Fighting to Lose (42 page)

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 ambassador 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

The German ambassador to Tokyo was General Eugen Ott, previously military attaché before getting the top post. As military attachés before the war were chosen by agreement between the Abwehr chief and the chief of the general staff, then Ludwig Beck, it is a safe bet that Ott had the same attitude toward the Nazis as they did. Moreover, the man who replaced him as attaché was Colonel Gerhard Matzky, identified after the war as a member of Canaris’s inner circle of conspirators. At the end of 1940, Matzky was recalled to Germany to head up Fremde Heere, the army general staff’s intelligence department. His replacement was Colonel Alfred Kretschmer, a forty-seven-year-old veteran of the First World War who had stayed on in the peacetime army and whose service included two years in Fremde Heere. He was also an opponent of the Nazis.

In other words, the German embassy in Tokyo was more an outpost of the German Resistance than an overseas branch of the Foreign Office, its key positions being filled by anti-Nazis loyal to Canaris. With Sorge occupying an office at the embassy, he was an easy way to tip Stalin off to Hitler’s plans quickly and safely. Fremde Heere was a key contributor to the planning for Operation
Barbarossa
, so Matzky was the ultimate source of the details Sorge obtained from Kretschmer and Ott. During their breakfast chats, Ott also updated Sorge on what he was gleaning from his Foreign Office masters in Berlin, and from their counterparts in Tokyo.20 Sorge’s great reputation as a spy was based on the intelligence the Abwehr — read Canaris — chose to give him.