Investigating an intelligence failure

"Marshall worked for the Roosevelt administration, but properly saw himself as being non-partisan. He did not feel it was proper for him to take sides in the campaign.

But he was also deeply worried that the Republicans might use the question of American intelligence, especially code-breaking, as an issue in the 1944 campaign. He was afraid that a lot of high-profile discussion of American codebreaking might well spook both the Japanese and Germans into changing a lot of their other codes and ciphers. That would have been a military disaster. Marshall wasn't interested in who won the election, but he damned well cared who won the war, and when, and how many casualties it might involve.

So he wrote a letter to Governor Dewey, and placed it in an envelope stamped Top Secret, For Mr. Dewey's eyes only and sent a high level officer as a courier to deliver it and to insure it not fall into the wrong hands. Dewey opened the letter, read the first two paragraphs, up to this:

What I have to tell you below is of such a highly secret nature that I feel compelled to ask you either to accept it on the basis of your not communicating its contents to any other person and returning this letter or not reading any further and returning the letter to the bearer.

Dewey had also seen the word "cryptograph" further down, without trying, and he stopped reading and handed the letter back and explained that he did not want to read it any further. The courier returned to Washington and reported to Marshall.

Marshall could not accept that. The issues involved were too important. So he rewrote the letter and again had it delivered to Dewey. The new letter read as follows:

My dear Governor: Colonel Clarke, my messenger to you of yesterday, September 26th, has reported the result of his delivery of my letter dated September 25th. As I understand him you (a) were unwilling to commit yourself to any agreement regarding "not communicating its contents to any other person" in view of the fact that you felt you already knew certain of the things probably referred to in the letter, as suggested to you by seeing the word "cryptograph," and (b) you could not feel that such a letter as this to a presidential candidate could have been addressed to you by an officer in my position without the knowledge of the President.

As to (a) above I am quite willing to have you read what comes hereafter with the understanding that you are bound not to communicate to any other person any portions on which you do not now have or later receive factual knowledge from some other source than myself. As to (b) above you have my word that neither the Secretary of War nor the President has any intimation whatsoever that such a letter has been addressed to you or that the preparation or sending of such a communication was being considered.
I assure you that the only persons who saw or know of the existence of either this letter or my letter to you dated September 25th are Admiral King, seven key officers responsible for security of military communications, and my secretary who typed these letters. I am trying my best to make plain to you that this letter is being addressed to you solely on my initiative, Admiral King having been consulted only after the letter was drafted, and I am persisting in the matter because the military hazards involved are so serious that I feel some action is necessary to protect the interest of our armed forces.

I should have much preferred to talk to you in person but I could not devise a method that would not be subject to press and radio reactions as to why the Chief of Staff of the Army would be seeking an interview with you at this particular moment. Therefore I have turned to the method of this letter, with which Admiral King concurs, to be delivered by hand to you by Colonel Clarke, who, incidentally, has charge of the most secret documents of the War and Navy Departments.

The most vital evidence in the Pearl Harbor matter consists of our intercepts of the Japanese diplomatic communications. Over a period of years our cryptograph people analyzed the character of the machine the Japanese were using for encoding their diplomatic messages. Based on this a corresponding machine was built by us which deciphers their messages. Therefore, we possessed a wealth of information regarding their moves in the Pacific, which in turn was furnished the State Department--rather than as is popularly supposed, the State Department providing us with the information--but which unfortunately made no reference whatever to intentions toward Hawaii until the last message before December 7th, which did not reach our hands until the following day, December 8th.

Now the point to the present dilemma is that we have gone ahead with this business of deciphering their codes until we possess other codes, German as well as Japanese, but our main basis of information regarding Hitler's intentions in Europe is obtained from Baron Oshima's messages from Berlin reporting his interviews with Hitler and other officials to the Japanese Government. These are still in the codes involved in the Pearl Harbor events.

To explain further the critical nature of this set-up which would be wiped out almost in an instant if the least suspicion were aroused regarding it, the battle of the Coral Sea was based on deciphered messages and therefore our few ships were in the right place at the right time. Further, we were able to concentrate our limited forces to meet their naval advance on Midway when otherwise we almost certainly would have been some 3,000 miles out of place. We had full information of the strength of their forces in that advance and also of the smaller force directed against the Aleutians which finally landed troops on Attu and Kiska.

Operations in the Pacific are largely guided by the information we obtain of Japanese deployments. We know their strength in various garrisons, the rations and other stores continuing available to them, and what is of vast importance we check their fleet movements and the movements of their convoys. The heavy losses reported from time to time which they sustain by reason of our submarine action, largely result from the fact that we know the sailing dates and routes of their convoys and can notify our submarines to lie in wait at the proper points.

The current raids by Admiral Halsey's carrier forces on Japanese shipping in manila Bay and elsewhere were largely based in timing on the known movements of Japanese convoys, two of which were caught, as anticipated, in his destructive attacks.

As another example of the delicacy of the situation, some of Donovan's people (the OSS) without telling us, instituted a secret search of the Japanese Embassy offices in Portugal. As a result the entire military attache Japanese code all over the world was changed, and though this occurred over a year ago, we have not yet been able to break the new code and have thus lost this invaluable source of information, particularly regarding the European situation.

A further most serious embarrassment is the fact that the British government is involved concerning its most secret sources of information, regarding which only the Prime Minister, the Chiefs of Staff and a very limited number of other officials have knowledge.

A recent speech in Congress by Representative Harness would clearly suggest to the Japanese that we have been reading their codes, though Mr. Harness and the American public would probably not draw any such conclusion.

The conduct of General Eisenhower's campaign and of all operations in the Pacific are closely related in conception and timing to the information we secretly obtain through these intercepted codes. They contribute greatly to the victory and tremendously to the saving in American lives, both in the conduct of current operations and in looking towards the early termination of the war.

I am presenting this matter to you in the hope that you will see your way clear to avoid the tragic results with which we are now threatened in the present political campaign.

Please return this letter by bearer. I will hold it in my most secret file subject to your reference should you so desire.

Dewey obviously was no supporter of Roosevelt, and genuinely believed that it would be in the interests of the nation that the Republicans win in 1944. But Dewey was also a patriot, and respected General Marshall enormously. He knew that Marshall would not have taken such an extraordinary step if the issues involved were not highly critical.

Dewey decided that it was more important to defeat the Germans and Japanese than to defeat Roosevelt. He decided that it was more important that the US be victorious than that the Republicans be. He made sure that the issue of intelligence failure would not be raised during the campaign. If he had used that issue, he might have won; as it was, he lost badly.

Or rather, he lost very well. I have an enormous amount of respect for Dewey because of the decision he made.

Marshall was deeply grateful, and later on a couple of occasions let Dewey see top secret information derived from codebreaking which was affecting the course of the war, so he could see just how vital it had actually been. If Dewey had acted other than as he did, the war might well have gone on another year, with thousands of additional American casualties.

Dewey was an American first, a Republican second. I wish that Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WVa) was an American first, but I am by no means certain. Rockefeller is the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Democratic committee staffers appear to have written a document for him describing how to use an investigation into American intelligence regarding Iraqi WMDs to best affect the 2004 election campaign. It's not clear exactly who wrote it, but Rockefeller acknowledges that it came from his staff, saying that it had not been intended for public release. (I should think not.)

Fox News has obtained a document believed to have been written by the Democratic staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee that outlines a strategy for exposing what it calls "the administration's dubious motives" in the lead-up to the war in Iraq.

The memo, provided late Tuesday by a source on the Committee and reported by Fox News' Sean Hannity, discusses the timing of a possible investigation into pre-war Iraq intelligence in such a way that it could bring maximum embarrassment to President Bush in his re-election campaign.

Among other things, the memo recommends that Democrats "prepare to launch an investigation when it becomes clear we have exhausted the opportunity to usefully collaborate with the [Senate] majority. We can pull the trigger on an independent investigation of the administration's use of intelligence at any time — but we can only do so once ... the best time would probably be next year."

The last paragraph of the memo reads, "Intelligence issues are clearly secondary to the public's concern regarding the insurgency in Iraq."

Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kan., appeared clearly shocked by the memo, which Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W. Va., ranking member on the Intelligence Committee, acknowledged was written in draft form and not meant for distribution.

Could such an investigation take place without revealing much of what kinds of data we had, and by implication how we learned it? We still have enemies, and many of the kinds of intelligence sources we used to learn about Saddam are also being used to monitor them.

Early in the struggle in Afghanistan, bin Laden released a couple of video tapes where he exhorted Muslims to oppose the US. In those videos he was standing in front of a striated rock outcrop, and an American geologist who had worked in the region recognized the striations and knew that it meant bin Laden could only be in a relatively small area of Afghanistan. He communicated that information to American intelligence.

Unfortunately, he also told the news media. In the next video tape, bin Laden stood in front of a tarpaulin which covered whatever might have been behind him. It may have been taped in the same location, but there was no longer any way to tell. And I have no doubt that many shadow warriors cursed that geologist for his utter stupidity.

Many of us are convinced that bin Laden died in December of 2001 in a bombing attack in Afghanistan, but it's possible that if that geologist had kept his mouth shut, we might have bagged bin Laden even earlier.

There may well be a serious question whether American intelligence failed before September of 2001. There may be serious questions about our intelligence regarding Iraq before we invaded there. But there's also a serious question whether a public investigation of those questions while the war continues might cause more harm than good, and cost a lot of American servicemen, or American civilians, their lives.

I don't expect the Democrats to forfeit the election or to refuse to contest Bush. On the contrary, I feel they have a duty to try to win, even though I think they don't have a snowball's chance of doing so. But I also feel they have a duty to make sure that the election campaign doesn't threaten national security or the progress of the war. I expect them to be Americans first, Democrats second.

Thank you for linking the entire article.
The extraction here is to emphasize the character and the motivation of 99 % of Americans of a couple three generations ago...

Would that there would be more Zell Millers today ,who is now considered a Neanderthal in the eyes of his fellow Democrats .

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