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The story was notorious at the time. I don't recall reading anything other than speculation as to who the leaker was. Interesting the story has finally come out.

The story of the Japanese WWII codes is a cautionary tale about reasoning from a conclusion. There were several other spectacular successes from codebreaking, such as shooting down Yamamoto. But in every case the Japanese concluded since their code was unbreakable it couldn't have been codebreaking. So, they blamed their disasters on spies, bad luck, anything other than American intelligence reading their radio traffic.

Johnson's role was was known and the incident is included in either Walter Lord or Gordon Prang's history of the battle. I don't remember which one. There is nothing in the article that was not previously published. The interesting part will be when the book based the grand jury testimony.

BTW, I believe the best history of Midway was Jonathan Parshall's "Shattered Sword". It seems that Fuchida's account, which everybody used for the Japanese side of the battle was debunked decades ago by Japanese historians but kept being repeated by American authors. Contrary to Fuchida, the planes our pilots saw taking off from the flight decks of the of the Japanese carriers were not going to attack the US task force. They were just augmenting the combat air patrol which was running low on ammo after slaughtering torpedo planes for the better part of an hour. The attack force was still below decks being re-armed.

"So, they blamed their disasters on spies, bad luck, anything other than American intelligence reading their radio traffic.

Hmmm...Doesn't that sound a lot like someone we know from the last election?

The story of the Japanese WWII codes is a cautionary tale about reasoning from a conclusion. There were several other spectacular successes from codebreaking, such as shooting down Yamamoto. But in every case the Japanese concluded since their code was unbreakable it couldn't have been codebreaking. So, they blamed their disasters on spies, bad luck, anything other than American intelligence reading their radio traffic.

The Japanese are still like this to a degree. I had a friend that worked for NEC and was sent to Japan to learn their telephone Switch. He said that their troubleshooting methods are exactly the opposite of our American companies. We learn to logically look for the simplest faults and then check successively up to the most difficult trouble. The Japanese are trained to look for the most difficult fail point first. My friend said it was a matter of pride with them. The would never insult anyone by asking them to look for the obvious. They would spend all day checking every component before finally checking to see if the power switch was turned on.

“But in every case the Japanese concluded since their code was unbreakable it couldn’t have been code breaking. So, they blamed their disasters on spies, bad luck, anything other than American intelligence reading their radio traffic.”

The Brits did the same to the German codes and keep their successes quiet for decades. The Nazis never figured it out.