PEARL HARBOR & IJN CODE JN-25: A Expansion to "Myths of Pearl...." [Archive]

NIMITZ1967

11-07-2007, 10:02 PM

http://forums.ubi.com/images/smilies/typing.gif Hello again to all!.....The good news is I'm not going to 'gab-on' http://forums.ubi.com/images/smilies/clap.gif http://forums.ubi.com/images/smilies/clap.gif....This article is a companion piece to the "Myths of the Pearl Harbor Attack" thread It's conclusions are simply ASTOUNDING!......Read and Enjoy!!!!!................On with the Show.... http://forums.ubi.com/images/smilies/winky.gif

DRAWING THE BLINDS:........... http://forums.ubi.com/images/smilies/25.gifBy Eric Nave and James Rusbridger

"......shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered-
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he that today sheds his blood for me,
Shall be my brother."

U.S.S. ARIZONA Memorial Dedication.

Every year, more than 2 million people visit the Arizona Memorial at Pear Harbor Naval Base, Hawaii. They first gather at the impressively dignified memorial center set in a peaceful landscaped garden overlooking the harbor, with a large museum containing many relics and pictures of the battleship. Visitors are then shown a film of the history of the USS Arizona and the attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941.
Presumably to assuage modern consciences and the economics of Japanese tourism and business interests in Hawaii, the film has been carefully sanitized so as to play down the treacherous nature of the attack that morning, which was made while diplomatic relations were still in progress. President Roosevelt's "infamy" speech to Congress has been excised and is shown only mute, thus robbing it of it's dramatic impact. Even the final surrender on board USS Missouri in 45' has been delicately edited so that there is only a fleeting glimpse of the defeated enemy. Revisionist history is commonplace in Communist countries, but it is bizarre to find it so grotesquely displayed at one of America's great national shrines.
But though the emphasis and morality of history can be tailored to suit political expediency, the true majesty of the Arizona Memorial cannot be tampered with...Each boatload of visitors is shuttled out across Pearl waters toward Ford Island in trim US Navy launches, often crewed by young women sailors whose parents weren't even alive in 1941. As they approach Alfred Prie's starkly functional structure that spans the wreck, each launch pauses to let visitors get their first glimpse of USS Arizona.............
As the launch lies idle in the still waters, the chatter dies away...... Each visitor - no matter what his age - sences he is about to enter a world where time has stood still............. and belongs to another generation. Quietly, visitors file up the steps into the memorial. First into the bell room with Arizona's bell hanging silent before them. Then out along the main catwalk, where they see the remains of this great battleship lying beneath the clear waters. Just a few pieces reach up out of the water toward the blue sky, as a reminder of the death that came so treacherously that Sunday morning many years before. And from the rusty relic still proudly flies the StarsandStripes, reminding visitors that the Arizona remains in commission with the US Navy.
Finally, at the far end, the visitors to the Hall of Remembrance look in silent awe at the names of 1,177 officers and men of the U.S.S. Arizona who lie entombed below. The names are carved into the marbel wall that flickers the sunlight reflected from the waters that ebb and flow around their final resting place. Like many before them, and since, these brave men risked their lives in the service of their country, knowing full well the perils of the sea......and now lie at peace, secure within it's protection for all time. Some visitors to Arizona find it a numbing experience. Young and old stand there in silence, gazing at the waters aound the wreck, with the thin, iridescent slick of fuel oil that still leaks from the tanks ruptured by Japanese bomb and torpedoes all those years before.
Certainly, there are plenty of other memorials and shrines to American war dead elsewhere around the world. They nestle in leafy woodlands in England, in sleepy cowfields of rural France, the plains of Belgium, the near industrial heartland of Germany, in sandy deserts and rocky, remote 'Pacific' islands......But none generates such strong emotions as does the Arizona Memorial. Why should this be so?

Because it is part of the story of the attack on Pearl Harbor, which, even with the passage of all this time, is still close to the minds and hearts of Americans. The Pearl Harbor attack was a shattering defeat for American military and political leadership. By itself this is sufficiently topical to keep the story alive today in the context of a surprise attack from another enemy. "Remember Pearl Harbor" is a cry heard frequently when military budgets are debated, and it is one that politicians ignore at their peril.
But there is much more to it than that. The story of Pearl Harbor remains an enigma to this day, containing all the elements of one of the worlds great mystery stories. Over the intervening years the American people have been given highly selective accounts of what happened,with the truth obscured by a combination of official secrecy, false testimony, coercian to tell lies....a deliberate attempt to hide the facts within a web of mythology and poor research.
Despite eight official investigations, a score of books, and hundreds of historical studies totalling many millions of words, vital questions have remained unanswered because of lack of accurate first-hand or archival material.
According to the official version, the idea of an attack on Pearl Harbor seemed so illogical when compared to an attack on targets nearer Japan that, due to cognitive dissonance (refusing to accept what you wish to believe), NO senior officer at OP-20-G or the Army War Plans Division was willing to consider it seriously or even to discuss it with the commanders in Hawaii. As a result, the important messages, like the Bomb Plot Signal, were ignored because they did not fit in with a preconceived idea of what the Japnese might do.
In other words, the information was in Washington.......but nobody recognized it.. As historian Roberta Wohlsletter put it in her 1962 history, "Pearl Harbor; Warning and Decision",
"The relevant signals so clearly audible after the event (were) partially obscured before the event by the surrounding noise."
The military view that an attack on Pearl was "unlikely" was shared by the local media. On September 6th, 1941, journalist Clarke Beach wrote in 'The Honolulu Star Bulletin',
"A Japanese attack on Hawaii is regarded as the most unlikely thing in the world, with one chance in a million of being successful. Besides having more powerful defences than any other (American) post, it is protected by distance. The Japanese fleet would have no bases from which to operate....(and)...American patrols would spot it long before it arrived."

During the 1950s, however, a number of revisionist historians began to publish books propagating the theory that President Roosevelt had deliberately concealed warnings of the attack, because he needed an excuse to bring America into the war, to help Britain defeat The Third Reich. The "Revisonist Theory" argues that Roosevelt and his closet collegues knew, from intelligence derived from the "MAGIC" decrypts of the PURPLE messages passing between Washington and Tokyo and Consular messages between Hawaii and Tokyo, that Japan planned to attack America if the negotiations in Washington failed. They also knew from the Bomb Plot Message, available in Washington on 9 October, that the Japanese were planning an aerial attack on Pearl Harbor. And Roosevelt was aware from the decrypts of the Japnese consular messages from Hawaii of their close and continuous interset in the movements of the U.S. Pacific Fleet.
On 2 December, Roosevelt read the message from Tokyo to Berlin instructing Oshima to tell Hitler that war with America "may come quicker than anyone dreams." Finally, there was the pilot message sent to Washington from Tokyo on 6 December warning the Japnese Embassy that a final message, terminating further diplomatic negotiations, was about to arrive and was presented to the State Department at precisely 1 pm on 7 December 1941.
None of this information was made available to the commanders in Pearl Harbor. Despite the increasing urgency of intelligence being decrypted as late as 6 and 7 of December, no effort was made to send any form of warning to either Adm Kimmel or Adm Short. It has often been argued that a PURPLE machine at Pearl Harbor would have enabled Kimmel and Short to have some sort of warning, but this is not so. True, it would have drawn attention to the 7:30 AM deadline, but without the JN-25 operational details, this would not necessarily have had much impact...After all, Gen Macarthur in the Philippines had 7 hours warning after the Pearl attack, yet was still caught unprepared, with all his aircraft on the ground. Far more crucial would have been to allow Hawaiian commanders to see JN-25 and J-19 consular decrypts, some of which, unknown to them, were being intercepted in Honolulu but were sent to either OP-20-G or SIS for decoding. These would have shown them that intence interest by the Japanese in the Pearl Harbor defences- in particular the message of 24 September, which divided Pearl Harbor into a number of target areas for an air attack, and became known as "The Bomb Plot Message".
One of the leading proponents of the "Revisionist" theory, Rear Admiral Robert A. Theobold, USN (ret), argued in his book, "The Final Secret of Pearl Harbor", that,...
"Everything that happened in Washington on 6 and 7 December supports the belief that Roosevelt had directed that NO (warning) messages be sent to Hawaiian commanders before noon on Sunday, Washington time. Stark arrived in his office at 9:25 AM on Sunday, 7 December and..acccepted...the (Japanese) declaration of war message (The MAGIC 14th part decrypt)...but against the advise of assistants refused to inform Kimmel. At 10:05 Stark knew that the message was to be delivered at 1 PM Washington time (7:30 am Hawaiian time), but again, despite the urging of his aides, refused to send word to Kimmel....Starks statement to the press in August 1945 that all he did during the pre-Pearl Harbor days was on order of higher authority...can only mean President Roosevelt...thus by holding a weak fleet in Hawaii as an invitation to a surprise attack, and, by denying the commander of that fleet the information which might cause him to render that attack impossible, Roosevelt brought war on the United States on 7 December 1941."

But this attack on Roosevelt cannot be sustained, because the decision to limit MAGIC material ONLY to Stimson, Gerow, Miles, Bratton, Knox, Turner, Ingersoll, McCollum, Watts, and- belatedly, Roosevelt and Hull....was taken by Stark and Marshall. In fact, the President Roosevelt was unaware he was being denied MAGIC material by his subordinates."
Thus, the decision to deny the Hawaiian commanders MAGIC material, and the refusal to permit their codebreakers to work on intercepted messages, had nothing to do with the President.

It would be conveniant to claim that Roosevelt ordered that the two aircraft carriers should sail from Pearl, thus denying Yamamoto his prize should this be his target. Unfortunately, that also cannot be sustained, because the ENTERPRISE left on 28 November on a perfectly routine mission. In any case, for the President to give such an order without explaining his reasons to the Navy could not have passed unnoticed.

The revisionist scenario has never been accepted for three reasons...First, no evidence has ever been produced to show Roosevelt would betray his office as President in this manner. Second, the information contained in the consular and diplomatic decrypts that Roosevelt saw gave no indication that Pearl might be the target; nor did it give any precise indication of the date of the attack. And third, even if he was aware that Pearl was the target, would a President who knew his Navy was unready for war put most of the Pacific Fleet at risk as part of a plan to get America into the war?......To believe this, we must believe FDR was a knave and a fool, which manifestly, he was not.
And did Roosevelt want to help Churchill to the extent of bringing America into the war prematurely?.....All evidence shows quite the contrary, that FDR desperately wanted more time to enable America to rearm before commencing hostilities.

Aside from the scenario of FDRs morality, both 'official' and 'revisionist' scenarios are outdated and INVALID because their authors were unaware that the British ( and most probably the Americans) were http://forums.ubi.com/images/smilies/16x16_smiley-surprised.gif READING JN-25 during the period leading up to the attack. This is hardly surprising, because the existence of JN-25 has only been officially acknowledged by the American Government in 1990 to the authors of this, while Nave's own account of how all Japanese codes, including JN-25, were broken by FECB and GCCS remains the only British source. The whole question of Japanese codebreaking continues to be completely embargoed by the British government.

The question of who knew what about Japanese plans during November 1941, when Yamamoto's Task Force sailed, is the crucial factor in determinig where responsibility lay. As we know, the messages from Yamamoto to his battle fleet were intercepted....it follows that those who could read JN-25 possessed the final pieces of The Jigsaw. If, however, they were only reading PURPLE diplomatic messages, then they were 'blind', because these NEVER contained any operational orders.
This fact was never appreciated during any of the 8 official inquiries, because the very existence of JN-25 had been deliberately suppressed by the US Navy, let alone whether it had been broken.. The question of whether Britain could read JN-25 never emerged at any of the inquiries. Despite official requests, NO British codebreaker from either GCCS or FECB was allowed to attend and give evidence. Churchill's memoirs, and the more recent official histories all carefully ignore the subject, just as they do the gift of two 'PURPLE' machines from America in January 1941.
After the Winds message had been decoded, Staff at Cheltenham were convinced that war was imminent, but that America was "well prepared". Briggs was on weekend leave in Ohio that Sunday, 7 December, when news came through of the first attacks. The initial reports were very sketchy, and Briggs was certain that in view of all the warnings that HAD been received, the Japanese had walked into a well-laid trap. But by the time Briggs got back to Cheltenham after the weekend, the truth of the losses had begun to emerge. He wondered what had gone wrong.
Briggs remembers; "When I first came off that weekend I had a chance to talk with Wigle, and I said "What happened?", he said, "I don't know...all I can say is nobody's talking," and that was the end of our conversation. No one knew anything. So I let it rest, as by then, with war declared we were very busy. But in the next month, as we began to hear the real facts about our losses, that's when I started looking back through our records for that 'EXECUTE' intercept and to see what I'd done with it"
But Briggs could find nothing in the files at Cheltenham. ALL the copies had vanished. When Briggs asked Wigle what had happened to all the copies, Wigle said "they had been called for, they needed additional 'backup', or words to that effect." But who asked for the copies? That remains a mystery. It certainly would not have been either Safford or Kramer. ,They already had a copy of the 'EXECUTE' off the teleprinter and the carbon copies that had come by messenger. So there was nothing more for them to learn by asking for all the other copies at Cheltenham. Therefore, whoever asked for all those copies was not interested in their content, but wanted to remove them altogether from the files.

And so began the Great Winds "EXECUTE" mystery that was to puzzle historians for the next forty five years.

As far as Briggs was concerned, that was the end of the story. He left Cheltenham and was posted elsewhere, including the Naval Intercept Station at Skaggs Island in California. At the end of the war, in September 1945, Briggs was posted back to Washington to work at OP-20-G, where his first assignment was with the newly formed Armed Forces Security Agency. By this time there had been 7 investigations into the Pearl attack, but the Winds messages were never mentioned at any of them, and therefore, neither Briggs, nor anyone else from Cheltenham was called to give evidence.

On 27 December 1941, the staff at FECB (except for Mortimer, who stayed behind to act as a liason officer until late January 1942); it's Hoellerith machines, and all it's codebraking records were safely evacuated from Singapore to Colombo, Ceylon, where they became known as Captain on Staff HMS LANKI. Nothing was left behind to give the Japanese the slightest clue that their codes had been broken. By early 1942, a large contingent of civilians from Bletchley Park, together with a team of WRENs arrived at FECB Colombo from Britain to expand their activities, although the first group were all lost when their ship was torpedoed.
In Singapore, FECB had had a fixed teletype link with Bletchley Park for 18 hours a day, and a continuous radioteleypte link with the naval base in Colombo, which had a seperate link to London. There were also secret radio links with the US Navy at Corrigedor (Station Coast) and the Dutch in Batavia at Kamer 14. Every scrap of information, from codebreaking, direction-finding, traffic analysis and any other form of intelligence collected by FECB, was immediately sent back to the naval section of GCCS at Bletchley Park.

GCHQ refused to provide the authors with ANY information about how code-breaking intelligence at FECB was handled, but a copy of the instructions was found in the archives in New Zealand. This showed that messages based on codebreaking information from FECB would be prefixed "ZYMOTIC", and also marked MOST SECRET and a warning included in any summary that the information came from "Special Intelligence". A similar codeword "ZEAL" was used to indicate codebreaking intelligence coming from Australia.
Other instructions included:

(7) All groups and rough working are to be kept seperate from other messages and are to be burnt (original emphasis), when no longer required for reference. This should normally be immediately and in any case not longer than a week.
(8) Log copies are to be burnt when no longer required.......normally no longer than a month from reciept.
(9) Knowledge of these messages restricted to as few officers as possible. The Captain on Staff or his Deputy will decide as to whom their copies are to be shown.
(10) If it is necessary to pass on information contained in these messages they will be reworded so as the contents cannot be traced back to Special Intelligence.
(11) In the case of (10), names of enemy ships should be avoided and positions should be expressed in a different form to that given in (original) ULTRA or ZYMOTIC message.
(12) No mention of any information is to be made in any war diaries, reports of proceedings, no matter how limited the circulation.

It is not hard to see from this why so little information about British codebreaking against the Japanese prior to December 1941 has found it's way into log-books and other official diaries of the period.
After the war there was an eighth investigaton; a full Congressional Inquiry that was run from 15th November 1945 to 31 May 1946. When this got under way, both safford and Kramer were closely questioned about the Wind's messages and in particular, the 'Execute' portion. It was put to them very strongly that their memories were at fault and that they had seen no "Execute" message. None of the other people who had seen the "Execute" message on December 4 were called to testify. This included Briggs, Wigle, the rest of the staff at Cheltenham, Admiral Turner (director of War Plans), Colonel Sadtler, and Admiral Noyes. Some of the senior staff at Cheltenham, and OP-20-G had been told to prepare statements, but none of these were ever put before the committee. It soon became clear that enourmous pressure had been brought on anyone who had seen the "EXECUTE" message to change his story and now say that he/she had not seen it, or that it was not a correct "Execute" message but had been "mistakenly written down". Even Daryl Wigle (now a Lieutenant), who had been Brigg's Station Chief at Cheltenham at the time, changed his story in a statement dated 11 December 1945 saying;

"I do not recall any Japanese language recordings being made. Cheltenham was never given any directive to record Japanese voice transmissions. There were no personel at Cheltenham capable of understanding or speaking Japanese. To the best of my knowledge Cheltenham was not, during the period immediately preceeding Pearl Harbor Day, ie., from 28 November to 7 December 1941, given any additional Japanese, Morse or voice assignments.

Wigle died in 1974 without ever elaborating on these claims, which are plainly at variance with the conversations which Briggs clearly remembers. The instructions Safford had given and saw being carried out by Wigle on 4 December, and the official version of events, which states that radio intercept stations had been specifically told to look out for the second "Winds" message. As it turned out, Wigle never gave evidence at the enqiury, so the statement was never challenged.
Considering the passage of time and all that had taken place during the war, it is hardly surprising that some people had genuinely forgotten the exact circumstances of the Winds message incident. Sadtler recalled he recieved the "execute" message fromm Stafford on 5 December rather than 4 December. Nevertheless, as Briggs remembers, "There were two factions at work. One was trying to eliminate any further discussion and revelations about the Winds message and our capabilities of reading Japanese signals. The second group was trying to admit as much as they could in an effort to tell the truth."

In the course of looking through his files to substantiate his story for the 1945 Inquiry, Safford discovered Briggs's name and, finding him stationed in Washington, asked Briggs to come over to his office in Building 18 at the Navy Department. as a result, Briggs had 3 or 4 meetings with Safford, during which he went through all the details of the Winds message saga and his interception of the "EXECUTE" portion on 4 December.
This was the first time Safford and Biggs had ever met.
"I got over there and found this very soft-spoken, pleasant man and we sat down, and one of the first things he shot me with was the fact he knew my call sign. "You were R/T?", I said thats right, that was my sign."Do you know you were the one who intercepted that Winds code 'execute' on December 4?"
.....I stopped for a minute, trying to recollect how he came by that. You see, I didn't know all this time that Safford was the one at the other end that had gotten the message that day. Then he said: "I'm trying to reconstruct the events on 4 December, would you help me?" Briggs did his best to answer all questions put to him by Safford, but of course, Briggs's knowledge was limited only to what happened to the intercept at Cheltenham and that he had personally sent it on the teleprinter to OP-20-G. During their second meeting, Safford asked Briggs whether he would be willing to testify before the congressional Inquiry then in progress...Briggs said he would.

Shortly after the second meeting, Briggs was called before his commanding officer, Captain Harper, who, ironically, was the same officer who in 1937 had first interviewed Briggs and suggested he join the Naval Intelligence section. Briggs recollection of the meeting is crystal clear.
"He asked me to sit down. He stated that he understood I had been having some meetings with Captain Safford with reference to my being called as a witness. I replied, "Yes." Harper wanted to know why this had been done without his knowledge and why he had not been informed. I advised the captain i didn't know I was supposed to report to him about this matter in view that I had gotten a call from Captain Safford direct. He, in effect, advised me that I should know that he was the commanding officer of the Station, not Captain Safford.
I agreed to that point, I said, "Yes indeed, sir, but Captain Safford didn't allude to the fact that you weren't aware of my being with him." He dropped it at that point and went on to the point in question. He seemed very serious and perturbed. he stated, in effect, that too much had already been revealed by the hearings. That he couldn't exactly explain at this point what was behind it. That someday perhaps I would understand, but at this point he couldn't give me the information necessary to sustain what he was about to tell me. Then he delivered his coup-de-grace.

http://forums.ubi.com/images/smilies/16x16_smiley-indifferent.gif"You are not to confer with Captain Safford any further. You are specifically prohibited from meeting with him in his office, and if there are any further inquiries or any requests with reference to this matter, you are to report to me at once." I acknowledged, sat there for a while, then he said, "That is all." So I left."

Despite this starkly clear order, Briggs felt he owed Safford an explanation and telephoned him to tell him what had happened.
"Safford was stunned". He said "Well, he didn't say we couldn't bump into each other or anything along that line. I'll call you back later. Some days later, Safford asked me to meet him again, which, despite Harper's instructions, I did. During our conversation Safford told me that after receiving my intercept off the tele-printer from Kramer he had personally sent a copy to Adm Noyes, who had in turn told Adm Turner, Col Sadtler and Adm Stark. He also said that he had tried to have me called as a witness at the hearing and that apparently, from a higher authority than Captain Harper, I was not to appear. And that was the end of the matter as far as I was concerned."

Briggs believes that Harper was far from happy with the role he had to play. "Harper seemed ill at ease that he had to tell me this. He wasn't mad at me. He was bothered, http://forums.ubi.com/images/smilies/16x16_smiley-sad.gif deeply bothered by it all."

The saga of the Winds message and whether the 'execute' portion was received or not was to occupy the attention of the Pearl Harbor investigators so greatly that it distracted their attention away from far more important matters that were never investigated.....The simple truth is that had both parts of the Winds message been placed before the 1945 Congressional committee, they would have provided no new evidence that the committee did not already possess.......
Having decided to conceal the message, it was then necessary not only to destroy all records but also to continue the deception during the 1945 Inquiry and pressure all those who HAD seen it originally into changing their stories in case they were called to testify.

Unfortunately, Safford, Kramer and Briggs were honest men who saw no reason to tell lies. The importance of the Winds Saga is therefore not 'what the message said', but that a number of sufficiently senior officers were able and willing to cover up the truth and shred files so as to falsify the records for posterity.
The question of who authorized the destruction of all copies of the message was closely investigated in 1945 without success. Safford discovered that at one intercept station- Winter Harbor, Maine- the officer in charge admitted that in the Spring of 1943 he had been told by the Navy Department to destroy all his station logbooks from 1931 through June 30, 1942. But this was not investigated to find out who had given such an order.
Similar destruction had also happened at the Cheltenham station. In Washington, Captain R. Mason stated that at various times up to Spring 1943 he had authorized the destruction of old Japanese intercepts to,......
"....avoid the impossibly huge accumulation of paper." after carefully inspecting them for important matter.........
But Mason was never called to explain what files he considered worthy of preservation.

Such wholesale destruction of important material within only a few years of it's being filed is quite contrary to normal U.S. Navy archival practice.

If this relatively harmless piece of evidence could be so professionally concealed from the American people, it legitimately raises the question of what other material was kept from them............

So....When did the U.S. Navy begin reading JN-25?

The answer ought to be as simple as it was in the case of the earlier "Red and Blue Book" codes.

But it is not.....

For 40 years, the official version was that JN-25 did not exist.

JN-25 was considered so secret by the U.S. Navy that even during 7 wartime investigations it was not once mentioned. And at the 8th and final post-war Congressional hearing, in 1945-46, only a few vague references to it can be found in the 39 volumes of evidence. It was never discussed in detail, nor was the U.S Navy asked to give evidence as to when it was first broken.
As the official history records:
"With reference to the Navy cipher(JN-25)....nothing appears in the Pearl Harbor testimony about this, although much is made of (the) failure to get a PURPLE machine (to Hawaii)."

Virtually all the books and articles about Pearl Harbor that appeared from 1946 onward covering the next 35 years concentrated on the MAGIC summaries decrypted from the PURPLE diplomatic intercepts. The argument is that had this material been passed to the Pearl commanders it would have alerted them to the attack. Not only is this assertion quite untrue, it has also served to confuse the real issue....which lies NOT with the PURPLE decrypts but with..............JN-25- the only code system used by the Japanese to transmit the final instructions for the attack..........

In 1979, President Jimmy Carter authorized the NSA to release a mass of Japanese intercepts. But before these were placed in the National archives, all references to JN-25 were censored. It is even more significant that not a single JN-25 decrypt was released that had been read prior to 7 December 1941, thereby giving the impression that no Japanese Naval operational signals had been decrypted before the attack. The few intercepts in the archives that pre-date Pearl Harbor all bear 1945-46 translation dates.

The starting point for research into the American history of JN-25 is "Naval Security Group History to World War II", prepared by Captain J.S. Holtwick, USN (ret), in June 1971, an extremely long and detailed account running to a total of 700 pages. On pages 396-97, the report deals with the five main ORANGE (Japanese) codes in current use in 1939-40. The fourth of these is called the "Operations Code System,", which is in fact JN-25, as shown in a footnote. The report states,...
"An additive key cipher is employed with this code, and although the method of recovery is well defined, the process is a laborious one requiring from an hour to several days for each message. A machine is under construction which will aid in the ...solution (and)...a few code values have been recovered but...at least six months will be required before complete messages can be read."

This confirms that some messages in JN-25 (doubtless those with 'good cribs' that helped reveal the contents), were being broken by early 1940- some taking several days- while the six-month period mentioned would take one to the latter part of the same year.
The report continues on page 398:
Captain Safford in August 1970 stated from memory:
"JN-25 came into effect 1st of June 1939 and in late September 1940 we turned in our first translation of a message, either the week before or the week after the Army (SIS) achieved their final breakthrough in the Japanese PURPLE machine.... By 1 December 1941 we had the code solved to a readable extent" ( empahsis added by authors). Thus no one was reading anything in the.....diplomatic (PURPLE) and Naval (JN-25) systems (until) the latter part of 1940. On the 4th of January 1941 it was reported that about 2,000 values had been recovered out of 33,000 possible in the JN-25 code."

Aside from the clarity of this statement, what is remarkable is that the entire history was carefully checked by the NSA and US Navy prior to it's declassification under Executive Order #12356 on 20th June 1985 and anything still considered sensitive is blanked out.
The comment about OP-20-G having recovered 2,000 values (in other words, they had identified 2,000 words and phrases in the dictionary as a result of penetrating the additive tables) is particularly interesting., because that same month OP-20-G evidently felt confident enough to offer two reconstructed copies of JN-25 to GCCS as part of the exchange of cryptographic technology which included the two 'Purple' machines.

The second primary souce is "A Brief History of Communications Intelligence in the United States", written by Safford between 21 and 27 March 1952 and released into the National Archives by NSA on 6 March 1982. Page 14 deals with JN-25 but is so heavily censored as to make little sense:

"On June 1st, 1939 the Japanese Navy introduced a new type of numerical code referred to by Navy COMINT personnel as (censored) the Operations Code. (the next two lines are totally censored). Mrs. Driscoll and Mr Currier spear-headed the attack and we were soon (censored) reconstructing the code. Recovery of the (censored) keys, (the word missing here is probably additive), however, involved much more labor and required many more crypto-analytic personnel than earlier transposition keys. Main work of solution was undertaken at Washington (OP-20-G).
By December 1940 we were working on two systems of keys withthis book; the 'old' keys for code recovery and 'new' keys for current information (five lines completely censored.)"

Despite the deletions by the NSA (which, incidentally, now claims to know nothing about the JN-25 code), it is possible to confirm that JN-25 was broken by OP-20-G soon after it's introduction, matching the progress made by Nave and Burnett. The reference to needing more people also confirms Nave's comment that JN-25 was a "tedious" rather than 'hard' code to break.
On the following page 15, there is a reference to the Japanese Flag Officers Cypher (what FECB called "the CinC's code"), which was used prior to the introduction of JN-25 and then discarded. The report makes the comment that,

"This was the only Japanese Naval Cryptographic system which the U.S Navy ever failed to solve."

The report continues......

"On December 1st, 1941 the system(JN-25) became unreadable....this could have been a tip-off as to coming hostilities but it also could have been a mere routine change of system. after all, the code had been in use for 2 1/2 years. Two weeks later Corrigedor (Station Cast) flashed the good news that the same old code was still in use but that new keys were being used with it. This was the third or fourth set of keys used with this same codebook.
The IJN had changed the codebook along with the cipher keys on 1st of December 1941,there is no telling how badly the war in the Pacific would have gone....due credit for Coral Sea and Midway should be given to the Navy's pre-Pearl Harbor COMINT effort."

This passage is particularly interesting for several reasons. First, Safford is mistaken that the date when key changes were made was 1 December, when in fact it was 4 December when this change was made. Second, he confirms that JN-25 was broken soon after it's introduction and was read throughout the two and-a-half year period to late 1941. And third, that the basic code remained unchanged and only additive tables (or KEYS) altered. All this tallies with the same progress made at FECB and GCCS.
The still censored message from station Cast on 15 December 1941 reads: "Com 16 OPNAV info CINCAF. TOP SECRET-- 151250. Two intercepts in (censored) plain code (December ) 6 and 13 followed within a few hours by enciphered versions confirmed indicator (censored) already recovered by mathematical elimination code remains unchanged(.) Will send recoveries this system if you desire begin work on current period."

It is incredible to find that, a week after the attack on Pearl harbor, Japanese code security was so poor that they were still sending the same messages in a low-grade system as well as in JN-25. Evidently, Station Cast had no difficulty recognizing this. What is even more important is that if Station Cast's codebreakers knew that JN-25 remained unchanged, then it must mean that they were reading it during the previous six-month period, from June 1st 1941 to December 4th 1941.

The third primary souce is Safford's own account, contained in the article "Rhapsody in Purple" in CRYPTOLOGIA, July 1982 which states.......

"The first completely decrypted message/translation in JN-25 followed the first decrypted 'PURPLE' message (September 1940),by about a week. Both Washington units (SIS and OP-20-G) were "in business"....and morale was extremely high. The numerical keys (additive tables) were changed on 1 December 1940 and again on June 1st 1941. A change...was anticipated for 1 December 1941"

This account is virtually the same as the statement on page 397 from the official history and again shows that from early October 1940, which roughly matches the 6 month period mentioned, JN-25 was being broken by OP-20-G. Bearing in mind that GCCS had 300 people working solely on JN-25, whereas OP-20-G had to split it's far smaller staff between a monthly roster of handling PURPLE traffic and the naval signals, it is not surprising that they took a year longer than GCCS to break JN-25!
Safford's account again confirms that the 6 monthly additive table changes posed OP-20-G no greater problem than they did Nave and Burnett. Safford then explains how three copies of the JN-25 codebook were being laboriously reconstructed by hand by Phillip Cate in exactly the same way as the Red and Blue Books had been done previously. The reconstructed JN-25 codebooks were essentially blank ledgers with the numerical five-figure code group in the left hand column, with the other columns containing the Chinese character, the Japanese 'Kana' equivalent, and the English translation. It was intended that one copy would remain with OP-20-G, the second would go to Station HYPO in Pearl harbor, and the third to Station CAST in Corrigedor.

The fourth primary source is a memorandum Safford wrote on 17 May 1945 for Lieutenent Commander John F. Sonnet, USNR, which included the following statement:

"Com 16 (Station CAST in Corrigedor) intercepts were considered most reliable....not only because of better radio interception, but because Com 16 was currently reading messages in the Japanese Fleet Cryptographic System (5 Number Code or JN-25), and was exchanging technical information and translations with the British in Singapore (FECB).
As regards the JN-25 system, the current version (JN-25b) had been in effect since 1st of December 1940 (and) remained in effect until 27-31 May 1942, and was partially readable in November 1941. A new system of keys was introduced on 4 December 1941 and reported by Com 16, but the carry over of the old code made their solution quite simple and we were reading messages again by Christmas, Corrigedor getting the initial 'break' on 8th December 1941. Com 16 had the benefit of it's own translations plus "tips" from (FECB) Singapore."

This statement confirms that JN-25 was being read at Station CAST and that there was some degree of co-operation with FECB. It also confirms that after the additive table change of December 4 1941, messages were still being sent in both the old and new keys and that this helped reconstruct the new tables very quickly.

Taken together, these four accounts of the U.S. Navy codebreaking show beyond doubt that between 1 June 1939 and December 7, 1941 some JN-25 messages were definately decoded by the US Navy. One would, therefore, expect to find in the American archives a series of JN-25 intercepts in their 'raw' state, and various de-crypts covering the 2 year period. Some of the earlier ones would be only partly read, with many gaps for unsolved groups, while the later ones- nearer the time of Pearl Harbor- would be fully translated.

But, not a single pre-Pearl Harbor JN-25 intercept or decrypt can be found in any American archive.

In their letter of 8 May 1989, the U.S. Naval Security Group stated:

"We regret we are unable to provide any assistance or illumination on the problem of JN-25. When the systematic declassification effort began in 1978...the decision was made to begin with a review of all Japanese message translations from the World War II era.
Since that time the question of the whereabouts and status of early JN-25 translations has been asked repeatedly but without resolution. We have been unable to locate them...in any form or microfilm...the 1941 JN-25 messages that are in (the National Archives) were all translated after the war ended.
From the historical perspective we agree it would be most fascinating to be able to follow the progress of the system through the evolution of it's translations. Regrettably, we are unable to do so."

This is an extraordinary letter that is hard to accept at it's face value.

The Naval Security Group on Nebraska Avenue in Washington is the direct successor of Safford's OP-20-G and has been the continuous custodian of ALL the U.S. Navy's cryptographic operations- including codebreaking, since July 1922. Therefore, there is absolutely no reason why the archives relating to this work should NOT be intact, especially as OP-20-G did not move from it's offices in the Navy Department on Constitution Avenue to Nebraska Avenue until 7 February 1943.
For the US Navy to comment that it would be "fascinating" to follow the progress of breaking JN-25 when they themselves were responsible for doing just that, is either extremely naive- which, considering the letter is from Commander George G. Henrikson, special assistant for security, is most unlikely....or it is the result of many years of official policy to deflect historical inquiries.
This letter means that every single scrap of evidence relating to JN-25 between June 1939 through late November 1941 has vanished.

Considering the historical importance of this material in the context of Pearl Harbor, it is impossible to believe that this could have happened throughout ALL the US Navy's Codebreaking offices, unless there had been a deliberate policy beginning in the immediate aftermath of the war to conceal or destroy all evidence relating to this code. Support for this thesis can be drawn from three facts. First, JN-25 archival material continues to be censored even after all these years. Second, the equally important and politically sensitive PURPLE diplomatic decrypts of the same pre-war period are freely available. If this latter material could be kept intact for posterity by the Army and Navy codebreakers, then it is quite remarkable that the US Navy has managed to
lose ALL of it's JN-25 documents.
And third, the US Navy prides itself on the impeccable condition and scope of it's archives.

It is also impossible to believe that the few pre-Pearl Harbor JN-25 decrypts in the National Archives were only decoded in late 1945 and early 1946. It is a matter of uncensored public record that by early 1942 the US Navy was reading JN-25 quite freely. During the next three years there were seven seperate inquiries into the attack:

1. The Roberts Commission- 18 December 1941 through January 23rd, 1942.
2. The Hart Inquiry- 5 February through 15 June 1944.
3. The Army Pearl Harbor Board- 20 July through 20 October 1944.
4. The U.S. Naval Court of Inquiry- 24 July through 19 October 1944.
5. The Clausen Investigation-23 November 1944 through 12 September 1945.
6. The Hewitt Inquiry- 14 May through 11 July 1945.
7. The Clarke Investigation- 14-16 September 1944 and 13 July through 4 August 1945.

The U.S. Navy refused to allow discussion of JN-25 at any of these inquries. Considering the defeat they sustained at Pearl Harbor, it strains credulity to believe they would not have been sufficiently curious to know what these few intercepts contained and to have decoded them as soon as possible. Reluctantly, one has to conclude that these copies in the National Archives have been deliberately falsified in order to create the impression that JN-25 was not being read in 1941.
As no such policy affected the public disclosures during 1945-46 inquiry of how American codebreakers had read the PURPLE diplomatic messages, why was the decision taken to conceal similar success against JN-25 from the american people that lasts even to this day? And who authorized it?
What makes this affair so bizzare is that from 8 December 1941 onward it was a matter of great pride that U.S. Navy Codebreakers were breaking JN-25, which only 7 months later was to lead to a dramatic victory at Midway, and a year after that, "grabbing the Peacock's tail" to shoot down Admiral Yammamoto's aircraft. It seems a remarkable coincidence that the official record of breaking JN-25 conveniently begins only after hostilities have commenced.
The foriegn ministries of some governments (like the British Foreign Office) are still embarrassed to admit that they read another nation's codes in peacetime. But in america, no such embarressment exists, because the revelation that their codebreakers read Japanese diplomatic traffic prior to a war declaration is not disputed. What then is the difference between PURPLE machine diplomatic decrypts and the decrypts from JN-25?

The answer is very simply that the JN-25 messages contained the final operational details of the Pearl Harbor attack, whereas PURPLE intercepts did NOT.

NIMITZ1967

11-07-2007, 10:02 PM

http://forums.ubi.com/images/smilies/typing.gif Hello again to all!.....The good news is I'm not going to 'gab-on' http://forums.ubi.com/images/smilies/clap.gif http://forums.ubi.com/images/smilies/clap.gif....This article is a companion piece to the "Myths of the Pearl Harbor Attack" thread It's conclusions are simply ASTOUNDING!......Read and Enjoy!!!!!................On with the Show.... http://forums.ubi.com/images/smilies/winky.gif

DRAWING THE BLINDS:........... http://forums.ubi.com/images/smilies/25.gifBy Eric Nave and James Rusbridger

"......shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered-
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he that today sheds his blood for me,
Shall be my brother."

U.S.S. ARIZONA Memorial Dedication.

Every year, more than 2 million people visit the Arizona Memorial at Pear Harbor Naval Base, Hawaii. They first gather at the impressively dignified memorial center set in a peaceful landscaped garden overlooking the harbor, with a large museum containing many relics and pictures of the battleship. Visitors are then shown a film of the history of the USS Arizona and the attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941.
Presumably to assuage modern consciences and the economics of Japanese tourism and business interests in Hawaii, the film has been carefully sanitized so as to play down the treacherous nature of the attack that morning, which was made while diplomatic relations were still in progress. President Roosevelt's "infamy" speech to Congress has been excised and is shown only mute, thus robbing it of it's dramatic impact. Even the final surrender on board USS Missouri in 45' has been delicately edited so that there is only a fleeting glimpse of the defeated enemy. Revisionist history is commonplace in Communist countries, but it is bizarre to find it so grotesquely displayed at one of America's great national shrines.
But though the emphasis and morality of history can be tailored to suit political expediency, the true majesty of the Arizona Memorial cannot be tampered with...Each boatload of visitors is shuttled out across Pearl waters toward Ford Island in trim US Navy launches, often crewed by young women sailors whose parents weren't even alive in 1941. As they approach Alfred Prie's starkly functional structure that spans the wreck, each launch pauses to let visitors get their first glimpse of USS Arizona.............
As the launch lies idle in the still waters, the chatter dies away...... Each visitor - no matter what his age - sences he is about to enter a world where time has stood still............. and belongs to another generation. Quietly, visitors file up the steps into the memorial. First into the bell room with Arizona's bell hanging silent before them. Then out along the main catwalk, where they see the remains of this great battleship lying beneath the clear waters. Just a few pieces reach up out of the water toward the blue sky, as a reminder of the death that came so treacherously that Sunday morning many years before. And from the rusty relic still proudly flies the StarsandStripes, reminding visitors that the Arizona remains in commission with the US Navy.
Finally, at the far end, the visitors to the Hall of Remembrance look in silent awe at the names of 1,177 officers and men of the U.S.S. Arizona who lie entombed below. The names are carved into the marbel wall that flickers the sunlight reflected from the waters that ebb and flow around their final resting place. Like many before them, and since, these brave men risked their lives in the service of their country, knowing full well the perils of the sea......and now lie at peace, secure within it's protection for all time. Some visitors to Arizona find it a numbing experience. Young and old stand there in silence, gazing at the waters aound the wreck, with the thin, iridescent slick of fuel oil that still leaks from the tanks ruptured by Japanese bomb and torpedoes all those years before.
Certainly, there are plenty of other memorials and shrines to American war dead elsewhere around the world. They nestle in leafy woodlands in England, in sleepy cowfields of rural France, the plains of Belgium, the near industrial heartland of Germany, in sandy deserts and rocky, remote 'Pacific' islands......But none generates such strong emotions as does the Arizona Memorial. Why should this be so?

Because it is part of the story of the attack on Pearl Harbor, which, even with the passage of all this time, is still close to the minds and hearts of Americans. The Pearl Harbor attack was a shattering defeat for American military and political leadership. By itself this is sufficiently topical to keep the story alive today in the context of a surprise attack from another enemy. "Remember Pearl Harbor" is a cry heard frequently when military budgets are debated, and it is one that politicians ignore at their peril.
But there is much more to it than that. The story of Pearl Harbor remains an enigma to this day, containing all the elements of one of the worlds great mystery stories. Over the intervening years the American people have been given highly selective accounts of what happened,with the truth obscured by a combination of official secrecy, false testimony, coercian to tell lies....a deliberate attempt to hide the facts within a web of mythology and poor research.
Despite eight official investigations, a score of books, and hundreds of historical studies totalling many millions of words, vital questions have remained unanswered because of lack of accurate first-hand or archival material.
According to the official version, the idea of an attack on Pearl Harbor seemed so illogical when compared to an attack on targets nearer Japan that, due to cognitive dissonance (refusing to accept what you wish to believe), NO senior officer at OP-20-G or the Army War Plans Division was willing to consider it seriously or even to discuss it with the commanders in Hawaii. As a result, the important messages, like the Bomb Plot Signal, were ignored because they did not fit in with a preconceived idea of what the Japnese might do.
In other words, the information was in Washington.......but nobody recognized it.. As historian Roberta Wohlsletter put it in her 1962 history, "Pearl Harbor; Warning and Decision",
"The relevant signals so clearly audible after the event (were) partially obscured before the event by the surrounding noise."
The military view that an attack on Pearl was "unlikely" was shared by the local media. On September 6th, 1941, journalist Clarke Beach wrote in 'The Honolulu Star Bulletin',
"A Japanese attack on Hawaii is regarded as the most unlikely thing in the world, with one chance in a million of being successful. Besides having more powerful defences than any other (American) post, it is protected by distance. The Japanese fleet would have no bases from which to operate....(and)...American patrols would spot it long before it arrived."

During the 1950s, however, a number of revisionist historians began to publish books propagating the theory that President Roosevelt had deliberately concealed warnings of the attack, because he needed an excuse to bring America into the war, to help Britain defeat The Third Reich. The "Revisonist Theory" argues that Roosevelt and his closet collegues knew, from intelligence derived from the "MAGIC" decrypts of the PURPLE messages passing between Washington and Tokyo and Consular messages between Hawaii and Tokyo, that Japan planned to attack America if the negotiations in Washington failed. They also knew from the Bomb Plot Message, available in Washington on 9 October, that the Japanese were planning an aerial attack on Pearl Harbor. And Roosevelt was aware from the decrypts of the Japnese consular messages from Hawaii of their close and continuous interset in the movements of the U.S. Pacific Fleet.
On 2 December, Roosevelt read the message from Tokyo to Berlin instructing Oshima to tell Hitler that war with America "may come quicker than anyone dreams." Finally, there was the pilot message sent to Washington from Tokyo on 6 December warning the Japnese Embassy that a final message, terminating further diplomatic negotiations, was about to arrive and was presented to the State Department at precisely 1 pm on 7 December 1941.
None of this information was made available to the commanders in Pearl Harbor. Despite the increasing urgency of intelligence being decrypted as late as 6 and 7 of December, no effort was made to send any form of warning to either Adm Kimmel or Adm Short. It has often been argued that a PURPLE machine at Pearl Harbor would have enabled Kimmel and Short to have some sort of warning, but this is not so. True, it would have drawn attention to the 7:30 AM deadline, but without the JN-25 operational details, this would not necessarily have had much impact...After all, Gen Macarthur in the Philippines had 7 hours warning after the Pearl attack, yet was still caught unprepared, with all his aircraft on the ground. Far more crucial would have been to allow Hawaiian commanders to see JN-25 and J-19 consular decrypts, some of which, unknown to them, were being intercepted in Honolulu but were sent to either OP-20-G or SIS for decoding. These would have shown them that intence interest by the Japanese in the Pearl Harbor defences- in particular the message of 24 September, which divided Pearl Harbor into a number of target areas for an air attack, and became known as "The Bomb Plot Message".
One of the leading proponents of the "Revisionist" theory, Rear Admiral Robert A. Theobold, USN (ret), argued in his book, "The Final Secret of Pearl Harbor", that,...
"Everything that happened in Washington on 6 and 7 December supports the belief that Roosevelt had directed that NO (warning) messages be sent to Hawaiian commanders before noon on Sunday, Washington time. Stark arrived in his office at 9:25 AM on Sunday, 7 December and..acccepted...the (Japanese) declaration of war message (The MAGIC 14th part decrypt)...but against the advise of assistants refused to inform Kimmel. At 10:05 Stark knew that the message was to be delivered at 1 PM Washington time (7:30 am Hawaiian time), but again, despite the urging of his aides, refused to send word to Kimmel....Starks statement to the press in August 1945 that all he did during the pre-Pearl Harbor days was on order of higher authority...can only mean President Roosevelt...thus by holding a weak fleet in Hawaii as an invitation to a surprise attack, and, by denying the commander of that fleet the information which might cause him to render that attack impossible, Roosevelt brought war on the United States on 7 December 1941."

But this attack on Roosevelt cannot be sustained, because the decision to limit MAGIC material ONLY to Stimson, Gerow, Miles, Bratton, Knox, Turner, Ingersoll, McCollum, Watts, and- belatedly, Roosevelt and Hull....was taken by Stark and Marshall. In fact, the President Roosevelt was unaware he was being denied MAGIC material by his subordinates."
Thus, the decision to deny the Hawaiian commanders MAGIC material, and the refusal to permit their codebreakers to work on intercepted messages, had nothing to do with the President.

It would be conveniant to claim that Roosevelt ordered that the two aircraft carriers should sail from Pearl, thus denying Yamamoto his prize should this be his target. Unfortunately, that also cannot be sustained, because the ENTERPRISE left on 28 November on a perfectly routine mission. In any case, for the President to give such an order without explaining his reasons to the Navy could not have passed unnoticed.

The revisionist scenario has never been accepted for three reasons...First, no evidence has ever been produced to show Roosevelt would betray his office as President in this manner. Second, the information contained in the consular and diplomatic decrypts that Roosevelt saw gave no indication that Pearl might be the target; nor did it give any precise indication of the date of the attack. And third, even if he was aware that Pearl was the target, would a President who knew his Navy was unready for war put most of the Pacific Fleet at risk as part of a plan to get America into the war?......To believe this, we must believe FDR was a knave and a fool, which manifestly, he was not.
And did Roosevelt want to help Churchill to the extent of bringing America into the war prematurely?.....All evidence shows quite the contrary, that FDR desperately wanted more time to enable America to rearm before commencing hostilities.

Aside from the scenario of FDRs morality, both 'official' and 'revisionist' scenarios are outdated and INVALID because their authors were unaware that the British ( and most probably the Americans) were http://forums.ubi.com/images/smilies/16x16_smiley-surprised.gif READING JN-25 during the period leading up to the attack. This is hardly surprising, because the existence of JN-25 has only been officially acknowledged by the American Government in 1990 to the authors of this, while Nave's own account of how all Japanese codes, including JN-25, were broken by FECB and GCCS remains the only British source. The whole question of Japanese codebreaking continues to be completely embargoed by the British government.

The question of who knew what about Japanese plans during November 1941, when Yamamoto's Task Force sailed, is the crucial factor in determinig where responsibility lay. As we know, the messages from Yamamoto to his battle fleet were intercepted....it follows that those who could read JN-25 possessed the final pieces of The Jigsaw. If, however, they were only reading PURPLE diplomatic messages, then they were 'blind', because these NEVER contained any operational orders.
This fact was never appreciated during any of the 8 official inquiries, because the very existence of JN-25 had been deliberately suppressed by the US Navy, let alone whether it had been broken.. The question of whether Britain could read JN-25 never emerged at any of the inquiries. Despite official requests, NO British codebreaker from either GCCS or FECB was allowed to attend and give evidence. Churchill's memoirs, and the more recent official histories all carefully ignore the subject, just as they do the gift of two 'PURPLE' machines from America in January 1941.
After the Winds message had been decoded, Staff at Cheltenham were convinced that war was imminent, but that America was "well prepared". Briggs was on weekend leave in Ohio that Sunday, 7 December, when news came through of the first attacks. The initial reports were very sketchy, and Briggs was certain that in view of all the warnings that HAD been received, the Japanese had walked into a well-laid trap. But by the time Briggs got back to Cheltenham after the weekend, the truth of the losses had begun to emerge. He wondered what had gone wrong.
Briggs remembers; "When I first came off that weekend I had a chance to talk with Wigle, and I said "What happened?", he said, "I don't know...all I can say is nobody's talking," and that was the end of our conversation. No one knew anything. So I let it rest, as by then, with war declared we were very busy. But in the next month, as we began to hear the real facts about our losses, that's when I started looking back through our records for that 'EXECUTE' intercept and to see what I'd done with it"
But Briggs could find nothing in the files at Cheltenham. ALL the copies had vanished. When Briggs asked Wigle what had happened to all the copies, Wigle said "they had been called for, they needed additional 'backup', or words to that effect." But who asked for the copies? That remains a mystery. It certainly would not have been either Safford or Kramer. ,They already had a copy of the 'EXECUTE' off the teleprinter and the carbon copies that had come by messenger. So there was nothing more for them to learn by asking for all the other copies at Cheltenham. Therefore, whoever asked for all those copies was not interested in their content, but wanted to remove them altogether from the files.

And so began the Great Winds "EXECUTE" mystery that was to puzzle historians for the next forty five years.

As far as Briggs was concerned, that was the end of the story. He left Cheltenham and was posted elsewhere, including the Naval Intercept Station at Skaggs Island in California. At the end of the war, in September 1945, Briggs was posted back to Washington to work at OP-20-G, where his first assignment was with the newly formed Armed Forces Security Agency. By this time there had been 7 investigations into the Pearl attack, but the Winds messages were never mentioned at any of them, and therefore, neither Briggs, nor anyone else from Cheltenham was called to give evidence.

On 27 December 1941, the staff at FECB (except for Mortimer, who stayed behind to act as a liason officer until late January 1942); it's Hoellerith machines, and all it's codebraking records were safely evacuated from Singapore to Colombo, Ceylon, where they became known as Captain on Staff HMS LANKI. Nothing was left behind to give the Japanese the slightest clue that their codes had been broken. By early 1942, a large contingent of civilians from Bletchley Park, together with a team of WRENs arrived at FECB Colombo from Britain to expand their activities, although the first group were all lost when their ship was torpedoed.
In Singapore, FECB had had a fixed teletype link with Bletchley Park for 18 hours a day, and a continuous radioteleypte link with the naval base in Colombo, which had a seperate link to London. There were also secret radio links with the US Navy at Corrigedor (Station Coast) and the Dutch in Batavia at Kamer 14. Every scrap of information, from codebreaking, direction-finding, traffic analysis and any other form of intelligence collected by FECB, was immediately sent back to the naval section of GCCS at Bletchley Park.

GCHQ refused to provide the authors with ANY information about how code-breaking intelligence at FECB was handled, but a copy of the instructions was found in the archives in New Zealand. This showed that messages based on codebreaking information from FECB would be prefixed "ZYMOTIC", and also marked MOST SECRET and a warning included in any summary that the information came from "Special Intelligence". A similar codeword "ZEAL" was used to indicate codebreaking intelligence coming from Australia.
Other instructions included:

(7) All groups and rough working are to be kept seperate from other messages and are to be burnt (original emphasis), when no longer required for reference. This should normally be immediately and in any case not longer than a week.
(8) Log copies are to be burnt when no longer required.......normally no longer than a month from reciept.
(9) Knowledge of these messages restricted to as few officers as possible. The Captain on Staff or his Deputy will decide as to whom their copies are to be shown.
(10) If it is necessary to pass on information contained in these messages they will be reworded so as the contents cannot be traced back to Special Intelligence.
(11) In the case of (10), names of enemy ships should be avoided and positions should be expressed in a different form to that given in (original) ULTRA or ZYMOTIC message.
(12) No mention of any information is to be made in any war diaries, reports of proceedings, no matter how limited the circulation.

It is not hard to see from this why so little information about British codebreaking against the Japanese prior to December 1941 has found it's way into log-books and other official diaries of the period.
After the war there was an eighth investigaton; a full Congressional Inquiry that was run from 15th November 1945 to 31 May 1946. When this got under way, both safford and Kramer were closely questioned about the Wind's messages and in particular, the 'Execute' portion. It was put to them very strongly that their memories were at fault and that they had seen no "Execute" message. None of the other people who had seen the "Execute" message on December 4 were called to testify. This included Briggs, Wigle, the rest of the staff at Cheltenham, Admiral Turner (director of War Plans), Colonel Sadtler, and Admiral Noyes. Some of the senior staff at Cheltenham, and OP-20-G had been told to prepare statements, but none of these were ever put before the committee. It soon became clear that enourmous pressure had been brought on anyone who had seen the "EXECUTE" message to change his story and now say that he/she had not seen it, or that it was not a correct "Execute" message but had been "mistakenly written down". Even Daryl Wigle (now a Lieutenant), who had been Brigg's Station Chief at Cheltenham at the time, changed his story in a statement dated 11 December 1945 saying;

"I do not recall any Japanese language recordings being made. Cheltenham was never given any directive to record Japanese voice transmissions. There were no personel at Cheltenham capable of understanding or speaking Japanese. To the best of my knowledge Cheltenham was not, during the period immediately preceeding Pearl Harbor Day, ie., from 28 November to 7 December 1941, given any additional Japanese, Morse or voice assignments.

Wigle died in 1974 without ever elaborating on these claims, which are plainly at variance with the conversations which Briggs clearly remembers. The instructions Safford had given and saw being carried out by Wigle on 4 December, and the official version of events, which states that radio intercept stations had been specifically told to look out for the second "Winds" message. As it turned out, Wigle never gave evidence at the enqiury, so the statement was never challenged.
Considering the passage of time and all that had taken place during the war, it is hardly surprising that some people had genuinely forgotten the exact circumstances of the Winds message incident. Sadtler recalled he recieved the "execute" message fromm Stafford on 5 December rather than 4 December. Nevertheless, as Briggs remembers, "There were two factions at work. One was trying to eliminate any further discussion and revelations about the Winds message and our capabilities of reading Japanese signals. The second group was trying to admit as much as they could in an effort to tell the truth."

In the course of looking through his files to substantiate his story for the 1945 Inquiry, Safford discovered Briggs's name and, finding him stationed in Washington, asked Briggs to come over to his office in Building 18 at the Navy Department. as a result, Briggs had 3 or 4 meetings with Safford, during which he went through all the details of the Winds message saga and his interception of the "EXECUTE" portion on 4 December.
This was the first time Safford and Biggs had ever met.
"I got over there and found this very soft-spoken, pleasant man and we sat down, and one of the first things he shot me with was the fact he knew my call sign. "You were R/T?", I said thats right, that was my sign."Do you know you were the one who intercepted that Winds code 'execute' on December 4?"
.....I stopped for a minute, trying to recollect how he came by that. You see, I didn't know all this time that Safford was the one at the other end that had gotten the message that day. Then he said: "I'm trying to reconstruct the events on 4 December, would you help me?" Briggs did his best to answer all questions put to him by Safford, but of course, Briggs's knowledge was limited only to what happened to the intercept at Cheltenham and that he had personally sent it on the teleprinter to OP-20-G. During their second meeting, Safford asked Briggs whether he would be willing to testify before the congressional Inquiry then in progress...Briggs said he would.

Shortly after the second meeting, Briggs was called before his commanding officer, Captain Harper, who, ironically, was the same officer who in 1937 had first interviewed Briggs and suggested he join the Naval Intelligence section. Briggs recollection of the meeting is crystal clear.
"He asked me to sit down. He stated that he understood I had been having some meetings with Captain Safford with reference to my being called as a witness. I replied, "Yes." Harper wanted to know why this had been done without his knowledge and why he had not been informed. I advised the captain i didn't know I was supposed to report to him about this matter in view that I had gotten a call from Captain Safford direct. He, in effect, advised me that I should know that he was the commanding officer of the Station, not Captain Safford.
I agreed to that point, I said, "Yes indeed, sir, but Captain Safford didn't allude to the fact that you weren't aware of my being with him." He dropped it at that point and went on to the point in question. He seemed very serious and perturbed. he stated, in effect, that too much had already been revealed by the hearings. That he couldn't exactly explain at this point what was behind it. That someday perhaps I would understand, but at this point he couldn't give me the information necessary to sustain what he was about to tell me. Then he delivered his coup-de-grace.

http://forums.ubi.com/images/smilies/16x16_smiley-indifferent.gif"You are not to confer with Captain Safford any further. You are specifically prohibited from meeting with him in his office, and if there are any further inquiries or any requests with reference to this matter, you are to report to me at once." I acknowledged, sat there for a while, then he said, "That is all." So I left."

Despite this starkly clear order, Briggs felt he owed Safford an explanation and telephoned him to tell him what had happened.
"Safford was stunned". He said "Well, he didn't say we couldn't bump into each other or anything along that line. I'll call you back later. Some days later, Safford asked me to meet him again, which, despite Harper's instructions, I did. During our conversation Safford told me that after receiving my intercept off the tele-printer from Kramer he had personally sent a copy to Adm Noyes, who had in turn told Adm Turner, Col Sadtler and Adm Stark. He also said that he had tried to have me called as a witness at the hearing and that apparently, from a higher authority than Captain Harper, I was not to appear. And that was the end of the matter as far as I was concerned."

Briggs believes that Harper was far from happy with the role he had to play. "Harper seemed ill at ease that he had to tell me this. He wasn't mad at me. He was bothered, http://forums.ubi.com/images/smilies/16x16_smiley-sad.gif deeply bothered by it all."

The saga of the Winds message and whether the 'execute' portion was received or not was to occupy the attention of the Pearl Harbor investigators so greatly that it distracted their attention away from far more important matters that were never investigated.....The simple truth is that had both parts of the Winds message been placed before the 1945 Congressional committee, they would have provided no new evidence that the committee did not already possess.......
Having decided to conceal the message, it was then necessary not only to destroy all records but also to continue the deception during the 1945 Inquiry and pressure all those who HAD seen it originally into changing their stories in case they were called to testify.

Unfortunately, Safford, Kramer and Briggs were honest men who saw no reason to tell lies. The importance of the Winds Saga is therefore not 'what the message said', but that a number of sufficiently senior officers were able and willing to cover up the truth and shred files so as to falsify the records for posterity.
The question of who authorized the destruction of all copies of the message was closely investigated in 1945 without success. Safford discovered that at one intercept station- Winter Harbor, Maine- the officer in charge admitted that in the Spring of 1943 he had been told by the Navy Department to destroy all his station logbooks from 1931 through June 30, 1942. But this was not investigated to find out who had given such an order.
Similar destruction had also happened at the Cheltenham station. In Washington, Captain R. Mason stated that at various times up to Spring 1943 he had authorized the destruction of old Japanese intercepts to,......
"....avoid the impossibly huge accumulation of paper." after carefully inspecting them for important matter.........
But Mason was never called to explain what files he considered worthy of preservation.

Such wholesale destruction of important material within only a few years of it's being filed is quite contrary to normal U.S. Navy archival practice.

If this relatively harmless piece of evidence could be so professionally concealed from the American people, it legitimately raises the question of what other material was kept from them............

So....When did the U.S. Navy begin reading JN-25?

The answer ought to be as simple as it was in the case of the earlier "Red and Blue Book" codes.

But it is not.....

For 40 years, the official version was that JN-25 did not exist.

JN-25 was considered so secret by the U.S. Navy that even during 7 wartime investigations it was not once mentioned. And at the 8th and final post-war Congressional hearing, in 1945-46, only a few vague references to it can be found in the 39 volumes of evidence. It was never discussed in detail, nor was the U.S Navy asked to give evidence as to when it was first broken.
As the official history records:
"With reference to the Navy cipher(JN-25)....nothing appears in the Pearl Harbor testimony about this, although much is made of (the) failure to get a PURPLE machine (to Hawaii)."

Virtually all the books and articles about Pearl Harbor that appeared from 1946 onward covering the next 35 years concentrated on the MAGIC summaries decrypted from the PURPLE diplomatic intercepts. The argument is that had this material been passed to the Pearl commanders it would have alerted them to the attack. Not only is this assertion quite untrue, it has also served to confuse the real issue....which lies NOT with the PURPLE decrypts but with..............JN-25- the only code system used by the Japanese to transmit the final instructions for the attack..........

In 1979, President Jimmy Carter authorized the NSA to release a mass of Japanese intercepts. But before these were placed in the National archives, all references to JN-25 were censored. It is even more significant that not a single JN-25 decrypt was released that had been read prior to 7 December 1941, thereby giving the impression that no Japanese Naval operational signals had been decrypted before the attack. The few intercepts in the archives that pre-date Pearl Harbor all bear 1945-46 translation dates.

The starting point for research into the American history of JN-25 is "Naval Security Group History to World War II", prepared by Captain J.S. Holtwick, USN (ret), in June 1971, an extremely long and detailed account running to a total of 700 pages. On pages 396-97, the report deals with the five main ORANGE (Japanese) codes in current use in 1939-40. The fourth of these is called the "Operations Code System,", which is in fact JN-25, as shown in a footnote. The report states,...
"An additive key cipher is employed with this code, and although the method of recovery is well defined, the process is a laborious one requiring from an hour to several days for each message. A machine is under construction which will aid in the ...solution (and)...a few code values have been recovered but...at least six months will be required before complete messages can be read."

This confirms that some messages in JN-25 (doubtless those with 'good cribs' that helped reveal the contents), were being broken by early 1940- some taking several days- while the six-month period mentioned would take one to the latter part of the same year.
The report continues on page 398:
Captain Safford in August 1970 stated from memory:
"JN-25 came into effect 1st of June 1939 and in late September 1940 we turned in our first translation of a message, either the week before or the week after the Army (SIS) achieved their final breakthrough in the Japanese PURPLE machine.... By 1 December 1941 we had the code solved to a readable extent" ( empahsis added by authors). Thus no one was reading anything in the.....diplomatic (PURPLE) and Naval (JN-25) systems (until) the latter part of 1940. On the 4th of January 1941 it was reported that about 2,000 values had been recovered out of 33,000 possible in the JN-25 code."

Aside from the clarity of this statement, what is remarkable is that the entire history was carefully checked by the NSA and US Navy prior to it's declassification under Executive Order #12356 on 20th June 1985 and anything still considered sensitive is blanked out.
The comment about OP-20-G having recovered 2,000 values (in other words, they had identified 2,000 words and phrases in the dictionary as a result of penetrating the additive tables) is particularly interesting., because that same month OP-20-G evidently felt confident enough to offer two reconstructed copies of JN-25 to GCCS as part of the exchange of cryptographic technology which included the two 'Purple' machines.

The second primary souce is "A Brief History of Communications Intelligence in the United States", written by Safford between 21 and 27 March 1952 and released into the National Archives by NSA on 6 March 1982. Page 14 deals with JN-25 but is so heavily censored as to make little sense:

"On June 1st, 1939 the Japanese Navy introduced a new type of numerical code referred to by Navy COMINT personnel as (censored) the Operations Code. (the next two lines are totally censored). Mrs. Driscoll and Mr Currier spear-headed the attack and we were soon (censored) reconstructing the code. Recovery of the (censored) keys, (the word missing here is probably additive), however, involved much more labor and required many more crypto-analytic personnel than earlier transposition keys. Main work of solution was undertaken at Washington (OP-20-G).
By December 1940 we were working on two systems of keys withthis book; the 'old' keys for code recovery and 'new' keys for current information (five lines completely censored.)"

Despite the deletions by the NSA (which, incidentally, now claims to know nothing about the JN-25 code), it is possible to confirm that JN-25 was broken by OP-20-G soon after it's introduction, matching the progress made by Nave and Burnett. The reference to needing more people also confirms Nave's comment that JN-25 was a "tedious" rather than 'hard' code to break.
On the following page 15, there is a reference to the Japanese Flag Officers Cypher (what FECB called "the CinC's code"), which was used prior to the introduction of JN-25 and then discarded. The report makes the comment that,

"This was the only Japanese Naval Cryptographic system which the U.S Navy ever failed to solve."

The report continues......

"On December 1st, 1941 the system(JN-25) became unreadable....this could have been a tip-off as to coming hostilities but it also could have been a mere routine change of system. after all, the code had been in use for 2 1/2 years. Two weeks later Corrigedor (Station Cast) flashed the good news that the same old code was still in use but that new keys were being used with it. This was the third or fourth set of keys used with this same codebook.
The IJN had changed the codebook along with the cipher keys on 1st of December 1941,there is no telling how badly the war in the Pacific would have gone....due credit for Coral Sea and Midway should be given to the Navy's pre-Pearl Harbor COMINT effort."

This passage is particularly interesting for several reasons. First, Safford is mistaken that the date when key changes were made was 1 December, when in fact it was 4 December when this change was made. Second, he confirms that JN-25 was broken soon after it's introduction and was read throughout the two and-a-half year period to late 1941. And third, that the basic code remained unchanged and only additive tables (or KEYS) altered. All this tallies with the same progress made at FECB and GCCS.
The still censored message from station Cast on 15 December 1941 reads: "Com 16 OPNAV info CINCAF. TOP SECRET-- 151250. Two intercepts in (censored) plain code (December ) 6 and 13 followed within a few hours by enciphered versions confirmed indicator (censored) already recovered by mathematical elimination code remains unchanged(.) Will send recoveries this system if you desire begin work on current period."

It is incredible to find that, a week after the attack on Pearl harbor, Japanese code security was so poor that they were still sending the same messages in a low-grade system as well as in JN-25. Evidently, Station Cast had no difficulty recognizing this. What is even more important is that if Station Cast's codebreakers knew that JN-25 remained unchanged, then it must mean that they were reading it during the previous six-month period, from June 1st 1941 to December 4th 1941.

The third primary souce is Safford's own account, contained in the article "Rhapsody in Purple" in CRYPTOLOGIA, July 1982 which states.......

"The first completely decrypted message/translation in JN-25 followed the first decrypted 'PURPLE' message (September 1940),by about a week. Both Washington units (SIS and OP-20-G) were "in business"....and morale was extremely high. The numerical keys (additive tables) were changed on 1 December 1940 and again on June 1st 1941. A change...was anticipated for 1 December 1941"

This account is virtually the same as the statement on page 397 from the official history and again shows that from early October 1940, which roughly matches the 6 month period mentioned, JN-25 was being broken by OP-20-G. Bearing in mind that GCCS had 300 people working solely on JN-25, whereas OP-20-G had to split it's far smaller staff between a monthly roster of handling PURPLE traffic and the naval signals, it is not surprising that they took a year longer than GCCS to break JN-25!
Safford's account again confirms that the 6 monthly additive table changes posed OP-20-G no greater problem than they did Nave and Burnett. Safford then explains how three copies of the JN-25 codebook were being laboriously reconstructed by hand by Phillip Cate in exactly the same way as the Red and Blue Books had been done previously. The reconstructed JN-25 codebooks were essentially blank ledgers with the numerical five-figure code group in the left hand column, with the other columns containing the Chinese character, the Japanese 'Kana' equivalent, and the English translation. It was intended that one copy would remain with OP-20-G, the second would go to Station HYPO in Pearl harbor, and the third to Station CAST in Corrigedor.

The fourth primary source is a memorandum Safford wrote on 17 May 1945 for Lieutenent Commander John F. Sonnet, USNR, which included the following statement:

"Com 16 (Station CAST in Corrigedor) intercepts were considered most reliable....not only because of better radio interception, but because Com 16 was currently reading messages in the Japanese Fleet Cryptographic System (5 Number Code or JN-25), and was exchanging technical information and translations with the British in Singapore (FECB).
As regards the JN-25 system, the current version (JN-25b) had been in effect since 1st of December 1940 (and) remained in effect until 27-31 May 1942, and was partially readable in November 1941. A new system of keys was introduced on 4 December 1941 and reported by Com 16, but the carry over of the old code made their solution quite simple and we were reading messages again by Christmas, Corrigedor getting the initial 'break' on 8th December 1941. Com 16 had the benefit of it's own translations plus "tips" from (FECB) Singapore."

This statement confirms that JN-25 was being read at Station CAST and that there was some degree of co-operation with FECB. It also confirms that after the additive table change of December 4 1941, messages were still being sent in both the old and new keys and that this helped reconstruct the new tables very quickly.

Taken together, these four accounts of the U.S. Navy codebreaking show beyond doubt that between 1 June 1939 and December 7, 1941 some JN-25 messages were definately decoded by the US Navy. One would, therefore, expect to find in the American archives a series of JN-25 intercepts in their 'raw' state, and various de-crypts covering the 2 year period. Some of the earlier ones would be only partly read, with many gaps for unsolved groups, while the later ones- nearer the time of Pearl Harbor- would be fully translated.

But, not a single pre-Pearl Harbor JN-25 intercept or decrypt can be found in any American archive.

In their letter of 8 May 1989, the U.S. Naval Security Group stated:

"We regret we are unable to provide any assistance or illumination on the problem of JN-25. When the systematic declassification effort began in 1978...the decision was made to begin with a review of all Japanese message translations from the World War II era.
Since that time the question of the whereabouts and status of early JN-25 translations has been asked repeatedly but without resolution. We have been unable to locate them...in any form or microfilm...the 1941 JN-25 messages that are in (the National Archives) were all translated after the war ended.
From the historical perspective we agree it would be most fascinating to be able to follow the progress of the system through the evolution of it's translations. Regrettably, we are unable to do so."

This is an extraordinary letter that is hard to accept at it's face value.

The Naval Security Group on Nebraska Avenue in Washington is the direct successor of Safford's OP-20-G and has been the continuous custodian of ALL the U.S. Navy's cryptographic operations- including codebreaking, since July 1922. Therefore, there is absolutely no reason why the archives relating to this work should NOT be intact, especially as OP-20-G did not move from it's offices in the Navy Department on Constitution Avenue to Nebraska Avenue until 7 February 1943.
For the US Navy to comment that it would be "fascinating" to follow the progress of breaking JN-25 when they themselves were responsible for doing just that, is either extremely naive- which, considering the letter is from Commander George G. Henrikson, special assistant for security, is most unlikely....or it is the result of many years of official policy to deflect historical inquiries.
This letter means that every single scrap of evidence relating to JN-25 between June 1939 through late November 1941 has vanished.

Considering the historical importance of this material in the context of Pearl Harbor, it is impossible to believe that this could have happened throughout ALL the US Navy's Codebreaking offices, unless there had been a deliberate policy beginning in the immediate aftermath of the war to conceal or destroy all evidence relating to this code. Support for this thesis can be drawn from three facts. First, JN-25 archival material continues to be censored even after all these years. Second, the equally important and politically sensitive PURPLE diplomatic decrypts of the same pre-war period are freely available. If this latter material could be kept intact for posterity by the Army and Navy codebreakers, then it is quite remarkable that the US Navy has managed to
lose ALL of it's JN-25 documents.
And third, the US Navy prides itself on the impeccable condition and scope of it's archives.

It is also impossible to believe that the few pre-Pearl Harbor JN-25 decrypts in the National Archives were only decoded in late 1945 and early 1946. It is a matter of uncensored public record that by early 1942 the US Navy was reading JN-25 quite freely. During the next three years there were seven seperate inquiries into the attack:

1. The Roberts Commission- 18 December 1941 through January 23rd, 1942.
2. The Hart Inquiry- 5 February through 15 June 1944.
3. The Army Pearl Harbor Board- 20 July through 20 October 1944.
4. The U.S. Naval Court of Inquiry- 24 July through 19 October 1944.
5. The Clausen Investigation-23 November 1944 through 12 September 1945.
6. The Hewitt Inquiry- 14 May through 11 July 1945.
7. The Clarke Investigation- 14-16 September 1944 and 13 July through 4 August 1945.

The U.S. Navy refused to allow discussion of JN-25 at any of these inquries. Considering the defeat they sustained at Pearl Harbor, it strains credulity to believe they would not have been sufficiently curious to know what these few intercepts contained and to have decoded them as soon as possible. Reluctantly, one has to conclude that these copies in the National Archives have been deliberately falsified in order to create the impression that JN-25 was not being read in 1941.
As no such policy affected the public disclosures during 1945-46 inquiry of how American codebreakers had read the PURPLE diplomatic messages, why was the decision taken to conceal similar success against JN-25 from the american people that lasts even to this day? And who authorized it?
What makes this affair so bizzare is that from 8 December 1941 onward it was a matter of great pride that U.S. Navy Codebreakers were breaking JN-25, which only 7 months later was to lead to a dramatic victory at Midway, and a year after that, "grabbing the Peacock's tail" to shoot down Admiral Yammamoto's aircraft. It seems a remarkable coincidence that the official record of breaking JN-25 conveniently begins only after hostilities have commenced.
The foriegn ministries of some governments (like the British Foreign Office) are still embarrassed to admit that they read another nation's codes in peacetime. But in america, no such embarressment exists, because the revelation that their codebreakers read Japanese diplomatic traffic prior to a war declaration is not disputed. What then is the difference between PURPLE machine diplomatic decrypts and the decrypts from JN-25?

The answer is very simply that the JN-25 messages contained the final operational details of the Pearl Harbor attack, whereas PURPLE intercepts did NOT.

NIMITZ1967

11-08-2007, 03:05 AM

http://forums.ubi.com/images/smilies/typing.gif.....Back again for the astounding Conclusion!............................

It is therefore a legitmate conclusion that the missing material contains information that is highly sensitive and embarrassing. That is why the US Navy went to such great lengths to conceal the existence of JN-25 from any postwar enquiry- just as happened with the missing "Winds" message- any related material is still censored. This is not a casual cover-up but a carefully premeditated policy of deceit of the greatest magnitude that can only have originated from the highest authority to deliberately frustrate the truth being told.
Some idea of the paranoia still affecting the US Navy about JN-25 can best be judged from their own letter in 1988 enclosing a single page from a JN-25 codebook and an additive table. It contained a covering letter which reads,

"After consultation with other concerned authorities it has been determined that one typical page from a basic code book and an additive table can be provided without contravention of current security guidelines pertaining to cryptologic material.
Attached is a copy of one page of the JN-25 Japanese Navy Fleet General Purpose Code from the 1941 era. As a single page this attachment is currently unclassified( emphasis added).....considerable effort was required to identify the document as responsive to the period in which you express interest."

The "concerned authority" is, of course, the NSA, which was responsible for the release of Japanese cryptographic material in 1978. They apparently share the US Navy's fear that for the public to see the entire JN-25 codebook dating from the last war, that this would somehow compromise america's security today. When asked about the pre-war JN-25, the NSA could only reply with classic obtuseness:

"Your request for information on the JN-25 code has been processed....but no records responsive to your request were located."

In Britain, the situation is just as bad. In 1945, immediately after the Japanese surrender, Winston Churchill sent personal secret instructions to FECB (then in Ceylon), that all archives were to be destroyed, including those brought out from Singapore in December 1941 before the surrender in February 1942. Whether Churchill had the authority to do this seems doubtful, but certainly he made no attempt to order a similar destruction of archives relating to the breaking of the German 'Enigma' codes.
Why Churchill treated Far East codebreaking so differently than that against Germany has never been explained. The Foreign Office still flatly refuses to do so. The consensus at FECB at the time was that Churchill wanted to ensure that no one else was able to write a history of the war in the Far East that challenged his version and showed his true role in the affairs of 1940-41. This would also explain why, when the Americans asked that Commander T. Wisden RN, and Lt Comm. W.W. Mortimer ( who had both worked at FECB on Japanese codes), attend the Pearl Harbor hearing to give evidence on their work, the request was also flatly refused by the Admiralty. The only records from FECB Colombo that appear to have survived were Mortimer's card index of all Japanese warships and merchants that he had begun in 1939. This sole surviving relic was brought back to the Admiralty by Lt. Trygve Jesperson, RNR, but they have never been placed in any public archive and so presumably remain with GCHQ to this day.
Despite the destruction of FECB's records, copies of all their work remained with GCCS. These are under the control of GCHQ today and cannot be inspected, nor have they ever been made available for the official histories of British intelligence during WWII, which conspicuosly ignore the work of British codebreaking against Japan prior to 1941. apart from the pre-war work against IJN Naval codes, these documents also contain copies of PURPLE intercepts that GCCS was able to decrypt from early 1941 onward.
However, some pre-Pearl Harbor JN-25 decrypts have found their way into archives outside Britain, and a typical one, dated 30 December 1940. From the top, the expression "MOST SECRET" indicates it is concerned with codebreaking. It is addressed to "Captain on the Staff Singapore", a cover name for the head of FECB, then Captain K.L. Harkness, RN, whose signature appears at the bottom. It is followed by another expression "MOST SECRET SOURCES", again indicating the message given has been derived from reading Japanese codes. The text of the messgae deals with future Japanese operational intentions, so it can only have come from JN-25.
Another decrypt, dated 24 January 1941 contains the intrigueing comment that Japanese documents have been "examined" in Batavia, suggesting either FECB or their Dutch friends had been involved in a burglary. The next paragraph talks about "Special Intelligence", which is another euphemism for intelligence derived from codebreaking.
An error in declassification has resulted in a batch of JN-25 decrypts from FECB Colombo, Ceylon (January- February 1942, being accidently included in some Australian material, now in the National Archives. The additive table for this 6 month period began on 4th of December 1941. What is particularly significant about these decrypts is that they were read immediately and are all complete, even though they were broken only 5 weeks into the new tables, which confirms that FECB had easily mastered the table or key changes. Since the previous table change occurred on 1 June 1941, long before November, JN-25 messages would have posed no problem to the British codebreakers in Singapore and Bletchley Park.

Despite the official policy of disinformation and censorship, both British and American codebreakers were able to read the Japanese operational orders sent in JN-25 throughout the months leading up to Pearl Harbor.
What the authors have done with this book (of which this is the final chapter), is to lay out new facts obtained from Nave's own unique codebreaking expertise, spanning the vital period 1925 through 1945 (this is the only first-hand account ever recorded). This, together with hitherto unknown archival material that had been unearthed world wide......

This clearly shows that Winston Churchill was able to read JN-25 as well as PURPLE diplomatic messages, during 1941 right up to the day of the attack. This is a fact that has never been publically revealed, and we believe it entitles us (the authors) to re-examine the Pearl Harbor attack from a totally new viewpoint..
Churchill was aware that a Task Force had sailed from Northern Japan in late November, 1941, and that one of it's likely targets was Pearl Harbor. Churchill deliberately kept this vital information from Roosevelt, because he realized an attack of this nature, whether on the U.S. Pacific Fleet or the Philippines, was a means of fulfilling his publicly proclaimed desire to get America into the war at any cost.
Although Roosevelt had experience in the Navy Department during WWI, unlike Churchill, he was not very well aquainted with the technicalities of codebreaking and, instead of having important raw decrypts brought to him directly, he relied on summaries prepared seperately by the Army and Navy. The crucial question, therefore, is whether he knew anything about JN-25.
It is impossible to give a precise answer to this for two reasons....First, although the evidence assembled clearly shows that the Navy's codebreakers at OP-20-G did break JN-25 long before 7 December 1941, the extent of their pentration, and how it was interrupted by the six-monthly additive table changes, is un-clear, because every scrap of pre-Pearl Harbor JN-25 material has vanished.

Second, in none of the contemporary accounts of the weeks before the attack is there any mention of the President looking at decrypts from JN-25, although there are plenty of references to his seeing PURPLE diplomatic material passing between Tokyo and Washington, and Tokyo and Berlin. But neither Roosevelt nor any of his closest advisors like Hull or Stimson has ever been quoted as making any reference to Roosevelt and his knowledge of JN-25. There is also no evidence that Roosevelt saw specific decrypts from the J-19 Consular Code like the Bomb Plot message. Furthermore, although there are guarded references in the exchanges with Churchill to intelligence based on PURPLE decrypts, there is no evidence that Roosevelt ever implied having access to Naval material from JN-25.
But, as we have shown, official histories and memoirs can be misleading. In theory, Churchill's extensive post-war memoirs (for which he was allowed priveliged access to government archives, despite then no longer being Prime Minister) should give an intimate and detailed record of how he conducted his affairs. However, because of postwar Anglo-American agreements that there should be no revelations about codebreaking, he goes through an elaborate charade of pretending he only received 'PURPLE' material from America, makes no mention at all of Japanese Naval codes being intercepted,
let alone broken, and completely ignores the period between Yammamoto's Task Force sailing and the attack.

On the other hand, would the US Navy have deliberately denied knowledge of their ability to read the vital IJN code from the Commander in Chief? It has to be considered a very real possibility. We have shown from official records that the Navy did conceal their ability to read JN-25 from Army codebreakers at SIS, because they did not trust them. We have also shown, from well documented evidence, that both the Navy and Army were suspicious of Roosevelt's staff, which they thought could not be trusted with sensitive intelligence material derived from codebreaking. They concealed JN-25, and all other Japanese codes from commanders in Hawaii. And it is a matter of record that General Marshall and Admiral stark deliberately- and quite illegally- denied the President and Hull any knowledge of PURPLE for 4 months after it was first broken in September 1941.... and then later denied Roosevelt access to PURPLE from May through November 1941, because of an alleged leak.
What is important about these last two incidents is that, according to all contemporary accounts, Roosevelt did not appear to realize that he had been denied such vital intelligence,, which reinforces the belief that he had little first-hand knowledge of his codebreakers achievements.
The decision to keep Roosevelt in the dark over JN-25 could only have been taken by a very senior naval officer, and the most likely candidate is Admiral Richmond K. Turner, Director of the Navy's War Plans Division, who, without any apparent authority, assumed control of the analysis and dissemination of OP-20-G's output. Turner has been described as "The Navy's Patton", and certainly his abrasive manner, distrust of the Army, and his open dislike of Roosevelt's aides all suit this description.
In the immediate aftermath of the attack, it would have been realized that the Navy had all along posessed the vital JN-25 decrypts that could have warned the President, and the Pearl Commanders, but he failed to make that information available. A very high-level decision was taken to 'house-clean' naval records of all references to pre-Pearl Harbor JN-25, so that it would seem no such messages ever existed. Therefore, Roosevelt, Kimmel and Short could not have been more precisely warned. Since very few people had such an authority and knew of the existence of JN-25, suspician must fall to Turner. It is quite impossible to believe that ALL traces of JN-25 intercepts and decrypts between 1939 and 1941 could have vanished so completely...unless it had been carefully planned.

As A.A. Hoehling wrote in "The Week Before Pearl Harbor":

"The panic that gripped the second deck of the Navy Department immediately after the attack...is beyond reasonable doubt. One officer, then in intelligence....went to his office safe...to find a number of MAGIC depatches missing. He never retrieved them. O.N.I. had done such a thorough house-cleaning of it's Top Secret files that...not even a departmental organization change of November-December 1941 could ever be found. These, conceiveably, were not so much willful attempts to destroy evidence, cover tracks and remove witnesses....as they were a result of headlong, blind un-reasoning fear. Obviously the Navy had been guilty of dire errors of both omission and commission. It's leaders...passionately desired to 'pull the curtains', 'draw the blinds', and 'shutter the windows'."

In his frenzy to cover-up (which included concealing the innocuous Winds messages,) Turner never imagined that one day questions would be asked about JN-25, or that any JN-25 archival material would ever be placed in the public domain. Turner has been helped by the intransigent atittude of the US Navy and NSA. Ironically, only as this book was in it's last stages of publication, and the NSA realized the authors possessed positive proof of both British and American codebreaking, did they belatedly confirm for the first time that a code called JN-25 had existed at all, in 1941.
At the postwar Pearl Harbor Investigation, the Navy encouraged discussion on peripheral issues about diplomatic codebreaking, counting on the excitement of the media and the naivete' of the inquiry team to overlook the issue. And so it has remained....

It is an inescapeable conclusion that Winston Churchill DELIBERATELY withheld from The United States of America, vital intelligence derived from reading the Japanese Naval code JN-25 that would have alerted Roosevelt in good time to set a trap, that would not only have decimated Yammamoto's Task Force but also allowed America to declare war legitimately on Japan from a far stronger military position.

Churchill rightly believed that if he told Roosevelt what he knew about the Japanese Task force that FDR would- as a totally honorable President- immediately warn his commanders. THIS Churchill feared.....it would alert the Japanese that their plans were known, causing them to cancel the attack and to abandon JN-25, which would have been a cryptological DISASTER for both the British and Americans, and leave Britain to face the Japanese on it's own in Malaya..........

Roosevelt was thus DECEIVED by Churchill, who took a ghastly gamble to bring America into the war in a manner that would sweep aside all opposition....Roosevelt was also badly served by his own divided and jealous subordinates....

The combination of the two brought a reluctant ally into the war.

Winston Churchill's gamble had paid off even if, in the process, Britain lost an empire.............


http://forums.ubi.com/images/smilies/typing.gifSo there you have it.....an astounding and very logical conclusion that opens up all sorts of possibilites for re-writing history...and not just of the Pacific War......which cries out http://forums.ubi.com/images/smilies/bigtears.giffor a 'Real' history like no other subject in WWII...The Pacific War simply BEGS revision and re-examination......soon......Hope you enjoyed this thought provoking article, and see the links to the other Pearl Harbor article .....Enjoy!!!!! http://forums.ubi.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_cool.gif

GerritJ9

11-08-2007, 03:51 AM

Pre-war, the Dutch had considerable success in cracking Japanese codes, both naval and diplomatic (despite manpower and financial limitations). Using information gained by being able to read the latter, they were able to thwart Japanese economic expansion in the NEI to a large extent. Unfortunately, when the IJN changed their codes and callsigns in 1940 (if I remember correctly) this left them blind from a naval point of view- there were simply too few experts available in the NEI to enable them to start from scratch and attack the new codes. For example, there were only FOUR KNIL and RNethN officers fluent in Japanese, one of them was on leave in the Netherlands when Germany invaded and he was stranded there- and thus no longer available. http://forums.ubi.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_frown.gif
For further info, see "Nishi No Kaze, Hare" by American author Robert D. Haslach. It was published in Dutch in the 1980s, I don't know whether an English edition was ever published.

Bucketlung

11-08-2007, 07:50 AM

I think the problem is people use the wrong standard in this situation. They want to know exactly what FDR and the other leaders knew on the morning of Dec 7th. The military doesn't work that way. You are judged based on what you should have known.

They knew an attack was coming in the Pacific. Hawaii is in the Pacific. Hawaii had a major military presence.

odjig292

11-08-2007, 09:42 AM

That's a very interesting summary, Nimitz. It certainly suggests that there may have been cover-ups in Washington to protect someone's career and pension, but I don't think it was the President. On the other hand, maybe the documents didn't exist and people just screwed up. One can never tell when Foggy Bottom goes on a witch-hunt. The witch hunts for the guilty party for both Dec 7 and Sept 11 were both ineffective, but that's politics for you.

The decision by the Japanese to go to war with America was part of information that Richard Sorge sent to Russia in early December 1941 just before he was captured. Sorge was a Russian spy who had infiltrated the highest levels of the Japanese Cabinet. This information was solid enough that it allowed the Russians to transfer over 100 divisions of Siberian troops guarding the Japanese border to Stalingrad, where they broke the German siege on that city. This was a HUGE turning point in the war, and Stalin informed Churchill about the Japanese plans when explaining why he was able to pull the troops from the border. Bletchley Park was reading the Japanese codes and knew something was up but not the specifics. Room 39, British Naval Intelligence, came to the conclusion that the most likely event was that the Japanese would attack the US without warning at sunrise, possibly on a Sunday, and the most likely target was Pearl Harbor. This was the typical Japanese pattern of declaring war in the past. They told Prime Minister Churchill's Office but it was still speculation as to when and where it would occur.

There was no way that Churchill could not tell Roosevelt. If I remember right, FDR was not included in the group of people who had access to the MAGIC intercepts before Dec. 7. Harry Hopkins in his book thinks that FDR heard about the possible attack from Churchill, but FDR reportedly said nothing to anyone. It wasn't his job, even if he had ulterior motives for being quiet. As the earlier thread pointed out, the attack did not have any serious impact on the US capability to retaliate. The carriers, subs, repair facilities and oil supplies were almost untouched. Some obsolete battleships were damaged and all but the Arizona were repaired and better equipped within a year. There was already a massive build-up of new faster, more powerful ships under way. Pearl could not have been warned any more than they were without telling the Japanese that their codes were broken. You don't give away that information during a war. The complete surprise at Pearl paid off many times over six months later when the US forces caught the Japanese napping at Midway with an especially effective attack. That was a second HUGE turning point in the war.

I have also stood on the USS Arizona monument and mentally relived that day. It is important because of what happened and what it triggered. It was a turning point in global events because it brought the Americans into the war, but it really was a minor battle in a major war. Two air raids are not a major action. Nagumo made a major blunder that day in not finishing the job. To return home because he lost 38 planes was a ridiculous decision.

joeap

11-08-2007, 11:28 AM

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Originally posted by odjig292:
T
The decision by the Japanese to go to war with America was part of information that Richard Sorge sent to Russia in early December 1941 just before he was captured. Sorge was a Russian spy who had infiltrated the highest levels of the Japanese Cabinet. This information was solid enough that it allowed the Russians to transfer over 100 divisions of Siberian troops guarding the Japanese border to Stalingrad, where they broke the German siege on that city. </div></BLOCKQUOTE>

Excuse me, I think you are mixing up the battle of Stalingrad, which took place in late 42 early 43 with the Battle of Moscow. The German army got within sight (a recon unit IIRC) of the Kremlin spires in November 1941 until a counteroffensive by the Red Army in December 1941.

Obviously the Siberian divisions had to be moved before then, am not sure of the top of my head when the PF attack force left Japan.

RogerDodger1946

11-08-2007, 05:40 PM

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Room 39, British Naval Intelligence, came to the conclusion that the most likely event was that the Japanese would attack the US without warning at sunrise, possibly on a Sunday, and the most likely target was Pearl Harbor. This was the typical Japanese pattern of declaring war in the past. </div></BLOCKQUOTE>

Strangly enough, Col. Billy Mitchell (for whom the B-25 bomber was named) made a similar prediction during his courts-martial in 1925. He even predicted the use of carrier based planes being used for the attack.

Since this was wholly politically incorrect, he was cashiered from the service.

odjig292

11-08-2007, 07:56 PM

Joeap quotes
<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content"> Excuse me, I think you are mixing up the battle of Stalingrad, which took place in late 42 early 43 with the Battle of Moscow. </div></BLOCKQUOTE>

You're quite right. I meant Moscow. I've passed the massive tank trap on the road to the airport that marks the further point they reached a dozen times.

NIMITZ1967

11-08-2007, 11:09 PM

Funny how the scars of war last, and last in a country like Russia.....I've read that 50 years after Napolean's 'Grand Armee' crossed the Berezina River, there was still detritius and rubbish left over, the scars of the crossing still visible 50 years later.....look at Europe fifty years after WWII....you wouldn't even know there had been a war on....whole cities rebuilt, some times brick by brick in the case of Warsaw, or EXACTLY as it was before for many German reconstruction projects....but then again...Russia has always been a little bit behind in some respects........and ahead in others....truly a country where time is NOT a factor in the development of it's history....