Foreword

On October 28, 1944, in Washington, D.C., I attended a birthday party given by a friend of mine, the Russian-born foreign correspondent, Isaac Don Levine,^[1] for his wife, Ruth. October 28 is my birthday too. So it became a double birthday party.

At that party, a loquacious colonel, assuming apparently that he was speaking “off the record,” confided that the United States had decrypted the Japanese diplomatic code a year or so before the attack on Pearl Harbor. From that time on, the top U.S. administration and military officials had been intercepting and reading many of the confidential messages that passed between the Japanese government in Tokyo and her emissaries in the United States and other countries. Thanks to this source of intelligence, the administration in Washington had been privy before the attack on Pearl Harbor to many Japanese secrets.

Republican presidential candidate Thomas E. Dewey had also learned this administration secret. But, out of patriotism, he was not exploiting it during the election campaign that was then under way. It could be that the Japanese were still using the same code, and Dewey did not want to run the chance of alerting the Japanese to change their code and thus destroy an extremely valuable source of U.S. intelligence.

It would have been a real scoop to report this news on the pages of Life, my employer at the time. But should I? I lost no time in sending a memorandum to Henry Luce, publisher of Life, about the colonel’s disclosure. He reacted as Dewey had. He told me to file the information away; it would be useful after the war.

Right after the Japanese surrender on August 14, 1945, Luce sent me to upstate New York to interview Dewey. After an all-night train ride, I caught up with him at the Elmira Reformatory, where he was on an inspection tour. He asked me to join him in his limousine for the ride to Geneva, his next stop. We drove along scenic Lake Seneca. But I didn’t glance at the beautiful Finger Lake scenery; I was enthralled with Dewey’s story.

In September 1944, a tall, dark, and handsome colonel, Carter Clarke, had delivered to Dewey a letter from Army Chief of Staff General Marshall. The letter told Dewey that we had cracked the Japanese diplomatic code. We were still deriving enormous military advantages from reading and decrypting coded intercepts. American lives would be lost if the Japanese changed their code. Therefore, it was of the utmost importance that no word about that should leak out that might reach the Japanese. As a result, Dewey was persuaded to keep the issues of Pearl Harbor and the Japanese code out of the campaign. Dewey told me I could use the story of his “gagging,” but he warned that I must not reveal my source. My article appeared in the September 24, 1945, issue of Life.

Luce then gave me the assignment of attending the hearings of the Joint Congressional Committee on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack, just then preparing to get under way. The Congressional hearings ran from November 15, 1945, until May 31, 1946, when the last witness appeared. Those hearings revealed a great deal, but probably even more significant were some of the things that they didn’t reveal. It was obvious from the testimony of some of the witnesses that they were trying not to tell everything they knew.

I recall to this day the dissimulation of one key witness, Captain Alwyn D. Kramer. As Japanese translator and Navy courier, he had played an important role in the weeks before the attack on Pearl Harbor. He had distributed to the top Washington officials many, if not most, of the secret Japanese messages intercepted during that period. He was asked at some length what he recalled about the messages he had delivered, and to whom. Kramer had testified in 1944 before the Navy Court of Inquiry. Between then and his appearance before the Congressional Committee, his recollections had been “refreshed,” he said, as a result of his having been questioned by military personnel conducting other Pearl Harbor investigations.

The members of the Congressional Committee noted several significant discrepancies between his testimony to them and his frank and open statements before the NCI. Two were especially notable. One dealt with the famous “East Wind Rain” message, a false weather report bearing a coded meaning, and the other concerned the Japanese government’s instructions to their Washington ambassadors asking them to deliver their reply to the U.S. State Department proposal at precisely 1:00 p.m. Washington time on Sunday, December 7.

According to Kramer’s testimony before the NCI, “East Wind Rain” indicated impending trouble, perhaps even war, between Japan and the United States. Concerning the 1:00 p.m. message, he had reported to the NCI that, when delivering it on Sunday morning, December 7, he had called the special attention of some of the recipients to the fact that 1:00 p.m. Washington time was about dawn in Hawaii. However, he denied to the Congressional Committee that he had intended to imply that either of these two messages carried any serious implications. When pressed by Committee member Senator Homer Ferguson of Michigan, he side-stepped. His earlier recollections had been “faulty,” he said; his memory had since been “refreshed.” Moreover, he flatly denied that anyone had asked him to change his testimony.

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Percy Greaves was hired privately to help the minority Republicans, who had no funds for a research staff. He attended every session of the Congressional hearings. In the course of fulfilling my assignment for Life, I saw him there regularly. He listened intently to all the testimony. Occasionally he would whisper in the ear of a Republican Committee member or write him a note, calling attention to some particular point to pursue in his questioning.

Percy’s serious interest in Pearl Harbor dated from those hearings. He continued to pursue the subject after the hearings closed. He interviewed participants, read everything he could find on the subject and researched all leads. Thus this book has been many years in the making. I talked with Percy about Pearl Harbor several times over the years.

Percy had completed a carefully documented draft when he died in August 1984. His widow, Bettina Bien Greaves, has done a noble job of reworking his materials, fleshing them out, and preparing his manuscript for publication. His revelations, as they are presented here, should help future students interpret the ramifications of the “seeds” that led to the Japanese attack, and of the “fruits” of that attack, namely the investigations and the attempted coverup.

John Chamberlain

January 1991