Joseph E. Persico (23 page)

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 that 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.

Besides the unmistakable content of the diplomatic traffic, other intelligence sources pointed to a Japanese attack. An eye-opener was a September 24 message from Foreign Minister Togo to the consul general in Honolulu, Nagao Kita, telling him to divide Pearl Harbor into five sectors and report on ship moorings and other activities in each sector. The message went on: “With regard to warships and aircraft carriers, we would like to have you report on those at anchor (these are not so important) tied up at wharves, buoy and in docks.”

Kita had a sharp-eyed agent to fulfill Tokyo's requests. Ensign Takeo Yoshikawa had been assigned to Hawaii by the Third Bureau, the intelligence branch of the Japanese Naval General Staff, to serve undercover as vice consul. He had arrived in Honolulu on March 26, 1941. Yoshikawa's assignment was to provide intelligence on U.S. Pacific Fleet activity in Pearl Harbor for Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, then masterminding the strike against this target. Yoshikawa led a deceptively leisurely life. He hung around a Japanese-owned restaurant, the Shunchu-ro, located conveniently on a hill overlooking Pearl Harbor. It had two telescopes for sightseers to enjoy the magnificent view. Yoshikawa took girlfriends on boat rides around Kaneohe Bay. He rented a Piper Cub at John Rodgers Airport and cruised above the harbor. All the while, this apparently indefatigable tourist was taking pictures, making notes, and preparing reports for Kita to send to Tokyo. He also sent home postcards of aerial views which were used to construct a mock-up of Pearl Harbor to train Japanese torpedo bomber pilots for the strike.

Captain Theodore S. Wilkinson, about to be named as chief of naval intelligence and described as “one of the best brains in the armed forces,” huddled with Lieutenant Commander Alwin D. Kramer, the Navy's chief Japanese translator, over the September 24 message dividing Pearl Harbor into sectors. Kramer's responsibility was to choose which messages to distribute to senior officials. The two officers concluded that Togo's interest in ship locations did not mean that the Japanese intended to attack Pearl Harbor; that was too farfetched. Rather, they concluded that the Japanese wanted to know in what order and how quickly American warships might sortie from the harbor to prevent or retaliate against an attack by Japan in Southeast Asia. The significance attached to this message is indicated by the fact that the Army did not translate it for over two weeks. The President was shown only those intercepts deemed worth his attention, and no evidence exists that FDR was shown this particular message which, after the fact, became known as “the bomb-plot message.” The decrypt was not even forwarded to Admiral Husband Kimmel, commander of naval forces at Pearl Harbor. In retrospect, Wilkinson and Kramer's misreading of the bomb-plot message appears obtuse. Yet, this particular decrypt would not have stood out as unique at the time. Tokyo was demanding similar information from its agents throughout Southeast Asia, the Philippines, Panama, and even San Francisco, San Diego, Seattle, and Vancouver. On November 19, Tokyo had alerted several diplomatic posts, including Washington, of a special signal to be inserted into the daily radio weather forecast: “In case of emergency (danger of cutting off our diplomatic relations).” If the threatened break involved the United States, the weather report would say, “Higashi No Kazeame,” meaning “East Wind Rain.” “When this is heard,” Tokyo instructed its envoys, “please destroy all code papers, etc.”

On December 1, the day FDR returned from Warm Springs, Tokyo told Nomura and Kurusu: “[T]o prevent the United States from becoming unduly suspicious we have been advising the press and others that though there are some wide differences between Japan and the United States, the negotiations are continuing.”

The cascade of clues pointing to an imminent attack continued. On December 2, Foreign Minister Togo asked Consul General Kita for more pinpoint intelligence on Pearl Harbor: “. . . [T]he presence in port of warships, airplane carriers, and cruisers is of utmost importance. . . . [L]et me know day by day. Wire me in each case whether there are any observation balloons above Pearl Harbor. . . . Also advise me whether or not the warships are provided with anti-mine nets.” While with hindsight the purpose of this and the preceding requests regarding Pearl Harbor seems glaringly obvious, they were, at the time, not given immediate priority by American codebreakers.

The Japanese had unwitting evidence from Roosevelt himself that their duplicity was working. On the same day that Foreign Minister Togo was asking for more intelligence on Pearl Harbor, FDR received Nomura and Kurusu in the Oval Office. The President's demeanor was cool as he warned them that he possessed information revealing that their country was moving a large expeditionary force south from Shanghai toward Indochina. The Americans evidently still knew nothing of the task force steaming toward Hawaii.