by Kai Bird
This was particularly true, he believed, for Americans of Japanese and German ancestry. In mid-September, he spent a week touring military installations throughout the West. Since July, when Roosevelt had placed an embargo on oil shipments to Japan, tensions on the West Coast had risen dramatically. Newspapers reported the presence of Japanese “agents in every mountain pass, working in every railroad division, in almost every harbor and ship company, gathering detailed information.”81 Americans of Japanese ancestry were widely suspected to be involved in such subversive activities.
McCloy was well aware of the source of these reports. While in San Francisco he was told of the exploits of Lieutenant Commander Kenneth D. Ringle, a naval-intelligence officer who had investigated Japanese intelligence capabilities on the West Coast. Employing “second-story” methods with the assistance of the FBI, Ringle had burglarized the Japanese Consulate in Los Angeles and analyzed a “truckload of documents.” The material contained the names of agents and some Japanese sympathizers on the West Coast. Ringle’s investigation led to the arrest in June 1941 of Itaru Tachibana, a Japanese naval officer posing as an English-language student. Ringle believed that Tachibana’s eventual deportation effectively destroyed Tokyo’s espionage capabilities on the West Coast.
But for McCloy, the success of the Ringle-FBI burglary operation only confirmed his belief that sabotage was a real danger. There were, after all, more than one million aliens in the country of German, Italian, or Japanese origin.82 The numbers in Hawaii were particularly disturbing to any army officer contemplating fifth-column risks; the islands contained 160,000 individuals of Japanese descent, of whom 37,500 were foreign born.83
The threat of sabotage still made headlines: in September 1941, Congressman Martin Dies told newspapermen that “the potential Japanese spy system in this country is greater than the Germans ever dreamed of having in the Low Countries.”84 But it was McCloy who was regarded as the objective outside expert on sabotage, and the confidence placed in him by Stimson, Ickes, and many others gave his opinions added weight, both within the administration and among the reporters he briefed in off-the-record sessions. For more than a year now, he had stressed the subject in conversations with Marshall, Miles, Stimson, Hoover, Ickes, and anyone else who would listen. And yet, for all the talk of sabotage, very little evidence had been unearthed by any of the intelligence organizations that the Germans or the Japanese had the kind of covert capabilities that would justify McCloy’s worst fears. Hoover, for one, was pretty much convinced that the arrests of Tachibana in California and the thirty-three Nazi spies in New York over the summer had effectively crippled Axis sabotage capability.85
McCloy nevertheless remained less than sanguine about the country’s counterintelligence successes, and one reason may well have been his access to a unique source denied Hoover. Earlier in the year, General Marshall had drawn up what he called a “Top List” of individuals allowed to inspect the “Purple” or “Magic” intercepts of decoded Japanese diplomatic cable traffic. The list was formally confined to the president, the secretaries of state, war, and navy, and the directors of army and naval intelligence.86 But in practice, as many as a dozen lower-ranking aides, including McCloy, were also seeing Magic intercepts. “It crossed my desk every morning,” he recalled.87
Magic allowed him to believe that he could know with near certainty what the Japanese were capable of and what their intentions were in the Far East. Ultimately, however, even Magic had to be interpreted, and for most of those reading the material, including McCloy, the intercepts tended merely to confirm what they wanted to believe about Japanese intentions. In the months prior to Pearl Harbor, anyone reading Magic might reasonably conclude that a war in the Far East was imminent. But McCloy, Marshall, and others always thought the first attack on American installations would come in the form of sabotage. There was little evidence in Magic to confirm this, and the telltale clues that Tokyo was planning an air attack were either ignored or analyzed and then dismissed.88
There were four Purple decrypting machines in Washington in 1941, and by November they were decoding an average of twenty-six daily messages between Tokyo and her most important embassies and consulates abroad.89 On September 24, 1941, Tokyo’s Foreign Ministry sent a cable to its Honolulu consulate requesting elaborate reporting on the exact positions of every U.S. naval vessel anchored in Pearl Harbor. This cable, which later became known as the “bomb-plot” message, wasn’t translated until October 9, 1941, when an alert G-2 officer, Colonel Rufus C. Bratton, brought it to the attention of Stimson and Marshall. Magic cables routed to Stimson often passed through McCloy’s hands first. Both men presumably saw the unusual message, but its significance did not register on either of them.90
In late November 1941, Marshall issued any number of warnings to his commanders in Hawaii, and though he also ordered them to initiate air reconnaissance, most of his messages emphasized that “subversive activities may be expected.” Not surprisingly, the army commander in Pearl Harbor, General Walter C. Short, acknowledged these warnings by moving his forces in Hawaii to Alert No. 1, which called for “a defense against sabotage, espionage and subversive activities without any threat from the outside.”91
Though it is more than likely that McCloy saw General Short’s message before it landed on Stimson’s desk, his entire orientation during the previous fifteen months made him the last man in the War Department to question whether the general might be placing an unjustified priority on the sabotage threat. Lying on his desk that day was General Miles’s latest intelligence estimate concerning the “subversive situation” on the West Coast. The report, dated November 25, claimed the Japanese had a “well-developed espionage network along the Pacific Coast.”92 McCloy did not doubt it.
As tensions mounted, he came into his office on the morning of December 4, 1941, to discover that disaster had struck. Someone had leaked the War Department’s highly classified “Victory Parade,” the detailed set of war plans on which he and very few others had been working since the previous July. The isolationist Chicago Tribune and other McCormick papers around the country published portions of the plan, word for word. The Tribune called it “a blueprint for total war,” which it was.93
Stimson came back that evening from a trip to New York to find McCloy and a couple of other aides gathered at his home and wearing “very long faces.” The secretary was unhappy with the leak; all the same, he couldn’t help being amused at the uncharacteristic glumness he saw in McCloy: “. . . for the first time in my observation of him McCloy was sunk. But the picture of this occurrence during my one day of absence rather tickled my funnybone and I cheered them up. The thing to do is to meet the matter head on and use this occurrence if possible to shake our American people out of their infernal apathy and ignorance of what this war means.”94
McCloy thought he knew who had leaked the memo. Only five individuals had copies of the plan: Stimson, Marshall, McCloy, Gerow, and Major Albert Wedemeyer, General Gerow’s aide in the War Plans Division. Wedemeyer had studied at the German War College in Berlin from 1936 to 1938, and had returned from Berlin with a profound admiration for the equipment and capabilities of the German Army. A number of U.S. officers had similar experiences in the 1930s and were known at the time as members of the “Potsdam Club,” so named after the Berlin suburb where the War College was located. Dean Rusk, working in G-2 at the time, recalled they “were so pessimistic as to be almost pro-German.”95
McCloy also believed Wedemeyer’s work on “Victory Parade” reflected a “defeatist attitude.” For his part, Wedemeyer had a low opinion of McCloy. He thought the assistant secretary was the kind of man who “would invariably agree with higher authorities, but would assert himself and swing his weight around in contacts with subordinates.” So there was already ill-will between the two men when McCloy called Wedemeyer into his office. The army major saluted the assistant secretary and, in the absence of any invitation to sit down, remained standing at attention.
On those rare occasions when he showed his anger, McCloy’s eyes, usually the most disarming thing about him, became cold and hard. He would tilt his large, balding head down and look at you from beneath a darkened, furrowed brow. Now he rose from behind his oversized mahogany desk, framed on either side by the American flag and the flag of the assistant secretary of war, and said with a hard edge to his voice, “Wedemeyer, there’s blood on the fingers of the man who leaked the information about our war plans.”96
Wedemeyer was shocked, and challenged him to repeat the accusation in his presence before Stimson. McCloy looked at him in silence for a long moment and then dismissed him.97 McCloy nevertheless had already conveyed his suspicions to the FBI, and he wanted the perpetrator court-martialed.98 So, when Wedemeyer returned to his office, he found two FBI agents waiting for him. Under questioning, he admitted that he felt the United States should not be involved in this war—or at least in a war against Germany. Like ex-President Herbert Hoover (in the aftermath of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union that summer), he favored letting the two totalitarian powers wear each other down.99 As such, Wedemeyer’s political and strategic views seemed to provide motivation for the leak. The FBI investigation was inconclusive, however, and no one was ever indicted.100
Stimson held a press conference on Friday, December 5, and tried to dismiss the importance of the plans by saying, “They have never constituted an authorized program of the government.”101 But he was being disingenuous. The problem was that many Americans, Wedemeyer included, believed the president was duplicitous. The Victory plans were not, as Stimson stated, merely contingency plans. They were plans for a war which—as the secretary would admit to his diary but not in public—the administration was already waging. What angered the isolationists most by the end of 1941 was their conviction that the president was skirting very close to the law. Few were in a better position to know this than Stimson and McCloy. Whether it was the allocation of transition funding for British arms in the months prior to passage of Lend-Lease, the dodging of the neutrality laws, or the investigation of labor union activists for sabotage, McCloy had always urged unrestricted action. It was this combination of unfettered activism and infectious optimism that had made him so useful to the administration throughout 1941.
By December 5, 1941, many Americans both in and out of government felt that a shooting war was very near. Those with access to Magic did not need to speculate; they knew war was only a matter of days away, and now the intercepts were about to hint at the exact hour it would begin. Because he felt “something was going to happen that weekend,” McCloy canceled an out-of-town appointment so he could be in his office both days.102 He arrived at 10:05 A.M. on Sunday morning, December 7, 1941, and went directly to the secretary’s office, where he and Stimson talked briefly about the apparent impasse in the Japanese negotiations. Shortly afterward, Stimson left for a meeting with Hull and Knox at the White House.103 Marshall was out horseback-riding. Earlier that morning, the last paragraph of a long transmission from Tokyo to the Japanese Embassy in Washington had been deciphered. Translated, the cable made it clear that Tokyo expected something of great moment to happen by 1:00 p.m. Washington time. The intelligence officer monitoring Magic that morning, Colonel Bratton, quickly decided he had to find someone in the military chain of command who could issue a warning.104
He did not think to inform McCloy, the highest-ranking civilian in the War Department that morning, who was sitting in his office just down the hall. Instead, Bratton tried reaching General Marshall at his home, but the general had just left for his horseback ride. Marshall did not return the call until 10:30, and it took another hour and half after that to issue a warning to Hawaii. This last warning was sent via Western Union teletype, and did not arrive until hours after the 1:00 deadline.105
By then, two waves of 360 Japanese aircraft had in the course of one hour sunk three battleships and damaged three more so badly they had to be put out of action. The surprise attack killed 2,335 military personnel and another 68 civilians. For the foreseeable future, the Japanese Imperial Navy now seemed capable of dominating much, if not all, of the Pacific Ocean.
McCloy was one of the first civilians in the War Department to hear the news. Even then, his instincts turned to the threat of sabotage. “My first thought was to protect the president,” he later recalled. “What came to mind was to send a detachment of Marines to the White House. . . . I immediately began doing what I could to implement plans for the security of the nation’s capital.”106 On his orders, armed guards were stationed around the White House, the Capitol, and other major buildings in the city. In the company of Sherman Miles and an army officer named Ulysses S. Grant (grandson of the president), he marched two blocks down to the Navy Department. “When we walked into Knox’s office,” McCloy recalled, “his aide, who happened to be a Southerner, said, ‘Here comes the entire Union Army.’ ”107
While Stimson spent a large part of the afternoon at the White House with the president, McCloy received “urgent” requests from military officials on the West Coast for instructions on how to prepare for a possible follow-up attack on the mainland. In response, he ordered into effect civil-defense plans that provided for blackouts and traffic restrictions.108 Stimson too was worried about sabotage. One of his first impulses was to start “matters going in all directions to warn against sabotage. . . .”109
At 4:00 P.M., McCloy convened in his office a meeting of the chiefs of the various armed services. Stimson then came in and gave them all a “little pep-talk.” Afterward, he sat around with McCloy, Marshall, Grenville Clark, Lovett, Miles, and Patterson, discussing what form the declaration of war should take. Only by the end of the day did the full dimensions of the disaster become clear. Even so, Stimson felt somehow relieved: “When the news first came that Japan had attacked us, my first feeling was of relief that the indecision was over and that a crisis had come in a way which would unite all our people.”110
McCloy agreed. The country may have been psychologically unprepared to take the final plunge into formal war, but now there was an indisputable consensus. There would be no consensus, however, on how the surprise attack could have happened.
If the public greeted the attack with simple incredulity, those reading Magic felt quite different emotions. McCloy saw right away that Pearl Harbor was first and foremost a failure of intelligence. The extraordinary secret weapon had been misused. The ability to read the enemy’s diplomatic traffic had lulled those on the Magic distribution list into an unwarranted confidence. General Douglas MacArthur’s chief of intelligence, General Charles A. Willoughby, later observed, “The sequence of [Magic] messages referred to, had they been known to a competent intelligence officer . . . would have led instantly to the inescapable conclusion that Pearl Harbor naval installations were a target for attack. . . .”111
The failure in the system was plain to see; no one person on the Magic distribution list was in charge of cataloguing and cross-indexing the intercepts. Years later, William Friedman, the man who had originally broken the Japanese code, remarked that those on the Magic distribution list had “had the messages only for so short a time that each message represented only a single frame” in a “long motion picture.”112 No one was allowed to hold on to the intercepts long enough to distinguish a pattern.
Hired more than a year ago for his expertise on intelligence matters, McCloy, one might have thought, would now be forced to share some of the blame for this intelligence failure. But, perhaps because he wasn’t in any obvious line of command, no one questioned his role. To his credit, he had argued for a more centralized control over intelligence matters than existed in G-2. However, the one step taken in this direction, the appointment of Bill Donovan as coordinator of information, precipitated no review of G-2’s handling of Magic. Donovan wasn’t even on the list to receive the intercept material.
Only in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor did McCloy hire someone whose exclusive job it would be to provide lon
g-term, in-depth analysis of Magic traffic. Sometime in December, he began having discussions on the problem with Alfred McCormack, one of his old Cravath partners. Within a few weeks, he had persuaded Stimson to hire McCormack “to brief the magic papers and cross index them so that they will form a really useful basis for inferring what the enemy are going to do.”113
The days and weeks immediately following the surprise attack were a period of frenzied activity, and McCloy was not immune from an atmosphere that at times approached hysteria. For the first couple of nights, he rarely left the department. Late Monday evening, he called Stimson at Woodley to report that “an enemy fleet was thought to be approaching San Francisco.” A few minutes later, he had to call back with the news that it had been a false alarm.114
Sabotage was still foremost in the thoughts of most War Department officials. Within twenty-four hours of the attack, the FBI and local police had detained 736 Japanese aliens on the West Coast in what the Los Angeles Times called a “great man hunt.” Four days later, the number of Japanese aliens in detention had risen to 1,37o.115 All those detained could be found on a Justice Department master list of “subversive and “dangerous” aliens, prepared months in advance of Pearl Harbor. The FBI believed the detention of those on the list would effectively end any serious possibility of widespread sabotage. A few days after Pearl Harbor, the Los Angeles Times advised its readers, “Let’s not get rattled.”116