Fighting to Lose (62 page)

Read Fighting to Lose Online

Authors: John Bryden

2.
PHH
, 37, Hewitt Inquiry, at 999.

3.
PHH
, 4, 1746–47;
PHH
, 7, 3390-91.

4.
PHH
, 37, Hewitt Inquiry, at 983; and Chapter 16, Note 8. Notice the use of the word “attic” instead of “dormer” as used by the HYPO/Shivers version. Notice also his statement that Kramer’s dilly-dallying “slowed up the whole process” of translating and making MAGIC available: Layton,
And I Was There
, 284. This is hidden in the evidence presented at the Pearl Harbor inquiries because the messages submitted showed only time of translation, not decryption. British code-breaking agencies showed time of decryption.

5. Layton,
And I Was There
, 281–83. Notice he writes that Kramer did not give the lights message the attention it warranted because it was in “a low-grade consular cipher.” From Chapter 16 we know it was high-grade.

6. Because it arrived on an odd day, when it was the navy’s turn to decipher incoming intercepts, it can be assumed the army’s Signals Intelligence Service was unaware of it at that point.

7. PHH, 37, Hewitt Inquiry, Tokyo to Washington, 6 Dec. 1941, Army 7149, at 694.

8. Layton,
And I Was There
, 290.

9. The officer of the watch that began at 7 a.m. testified that the fourteenth part and the army translation of the one o’clock message were ready by 7:15, but Kramer did not come in until nine o’clock:
PHH
, 33, Naval Court, Alfred Pering, at 802–4. He also said Kramer had been phoned at home about the messages during the night, as certainly he would have been since the one o’clock message was sent in PURPLE and in “Government code,” a method reserved for the most urgent and most important messages. The middle watch officer, F.M. Brotherhood, was more circumspect, but did testify that at the end of his shift he left for Kramer “those dispatches which were supposed to be delivered to him.” These must have included the fourteenth part, which was in English, and a copy of the one o’clock message in Japanese, because Brotherhood said the “original” was sent to the army for translation:
PHH
, 33, at 839–44. Kramer claimed he had not been phoned and that he came in at 7:30:
PHH,
33, at 858–61.

10. Arthur A. McCollum, “Unheeded Warnings,” in Paul Stillwell,
Air Raid: Pearl Harbor! Recollections of a Day of Infamy
(Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1981), 85–87. McCollum’s recollections back up Pering’s statement that Kramer did not arrive in his own office until nine o’clock. See also
PHH
, 36 at 24-27.

11.
PHH
,
39
, Army Board Report, at 93–5.

12. See the selection of decrypts, including some BJs, collected from the Government Code and Cipher School in 1944 and reproduced in Clausen and Lee,
Pearl Harbor: Final Judgement
, 353–93. Wartime cryptogapher Eric Nave, who was with the Australian section of the British Far East Combined Bureau, reported personally breaking a J-19 message in Nov. 1941, and states that the code was then well-known to the Government Code and Cipher School: Rusbridger and Nave,
Betrayal
, 25, 136. These claims are backed up by Ian Pfennigwerth,
A Man of Intelligence
, 174–75, citing documents in Australia’s National Archives.

13. Powers,
Secrecy
, 243.

14. The proof of this assertion is Popov’s questionnaire itself. However, Jebsen’s description in
Spy/Counterspy
, 142–44, of hosting a fact-finding visit of Japanese army and navy officers to Taranto in April appears also to be true.

15. Evidence obtained from Richard Sorge by the Japanese after his arrest and made available to the House Committee on Un-American Activities, Hearings on the American Aspects of the Richard Sorge Spy Case 82 Congress( 9, 22, 23 Aug. 1951). Sorge said he obtained this from the German Ambassador who, in this case, was a Canaris protegé.

16. “Herr Sorge sass mit zu Tisch,”
Der Speigel
, 3 March 1951.

17. H.C. on Un-Amercan Activities, Sorge Case; and David E. Murphy,
What Stalin Knew: The Enigma of Barbarossa
(New Haven, CT; and London: Yale UP, 2005), 86–86.

18. Murphy,
What Stalin Knew
, 87.

19. Ibid.

20. H.C. on Un-American Activities, Sorge Case, Testimony of Mitsusada Yoshikawa, (1946) He was the Japanese prosecutor who interrogated Sorge after his arrest.

21. West and Tsarev,
Crown Jewels
, 140; and Yuri Modin,
My Five Cambridge Friends
(New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1994), 92. See also, Curry,
Security Service
, 259–60. Note the deletion on p. 260, which undoubtedly refers to intercepting diplomatic bags. Herbert Yardley,
Secret Service In America
(London: Faber & Faber, 1940), 49–50, went into detail about how to open diplomatic mail, photograph its contents, and then reseal everything without leaving traces, so the practice was hardly a secret anymore.

22. West and Tsarev,
Crown Jewels
, 140; and Carter,
Anthony Blunt
, 274, citing an interview with Desmond Bristow. There was nothing new in what Blunt was doing. See next paragraph.

23. Liddell Diary, 14 Aug. 1941, and passim. See also, Curry,
Security Service
, 260, which specifically mentions BJs. A 1942 Soviet assessment of Blunt’s work during Oct.–Nov. 1941 reported him as having supplied data on the deployment of Japanese troops and being responsible for the liaison between MI5 and GC&CS and the “distribution of diplomatic decrypts”: West and Tsarev,
Crown Jewels
, 145–46.

24. For examples of British intercepts of pre-Pearl Harbor Japanese diplomatic traffic that was copied to MI5 — that is, for Blunt — see Clausen & Lee,
Pearl Harbor: Final Judgement
, 353–77. Up to this writing, only isolated Japanese decrypts from this period have been released at the PRO, so this collection, which Clausen obtained from GC&CS in 1944, is extremely valuable for what it can reveal of how closely Churchill could follow for himself the Japanese-American trajectories to war.

25. “Reinforced by the Siberian divisions which Stalin had risked moving from the Far East on the basis of reports, including Philby’s, it beat the Germans back.… ” Genrikh Borovik,
The Philby Files
(New York: Little, Brown, 1994), 195. As head of the Iberian desk, Philby was not then in a position to supply much intelligence useful to Stalin’s decision, so the other “reports” must have included Blunt’s. Stalin, who was chronically suspicious, would have needed to see at least some actual carbon copies of the decrypts to be convinced. See examples reproduced on the inside cover of
Crown Jewels
.

26. Clausen and Lee,
Pearl Harbor: Final Judgement
, 354. There are two typos: No. 2363 should be 2353 and No. 09127 should be 098127. I have rendered “communications” as “commercial cable and radio-telegraph services” for clarity, since that is definitely what was meant. British and American companies overwhelmingly dominated cable and radio-telegraph communications worldwide, and a clash with either the U.S. or Britain would see these services terminated instantly. There was another version of this “winds” message decrypted and released at the same time.

27. “Foreign Minister Tokyo to Ambassador Berlin, 30th November, 1941 (In Chef de Mission Cypher recyphered on machine),” Clausen and Lee,
Pearl Harbor: Final Judgement
, 360–61. The American version — Tokyo to Berlin, 30 Nov. 1941 (Purple CA) — was available to Roosevelt the day before:
PHH
, 37, Hewitt Inquiry, Exhibit 18, at 664. It is more muted in tone, but the message is the same. The fact that the British version was marked BJ means it was definitely read by Churchill. The two leaders would surely have discussed it during their next transatlantic scrambler telephone conversation.

1. Endnotes are not provided for incidents described and sourced in earlier chapters.

2. “European Axis Signals Intelligence in World War II as Revealed by TICOM Investigations,” prepared by chief, Army Security Agency, 1 May 1946. Short title: TICOM Report, NSA, DOCID 3560861. Found online. The Germans had not broken PURPLE, however.

3. Colville,
Fringes
, 419; and Liddell Diary, 6 Aug. 1941. See also, Joseph P. Lash,
Roosevelt and Churchill, 1939–1941
(New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978), 393, and the allusion to “leakage” in Churchill,
Grand Alliance
, 430.

4. Nicolai,
German Secret Service
, 208. It was not a healthy practice. Spies caught with such documents would be shot.

5. OKW issued a directive postponing the invasion to 21 Sep., with the go-ahead order to come a minimum of ten days in advance. It was then postponed indefinitely on 14 Sep. See “12 Top Secret Directives” of OKW, U.K. Air Ministry translations, LAC, RG24, 981.013(D29). This means both spies were dispatched when Canaris knew that the invasion order was unlikely to be given.

6. Andrew,
Authorized History
, 129–30, 158–59. It could, of course, have been simply a matter of purging Scotland Yard by dumping the infected part onto MI5.

7. Jeffery,
MI6
, 328–30. The very fact that his name was put forward to be considered by Hankey, Wilson, Cadogan, et cetera, gives him this stature. The governing Establishment centred on members of the Privy Council. (See Appendix.)

8. And they did have them. A set of topographical maps of major British cities belonging to OKH were captured by the Canadians. For the originals: LAC, RG24, 20440. This file also contains ground photographs of potential air targets collected by German spies before the war.

9. Farago,
Game of Foxes
, 280 Farago sourced his other books extensively and used primary documents. The complete lack of endnotes in
Game of Foxes
suggests they existed in a draft manuscript but were dropped prior to publication.

10. Churchill,
War Speeches
, I, 210–14.

11. Churchill to Paul Reynaud, 16 May 1940. War Cabinet minutes, 15 May, TNA, CAB 65/13/9.

12. Indeed, in response to a German questionnaire Robertson submitted to him, Boyle specifically said that the Group locations of Fighter Command were not to be disclosed: Robertson, Note to File, 24 Jul. 1940, PRO, KV2/448, Doc. 900a. He did approve directing the Luftwaffe’s attention to Harrogate, however, which is certainly a case of sending the bombers onto an innocent target.

13. The operations room at Uxbridge was completed just before the war, and built sixty feet underground. RAF Stanmore Park was in the London borough of Harrow with Fighter Command itself housed in nearby Bentley Priory.

14. Frederick Winterbotham,
The Ultra Spy: An Autobiography
(London: Macmillan, 1989), 208. Winterbotham is the “I” in this description.

15. Curry,
Security Service
, 247. This is the only direct reference to diverting German bombers on to cities of British choice that this writer found in available documents of the period. It apparently escaped the MI5 censor’s scissors.

16. This would apply especially during 1940 and early 1941 when Robertson was still B3 and Arthur Owens’s case officer.

17. Winterbotham,
Ultra Spy
, 128, 136–40.

18. Winterbotham,
Ultra Spy
, 153, and passim. In the Westminster parliamentary system, government department heads (ministers) normally sit in the House of Commons, where they are theoretically required to truthfully answer the questions put to them by Opposition MPs during the daily Question Period. The upper chamber — the House of Lords, the Senate of Canada, et cetera, — does not have the same onus of truth because the members are not elected. (Author’s opinion.)

19. Winterbotham,
Ultra Spy
, 158–59, 164–66. Churchill had been in this loop before the war, which might explain why he did not object to releasing the weather information in 1939, although then the head of the Royal Navy.

20. Message 174 from 3504, 8 Aug. 1940; NARA, T-77, Reel 1540, Frame 419. Notice “Betrifft Identity Cards” followed by “Bezug ISAR.”

21. Both frequented the Reform Club, which catered to political “progressives,” so an investigator could easily have linked them there. According to Russian sources, Burgess claimed Grand had once given him the task of planting misinformation on Rothschild, designed to disrupt efforts to secure Palestine as a homeland for Jews, which, if true, Grand would certainly have remembered: John Costello and Oleg Tsarev,
Deadly Illusions
(New York: Crown Publishers, 1993), 239–40, citing a letter from Burgess in his NKVD file.

22. Kim Philby,
My Silent War
(London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1968), 12.

23. Andrew,
Authorized History
, 270–72.

24. The entry for 24 Sep. in his diary, where he mentions dining at the Reform Club with Burgess to 11:30 p.m. the evening of the Registry fire, establishes an alibi for Burgess, except that Liddell got the date wrong! See Chapter 7, Note 21.

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