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2 .. Lfu.E--

INFORMATION 

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ACTION 

NOTE AND 

RETURN 

4 SEE ME 

SIGNATURE 

REMARKS 

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~,--~~......,._ c - ... .. p ~J- ~ 

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FROM NAME OR TITLE 

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ORGANIZATION AND LOCATIOll of.:1. '- -:LGi. ~ ~ 

~eclassified and approved for release by NSA on 05-16-2014 

3526 

pursuant to E.O.) 
/ 

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DIR 

Diru: c/s, NBA 

l.. Inclosed llflrewith 1s the atud;y ot Pearl Harbor required as part 3 ot subject 

\ contract. Parts l. and 2 were COJll>l,eted and accepted ;pnviouaq. 

2. fJh1s atucw bu beeD reviewed b7 cosn:J.zant h.1gll-levol. :personnel iD PnOD. 

'lbeir QOQlllCD'ta end recomrnenaatSona are 8UllDl.IZ'izecl below: 

a. Dlere is li"1e,, 1t f/lJ:¥, nev tactu&l. -.terlal.; hcniever, Ur. Frieam.u's 

-.; ...r anaqais provides some nev :lrrtezp'etatioa ot the facts. 

b. fhe controverq over pl&c1Dc tile 'blmle tor t.he Pearl Barbor disaster 

'l1ill. probab]J never be settled. ' 

c. The stuq would probe.bl.¥ not be :imp'oved b7 f'urbher vork on it, except 

'tor m:iDor editing. ' 

d. It is reCQ1111eDded that the s~ be accepted as fulf'ill !ng the contract 

and that the contract be cl.oaecl. 9J.e atuq aboul4 not be lJU.bliahed, but a caw 

should be tiled with the EA UiatoriaD. 

IDcl: 

a/s 

. \ 

19 ,llNl 1951 

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""":::'\r.-:-~ - ~-=-- r~ r c::;. 1 •• -, l ,_ ~.,~\r<::"''-? , _.....,_ ,,, ... ~ .. -- -

-------- ~---~~-~--~-------==~i;:_ 
REF ID:A72891 

GECRElJ 

Director 

.lat1aaal Securit;v Age:rJq 

~25 !>.C. 

At;tn: ChS.et 1 Central. Office of Reteience 

Si:r: 

12 MAR 1957 

Beterence 1a na1e to Ccartxac:t Bo. :ll49-170-ec-J.'/391 i'ile :io. $Wia•%, 56-ISl/PR-210, wbich wa entena. 1ntD aa ot 1 Aupat 1955 b7 ancl between the 

T!d.ted states or .lnmic:a ID1 the ~tgaea, 4IDO. vblm we JllDClin.ed ~ aa 

to date ~ del.S.ve17 ot all t1le 111m8 called ~or \D1llr -.1.cl. contftlct. In 

accaraance V1tb tbe ~1cm of Article 11 (Del.i'VllZ'7) of a&1.d cantract,, I 

am semUng iou hel"evit.b (a) ~te~ i;o ~ CiU"la ~ to 

tbaae sent 1Dler ho.1ed 1,, Article I, i~ b(l) ot 11&1cl contract; and 

(b) tbe cmrplded mm.II~ aeJled for unJer ft'0.1ect 3 ti# thew Art1cle1 

v1s. 1 a apec1a1 report ~ tmtatlveq entiu.l !'be fl:&tols!cal. lireamd at the Varloua ottic1al IDYea~ lzdio & A an P-.r1 

• 'lhe nn &llttiiive um Ot the~i;;a tor TM Pl'oJed 3 :La 

DOii mt quite aul:able .a. :t ha've ~ 1't .a.'VUable to llllml1 :1.• 'b7 prehc• 

SDs :Lt With t.ba wo:raa 11Cei1ai.D. aapecta ot 1*Clc 111,. nwldns the ~ 'ttitle 

''Cena.tu El£ or ''!'le' in t.be~ml -uncl at '&be Varioua Ott1c1&1.t.1ji@:Qii)Dto tbe A~ W'1 _.8 

I ba11e a1a,Pte4 a rati.r ~ style vhlcb m.l' pesf.mpB .U the bro• 

d11lre mre iDtereaUDg. Seven.l. la.a tbere:ln cast, a mw 11ght, I thlnk1 on 

certaiJl aspects or the 1Direets.p.t1am and tlae queatif.ma J'ailled b7 a catesar:r 

of histar.l.lma 1dlo llave much to IJ9f/ ~ t.be 9*tack on Pai-1 Harbor and. Vbo 

are lmovD .. "revts1Cll1ata •• , rev bl'OChuN ., 'li1lel'efore be 1J8ehl. 1n a stuil¥ 

of tbe Pearl Barbor ~ L_tlez', -~ 1'or b1atar11ma who tKe a lllOzte 

raliaUc viev of 'Vbn ..,.._am! vllJ' tbe u. s. fOl"cea 1D Baw-1:1. vere 

causlLt bJ' aurprlae. 1~ 1a JIG'l1llJa ldartuaate tbR I ma. to use & aza1.l 

mom't of zaterial Vb:l.ch 1a 8Ull. claasUled llD4 'fibenrore 'the b1"oclmre • 

a vtla1e baa ha4 to be cluaitlec1. 

I zealize ~ too WU t.iat U1e present brocbm:e cm ~ 'be 

1mpl"OVed b7 fur1;ber vark but tbe 'ti1me l!td:t~ twice extieaded·-stam.l:ta 

ot no ad.Uiticmal de.la;' 111 the c1ellftl'1' ot th1a ltm. I;at; it be CODaicJend. 

1D the 1il0.1'da ~ tbe previom DUector of t.be B&UOD&l Securitq Af/f/AC7, • 

''!fode1 No. i.·· 

2 Incl.a: 

a/a 

BECRElJ 

/ 
REF ID:A72891 

CERTAIN ASPECTS OF "MAGIC" IN THE CRYPTOLOGICAL BACKGROUND 

OF THE VARIOUS OFFICIAL INVESTIGATIONS 

INTO THE A'PrACK ON PEARL HARBOR 

b7 

William F. Friedman 
REF ID:A72891 

Certain Aspects of "Magic" in the Cryptological Bac:kgmund 

of tbe Various Official Investigations 

into the Attack on Pearl Harbor 

Section ~ 

1. 

2. 

3. 

4. 

5. 

6. 

7. 

8. 

Introduction • . • • • • . . • • • • . • . • • • . The Real Essence of the Problem • • • . • • • • • 

A New Look at the Revisionists Allegations of 

Conspiracy to Keep Kimm.el and Short in the 

Dark . • • • • • • • • . • . • . • • • • . . • 

Was MAGIC Withheld fran Kimmel and Short and1 

if so, 'Wb1"? • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • 

The "Winds Code Messages" . . . . . . . . . . The Question of Sabotage . . . . . . . . . . Conclusions . . . . • • • • • • 

Epilogue •• . . . . . . . . . . 

APPENDIX 1. ''Pearl Harbor in Perspective 1

11 

by Dr. Louis Morton. United States Naval 

Institute Proceeding~Vol. 81 1 No. 4, 

April 1955, PP• 461-

. . . . . . 

APPENDIX 2. ''Pearl Barbor and the Revisionists 1 " by 

Prof'. Robert :e:. Ferrell. The Historian, Vol.. XVII, 

No. 21 Spring 19551 PP• 23.5-233 

) 

1 

ll 

18 

35 

49 

53 

65 

68 
REF ID:A72891 

1. INTRCJ>U::TION 

More than 15 years have passed since the Japanese, vi th unparalleled 

good luck, good luck that DOW seems astouna1ng, and with a degree of 

skill unanticipated by the United States, executed their surprise attack 

on Pearl Barbor during the morning hours of 7 December 1941. It was an 

attack that constituted a momentous disaster for the United States, it 

made our Navy's Pacific Fleet, for all practical purposes, hors de combat 

f'or lllBD1' months. In the view of' Mark s. Watson, in a volume written for 

the Army series on the history of the u. s. Army in World War II, Chief 

of Staf'f': Prewar Plans and Preparations ( 1950), the disaster was the 

result of' a "fateful series of mischances" among which be listed those 

which be considered the most :Lmportant. He did not list them all; to 

do so would make the disaster partake of the character of an enormous, 

and almost incredible Greek trageq-ao ~ big and littl.e things went 

wrong to make the disaster possible and to prevent its being averted with 

little or no damage. 

The Battle of' Pearl Barbor is still being fought but the adversaries 

this time are all Americans; and though the battle is bloodless, because 

the weapons are DOW words, not bullets or bombs, it is quite acrimonious 

and intense, as internal. or civil wars general.ly are. This time the 

battle is intended to capture, b;y a sort of literary ''bra.inwashing," the 

minds of a large segment of the American people who more or less dimly 

feel tbat the truth, the whole truth, has not yet been told. Ma.111' 

Americans, I • sure, are still undecided in regard to who or what was 

1 

<S:) -

.... _ ... ,, /.. ' - -,, ... 
REF ID:A72891 

bECRElJ -

responsible for this most momentous and most humiliating naval disaster 

in our history. 

Fifteen million words, more or less, have been written concerning, 

explaining, or attempting to assess and fix responsibilities for the 

Pearl Harbor disaster, and to show why the U. S. forces at Honolulu were 

caught napping in the early hours of what President Roosevelt referred 

to as that "day of infam;,y" when he appeared before Congress on 8 December 

1941 to declare war on Japan. The Report and Hearings Before the Joint 

Committee on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack (79th Congress, 

2d Session, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1946), hereinaf'ter 

referred to as PBR, alone contain 15,000 transcript pages; the over-all 

final report of the Committee comprises some ten million words and fills 

4o volumes of closel.y printed text. Thus far, in ad.di ti on to this vast 

a.mount of material there must be at least five million words in the 

writings of private individuals. Some of them defend the Findings, 

Conclusions, and Recommendations of the Majority in the PHR, others 

defend the Findings and Conclusions of the Minority in the PBR, still 

others disagree and violently attack both what the Majority and the 

Minari ty said. Even representative Keefe 1 a Republican who signed the 

Majority Report found it necessary to add to that report some additional 

views of his own where he could not agree with those of the Majority. 

It is obvious that in this brochure it will be impossible to deal with 

all that has been written on the subject. Even to list by title the 

books 1 brochures, articles (not to mention the thousands of newspaper 

accounts, letters to editors, etc.) which have something to add to the 

.s BECRElJ2 
REF ID:A72891 

.__ __,, GECREll _ 

story would be a :t'air:cy" large task. A bibliography covering the items 

on Pearl Harbor in 'l1JY' private collection will be found in the "Subject 

file" now in the NSA Library. But it is a strange, indeed, it is a 

remarkable fact that not a singl.e new item of information having a direct 

bearing upon attempts to explain why the Pearl Barbor attack could have 

come or did come as a COJ!i?lete surprise to the U. S. has been turned gp 

since 1946, when the Joint Congressional COlDllll.ttee canpleted its task. 

One may well assume, therefore, that since no new facts have come to light 

it must be something else that is keeping the Battle of Pearl Harbor 

going. The assumption is true· the facts developed in the various 

investigations of 1944, 1945, and 1946 are being scrutinized now through 

different sorts of spectacles and by different observers, this results 

in new "interpretations" of the old, well-known tacts. 

It is the purpose of this brochure to make a few observations and 

comments on the current Battle of Pearl Harbor. They are directed at the 

writings of certain historians who call themselves or are known as 

"revisionists," and who find much support in two recently published books, 

both by high-ranking officers of the U. s. Navy. These charges are veey 

serious~indeed they are tantamount to imputing at least veey questionable behavior by persons of such stature as the late President Fra.nklin 

D. Roosevelt, the A:r:m;y's Chief of Staff, General George c. Marshall, and 

the Navy's Chief o:r Naval Operations, Admiral Harold R. Stark. The 

charges are really not new; their antecedents, or nuclei of them or 

carefully veiled hints at them, can be found in some of the early writings of the more rabid Roosevelt-haters, and even in some parts of the 

3 
REF ID:A72891 

SE:CRElJ 

reports made by various official U. S. investigating bodies appointed to 

look into the matter during the last phases of World War II or soon after 

that war had been won. 

In another section of this report will be found an attempt to explain 

the genesis of the suspicions which aroused the Roosevelt haters and 

which kept them "needling" the President and his Administration for an 

explanation of how it was possible that the U. S. was taken so completely 

by surprise when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, to introduce the 

explanation a.t this point I think would be confusing. All that can 

logicaJ..ly be said right here is that the President, his Administration, 

and the Chiefs of the two .military services simply could not a:f'ford to 

perm.1 t the true explanation to be broadcast while the war was still in 

progress. 

A very impartial bibliographical survey of the principal items in the 

literature of the subject bas been prepared by a historian of recognized 

standing, Dr. Louis Morton, Chief of the Pacific Section of the u. S. 

A'rIJJ3' s Office of Ml.li tary History. His survey, entitled ''Pearl Harbor 

in Perspective," was published in the April 1955 issue of the United 

States Naval Institute Proceedings (Vol. 81, No. 4, Whole No. 626, pp. 461-

468) • A capy of Dr. Morton's survey forms Appendix 1 to this brochure. 

A second recapitulation of the Pearl Harbor stor;r and also a. source 

of material which may interest the reader in what the present brochure 

aims to do is found in an article by Robert H. Ferrell, Assistant Professor of History at Indiana University, published also in 1955, in 

The Historian, under the title ''Pearl Harbor and the Revisionists" 

4 

GECRElJ 
REF ID:A72891 

(Vol. XVII, No. 2, Spring 1955, pp. 215-233). Prof'. Ferrell's article 

{given completely in Appendix 2 to this brochure) begins as follows· 

It was perhaps inevitable that after the second World War, 

as after the war of 1914-18, there should appear in the United 

States a school of' historians questioni1¥' the purposes of the 

war and the motives of the wartime statElmen. The cost of both 

world wars, in human lives and in physi&J. resources, was very 

high, and it was only natural that some individuals should question such expenditure. Yet the new school of "revisionism" 

appearing after the second Worl.d We.r has undertaken a line of 

investigation which, if' successful, will force the rewriting of 

an entire era in American history. The revisionists hope to 

prove that in 1941 President Franklin D. Roosevelt purposely 

exposed the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, a.nd goaded tbe 

Japanese into attacking it, thus bringing the United States 

into the war on the side of the Allies. As Professor Harry 

Elmer Barnes has put the case, in rather plain English, "The 

net result of' revisionist scholarship applied to Pearl Harbor 

boils down essentially to this: In order to promote Roosevelt's 

political ambitions and his mendacious foreign policy some 

three thousand American bays were quite needlessly butchered. . . . 

Professor Ferrell follows this extract f'rom Professor Barnes with 

the following words (in a footnote) 

"Of' course, they were only a drop in the bucket compared to 

those who were ultimately slain in the war that resulted, which 

was as needless, in terms of vital American interests, as the 

surprise attack on Pearl Harbor." H. E. Barnes, ed., Perpetual 

War f'or Perpetual Peace (Caldwell, Idaho, 1953), Ch. 10, "summary 

and Conclusions, 11 p. 651. 

Strong language, isn't it'? Very strong, I think, comJ.ng f'rom a wellknown historian such as Barnes. What substance is there to the strident 

clams of' those professional historians, some of' them very well-known and 

able men, who a.re the spokesmen f'or the revisionists? What is it that 

they wish to prove f'rom their study of' the facts concerning the Pearl 

Harbor disaster? First, they wish to prove that there was no need at all., 

"in terms of' vital American interests," i'or the U.S. to enter into World 

5 

SE:GRE:1 
REF ID:A72891 

BECRE1 

War II e.s one of the belligerents. Some of them no doubt believe that 

we fought on the wrong side, with the wrong allies! With this phase of 

the subject I sball not concern myself in this brochure, since I make no 

pretence whatsoever of being a historian competent to deal with such an 

important subject. Next, some of the revisionists claim or believe that 

they have proof that the disaster at Pearl Harbor was no "accident," that 

it was brought about delibE!ratelyby President Roosevelt. They believe 

that what they call our "back-door" entry into the conflict was based 

upon an erroneous view, held by hllll and his Administration, as to what 

the U. S. role should be in world affairs, also, they want us to believe 0 

that our entry into World War II was for the personal political advantage 

of President Roosevelt and his followers in the Administration. They 

contend, in fact, that he goaded the Japanese into making the attack, 

that he enticed them into doing so by using the U. S. Pacific Fleet as a 

"lure;" that he ~from the so-cal.led "MAGIC", the Japanese secret 

communications which Army and Navy crypte.nalysts had solved, the exact 

time the attack would be made and the exact place where they were going 

to make it, that the President sensed that such an attack was the on:cy 

tlung which would unify American opinion and bring the people of the 

United States to a pitch of excitement and resentment sufficiently high 

to lead them to accept w1 th equanimity U. S. entry into World War II on 

the side of the British and the French, thereby, as Roosevelt felt and 

as turned out to be the case, assuring the complete defeat of the Axis 

powers, that President Roosevelt should and could have a.voided the 

disaster at Pearl Harbor but deliberately chose not to do so, for the 

r, CECRElJ' 

6 
REF ID:A72891 

reasons cited above; and that he purposely withheld MAGIC intelligence 

from Admiral Kimmel, Comme.nder-in-Chief of the U. S. Pacific Fleet, and 

General Short, Commanding General of' the Hawaiian Department, the two 

highest-ranking commanders in Hawaii who should have been but were not 

given this information and who, therefore, were permitted by him to be 

deliberately misled as to the real situation, misled to the point, in 

fact, th.at when the attack came they were entirely unprepared even to 

meet it, let a.lone repulse it. In withholding this information, one of 

the proponents of this theory, a retired admiral of the regular u. s. 

Navy, Rear Admiral Robert A. Theobald, implies in his book, The Final 

Secret of Pearl Harbor (New York. The Devin..A.dair Co., 1954), that to 

make it quite certain th.at the Japanese attack would be a complete surprise, so far as General Short and Admiral Kimmel were concerned, the 

President had to have and did have as. reluctant partners in his conspiracy, 

or what was tantamount thereto, General Marshall, the Chief of Sta.ff of 

the Amry, and Admiral Stark, the Chief of Naval Operations, both regular 

officers of highest integrity and repute. And although Admiral Kl.Dllllel 

in his own book Admire.l Kimmel' a Story (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1955) 

does not go quite so far as does Admiral Theobald as to make charges 

tantamount to conspiracy, he does go quite a long distance along the same 

route. There is a degree of confusion in regard to this point, however. 

The follO\nng, for example, appears on the inside flap of the dust cover: 

Admiral Kimm.el sticks to his own end of the story. He tells 

us about the material he was denied, the warning messages he didn't 

get. He imp~ no m.oti ves, he makes no deductions from unproved 

hypotheses. LTris tlll.s a. sl.ap at Theobald? .'.7 But the book is 

7 

GEQRElJ· - L 

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REF ID:A72891 

sufficient to nail down the inescapable point the blame for the 

loss of the Pacific Fleet battleships rests squarely on Washington 

not on the men at Pearl. 

But on the back of the dust Jacket, repeated from the last chapter of his 

book (p. 186), Admiral Kimmel says· 

Again and a.gain in my mind I have reviewed the events that preceded the Japanese attack, seeking to determine if I was unjustified 

in drawing from the orders, directives and information that were 

forwarded to me the conclusions that I did. The fact that I then 

thought and now think my conclusions were sound when based upon the 

information I received, has sustained me during the years that have 

passed since the first Japanese bomb fell on Pearl Harbor. 

When the in:f'ormation available in Washington prior to the attack 

was finally disclosed to me long after, I was appalled. Nothing in 

my experience of nearly forty-two years service in the Navy bad prepared me for the actions of the highest official.s in our government 

which denied this vital information to the Pearl Harbor commanders. 

1,4fl!&c,v1 If those in authority wished to engage in power~policies, the 

least that they should have done was to advise their naval and military commanders what they were endeavoring to accomplish. To 

utilize the Pacific Fleet and the ArrrIY forces at Pearl Harbor as a 

lure for a Japanese attack without advising the command.er-in-chief 

of the fleet and the commander of the Army base at Hawaii is something I am wholly unable to comprehend. 

While I am still able to do so, I feel that I must tell the 

story so that those who follow may fully realize the imperative 

necessity of furnishing the naval and military commanders at the 

front with 1'ull. and c1ear information. Only in this way can the 

future security of our country be preserved. 

Dr. Morton in camnenting upon Admiral K:umnel 's Story says (p. 46l): 

Admiral Kimmel's case rests upon the allegation that be was 

deliberately denied in:f'ormation available in Washington. Had he 

had this information, he says, he would have known the Japanese 

intended to strike Pearl Harbor and could have adopted measures 

to meet the attack and minimize the losses. These measures,, which 

he outlines, are of considerable interest, though one wonders to 

what extent they are guided by hindsight. 

Dr. Morton continues as follows· (p. 462) 

8 
REF ID:A72891 

GECRElJ 

To support his case, Admira1 Kimmel draws on the evidence 

presented during the investigations of the Pearl Harbor attack. 

This evidence, he clB.lJilS was not only obscured at the tlllle but 

was evaluated to produce a desired result. Inconsistencies in 

the testimony were ignored, and important questions raised during the bearings left unanswered. He charges bias on the part 

of investigating officers and a deliberate effort to white-wash 

the administration and block an impartia1 search for the truth. 

"The Congressional investigation," Kimmel declares, "was governed 

by the majority party, the Democrats. The huge volumes of 

testimony in that inqw.ry served to confuse the public mind as 

to the significance of the facts and to smother testimony damaging to the adm.J.mstration." 

Responsibility for Pearl Harbor, Kimmel charges, rests 

squarely upon the shoul.ders of his superiors in Washington and 

ultimately on the Commander-in-Chief', President Roosevelt. 

"Until this day," he writes, "I have kept silence on the subject 

of Pearl Harbor • • • Now, however, I deem it my duty to speak 

out. What took place in Washington must be so clearly placed 

on the public record that no group of persons in administrative 

power will ever dare again to invite another Pearl Harbor and 

place the blame on the officers in the fleet and in the field. 11 

The charges that Admiral Kumnel makes are not new and were 

being circulated even before the end of the war. The Japanese 

attack on December 7 had unified the country and ended temporarily the debate between the "Isolationists" and the "interventionists" which had marked the prewar years. All classes and 

parties closed ranks for the duration of the struggle. But even 

during the war, there ha.d been a recognition of the political 

implications involved in the question of responsibility for 

Pearl Harbor, and the administration had taken steps to preserve 

the record. Six investigations had been conducted even while 

the conflict raged, all but one of them by the A-rm:/ and Navy. 

As a result, a large volume of testl.lDOny and documents that 

might otherwise have been lost was assembled. But the requirements of wartime security and a unified national effort made 

public debate impossible. 

The we.r over, partisan differences reappeared, and critics 

of President Roosevelt began to challenge openly the views so 

widely held during the we.r years. The cooling of passions and 

disillusion with the postwar world raised further questions 

about American participation in the war. Historians and 

publicists, as they have done after every war, sought to 

reassess the causes of the war and to pla.ce Roosevelt's policy 

in the larger perspective of American history. Thus, in the 

years following the end of the conflict, a new interpretation of 

the events that had preceded the war and of the conduct of the 

war itself emerged. 

GECRE:lJ 9 
REF ID:A72891 

The foregoing final paragraph of the extract from Dr. Morton's 

article bri:ngs us directly to the principal revisionist contention which 

will be examined in the present brochure. The contention, as noted above, 

was first stated in 1945 by John T. Flynn, one of the early and most 

vitriolic revilers of President Roosevelt, in a pamphlet entitled The 

Final Secret of Pearl Harbor, in which he revealed the fa.ct that U. S. 

cryptanaJ.ysts had solved the Japanese diploma.tic codes and ciphers before 

the Pearl Harbor attack. His contention was that the intelligence 

derived or derivable from the solved a.nd translated messages, the socalled MAGIC, told exa.ctl.y where and when the Japanese were going to 

strike, that this priceless information Roosevelt deliberately kept from 

Admiral Kl.lllmel and General Short, nth the result that the Japanese were 

able to :make their attack with complete surprise, and that the loss of 

men and ships that resulted therefrom, however unfortunate it was for 

the U. s. and a few American families, unified the country. That, claims 

Flynn, was Roosevelt's aim. At any rate, as Dr. Morton indicates, the 

Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor ended the debate between the "isolationists" and the "interventionists." 

DEGRE:) 

10 
REF ID:A72891 

GECRElJ 

2. THE REAL ESSENCE OF THE PROBIEM 

Distilled down to its essence, therefore, the first question is· Did 

i1A.GIC really contain clear and unequivocal indications as to exactly where 

a.nd when we would be hit by the Japanese in the war which Roosevelt knew, 

or was expecting, or at lea.st felt was in the offing? 

Much has been written on this basic question, hundreds of thousandsindeed, millions of words, in fact-have been published on the question in 

an attempt to answer it either affirmatively or negatively. If some 

Americans now scoff at the whole business and sa:y that all that could be 

said on the point was said years a.go~why not stop flogging a dead horse?--

let them note that in as staid and unsensational a newspaper as The Wall 

Street Journal there appeared a long review of Admiral Kimmel's Story in 

the issue for 14 January 1955, accompa.ru.ed by a lengthy editorial entitled 

11Pearl Harbor 11 in the same issue, let them note, too, another lengthy 

editorial entitled ''Myth of the broken code" in the issue of the same 

newspaper for 21 January 1955, let them read also the baker's dozen 

"Letters to the Editor" in the issues for 21 January, 31 January, 4 February, and 6 February 1955, all commenting upon the two editorials and 

the book review mentioned above. The question therefore can by no means 

be said to be "dead and buried," in fact, even to this day references to 

the ''MAGIC" that was available and was not used at the time o'f Pearl Harbor 

keep popping up in the daily newspapers, in periodicals, and in books. 

For instance, there are two "Letters to the Editor" in the Washington Post 

on Pearl Harbor as recently a.a 31 December 1956 and 4 January 1957. And 

11 
REF ID:A72891 

GECRElJ 

as I write this brochure word bas JUSt come that the Chicago Tribune 1s 

about to publish another (revisionist, no doubt) article on the subject. 

Let me therefore repeat the question· Did MAGIC really contain clear 

and unequivocal indications as to exa.ctJ.y where and when we would be hit 

by the Japanese in the war which Washington knew, or was ex;pecting, or at 

least :f'elt was probably soon to come? 

In this brochure I shall attempt to dispose of this basic question 

in a rather Sl.Dlple and, in nry opinion, a definitive manner by attacking 

it in what may seem to be a round-about way. But just be:f'ore getting 

right down to it I will place before the reader a short extract from a 

book published late in 1956 by a recently-deceased and a highly-respected 

(by certain .Americans who knew him) Japanese whose words were such- he 

died in prison-as to indicate that he had no particular reason for hiding 

the truth. I refer here to the book written by Shigenori Togo, the man 

who was Japanese Minister of Foreign Affairs at the time of the attack on 

Pearl Harbor and across whose desk there certainly must have passed the 

most important of the messages to and from the Foreign Office and Japanese 

ambassadors, ministers, and consuls abroa.d.1 

It is to be noted, and indeed emphasized, before going into this 

phase of the subject, that at the time of the attack the only cryptographic 

systems wluch the U. s. cryptanalytic agencies had solved and were able to 

read were not the Japanese military or naval systems, they were only the 

systems used by the Foreign Office. Whatever intelligence the U. S. 

authorities were able to obtain from MAGIC therefore must have been and 

1 The Cause of Japan. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956. 

12 
REF ID:A72891 

GECRElJ 

was clearly derived from Japanese diplomatic communications. With this 

fact in mind let us take a look at an item of much interest in Togo's book 

(pp. 118-119 a.nd 197) 

It is not difficult to conceive the extent of the tyranny of 

the mlitary power from the fact that on the eve of the Pacific 

War such a fundamental datum as the total tonnage of Japanese 

naval vessels--not to speak of the displacement of the gigantic 

battleships Yamato and Musashi, or the plan to attack Pearl Harbor--

was vigilantly withheld from the knowledge of the civilian cabinet 

llll.nisters. General Togo even told ]Jl_e in Sugamo Prison that it was 

only at the IMrFE that he had first learned that the Japanese task 

force which carried out the attack on Pearl Harbor had assembled 

at Hi tok:appu Ba.y on 10 November, and weighed anchor for Hawaii on 

the morning of the 26th? The high comm.and did not divulge its 

secrets even to the :f'ull general. who was Premier and Minister of 

War, it is easy to conceive how other ministers were treated. 

. . . . . . . . . . . The war decision was thus ma.de, and various problems winch 

would arise with the opening of the war were submitted to meetings 

of the Liaison Conference. One thing which--needless to say--wa.s 

not discussed in the Liaison Conference was operational. aspects 

of the impending hostilities. It was disclosed at the I.Mr.FE that 

the naval task force under Admiral Nagumo had sailed from Hitoka.ppu 

Bay on 26 November under orders to strike Pearl Harbor, and in its 

Judgment the tribunal ma.de the absurd finding that the scheduled 

attack was freel:y discussed at the meeting of the Liaison Coni'erence on 30 November. We ha.d, of course, no knowledge of the plan, 

it was the invariable practice of the high command not to divulge 

to civilian officials, such as us, any scrap of information bearing on these highly secret operations, and anyone familiar with 

the system w:i.ll read.il:y understand our total lack of knowledge of 

them. (This condition is sufficientl:y well illustrated by the 

fact, which I have mentioned elsewhere, that ToJo told me that 

it was only at the Ii.fr.FE tri.a..l itself that he first learned any 

operational details of the Pearl Harbor attack, a :mass of additional evidence was adduced at the trial shOWJ.ng that the civilian 

members of the Cabinet had no prior knowledge even of the existence of the plan to attack Hawaii.) 

It is a fair and logical deduction to conclude that if Togo was 

telling the truth, i.e., that the civilian members of the Japanese Cabinet, 

including Prl.llle thnister Tojo and the Foreign MJ.m.ster himself, had no 

EiE:CRElJ 13 
REF ID:A72891 

~GECRElJ 

prior knowledge of the plan, including of course the exact date on which 

the Pearl Harbor attack was to take place (as set by the Japanese high 

command) then the MAGIC messages themselves in the communications from 

and to the Foreign Office could not possibly have contained a:ny definite 

information, let alone a clear-cut statement, on this very important 

point. And if the MAGIC messages did not contain this information or 

statement how cou1d President Roosevelt or any members of his lJJIJnediate 

official family, or the heads of' U. s. Anrry and u. S. Navy intelligence 

staf'fs ~from the MAGIC messages exactly where and when the attack 

was coming? But this question ~ arise did Togo tell the truth in 

his book? If he did, how are we to explain certain of the MAGIC messages 

the records of PHR contain? 

After re-reading the hundreds of MAGIC messages that were exchanged 

between the Foreign Ministry and its offices abroad in the year 1941 it 

seems fantastic, it strains our credulity, to believe that Togo did not 

know what was being planned. To mention only one set of messages, the 

"dead line" messages-after which "things a.re automatically going to 

happen" -how could Togo ~ know what was being planned? How are we to 

explain them, if he didn't know that the u. S. was going to be attacked? 

But J.et it be remembered that we are now re-reading the messages from the 

vantage point of hindsight. There is not a single message that can be 

said to contain categorica1 evidence proving that Minister Togo must have 

known that Pearl Harbor was to be the target. In 1946, and even now 

when we re-read those messages in Part 12 of the PHR, I rea.lize that it 

is f'a.ntastic that somebody in u. S. Intelligence did not or could not 

see that the blow was being prepared age.inst Pearl Harbor. But if we 

14 

; .:: 
REF ID:A72891 

believe Togo was an honorable ma.n and was telling the truth, then we ~ 

conclude that he and his closest associates in the Foreign Office were no 

better at intelligence than our own intelligence authorities! They knew 

or only guessed that something was going to happen after 29 November 1941, 

but they didn't know exactg where or when! Or shall we assume that somebody in the Japanese Foreign Office, some subordinate of Togo, the Foreign 

M.1.nister, was "in on the secret"-and it was he that took care of all the 

messages that pointed to Pearl Harbor? Could be! Could easily be! How 

many messages going out of a.ey one of our own large executive departments 

and signed by the Secretary thereof are actua.J.ly seen by the Secretary'? 

But I do not wish to belabor the point. Let us merely say that it is 

quite possible that Togo saw none of the crucial messages or, what is 

more probable, that he saw them but, not being "in on the secrets" of the 

Japanese high command, did not draw the correct deductions-that the u. S. 

was to be attacked, without warning, at Pearl Harbor in the early hours 

of 7 December 1941, and that the object of the attack was to destroy the 

U. S. Pacific Fleet if possible. But let us also remember that reading 

the MAGIC messages in 1946 or in 1956 is a.nalogous to reading the final 

chapter of a detective tale-before the preceding chapters, with their 

false and purposely misleading clues injected by the author to evoke the 

reader's interest. In reading such a detective story in the norme.l manner 

the final chapter often makes the reader feel ini'erior, even silly, that 

he could not see the truth, the real elements of the Jey"stery right from 

the beginning. The Japanese were getting intelligence reports-call them. 

if you will, "ordinary spy reports" from several u. s. mll.te.ry bases 

BECRElJ 15 
REF ID:A72891 

G)E:GRElJ 

besides He.we.ii, such as the Philippines, Pana.ma Canal., Seattle, and San 

Francisco. It is true that Je.pa.nese interest in Pearl Harbor seemed to 

be a.nd e.c~ was much greater than e.t any other base, but one could 

also say that this greater interest stemmed from e. perhaps JUStifie.ble 

fear by the Japanese that the U. S. Pacific Fleet might sortie some dark 

night and strike the first blow e.t Japan. ~ e.s well as the U. S. , 

did not want to be taken by surprise! Perhaps an intelligence speciahst 

with the proper kind of imagination might have hit upon the real reason 

for the greater Japanese interest in Pearl Harbor, but who can be certain 

of this? All that can safely be said in regard to the Togo statement is 

this Both he and Prime Minister ToJo may have been told, or they may 

have guessed, that Japan was going to strike-but not exac~ly where and 

when. These two very J.DIPOrta.nt elements the Japanese high ccmmia.nd kept to 

itself even after the task force left Japanese waters. And for those 

revisionists who think the u. S. note of 27 November 1941 was an ultimatum 

and that it was that note which triggered off the attack on Pearl, let 

them ruminate on the fact that the Japanese task force which attacked 

Pearl left Japanese waters the day before that note was sent off by 

Secretary of State Hull. His note may have constituted an ultllD8.tum.-

but it did not bring on the attack. The attack was planned very carefully, 

months before that, and, to repeat,was already launched to the point of 

having departed from Japanese waters. 

But there is another revisionist prop, and a very J.m:.Portant one, I 

must emphasize, which I wish to undermine, for it should be greatly weakened when consideration is given to another argument which is so obvious 

pE:CRElJ 16 
REF ID:A72891 

SE:CRE:lJ 

and simple that it bas been a source of astonishment to me tha.t the revisionists themselves have not thought of it. (Parenthetically I want to 

preface the argument by saying that any hesita.ncy I might have in stating 

it melts away when I find that severa.l very a.ble naval historians Wl.th 

whom I have discussed it expressed astonishment that it had not hitherto 

been mentioned. One of them said of it in a recent personal letter 

"In retrospect I realize that some of the ideas you mentioned a.bout the 

events lea.ding up to the attack on Pearl Harbor (like Columbus' egg 

trick!) are startling in their simplicity and obviousness-which is probably wby no one has heretofore recognized their importance." My contention, I think, warrants taking a new look at a. certain phase of the 

Pearl Harbor :mystery-if indeed there is any mystery a.bout the factors 

entering into our being taken by sur,prise. 

BECRElJ 

-, 17 
REF ID:A72891 

BECRElJ 

3. A NEW LOOK AT THE REVISIONISTS ALLEGATIONS OF CONSPIRACY TO KEEP 

KIMME!L AND SHORT IN THE DARK 

The revisionists• argument, which I hesitate to repeat (since it has 

already been stated in this brochure, but its repetition may make what I 

have to say crystal clear) runs as follows President Roosevelt desperatel.y needed a good reason for JUStifyl.ng America's entry into World War 

II. He needed it in order to save the British from utter defeat by Germany, 

France was e.lreaey- down and out! Britain was next on Hitler's list-and 

then the United States. (The revisionists deny this most vehemently, but 

everything that Hitler had done thus far was strictly in accordance with 

the plans he outlined in Mein Ke.m;pf. In this connection, and as I write 

this, there has Just came out a book which must be regarded as authori tative and which is caJ.led The German Weapons and Secret Weapons of World 

War II, by Rudolf Lusar. Lusar was head of the Technical Arms Department 

of the Wehrmacht. He discloses that Germany was also building the Heinkel 

343, a bomber capable of reaching the United States and returning without 

refuelling. Several of the planes were ready at the end of the war. The 

book also says that it was originally planned to stage the first air raid 

on the United States in May 1945. So much for the revisionist contention 

that the benign Herr Hitler had no designs whatsoever on the United States; 

for it is very clear that he planned to bomb this country just as soon as 

he had finished off England.) The President wanted to get the u. S. into 

the conflict not only to save Brite.in but, ultJ.IDately, also to save the 

U. S. Timely action was needed. He had goaded Hitler by several 

unneutra.l acts in the Atlantic, as well as in establishl.ng certain U. s. 

GECRElJ / 18 ,... -
REF ID:A72891 

BECRElJ 

logistical relations with Britain ("lend-lease," the transfer of 50 U. S. 

destroyers, etc.); but Hitler was too clever to be pushed to the point 

where Germany would have to declare war on America prematurely or where 

German action would justify an American declaration of war on Germany 

before Germany was ready for such action. Hitler realized, as well as 

President Roosevelt, that what America. did held the answer to Germany's 

problem. President Roosevelt knew that the American people were not at 

all anxious to be drawn into the European war, but he felt that it was 

absolutely necessary that something be "engineered," so to speak, in order 

that the u. S. would, willy-nilly, be drawn into the conflict. This, the 

revisionists contend, as I have reiterated, Roosevelt felt was necessary 

to save England, it was incidentally also intended, they contend, to 

divert attention from the fa.:i.lure of the New Deal to bolster the badly 

sagging econom;y as a result of defective monetary policies and other 

internal difficulties. U. S. participation was also a Democratic obJective, they say, for Roosevelt's reelection, and, of course, it was desirable to preserve the Rooseveltian prestige. The long-drawn out arguments 

with the Japanese mJ.ght, in view of the Tri-pa.rtite pa.ct of the German, 

Italian, and Japanese Axis, e.r.d despite Hitler's canny strategy of not 

succumbing to American provocation in the Atlantic, serve his purpose. 

Americans did not like the Japanese anyhow and were distrustful of these 

Orientals. Japanese ambitions in the Far Ea.st and distrust of the 

Japanese kept popping up everywhere in the American press and public 

opinion. But Roosevelt felt that there was one sine qua non to getting 

into a shooting war with the Japanese. In the words of Mr. Stimson, his 

BECRElJ 19 
REF ID:A72891 

GE:GPElJ 

Secretary of War, unfortunate words one must now adm.J..t,, it was all a 

matter of how the Japanese "could be maneuvered into the position of 

firing the first shot,," otherwise the American people would be lukewarm 

about a war with them. MAGIC, that is, the secret intelligence which the 

solution of the Japanese diplomatic communications ma.de available to the 

Roosevelt Administration in great abundance, provided a golden opport'Wlity-so the revisionists, including Admiral Theobald, fervently believe. 

I have already and more than once stated in this brochure that the revisionists are convinced that MAGIC told the President exactly when and 

where t.lieir attack was going to be launched in t..'lle early hours of the 

morning of 7 December 1941, at Pearl Harbor. By withholding from the 

u. s. commanders at Pearl Harbor this private knowledge which President 

Roosevelt gained from MAGIC-the horse's mouth, so to speak-enabled the 

President to accomplish his heart's desire. With this highly secret information be could maneuver the Japanese so that they would fire the first 

shot, he realized, they concede, that there would be some losses of men 

and ships, of course, as so caJ.J.ously stated in the extract from Professor 

Barnes which was quoted above, but these losses, they contend, he would 

regard as Justified in the long run by saving England, France, and, later 

on, America. from the Axis Powers-and it would incidentally save his own 

prestige and insure his reelection. 

The J.I!I.Portant element in the foregoing argument, let it be noted, is 

that, to quote from Secretary Stimson's diary a bit, Japan was to be 

"maneuvered into a position of firing the first shot. 11 The maneuver, 

according to the revisionists, included using the ships of the u. s. 

SEC~Ell 20 
REF ID:A72891 

GECRElJ 

Pacific Fleet as a lure, that is wlzy', they argue, Roosevelt insisted on 

having that fleet based on Pearl Barbor instead of on the west coast of 

'1 

the u. s., as Admiral Richardson, Kimmel's predecessor, wished. But let tr 

be noted that Admiral Richardson's obJections stemmed from purely logistical considerations, such as easier maintena.nce and repair, and morale 

of the sailors entered into the picture-Hawaii was a long way from "home" 

for the men and officers of the fleet. (Admiral Richardson bad not the 

slightest idea that keeping the fleet at Pearl would deter the Japanese 

from doing what they wished to do in the Far East. In fact, he thought 

keeping the fleet on the West Coast would be more effective. Well, the 

President, the Cammand.er-in-Chl.ef, didn't agree with Admiral Richardsonand that's all there was to it. It turned out, unfortunately, that 

Admiral Richardson's view was more nearly correct than the President'sbut does that mean that the President had ulterior motives in keeping the 

fleet at Pearl" I don't think so at all.) 

And now for my col.mter argument on this score. 

If we assume for the moment that the revisionists' argument is valid, 

why don't they go Just one step further? If all that President Roosevelt 

thought necessary for his purposes, if all that he was seeking, was "to 

maneuver the Japanese into firing the first shot," and if MAGIC contained 

all that the revisionists claim it contained, would it not have been 

possible, by means of that very MAGIC to accomplish his purpose without 

such a terrible loss of American lives a.nd, without loss of any of the 

ships that constituted the apple of the President's eye, the Navy's big 

battleships? If Roosevelt was so clever a politician and so Machiavellian 

GECRElJ 21 
REF ID:A72891 

in his strategy as to think up a way of maneuvering the Japanese into a 

position wherein they would be enticed or maneuvered into firing the first 

shot, should one doubt that he lacked the intelligence to have gone one 

step further in his thinking and saying something like the following to 

hllDSelf "Eureka! I've got it. MAGIC will provide the golden opportunity I've sought for so many months. I've hit upon a perfectly marvelous 

idea and opportunity! An absolutely and amazingzy wonderful opportunity! 

The Japanese have to cane to Pearl Harbor to make their surprise attack, 

an attack clearly indicated by these MAGIC messages. They have to travel 

severaJ.. thousand miles, in fa.ct, to get to Hawaii from Japanese waters. 

Ii' we caught them red-handed, so to speak, near Hawaii and preferably 

JUSt before the attack, nobody could possib'.cy claim they were on a simple, 

harmless reconnaissance mission-or on maneuvers. Why, with JapaneseAmerican relations so tense, even i:f' they were caught as many as 500 miles 

from Pearl Harbor every unbiased critic would say that they rea.J..:cy fired 

first! So I'll bring Kimmel and Short :f'ul1y into the picture-I'll tell 

them the story MAGIC is telling us. I'll secretly order them here right 

away (November 26th, for example) and I'll have Marshall and Stark come 

in. I'll show Kimmel and Short the crucial messages. Then I'll tell 

them something like this Look, 11\Y' boys, you see now, don't you, what 

your're in an excellent position to do to the Nips? You see, don't you 

that this inside and absolutely authentic information says that they are 

CODll.ng from Japan to attack Pearl Harbor by surprise at seven o'clock on 

the morning of' 7 December, they're coming with a task force which will 

certainly be a pretty big one, you may be sure. It will com.prise several 

SEGRE) 22 
REF ID:A72891 

" BECRElJ 

aircraft carriers, they'll have maybe as many as 350 aircraft, including 

dive bombers, etc., of course. Now as Commander-in-Chief, I direct you 

to do everything that will be necessary to meet them when or preferably 

JUSt bef'ore they arrive to launch their attack. I direct you to destroy 

~ 

them, knock out the whoJ.e task force, carriers, planes, and al.l., just 

before they reach oa.hu if' you can. I direct you, K:umneJ., to get aJ.J. your 

battJ.eships and, of' course, your carriers out of their berthing positions 

at Pearl. Harbor some time during the night, so that there won't be any 

ships there f'or them to bomb. And I want all your planes, incJ.uding 

those on your carriers, the Lexington and the Enterprise, up in the air 

bef'ore seven o'cJ.ock, you'd better get off' messages at once to HaJ.sey, 

Newton, and Brown to al.ert their task forces, if' they're not at Pearl get 

them back as soon as you can, maybe you'll want to get the Saratoga back 

from the West Coast to Join your other carriers if' there's still time, 

and that's OK with me. Short, I want aJ.l your anti-aircraft batteries on 

shore to be fully manned and with live ammunition at hand, read¥ for use, 

I know you don't have too much in the way of' f'ighter and bomber pl.anes but 

I li8.Ilt you to wipe out as many of their aircre.f't as possible with what you 

have. Forget that screwy message you sent about being prepared f'or 

sabotage-in view of these messages that's an absurd notion. You can see 

that the Japs a.re after our fleet e.nd the protection of the fJ.eet while 

at Pearl is your JOb, you know. Be sure your radar is working properly24 hours a day. I want you, Kimmel, to get your carriers and battl.ewagons 

out where they can destroy the Japanese earners and escort ships while 

their aircraft are being shot down Just before they reach Pearl. This, 

GECRElJ 23 
REF ID:A72891 

BECRElJ 

'1113' lads, if done well will go down in history as the most thrilling and 

J.m.Portant battle of all time. Even much more important is the fact that 

if you knock off their task force and assuming we'll have minimal. losses 

we'll came out far ahead in naval. strength because right now our Pacific 

Fleet is no match for the Japanese Combined Fleet-they've got more 

ships, faster ships, and with longer-range guns than we have, I'm sorry 

to say. Now I don't want you to tell anybody I 've alerted you because of 

what MAGIC is telling us. We're reading their most secret diplomatic 

codes and ciphers, which are all that count now anyhow right now, and it's 

very important that they don't get suspicious about the security of their 

Foreign Of'fice communications. I want them to continue using those 

cryptographic systems because the information we're getting out of them 

now is priceless and will be even more so in the war which will without 

question ensue when you've destroyed their task force for Pearl. They 

won't get suspicious J.f you will act exactly as though your operations 

and maneuvers are a routine matter-training-but I want you to be on 

Alert No. 1. Don 1 t forget that on 17 June 1940, when we thought the Japs 

and the Germans were about to gang up on us, we sent messages directing 

our cODDD.anders to put our forces at Pearl on a full alert, and you d.J.d 

so~ that tl.Ill.e, fortunately, nothing happened. We were probably jUUG>ing 

at conclusions then, but now it 1 s different-now we 've got th.J.s MAGIC. 

You'll have to go at this carefully, of course, so as not to alarm the 

Japs and lead them into calling the whole thing off, which they still can 

do, as we understand their plan. But the important thing is to keep from 

doing anything that will alarm them and make them call the whole thing off. 

24 
REF ID:A72891 

BECRElJ 

c_ 

I want them to fire the first shot. I 'm sure you ca.n think up ways to 

work up to a condition of full. a.J.ert so that they'll not get suspicious. 

That mght precipitate a.n "incident" a.nd give the Japs an excuse to say 

that we commJ. tted the first overt act. Besides we don 1 t want to ala.rm 

the civil population, of course. Everybody knows that relations between 

Japa.n a.nd ourselves are very tense right now, so that exercises a.nd 

maneuvers of a defensive type will certainly be regarded as only logical 

a.nd the natural thing to do. Now I suggest that you get back to your 

posts as fast as you can-you've got only a few days to prepare a real 

surprise for the surprise they think they're going to spring on us. 

Let's see how well you can knock 'em off. Give •em hell: So long, and 

the best of luck to you. About 150 million Americans will probably never 

know how much they will owe you two for what I'm sure you'll be able to 

do, even with what little you have. I wish you bad more-but you know 

what the trouble is. I don't have to tell you. It 1 s enough merely to 

remind you that the Selective Service Act was extended in the House JUSt 

a few months ago by a majority of Just one vote." 

On 3 December the President (in this imaginative account) sends a 

message to Kimmel a.nd Short telling them that we've deciphered a long 

message from the Japanese Consul.,, Kita, in Honolulu to Tokyo. "Kita is 

the Jap whose been giving them the dope about ships in harbor; he 's the 

one whose been sending Tokyo the detailed story of what ships are anchored 

where. But from this 3 December message it's clear that somehow Ki ta bas 

figured out, or maybe somebody in Tokyo has figured out, that it would be 

§ 

a terrible denoument to come all the way from Japa.n to make their surprise ,, 

BECRElJ 25 
REF ID:A72891 

BECRElJ 

attack only to find that the 'birds had flown the coop. ' So Ki ta. has 

figured out a plan whereby he and his spies in and around Pearl can send 

la.st word to the Japanese Atta.ck Force Commander that everything is OK, 

that the important elements of the U. S. Fleet are still in their berthing 

positions, and haven't suddenly departed just a few hours before the 

attack is scheduled to commence." (See Message from Kita to Tolcyo, 

3 December 1941, p. 267 of Part 12, PHR, a message which by the way was 

not processed until ll December 1941 but which ii' there really was a conspiracy would certainly have been done before 7 December.) "Kita doesn't 

even have the slightest inkling, of course, that I'm telling you, Kimmel 

and Short, about the set-up be bas prepared to make sure to get word to 

the Japanese task force that the birds haven't fl.own the coop. You arrange 

with Naval Intelligence, Army Intelligence and the FBI at Honolulu to 

grab Kita and Kita's spies on Saturday and hold them in cold storage 

until after the plB.nned for attack has come off-and has, of course, 

failed, because it will fail, if you've done your part." 

Ii' any reader of this brochure thinks that the foregoing fanciful, 

J.IDaginative, or conjectural account of what might have happened is too 

bizarre for serious consideration let me call his attention to what 

Admiral Kimmel says he could and would have done-if only he'd been "let 

in on" MAGIC, or at lea.st had been told what was in those messages. Let 1 

me quote from his book (pp. 87-88) 

No one had a more direct and l.lDilledJ.ate interest in the 

security of the fleet in Pearl Harbor than its camm.ander-inchJ.ei'! No one had a greater right tha.n I to know that Japan 

bad carved up Pearl Harbor into sub-areas and was seeking and 

receiving reports as to the precise berthings in that harbor 

GECRElJ 
REF ID:A72891 

GECRElJ 

of the ships of the fleet. I had been sent Mr. Grew's report 

earlier in the year with positive ad.vice from the Navy Department that no credence was to be placed in the rumored Japanese 

plans for an attack on Pearl Harbor. I was told then, that 

no Japanese move age.inst Pearl Harbor appeared "immJ.nent or 

planned for in the foreseeable future." Certainly I was entitled 

to know when information in the Navy Department completely altered the information and advice previously given to me. Surely, I 

was entitled to know of the intercepted dispatches between Tokyo 

and Honolulu on and after September 24, 1941, which indicated 

tha.t a Japanese move against Pearl Harbor was planned in Tokyo. 

Knowledge of these intercepted Japanese dispatches would 

have radica.lly changed the estimate of the situation made by 

me and my staff. It would have suggested a re-orientation of 

our planned operations at the outset of hostilities. The ·war 

plans of the Navy Department and of the Pacific Fleet, as well 

as our directives and information from Washington prior to the 

attack, indicated that the Pacific Fleet could be most effectively employed against Japan through diversionary raids on 

the Marshalls when the Japanese struck at the Mal.a.y Barrier. 

Knowledge of a probable Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor would 

have afforded an opportunity to ambush the Japanese striking 

force as it ventured to Hawaii. It would have suggested the 

wisdom of concentrating our resources to that end, rather than 

conserving them for the Marshall Islands expedition. 

Admiral KiJmnel cites instance after instance, message after message, 

wb.J.ch contained information which, he says, would have been of vital 

importance to him and would have prevented the disaster if only he had 

been given the information wb.J.ch he should have received as Commanderin-Chief of the U. S. Pacific Fleet. Maybe, maybe he's right in h:Ls 

contention. His proxim.J.ty to the scene might have led him to make the 

J.ID8.ginative jum;p that was necessary in order to reach the correct solution 

to the astounding story that MAGIC was unfolding. 

Imagination bogs down when one considers what such a picture as I 

have conJured u;p might have been painted from what the Japanese messages 

were saying-or what the revisionists claim they clearly said. 

BECRElJ 

27 
REF ID:A72891 

GECRElJ 

It is true that in Hawaii there were fewer fighting aircraft, both 

Army and Navy, tha.n were released from the Japanese carriers when the 

attack was launched. But the aircraft on the u. S. Navy carriers Lexington 

and Enterprise, had these carriers been positioned on the basis of' the 

information the revisionists claim President Roosevelt had, would have 

ma.de u;p for the la.ck of aircraft on Hawaii at the time of the attack. 

In Admiral Kumnel' s story the Admiral makes a few comments on the 

question of' whether: his account represents action that he might have 

taken. But let it be remembered that what he says is based on hindsight, 

and the Admiral freely a.dmJ.ts this point. He contends that had he had 

the benefit of the intelligence which was in the MAGIC messages and wh:Lch 

he never received the story would have been very different (pp. 109-111): 

The question will arise in your minds, as it has in mine 

Would the receipt of this information have made a difference in 

the events of December 7? No man can now state as a fact that 

he would have taken a certain course of' action years ago had he 

known facts which were then unknown to him. All he can give is 

his present conviction, divorcing himself from hind.sight as far 

as humanly possible, and re-creating the atmosphere of' the past 

and the factors which then influenced him. I give you my views, 

fo:cmed in this manner. 

Had I learned these vital facts and the "ships in harbor" 

messages on November 28th, it is my present conviction that I 

would have rejected the Navy Department's suggestion to send 

carriers to Wake and Midway. I would have ordered the third 

carrier, the "Saratoga," back from the West Coast. I would 

have gone to sea with the fleet and endeavored to keep it in 

a.n intercepting position at sea. This would have permitted 

the disposal of the striking power of the fleet to meet an 

attack in the Hawaiian area. The requirements of keeping the 

fleet fueled, howevei;would have ma.de necessary the presence 

in Pearl Harbor from time to time of detachments of' various 

units of the main body of' the fleet. 

On December 4, ample time remained for the Navy Department to forward to me the information which I have outlined, 

CECRElJ 28 
REF ID:A72891 

SEGRE:) 

and in addition the followl.ng significant facts, which the Na.vy 

Deparbnent learned between November 27 and that date 

1) Japan had informed Hitler that war with the Anglo-Saxon 

powers would break out sooner than anyone dreamt, 

2) Japan had broad.cast her nnds code signal using the words 

"east nnd rain," meaning war or a rupture of diplomatic 

reJ.ations nth the United States. 

AssU1I1J.ng that for the first time on December 5 I had aJ.l the 

important information then avail.able in the Navy Department, it 

is my present conviction that I would have gone to sea with the 

fleet, including the carrier "Lexington" and arranged a rendezvous at sea with Halsey's carrier force, and been in a good 

position to intercept the Japanese attack. 

At some time prior to December 6, 1941, the commanders of 

Hawaii could have been informed of the prOJDJ.se of armed support 

as detailed by the War Department in London to Air Marshal Brooke 

Popham in Singapore. This vital information was denied to them. 

On December 6, fifteen hours before the attack, am;ple t:une 

still remained for the Navy Department to give me all the significant facts which I have outlined and which were not available 

to me in Hawaii. In a.dd.J.tion, the Navy Department could then 

have advised me that thirteen parts of the Japanese reply to 

the American proposals had been received, that the tone and 

temper of this message indicated a break in diplomatic relations 

or war with the Um.ted States, and that the Japanese reply was 

to be formally presented to tlu.s government at a special hour 

soon to be fixed. Had I received this information on the 

afternoon of December 6, it is my present conviction that I 

would have ordered all fleet units in Pearl Harbor to sea, 

arranged a rendezvous nth Halsey's task force returning from 

Wake, and been ready to intercept the Japanese force by the 

t:une fixed for the outbreak of war. 

Even on the morning of December 7, four or five hours before 

the attack, had the Navy Department for the first tlllle seen fit 

to send me a.11 this significant information, and the add.J.tiona.J. 

fact that 1 00 P .M., Washington tlllle, had been fixed for the 

delivery of the Japanese ultllll8t\Dll to the United States, my 

light forces could have moved out of Pearl Harbor, all ships 

in the harbor would have been at general quarters, and all 

resources of the fleet in instant readiness to repel an attack. 

For same years I, too, have wondered to what extent Kl.ml11el's statements as to what we could or might have done, had he had or had he been 

given the information in MAGIC, are guided by hindsight. But having 

~ --:, ' I GEGRElJ 29 

I_-"\...._..._? I. .,. 
REF ID:A72891 

GECRElJ 

read his book carefully I f'eel that it is quite possible that he is 

warranted in makiDg his statements. The defense of Pearl Harbor was not 

his responsibilJ.ty, of course-it was General. Short's. But between 

Kim:nel and Short, both capable officers, their closeness to the situation 

and the greater amount of time they had to think a.bout their duties and 

responsibilities with respect to safeguarding the Pacific Fleet might 

have led them to a safe conclusion that they had better take all preca.utions to avoid a sudden attack on Pearl Harbor. 

One further comment if, as a result of the inside information the 

revisionists say we got from MAGIC, all the submarines, destroyers, 

carriers and battleships in a large task force of the U. s. Pacific Fleet, 

or even the whole of' the fleet had been lying in wait for the Japanese 

task force sent to make the attack on Pearl Harbor there would have been 

strength enough, I tlnnk, to wipe out the whole Japanese task force. It 

is true that the Japanese task force included only two battleslu.ps, but 

it had six carrJ.ers, two heavy cruisers, a light cruiser, eleven destroyers 

and a number of submarines, about five, sane of which carried mdget submarines. (Capt. Harley Cope, USN in "Climb Mount Niitaka.," u. s. Na.val 

Institute Proceedings, Vol. 72, No. 12, December 1946.) I say this on 

the assumption that AdmJ..ral Kimmel would have timed his counter-move so 

that the Japanese task force would not have had the protection of the 

aircraft of its carriers, because if Kimm.el and Short had operated on the 

basis of informaticm. the revisionists claim was clearly in MAGIC the 

Japanese 361 planes would al.ready have departed on their mssion. Tlu.s 

I regard as a point of considerable JJII.Portanfi:e. There is reason to 

SE:GRE:1 

) 

30 
REF ID:A72891 

believe that had only a task force of the U. S. Pacific Fleet gone out to 

engage the Japanese task force in battle on the high seas, the U. S. task 

force would probably have fared very ba.d.cy because of the fact that the 

Japanese not only did have six carriers to our two but also their battleships were faster and had longer range guns. Also, if even the whole 

U. S. Pacific Fleet had gone out, on the basis of MAGIC-as MAGIC is conceived by the 11 revisionists 11 -to meet the Japanese task force which was 

to attack Pearl Harbor, and had the two navies met on the high seas, with 

the Japanese carriers still sailing with their entire complement of' airplanes, the U. S. Pacific Fleet would probably have suffered a teITible, 

h'Ul'DJ.liating and ignominious defeat, because the Japanese task force 

because of' what I have already said a a had six carriers to our two, 

their first-line battleships were speedier and had longer-range guns than 

any of' our own battleships had. Not only would there have been a great 

loss of' .American lives, but also none of' our battleships or carriers could 

have been raised and repaired. As it was, and quite f'ortUJ.tously, there 

were no carriers at Pearl on 7 December, and with one exception the battleships damaged or sUIJk at Pearl Harbor were soon back in commJ.ssion, thanks 

to an obvious strategic error ma.de by the Japanese high command-they could 

have but they failed to destroy the dry docks, machine shops, and the 

repair facilities at Pearl! Why the Japanese overlooked this rather 

obvious point is not too clear, it shows them to be not too good as naval 

strategists. Only one Japanese naval officer has thus far tried to 

explain this strategic error. They, or at least Admiral Yamamoto had the 

imagination to realize that with the U. S. Fleet in being in the Pacific 

GECRElJ 31 
REF ID:A72891 

their plans for conquest could not be carried to completion very easily, 

therefore it wa.s necessary to destroy the U. s. Fleet. Dr. Louis Morton 

in hl.s article "The Japanese decision for war" (U. s. Naval Institute 

Proceedix:e;s, Vol. Bo, No. 12, December 1954, p. 1329) says 

Against the eJJnost unanimous opposition of the naval planners, 

Admiral Yamamoto remained a.daman.t. Unless the .American Fleet 

could be destroyed at one blow at the start of the war, he 

insisted, the Japanese would probably fail in their effort to 

seize the Netherland Indies and Mala.ya. And even if they were 

successful, he predicted that they would be unable to hold azJY' 

of their gains for long. • • • A determined effort by the 

Pacific Fleet might well result in d:Lsaster. • •• The Japanese 

believed it necessary to destroy or neutralize the American 

Fleet at Pearl Harbor and to deprive the United States of its 

base in the Philippines.* .America's line of communications 

across the Pacific was to be cut by the seizure of Wake and 

Guam. 

But that was as far as JJDagination of Japanese Navy strategists carried 

them the only thing they thought necessary was to destroy the U. S. 

Pacific Fleet. On the other hand, although the U. S. war plans elaborcontemplated 

ated in the first half of 1941 (ftn May of that year) took into account 

the possibility that the Japanese might, (as they had three times before 

and successfully) begin a war on an enemy without a preceding declaration 

of war, that is, by a surprise attack, and although this possibility was 

placed first on the list of contingencies, with Pearl Harbor as the focal 

point of the attack, and although the war plans even envisioned that such 

an attack could come from aircraft flown from carriers, it is an almost 

inexplicable fact that all this was simp1y forgotten by the end of the 

same year. The U. S. high command in Washington certainly forgot this 

* Some .American naval historians and strategists disagree 'Wl.th Dr. Morton 

on this point, they insist that the Japanese Navy needed a spectacular 

victory-the Army was getting too much publicity, and that is why 

Yamamoto J.nSisted on the Pearl Harbor attack. It was not necessary for 

their plans to take all that could be taken in Southeast Asia. 

GECRElJ 32 
---- -

B§CP\iiF ID:A72891 

contingency, and the two principal commanders in Hawe.ii, by December 1941, 

also apparently forgot it-or did they lack the imagination that the 

January to May 1941 war planners used in thinking up the things that the 

Japanese might dot In Washington they were thinking only of deterrents 

to Japanese expansion in the Far Ea.st. They imagined that as long as the 

U. S. Pacific Fleet remained intact in the Pacific it wou1d serve as a 

deterrent to Japanese moves toward conquest in Southeast Asia. The 

Japanese attack Pearl Harbor, our greatest overseas bastion'! How absurd! 

Washington, by December 1941, just simply cou1d not imagine tha.t the 

Japanese would be foolhardy enough to attack Pearl Harbor and try to 

destroy the ships of Pacific Fleet in their berthing positions in tha.t 

harbor. Except here and there among the Jlllll.or officers of the Navy the 

possibility of a surprise air attack on the Fleet was kept in mind. "A 

group of the younger officers (on the West Virginia) ••• anticipating 

an air attack on the Fleet, had discussed among themselves wha.t to do in 

case it came, and knew exactly how to act." (Morison, S. E. The rising 

S'l.m in the Pacific, Vol. III of History of United States Naval Operations 

in World War II, Little Brown and Co., Boston, 1953, p. 103). Their 

foresight, says Prof. Morison, saved the West Virginia. To repeat, it 

is true that this contingency about which I ha.ve already said a good deal, 

was explicitly stated in war plans-but apparently nobody seriously 

believed that it cou1d be done, or that the Japanese wou1d be so foolish 

as to try it. Indeed, Prof. Morison says of the attack on Pearl Harbor 

(P. 132) 

BECRElJ 33 
REF ID:A72891 

BE:CRE:ll 

Thus, the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, far from being 

a "strategic necessity," as the Japanese claimed even after the 

war, was a strategic imbecility. One can search military history 

in vain for a.n operation more :fatal to the aggressor. On the 

tactical level, the Pearl Harbor attack was wrongly concentrated 

on ships rather than permanent installations and oil tanks. On 

the strategic level it was idiotic. On the lugh political level 

it was disastrous. 

34 
REF ID:A72891 

BECRElJ 

4. WAS MAGIC Wrl'HBELD FROM KIMMEL AND SHORT AND, IF SO, WHY? 

We come noia>to another ver:y important question which has been raised 

in revisionist circles \.1hy did not the commanders at Pearl Harbor get 

MAGIC, why did they not have the machines and facilities for deciphering 

the Japanese highest level diplomatic communications, the so-called 

11Purple" crypto-system.'1 Prof. Ferrell sa;ys 11The British and General 

MacArthur received the Purple decoding machines from Washington, why not 

the commanders at Pearl Harbor? (p. 225) This is a good question, and 

not as foolish as it might be made to appear by the usual answer that the 

authorities in Washington couldn't prevent the Pearl Harbor attack, even 

with the code, so what woul.d KilDmel and b.J.s Army opposite at Hawaii, 

Lieutenant General Walter C. Short have done with it." 

Let us agree that the question raised is not a foolish one but let 

us consider it in two parts. First, as to why the British got the Purple 

system. In the autumn of 194o U. S. military and naval authorities on 

the highest level agreed that there shoul.d and could be some exchange of 

intelligence between the U. S. and the U. K. Included in the material to 

be exchanged was cormnun1cat1on intelligence. It was ascertained that the 

u. K. communication intelligence experts had not succeeded in solving the 

h:tghest-level Japanese dJ.pl.omatic cryptosystem and the machine which was 

involved in enciphering and deciphering the messages in that system. 

/Jf or, parenthetically, had the German experts :J Crypta.nalysts of the 

U. S. Army's Signal Intelligence Service, however, had accomplished this 

task and were reading the Japanese messages in that cryptosystem, wh:Lch 

BECRElJ 35 
REF ID:A72891 

6EGRE:lJ 

they had named, for brevity as well as for disguise, the "Purple" system, 

' 

its predecessor, also a maclune system, having been named the "Red" 

system. On the other hand, it had been ascertained that the u. K. crypta.na.lysts, although they had been unsuccess:f'ul with the ''Purple" system, 

had been quite success:f'ul with certain German a.nd Italian diplomatic 

cryptosystems the stu~ of which had only recentl.y been undertaken by 

U. s. cryptanalysts. It therefore seemed that both the U. S. and u. K. 

could profit by same sort of exchange. A team of four cryptana.J.ysts, two 

from the Army and two from the Navy, was sent to London in January of 

1941 to discuss the technical aspects of an exchange of material. The 

U. S. team took with it a recently-completed ''Purple" me.chine and the 

data necessary to use it in deciphering the Japanese messages. It is 

very J.DI.POrtant to understand that the British had not only extensive 

facilities for intercepting and forwarding Japanese diploma.tic traffic 

to London but they also had a corps of very competent crypt~sts and 

Japanese translators-without whom possession of the ''Purple" ma.chine 

would have been of l.J. ttle or no vaJ.ue. The British al.so were able to read 

and translate other systems carrying Japanese diploma.tic traffic-and they 

did so not only in London but also at Singapore and Hong Kong, and possibly 

in one or two other strategic spots under the British Crown. 

In the exchange of the ''Purple" ma.chine and informational details 

concerning the Purple system for specific technical data on certain German 

and Italian cryptosystems {principally diplomatic) both the U. s. and the 

U. K. gained advantages of inestl.Ill8.ble value. On this point there never 

has been any doubt on either side. Moreover, this exchange paved the way 

BECRE1 

36 
REF ID:A72891 

CECRElJ 

to a later complete U. S. - U. K. collaboration in cryptanalytic operations after the U. S. entry into World War II as one of the belligerents. 

The value of this collaboration can har~ be overestimated but this 

brochure will not deal with th:Ls aspect. 

As long as we are dealing WJ. th the question about the U. S. deli very 

to the British of a ''Purple 11 machine and the cryptosystem which used it, 

we may well go into a related question concerning which little has been 

said in the torrent of words about the Pearl Harbor disaster. The British 

acquired the ''Purple 11 in January 1941, and were able from the very first 

to use it-no strings were attached to this usage, except that the secret 

would be treated WJ.th the care that it deserved in order to keep from 

enemy knowledge the fact that we had solved it. {There have al.ways been 

very detailed and strict regulations governing the handling of camml.IIll.cations intelligence and in ti.me the u. S. and U. K. regulations became 

identical). The reason for mentioning that there were no strings attached 

to the U. s. gift to the British is to forestall a revisionist allegation 

that President Roosevelt must have permitted the gift to be :made only on 

condl. tion the. t no information coming from 11Furple 11 would be used by the 

British in a manner that would interfere WJ.th his conspiracy to withhold 

from the two commanders at Pearl Harbor whatever intelligence they might 

obtain which would prevent the Japanese ta.king them by surprise. Such an 

allegation would, of course, be absurd on its face-but then the revisionists do not always argue in a logical manner. Exact4" why the British 

would, even if they could have agreed, to keep "Purple" intelligence from 

Short a.nd Kimmel is hard to understand. In the first place, although there 

pECF:E"O 37 
REF ID:A72891 

SE:GPE1 

was no direct communication between these commanders and the British, 

certainly, there was communication between British and American intelligence authorities in the Far East. In the second place, let it be noted 

that the British had been able to read and were reading Japanese diplomatic systems other than Purple; in t'act, many of the messages which the 

revisionists claim most definitely indicated that a surprise air attack 

was to be made at Pearl Harbor were in cryptosystems other than Purple. 

For example, the so-called "bombing plot 11 message was not in ''Purple 11 

at all but in a system held by consu1ates, a. system designated by us as 

J-19, a.nd severa.J. other messages related to the bombing plot message were 

in the same system. 

What has Eil.l the foregoing to do with the British? Simply this is 

it conceivable that the British, too, would have participated in a conspiracy of silence so as to let the Japanese destroy the u. S. Pacific 

Fleet, the fleet that was their principal protection against Japanese 

agression in the Far East? Ha.rd:cy'. Is it not clear that the various 

messages in Purple and in the other Japanese systems conveyed to the 

British no definite statement as to an impending attack on the American 

bastion in the Hawaiian area.? The British, let us remember, were then 

supposed to have the finest and most carefully trained intelligence experts 

in the world. Is it likely that the detailed story of a.n impending attack, 

if revealed by MAGIC, would have been completely overlooked by their 

experts? Is it conceivable that they would, if they saw the outlines of 

the story, have kept it to themselves? That they would have kept it from 

their U. S. friends? That they would have seen to it that no word of it 

GECRElJ 38 
REF ID:A72891 

GECRElJ 

leaked to Short and Kimm.el? The British were counting u;pon the U. S. to 

protect British interests in the Far East. 

In the foregoing para.graphs it was stated tha.t certain Japanese 

messages were long-delayed in their processing into plain English by the 

Army a.nd Navy crypta.na.lytic units. These delays were ca.used by several 

things. (1) there were so many messages to be forwarded from U. S. 

intercept stations that U. s. radio facilities were then not equal to 

the task of carrying them a.11, many had to be sent by air mail pouch or 

even by ordinary U. S. Mail pouch, (2) there were so many messages and 

so few persons capable of processing them in WashJ.ngton--let us not forget 

that a few dozens of persons in Washington were trying to keep up with 

what hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Ja.pa.nese were doing in Ja.pa.nese 

message centers in Japanese embassies, legations, and consulates a.ll over 

the world, (3) there were many times when it was impossible to solve a. 

new key until a. sufficient amount of traffic had accumulated, (4) there 

were many cases when decrypting a message was stymied by errors in transmission or interception, (5) there were only a. ha.ncli'ul of persons in 

both the Army and the Na.vy cr,ypta.na.lytic um.ts who could translate 

Japanese-and no pool in the u. s. from which trained and trustworthy 

Japanese translators could be selected, as is the case in other foreign 

languages such as French, German, Spanish, etc., and until the Japanese 

was converted into English, the messages containing useful intelligence 

about Japan might just as well be filed in the waste basket. 

While we dwell upon the foregoing elements in the story it might be 

a good place to point out that a conspiracy to withhold information in 

GECRElJ 39 
REF ID:A72891 

SE:CRE:lJ 

order that an attack might be carried out could hardly a.ff ord to risk 

certain contingencies. For instance, it would be essential, would it not, 

that a high degree of priority in processing be accorded e.J.l Japanese 

Government messages going to or coming from Honolulu, so that the e.J.leged 

conspirators themselves might not be caught napping? But it is a fa.ct 

th.at several veey important messages having a direct bearing on the situation were not processed until several days after the attack. The veey 

fact that the processing of a.ll messages to and from Honolulu was not 

given the highest or even a high priority itself constitutes an argument 

against the alleged conspiracy being objective--a.nd not camplete:cy- subJective. 

Let us now take up the question about the withholding of MAGIC from 

Admiral Kimm.el and General Short--as viewed by the highest level authorities in Washington. First of all it is easy to adrni:t; the fact that the 

critical MAGIC messages of the ear:cy- autumn of 19-41 and up to the day of 

tJ:;e attack were Withheld from them, there can be no question whatever 

about this fact. But the important point is ~ The revisionists say 

that it was necessitated by the Roosevelt-Marshall.-Stark cons~acy to 

bring about the attack on the Fleet at Pearl Harbor. A dispassionate 

view, however, must take into consideration quite different and more 

logical factors. First, as the Puz:ple messages continued to be read in 

Washington the strategic value of our solution of that cryptosystem 

became increasing:cy apparent. This is a good place to insert what General 

Marshall had to say on the subject of the value of MAGIC, which he described in detail in a high:cy- secret letter he wrote to Governor Dewey, a 

GECRElJ 4o 
REF ID:A72891 

GECRElJ 

Republican, who had learned about MAGIC (nobody knows how or from wham). 

Marshall had learned that Dewey was proposing to use thl.s highly explosive 

information in the 1944 Republican Presidential campaign against a fourth 

term for Roosevelt. The war was not over: Here it is, in extenso 

Extracted from CONGRESSIONAL INVESTIGATION PEARL HARBOR A'.r.I'ACK, 

Part 3, PP• ll32-1133. 

/Jopif 

TOP SECRET 

For Mr. Dewey's eyes only. 27 September 1944. 

~ dear Governor Colonel Clarke, my messenger to you of yesterday, September 26th, has reported the result of his delivery of my 

letter dated September 25th. As I understand him you (a) were unwilling to commit yourself to any agreement regarding "not communicating 

its contents to any other person" in view of the fact that you felt 

you already knew certain of the things probably referred to in the 

letter, as suggested to you by seeing the word 11 cryptogra.ph, 11 and 

(b) you could not feel that such a letter as this to a presidential 

candidate could have been addressed to you by an officer in my position without the knowledge of the President. 

As to (a) above I am quite willing to have you read what comes 

hereafter with the understanding that you are bound not to commUill.-

cate to any other person any portions on which you do not now have 

or later receive factual knowledge from same other source than myself. 

As to (b) above you have my word that neither the Secretary of War 

nor the President has any intimation whatsoever that such a letter 

has been addressed to you or that the preparation or sending of such 

a communication was being considered. I assure you that the only 

persons who saw or know of the existence of either this letter or my 

letter to you dated September 25th a.re Admiral King, seven key 

officers responsible for security of military communications, and 

my secretary who typed these letters. I am trying my best to make 

plain to you that this letter is being addressed to you solely on 

my initiative, Admiral King having been consulted only after the 

letter was drafted, and I am persisting in the matter because the 

Illl.litary hazards involved are so serious that I feel same action is 

necessary to protect the interests of' our armed forces. 

I should have much preferred to talk to you in person but I 

could not devise a method that would not be subJect to press and 

radio reactions as to why the Chief of' Staff' of the Army would be 

seeking an interview with you at this particular moment. Therefore 

I have turned to the method of this letter, with which Adlnl.ra.1 King 

41 
REF ID:A72891 

concurs, to be delivered by hand to you by Colonel Clarke, who, 

incidenta.J..ly, ha.s charge of the most secret documents of the War 

and Navy Departments. 

In brief, the militaey dilemma is this 

The most vital evidence in the Pearl Harbor matter consists of 

our intercepts of the Japanese diploma.tic communications. Over a 

period of years our cryptograph people a.naJ.yzed the character of 

the machine the Japanese were using for encoding their diplomatic 

messages. Based on this a corresponding machine was built by us 

which deciphers their messages. Therefore, we possessed a weal.th 

of information regarding their moves in the Pacific, which in 

turned was furnished the State Department-rather than as is 

popularly supposed, the State L2987EJ Department providing us with 

the infonnation--but which unfortunately made no reference whatever 

to intentions toward Hawaii until the last message before December 

7th, which did not reach our hands until the follOWJ.ng day, December 

8th. 

Now the point to the present dilemma is that we have gone ahead 

with this business of deciphering their codes until we possess other 

codes, German as well as Japanese, but our main basis of information 

regarding Hitler's intentions in Europe is obtained from Baron 

Oslu.ma's messages from Berlin reporting his interviews with Hitler 

and other official.s to the Japanese Government. These are still in 

the codes involved in the Pearl Harbor events. 

To explain further the critical nature of this set-up which 

would be wiped out almost in an instant if the least suspicion were 

a.roused regarding it, the battle of the Coral Sea was based on 

deciphered messages and therefore our few ships were in the right 

place at the right time. Further, we were able to concentrate our 

lJ.mJ.ted forces to meet their naval advance on Midway when otherwise 

we almost certainly would have been some 3,000 miles out of place. 

We had full information of the strength of their forces in that 

advance and also of the smaller force directed against the Aleutians 

wlu.ch finally landed troops on Attu and Kl.ska. 

Operations in the Pacific are largely guided by the information 

we obtain of Japanese deployments. We know their strength in various 

garrisons, the rations and other stores continw.ng available to theIJL, 

and what is of vast importance we check their fleet movements and 

the movements of their convoys. The heavy losses reported from time 

to time which they sustain by reason of our submarine action, largely 

result from the fact that we know the sailing dates and routes of 

their convoys a.nd can notify our submarines to lie in wait at the 

proper points. 

42 
REF ID:A72891 

GECRElJ 

The current raids by Admiral Halsey's carrier forces on Japanese 

shipping in Manila Bay and elsewhere were largely based in tl.Dll.ng on 

the known movements of Japanese convoys, two of which were caught, 

as anticipated, in his destructive attacks. 

You will understand from the foregoing the utterly tragic consequences if the present political debates regarding Pearl Harbor 

disclose to the enemy, German or Jap, any suspicion of the vital 

sources of information we possess. 

The Roberts ' report on Pearl Harbor had to have withdrawn from 

it aJ.l reference to tlu.s highly secret matter, therefore in portions 

it necessari1y appeared incomplete. The same reason which dictated that 

course is even more important today because our sources have been 

greatly elaborated. 

~987!]" As another example of the delicacy of the• situation, 

some of Donovan's people (the OSS) WJ. thout telling '~; instituted 

a secret search of' the Japanese Embassy offices in Pertuga.1.. As a 

resu1t the entire Illl.lita.ry attache Japanese code aJ.l over t..lie world 

was changed, and though this occurred over a year ago, we have not 

yet been able to break the new code and have thus lost tlu.s invaluable source of' information, particularly regarding the European 

situation. 

A further most serious embarrassment is the fact that the 

British government is involv~d concerning its most secret sources 

of information, regarding which onl;y" the Prime MJ.ru.ster, the Chiefs 

of Staff and a very ll.Dll.ted number of other officials have knowledge. 

A recent speech in Congress by Representative Ha.mess would 

clearly suggest to the Japanese that we have been reading their 

codes, though Mr. Harness and the American public would probably not 

draw any such conclusion. 

& tJ.'" The conduct of General Eisenhower's campaign and of all perations in the Pacific a.re closely related in conception and tl.Dll.Dg 

to the inf orma.tion we secretly obtain through these intercepted 

codes • They contribute greatly to the victory and tremendously 

to the saving in American lives, both in the conduct of current 

operations and in looking towards the early termination of the war. 

I am presenting this matter to you in the hope that you "Will see 

your way clear to avoid the tragic results with which we are now 

threatened in the present political campaign. 

Please return this letter by bearer. I will hold it in rrry most 

secret file subJect to your reference should you so desire. 

Faithfully yours, 

(Sgd) G. C. MARSHALL. 

GECRElJ 43 
REF ID:A72891 

GECRElJ 

It seems to me that the foregoing letter goes a long way toward 

answering the question as to why MAGIC was w1 tbheld from Kimm.el and Short. 

Stated briefly, the authorities in Washington were fearful that if MAGIC 

continued to be sent them the secret that we were able to read all their 

diplomatic CI"Y'Ptocommunications, including ''Purple", their most secure 

system, would soon find its way to the Japanese. The whole of the island 

of Oahu had thousands of Japanese nationals, among whom it was natural 

to assume there were-there must have been-plenty of spies. The Arrrry 

and Navy authorities in Washington felt that it was becoming too dangerous to the continued secrecy of the fact that we had solved and were 

reading messages in Purple to send SJ:1Y more of the messages to KJ.JDI11.el 

and Short. Of course they could have been sent some gists-as had been 

done in the first half of 1941-but General Sherman Miles, the then 

Assistant Chief of Sta.ff for Military Intelligence, stated before the 

Joint Congressional Committee that sending even gists would have been 

dangerous, by overloading the radio circuits, and he went on to say that 

while the Navy CI"Y'Ptosystems could have been used, because they were 

more secure than the Army's, even that would not remove the danger altogether. /J. will interject at this point the statement that General Miles 

was not too well-informed on these practical matters, because the Navy 

had adopted and was using an AI'DI3' cryptosystem a.nd a machine invented by 

Army personnel[! Both the Army and the Navy's CI"Y'Ptosystems could and 

would have stood up under the strain of sending all the important MAGIC 

messages to Kimmel and Short and in extenso. 

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But, insist the revisionists, the Navy f'urnished a MAGIC machine and 

information on how to use it to the Commander of the 16th Naval Districtthe Philippines. Why not to Kimm.el a.nd Short'! There were very good 

reasons for this, but at this point we shall mere~ ask did possession 

of MAGIC prevent General MacArthur from being ta.ken by surprise a.nd losing 

all his planes at one fell swoop more than 12 hours after the General knew 

of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor? General MacArthur blames his 

chief of the Army Air Corps forces in the Philippines, General Brereton, 

for being caught napping, and Brereton blames MacArthur. Possession of 

the Purple machine alone obvious~ was not sufficient-the interpretation, 

appreciation, and evaluation of MAGIC is just as important. It might be 

useful to quote what General Willoughby, MacArthur's G-2, said on th.is 

latter point in an affadavit dated 8 May 1945 (PHR, Part 35, p. 87) in 

protecting the Navy's monopo~ of MAGIC· 

In 1941 the Navy obtained and maintained a highly efficient crypto-ana~ical service, specializing in Japanese material, though 

the Arrq bad notab~ participated in the development of this subject, 

the Navy appears to have obtained a lead, consequen~, it can be said 

that the Navy enjoyed on almost monopolistic privilege. In an otherwise meritorious desire for security (though every modern nation 

knows that crypto-ana~sis is going on), the Navy has shrouded the 

whole enterprise in mystery, excluding other services, and rigi~ 

centralizing the whole enterprise. At this date, for example, this 

same system is still in vogue as far as SWPA is concerned, the 

crypto-analysis is made in Melbourne, forwarded via 7th Fleet D.N.I., 

the Melbourne station is under direct orders of Washington, is not 

bound by any local responsibilities, forwards what they select, and 

when it suits them. The possibility of erroneous or incomplete 

selection is as evident now as it was in 1941. The only excuse the 

Navy has is that its field is primari~ naval intercepts, but there 

is a lot of Army traffic or other incidental traffic. This collateral 

traffic is not always understood or correc~ interpreted by the Navy, 

in my opinion. 

GECRE:lJ 

' " 

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The solution to this vexing and dangerous problem is a completely joint, inter-locking intercept and crypto-anal.ytical 

service, on the highest level, with the freest interchange of 

messages and interpretation. 

The sequence of messages referred to, had they been known 

to a competent intelligence officer, with Battle Order and 

tactical background, begirming with November 14th, would have 

led instantly to the inescapable conclusion that Pearl Harbor 

naval installations were a target for attack, with November 

25th or November 29th as the deadlines, suggesting irresistibly 

that elapsed time was involved, for some sort of naval seaborne 

sortie. 

C • A. Willoughby, 

C • A. Willoughby, 

Major General, G. s. c., 

Asset.Chief of Sta.ff, G-2, 

General Headquarters, SWPA. 

The fact is that skilled cryptanalytic help and skilled Japanese 

translators were not in sufficient supply to permit either the Army or 

the Navy to maintain macy such people anywhere outside the U. S. -they 

were badly needed in Washington. And besides, nobody thought or even 

imagined that they were so badly needed at Pearl Harbor as at Manilathe Japanese would never be so foolhardy as to attack Pearl! The U. S. 

Navy authorities believed that the Philippines might be cut off-but not 

Hawaii. Manila needed MAGIC much more than Pearl! That explains why 

there was a Purpl.e machine in Manila, more than anything else. The Navy 

communications personnel at Pearl were assigned the mission of trying 

desperately to solve the important Japanese naval c:ryptosystems and to 

get what information could be gleaned from traffic a.nalysis of Japanese 

communications, the Ar:m:f had ~ signal intelligence or cryptana~ic 

personnel at all in Hawaii after 1939-the very small unit it did have 

in Honolulu was brought back to Washington after but one year's operations there-because the few trained persons of that unit were thought 

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to be much more usefUl in Washington. Hawe.ii seemed to be the la.st place 

the Japanese would try to attack! Why keep the few trained cr,yptanalytic 

personnel there when they could be so much more useful in Washington? 

What the Army had, therefore, was simply an intercept unit directed to 

listen in on certain assigned Japanese circuits and to forward the 

traffic to Washington for study. 

In this decision to bring back to Washington that small Army cryptanalytic unit (two or three persons at most!) I am quite sure that the 

Chief Signal Officer consulted no higher authority--and, I am sure too, 

the Commanding General of the Hawaiian Department at that time, General. 

Short's predecessor, was gl.ad to get rid of the unit-its maintenance 

caused him difficult logistical problems. The secrecy of its operations 

certainly was a source of irritation to him and his staff-they never 

got to see the results. The trained Signal Corps officer the Signal. 

Intelligence Service in Washington sent to Hawaii in 194o performed no 

signal intelligence functions, by direction of the local commander he 

was soon given ''more necessary" duties, such as devising and supervising 

the laying of communication cables in and around Honolulu. And with 

this decision I can take no exception-the Commanding General on the 

spot knew best what he needed. I know for a fact that when the Signal. 

Corps sent a very small unit to Corregidor it was only with the greatest 

difficulty that the Comma.ruling General there was finally persuaded to 

let the unit do what it was sent out to do-but only for a short time. 

The members of any Signal Intelligence unit (Signal. Corps personnel) were 

badly needed for ordinary Signal Corps functions. Washington could do 

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very little about this-the local commander decided. In all that I have 

said above, however, the most important point by far was, so far as 

concerned both the Philippines and Hawaii, that an attack by the Japanese 

was too fantastic to warrant much thought, so preparations for a possible 

attack were somewhat neglected. 

BECRElJ 

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5. THE 11WINDS CODE MESSAGES" 

Many thousands of words have been expended in discussing and writing 

the story of the so-called "Winds Code Messages," and, in particular, 

whether there were any authentic "Winds Code Execute" messages. 

There were two "Winds Code" set-ups, which were intended, for reasons peculiar to the Oriental menta.lity, to give a certain kind of warning but .just exactly what kind of a warning is unclear because both of 

these "set-ups" were, to say the least, impractical, indeed quite 

foolish, because they were so susceptible of being confused with ordinary weather and news broadcasts. And, indeed, this is exactly what 

did happen with regard to the one of most interest to the U. S. A weather 

broadcast-now termed the false "Winds Code Execute" message was intercepted-and for a few hours at any rate was taken to be the real thing. 

But it wasn't "the real McCoy"-it resembled what the Execute message 

might have been but when carefully scrutinized it Just didn't meet all 

the conditions specified in the code instructions. The alarm it set off 

subsided as soon as the discrepancies with what a real Execute should be 

were recognized. 

I think that one thing was established conclusively after exhaustive 

investigation by several of the Pearl Harbor boards, including that of 

the Joint Congressional Committee the Japanese never did send out an 

authentic "Winds Code Execute" message which clearly indicated that Japan 

was going to attack the u. S. If indeed the Foreign Ministry intended to 

transmit such a message it was forgotten at the last moment, and even if 

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it had not forgotten, the most the message could have conveyed was th.at 

there was going to be a break in relations between Japan and the country 

signified by the particular "Winds Code Execute" message. The other 

thing which seems to be certain is that h.a.ving forgotten to send out the 

"Execute" meaning a break between Japan and the U. S., somebody seems to 

have remembered to send out after the attack on Pearl Harbor a "Winds 

Code Execute" signifying that Japan was breaking relations with Britain 

but not With the u.s.s.R. Even this one the Japanese who were interrogated after the surrender of Japan denied having transmitted but aJ.l the 

evidence I have examined indicates that they were not telling the truth. 

One might say, if they didn't tell the truth about that one we should not 

put any credence in their denial that a "Winds Code Execute" was sent out 

on 3 December, the one indicating a break in relations (or war) with the 

U. S. Certain of' the Japanese interrogated on the point denied ever 

setting u;p the "Winds Code" in the first place. This point is examined 

in great detail in Appendix E to PBR, pp. 467-486 and there is consummate 

skill in this examination. The PHR arrived at the following conclusion, 

which I think represents the last word that can be said on this subJect 

(p. 486) 

CONCLUSION. From consideration of aJ.l evidence relating to 

the winds code, it is concluded that no genuine message, in 

execution of' the code and applying to the United States, was 

received in the War or Navy Department prior to December 7, 1941. 

It appears, however, that messages were received which were 

im tiaJ.ly thought possibly to be in execution of the code but 

were deteI'llll.ned not to be execute messages. In view of the preponderate weight of evidence to the contrary, it is believed that 

Captain Safford is honestly mistaken when he insists that an 

execute message was received prior to December 7, 1941. Considering the period of time that h.a.s elapsed, this mistaken 

impression is understandable. 

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Granting for purposes of discussion that a genuine execute 

message applying to the winds code was intercepted before December 7, it is concluded that such fact would have added nothing 

to what was al.ready known concerning the critical character of 

our relations with the Empire of Japan. 

This conclusion reached in 1946 remains unshaken to this d.ay-nothing ha.s turned up to make a change in it desirable, so far as concerns 

any "Winds Code Execute" message that might have been tranSllll.tted on 

3 December, as Captain Safford contended. One could only wish that the 

conclusion bad stated categorically that there was such a message in 

regard to a break in relations between Japan and the British (and also 

the Dutch Ea.st Indies) because the evidence is clear that such a signal 

~sent-but then, by that time, 8 December, the attack on Pearl Harbor 

was finished. 

The "revisionists, " however, still believe in Captain Safford-the 

sole person who stuck to his statement that there '!!:!. a 3 December warning, and that all copies of that message were deliberately destroyed. 

The interesting thing a.bout this whole tempest-in-a-teapot is that even 

if there bad been an authentic u. S.-Japan execute message it would have 

not 

told us nothing whatever that was/ already known on 3 December. Moreover, 

and this I tlu.nk is very important, the attack on Pearl was prepared for 

with so much secrecy I would doubt !!:!'l.much that the Japanese would take 

any chance whatever in sending out a message which might "tip their hand". 

It just doesn't fit in the picture at aJ.l! 

It is interesting to note that Admiral Kimm.el, while he mentions 

the "Winds Code" affair and cites (p. 100) what the Naval. Court of 

Inquiry said about it-later proved to be wrong-does not press the 

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matter 1PO seriously. I think the Admiral is very dubious that a real 

Execute was ever sent out on 3 December as claimed by Captain Safford, 

although he does say (p. 101) "The findings of the Naval Court of 

Inquiry on this subJect are ' confirmed by the evidence presented to the 

joint congressional investigating committee." The Admiral does not 

state specificaJ.ly what the "fin.dings" were but the reader is left to 

conclude that the committee folllld that there was an Execute transmitted 

on 3 December and that it was intercepted by us-but the information was 

not transmitted to him or to other commanders afloat. 

Senators Ferguson and Brewster in their Minority Report say (p. 526) 

''Even if the wind execute message they saw was a false one they believed 

it true at the time and should have acted accordingly." A good point, and 

I think, one that should be emphasized, it is too bad it wasn't followed 

up regardless of any other considerations. 

GECRElJ 

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6. THE QUESTION OF SABCY.rAGE 

What led General Short to prepare for sabotage rather than for 

military action by the Japanese? 

In my opinion the reason for General Short's very brief answer to 

the war warning message sent him after the 26 November 1941 American 

rejoinder to Japanese proposals for arriving at a modus vivendi was not, 

as many people believe, utter nonsense. Short said merely that he was 

prepared for sabotage. The fact is that everybody in Washington and, 

apparently, also in Honolulu had but two things in mind as to possible 

or probable Japanese action. First, the Japanese march was certainly to 

be to the southward (to Mala.ya, Thailand, Indo-China, Borneo, or the 

Dutch East Indies, indeed ~ their actions seemed to point in those 

directions) and Short was not able to do anything at all about that. 

Then, secondly, there was incessant talk in America, including in the 

radio broadcasts and in the writings of columnists, sabotage was what 

we had to guard against. The genera.lly-held view was that the Japanese 

were tricey, that attempts to thwart their march would be countered by 

the various mechanisms of sabotage. This I remember very vividly. And 

I feel sure that when General Gerow received General Short's message 

stating that all steps to prevent sabotage had been ta.ken and that he 

was in liaison with the Navy, General Gerow probably thought ''Fine 

business-Short's on the JOb. 11 So must have the others in Washington 

who saw it-General Marshall included. By hindsight Short's message 

seems entirely unresponsive to the message sent him. But the matter of 

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sabotage was in the air. That's what we had to look out for. Confirmation of this attitude can be seen in various messages. Even the Navy's 

strong message beginning "This dispatch is to be considered a war warning" 

ends with "Continental Districts Guam Samoa directed to take appropriate 

measures against sabotage. " Everybody had forgotten all about the war 

plan of May 1941 which envisaged as the first and most dangerous contingency a surprise air attack on the Fleet at Pearl Harbor. Parenthetically I may add that those whose memories of World War I included the 

two great acts of sabotage by German agents in this country (the Black 

Tom explosion and the Kingsland Fire) before the U. s. became a belligerent 

in that war will perhaps agree WJ.th me that Japanese sabotage was the 

thing Americans thought was most to be feared in regard to American 

territory. Let us not forget that this fear quickly expressed itself 

very clearly and heartlessly in what was done to thousands of Japanese-

.American citizens (including Nisei) in California the moment we declared 

war on Japan. Wby did they move them out of the port cities? What were 

the authorities afraid of? Sabotage! For this reason I, for one, find 

it difficult to criticize General Gerow in his handling of General Short's 

message in response to the 26 November message from Washington. 

But what about the views held by U. s. intelligence authdrities on 

this question of sabotage? Were they the same as those of the average 

American citizen, "the man-in-the-street"? I think they were-and JUSt 

as the views of "the man-in-the-street" of those days were wrong, so it 

seems were the views of our intelligence authorities. Why? Because we 

never have paid too much attention to intelligence. After several 

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thousands of yea.rs of experience, why do mi.ll.tary and naval authorities 

seem to pay less attention to intelligence tba.n to logistics, for instance? 

Why does intelligence ha.ve to play the role of step-child in the conduct 

of warfare? Wha.t is there about intelligence tba.t makes it less desirable 

as a. career than artillery, for exa.m,ple? The reasons a.re clear when one 

looks into the matter. 

Admiral Theobald lays great emphasis on Tokyo to Honolulu message 

number 83 of 24 September 1941 (the so-ca.lled 11Bombing Plot Message") 

and says (p. 46) 

After studying Tokyo dispatch #83, no DU.litary intelligence 

organization could fail to reach that deduction Lthat it was to 

prepare the detailed plan for a surprise attack on the major 

units of the Fleet moored therif. 

Here I think is the kernel of the nut--the secret of why the U. S. 

was taken by surprise. I have underlined the phrase "no military intelligence organization" in the foregoing extra.ct because I think that our 

lDl.litary and naval intelligence organizations had serious defects at 

that tJJne-a.nd I think they still have. (Theobald does not mean JUSt 

lDl.li tary, U. S. Arra:! Intelligence, but also U. S. Navy Intelligence.) 

I think that serious defects in our military and naval intelligence ma.de 

it possible for the Japanese to take us by surprise at Pearl Harbor. 

A strong statement? Yes, but I think it is warranted. I will with some 

diffidence go into this question because I do not know too much about 

the situation as of 1957· I did know what it was like in 1940-41 and 

in 1950, four years after the PHR was released. It is clear that the 

intel.lJ.gence situation in the u. S. was defective in 1940-41 and in 

1950, when the Korean "police action" broke out without warning. Where 

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were our intelligence services then? What were they doing or thinking 

about? By 1950 we had CIA. What help was CIA? 

Four years after the PHR was released, Major General Sherman Miles, 

Assistant Chief' of' Staff' for Intelligence of' the War Department General 

Staff', from April 194o to February 1942, in what some people may regard 

as an apologia, has many things to say in an endeavor to explain what 

appear to have been derelections of' bl.ID.Self' and his staf'f'~ It was a.n 

attempt to absolve G-2 from its responsibility for the debacle on 7 

December 1941. For the most pa.rt he does as good a job of this, perhaps, 

as could be done to exculpate G-2 from its failures, omissions, and la.ck 

of the k:t.nd of ima.gl.llB.tion which might have foreseen and forestalled the 

disaster ca.used by the Japanese surprise attack. A salient para.graph 

among many which could be quoted is the following (p. 71) 

The plain fact is that the war wa.rm.ngs sent out by the 

highest lDl.lita.r,y authorities nine days and more before Pearl 

Harbor were far more authoritative and more definitive of what 

the Hawaiian commands might expect, and what was expected of 

them, than any information or interpretations from ''magic" 

that Military or Na.va.l Intelligence could possibly have sent. 

Complete reliance was placed on the effect those warnings 

should have had-and dl.d have everywhere except in Hawaii. 

But Tokyo apparently believed that the incredible might 

happen and Hawaii be surprised Washington did not. 

General Miles takes it for granted that the warnings sent out by 

Washington properly alerted all our overseas comma.nds except the one in 

Hawaii. One wonders about the basis for the Genera.l's assumption in 

this regard. Indeed, in one case, a.lrea.ey- mentioned, even 12 hours after 

General MacArthur in the Philippines knew that the Japanese had made the 

1 - "Pearl Harbor in retrospect" in the Atlantic Month1y for July 1948, 

pp. 65-72. 

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surprise attack at Pearl Harbor his command was nevertheless taken 

completely by surprise, when 'the Japanese destroyed all his planes ~ 

the ground, just as they did in Hawaii. General Miles, notwithstanding 

his statement that (p. 70) 

"The Hawaiian commands later complained that this ''magic 11 

information was not transmitted to them~this in spite of their 

failure to react to the authoritative warning orders sent them 

when the situation was commonly known to be far more critical. 

By comparison, it may be noted that General MacArthur, who had 

access to "magic," could not later identify the more important 11ma.gic 11 messages, he apparently took no action on them, but 

alerted his command for war on Washington's warning orders. 

Thu$ assumes that General MacArthur "alerted his command for war on 

Washington's warning orders." What does "aJ.erting" mean, aeyhow, if a 

commander loses all his planes by what I think was inattention? 

General. Miles admits (pp. 70-71) that "there were two "MAGIC" 

messages • • • which have subsequently been held to have been signposts, 

had we so read them, to Pearl Harbor." The General. devotes many words 

to these two cases and concludes that the signposts pointed to a halfhearted proposal, a.dml.ttedl.y discussed in Washington, that the British 

and U. S. occupy the Netherland Indies before the Japanese did so~d 

he thus tried to explain away the famous clue contained in a Tokyo message 

to Berlin telling General Oshima, the Japanese Ambassador to Germany, to 

tell the Germans: "Say veey secretly to them that there is extreme 

danger that war may suddenly break out between the Anglo-Saxon nations 

and Japan through same clash of arms, and add that the time of the break.-

ing out of this war may came quicker than anyone dreams. " The explanation of Miles (or, better perhaps, the lack of JJDBgination) on the part 

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of u. S. intelligence agencies appears to me (even by hindsight, of course) 

to be pretty thin. 

Here are two more paragraphs from General Miles ' article, both of 

which I think are of considerable significance 

The last twenty-four hours in Washington before the bombs 

fell have come in for much scrutiny. Why did the President, 

with most of the Japanese final answer before him, conclude 

that it meant war and then, after a fitful attempt to reach 

Aamiral Stark by telephone, quietly go to bed? Why was he 

in seclusion the following morning? Why was no action taken 

on the Japanese reply by the Secretaries of State, War, and 

Navy when they met on that Sunday morning? Why did they not 

consult the President, or he send for them? Where was everybody, including my humble self? Why, in short, didn't someone 

stage a last-minute rescue, in good Western style? 

The picture undoubtedly is one of men still working under 

the psychology of peace. They were, to quote Secretary Stimson 

again, "under a terrific pressure in the face of a global war 

which they felt was probably imminent. Yet they were surrounded, outside of their offices and almost throughout the 

country, by a spirit of isolationism and disbelief in danger 

which now seems incredible." They were men who thought they 

had done their possible to prepare for impending war, and who 

had no idea that there was an innocent maiden in need of rescue. 

I will add another extract tb.at may be helpful in seeing things in 

what I regard as their proper light. This extract comes from Secretary 

Stimson's statement with respect to the report of the Army Pearl Harbor 

Board, repeated as a footnote (p. 239) to the PHR 

As expressed by Mr. Stimson "A keener and more imaginative 

appreciation on the part of same of the officers in the War and 

Navy Departments of the significance of some of the information 

might have led to a suspicion of an attack specifically on Pearl 

Harbor. I do not think that certain officers in the War Department :f'unctioned in these respects with sufficient skill. At all 

times it must be borne in mind, however, that it is easy to 

criticize individuals in the light of hindsight, and very difficult to recreate fairly the entire situation and information with 

which the officers were required to deal at the tJ.me of the 

event." See statement of' the Secretary cL War with respect to 

the report of the Army Pearl Harbor Board, comm! ttee exhibit 

No. 157· 

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My own explanation of' the failures and derelictions of U. S. intelligence can be stated in few words· I do not tlnnk there were no imaginative officers in G-2 or in Naval Intelligence, but more important there 

was nobod;y in either the ArfII3 or the Navy intelligence staffs in Washington 

whose most important, if' not sole duty, was to study the whole story which 

the MAGIC messages were unfolding and which played so important a part in 

our failure to deduce that the Japanese were planning a surprise attack on 

the U. S. Fleet at Pearl, there was nobody whose responsibility it was to 

try to put the pieces of the jig-saw puzzle together. Certainly there 

was nobody in the Arrtr3' s Signal. Intelligence Service who was assigned to 

or available f'or this purpose--even if' the responsibility for tlns sort 

of' work had been fixed on that organization, which it wasn't. This was 

likewise true of the equivalent Navy organization. This important phase 

of' intelligence was a responsibility which in both services was jealously 

held by the Intelligence staffs. And the distribution of the MAGIC 

messages was so rigidly controlled that there was nobody in either of 

these Intelligence staffs whose duty it was to study the messages from 

a long-range point of view. The persons, officers and civilians, in 

1ntelligence, as well as in the White House, had the messages only for so 

short a time that each message represented only a single frame, so to 

speak, in a long motion plcture film--a film which should have been shown 

and should have been intently studied as a continuous series of pictures, 

because they were telling a story. But the film was sim,p1y not there to 

be studied and this was a ver;y serious weakness, I think, in the 1ntelligence organizations of the two Services. It may have been that they 

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" 

simply did not have the people to devote to such work. 

Of course, there are those critics who point to the message which 

Navy Captain McCollum testified that he thought should be sent to Admira1 

Kimm.el, and to the one which the Army's Colonel Sadtler testified that he 

thought should be sent to General Short. They, it seemed, sensed that 

MAGIC was telling a story and was pointing toward a surprise attack, the 

most likely target being Pearl Harbor. But both efforts ca.me up against 

stone walls-their supperior officers claimed enough had been sent to put 

Kimmel and Short on full al.ert To send more would only confuse them, 

or worse than that, irritate them. But the latter were obviously wrongor so it seems to us now-again by the aid of hindsight. Admiral.a Theobal.d 

and Kl.IDIIlel have made the most of this failure on the part of those above 

Captain Mccollum and Colonel Sadtler to rea1ize how inadequate the warnings 

that had been sent to Short and Kimmel really were. 

The Joint Congressional Committee (Majority Report) clearly felt that 

what Kimmel and Short were sent by way of information left much to be 

desired. One thing seems certain, as I have al.ready said the intelligence arrangements in both Services were inadequate. The COJlllll.l. ttee reached 

certain conclusions and made but five major recommendations, the second of 

which is as follows 

That there be a complete integration of Army and Navy 

intelligence agencies in order to avoid the pitfalls of divided 

responsibility which experience has made so abundantly apparent, 

that upon effecting a unified intelligence, officers be selected 

for intelligence work who possess the background, penchant, and 

capacity for such work, and that they be maintained in the work 

for an extended period of time in order that they may became 

steeped in the ramifications and refinements of their field and 

employ this reservoir of knowledge in evaluating material received. 

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The assigI1D1.ent of an officer having an aptitude for such work 

should not impede his progress nor affect his promotions. 

Efficient intelligence services are Just as essential in time 

of peace as in war, and this branch of our armed services must 

always be accorded the important role which it deserves. 

What has been done about this recommendation by the Services? Very 

little, in fact, I think it can be said that nothing has been done. Of 

course, we have the Central Intelligence Agency, but is that establishment 

really responsive to the Joint Camm.J.ttee's recommendation? I hardly 

think so. The three services no doubt can cite good reasons why they 

have not made a professional career in intelligence possible or attractive 

to its officer personnel, no doubt they can cite at length factors and 

difficulties that would have to be overcome. All I can say is that Judging by what the Army has done the attitude toward intelligence seems not 

to have changed very much, as is indicated by the follOWJ.ng editorial 

which appeared in the Washington Post on 5 December 1955 and which states 

the case in succinct terms 

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Snub to Intelligence 'iJ,~ ~' The recent reorgamzahon In the <\rmy General 

Slaff leaves the Mihtary Intelligence Service m an 

ambiguous and rather humihatmg position Al· 

though directors of the other ma1or staff divlSlons 

have been designated as Deputy Chiefs of Staff 

with the "rank of lieutenant general, the Chief of 

Intelhgence remains a maJor general with the subordmate title of Assistant Chief of Staff 

The extraordinary thmg about all this is that not 

long ago the special task force which mvestigated 

the mtelhgence problem for the Hoover Corrimis6ion strongly recommended that m the case of 

it.hose units associated with the three armed services 

their chiefs "be evaluated in the organizational 

structure to level of Deputy Chiefs of Staff in the 

Army and Air Force, and Deputy Chief of Naval 

Operations m the Navy " This was a rather 

prohx way of saying that they ought to have a 

little more prestige and influence, along with a 

little more gold braid, than they now en3oy Why, 

in the case of all three services, was this recommendation ignored by the Department of Defense? 

The chief function of military intelligence 1s to 

collate and interpret the mformahon provided by 

the attaches abroad and by other agencies, such as 

the CIA, the FBI and its own counterespionage 

service Correct interpretation reqmres more than 

the accumulation of relevant facts, 1t also requires 

a considerable knowledge of the psychology of the 

potential enemy and this m turn reqmres an 

extensive study of his language history, culture, 

customs and philosophic tradition, since these 

afford the keys to such an understanding But all 

this, together with the secrecy m which their actmties are necessarily cloaked, seems to have made 

intelligence officers somewhat suspect t-o a certain 

sort of pohtlcian Even professional m1htary men 

are often mclmed to discount the vallie of the 

critical function exercised by intelhgence officers 

in the discussion of pet military pro3ects or plans 

The question raised by the r~orgami:ation is 

whether we can reahstically expect to mcrease the 

quahty of mihtary mtelhgence by deemphasizing 

its significance It is hard to see how a career m 

tntelbgence can be made to appeal to capable officers when the importance of mtelhge11ce is so 

obviously downgraded m comparison with other 

staff functions 

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.... , ... 

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High-level Anny authorities obviously don't think that Intelligence 

is as important as Personnel, Supply, and similar services. How long 

will it take before it becomes quite clear to them that Intelligence can 

be of the greatest help in fighting a war? For too many years intelligence in the Army and in the Navy has been a. "deadend" for officers who 

showed an interest in it, or an aptitude for it. Is this to continue 

indefinitely? Do the Armed Forces think that the Central Intelligence 

Agency will or can do the job? Of course, CIA representatives can be 

assigned to the headquarters of military commands-but will that fill the 

need? I doubt it, I doubt it very much. 

The introductory statement of the "S\U)ervisory, Administrative, and 

Organizational Deficiencies in our Military and Naval Establishments 

revealed by the Pearl Harbor Investigation" (p. 253) the PBR begins as 

follows 

The Cammi ttee has been intrigued throughout the Pearl Harbor 

proceedings by one enigmatice.l and paramount question Wby, With 

some of the finest intelligence available in our history, With 

the almost certain knowled§e that war was at hand, with plans that 

conteDij?lated the precise type of attack that was executed by 

Japan on the morning of December 7-Why was it possible for a 

Pearl Harbor to occur? The answer to this question and the 

causative considerations regarded as having any reasonably proximate bee.ring on the disaster have been set forth in the body 

of this report. Fundamentally, these considerations reflect 

s\U)ervisory, adm:inistrative, and organizational deficiencies 

which existed in our Military and Naval establishments in the 

days before Pearl Harbor. In the course of the Committee's investigation still other deficiencies, not regarded as having a direct 

bearing on the disaster, have presented themselves. Otherwise 

stated, all of these deficiencies reduce themselves to principles 

which a.re set forth, not for their novelty or profundity but for 

the reason that, by their very self-evident simplicity, it is 

difficult to believe they are ignored. 

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It is recognized that many of the deficiencies revealed by 

our investigation may very probably have already been corrected 

as a result of the experiences of the war. We desire, however, 

to submit these principles, which are grounded in the evidence 

adduced by the Committee, f'or the consideration of' our Army and 

Navy establishments in the earnest hope that something constructive may be accomplished that will aid our national. defense and 

preclude a repetition of the disaster of December 7, 1941. We 

do this after careful and long consideration of the evidence 

developed through one of the most important investigations in 

the history of the Congress. 

What have the Services done to ameliorate the deficiencies mentioned? 

In my opinion, very little. Maybe it would be correct to slcy" "nothing." 

As a colleague said to me recently "Nothing will be done-until war breaks 

out. Then, of course, intelligence is no longer treated a step-child." 

Is that what we want? The chances are that there won't be time to use 

intelligence after a war breaks out maybe the U. S. WJ.11 be down and 

out by that time. 

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7. CONCLUSIONS 

After reading some but not aJ.l the IDJ.llions of words aJ.lud.ed to at 

the beginning of this brochure to what conclusions have I arrived? I will 

be brief. 

First, I must confess, I think that Kimmel and Short were not as culpable as I first thought they were back in 1941-1942, despite all the 

11warm.ngs 11 sent them. The Washington authorities were culpable, toomaybe a lot more culpable than were these two officers. Both the MaJority 

and the Ml.nori ty Reports make good sense. The Report of the MaJori ty 

contained some vecy pertinent recommendations-but nobody seems to be doing important 

veey much about implementing the second and perhaps the most/of these 

recommendations, nor has much, if anything, been done about following up 

on the Conclusions of the Minority, Senators Ferguson and Brewster. In 

1946 I thought the latter two senators were 11hitting below the belt" but 

today, in 1957, I think they hit closer to the truth than the Majority. 

I think Mr. Keefe's "additional. views 11 on the Majority Report make good 

sense-Kimmel and Short, he said, were not the sole culprits. I think 

that the Intelligence Services came off rather easily-too easily in the 

:f'J.XJ.ng of responsibility and pointing out derelictions. I th:Lnk the 

intelligence staffs might have used more imagination but this was not 

because they were staffed with obtuse officers or persons of low-grade 

intelligence. As a matter of cold fact, I think, they were badly understaffed, because in both the Army and the Navy "intelligence 11 didn't 

count-for much at any rate, then. This raises the question· does it 

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.-- ,..- ' ( 

S5CPE:)'" 

count for much more today in the Armed Services? I think that KllllJD.el and 

Short should have been sent more information-even if they were sent only 

"gists" of MAGIC-to let them evaluate for themselves the significance of 

whe.t the Japanese were saying. General Miles says that the we.ming 

messages sent them were of far more importance than anything they could 

have got from "Magic". I don't agree. They might have had more time to 

I'Uil!l.nate, they might even have guessed-as AdmJ.ral KJ.JDID.el hints-what the 

Japanese were planning, our commands might therefore have been much more 

prepared than they were to meet the attack. This, one must admit, could 

have been done even without their having a Purple ma.chine or a cryptanalytic staff to solve and translate messages in that or in the other 

Japanese diplomatic systems. 

I think that Admiral Stark was wrong in waiting for General Marshall 

to be found before sending off a message to Kimmel and Short-and to the 

other overseas commanders-as soon as the last part of the 14-part Tokyo 

to Washington message became available-especially when he knew from 

"Magic" that Kurusu and Nomura were told exact1y to the minute when to 

present the whole message to Secretary Hull. (That we knew the contents 

of the last part of that message ['deliver this whole message exactly 

at 1 00 p.m.'.:J before the Japanese Embassy code clerks had them is a 

credit to the efficiency of Army and Navy cryptanalytic staff's.) 

I think that Colonel Edward French, Chief of the Signal Corps Message 

Center, used very poor judgment when he sent Marshall's message via 

connnercial radio. He could have used Navy radio or FBI radio-but I am 

sure he thought it was infra dig to ask a "sister" government radio 

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service {especia.J.ly the Navy) to do (at a critical moment) something that 

Army radio couldn't do. Or maybe Colonel French didn't realize the gravity 

of the situation, or was not told so in impressive enough language. 

The Ferguson-Brewster Minority Report does not point the finger at 

!!!. the high ranking officials who should share the responsibility but 

it does say { p. 573) ''Both in Washington and in Hawaii there were numerous 

and serious failures of men in the lower civil a.nd military echelons to 

perform their duties and discharge their responsibilities. These are too 

numerous to be treated in detail and individually named." I would have 

liked them to have named the Directors of Intelligence in the Army and in 

the Navy, specifically, because I think poor intelligence work played such 

a large part in the debacle. 

And, of course, although it is clear that MAGIC was withheld from 

Kimm.el and Short after the summer of 1941, I do not think (and of this I 

a.m quite sure) that it was deliberately withheld for the specific purpose 

of bringing on the attack at Pearl! Except for the most rabid of the 

revisionists this is too fantastic a thesis, but there is a stronger 

argument against such a thesis it is not supported by the facts. 

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8. EPILOGUE Sc:cRc:1J 

What was it that so a.roused the a.nti-Rooseveltians, lea.ding them to 

suspect that it was "skullduggery" and gross negligence in Wa.shl.ngton 

that wa.s responsible for the Pearl Harbor disaster? 

Why did the President, his closest associates in the White Bouse, 

a.nd the officers in the top-level positions in the Array a.nd in the Navy, 

generate so much suspicion in the minds of the Republicans? Why such 

reluctance to have a.n investigation to explain why the U. S. forces were 

caught by surprise at Pearl Barbor? This is a. point which I do not think 

is explained in the literature and which ought to be. Why did the President and his administration allow so much suspicion to grow up in the 

minds of the Republicans by the questions which the latter raised after 

7 December 1941 and which they continued to raise throughout the war? 

Could this have been a.voided? It is my opinion that it was this refusal 

to explain, this subjection to continued "needling" of the President and 

the Democrats by the Republicans throughout the war that aroused the 

gravest suspicions that there was indeed gross negligence in the White 

House and at the high.est executive levels, and maybe greater derelictions 

to be hidden. The adamant resistance the President and the Democratic 

Administration had to maintain against Republican. pressure for Congressional hearings on this point and the reasons therefor were quite obvious 

we now know that such hearings would have "let the cat out of the bag"-

that the u. s. was reading all the Japanese crypto-communications between 

the Foreign Office and its embassies, legations, and consul.ates abroad. 

The Japanese would have changed their Purple system without delay. It 

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is inconceivable, the Administration believed, that the secret could have 

been kept even if al.l the hearings were in Executive Sessions. They felt 

and were warranted in feeling that Hearings on the subJect would be disastrous during the war too much vital information on the subject would 

have leaked out. It is true that the Japanese had been al.erted during 

the war by the Germans; they were told, in fa.ct-and nobody knows to this 

day JUSt how the Germans found out-that we were reading Japanese dJ.plomatic messages. All this appears in the PHR and makes interesting rea.d.J.ng. 

But it is astonishing that even after they were told the Japanese just 

simply refused to believe the story and continued to use the Purple 

system. (Neither, for that matter, did the Germans put much credence in 

the suspicions, forwarded by Marshal Rommel franAfrica, that the British 

must be reading his messages, Rommel felt tha.t this and only this could /2' 1 .1-."\-- ----\...::..; 

account for his continuing defeats in North Africa a~er 19Ll!J) Have these 

two episodes any lessons for us? Yes, indeed! Cryptographers becane 

enamored of their inventions and their minds become polarized in a sort 

of conviction ••• that the systems they have concocted are invincible. 

It happened to us, too! I can remember the mental shock I bad when -r8 a. 

indubitable evidence was placed before me showing that the Germans were I~ ~ .... 

J.v.1μ rea.d.J.ng the enciphered code system we were using for cammimications between P. μ ,,.,..; 

"'-'-t I ,,J" ~-.~J 

U. S. Army Observer WJ. th the British Expeditionary Forces in North Africa o'L 1J-i'tr"1Vt-

&V~ ~ in 1942-3 and Washington! That is why I believe that some boccy--experts, wfF-~,,,..,....._ ""'-.,v 1f,.,,.., of course-outside the one that tlu.nks up and produces our own crypto- flR'-,,t.J.. /;-

systems but WJ.thin NSA should be called in frequently to take a good look 

at those systems to make sure that some crack in the strong cryptosecurity 
t 

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edifice the NSA cryptographers think they have erected doesn't exist and 

that such a crack can not be widened. 

WILLIAM F. FRIEDMAN 

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70