Joseph E. Persico (25 page)

Some Pearl Harbor researchers have made much of the “winds” messages, which were to be inserted into Japanese weather reports, the implication being that the signal “East Wind Rain” meant that Japan was about to attack the United States. This signal, however, meant only that the designated Japanese embassies were to destroy their codes and coding machines. But what of the decrypted messages from Foreign Minister Togo to Consul General Kita in Honolulu requesting information on facilities and ship movements in Pearl Harbor? The problem with viewing these intercepts as clear indications that the Japanese had targeted Pearl Harbor is that American codebreakers received them among a flood of requests for similar information on nearly a dozen other ports. Further, no evidence exists that any of the decrypts handled at this level were shown to FDR. If any American did have solid evidence in hand that the Japanese were preparing an attack on Pearl Harbor, it was J. Edgar Hoover. Yet, Hoover's visceral dislike of the double agent Dusko Popov and his superficial handling of the microdot questionnaire that Popov carried deprived anyone in the U.S. government, including FDR, of strong evidence that the Japanese had targeted Pearl Harbor.

“The Fog of War” is an apt description of the confusion that obscures what is actually happening in the heat of battle. A corollary phrase, the “Flood of Intelligence,” might explain why outcomes look clearer after rather than before the fact. After the fact, the threads connecting A to B to C to Pearl Harbor appear to stand out unmistakably. But that clarity emerges only in retrospect, only after these strands have been teased from a dense bundle of other threads. At the time, the relevant strand stood out no more visibly than hundreds of competing threads—the true, the false, the misleading, the contradictory, the irrelevant.

Physically, what FDR received from his couriers was a decryption form indicating From, To, Date, Time of Transmission, Time of Interception, and Time of Translation. He rarely received any analysis connecting these bits and pieces. In effect, the President and other members of the War Council, including Hull, Stimson, Knox, and Marshall, were delivered raw decrypts and were left to evaluate them, acting as their own intelligence officer. This situation was best described by the Army's codebreaking genius, William Friedman, who later observed: “[T]here was
nobody
in either the Army 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. . . . [N]obody whose responsibility it was to try and put the pieces of the jig-saw puzzle together.”

Based on the information FDR had in hand on the eve of Pearl Harbor, if asked if Japan was going to attack the United States, he would certainly have answered “Yes.” He made clear this conviction in the War Council meeting of November 25 where, according to Stimson's diary, FDR stated, “We were likely to be attacked perhaps next Monday. . . .” If asked if he knew with certainty where the Japanese would strike, he would have to have answered “No.” Given the targets suggested in the Japanese intercepts, if asked if Pearl Harbor was in danger, he likely would have answered, “Probably not.” Never in any report or intelligence, whether from agents or broken codes, did FDR ever receive a warning that said Pearl Harbor will be attacked. General Marshall told FDR that the harbor was invincible and a most unlikely target. It was, the general said, “. . . the strongest fortress in the world. . . . Enemy carriers, naval escorts and transports will begin to come under air attack at a distance of approximately 750 miles. This attack will increase in intensity until within 200 miles of the objective, the enemy forces will be subject to all types of bombardment closely supported by our most modern pursuit.”

Undeniably, Roosevelt wanted to enter the war, but the war in Europe, which he had all but done in the Atlantic, lacking only a formal declaration. Yet, none of his speeches, warning of Nazi machinations in South America, threats to the Panama Canal, or the alleged unpremeditated U-boat attack against the destroyer
Greer,
had aroused sufficient public ire to lead the nation into that war. If then, a president wants war with Germany, why does he invite an attack on Japan? Put another way, if Tom is itching to fight Dick, why provoke a fight with Harry? Does the intelligence available to the President and his inner circle support the thesis that FDR invited the blow at Pearl Harbor to propel the country into the war?

One argument pressed by revisionists is that the President had prior knowledge of the impending attack through intercepted radio signals from the Japanese task force bound for Pearl Harbor. A corollary claim is that had the President alerted the Pearl Harbor defenders of the approaching menace, the Japanese fleet would have turned back. A major source supposedly proving this thesis has been identified only as “Seaman Z” who worked in the intelligence branch of the 12th Naval District in San Francisco. One of Z's duties was to plot communications intercepted anywhere in the Pacific, commercial or military. The revisionist claim is that prior to the attack, Z managed to get cross bearings on mysterious signals that could be a missing Japanese carrier force.

Among the documents at the Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park is the transcript of an interview of Robert D. Ogg conducted by I. G. Newman, a historical consultant and former naval officer. Ogg, it turns out, was Seaman Z. Newman asked Ogg if his superior, Lieutenant Elsworth A. Hosmer, had ever been ordered to relocate a missing Japanese carrier force. Ogg replied, “My comment on that is that in no way was he ordered to do so. . . . I don't think he had any reason to feel from anything that was conveyed to me that they [the Japanese task force] went East, West, South or where.” Newman asked Ogg if his plotting of cross bearings led him to tell Hosmer, “It could possibly be the missing task force.” Ogg replied, “I never made such mention to Hosmer whatsoever.” Ogg further told his interviewer, “. . . [D]uring those four or five days [prior to Pearl Harbor] I certainly had no feeling that an entire Jap fleet . . . was involved. . . .” The airwaves across the Pacific were indeed filled with signals, many emanating from Japanese vessels. But the weight of evidence is that the Japanese task force never broke radio silence, not even from one ship to another; thus there would have been no signals to intercept. This position is supported by Minoru Genda, one of the key architects of the attack, who claims that the Pearl Harbor task force “kept an absolute radio silence.” A member of the task force itself, Lieutenant Commander Chuichi Yoshioka, has stated, “[R]adio silence
was
imposed even before the ships assembled in a small bay in Intara Island on November 24th.” A recent revisionist, Robert B. Stinnett, claims to have found documentary proof that the Japanese task force did break radio silence, that American monitors intercepted these transmissions, and that they were decrypted and sent to FDR. Thus, Stinnett's word is pitted against those of Japanese who actually participated in the Pearl Harbor attack and who had no motive to protect Franklin Roosevelt's position in history. The revisionist premise is that exposure of the Japanese task force would have forced its leader, Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, to turn around and go home. Therefore, FDR said nothing because he wanted the attack to proceed. Yet, while the Japanese sought the advantage of surprise, it was not indispensable. As Ronald Spector, a well-regarded historian of this period, writes, “Admiral Nagumo and his staff half expected to have to fight their way in.” Indeed, encountering opposition was one of the alternatives practiced by the Japanese task force in war-gaming the strike.

The final conspiracy theory to be dealt with from the intelligence standpoint is whether or not Prime Minister Churchill had knowledge of the impending attack on Pearl Harbor from his own sources, and deliberately withheld this information from Roosevelt so that the Japanese would succeed in their attack and thus plunge the United States into the war. As James Rusbridger claims in
Betrayal at Pearl Harbor,
“Churchill was aware that a task force had sailed from northern Japan in late November 1941, and that one of its likely targets was Pearl Harbor.” Rusbridger goes on to say that “Churchill deliberately kept this vital information from Roosevelt, because he realized an attack of this nature, whether on the U.S. Pacific Fleet or the Philippines, was a means of fulfilling his publicly proclaimed desire to get America into the war at any cost.” It must be asked whether drawing the United States into a war with Japan was a logical way for Churchill to get FDR into the war in Europe. Churchill was certainly capable of manipulating intelligence to serve his country's ends. He had no qualms about Stephenson's BSC manufacturing stories to feed to Roosevelt that the Nazis were conspiring to invade South America and threaten the Panama Canal. He allowed Roosevelt to continue thinking that Hitler would invade Britain when his own Ultra interceptions made clear that this danger had passed. However, an attack that would have brought America into a war with the Japanese was a risky bet for Churchill. How he viewed his best interests is clear from a five-page report written on November 12, 1941, less than a month before Pearl Harbor, by the American ambassador to Britain, John Winant. Winant had spent three days with Churchill in the country. According to Winant's notes, forwarded to FDR, Churchill set out three positions in which Britain might find itself. The worst-case scenario, which Churchill considered unthinkable, was that Japan would come into the war against Britain and that America would stay out. The next best outcome would be for neither Japan nor America to enter the war. But Churchill's preference, the PM told Winant, was that “the United States enter the war without Japan.” With this as his first choice, it hardly seems that Churchill would deliberately enable a Japanese attack on America by withholding intelligence from Roosevelt. Finally, Churchill possessed no sources of signal intelligence in the Pacific that were not already available to FDR. What the Prime Minister concluded, as late as November 25, was that Japan was irrevocably committed to attack Thailand.

Ironically, in order to get America into the European conflict, Churchill had to depend on Adolf Hitler to declare war on the United States. As expressed by the diplomat and later presidential advisor George Ball, “If Hitler had not made this decision and if he had simply done nothing, there would have been an enormous sentiment in the United States . . . that the Pacific was now our war and the European war was for the Europeans, and we Americans should concentrate all our efforts on Japan.” Churchill, with the Ultra secrets at his fingertips, nevertheless learned of the attack on Pearl Harbor just as millions of Britons did. As Captain Malcolm Kennedy, a Japanese linguist at Bletchley, wrote in his diary on December 7, “. . . [T]he news on the 9
P.M.
wireless, that Japan had opened hostilities with an air raid on Pearl Harbor, more than 3000 miles out in the Pacific, came as a complete surprise.” Winston Churchill had not learned of Pearl Harbor through advance intelligence that he withheld from FDR. He learned about it on the BBC.

The revisionist theory requires a certain path of logic. First, FDR had to know that Pearl Harbor was going to be bombed. His secretaries of state, war, and Navy either did not know or, if they did, they all lied and conspired in the deaths of twenty-four hundred Americans and the near-fatal destruction of the Pacific Fleet. Pearl Harbor is nowhere mentioned in Admiral Stark's November 27 war warning to the fleet, unless, again, we imagine the chief of the American Navy deliberately misleading the defenders of Pearl Harbor and conniving in the mass death of men under him and the destruction of his ships. If Nomura and Kurusu did not know what their government intended, it is difficult to argue that the American President or his chief aides knew. For FDR to fail to alert the defenders of an attack that he knew was coming, we must premise that the President had enlisted men of the stature of Stimson, Hull, Knox, and Marshall in a treasonous conspiracy, or that he had a unique source of information on Japanese fleet movements unknown to anyone else in the government.

The conspiracy theory fails most abysmally in that it would
not
achieve its supposed end. It would not have brought America into the European war. FDR's legendary “day that will live in infamy” speech declared war only on Japan, not Germany. For that war, FDR, too, had to depend on Adolf Hitler. As he had told Churchill four months before aboard the
Augusta,
a fight with Japan would be “the wrong war in the wrong ocean at the wrong time.”

Why, then, one may wonder, have authors and scholars, some of distinction, embraced the conspiratorial thesis that has led ordinary citizens to ask, “Is it true that FDR knew the Japanese were going to attack Pearl Harbor?” The best answer lies in the fact that dramatically scripted conspiracies provide high theater, while the truth is often messy, random, illogical, even dull. The thesis of a Roosevelt-engineered attack on Pearl Harbor joins the perennially recycled conspiracy theories about the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy, which will go on and on and on. The inescapable, if prosaic, truth is that no evidence whatever exists that President Roosevelt wanted a war in the Pacific, and all the evidence demonstrates that he wanted to enter the war in Europe. A monumental distraction from that objective, a war with Japan, was the last thing he needed. All the secrets, the intelligence, the intercepted Japanese codes, the very stuff with which the historian works, support this conclusion: Pearl Harbor was a catastrophe, not a conspiracy.

Chapter XI

Secrets of the Map Room

ON THE evening of December 22, 1941, just two weeks after Pearl Harbor, a whirlwind struck the White House. Prime Minister Churchill arrived. The President's sometime speechwriter Robert Sherwood caught the Prime Minister's motive for the trip: “When Churchill and his staff came to Washington in December of 1941,” Sherwood later wrote, “they were prepared for the possibility of an announcement by Roosevelt that due to the rage of the American people against Japan and the imperilled position of American forces in the Philippines and other islands, the war in the Pacific must be given precedence.” This was a strategy that Churchill was determined to derail while at the White House and he expected to pursue his strategic objectives among the comforts to which he had become accustomed. He wanted no talking outside his room, no whistling in the corridors, and his libations were to be served on time. He instructed the White House usher, Alonzo Fields, “I must have a tumbler of sherry in my room before breakfast, a couple glasses of scotch and soda before lunch and French champagne and 90 year old brandy before I go to sleep at night.”

A seventeen-year-old girl, Margaret Hambley, whom FDR regarded as his godchild, has left a vivid picture of Churchill at the White House. “He has,” Hambley wrote, after attending a dinner for the PM, “a very pink face, whitish, red thin hair and very piercing pale blue eyes. His nose has a very strange shape. It looks as if it was chiseled. . . . He is not a conversationalist for formal dinners, he is much more apt to ask very deep, thought-provoking questions. He has a habit of asking a question and then when the person is nicely involved in a long oratory, the PM will suddenly turn away and join in another conversation just as if he were listening to both and found the other more interesting. He has a very keen mind much more so than the President but of course he has not that wonderful charm and personality. It is as if his round cherubic face had an entirely different mind behind it.” Young Hambley found the powerful orator of the House of Commons an indifferent speaker over the roast beef and Yorkshire pudding: “He has a very poor voice. One can hardly understand him it is so indistinct and stammering, but he uses the most wonderful language imaginable.” Churchill's humor surprised her: “He was looking very gloomily down at his plate but with a twinkle in his eye and said how perfectly dreadful the man [Hitler] was to bomb all the beautiful scotch whiskey and cigar warehouses. He said he didn't know what would happen to [his] country when its supplies of whiskey and cigars ran out.”

The Rose Suite became the temporary seat of British government. White House staffers—shifting beds and other furniture to accommodate Churchill's retinue—found themselves weaving among a steady stream of uniformed couriers delivering the secrets of empire in the locked red dispatch cases bearing a warning,
THIS BOX IS ONLY TO BE OPENED BY THE PRIME MINISTER IN PERSON.
And Churchill kept the key. It soon became apparent that Churchill's and Roosevelt's living habits meshed like mismatched gears. The President, after reading in bed, ordinarily turned lights out by 10:40
P.M.
Churchill liked to stay up talking, talking, talking into the small hours. FDR was generally awake by 8:30
A.M.
The Prime Minister liked to stay in bed until noon.

Churchill's ceaseless prowling of the White House, steady drinking, and late hours appear to have caught up with him and produced one of the better-kept secrets of the war. On the fourth day of the Prime Minister's visit, he and Roosevelt had retired late after agreeing that the war in the Pacific would be run out of Washington and the war in the West out of London. Churchill found the heat in his bedroom stifling, and he struggled to open a jammed window. As he told his doctor, Charles Wilson (later Lord Moran), “I noticed all at once I was short of breath. I had a dull pain over my heart. It went down my left arm.” Wilson instantly recognized the classic symptoms. Churchill had had a mild heart attack. As the physician wrote in his diary, the “textbook treatment is at least six weeks in bed. That would mean publishing to the world, and the American newspapers would see this, that the PM was an invalid with a crippled heart and a doubtful future.” Wilson said nothing about a heart attack to Churchill and told him only, “Your circulation is a bit sluggish. It is nothing serious . . . but you mustn't do more than you can help in the way of exertion for a little while.” Thus, not only Churchill, but his host, FDR, never knew exactly what befell the Prime Minister while he stayed in the Rose Suite.

During one of their nocturnal conversations, FDR and the PM discussed exchanging knowledge of their countries' codes. Churchill remained a hungry consumer of signal intelligence far more than Roosevelt, who still favored the cloak-and-dagger over keyboards and rotors. At home, the Prime Minister insisted on having Ultra decrypts brought by special courier from Bletchley Park to 10 Downing Street several times a day. The stolen secrets of other nations had long been a Churchill passion. Before coming to power he had written, “I attach more importance to [decrypts] as a means of forming a true judgment of public policy in these spheres, than to any other source of knowledge at the disposal of the state.” His Bletchley codebreakers, in Churchill's phrase, were “the geese who laid the golden eggs and never cackled.” An early Churchill name for the intercepted German codes had been Boniface, chosen to mislead the enemy into thinking that the source was an agent rather than a penetrated cipher system. The name, with its medieval ring, appealed to Churchill, who clung to it long after Ultra became used exclusively by everyone else in on the secret.

The Prime Minister accepted, in theory, that in codebreaking the Americans deserved to be Britain's partner. Since February 1941 the British had been in possession of the Japanese machine for encoding Purple, along with keys for breaking the code, courtesy of their American colleagues. Thus, in the months preceding Pearl Harbor, the British were able to read essentially the same Japanese diplomatic secrets as did FDR. The Americans, however, remained decidedly junior, even limited partners, since the British questioned their ability to guard secrets. Though the Americans had given a Purple machine to Bletchley, the British did not turn over an Enigma machine to Arlington Hall. The Americans saw of Ultra decrypts only what the British chose to share.

Churchill, however, did have a confession to make. “Some time ago,” he cabled FDR after his return to London, “our experts claimed to have discovered the system and constructed some [code] tables used by your Diplomatic Corps. From the moment we became Allies, I gave instructions that this work should cease.” In fact, the British had been reading U.S. State Department codes for over two decades. The reason for Churchill's admission and promise to stop the practice was hardly an instance of English fair play. Rather, he was warning FDR that if an ally was breaking America's codes, the “. . . danger of our enemies having achieved a measure of success, cannot, I am advised, be dismissed. I shall be grateful if you will handle this matter entirely yourself, and if possible burn this letter when you have read it. The whole subject is secret in degree which affects the safety of both our countries. The fewest possible people should know.” The cable, however, was not burned.

Churchill's preoccupation with code security was fully warranted. On February 1 the German navy had shifted to a new four-rotor enciphering combination for submarine traffic, replacing a system Bletchley had cracked. In intelligence parlance, British cryptanalysis had gone “blind,” and in subsequent months ship sinkings soared. A despairing Churchill told Roosevelt, “When I reflect how I have longed and prayed for the entry of the United States into the war I find it difficult to realise how greatly our British affairs have deteriorated since December 7.” His desperation was understandable. When U-boat torpedoes sank two average-size cargo vessels and one tanker loaded with American supplies bound for Britain, the loss amounted to approximately 42 tanks and 428 tons of tank parts and supplies, 236 artillery pieces, 24 armored cars, 5,210 tons of ammunition, 600 rifles, 2,000 tons of stores, and 1,000 tank loads of gasoline. To achieve similar destruction by bombing, it was estimated the enemy would have to conduct 3,000 sorties.

Part of the considerable baggage Churchill had brought during his White House stay included a portable version of his Map Room, the original located in a bombproof underground London headquarters at Storey's Gate. The traveling Map Room had been installed in the Monroe Room of the White House, and Churchill later described FDR's fascination with it: “He liked to come and study attentively the large maps of all the theatres of war which soon covered the walls, and on which the movement of fleets and armies was so swiftly and accurately recorded.” After Churchill's departure, FDR had to have his own Map Room. Always more comfortable with Navy personnel, he turned the task over to his new naval aide, Captain John L. McCrea, who had replaced Captain Beardall. McCrea had been a reluctant recruit to the Roosevelt staff. The doughty sea dog had been slated for command of a cruiser when Admiral King, commander in chief of the U.S. Fleet, drafted him to serve FDR. McCrea had all the qualifications, one of his Navy pals kidded him; he was over six feet tall and had a strong back. McCrea protested the assignment to King and Navy secretary Knox. He had been raised a Republican, never voted, and was no fan of the New Deal, he complained. “Well, what do you think I am?” Knox replied.

From their first encounter in January 1942, Roosevelt blinded McCrea with his electric charm, nimble mind, and razor-sharp memory. FDR could recite the captain's naval career over the preceding twenty years. McCrea began to relish his place within FDR's inner circle. David Kahn, the preeminent American historian of cryptography, paints a vivid picture of the working arrangement between the President and his naval assistant: “When McCrea arrived in the morning, Roosevelt would usually be either in bed, in which case McCrea would hand him the papers, or in the bathroom shaving. If the latter, the naval officer would go in, close the toilet cover, sit down on it, and in that inglorious position read the leader of the most powerful nation in the world some of the most secret documents of the greatest war in history.” As they reviewed the deployment of the fleet, Roosevelt would astonish McCrea with his mastery of geography, down to remote specks on the globe. The President explained his expertise as a by-product of his hobby. “[I]f a stamp collector really studies his stamps,” the President told his aide, he would know the world. McCrea was amused by Roosevelt's continuing references to “when I was in the Navy,” and the pleasure FDR took in reminding him that he had supervised all the current naval brass when they were junior officers—Stark, King, Leahy, Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Halsey, and dozens of others whom he could recall by name, rank, and early assignments. What welded the anti–New Deal Navy officer most closely to his new chief was FDR's habitual geniality, the utter lack of self-pity. McCrea was filled, he said, with admiration at “the patience with which he bore his affliction . . . with never a reference to it.”

McCrea attacked the President's order for a map room with zeal. He expropriated a ladies' room on the first floor of the White House ideally located across from the elevator the President used to reach the Oval Office and next to the room occupied by the President's physician, Admiral McIntire, whom FDR saw almost daily. Within days of Churchill's departure, the Map Room was functioning. Blowups of maps papered the walls from floor to ceiling. Lieutenant (Junior Grade) Robert Montgomery, the Hollywood actor now on active duty as McCrea's assistant, added creative touches that delighted FDR. Montgomery designed pins to indicate where the major chiefs of state were at a given moment. Roosevelt's pin was shaped like a cigarette holder, Churchill's like a cigar, Stalin's like a pipe. Other shapes and colors indicated the location of units of the U.S., Allied, and enemy fleets. One U.S. Navy vessel, the destroyer on which Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. served, had its own pin. The maps were updated two and three times a day and hung at sitting level so that the President could study them from his wheelchair.

The Map Room gradually assumed a more sensitive function than merely presenting a pictorial plot of the war. The cables the President sent to other world leaders were encoded in the Map Room and their messages to him decoded there. War plans were filed in the onetime ladies' room, along with records of all military discussions and decisions. The President had his Magic intercepts kept there in what he called “The Magic Book.” As Churchill had done in London, FDR made his Map Room America's wartime nerve center. He was wheeled in and out of the room at least twice a day. He had a sign posted on the door,
NO ADMITTANCE,
and approved a list of only six others allowed to pass in and out without permission. The former ambassador to Vichy France, the stolid, reliable Admiral William D. Leahy, whom FDR had brought back to serve as Chief of Staff to the commander in chief, headed the list. The other five were Captain McCrea, Admiral McIntire, Harry Hopkins, and William Rigdon, a former ship's clerk who had risen to become an invaluable factotum to the President and whose duties ran from supervising the Filipino stewards on the presidential yacht to monitoring secret messages coming into the Map Room. The admissions policy was strictly enforced. Frank Knox complained bitterly to FDR when he was barred entrance. Mrs. Roosevelt casually walked in, past dumbfounded guards, to find Captain McCrea with his pants down in the one place he thought it safe to change uniforms. Grace Tully, whom the President often sent to the Map Room to pick up and deliver dispatches, remained unimpressed. She found the room a “hodge podge of varicolored pins, arrowhead lines, and generally confusing symbols.” But it was right up FDR's alley. The President, she said, “took to that sort of thing like a duck to water.”