The 7 December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor by Imperial Japanese Navy planes achieved complete surprise. So unexpected was such an attack, in fact, that even the discovery of Japanese midget submarines at the mouth of Pearl Harbor or the tracking of unknown aircraft approaching Oahu by U.S. Army radar never raised a general alarm among American forces. Considering the skillful planning and execution of the Japanese operation and its subsidiary radio-deception scheme, the degree of surprise was understandable.
Wilbur Wright's retelling of events at Pearl Harbor in
the Naval Institute's Americans at War Series
Yet many Americans believed that the astonishing blow could not have happened without some sort of conspiracy by U.S. political and military leaders who kept significant warning intelligence from Pearl Harbor's commanders, Admiral Husband E. Kimmel and Lieutenant General Walter C. Short. One of the purported warnings—a series of ordinary weather phrases known as the Winds message buried in a Japanese news broadcast—was touted as critical to the conspiracy theory. But recent scholarship, especially the newly released National Security Agency documentary history, West Wind Clear, which brought to public attention records overlooked for decades, has demonstrated this claim to be baseless.
While it took several years and, in some cases, decades, before most of the conspiracy charges about the successful attack emerged in various books and articles, the claim about the Winds, or Winds Execute, message appeared and took hold at the same time as several of the 1943-46 Pearl Harbor hearings by the Navy, Army, and Congress. The allegation about the Winds message had a single source, but a well-placed one at that: U.S. Navy Captain Laurance F. Safford. The former founder and head of the Navy's radio-intelligence and code-breaking unit, OP-20-G, Safford appeared before several of the hearings and made his case for a conspiracy about the Winds message.
His story was that the message—really a series of innocuous weather phrases (East Wind Rain, West Wind Clear, and North Wind Cloudy) or single words (East, West, North) known as an open code—was to be inserted in an overseas news broadcast as a means to warn Japanese diplomats of deteriorating relations between Japan and the United States, Great Britain, or the Soviet Union. Safford averred that the execute message containing all three phrases had been intercepted on 4 December. As a result, a warning message was to have been sent to Admiral Kimmel. Furthermore, knowledge of the intercept was known throughout the U.S. government, but an official conspiracy had destroyed the evidence of its existence. He concocted a list of 26 people who, Safford continued, knew of the existence of the message and its translation.
If Safford's case for conspiracy had been as strong as he and his supporters charged, then it should have stood up to any and all cross-examinations. But at the early Pearl Harbor hearings his testimony received, at best, a lukewarm reaction. The first four boards and inquiries he testified before asked him few questions about his evidence; two of them were skeptical of his story.
In February 1946, however, when he appeared before the Joint Congressional Committee on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack, the outcome was dramatically different. This hearing was his best opportunity to make the strongest case for his claim, but he failed miserably. Asked at last to back up his theory, Safford's evidence simply wilted. Among other things, in reference to his accusation that the message (actually phrases) was heard, he conceded that he had theorized about a possible transmission; he could produce no evidence that one had been intercepted. No warning message based on the alleged Winds intercept was sent to Kimmel. All the witnesses he named could not recall events anything at all like Safford described. Some knew of erroneous intercepts of phrases that appeared somewhat similar but nothing like what Safford claimed.
To the congressional committee, what was most striking about Safford's version of events was that his story had varied significantly before each of the other hearings. The date of the intercept kept changing; the rosters of people who supposedly had seen it differed; and the story of the handling of the purported message varied at each retelling. Before the Army Pearl Harbor Board, Safford even admitted that he had borrowed all of the phrases from the Japanese "set-up" message, which the Navy had intercepted in November 1941, and presented them as the text of the messages supposedly intercepted. The joint congressional committee called his hand, and Safford could produce nothing of substance, only a mixture of speculation, conjectures, mistaken timelines, and a surprising misunderstanding of procedures for handling and disseminating intelligence.
Why did Safford make his claim in the first place and then stick to it despite the flaws in his story and the criticism from many fellow officers? Over the years, this question has perplexed many historians, including this one. He had a certainty about his story that belied its substance. But we cannot dismiss his account as mere delusion. Safford's long and important role in the early days of naval cryptology gave his allegations an authority that could not be dispatched quickly. Safford's claims were researched thoroughly by both the Army and Navy code-breaking elements—the latter at Safford's own request. Yet the months-long searches turned up nothing to support his position.
Most likely, Safford's persistence in his allegations about the intercept and subsequent cover-up of the Winds Execute message arose from his unshaken belief in the ability of U.S. radio intelligence to intercept all important Japanese communications. He believed that the Winds Execute message must have been intercepted, but perhaps its importance at the time had been overlooked. This certainty helps explain his long and wide search for evidence through all of the records of naval radio monitoring sites, as well as the records of both the Army and Navy's code-breaking units.
When Safford could find no trace of the intercepted Winds message (or its translation), rather than conclude it was never sent, he came to believe that it had been deliberately suppressed or destroyed. From this mindset it was not difficult for Safford to begin to find "evidence" of a conspiracy. To his mind, a canceled serial number meant a destroyed translation, theoretical intercepts of messages became actual copy, and third-hand hearsay of orders to destroy the purported message all pointed to a command conspiracy. Safford simply closed his mind to the reasonable explanation that no Winds message had been sent on 4 December. He could not admit to a failure by naval radio intelligence to hear it—or, as actually happened, that the Japanese did not send a Winds message until hours after the attack.
In refusing to acknowledge what really occurred, Safford's attitude was quite similar to that of notable naval intelligence officers in Hawaii at the time of the attack: Commanders Joseph Rochefort, who headed the radio-intelligence unit in Hawaii, and Edwin Layton, who was Admiral Kimmel's intelligence officer. When both officers were confronted with evidence of the successful Japanese radio-deception plan prior to Pearl Harbor, they denied it could have happened. Rochefort would not allow that radio intelligence could be spoofed as the Japanese had accomplished, while Layton could not accept that the Japanese task force could keep completely silent during its transit to Hawaii.
Safford's story about the Winds message also emphasized its importance as a warning of Japanese intentions; he said, "It meant War—and we knew it meant War." Yet the transmission of the only verified Winds Execute message happened some six hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and at that, it only carried a reference to relations with the British. In fact, the entire warning apparatus the Japanese Foreign Office established to alert its diplomats failed. The warning message was sent well after the attack—useless for intelligence as well as a timely warning. In the end, Safford was simply wrong about the existence and importance of the warning phrases.
Despite Safford's failure to prove his claim, the fiction that a Winds message had been heard before Pearl Harbor lingered. Beginning about 30 years after Safford's congressional testimony, a number of revisionist historians revived his story. While a few did not accept the Winds message's importance, all accepted Safford's version of events, even despite his reluctant admission the message had been fabricated. The longevity of his claim into recent times can be attributed to Internet sites that continue to circulate the story without reviewing the evidence.
In late 2008, the NSA published a documentary history of the controversy, West Wind Clear. The book includes research into records that revisionists usually ignore, such as Safford's admission; records usually overlooked, like those from British intelligence and Dutch diplomatic sources; and material the many Pearl Harbor hearings did not collect, from agencies such as the Federal Communications Commission and the Department of State. This far-ranging search allowed the authors of West Wind Clear to restore the true narrative of events and expose Safford's errors, false evidence, and contradictions.
Ultimately, the only importance that can be attached to Safford's allegation is a negative one. It was a distraction for a number of Pearl Harbor investigations at the time he made his claims. Moreover, decades later his version of events would emerge as an important foundation for conspiracy theories about Pearl Harbor.