Chapter One: The Biggest Story of My Life

Washington

December 8, 1941

About 1:00 A.M.

Edward R. Murrow couldn't sleep. His wife, Janet, watched him pace in their hotel room. He was chain-smoking. Murrow, the CBS radio newsman, had just returned from a midnight meeting with President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the White House. Japan's carrier and submarine raid on Pearl Harbor had taken place twelve hours earlier, and the full impact of the military disaster was slowly sinking in for FDR and the American people.

During their twenty-five-minute discussion in the second-floor Oval Study, the President provided Murrow with something -- we will never know exactly what -- that any reporter would kill for. That night he told his wife, "It's the biggest story of my life, but I don't know if it's my duty to tell it or forget it." Long after the war ended, Murrow was asked about this meeting by author-journalist John Gunther. After a long pause, Murrow replied: "That story would send Casey Murrow through college, and if you think I'm going to give it to you, you're out of your mind."

Earlier in the week, the Murrows had accepted a personal dinner invitation from the Roosevelts. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt personally prepared, cooked, and served supper for two dozen guests. Her specialty was scrambled eggs and sausage, cooked in an electric chafing dish that sat atop a long buffet table in the family dining room. It was the invariable menu. Since the regular White House staff was given Sunday off, she did the cooking while the President mixed the cocktails.

After he heard the first news flashes about the Pearl Harbor raid, Murrow checked with the White House to see if the supper was still on. Told that it was, he and Janet then walked across Lafayette Park, crossed Pennsylvania Avenue, and entered the mansion through the North Portico. After the Murrows were ushered into the dining room, Mrs. Roosevelt explained that the President was meeting with congressional leaders and military officers and could not join them for supper.

Outside on Pennsylvania Avenue a small crowd had gathered. The White House was ablaze with light. No one inside the mansion thought to pull the window shades or institute blackouts on the first day of war -- that would came later. An Associated Press photographer took a picture from Lafayette Park. It shows a window in the family dining room with a silhouette of a tall figure -- probably the First Lady -- presiding over her scrambled eggs.

During the dinner, White House chief usher Howell Crim asked Murrow to remain for an informal meeting with FDR. After Janet Murrow returned to their hotel, her husband went to the second floor and waited outside Roosevelt's Oval Study -- not to be confused with the Oval Office -- in the West Wing of the White House. Soon Murrow was joined by William "Wild Bill" Donovan, Roosevelt's Coordinator of Information and later founder of the wartime Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA.

Donovan had not been present at dinner but had been summoned by the President from New York, where he had been watching a football game at the Polo Grounds. Football fans heard an unusual announcement over the public address system about 2:30 that afternoon: "Colonel William Donovan, come to the box office at once. There is an important phone message." The message was from James Roosevelt, the President's son and a member of Donovan's staff; he told Donovan about the Japanese attack.

Throughout the evening of December 7, Roosevelt conferred with congressional and military leaders. He decided his first wartime move would come the next morning, December 8, when he would ask Congress to declare that a state of war existed between Japan and the United States. He prepared a rough draft of what later became his "Day of Infamy" speech. Then he invited Murrow and Donovan into the study for a midnight snack of sandwiches and cold beer. Chief Usher Crim noted that the three men spent twenty-five minutes together in the study before Roosevelt retired to his adjoining bedroom. Crim's arrival and departure notations in the Usher Book comprise the only official record; there were no official minutes of the meeting.

Only Donovan has hinted at what went on: the conversation was mostly about public reaction to the attack. He sensed that this was FDR's overriding concern. In 1953, while he served as ambassador to Thailand, Donovan disclosed the details of the meeting to his executive assistant, William J. vanden Heuvel, who summarized the recollections in his diary. The President asked Murrow and Donovan whether they thought the attack was a clear case of a first Japanese move that would unite Americans behind a declaration of war against the Axis powers. Both guests thought it would indeed have that effect.

Donovan believed that Roosevelt welcomed the attack and that it was less of a surprise to him than it was to others in the White House. FDR claimed he sent an advance warning to Pearl Harbor that an attack by Japan was imminent. "They caught our ships like lame ducks! Lame ducks, Bill. We told them, at Pearl Harbor and everywhere else, to have the lookouts manned. But they still took us by surprise."

Still not convinced that America's isolationist sentiments would change after this attack, FDR then read to the two men from a message he had received from a British Foreign Office official, T. North Whitehead: "The dictator powers have presented us with a united America." Roosevelt wondered whether Whitehead's assessment was correct. Again he asked, would America now support a declaration of war? Donovan and Murrow again replied in the affirmative.

Whitehead was an influential member of the Foreign Office and an advisor to Prime Minister Winston Churchill on matters affecting America's aid to the British in 1940 and 1941. He evaluated American public opinion and "read" FDR's mind for the Prime Minister. In written comments to Churchill in the fall of 1940, Whitehead had warned of continued United States isolationism, but predicted it could be overcome: "America is not in the bag. However, the President is engaged in carefully calculated steps to give us full assistance."

Several years later Murrow made a brief, circumspect broadcast that in part addressed the question of what the President had known before the Japanese hit Pearl Harbor. According to Murrow's biographer Ann Sperber, "The broadcast itself was a response to an article by John Chamberlain inLIFEmagazine charging Roosevelt with foreknowledge of the attack. Murrow did not believe it and said so on the air, making it clear that he had only his instinct to go on."

In the end, Murrow's big story remained unwritten and unbroadcast. Sperber believed that the meeting concerned damage reports. Whatever it was, it weighed heavily on Murrow's mind. "But he couldn't forget it either, blaming himself at times thereafter for not going with the story, never determining to his satisfaction where his duties lay that night or what had been in the subtle mind of FDR," Sperber wrote. Murrow took the story to his grave. He died April 7, 1965, two days past his fifty-seventh birthday.

Had FDR revealed something that night about his foreknowledge? Damage reports emerged immediately in local Hawaii papers, though the full details of the American losses were not released to the nation's news media until December 16, 1941, by Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox. He confirmed the initial report by the HonoluluStar-Bulletin.Secretary Knox named the seven warships sunk: USSArizona,USSUtah,USSOklahoma,USSCassin,USSDownes,USSShaw,and USSOglala.He said the human toll on Oahu was 2897 Americans killed, 879 wounded, and 26 missing. There was severe damage to the Army's aircraft and hangars on Oahu. Knox said the Japanese planes came from aircraft carriers and had the "most tremendously detailed" information of the naval layout at Pearl Harbor. He listed Japan's losses at forty-one planes shot down, and disclosed the American capture of a Japanese two-man midget submarine that had gone aground on an Oahu beach and the sinking of four other Japanese midget subs.

Once the nation's news media reported the attack details on December 16, 1941, there was no "big story" left to report on the main events at Pearl Harbor. None -- except speculation about Roosevelt's foreknowledge. Certain words and phrases cited by Donovan hinted at what he and Murrow were told by FDR. William vanden Heuvel's diary, according to author Anthony Cave Brown, is tantalizing: "The President's surprise was not as great as that of other men around him. Nor was the attack unwelcome. It had ended the past months of uncertainty caused by FDR's decision that Japan must be seen to make the first overt move."

Any conclusion about the Murrow meeting must remain speculative, because the participants refused to tell the story. However, there are many more direct pieces of evidence from the days and weeks leading up to December 7 that put the question of FDR's foreknowledge definitively to rest. Previous accounts have claimed that the United States had not cracked Japanese military codes prior to the attack. We now know this is wrong. Previous accounts have insisted that the Japanese fleet maintained strict radio silence. This, too, is wrong. The truth is clear: FDR knew.

The real question is even more intriguing: did he deliberately provoke the attack? Were there earlier covert moves by the United States? According to a secret strategy memo, dated October 7, 1940, and adopted by the President, there were.

Chapter two: FDR's Back Door to War

Navy Headquarters

Washington

October 7, 1940

As warfare raged in Europe and portions of Africa and Japan, Germany and Italy threatened countries in three continents, a memorandum circulated in Washington. Originating in the Office of Naval Intelligence and addressed to two of FDR's most trusted advisors, it suggested a shocking new American foreign policy. It called for provoking Japan into an overt act of war against the United States. It was written by Lieutenant Commander Arthur H. McCollum, head of the Far East desk of the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) (see Appendix A).

McCollum had a unique background for formulating American tactics and strategy against Japan. Born to Baptist missionary parents in Nagasaki in 1898, McCollum spent his youth in various Japanese cities. He understood the Japanese culture, and spoke the language before learning English. After the death of his father in Japan, the McCollum family returned to Alabama. At eighteen McCollum was appointed to the Naval Academy. After graduation, the twenty-two-year-old ensign was posted to the US embassy in Tokyo as a naval attaché and took a refresher course in Japanese there. McCollum was no stuffed shirt. He enjoyed parties and the favorite drink of Japan's naval community -- Johnny Walker Black Label Scotch. He was never at a loss for words. After telling a long story, he'd pause with his favorite phrases, "In other words," then go into an even longer version.

In 1923, as the fads of the Roaring Twenties swept the world, members of the Japanese imperial household were anxious to learn the Charleston. McCollum knew the latest dance routines, so the embassy assigned him to instruct Crown Prince Hirohito, the future Emperor, in slapping his knees to those jazz-age rhythms. Later that year, McCollum helped coordinate the US Navy relief operations following the great Tokyo earthquake. Though the American assistance was well intentioned, McCollum learned that the proud, self-sufficient Japanese resented the anjin (foreign) relief operations. Nearly twenty years later, McCollum took it upon himself to multiply this resentment a hundredfold by pushing for American interference in Japan's brutal policies of domination in the Pacific.

Lieutenant Commander McCollum's five-page memorandum of October 1940 (hereafter referred to as the eight-action memo) put forward a startling plan -- a plan intended to engineer a situation that would mobilize a reluctant America into joining Britain's struggle against the German armed forces then overrunning Europe. Its eight actions called for virtually inciting a Japanese attack on American ground, air, and naval forces in Hawaii, as well as on British and Dutch colonial outposts in the Pacific region.

Opinion polls in the summer of 1940 indicated that a majority of Americans did not want the country involved in Europe's wars. Yet FDR's military and State Department leaders agreed that a victorious Nazi Germany would threaten the national security of the United States. They felt that Americans needed a call to action.

McCollum would be an essential part of this plan. His code name was F-2. He oversaw the routing of communications intelligence to FDR from early 1940 to December 7, 1941, and provided the President with intelligence reports on Japanese military and diplomatic strategy. Every intercepted and decoded Japanese military and diplomatic report destined for the White House went through the Far East Asia section of ONI, which he oversaw. The section served as a clearinghouse for all categories of intelligence reports, not only on Japan but on all the other nations of eastern Asia.

Each report prepared by McCollum for the President was based on radio intercepts gathered and decoded by a worldwide network of American military cryptographers and radio intercept operators. McCollum's office was an element of Station US, a secret American cryptographic center located at the main naval headquarters at 18th Street and Constitution Avenue N.W., about four blocks from the White House.

Few people in America's government or military knew as much about Japan's activities and intentions as Lieutenant Commander Arthur H. McCollum. He felt that war with Japan was inevitable and that the United States should provoke it at a time which suited US interests. In his October 1940 memorandum McCollum advocated eight actions that he predicted would lead to a Japanese attack on the United States:

Make an arrangement with Britain for the use of British bases in the Pacific, particularly Singapore.

Make an arrangement with Holland for the use of base facilities and acquisition of supplies in the Dutch East Indies [now Indonesia].

Give all possible aid to the Chinese government of Chiang Kai-shek.

Send a division of long-range heavy cruisers to the Orient, Philippines, or Singapore.

Send two divisions of submarines to the Orient.

Keep the main strength of the US Fleet, now in the Pacific, in the vicinity of the Hawaiian Islands.

Insist that the Dutch refuse to grant Japanese demands for undue economic concessions, particularly oil.

Completely embargo all trade with Japan, in collaboration with a similar embargo imposed by the British Empire.

McCollum's eight-action memo was dated October 7, 1940, and was addressed and forwarded to two of Roosevelt's most trusted military advisors: Navy captains Walter S. Anderson and Dudley W. Knox. Anderson was the Director of the Office of Naval Intelligence and had direct White House access to FDR. Knox was a naval strategist and chief of the ONI library. He served as mentor to Admiral Ernest J. King, another of the President's military advisors in 1940-41 and commander of the Navy's Atlantic Squadron (later the Atlantic Fleet). Knox agreed with McCollum's eight actions and immediately forwarded the memorandum to Anderson with this restrained comment: "I concur in your courses of action. We must be ready on both sides and probably strong enough to care for both." He recognized Britain's precarious military position: "It is unquestionably to our general interest that Britain be not licked. Just now she has a stalemate and probably can't do better." Knox did not discuss maneuvering Japan into committing an overt act of war, though he cautioned: "We should not precipitate anything in the Orient."

The paper trail of the McCollum memo ends with the Knox endorsement. Although the proposal was addressed to Anderson, no specific record has been found by the author indicating whether he or Roosevelt actually ever saw it. However, a series of secret presidential routing logs plus collateral intelligence information in Navy files offer conclusive evidence that they did see it. Beginning the very next day, with FDR's involvement, McCollum's proposals were systematically put into effect.

Throughout 1941, it seems, provoking Japan into an overt act of war was the principal policy that guided FDR's actions toward Japan. Army and Navy directives containing the "overt act" phrase were sent to Pacific commanders. Roosevelt's cabinet members, most notably Secretary of War Henry Stimson, are on record favoring the policy, according to Stimson's diary. Stimson's diary entries of 1941 place him with nine other Americans who knew or were associated with this policy of provocation during 1941.

Roosevelt's "fingerprints" can be found on each of McCollum's proposals. One of the most shocking was Action D, the deliberate deployment of American warships within or adjacent to the territorial waters of Japan. During secret White House meetings, Roosevelt personally took charge of Action D. He called the provocations "pop-up" cruises: "I just want them to keep popping up here and there and keep the Japs guessing. I don't mind losing one or two cruisers, but do not take a chance on losing five or six." Admiral Husband Kimmel, the Pacific Fleet commander, objected to the pop-up cruises, saying: "It is ill-advised and will result in war if we make this move."

One of the catalysts for Action D may have been British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. On October 4, 1940, he requested that a squadron of US cruisers be sent to Singapore. McCollum included the request as a suggestion in his eight-action memo. As it turned out, however, no cruisers were sent to Singapore.

From March through July 1941, White House records show that FDR ignored international law and dispatched naval task groups into Japanese waters on three such pop-up cruises. One of the most provocative was a sortie into the Bungo Strait southeast of Honshu, the principal access to Japan's Inland Sea. The strait separates the home islands of Kyushu and Shikoku, and was a favored operational area for the warships of the Imperial Japanese Navy in 1941.

Japan's naval ministry registered a protest with Ambassador Joseph Grew in Tokyo: "On the night of July 31, 1941, Japanese fleet units at anchor in Sukumo Bay (in the Bungo Strait, off the island of Shikoku) picked up the sound of propellers approaching Bungo Channel from the eastward. Duty destroyers of the Japanese navy investigated and sighted two darkened cruisers that disappeared in a southerly direction behind a smoke screen when they were challenged." The protest concluded: "Japanese naval officers believe the vessels were United States cruisers."

Action D was very risky and could have resulted in a loss of American lives approaching that of Pearl Harbor. In the end, however, no shots were fired during the cruises. It would take not just one, but all eight of McCollum's proposals to accomplish that.

Two major decisions involving Japan and the Far East took place on October 8, 1940 -- the day after McCollum wrote his memo. First, the State Department told Americans to evacuate Far East countries as quickly as possible. Then President Roosevelt brought about Action F -- keep the United States Fleet based in Hawaiian waters -- during an extended Oval Office luncheon with the fleet's commander, Admiral James O. Richardson, and former Chief of Naval Operations Admiral William D. Leahy, a favored presidential confidant. When Richardson heard the proposal, he exploded: "Mr. President, senior officers of the Navy do not have the trust and confidence in the civilian leadership of this country that is essential for the successful prosecution of a war in the Pacific." Richardson did not approve of Roosevelt's plan to place the fleet in harm's way. He strongly disagreed with two of FDR's lunchtime points: 1. FDR's willingness to sacrifice a ship of the Navy in order to provoke what he called a Japanese "mistake," and 2. Richardson quoted the President as saying: "Sooner or later the Japanese would commit an overt act against the United States and the nation would be willing to enter the war."

After Richardson and Leahy left the Oval Office luncheon, dishes were cleared and reporters were ushered in for a 4:00 p.m. press conference. The ever-affable FDR used humor to lead reporters astray:

Q: Can you tell us anything, Mr. President, about your conference this afternoon with Admiral Richardson and Admiral Leahy?

THE PRESIDENT: Oh, we were just studying maps.

Q: Did the conference touch upon frontiers in the Far East?

THE PRESIDENT: We studied maps.

Q: Pacific maps?

THE PRESIDENT: We studied maps and are learning geography.

Q: Were they mostly in the Eastern Hemisphere?

THE PRESIDENT: What?

Q: We thought mostly maps of the Eastern Hemisphere.

THE PRESIDENT: All three hemispheres.

Q: O.K.(Laughter)

For Richardson, the safety of his men and warships was paramount and the policy was no laughing matter. Richardson stood up to Roosevelt. Doing so ended his naval career. On October 26, 1940, a White House leak to the Washington-basedKiplinger Newsletterpredicted that Richardson would be removed as commander-in-chief.

The admiral was relieved of his command on February 1, 1941, during a major restructuring of the Navy. The sea command held by Richardson -- Commander in Chief, United States Fleet (CINCUS) -- was modified. In his restructuring, Roosevelt approved a two-ocean Navy and created the Atlantic Fleet and the Pacific Fleet. Skipping over more senior naval officers the President picked Rear Admiral Husband Kimmel to head the Pacific Fleet and promoted him to four-star rank. The job had been offered to Rear Admiral Chester Nimitz in the fall of 1940, but Nimitz "begged off" because he lacked seniority.

Roosevelt had carefully selected and placed naval officers in key fleet-command positions who would not obstruct his provocation policies. One of them was Admiral Harold Stark, his chief of naval operations since August 1939, an all too faithful servant of the President. Outgoing Admiral Richardson criticized Stark as "professionally negligent" for kowtowing to FDR and agreeing to place the fleet in jeopardy. He said Stark had been derelict and had suffered a major professional lapse due to "taking orders from above." In Richardson's opinion, Stark could have protested the orders to keep the fleet at Pearl Harbor or at least questioned the policy in proper but forceful fashion. After the success of the December 7 attack, Richardson claimed FDR turned his back on Stark: "The President said that he did not give a damn what happened to Stark so long as he was gotten out of Washington as soon as practical."

There is no evidence that Admiral Kimmel knew of the action plans advocated by McCollum, because Admiral Richardson never told him of them. "The Roosevelt strategy of maneuvering the Japanese into striking the first blow at America was unknown to us," Kimmel wrote in his book,Admiral Kimmel's Story,published in 1954. His first suspicions that someone in high office in Washington had consciously pursued a policy that led straight to Pearl Harbor "did not occur to him until after December 7, 1941." Kimmel said he accepted the command of the Pacific Fleet "in the firm belief that the Navy Department would supply me promptly with all pertinent information available and particularly with all information that indicated an attack on the fleet at Pearl Harbor."

Not until Japan surrendered in 1945 did Richardson break his four-year vow of silence and turn on Stark. He said he shared Kimmel's belief and he denounced Stark's failure in harsh terms: "I consider 'Betty' Stark, in failing to ensure that Kimmel was furnished all the information available from the breaking of Japanese dispatches, to have been to a marked degree professionally negligent in carrying out his duties as Chief of Naval Operations." Richardson continued: "This offense compounded, since in writing Stark had assured the Commander-in-Chief of the United States Fleet twice that the Commander-in-Chief was being kept advised on all matters within his own knowledge." Richardson cited Stark's promise: "You may rest assured that just as soon as I get anything of definite interest, I shall fire it along."

Kimmel received his promotion to admiral and was designated CINCPAC (Commander in Chief, Pacific Fleet). Then, depending upon their missions, forces were either assigned to the Atlantic Fleet, whose commander was Admiral Ernest J. King as CINCLANT, to the Pacific Fleet with Kimmel as CINCPAC, or to the small Asiatic Fleet, commanded by Admiral Thomas Hart in Manila as CINCAF.

Richardson's removal on February 1, 1941, strengthened the position of McCollum. Only five months earlier, in mid-September 1940, Germany and her Axis partner, Italy, had signed a mutual-assistance alliance with Japan. The Tripartite Pact committed the three partners to assist each other in the event of an attack on any one of them. McCollum saw the alliance as a golden opportunity. If Japan could be provoked into committing an overt act of war against the United States, then the Pact's mutual assistance provisions would kick in. It was a back-door approach: Germany and Italy would come to Japan's aid and thus directly involve the United States in the European war.

McCollum predicted a domino effect if Germany overwhelmed Britain. He was certain that Canada and the British territories in Central and South America and in the Caribbean would succumb to some degree of Nazi control. The strategic danger to the United States was from Germany, not Japan. In his eight-action memorandum, McCollum cited these six military factors in promoting his proposals:

All of continental Europe was under the military control of the German-Italian Axis.

Only the British Empire actively opposed the growing world dominance of the Axis powers.

Axis propaganda successfully promoted American indifference to the European war.

United States security in the Western Hemisphere was threatened by the Axis fomenting revolution in Central and South American countries.

Upon the defeat of England, the United States could expect an immediate attack from Germany.

Warships of the Royal Navy would fall under the control of the Axis when the British were defeated.

His dire predictions were undoubtedly right. The number one problem for the United States, according to McCollum, was mobilizing public support for a declaration of war against the Axis powers. He saw little chance that Congress would send American troops to Europe. Over the objections of the majority of the populace, who still felt that European alarmists were creating much ado about nothing, he called for the Administration to create what he called "more ado": "It is not believed," wrote McCollum, "that in the present state of political opinion the United States government is capable of declaring war against Japan without more ado."

His solution to the political stalemate: use the eight proposed actions to provoke Japan into committing an overt act of war against the United States, thus triggering military responses from the two other signers of the Tripartite Pact. An allusion to McCollum's eight actions was recorded by Assistant Secretary of State Breckenridge Long. He wrote that on October 7, 1940, he learned of a series of steps involving the US Navy and that one included concentrating the fleet at Honolulu to be ready for any eventuality. "It looks to me as if little by little we will face a situation which will bring us into conflict with Japan," Long wrote in his diary.

A link to some of McCollum's provocations surfaced earlier in 1940 but did not produce a written directive. McCollum's proposal, triggered by the Tripartite Pact, is the only verifiable evidence of the American policy. The links started in May 1940, when FDR met with Secretary of State Cordell Hull and Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox and discussed permanently basing the United States Fleet in Hawaii. Their suggestion raised the immediate ire of Richardson, who began a five-month argument to return the fleet to the West Coast. He lost the battle on October 8, a day after McCollum wrote his memorandum.

Earlier in 1940, an influential citizens' group urged withholding war materials from Japan as punishment for what they perceived as her aggression in China. But their embargo advocacy called for stopping the Japan-China conflict -- not enticing an overt act of war.

Arthur McCollum continued his close ties to Japan. In 1928, the Navy sent him back to Tokyo, this time as a language instructor. The thirty-year-old McCollum taught a Japanese language class that included three other officers of about the same age. All four were destined to provide FDR with secret intelligence on Japanese war preparations during the 1940-41 prelude to Pearl Harbor. They were also to become lifelong friends.

Eventually these four men became leading naval intelligence officers in World War II: Joseph J. Rochefort, cofounder of the Navy's communication intelligence section; Edwin Layton, the intelligence officer for the Pacific Fleet, 1940-45; Lieutenant Commander Ethelbert Watts, as assistant to McCollum in 1940-41; and McCollum himself, head of the Far East desk of the Office of Naval Intelligence. Every pre-Pearl Harbor intercept of Japanese radio communications would pass through their hands. Rochefort became commander of Station HYPO, the combat intelligence center for the Pacific Fleet, one of America's most important cryptographic centers, at the Pearl Harbor Naval Yard. (HYPO, a part of the Navy's phonetic alphabet, stood for the letter H -- Hawaii.) McCollum and Watts supervised the communications intelligence pipeline to Roosevelt. Layton directed information to the Pacific Fleet commanders: Richardson in 1940, Kimmel in 1941, and Nimitz in 1942-45.

Naval intelligence established a secret delivery system for Japanese military and diplomatic intelligence for Roosevelt in the winter of 1940. McCollum was the distribution officer on 151 routing slips found by the author in the National Archives. These Navy routing slips provide a trail to a massive collection of Army and Navy documents that resulted from monitoring Japanese communications and that were available to Roosevelt and key members of his Administration between February 1940 and December 7, 1941. Sometimes when he had a hot item McCollum personally delivered the report to FDR; otherwise the President's naval aide made the delivery. This twenty-two-month monitoring program allowed the American government to anticipate and then study Japan's reactions to the provocations advocated by McCollum.

McCollum dispatched his first intelligence reports to the White House on February 23, 1940. There were two, both in a diplomatic code. McCollum marked both: "Original to Aide to President" and sent them to FDR. At the time, the President and seven members of his staff, including naval aide Captain Daniel J. Callaghan, had reached the midpoint of an eighteen-day fishing cruise aboard the cruiser USSTuscaloosain Pacific waters off the west coast of Panama. Naval seaplanes landed alongside the warship and delivered the documents to Callaghan.

In the first message, Roosevelt learned that Japan was applying diplomatic pressure to obtain oil export rights in Portuguese Timor, a small island east of the Dutch East Indies. The other dealt with Japanese Army plans to send "advisors" to Bolivia, which had vast resources of tin needed by Japan's military-industrial complex. McCollum noted that both reports were based on "highly reliable information," a standard oblique reference to intercepted communications.

Extraordinary secrecy surrounded the delivery system. The Japanese intercepts destined for FDR were placed in special folders. Captain Callaghan as naval aide was responsible for the safety of the documents. Roosevelt read the original copy but did not retain any of the intercepts. Each original was eventually returned to the folder and stored in McCollum's safe at Station US in Washington. There they remained, available for White House review. Shortly after December 7, when Congressional critics began to question the Administration's failure to prevent the Hawaii attack, all records involving the Japanese radio intercept program -- including the White House route logs and their secret contents -- were locked away in vaults controlled by Navy communications officials.

During the spring and summer of 1940 the diplomatic intercepts provided valuable insights into Japanese foreign policy. Through the intercepts, FDR could follow Japan's continued pressure on Portugal to supply her Empire with raw materials from Timor, its colony in the East Indies. After Nazi armies conquered France in May 1940, Japan expanded her quest for raw materials and pushed for access to the French colony of Indochina, today's Vietnam.

That August, Hitler's Luftwaffe began all-out bombing of England, targeting airfields, aircraft factories, and radar stations. A massive attack by 2500 planes of the Luftwaffe hit London onAdler Tag(Eagle Day), August 16. The next day the Führer declared a total blockade of the British Isles. By August 31, Germany claimed victory in the Battle of Britain and Hitler began to assemble barges and ships for Operation Sea Lion, the invasion of Britain, which would never take place.

Roosevelt's third-term nomination heartened internationalist-minded Democrats at the party's convention in Chicago. He was forced to campaign against a Republican antiwar platform led by its nominee, Wendell Willkie. A Gallup Poll taken in early September showed that 88 percent of Americans agreed with the views of an isolationist bloc, led by aviation hero Charles Lindbergh and industrialist Henry Ford, that advocated staying away from Europe's wars. Yet Roosevelt outmaneuvered the isolationists and persuaded Congress to pass (by one vote) the Draft Act, then sent fifty World War I destroyers to England as part of what would become the Lend-Lease program of aid to the allied powers, including the Soviet Union. During the campaign, he promised American mothers and fathers: "Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars." But according to FDR biographer Robert Sherwood, the President assured members of his staff during a campaign swing through New England, "Of course, we'll fight if we are attacked. If somebody attacks us, then it isn't a foreign war, is it?" McCollum's eight-action memo would soon make the President's words a reality.

McCollum's concept for his memo's Action F -- keeping the fleet in Hawaiian waters -- had its beginning in April 1940, when major portions of the US fleet moved from their West Coast bases and joined warships of the Hawaiian Detachment (later named the Pacific Fleet) for an annual training exercise. Once the exercise was completed, Admiral Richardson planned to send the fleet (less the Hawaiian Detachment) back to the West Coast.

The fleet never returned. Washington slowly put the brakes on Richardson's plan and issued specious explanations for keeping the fleet in Hawaii. Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles answered Richardson's objections by predicting a "diplomatic disaster" if the fleet returned to the Pacific Coast. In late April, Welles' rationale was touched on in a message sent to Richardson by Admiral Stark, who offered his own version of the potential "diplomatic disaster." He told Richardson the fleet might receive instructions to remain in Hawaiian waters "in view of the possibility of Italy becoming an active belligerent and maybe you won't."

There was no adequate explanation for connecting Italian threats to the United States and basing the fleet in Hawaii. The "might" and "maybe" in the dispatches made no sense to Richardson. He requested a meeting directly with Roosevelt. The admiral disagreed with what he sensed was the "Europe First" priority in the White House.

As commander of America's major sea command, Richardson's first duty was to carry out the orders of Roosevelt and his military chiefs. He reluctantly obeyed the orders but stated his objections for the record. He would not sacrifice his ships and men to what he saw as a flawed policy. Richardson listed five objections to basing the fleet in Hawaii:

Lack of fundamental training facilities.

Lack of large-scale ammunition and fuel supplies.

Lack of support craft such as tugs and repair ships.

Morale problems of men kept away from their families.

Lack of overhaul facilities such as dry docking and machine shops.

He objected in vain. Roosevelt wanted the fleet kept in Hawaiian waters. All Admiral Richardson received from his protests were more indecisive orders from the administration. A dispatch of May 4 is an example:

IT LOOKS PROBABLE BUT NOT FINAL THAT THE FLEET WILL REMAIN IN HAWAIIAN WATERS FOR A SHORT TIME AFTER MAY 9TH.

He was particularly displeased on May 7, 1940, when he was ordered to issue a press release saying that he had asked to keep the fleet in Hawaii. "There was no logical reason for me to make such a request," Richardson wrote. "It made a perfect nitwit out of me."

The rationale behind the directives became even less convincing on May 15, when the warships were ordered to "stay in Hawaiian waters for some time." Richardson thought he had a chance to dissuade Roosevelt and asked for a meeting in the White House. The two met alone for lunch on July 8, 1940. The meeting was a disappointment for Richardson. "I came away with the impression that, despite his spoken word, the President was fully determined to put the United States into the war if Great Britain could hold out until he was reelected." But the admiral gave no details of the White House conversation except to say that FDR had promised not to send the fleet to the Far East under "any foreseeable conditions."

In the "illogical basing of the fleet at Hawaii," Admiral Richardson saw a disaster in the making. He was responsible for 69,000 sailors under his Pacific command, and he grew increasingly alarmed at using them and his 217 ships in what he saw as a provocative scheme. He asked, "Are we here as a stepping-off place for belligerent activity?" Exasperated, he complained, "The President and Mr. Hull [Secretary of State Cordell Hull] never seem to take it into consideration that Japan is led by military men, who evaluate military moves, largely on a military basis." Richardson missed the point. White House strategy was based precisely on the premise that Japan's militant right wing would push for an act of force against the United States. Though he got nowhere with Roosevelt, Richardson bided his time.

During midsummer of 1940, with his third-term presidential campaign in mind, Roosevelt issued a licensing plan -- McCollum's proposals had not yet been adopted -- that appeared to curtail Japanese access to petroleum products and scrap iron in America. The San FranciscoCall-Bulletinphotographed stevedores in July and October 1940 at San Francisco docks, loading the Japanese vesselsTasukawa MaruandBordeau Maruwith scrap iron, an apparent violation of FDR's embargo. The ships loaded up with tons of scrap iron, slipped out through the Golden Gate, and headed for Japan.

The oil-licensing system was also a sham in that it did not apply to the refineries on America's West Coast. The White House essentially allowed Japan to obtain petroleum supplies sufficient to maintain its ability to make war. Japan's consul-general in San Francisco assured his government that the Roosevelt administration was not enforcing the embargo; oil and gasoline supplies were available. "All our export permits have been granted. These American agencies from whom the oil is bought go ahead and make suitable arrangements with the government authorities at Washington."

The consul-general wrote that he had purchased "special blend crude oil" and easily evaded Roosevelt's embargo. He then detailed Japanese purchases of over 44,000 tons (321,000 barrels) from the Associated Oil Company. In concluding his secret dispatch, the consul-general told Japan's military leaders: "American oil dealers in the San Francisco area selling to Mitsui and Mitsubishi, of which the principal one is the Associated Oil Company, feel that there will be no difficulty about continuing the shipment of ordinary gasoline to Japan."

The consul-general's "no difficulty" dispatch was routed to FDR on September 16, 1940. But no one in the White House enforced the petroleum embargo. Instead, export of oil to Japan received the green light. Japanese oil and gasoline tankers, with the tacit approval of the Administration, rushed back and forth across the Pacific loading up at oil refineries in Pacific Coast ports. Naval radio direction finders, on orders from Washington, tracked the tankers to the Japanese naval oil depot at Tokuyama, located at the southern tip of Honshu on the Suo Nada, an arm of the Inland Sea.

Between July 1940 and April 1941, during a period when American petroleum supplies were supposedly under embargo, nearly 9,200,000 barrels of gasoline were licensed for export to Japan. Approval for 2,000,000 additional barrels was pending late in April 1941. From October 1940 to December 1941, the Japanese tankers were under constant electronic surveillance by the Navy. Washington closely followed the tankers.

Transportation of the petroleum to Japan was monitored at Station SAIL, control center for the Navy's West Coast Communications Intelligence Network (WCCI) near Seattle (SAIL being the Navy phonetic for the letter S -- Seattle). Commercial radio facilities of Mackay Radio & Telegraph, Pan American Airways, RCA Communications, and Globe Wireless provided information used in the surveillance. This vast monitoring network extended along the entire West Coast from Imperial Beach, California, to Dutch Harbor, Alaska.

The surveillance yielded important intelligence for the White House by tracing the movement of oil supplies, watching for signs of Japan withdrawing merchant vessels from the world's oceans, and identifying the radio transmitter characteristics of each vessel. Code breakers at SAIL and the West Coast network produced Tracking Chart 1 based on radio-direction-finding reports that traced the Pacific Ocean routes taken by eight of Japan's tankers from October 1 to December 6, 1940. From the tracking chart, US Navy officials learned that most of the petroleum was obtained from the Associated Oil Company refinery at Port Costa, California, and transported directly to Tokuyama -- the principal oil storage facility for warships. President Roosevelt obtained his confirmation that Japan was evading his embargo from the consul-general's "no difficulty" intercept.

Naval intercept operators easily followed the tankers. During their round-trip voyages, they diligently used their radio transmitters and provided their positions to the Navy's radio direction finders. Navy intelligence in San Francisco identified all the tankers by their Japanese radio call signs. Two of the tankers, theKyokuto Maruand the HIMJSShiriya,were destined to be included in the Pearl Harbor strike force. Both vessels sailed into San Francisco Bay throughout 1940 and 1941, picked up their cargoes of American oil, and returned to fill the Tokuyama storage facility. A year later, theKyokuto Maru'sradio signal was instantly identified when she became the flagship of the eight-vessel tanker train that refueled the warships of the Pearl Harbor force.Maruderives from the Japanese wordmaru,meaning "circle." Merchant ships, but not warships, have the word added to their name for good luck as they encounter the perils of the high seas in the belief thatMaruscomplete the voyage to the distant port and return to a joyous homecoming, thus completing the circle. In 1940 and 1941, theKyokuto Maruwould make many circles between ports in America and Japan.

During the last days of September and first week of October 1940, a team of Army and Navy cryptographers solved the two principal Japanese government code systems: Purple, the major diplomatic code, and portions of theKaigun Ango,a series of twenty-nine separate Japanese naval operational codes used for radio contact with warships, merchant vessels, naval bases, and personnel in overseas posts, such as naval attachés. Much has been made of the Purple Code and far too little of the navy codes. Historians have made misleading references to the Purple Code by confusing its use and purpose. It was used solely by the Japanese Foreign Ministry for encoding diplomatic messages dispatched by radio between Tokyo and selected overseas embassies and consulates. In the United States, Japan issued the Purple system to its Washington embassy and to its consulate in Manila, but not to the Honolulu consulate. The Purple Code was never used by the Japanese Navy.

Leading historical publications in the United States have confused readers by publishing erroneous details on Purple. The truth of Pearl Harbor is found in the naval codes, not in the diplomatic codes. As recently as December 1997, Naval History, a magazine published by the US Naval Institute, printed an article which claimed that the American naval victory at Midway resulted from breaking the Japanese Purple cipher. In fact, however, the Midway victory came about because US Navy cryptographers had broken Japan's Code Book D, one of the twenty-nine code systems in theKaigun Ango.Throughout 1941 and most of 1942, United States naval cryptographers and intercept operators referred to Code Book D as the 5-Num code, because a group of five numbers represented a Japanese word or phrase. Japan's navy assigned thousands of different five-number combinations to represent their language for radio transmission purposes. On November 19, 1941, the five-number group for the carrierAkagi,the flagship of Japan's Hawaii force, was 28494. It was up to US Navy code breakers to solve the meaning of 28494 (and subsequent revisions). And they did, starting in October 1940.

Cryptographers have their own jargon. To them, "recovered value" or "solution" means that they had solved and knew the meaning of 28494. In addition to the 5-Num code, American cryptographers solved and could recover values from three other code systems of theKaigun Ango:Merchant Marine Code (Code Book S); radio call signs(Yobidashi Fugo)issued to every category of Japanese warships, units, individual officers, and vessels of the Japanese Merchant Marine, known asMarus;and Japan's naval movement code in which warships,Marus,and individuals reported their arrivals, departures, and destinations. These four naval systems were used by Japan's navy for radio messages in the pre-Pearl Harbor period and throughout the Pacific War. The US success in solving the diplomatic and naval code systems was a closely guarded American secret. President Roosevelt regularly received copies of Japanese messages decoded and translated from both the Purple Code and theKaigun Ango.

Controversy surrounds the timing of the successful decryption of the four code systems of theKaigun Angoby American code breakers. Testimony given to various Pearl Harbor investigations suggests that the navy codes were not solved until Spring 1942. The author's research proves otherwise. Their solution emerged in the early fall of 1940, at about the same time Arthur McCollum's memorandum reached the Oval Office.

Rear Admiral Royal Ingersoll, Assistant Chief of Naval Operations, revealed America's ability to detect and predict Japan's naval war strategy and tactical operations to the US Navy's two Pacific commanders, Admirals James Richardson and Thomas Hart, in a letter dated October 4, 1940. Ingersoll was specific: The Navy began tracking the movement and location of Japanese warships in October 1940. "Every major movement of the Orange (America's code name for Japan) Fleet has been predicted, and a continuous flow of information concerning Orange diplomatic activities has been made available." He said that Navy cryptographers had solved the Japanese naval merchant ship code. "The system itself is 99 percent readable," reported Ingersoll.

Japan's main naval radio system, the "Operations Code" (the 5-Num code) remained a problem for cryptographers. A full solution was expected by April 1941. "Recovery was well defined," wrote Ingersoll, "but demanded laborious work sometimes requiring from only an hour to as many as several days to decode each message." To speed up decryption time, the Navy constructed a special decoding machine. Mystery still surrounds the workings of the machine -- as is typical of nearly sixty years of Navy secrecy concerning all aspects of the 5-Num code. The machine has not been turned over to the National Archives. Neither have the original Japanese naval intercepts in the 5-Num code that were obtained by US Navy cryptographers. The author contends that this extraordinary secrecy, which still remains in effect in 1999, is intended to distance the American government and particularly FDR from foreknowledge of Japanese attack plans.

But Ingersoll's 1940 letter, sheds a light on the 5-Num system that was never intended by the pre-Pearl Harbor naval censors. Recovery was effected before April. By the end of January 1941, President Roosevelt was on the receiving list of theKaigun Ango,according to the White House route logs prepared by Arthur McCollum.

On January 30, Station CAST, the navy's Philippine cryptographic center on Corregidor Island in Manila Bay, placed the first Japanese military intelligence in FDR's hands. It informed Roosevelt of a large build-up of Japanese warships in the South China Sea off French Indochina. It was an ominous beginning.

Excerpted from Day of Deceit by Robert B. Stinnett
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