Pearl Harbor Conspiracy and Cover–Up
The first person I know of to really blow the whistle on the Pearl Harbour conspiracy coverup was a retired US Navy admiral who as a rear admiral was at Pearl Harbour on 12-7-41, and later retired to Marblehead, MA, a town near where I grew up. In 1954 he published a book "The Final Secret or Pearl Harbor" and spoke publically (Salem Marine Society, Salem, MA) on his findings and participation in the first investigation, known as the Roberts Commission, and followed subsequent investigations as advisor to the skapegoated Admiral Kimmel. He left no illusions as to who he believed were primarily responsible for provoking Japanese military aggression toward the USA, for dangling a big part of a deliberately weakened and exposed Pacific Fleet as bait, for deliberately deceiving the Army and Navy commanders on Hawaii as to Japan's intentions to attack specifically Pearl Harbor, and denying them intel they had that could have at least seriously blunted the Japanese attack and saved thousands of lives. He makes an excellent case for President Roosevelt, General Marshall, then Chief of Staff, US Army, and Admiral Stark, Chief of Naval Operations, and certain members of their staffs having known, primarily thru broken Japanese codes, the intended time and place of the attack, and having conspired to keep that knowledge from the commanders on Hawaii. The book also includes a forward by Admiral William Halsey, who also was serving under Admiral Kimmel as one of three senior commanders of the Pacific Fleet on 12/07/41. Included in his forward are such statements as "I did not know then of any of the pertinent "Magic Messages"…the mass of evidence made available to us pointed in another direction…Had we known of Japan's minute and continued interest in the exact location and movement of our ships in Pearl Harbor, as indicated in the "Magic Messages", it is only logical that we would have concentrated our thought on meeting the practical certainty of an attack on Pearl Harbor…I have always considered Admiral Kimmel and General Short to be splendid officers who were thrown to the wolves as scapegoats for something over which they had no control."
According to "Infamy, Pearl Harbor and its Aftermath",researched and written by John Toland and Published in 1984, which benefits from far more available information that what was available to Admiral Theobald in the early ‘1950's, Admiral Halsey stated "I did not feel that we were well informed on what the Japs were doing and I felt we were operating in the dark. I had the personal feeling, entirely personal, that they knew a lot more in Washington than we knew out there and that we should have been informed....I recall vaguely discussions along that line and damning them for not letting us in on the information." Toland also reveals extensive knowledge on the part of Dutch East Indies military officers of the date, time and place of the attack, and their transmittal of that intelligence to US military brass in DC. It touches on warnings from other sources including Korean and European agents. It outlines Japanese espionage operations on Hawaii, which were known in DC but concealed from the Hawaii commanders, and which pinpointed the precise locations of US warships in Pearl Harbor. It discusses numerous intrigues on the part of US military brass in DC to prevent the commanders on Hawaii from figuring out the when and where of the Japanese attack, including deliberate breakdowns of communications between Hawaii and DC, and delayed and circuitous routings of messages about the impending attack from DC to Hawaii. This book gives terrific exposure of the CYA efforts of not only General Marshall, Admiral Stark, and their immediate DC based staffs, but also of those of certain partisan Democrats in Congress to bury facts about the Pearl Harbour fiasco that would surely have embarrassed FDR and damaged the Democratic Party. The receptions and later disappearances of the "Winds Execute" message, the intimidations and blackmailings of various officers into changing their testimonies (some more than once), show the extent to which people went to protect the guilty. The research effort that went into this book is indicated by its nine page bibliography, which includes numerous interviews, personal correspondences, diaries, records, reports, magazine articles, and books.
An outstanding research effort in the now declassified intelligence files preceding Pearl Harbor has revealed that every assumption, every statement by military and political leaders-nearly every "fact"- about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor are now proven to be lies. In his book "Day of Deceit", Robert Stinnett shows that FDR and others were actually tracking the Japanese fleet across the Pacific- right up to the moment of attack and were fully aware the purpose of the fleet was to attack Pearl Harbor.
Of great significance, Stinnett uncovered a detailed 8-point plan referred to as "Lieutenant Commander Arthur McCollum’s Memorandum of October 7, 1940", which proposed 8 specific actions designed to provoke Japan into attacking the USA. Endorsed by a Captain Dudley Knox, every one of the recommended actions was taken by the FDR administration.
Also detailed by Stinnett is the Japanese espionage activity known as the "bomb plot". Using grid coordinates, plots of locations of U.S. warship anchorages in Pearl Harbour were made on excellent maps of the area and transmitted to Tokyo by a Japanese naval spy, Tadashi Mokimura. This activity was monitored by elements of U.S. Navy intelligence and known to the F.B.I. But that information was never made known to the Army and Navy commanders on Hawaii.
Toland’s book details that about 8 a.m. on December 4th, 1941, at a US Navy shortwave monitoring station in Cheltenham, Maryland, senior radio operator Ralph Briggs received the message he had been waiting for. The words were "East Wind - Rain". Briggs immediately teletyped the message to Washington. He, alone among the radio operators at Cheltenham, knew what the three words meant. "East Wind, Rain" was one of three possible "execute" messages which Japanese diplomats around the world had been alerted to begin listening for on November 19th. They were told to monitor the regular news and weather broadcasts from Tokyo, just as they always did, but to pay especially careful attention to the phraseology employed to describe the weather.
If they heard the words "North Wind, Cloudy," it meant war with the Soviet Union.
If they heard the words "West Wind, Clear," it meant war with the British Empire.
And if they heard the words "East Wind, Rain," it meant war with the United States.
The Roosevelt government knew the meaning of the "East Wind, Rain" message because American and British intelligence were able to read the Japanese diplomatic code, and they had intercepted and read the message from the Japanese foreign ministry of November 19th, 1941, which instructed Japanese embassies and consulates to be listening for the "winds" execute messages on their shortwave receivers, and which clearly explained the meaning of the messages.
After Ralph Briggs had teletyped the "winds" message to Washington, it was quickly transmitted to Army Signals Intelligence and to the White House. The teletype equipment then in use at Cheltenham produced an original and a copy at the sending end, and two copies at the Washington end. Briggs also typed out another original and two carbon copies on a regular typewriter. All these he carefully filed.
The following week Ralph Briggs found the station’s copy missing from the files. Every copy of the "winds" message had disappeared. Near and after the end of WW2, Briggs was ordered by a superior officer not to discuss his role in the incident. Only years later, after retiring from the U.S. Navy and from civilian employment with the Navy, did he write an affidavit testifying to the above, which his second wife let me read in 2001. She told me that because his first wife was blind and needed a seeing-eye dog and the medical/health insurance the Navy provided, he dared not violate his orders to keep quiet about the "East Wind, Rain" message. His first wife died in later years, but his second wife supported his decision to write the affidavit after he retired from the Navy and later from civilian employment with the Navy.
The espionage team divided Pearl harbor up into several numbered target areas for an aerial attack and requested Mokimura to make a twice-weekly report to Tokyo on the vessels at anchor in Pearl Harbor and their exact locations. The codebreakers in Washington knew the significance of this message, and called it "The Bomb Plot Message." Yet Washington did not pass this information along to the Army and Navy commanders in Hawaii. At least three messages about the bomb plan for Pearl Harbor passed between Tokyo and the Japanese consulate in Hawaii. All of them were read by Washington, the last that we know of on December 3rd. None were passed along to the American commanders at Pearl Harbor.
The Roosevelt government not only were reading the Japanese diplomatic code, they were also reading the Japanese naval code. Washington knew through reading the Japanese naval traffic that all Japanese merchant vessels were to return to their home waters by December 7th. This information was not given to the commanders at Pearl Harbor.
Washington knew through reading the Japanese naval traffic that a huge task force, including a large group of aircraft carriers, was sailing into the Pacific on November 26th for an eight-day voyage and was to reach its standby position and refuel on December 4th. Washington also had to have realized that there was no possible target in the Pacific that required the use of carrier-borne aircraft except Pearl Harbor. This information was not given to the commanders at Pearl Harbor.
On the 27th of November, Washington learned through the Dutch attaché in Washington, who had also received a decrypt of the Japanese naval message ordering the task force to sea from his own intelligence men in the Dutch East Indies, that the task force's most likely direction was east and that its most likely target was Pearl Harbor. This information was not passed along to the American commanders at Pearl Harbor.
And on December 2d, the day after which the naval code would normally have been changed, Washington intercepted and read the message giving the date for the attack. "Climb Mount Niitakayama 1208." Mount Niitakayama was then the highest mountain in the Japanese Empire and was the code word for the attack, and 12-8 Japanese time is 12-7 Hawaiian time. This message was also intercepted and read by British intelligence, who concluded, according to W. W. Mortimer of the British Far East Combined Bureau, that since no task force had been sighted in waters south of Japan, the only target that fitted the length of voyage, mid-ocean refueling, and the inclusion of aircraft carriers was Pearl Harbor, and that an attack on Sunday, December 7, the date given in the Japanese message would offer the greatest element of surprise there. This information was passed along to Washington, who, once again, did nothing to warn the commanders at Pearl Harbor.
Mr. Tom Kimmel, former US Navy officer and FBI agent, and a grand-son of U.S. Navy Admiral Kimmel, in his presentations, lays out the case that has at its centre a wartime double agent called Dusko Popov who was working for the Germans and the British. The British secret service passed on details to the FBI about the areas of intelligence the spy was seeking to gain information.
The anti-torpedo capabilities of Pearl Harbor defenses were one of the areas of interest. The FBI fed the spy with worthless plans of torpedo nets that had been planned for the US base but had been mothballed as unworkable. Ironically, the information about the nets would appear to have had some bearing on the Japanese decision to use devastating "shallow water dropped torpedoes" from attacking aircraft which sunk or damaged 21 ships of the US Pacific Fleet. Mr. Kimmel said his grandfather was never informed of the Axis powers’ interest in the defenses at Pearl Harbor, nor of a diplomatic ultimatum delivered by the US to the Japanese less than two weeks before the Pearl Harbor attack requesting it to desist from its military interventions in China. The late Admiral was also not made aware that aircraft-dropped torpedoes capable of being used in the shallow waters of Pearl Harbor even existed despite higher echelons of the US military being aware at the time that the technology had been developed by the British and had therefore possibly been developed elsewhere.
It is only with the declassification of documents in the past 20 years that evidence has been gathered to show how much pertinent intelligence was never passed on to Admiral Kimmel by his superiors in the US military.
See also:
http://thenewamerican.com/node/1027
See also:
https://www.worldaffairsbrief.com/keyto ... arbor.html