. He let slip to his opposite number in the FBI the following — the writer is actually one of Hoover’s deputies:

Col. John T. Bissell today informed G.C. Burton, in the strictest of confidence (and with the statement that if it ever got out that he had disclosed this information he would be fired), that about ten days before the attack on Pearl Harbor a number of Japanese radio intercepts had been obtained in Hawaii. When they were unable to break the code in these intercepts in Hawaii they sent them to Washington where G2 broke them. It was found these radio messages contained substantially the complete plans for the attack on Pearl Harbor as it was actually carried out. The messages also contained a code Japanese word which would be sent out by radio to the Japanese fleet as the signal for the attack, when this word was repeated three times in succession….5

Sure enough, the Japanese pilots in their fighters and bombers circling over the black sea north of Hawaii had heard in their earphones “TORA! TORA! TORA!” — Tiger! Tiger! Tiger! — before they turned south and formed up against the red rays of the rising sun.

Special Agent Shivers submitted his formal report on the events of December 7 on December 26.6 In the week before, in the hours he spent picking out the words on his typewriter, he could anytime have walked around the anchorage of the wrecked Pacific Fleet, with the USS
Oklahoma
bottom-up in the oily water, the USS
Arizona
awash to the decks, its upper works a tower of twisted and blackened metal. The air reeked of fuel oil and burned paint.

The report began by asking that it not be shown to the army or navy, a request that Hoover respected since it never was mentioned in any of the subsequent Pearl Harbor inquiries. Shivers then went on to tell how, shortly after the attack, he asked the Honolulu police to raid the Japanese consulate, and how they arrived just in time to save a codebook that the consul general was trying to burn. It was turned over to the navy cryptographers at Station HYPO, the Hawaii branch of Op-20-G. Within a few days, they had used it to decipher some of the messages Consul Kita had sent to Tokyo in the week before the attack. These included some stunning last-minute ships-in-harbour reports.

The HYPO cryptographers normally worked strictly on Japanese navy ciphers. They did not receive diplomatic intercepts and did not have the keys to break that kind of message. However, they happened to have some of Consul Kita’s most recent enciphered originals because they had been brought in the Friday before and the day of the attack by the district Naval Intelligence officer, Captain Irving Mayfield. He had managed to persuade one of the local radio-telegraph services, RCA Communications, to secretly hand them over. Ten or so had been easily solved but were of little interest. The rest were in a code-cipher combination that could not be broken. These, on December 9, the codebook unlocked.7

This look by the HYPO cryptographers at Japanese espionage activities in their own backyard, as it were, must have been tremendously exciting. The messages clearly set out the Japanese consulate’s role in paving the way for the attack, and if they had been available beforehand, the Pacific Fleet could have been ready. In the enthusiasm of the moment, strictly against the navy’s rules, the decrypts were shared with Shivers.

The most significant of them, in terms of providing ample warning in ample time, was the so-called “lights message” sent by Kita on December 3. More than four hundred words long after translation, it was apparently prepared by the Abwehr’s spy in Honolulu, Otto Kühn, and comprised an elaborate set of procedures for signalling seaward by means of lights at night and visual cues by day. It would seem the idea was to provide Japanese submarines lurking off shore with the latest on the whereabouts of the warships in Pearl Harbor.

#0245 (1) “PA”

From: Kita

To: Foreign Minister, Tokyo

(Secret Military Message No.) (By Chief of Consulate’s Code)

To: Chief of Third Section, Naval General Staff

From: FUJI

Re Signals: I wish to simplify communications as follows:

Code:

1. Battle force including scouting force are about to put to sea
   
2. Several aircraft carriers plan to put to sea
   
3. All battle force has sailed (1st–3rd dates inc.)
   
4. Several aircraft carriers have sailed (1st to 3rd)
   
5. All aircraft carriers have sailed (1st to 3rd)
   
6. All battle force have sailed (4th–6th)
   
7. Several aircraft carriers have sailed (4th–6th)
   
8. All aircraft carriers have sailed (4th–6th)….
   

The message goes on to explain that 1 through 8 are to be signalled at night on the hour between 7:00 p.m. and 1:00 a.m. by a light in the dormer window of a certain house, or in a certain beach house, or by car headlights on a particular hill. The number of sheets on a clothesline and stars on a sailboat’s sail were to do the same during the day.8

The “lights message” has been derided by some historians over the years, but the generals sitting on the 1944 Army Pearl Harbor Board took it seriously enough. This was the third in a series of eight investigations into the failures at Pearl Harbor, that began in 1942 and culminated in the 1945–46 hearings of the Joint Committee of Congress investigating the attack. The army probe zeroed in on the lights message: “The period in which the signals were to be given was December 1 to 6. If such information had been available to our armed forces it would have clearly indicated the attack.”9 In other words, if the lights message had got to the decision-makers in Washington or Hawaii promptly, the sirens would have sounded.

It did not happen. The lights message was intercepted and copied the same day it was sent, but did not become available in translation until December 11 — far, far too late. The how and why of this delay is at the centre of determining whether the Americans being surprised at Pearl Harbor on December 7 was by accident or design.

The story accepted by the Joint Committee in its 1946 report runs generally like this. On December 2–3, the Japanese Foreign Ministry in Tokyo sent out circular notices to Japan’s diplomatic missions in American- and British-controlled territories ordering them to destroy their high-grade codes and enciphering machines. They were to retain only the low-security LA and PA codes. This became a crucial point because the congressmen accepted testimony that precisely because various Japanese messages indicating war was imminent were in low-grade PA code, they were not deciphered and translated in time. The congressional report, dealing with some specific examples, is worth quoting:

The messages from Honolulu to Tokyo on December 6 were transmitted in the PA-K2 code system, a relatively insecure Japanese code and one past experience had showed was not ordinarily used for messages which Tokyo considered of the highest importance. The actual content of any message could not of course be known until it could be decoded and translated, and before the attack there was no reason to suspect that the two messages sent from Honolulu to Tokyo on December 6 would prove of unusual interest. It is to be noted, however, that the low-grade PA-K2 was virtually the only code available to the Honolulu consul after he had destroyed his major codes pursuant to instructions from Tokyo on December 2.10