It seemed like an ordinary morning, as he tuned his receiver to the station and began transcribing what he heard. At 8 a.m. he received the message he had been waiting for. It seemed to be nothing more than a regional weather forecast, the kind that the stations he monitored transmitted every day during their news broadcasts. But Briggs, alone among the radio operators at Cheltenham, knew what the three words meant. They meant that the world was going to change in unpredictable but cataclysmic ways. They meant that many of his friends and countrymen would soon be dead. They meant that America would never be the same again.The three words were casually spoken during the regular news and weather feature from Radio Tokyo, Japan. The words were "East Wind, Rain." Briggs immediately teletyped the message to Washington. "East Wind, Rain" was one of three possible "execute" messages which Japanese diplomats around the world had been alerted to begin listening for on November 19th. They were told to monitor the regular news and weather broadcasts from Tokyo, just as they always did, but to pay especially careful attention to the phraseology employed to describe the weather.