Fighting to Lose (31 page)

Munition dumps and mine depots

Naval units, munition and mine depots on the Island of Kusha. (Pearl Harbour) Where possible drawings or sketches. Naval and munition depots in Lualueai. Exact position. Railway connections. The exact munition … reserve of the army believed to be in the crater Aliamanu. Information regarding exact position required. Ascertain if the crater Punchbowl at Honolulu is being used as a munition depot. If not, what other military depots are there?

AIR BASES

Lukefield Airdrome. Details if possible with sketches, showing the positions of hangers, workshops, bomb depots and tank fields. Are there any underground tank depots? Exact position of naval air station.

Naval air support base at Kaneohe. Exact details of position, number of hangers, depots and workshops. Equipment.

Army air base at Wicham Field and Wheeler Field. Exact position. Number of hangers, depots and workshops. Are there underground depots?

Bodger Airport. Will this depot be taken over by the Army or the Navy in wartime? What preparations are being made? Number of hangers; are there Possibilities of landing seaplanes here?

Pan American Base. Exact position, sketches. Is the airport identical with Rodgers Airport, or is it a part of it? (A radio station belonging to PA is on the Monapuu Peninsula.)

NAVAL BASE AT PEARL HARBOR

Exact details and sketches of the position of the shipyards, piers, workshops, oil tanks, drydocks and new drydocks believed to be under construction.

Where is the minesweeper depot? How far has work developed in the east and southeast lock? depth of water; number of moorings. Is there a floating dock at Pearl Harbour or is it intended to have one there?

Details regarding new British and American torpedo net defenses. To what extent are these in use? British and American anti-torpedo defense apparatus on warships and other ships. How used at sea? Details of construction….27

A curious aspect of this English-language version of the questions is the Canadian word usage and spellings. Canadians, then as now, tend to interchange American and British idioms and spellings:
radio
for
wireless
,
airdromes
for
aerodromes
,
harbour
for
harbor
, (gasoline)
tanks
for
petrol installations
, and so forth. Some textual peculiarities also suggest the translator’s first language was not English. As it happens, the veteran Abwehr spy Paul Fidrmuc was then at KO Portugal; he had lived in Canada before the war working as a freelance magazine writer. This would also account for the tight, newspaper-style composition, and for the typos, which surely would not have been present had the writing been done in Berlin or London.28

The document recalled the famous Zimmermann telegram of the First World War. It was proof positive that Japan and Germany were pretending friendship with the United States while secretly plotting against it. The references to sketches, drawings, exact positions, depth of water, and torpedo nets indicated that Pearl Harbor was being mapped out for air attack. Roosevelt could only have concluded that the Japanese were allowing that war with Britain could include war with the United States, and were planning accordingly.29

The implied threat to Hawaii would have resonated with the president because of a report submitted earlier in the year by Joseph Grew, the U.S. ambassador in Tokyo. In January he wrote that a number of sources in Japan were saying that in the event of trouble breaking out between the United States and Japan, the Japanese intended to make a surprise mass attack on Pearl Harbor. Although the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) dismissed Grew’s information, Admiral Stark, chief of naval operations and America’s top sailor, took it seriously enough to suggest that the secretary of the navy warn the secretary of war that they should jointly take steps to ensure that a surprise attack could be withstood.30

Admiral Stark was aboard the USS
Augusta
along with the two leaders, and when his opinion was sought — as surely it would have been — he would have told Roosevelt that in fact the defences of Pearl Harbor were still weak and its ability to detect an approaching enemy inadequate. As for the Pacific Fleet, provided its aircraft carriers were not lost, the remainder were expendable. Battleships, as Roosevelt himself well knew, had lost their supremacy to air power.31

All this would have presented a tempting prospect, one that would not have escaped the two leaders. The Constitution forbade the United States from throwing the first punch when war seemed inevitable. Both Grew’s report and the Popov questionnaire indicated that Japan was exploring the possibility of a Taranto-style raid on Pearl Harbor. If Japan could be provoked into carrying out such an attack as a first act of war, the problem of getting America into the war with Germany might be solved.

Roosevelt already had Japan in a squeeze. In July he had frozen the country’s assets in the United States in protest over the air bases it was building in French Indochina. This effectively halted all trade between the two countries, denying Japan most of the American oil and scrap iron it needed to run its economy.

As Undersecretary of State Wells looked on, the two leaders now worked out a plan whereby the president would draw the economic noose even tighter, while insisting that Japan withdraw from both Indochina and China. The chances of the Japanese agreeing to quit China were on the underside of nil. Churchill calculated the United States and Britain could be at war with Japan in about three months.32

There is separate indication that Churchill thought that war with Japan was fairly certain. Just as the meeting was winding up on August 12, Canada and Australia were sent a secret message from the British government telling them that if war with Japan should be imminent, the BBC would broadcast the code phrase “We hope to include in our programme a talk on the development of air communications in the Far East.” If the BBC also gave a date and time, that would be when the hostilities were expected to begin.

Also, in his report on the Atlantic meeting to the War Cabinet on August 19, Churchill said Roosevelt was determined to get into the war, by provocation if necessary. “Everything is to be done to force an incident,” the president vowed according to him. The Cabinet minutes recorded this as meaning an incident involving Germany, but Japan, not Germany, had been the principal object of the talks between the two leaders. But then again, no one present would have wanted the truth on the permanent public record, to be gawked at by future generations.33

Several days later, on August 27, the following Abwehr wireless message was intercepted, deciphered, and read by the British. It was undoubtedly seen by the Americans, as well:

Berlin to Spain

Following rumour is for further circulation as may be suitable, also for 7580 and 7591. In Japanese naval circles the possibility of a clash with the American and English fleet is looked forward to with utmost calm. It is explained in these circles that even reckoning with a union of the American fleet with the English, the strength of the Japanese fleet is today so great that the ratio of strength would be 2 to 1 in favour of Japan.34

The Abwehr office in Madrid was connected to Berlin by telephone, teletype, and courier. There was no reason for sending such a sensitive message by wireless in an easy-to-break cipher unless it was intended that the British and Americans read it.35

The SS and German police messages depicting the atrocities in Russia also appear to have been made available to the British deliberately. When Churchill’s BBC speech on the killings was picked up in Germany, the SS immediately concluded that the double transposition cipher they were using was compromised. They demanded another and the armed forces cipher bureau, OKW/Chi, quickly complied. They were given a double Playfair system, well-known to professional cryptologists and even easier to break. OKW/Chi was housed next door to Canaris’s office on the Tirpitzuferstrasse and was an agency of OKW’s communications chief, General Erich Fellgiebel. Fellgiebel was an open critic of the Nazis, but was tolerated by Hitler because of his perceived irreplaceable expertise.36

As the summer turned to fall, the decrypts reporting on the killings in Russia multiplied. They went straight to Churchill, and by diplomatic bag or secure transatlantic undersea cable on to the United States, and, surely, to the White House.37 Meanwhile, the trade embargos, plus the barring of Japanese ships from the Panama Canal, slashed Japan’s import trade by 75 percent, leading to serious shortages in food and fuel.

The Japanese were in a quandary. If Japan did not take up arms soon, it would be too weak to fight.

13

August 1941

Dusko Popov was not alone that day in early August 1941 when he flew into New York by Dixie Clipper, the giant flying boat on the Lisbon–Bermuda–New York run. As he stepped down into the waiting motor launch, his arm dragged down by a briefcase stuffed with $70,000 in cash, just behind was Hamish Mitchell, a senior MI6 officer.1 They shared a taxi to the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.

Mitchell had latched on to Popov when the Clipper made its refuelling stop in Bermuda, sitting beside him for the rest of the trip. His assignment was to use his diplomatic passport to get Popov’s briefcase through customs unexamined, but there was more at stake than just the money. Popov was carrying something far more precious: stuck to four telegram forms were close to a dozen microdots containing the questions the Germans wanted answered about the U.S. Pacific Fleet. This was the hard evidence Roosevelt needed if he ever had to prove Germany was complicit in a Japanese plan to attack Pearl Harbor. Popov handed them over to Mitchell in the taxi.2

Popov idled alone at the Waldorf for the next two days while the microdots were examined at British Security Coordination (BSC), the New York office of MI6. The wait must have rattled him. When two intelligence officers from the U.S. Army and U.S. Navy called at the hotel on August 14, carrying out a routine check on persons of possible interest entering America, Popov assumed they were the secret service types he had expected to be waiting to meet him. The first thing he did was ask the army man to help him put his $70,000 — equivalent to $1 million in those days — into the hotel safety deposit box. The assistant manager who arranged matters was a naturalized Italian and Popov blathered on to him about being a British agent pretending to be a German agent, revealing that the money was for his mission. The FBI later called it the “most stupid” thing he could have done.3

Back in his hotel room, Popov proceeded to tell the two intelligence officers everything. They must have realized Popov had got it wrong, but they listened anyway. When he reported the incident to the FBI, the army man was careful to stress that the encounter had been entirely an accident. They had sought Popov out, he explained, to collect what information he might have on Yugoslavia, invaded by Hitler’s armies in May.

That same afternoon, Charles Ellis, the most senior officer for MI6 in America, turned up at the New York office of Percy Foxworth, chief of the FBI’s Special Intelligence Service and principal liaison with BSC, to inform him that the expected British double agent had arrived, was staying at the Waldorf, and that the FBI were welcome to take him over. He had been Britain’s “number one agent,” Ellis told Foxworth, and with his help the British had been able to “locate all of the radio stations used by the Germans and also to identify a large number of their agents.”

This was a huge fib, but it drew Foxworth in, especially as Ellis had brought along samples of his secret ink and copies of his code, his wireless instructions, and a photo-enlargement of a list of questions in English the Germans wanted their spy to get answers to. Foxworth sent the questionnaire on to Hoover with the strong recommendation that the FBI take Popov on.4 If, by any chance, Roosevelt and Churchill did not get Popov’s Pearl Harbor questionnaire at their Atlantic meeting, Hoover got it now.

Ellis’s boss was William Stephenson — famous after the war as “The Man Called Intrepid” — and he had a direct line to both leaders, via Menzies of MI6 to the prime minister, and to the president via Vincent Astor, the millionaire boyhood chum of Roosevelt who long had been acting as the president’s unofficial liaison with British intelligence in the United States. Stephenson was also said to be in direct contact with Churchill. He would not have missed conveying the explosive questionnaire to both leaders if he had been shown it, and did not think they knew of it. Apparently he was not shown it.5