ZGram - 12/3/2002 - "The Pearl Harbor Deception"

[irimland@zundelsite.org]

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny

December 3, 2002

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

Revisionism getting to be a fashion:

The Pearl Harbor Deception

By Robert B. Stinnett*

Two questions about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor have ignited 
a controversy that has burned for 60 years: Did U.S. naval 
cryptographers crack the Japanese naval codes before the attack? Did 
Japanese warships and their commanding admirals break radio silence 
at sea before the attack?


If the answer to both is "no," then Pearl Harbor was indeed a 
surprise attack described by President Franklin D. Roosevelt as a 
"Day of Infamy." The integrity of the U.S. government regarding Pearl 
Harbor remains solid.


But if the answer is "yes," then hundreds of books, articles, movies, 
and TV documentaries based on the "no" answer-and the integrity of 
the federal government-go down the drain. If the Japanese naval codes 
were intercepted, decoded, and translated into English by U.S. naval 
cryptographers prior to Pearl Harbor, then the Japanese naval attacks 
on American Pacific military bases were known in advance among the 
highest levels of the American government.


During the 60 years, the truthful answers were secreted in bomb-proof 
vaults, withheld from two congressional Pearl Harbor investigations 
and from the American people. As recently as 1995, the Joint 
Congressional Investigation conducted by Sen. Strom Thurmond and Rep. 
Floyd Spence, was denied access to a naval storage vault in Crane, 
Indiana, containing documents that could settle the questions.


Americans were told of U.S. cryptographers' success in cracking 
pre-Pearl Harbor Japanese diplomatic codes, but not a word has been 
officially uttered about their success in cracking Japanese military 
codes.


In the mid-1980s I learned that none of the hundreds of thousands of 
Japanese military messages obtained by the U.S. monitor stations 
prior to Pearl Harbor were introduced or discussed during the 
congressional investigation of 1945-46. Determined to penetrate the 
secrets of Pearl Harbor, I filed Freedom of Information (FOIA) 
requests with the US Navy. Navy officials in Washington released a 
few pre-Pearl Harbor documents to me in 1985. Not satisfied by the 
minuscule release, I continued filing FOIAs.


Finally in 1993, the U.S. Naval Security Group Command, the custodian 
of the Crane Files, agreed to transfer the records to National 
Archives in Washington, D.C. In the winter of 1993-94 the files were 
transported by truck convoy to a new government facility built on the 
College Park campus of the University of Maryland inside the 
Washington Beltway, named Archives II. Mr. Clarence Lyons, then head 
of the Military Reference Branch, released the first batch of Crane 
Files to me in the Steny Hoyer Research Center at Archives II in 
January 1995.


Apparently, the pre-Pearl Harbor records had not been seen or 
reviewed since 1941. Though refiled in pH-safe archival boxes by 
Lyons' staff, some of the Crane documents were covered with dust, 
tightly bunched together in the boxes and tied with unusual waxed 
twine. Lyons confirmed the records were received from the U.S. Navy 
in that condition.


It took me a year to evaluate the records. The information revealed 
in the files was astonishing. It disclosed a Pearl Harbor story 
hidden from the public. I believed the story should be told to the 
American people. The editors of Simon & Schuster/The Free Press 
published Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor on 
December 7, 1999.


Day of Deceit was well received by media book reviews and the on-line 
booksellers, Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.com, earning a 70 percent 
public approval rating. Day of Deceit continues among the top ten 
bestsellers in the non-fiction Pearl Harbor book category, according 
to Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.com.


About 30 percent of the reviews have discounted the book's 
revelations. The leaders of the dispute include Stephen Budiansky, 
Edward Drea, and David Kahn, all of whom have authored books or 
articles on code breaking. To bolster their pre-Pearl Harbor 
theories, the trio violated journalistic ethics and distorted the 
U.S. Navy's pre-Pearl Harbor paper trail. Their efforts cannot be 
ignored. The trio has close ties to the National Security Agency, the 
overseer of U.S. naval communications files. Kahn has appeared before 
NSA seminars. The NSA has not honored my FOIA requests to disclose 
honorariums paid the seminar participants but has released records 
that confirm Kahn has been a participant.


Immediately after Day of Deceit appeared in bookstores in 1999, NSA 
began withdrawing pre-Pearl Harbor documents from the Crane Files 
housed in Archives II. This means the government decided to continue 
60 years of Pearl Harbor censorship. As of January 2002, over two 
dozen NSA withdrawal notices have triggered the removal of Pearl 
Harbor documents from public inspection.


The number of pages in the withdrawn documents appears to be in the 
hundreds. Among the records withdrawn are those of Admiral Harold R. 
Stark, the 1941 Chief of Naval Operations, as well as crypto records 
authored by Commander Joseph J. Rochefort, the chief cryptographer 
for the Pacific Fleet at the time of Pearl Harbor. Under the Crane 
File transfer agreement with National Archives, NSA has the legal 
right to withdraw any document based on national defense concerns.


Concurrent with the NSA withdrawals, Budiansky, with the aid of Kahn 
and Drea, began a two-year media campaign to discredit the paper 
trail of the U.S. naval documents that form the backbone of Day of 
Deceit. One of the most egregious examples of ethical violations 
appeared in an article by Kahn published in the New York Review of 
Books on November 2, 2000. In that article, Kahn attempted to bolster 
his contention that Japanese admirals and warships observed radio 
silence while en route to attack American Pacific bases. Kahn broke 
basic journalism ethics and rewrote a U.S. Naval Communication 
Summary prepared by Commander Rochefort at his crypto center located 
in the Pearl Harbor Naval Yard.


About 1,000 intercepted Japanese naval radio messages formed the 
basis of each Daily Summary written by Rochefort and his staff. The 
Japanese communication intelligence data contained in the messages 
was summarized and delivered daily to Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, 
Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Fleet. Rochefort's summary of 
November 25, 1941 (Hawaii time) was not to Kahn's liking. It revealed 
the Commander Carriers of the Imperial Japanese Navy was not 
observing radio silence but was in "extensive communications" with 
other Japanese naval forces whose admirals directly commanded the 
forces involved in the Pearl Harbor attack. Because of the 
International Dateline, the "extensive communications" mentioned in 
the summary took place on November 26, 1941, Japan time, the exact 
day the Japanese carrier force began its journey to Hawaii.


In its entirety the Rochefort summary reads: "FOURTH FLEET-CinC. 
Fourth Fleet is still holding extensive communications with the 
commander Submarine Fleet, the forces at Jaluit and Commander 
Carriers. His other communications are with the Third, Fourth, and 
Fifth Base Forces."


The meaning of the summary is unequivocal: The commanders of the 
powerful Japanese invasion, submarine, and carrier forces did not 
observe radio silence as they maneuvered toward U.S. bases in Hawaii, 
Wake, and Guam Islands in the Central Pacific. Instead they used 
radio transmitters aboard their flagships and coordinated strategy 
and tactics with each other.


The summary corroborates earlier findings by Pulitzer Prize-winning 
historian John Toland. In the late 1970s, Toland interviewed 
personnel and obtained U.S. naval documents from San Francisco's 
Twelfth Naval District that disclosed that the "extensive 
communications" were intercepted by the radio direction finders of 
the U.S. Navy's West Coast Communications Intelligence Network. 
Doubleday published Toland's account in 1982 as Infamy: Pearl Harbor 
and its Aftermath.


Yet in his NYRoB article Kahn deleted portions of the Rochefort 
summary in the middle of the first sentence, profoundly diminishing 
its significance. Kahn's version: "Fourth Fleet is still holding 
extensive communications with the Commander Submarine Fleet."


Kahn violated basic journalism rules by deleting crucial words and 
not using eclipses to indicate a deletion. When I cited these ethical 
violations to the editors of the NYRoB, Kahn offered an excuse and 
implied that Rochefort's summary was too long. "I had to condense my 
review," he wrote.


Kahn probably believes his deletion was insignificant because he 
denies that the Commander Carriers were involved in the Pearl Harbor 
attack. "The force that attacked Hawaii was not that of the Commander 
Carriers but the First Air Fleet," he wrote in his reply to my 
Letter-to-the-Editor of the NYRoB (February 8, 2002). Kahn revealed 
his ignorance of the Japanese naval organization. The First Air Fleet 
operated under Commander Carriers, that is, Vice Admiral Chuichi 
Nagumo, who was in charge of the entire Hawaii Operation.


Captain A. James McCollum, USNR (Ret), who served in San Francisco's 
Twelfth Naval District intelligence office (and later on the 
intelligence staff of Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz) accused Kahn of 
committing "journalistic crimes." "That critic, David Kahn, seems to 
have deliberately distorted some facts and even altered 
quotations...," McCollum wrote in his letter to the editors of the 
NYRoB on February 14, 2001. The letter was never published.


Stephen Budiansky continued his media blitz in the Wall Street 
Journal. In a December 27, 2001 Letter-to-the-Editor of the Journal, 
Budiansky praised Kahn as "...widely regarded as the world's leading 
authority on the history of code breaking..." Then in following 
paragraphs, Budiansky mimicked Kahn and misreported the facts 
concerning the U.S. naval monitor station on Corregidor, known as 
CAST. He challenged the Day of Deceit account and wrote that CAST was 
located in Cavite, Philippines.


Budiansky's errors involving CAST reveal a poor understanding of U.S. 
naval communications intelligence operations. CAST was temporarily 
located at the Cavite Naval Base in 1936, then moved to Mariveles on 
the Bataan Peninsula. In October 1940 the station was relocated to 
Corregidor. The new quarters were located in an underground crypto 
center carved from the rock of Corregidor. CAST remained on the rock 
until the spring of 1942 when advancing Japanese troops forced its 
removal to Australia. Budiansky did not differentiate between the 
1940-41 U.S. naval broadcast radio center at Cavite and the U.S. navy 
cryptographic monitor station on Corregidor.


The mistakes of the Budiansky-Drea-Kahn team concerning Station CAST worsen.


In the same Wall Street Journal edition, Edward J. Drea, a retired 
U.S. Army historian, also wrote a misleading account of the crypto 
operations at CAST in November 1941. Mr. Drea challenged a CAST 
report dated November 16, 1941, by its commanding officer Lieutenant 
John M. Lietwiler who reported to Washington that his staff was 
"current" in intercepting, decoding, and translating the Japanese 
navy's Operation Code.


Lietwiler was a highly trained crypto expert in deciphering the 
Japanese navy's main operation code known to Japan in the fall of 
1941 as the Kaigun Ango-sho D, Ransuhyo nana (Navy Code Book D, 
random numbers table seven). He spent 1940 and most of 1941 learning 
the principles of decoding Code Book D from Agnes Meyer Driscoll, the 
brilliant Chief Civilian Cryptanalyst for the U.S. Navy. Ms. Driscoll 
was the first American to discover the solution of Code Book D, soon 
after Japan introduced it in June 1939.


Upon completing the Code Book D crypto course, Lietwiler was 
dispatched to CAST with the latest decoding details of Table Seven. 
He arrived and took command of CAST in September 1941. Lietwiler's 
expertise and devotion to his crypto duty meant nothing to Drea. In 
his letter, Drea demoted Lieutenant Lietwiler and described him as a 
"1941 writer."


Challenging my interpretation of Lietwiler's letter, Drea states: 
"Nowhere in the cited communications is the Japanese naval code 
mentioned." Drea is correct in the narrowest sense. To understand 
that Lietwiler was discussing the Japanese naval operations code 
requires a broader context.


Mr. Drea failed to comprehend Lietwiler's technical crypto language 
used in the letter. It was addressed to Lietwiler's counterpart in 
Washington, D.C., Lieutenant Lee W. Parke, another of the U.S. Navy's 
brilliant cryptographers. Parke had devised a crypto machine that 
automatically decoded the additive/subtractive columnar tables of 
Table Seven. Parke called his invention the JEEP IV and sent it to 
CAST by officer courier. It arrived on Corregidor on October 6, 1941, 
via the armed U.S. naval transport U.S.S. Henderson.


The construction of JEEP IV was specifically authorized by Rear 
Admiral Royal Ingersoll, Acting Chief of Naval Operations. In a memo 
dated October 4, 1940, Ingersoll wrote, referring to Code Book D: "an 
additive key cipher is employed in this code, and, although the 
method of recovery is well defined, the process is a laborious one, 
requiring from an hour to several days for each message. A machine is 
under construction which will aide in the mechanical part of the 
solution, but it must be accepted that current information will 
seldom be available immediately..." The Ingersoll memo directly 
connects the Lietwiler memo to the Japanese naval operations code.


Lietwiler refers explicitly to JEEP IV in the letter and adds that 
his Crypto Yeoman Albert Myers, Jr., bypassed JEEP IV and was able to 
"walk across" the many columnar tables of Code Book D. Readers of the 
Wall Street Journal should know that Code Book D used columnar random 
number Table Seven in the fall of 1941. If Mr. Drea had done more 
crypto homework, he would have known the purpose of JEEP IV. It is 
fully spelled out in U.S. Navy files. JEEP IV is derived from Parke's 
unit whose secret navy crypto designator was GYP (phonetic = jeep). 
But he failed to understand the esoteric language used by the two 
code breakers.


I could point out more errors by the trio, but I will limit myself to 
one more. They refer to errors in dates in Day of Deceit. The 
so-called date "errors" they cite are not "errors" but are related to 
the geography of the International Date Line. Like many easterners 
who have never been west of the Hudson River, the trio does not 
realize that November 25 in Hawaii is November 26 in Japan. The 
mid-ocean date change between America and Japan is known throughout 
the world. It is the result of geographers establishing the Date Line 
in the Mid-Pacific. America's day begins in Guam, not New York.


(Source:  http://www.independent.org/tii/news/021202Stinnett.html )