From the WSJ Opinion Archives
THINKING THINGS OVER
September 11, December 7
And Limits of Intelligence
Did we learn the lesson of Pearl Harbor?
September 11 is engraved in American history as a second "day of infamy." Like the December 7 attack on Pearl Harbor, the destruction of the World Trade Center shocked the national imagination. But it says something about the limitations military and diplomatic intelligence that in retrospect neither was truly surprising.
Anyone paying attention to public affairs through 1941 pretty much knew war was coming in the Pacific. In addition, the U.S. had broken the Japanese diplomatic code. On Nov. 27, the Chief of Naval Operations sent a message to his commanders starting "This dispatch is to be considered a war warning." But no one thought the Japanese would have the audacity to strike at the main U.S. base in the Pacific.
So too, Osama bin Laden had openly proclaimed Jihad against the U.S., and his al Qaeda terrorists had repeatedly struck at Americans. They even made a previous attempt at their principal September 11 target. I remember a high official telling me "we haven't heard the last" of bin Laden. But no one imagined terrorists would have the audacity to hijack airliners and ram them into the twin towers.
A spate of Pearl Harbor books accompanied the movie turkey earlier this year. Browsing through them, I'm struck by how little has been learned since Roberta Wohlstetter's "Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision" (Stanford: 1962). Her main point was that while we can hope that intelligence will give us timely warnings, we cannot expect it. In retrospect you can identify valid advance signals, but before the event it's nearly impossible to separate them from "noise," the ambiguities and conflicting evidence that bedevil human experience.
The chestnut still lingers that President Roosevelt knew Pearl Harbor was the target and concealed this to get the nation into the war. The notion is wildly implausible; what commander would sacrifice most of a fleet to open a two-front war? But a year ago it got a new lease on life from Robert B. Stinnett's "Day of Deceit" (Free Press: 2000). Mr. Stinnett used the Freedom of Information Act to harvest reams of intercepted radio messsages prior to the raid; they do suggest Pearl Harbor as a target. Experts in the material say that he missed the point that this traffic--in military code AN-1 instead of diplomatic "Purple"--was not in fact decoded and translated until a clean-up effort in 1945 and 1946.
Consider Stephen Budiansky in "Battle of Wits: the Complete Story of Codebreaking in World War II" (Free Press: 2000). He reports that "month-by-month progress reports, internal histories, war diaries, logs--some declassified only in 1998--are all in agreement: Not a single AN message had ever been read currently by the time of Pearl Harbor, and not a single AN message transmitted at any time during 1941 was read by Dec. 7."
The myth lingers because of anti-Roosevelt feelings, plus the effort at vindication from partisans of commanders relieved after Pearl Harbor. (In my view quite justly.) Also because on Dec. 7 U.S. aircraft carriers were safe at sea, dispatched to carry planes to where an attack seemed more likely. And finally because the U.S. did indeed shortly break the key military code, allowing it to win the battle of Midway and throw the Japanese Navy on the defensive for the rest of the war.
This code-breaking and intelligence coup was primarily the doing of Lt. Cmdr. (later Captain) Joseph J. Rochefort, head of Station Hypo, a cryptanalysis outpost on Honolulu. Three days after Pearl Harbor Cmdr. Rochefort was unleashed on the main fleet code, designated AN-1 and later JN-25. Building on earlier work in Washington, he could read the code in real time by March 18, 1942.
Washington, however, refused to accept his interpretation of the intercepts--resisting identification of Japanese invasion target "AF" as Midway Island. He won the support of Admiral Chester Nimitz, however, and the two arranged for a fictitious message that Midway has lost its desalination plant; Japanese messages shortly included one that "AF air unit" had reported a water shortage. Ultimately Rochefort was able to predict almost precisely the time, location and bearing at which the Japanese force would be spotted.
Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, stung after his Pearl Harbor victory by the Dolittle raid on Tokyo, had indeed set out to eliminate American airpower on Midway. He hoped to ambush American carriers sent in relief. Armed with Rochefort's information, Nimitz and Raymond Spruance ambushed him first. On locating the Japanese, Admiral Spruance commanded his three carriers to launch torpedo planes, despite knowing they lacked the range to return. All but four planes were destroyed. Amid the battle on the surface, American dive bombers came over Yamamoto undetected at 14,000 feet at 10:20 a.m. local time June 4. By 10:26 three Japanese carriers were aflame; the offensive that opened at Pearl Harbor was over. With his fourth carrier destroyed later in the day, Yamamoto limped back to Tokyo less than six months after his Dec. 7 triumph.
If Captain Rochefort illustrates the brilliance of intelligence work, he also less happily illustrates the limitations of an in-bred and highly political craft. While he warned that it "would only make trouble," Nimitz recommended him for the Distinguished Service Medal. Not only was the medal refused, but the Washington brass that had resisted AF as Midway claimed credit. At the end of the war, Rochefort commanded a floating dry dock in San Francisco. In 1986, heeding a campaign by Naval veterans, President Reagan and Navy Secretary John Lehman awarded the Distinguished Service Medal posthumously.
There could be few better recipes for bureaucratic politics than a handful of secretive and secluded wizards sorting through endless "noise." And the bigger the subject the more the noise, and the more subtle pressures arise to bend to a political line or justify last year's guesses. So over my journalistic career, I've watched our intelligence masters be surprised by the Soviet missile build-up, massive cheating on the biological weapons convention, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Communist empire.
Intelligence can be brilliant, especially with today's technical capabilities. I doubt that the caves of Tora Bora will be a secure refuge. But I also feel quite free to make my own guesses about, say, the likely origin of anthrax attacks, the military might of Saddam Hussein, the intentions of the PLO, the desire for freedom along the Arab Street. And I urgently hope that President Bush and the rest of our leaders, instead of deferring to "experts," follow their own instincts as well.
Mr. Bartley is editor of The Wall Street Journal. His column appears Mondays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.
