Now, some eleven hours later, the parade of officials finally ended, Donovan and Murrow found FDR alone sitting in semi-darkness, his face illuminated by a pool of light from a desk lamp. The room was still cluttered with the extra chairs. Stacks of books, piles of yellowed papers tied with string rested alongside the bookcases, and FDR’s ship models cast their shadows against the walls. Gathering dust in one corner stood an incongruous pipe organ. Removed from the President’s desk were the stamp album, magnifying glass, scissors, and stickers he had been working on when Knox’s call turned his world upside down. The reporter in Murrow noted that the President was now wearing a shapeless gray “sack jacket” and munching a sandwich washed down with a beer. FDR’s ashen pallor matched the jacket, and he appeared drained of energy. Still, Murrow remembered, “Never have I seen one so calm and so steady.” The President asked Murrow about morale in bomb-blasted London. Murrow’s response that Britain would hold out clearly pleased FDR. He had received a call earlier from Churchill and told the PM, “We’re all in the same boat now.”
FDR had before him the latest damage assessments from Pearl Harbor delivered by Admiral Stark. Over 350 Japanese torpedo and dive bombers had struck in three waves. Casualties were heavy and would ultimately total 2,403 Americans dead and 1,178 wounded. Much of the Pacific Fleet lay at the bottom of Pearl Harbor or in disemboweled ruin, the decks running red and strewn with bodies. The Navy’s losses totaled eighteen vessels, including the battleships Arizona, West Virginia, and California sunk, the Oklahoma capsized, and the Nevada run aground. The President turned to Donovan, speaking in cold rage, “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.” The ship losses seemed particularly personal to him. He still liked to refer to his years as assistant secretary as, “When I was in the Navy.” The losses suffered by the Air Corps were almost as staggering as the fleet’s. Nearly 350 planes had been destroyed or damaged. FDR pounded his fist on the desk. “They caught our planes on the ground, by God, on the ground!”
Pearl Harbor was an intelligence failure of stunning magnitude. Not only naval intelligence but all military intelligence had failed abysmally. The FBI failed. The fledgling Donovan organization failed, though on that night FDR never criticized Donovan’s performance. Rather, he told Donovan, “It’s a good thing that you got me started on this [intelligence business]… .” When, through Magic, the President, the secretaries of war and state, and the service chiefs were able to read what the Japanese ambassador and foreign minister were saying up to the moment the first torpedo struck the first American warship, with broken codes revealing that the Japanese had spies reporting on the fleet’s deployment at Pearl Harbor, how could the imminence of the attack have been missed? Why had both signal and human intelligence failed so totally?
The answer can be found only by examining how the intelligence available to the President was used, misused, or unused. In hindsight, a fairly straight line can be traced from clue to clue to an inevitable attack. If one seeks perhaps the earliest warning it was the message Ambassador Joseph Grew transmitted from Tokyo to Secretary Hull on January 27, 1941, over eleven months before the attack. “A member of my Embassy,” Grew cabled, “was told by my … colleague that from many quarters, including a Japanese one, he heard that a surprise mass attack on Pearl Harbor was planned by the Japanese military forces, in case of ‘trouble’ between Japan and the United States… . My colleague said that he was prompted to pass this on because it had come to him from many sources, although the plan seemed fantastic.” On the other hand, a Magic intercept of a Japanese transmission from Pearl Harbor to Tokyo dated February 15, just nineteen days after Grew’s message, predicted an American, not a Japanese threat: “Indications seem to be that the U.S. has decided to declare war on Japan within the next three weeks.”
China had continued to remain the sore point between the United States and Japan. The Japanese, as late as September 1941, continued to demand first, that the United States and Britain not increase their military position in the Far East; second, that the United States lift its embargo on oil; and third, that America stop aiding Chiang Kai-shek. The State Department had advised the administration “that adoption and application of a policy of imposing embargoes upon strategic exports to Japan would be … likely to lead to this country’s becoming involved in war.” War could likely have been averted since the United States could have lifted the oil embargo at no cost to itself. But FDR had stuck to the position that Japan must leave China; and this demand the Japanese could not abide. Thus, something of a diplomatic Kabuki dance leading inexorably toward war had followed.
By November, Japan had two key emissaries in Washington, the regular ambassador, Kichisaburo Nomura, and a special envoy, Saburo Kurusu. Kurusu had earlier served in the Japanese consulate in Chicago, where he married an American, Alice Little. At a press conference on his most recent return to the United States, Kurusu had sought to ingratiate himself with an American audience by saying, “I fully realize the difficulty of my task, making a tight scrum, I wish I could break through the line and make a touchdown.” Kurusu’s aide had to explain to baffled American reporters that “scrum” was a rugby term, and that the envoy had meant to say “huddle.”
Every communication, however secret, between the two diplomats and Tokyo during the buildup to Pearl Harbor was available to the President. A November 5 message classified “of utmost secrecy,” from the foreign office to the Washington embassy carried instructions in the event that a long-shot pending accord between Japan and the United States could be approved. This message, broken and translated the same day, set a suspiciously rigid deadline. “It is absolutely necessary that all arrangements for the signing of this agreement be completed by the 25th of this month,” the dispatch read. Behind this message, and unknown even to Nomura and Kurusu, was a decision reached by the Japanese cabinet, headed now by the tough new premier, General Hideki Tojo, to go to war if the Americans failed to meet the deadline.
FDR might have been warned of what was coming if one of his chief intelligence sources had possessed more imagination. During the late summer of 1941, the FBI chief in New York, Percy E. “Sam” Foxworth, arranged a meeting between his boss, J. Edgar Hoover, and a Yugoslav named Dusko Popov, recently arrived in the United States. Popov came from a wealthy family with far-flung business connections, which allowed him to pursue his burning passion, café society high life. In 1939, Johann Jebsen, with whom Popov had attended school in Germany and who now worked for the Abwehr, recruited the Yugoslav playboy as an agent. Popov was sent to spy in England, where he promptly revealed his Abwehr role to MI6. The British happily recruited him as a double agent. Abwehr officials were so pleased with the intelligence Popov fed them, fabricated by MI6, that they decided to send him to America to establish a spy network.
Popov arrived in the United States via neutral Portugal aboard a flying boat in August 1941. In order to carry out his double agent role without being arrested as an actual German spy, Popov would have to get Hoover’s approval to operate a bogus espionage ring. It was then that Sam Foxworth arranged for Hoover to meet Popov. What Popov had already revealed to Foxworth was extraordinary. He told him that his friend Jebsen and Baron Gronau, the German air attaché in Japan, had escorted Japanese naval officials to Taranto, Italy, to study one of the war’s most effective air raids. The Japanese wanted to learn how the British, in November 1940, had practically destroyed the Italian fleet in Taranto harbor by using torpedo planes launched from the aircraft carrier Illustrious. If that intelligence did not suggest Japanese interest in Pearl Harbor, Popov had stronger evidence. Before leaving Lisbon, the Abwehr gave him a lengthy list of questions to pursue while he was in America. Much of the questionnaire was general and predictable: He was to report on American troop movements, war production, shipping activity, and military base locations. But his most specific instructions, c
overing a third of the questionnaire and given “the highest priority,” dealt with Pearl Harbor. Popov was to travel to Hawaii to answer these queries: “Details about naval ammunition and mine depot on Isle of Kushua [Pearl Harbor]… . Is the Crater Punch Bowl [Honolulu] being used as an ammunition dump? … How far has the dredger work progressed at the entrance and in the east and southeast lock? Depth of water? … The pier installations, workshops, petrol installations, situation of dry dock No. 1 and of the new dry dock which is being built… . Reports about torpedo protection nets newly introduced in the British and USA Navy.” The Abwehr also wanted, clearly at the behest of the Japanese, sketches and the exact location of “Wickham” (Hickam), Wheeler, Luke, and “Kaneche” (Kaneohe) airfields.
J. C. Masterman, who headed the British XX (Double Cross) Committee that handled double agents like Popov, had also been given a copy of the questionnaire. Masterman concluded, “… [I]n the event of the United States being at war, Pearl Harbor would be the first point to be attacked… .” However, he did not report this conclusion to U.S. authorities because he did not want to appear to be another Briton nudging America toward war. The Americans, he believed, upon seeing this extraordinary document, would draw their own conclusion.
Just as extraordinary as Popov’s instructions was the form in which they had been communicated. The entire questionnaire had been reduced four hundred times normal to the size of a period by the microdot process developed by a German professor, Arnold Zapp.
Prior to meeting with J. Edgar Hoover, Foxworth warned Popov, “Mr. Hoover is a very virtuous man.” The New York chief believed the warning necessary because in the weeks that Popov had been waiting to see Hoover, he had used Abwehr money to indulge his pleasures to the hilt. He rented a penthouse apartment on Park Avenue and resumed an affair with the French actress Simone Simon. Another FBI report had Popov with a girlfriend in Florida, where the bureau threatened him with prosecution for violating the Mann Act in taking a woman across state lines for immoral purposes. Popov complained to a British intelligence agent, “If I bend over to smell a bowl of flowers, I scratch my nose on a microphone.”
For Hoover the meeting was hate at first sight. He disliked Slavs, along with Jews, Catholics, and blacks. Further, Hoover distrusted double agents. Popov was tall, handsome, suave, glib, high living, flashy, and a foreigner, everything that Hoover detested. The director had been shown the reports of Popov’s sexual escapades and, perhaps even more damning, learned that Popov had dared stray into Hoover’s favored night spot, the Stork Club in Manhattan. Here was a man who could commit, in Hoover’s eyes, the ultimate sin: He might embarrass the bureau. Under no circumstances would Hoover allow Popov to establish even a fake German spy ring in the United States. And he certainly was not going to let the man go to Pearl Harbor. Of all that Popov told him, the only thing that caught Hoover’s attention was revelation of the microdot process. The mechanics rather than the substance of Popov’s Abwehr instructions seized Hoover’s imagination. He cut short the meeting with the Yugoslav and told him, “I can catch spies without your or anyone else’s help… .” Like all double agents, “you’re begging for information to sell to your German friends so that you can make a lot of money and be a playboy.” Not only did Hoover dismiss Popov, but the competitive director refused to inform his intelligence rivals, MID, ONI, and COI, of what the Yugoslav had been told to look for at Pearl Harbor.
What Hoover did, on September 3, just days after seeing Popov, was to send a letter marked “strictly confidential,” through Pa Watson to FDR. It began, “I thought the President and you might be interested in the attached photographs which show one of the methods used by the German espionage system in transmitting messages to its agents.” Hoover had attached a copy of a telegram with two tiny smudges, which were the microdots. He also provided the President with a sampling of the questions contained in Popov’s instructions. Hoover made no mention that Popov had revealed the secret to him, making it appear that the microdot process had been discovered “in connection with a current investigation being made by the FBI.” The part of the microdot enlarged and translated for the President included questions about total U.S. monthly production of fighter planes, planes delivered to Britain, even “the air-training plan being followed in Canada.” But, astonishingly, Hoover included none of the pointed inquiries about Pearl Harbor, not a word about the numerous specific questions that would have alerted the President that the Japanese had an alarming interest in America’s major naval bastion in the Pacific. It was as if a lookout on the Titanic had alerted the captain to a rowboat to port while ignoring the iceberg to starboard. As for Dusko Popov, Hoover kicked him out of the country. He was allowed to go to Rio de Janeiro to carry on his double life there for MI6.
Bill Donovan, prior to Pearl Harbor, did forward to the President one item of critical intelligence. Malcolm R. Lovell, one of Donovan’s early recruits, reported to his chief a statement made to him by Dr. Hans Thomsen, the German chargé d’affaires in Washington. The diplomat had told Lovell, “If Japan goes to war with the United States, Germany will immediately follow suit.” Thomsen also told him, “Japan knows that unless the United States agrees to some reasonable terms in the Far East, Japan must face the threat of strangulation… . If Japan waits, it will be comparatively easy for the United States to strangle Japan. Japan is therefore forced to strike now… .” On November 13, Donovan had Thomsen’s statement hand-delivered to the President. Further evidence of Japan’s intent came in a Magic intercept of message Number 812, dated November 22, from Tokyo to Nomura and Kurusu in Washington, noting that the Japanese had extended their deadline for signing the agreement with the United States from November 25 to November 29. The foreign minister added, “The deadline absolutely cannot be changed. After that things are automatically going to happen.”
Admiral Stark, the Navy chief, sent a message to the Pacific Fleet on November 24, reading: “A surprise aggressive movement in any direction including attack on Philippines or Guam is a possibility.” At noon the next day, FDR called together his War Council in the Oval Office, including Hull, Stimson, Knox, Marshall, and Stark. The President, according to Stimson’s diary, predicted, “We were likely to be attacked perhaps (as soon as) next Monday [December 1], for the Japanese are notorious for making an attack without warning.” Stimson’s entry went on, “The question was how we should maneuver them into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves.”
Two days later, FDR obtained intelligence that a Japanese fleet was moving south from Shanghai. The same day the President received a memorandum from Admiral Stark classified “Secret” that warned, “Japan may attack: The Burma Road; Thailand; Malaya; the Netherlands East Indies; the Philippines; the Russian Maritime provinces.” That same November 27, Stark radioed the Pacific Fleet one of the key messages sent prior to the Pearl Harbor attack: “This dispatch is to be considered a war warning,” it read, “an aggressive move by Japan is expected within the next few days. The number and equipment of Japanese troops and the organization of Naval Task Forces indicates an amphibious expedition against either the Philippines, Thai or Kra Peninsula or possibly Borneo.”
Along with the near certainty of attack, the American codebreakers now produced proof of breathtaking Japanese duplicity. In a rush translation, Magic revealed that on November 28 the new Japanese foreign minister, Shigenori Togo, was telling his Washington negotiating team, “Well, you two ambassadors have exerted superhuman effort but, in spite of this, the United States has gone ahead and presented this humiliating proposal.” Togo referred to a ten-point plan submitted by Stimson that included a Japanese pullout from China. The foreign minister then coached the ambassadors: “However, I do not wish you to give the impression that the negotiations are broken off. Merely say to them that you are awaiting instructions… .”
While Japan and America appeared on a collision course, Churchill’s communications to Roosevelt indicated clearly th
at the Prime Minister did not want to see the United States distracted from the conflict in Europe by a diversion in the Pacific. On November 26 he sent a message via their private channel using his favored form of address, “Personal and secret for the President from Former Naval Person,” that read: “… [W]e certainly do not want an additional war.”
On November 30 the President was in Warm Springs, where he had gone to celebrate a belated Thanksgiving with fellow polio victims being treated there. The hiatus was abruptly ended by a desperate call from Stimson. A Japanese attack seemed imminent, the secretary of war warned. The President should return to Washington at once, which he did on December 1.
On the very day that FDR returned to Washington, Premier Tojo sought an audience with Emperor Hirohito to ask his permission to implement the plan for war against the United States. The emperor nodded his assent. A Japanese task force under radio silence—six aircraft carriers, two battleships, two cruisers, and nine destroyers—had already steamed out of Kure naval base four days before destined for Pearl Harbor with orders, once the emperor’s agreement was obtained, to deal the American Pacific Fleet “a mortal blow.”
Among the Magic decrypts shown to FDR by his naval aide, Captain Beardall, one particularly captured his interest. The Japanese foreign office had sent Japan’s ambassador in Berlin, General Oshima, a message to deliver to Hitler and his foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, that read: “… Say very secretly to [the Germans] that there is extreme danger that war may suddenly break out between the Anglo-Saxon nations and Japan through some clash of arms and add that the time of the breaking out of this war may come quicker than anyone dreams… .” The usual Magic procedure was for FDR to return decrypts. But a day later, for the first time, the President asked Beardall to retrieve a copy of this transmission for him to keep.
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