samedi 23 janvier 2016

The "East Wind Rain" Message and FDR's Foreknowledge of Pearl Harbor

The impressive evidence that U.S. Intelligence intercepted the December 4 "East Wind Rain" execute message, which signaled imminent war with America, is one of the keys to understanding that Roosevelt and a number of officials in his administration knew the Pearl Harbor attack would take place and knew that it would happen on December 6 or 7. This is why government officials tried so desperately to erase all evidence that the execute message was broadcast and intercepted. But now, decades later, the evidence that U.S. Intelligence intercepted the execute message is powerful and beyond credible dispute.

Some facts:

* We now know from released documents that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and Assistant Director D. M. Ladd wrote memorandums documenting that U.S. intelligence officials had foreknowledge of the Pearl Harbor attack from information that came from Japanese intercepts, one of which was a coded message that repeated a specific term to indicate imminent war. The memos do not give the name of the coded message that signaled imminent war, but their description of it clearly matches other descriptions of the “East Wind Rain” execute message.

* An important step forward in research on the controversy regarding the "East Wind Rain" execute message came in 1985 with the publication of Admiral Edwin Layton's book And I Was There: Pearl Harbor and Midway--Breaking the Secrets. Layton died before the book was ready for print. Historian John Costello and naval expert Captain Roger Pineau (USNR, Ret.), who had been assisting Layton with the work, completed the editing of the book and added a valuable "Authors' Notes" postscript. Among other things, Pineau and Costello found new evidence that the "East Wind Rain" execute message was broadcast and intercepted at least two days before Pearl Harbor was attacked, and that certain high officials in Washington sought to destroy all copies of the message and to pressure military officers to either deny they had seen the message or to say that it was a different execute message (such as "West Wind Clear") (pp. 517-521).

Costello and Pineau uncovered a 1944 Navy Intelligence document that contains evidence that the execute message was intercepted on 4 December. The document was produced by the Navy's Code and Signal Section (OP-20-G, aka "Station Negat") in Washington, D.C. It lists Japanese messages that were intercepted in 1941 and includes each message's date of intercept, its assigned serial number, and a brief summary of its contents. The document supports Captain Safford's assertion that the execute message was assigned the serial number 7001 and that it was intercepted on 4 December. The document says that message 7001 was intercepted on 4 December, and the summary of the message's contents says that "#7001 is believed to be the (missing) translation of the Winds Message" (p. 528).

Back then many people referred to the "East Wind Rain" execute message as the "Winds Message." We know that message 7001 could not have been the Winds setup message because the setup message was intercepted on 26 November.

* It should be remembered that no one disputed the existence of the December 4, 1941, “East Wind Rain” execute message, which signaled imminent war with the U.S., until 1944. Even the Roberts Commission did not deny its existence, nor did the Army Pearl Harbor Board and the Navy Board of Inquiry. A few officers said they weren’t sure which kind of “Winds” execute message had been received, but they confirmed that it was intercepted before the Pearl Harbor attack.

* During the Army and Navy investigations into the Pearl Harbor disaster, three senior military officers testified that the “East Wind Rain” execute message was intercepted a few days before the attack and that they saw a copy of it. Two other senior military officers testified that they were advised of the receipt of the execute message and discussed it with other officers a day or two before the bombing.

* The BBC documentary Sacrifice at Pearl Harbor presents evidence that at least two Western intelligence services intercepted the “East Wind Rain” execute message on December 4. The documentary includes interviews with two retired cryptographers, Eric Nave and Ralph Briggs, who were personally involved in handling the November 19 Winds code message (Nave) and the December 4 execute message (Briggs).

Nave, known as the “father of British cryptology,” was on duty at an intelligence station in Melbourne, Australia, when the Winds message was intercepted on November 19. Briggs, a Navy Intelligence non-commissioned officer and a Japanese linguist, was on duty at the Navy communication center in Cheltenham, Maryland, on December 4 and intercepted the execute message on that day.

* A document released by NSA in 1980 reveals that in 1977 the Naval Security Group interviewed Briggs about the “East Wind Rain” execute message. The document reports that Briggs confirmed that he intercepted the message on December 4, that he was ordered by his superiors not to testify at the 1946 Congressional hearings on the Pearl Harbor attack, and that he had discovered that the copies he had made of the message were missing from the station’s files. As one reads that document, one sees that, contrary to traditionalists, Briggs did not recant his story but stuck by every essential point of it.

In 1991, Nave teamed up with James Rusbridger to write Betrayal at Pearl Harbor. As part of their research for the book, they discovered that Lt. Charles Dixon, a cryptographer in the New Zealand Army, intercepted the “East Wind Rain” execute message on December 4 at a British intelligence facility on Stonecutters Island near Hong Kong. They learned this from an interview with Cedric Brown, a senior officer in the New Zealand Navy, who knew Dixon well.

* Two former attaches at the Japanese Embassy in Washington, Kenici Ogemoto and Yuzuru Sanematsu, confirmed, one of them in writing, that the East Wind Rain execute message was broadcast on December 4. One of these men, Sanematsu, became a leading Japanese naval historian after the war. In one of his books, he wrote about his personal knowledge that the Japanese Embassy in Washington received the execute message on December 4 and that its receipt caused quite a stir among the staff at the embassy.

* Both the Japanese Navy and the American Navy changed their codes on December 4, exactly as one would expect them to do in response to the broadcast and interception of the “East Wind Rain” execute message, which, again, meant that war with the U.S. was imminent. In addition, it was on this same day that the U.S. Navy ordered remote installations in the Pacific to destroy excess codes and ciphers, a standard procedure when war is expected to occur in the immediate future.

* December 4 was also the day when the Navy’s chief expert on Far Eastern intelligence, Captain Arthur McCollum, drafted an urgent war warning for Navy commanders in the Pacific. McCollum denied that his sudden urge to send a war warning on December 4 was prompted by interception of the “East Wind Rain” execute message, but Captain Laurance Safford testified that he discussed the interception of the execute message with McCollum on that day and that McCollum’s first draft of the war warning mentioned the execute message.

Some links:

http://ift.tt/1OEYc8J (this article discusses the FBI memos on military intelligence foreknowledge of the attack)

http://ift.tt/1OEYcp1

http://ift.tt/23kDZMT


via International Skeptics Forum http://ift.tt/1lFagw8

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