MILNET Brief
  Mideast Briefing by Dr. Mohamed Ibn Guadi, August 20, 2004

"We are engaged in a fourth world war.  The Third World War was the Cold War, and the Fourth is the War on Terror...This fourth world war, I think, will last considerably longer than either World Wars I or II did for us. Hopefully not the full four-plus decades of the Cold War."
  - R. James Woolsey, former Director of Central Intelligence, April 3, 2003

MILNET presents the first of what we hope will be regular guest briefings by Mohamad Ibn Guadi.  Dr. Guadi has already begun to provide MILNET with a list of what he feels are important news stories dealing with the Mideast and Islamic terrorists.  This month we began to list those important stories for our visitors as well as mirrored an interview conducted with Dr. Guadi by Ryan Mauro. 

This first briefing looks at a topic that keeps appearing in the media, and one which will be with us for some time.  It is especially important as the U.S. Congress and the Bush Administration square off for their battle on how to best make changes to the Intelligence Community. 





World War IV : Unconditional Surrender
The June 6, 2004 visit in France by U.S. President George W. Bush at the time of the sixtieth anniversary of the Normandy landing, was celebrated under a new climate: post 9/11. The least one can say is that the atmosphere at the time was rather tense. Indeed, when President Bush compared the 2004 War against Terrorism with the World War which was played out in Europe in 1944, many European commentators either failed to comprehend the comparison or decided not to note it to their public. They judged that this analogy remained far too grandiose to be true. Guided by a presupposed bias of their public towards the United States, these "analysts" in many different European media could not perceive the real stakes which had already begun to take shape at the beginning of the 21st century.  It is unfortunate since this daring comparison on behalf of the American President was in fact much more relevant than it appeared at the time. Like all the analogies, it has its limits, but contained within is a rich lesson.

The political realities of of the Cold war was a  bipolar world. The Western world, believing they were fighting on the side of good versus evil, shared a common cause, the Soviet threat. This threat was formalized in the trappings of the Cold War. The parameters of defense were designed to counter underwater nuclear attack or a land based missile provocation like the crisis of the missiles in Cuba in 1962.  This dominated both the defense expenditures and the political dialogue. Unheralded and  unrecognized by most in the West, the advent of modern day terrorism in the Middle East began to change the Cold War symmetrical challenge by forces in Europe to an asymmetrical threat that could  appear anywhere and at any time.

Terrorism was not born on that September 11 morning, yet this event incontestably upset the paradigms of military strategies up to that point.  For until that moment in time, most western militaries and politicians were unready to fight the terrorism of religious inspiration, unwilling to directly face the battle from the militants of Islam.  As many have said since, the western military mindset was still clinging to the well understood tenets of the Cold War.  During the Nineties, we attended the growth of the terrorist groups which proportionally grew right along with the pusillanimity of the Westerners to face their threats.  

It is not without reason that the American President reminded us that September 11 was our generation's "Pearl Harbor of the 21st century"... The morning of December 7, 1941, Roosevelt convened the Congress to decide to declare the war on Japan in response to a horrible and cowardly surprise attack. Thus the modern President's reminder was appropriate, constructive, and instructive.

Many of us find it difficult to understand the number of analogies that exist between the Second World War and the Fourth War -- this War on Terrorism. Although this war resembles the long and painful Cold War, it is much more.  The events of 1941 and 2001 enable us to perceive in the declaration of president Bush, a relevance which appears validated by the undeniable lessons of history.  

Pearl Harbor & 9/11


America's failure to engage Japan seriously prior to the attack on Pearl harbor is eerily echoed by the engagements by the U.S. led coalition in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Whereas the Japanese entry into World War II enraged politicians in Europe, Japan tended to adopt a policy more threatening and quarrelsome towards Southeast Asia. In September 1940 The small asian nation  boldly occupied the main part of the areas which were rich in raw materials and cut off the supply to Tchang Kaï Chek while taking the control of the Tonkin Gulf. Thus, the goal of Japan was clear: to cut all the communications between China and India, and in the long term to invade China as part of their conquest of the lower Asian continent.

Japan's arrogance was evident as they signed a pact with Germany and Italy which was shortly thereafter called "the Axis of the Evil".  The pact is now a familiar one,  in which each member committed himself defending the two others.  While prohibiting the export of iron to Japan, Roosevelt refused to engage militarily. On both sides, many wished and hoped there would be no war. The Japanese diplomacy, via Admiral Kichisaburo, the appointed Ambassador in Washington, ensured that the maintenance of peace would remain more important than the agreement made with the Axis.

In July 1941, the new Japanese government formed by prince Fuminaro Konoye, chose a definitely harder line: occupation of French Indo-China. The Japanese fought this war quite effectively until it came time to  begin the seizure of China.  U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt then decided to nationalize the Philippines and entrusted the region to General MacArthur, placing that great general in charge of the whole of operations in the Far East.

The decoding of "Purple"  the secret Japanese cipher enabled U.S. and British listening posts to intercept much of the Japanese battle orders.   While seeking to save time  by opening fictitious negotiations, Japan secretly decided to attack the base of Pearl Harbor in order to surprise the Americans.  U.S. educated Admiral Yamamoto was charged to carry out the raids on the American bases sometime between April  7 and April 12. And it is precisely on that Sunday morning of December 7, 1941 that General Marshall was made aware of Japanese military plans.  Unfortunately, communications to U.S. forces worldwide, were unreliable. The  U.S. military attempted in vain ot raise the naval bases in Panama, Hawaii, San Diego and the Philippines. The messages arrived too late.

The charges of negligence which were uttered towards Roosevelt are exactly the same ones as those with which President Bush was charged, after September 11. Many accused the U.S. President of  neglecting the terrorist threat, to have been too slow to build a defense against it  Actually, this is far from the truth, just as accusations against the Roosevelt administration were in 1941. The CIA had already made contacts in Afghanistan to track, and to eliminate if possible, Usama Bin Laden. But the legal and administrative scruples which handcuffed the Agency in the nineties made progress slow and to some degree impossible in early 2000.

The awakening of the terrorist threat was actually much older. In May 1977, Douglas Heck, the State Department's Coordinator for Counterterrorism declared that "international terrorism became so extensive that the governments of Libya, of Somalia, South Yemen and Iraq all provided terrorists active support".

The attack of September 11, like that of Pearl Harbor, was not easily conceivable yet there were clues waiting for the right interpretation. Following the historical example of the use of Magic in deciphering the Japanese attack orders, modern code breakers had a frightening hint to decode.  A few days before September 11 the NSA intercepted two separate communications from suspected terrorists which held vital clues to the conspiracy.  Unfortunately, reportedly due to an overworked staff of linguists capable of deciphering middle eastern languages, the analysis of the intercepts did not take place until well after September 11.  Unlike the case of of Pearl Harbor, the warning this time was never transmitted. 

Certain other translators were also suspected to have provided deliberately erroneous translations of the threats to U.S. National Security. In addition, in June of 2001, a report drawn up by an agent of the French DGSE outlined the confessions of a Kuwaiti eminent personage suggesting through his interlocutor that they were "avoiding interior flights in September, especially in the direction of New York, because of serious threats".  The report was classified and buried because it was not thought to have enough credibility.  Israel's  Mossad also shared suspicions in Washington in July. Unfortunately, all these human sources were deemed too vague and with no credible intelligence to react to, the Cold war mentality that was meant to avoid mistakenly launching a nuclear strike dismissed the intelligence as not actionable.

However the charges against George W. Bush, following this tragedy, were about the same ones as those levied against Roosevelt. Historians like Charles Beard or Charles Tansill accused Roosevelt of taking the country to war "via the back door". In his work "Infamy: Pearl Harbor and Its Aftermath", John Toland went even further claiming that Roosevelt and his government knew that the Japanese were going to attack but that it had deliberately let the attack occur as a tactic to involve the country in the war. Of course, Toland did not cite any proof of his allegations. Actually, history clearly shows the war was inescapable and Roosevelt tried to delay U.S. entry as long as possible.

As Churchill wrote later, the engagement of America in the war against the Axis had delighted the allies considerably.   For Churchill, the arrival of the United States in the conflict assured an allied victory. 

Paradoxically, whereas the United States had just been victims of a terrible attack with Pearl Harbor by Japan, and after the American Congress declared war on Japan, Germany and Italy accused the United States "of open acts of war" and declared war on the U.S. themselves.  In a remarkable parallel, when the U.S. went into Afghanistan to depose the Taliban who refused to give up Bin Laden, those same nations joined the opposition to "irresponsible U.S. aggression".

The problem in winnowing out the attack indicators in the wealth of U.S. intercepts during the months before Pearl harbor were perhaps as difficult at those facing the modern NSA before September 11.  Roberta Wohlstetter wrote in 1962 in her work "Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision ", that the warnings concerning a possible attack with Pearl Harbor were many, however they were embedded in a gigantic flood of otherwise erroneous indications and relatively useless information.  U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld likes to quote the  Thomas Schelling foreword in Roberta Wohlstetter’s book Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision :
"We tend to confuse, in our plans, the unusual one with improbable... the danger resides in the poverty of our imagination, in the routine obsession of some dangers more improbable than familiar" 1

This sentence is better definitely more reasonable than the most eccentric theories of conspiracies surrounding September 11.

In 1941, Admiral Kimmel and others in Hawaii did not take the warnings coming from Washington as early as November 27 seriously.  One can only wonder if General Marshall had been able to pick up the phone or perhaps send a "Flash Immediate" via reliable, secure, and encrypted data channel, would the attack on Pearl Harbor have been a success?  Of course we will never know.  Similarly, if preceding Presidents to George W. Bush had funded the NSA linguist programs, mightn't the dots have been connected deep in the bowels of the Maryland 'puzzle palace'?  One can only hope today that the U.S. Congress will not fail to help the Intelligence Community fund increased recruitment for linguists wherever they are needed.  After all, America has had two chances to learn this lesson -- isn't it about time they heeded it?

 

Unconditional Surrender


The Fourth World war with which we are confronted clearly resembles the Second War. Like those days, since the American intervention  in Iraq, opponents of the war have been shrilly saying that all President Bush has done is to produce more terrorists and finally to encourage all militants of Islam to engage more actively in terrorism.  These voices seem to ignore provocation after provocation --  the attack against the World Trade Center in 1993, the attacks against the American embassies in Kenya and of Tanzania, the attack against the USS Cole in 2000.  Was the media sensationlized decapitation of the journalist Daniel Pear the result of this unspecified declaration of war?  On the other hand the appeasement disguised as gentle diplomacy fostered the agreements of Oslo in the Nineties, as well as the agreement of peace with Jordan. Neither of these hugely conciliatory moves prevented the aforementioned attacks, nor did they prevent the fatwa of Usama Bin Laden in 1998 in which he ordered all Americans to be killed, civilians and soldiers alike.  America's crime?  Support for Israel and Saudi Arabia, as well as a refusal to appease terrorists.

This is hardly evidence that President Bush's strategy will produce more terrorists.  Those who would appease have forgotten that the terrorists are generated in numbers equal to the task without the help of the West. There is an analogous event during the second World War which is essential. At the Casablanca, Morocco conference on January 13, 1943, Roosevelt and Churchill and their staffs met to decide military operations against the Axis. It was a question of establishing a common strategy to demolish Germany. At the conclusion of the meeting, Churchill and Roosevelt held a press conference where Roosevelt was to make a statement which caused an international echo. Roosevelt declared that the British Prime Minister and he would not accept anything other than an unconditional surrender from Germany, Italy and Japan.  Churchill was very surprised by this declaration and indeed was quoted later in Robert E Sherwood's "Roosevelt and Hopkins: Year Intimate History "(for which Sherwood gained the Pulitzer price):

"I heard these words - Unconditional Surrender - for the first time in the mouth of the President. It should be remembered that at this time, nobody dared yet to affirm that the victory was assured. But the challenge was required. Myself, I would not have used these words, but I lined up at the side of the President immediately and frequently defended this decision." 2
It is only later than Roosevelt admitted that he he had made the statement spontaneously because he barely had time to prepare for the press conference. Roosevelt reflected upon a similar moment for Civil War General Ulysses S. Grant.  Grant has also used the  phrase "Unconditional Surrender"  and it had suddenly become the essential message Roosevelt wanted to deliver.  It is no wonder that Grant would be the inspiration for Roosevelt.  The son of a leather tanner, the American Civil War transformed him from a simple worker in Galena, Illinois, to one of the most famous Generals of his time, as well as the eighteenth President of the United States.

A few hours after the drama of September 11, President Bush stated: "We will not make any difference between those which plan such acts and those who harbor them" later being coined as "the Bush Doctrine".  This statement echoed that of Roosevelt's simply because to propose such a strategy as unheard of.  It meant that any state suspected of  sheltering terrorist organizations would incur American repercussions.  Bush reinforced that sentiment again on September 21 in front of the Congress: "You are with us or you are with the terrorists".   When Bush proposed this strategy, Rumsfeld, Cheney or Powell had not been consulted.   And like Roosevelt, he had essentially taken America into a long war against evil with only one outcome possible.

For a "Clausewitzien", terrorism is not a large battle. Functioning on an asymmetrical system, terrorism remains, in our opinion, justified by the ones and fought by the others. Contrary to the conventional wars in history, one does not sign an armistice with the terrorists. In other words, terrorism which is based upon a strategy of skirting direct attack will be able to be destroyed only if the implied state's ability to create harm is eliminated.   Providing sanctuary to nation less terrorists only delays their elimination therefore those states that provide harbor to them must be eliminated as well.

Those voices that accused President Bush of doing nothing more than incite the hatred of the militants of Islam, obviously did not assimilate the lessons of history. When Roosevelt stated his demand for unconditional surrender, it started a general dispute. Like the modern militants of Islam, it left with the Axis nations one choice: to fight until death. Capitulation was out of question for the Axis. Even Eisenhower protested and declared rightly:
"If one gave you the choice between the scaffold or to charge with the bayonet, it is probable that you would choose the last solution.
After the declaration of Roosevelt, General Sir Stewart Graham Menzies, chief of the MI-6, told Churchill,
"the German army did not have any more other choices but to fight with the ferocity of the rats driven back with despair."
For his part, the commanding General of the Royal Air Force, Air Marshall Sir John Slessor, concluded that "the effect was regrettable".

The notion of an unconditional surrender -- total capitulation --  eliminated the possibility of any political or diplomatic payment to put an end to the conflict.  Some believe there was an added rationale proposed by Roosevelt's advisors.  It was thought that the  Schwarze Kapelle, the name which the Nazis used for the conspirators in the German army, would kill Hitler and reverse the nation's course.

The same problem emerges at the beginning of the Nineties in the case of Iraq. The only difference was that some of the public opponents of Saddam Hussein profited from a support without external intervention.  As we see the oil for food program audits pointing a finger at so called U.S. allies, countries that voted to impose sanctions and then secretly accepted bribes from Saddam Hussein, it becomes clear that Roosevelt got it right.  Give a dictator an out and he will find a way to work it to his advantage.

Should Roosevelt have acted like George Bush Senior? To ask the Iraqis to revolt and simply allow Saddam to massacre the rebellious Shiite in the south of Iraq? In one decade, the Iraqi opposition was financed by the CIA and the American government, yet Saddam Hussein could have cared a less.   Attacks were organized against the Iraqi dictator and none prospered.   Baghdad saw its capacity reinforced rather than weakened. A decade of U.N. floundering did nothing to change Iraq's behavior, nor did it remove terrorist's save havens from Iraq.  Similarly, Afghan opponents against the Taliban during the Clinton Administration were aided by quiet U.S. support yet nothing came of that effort as well.  Were these both missed opportunities?  Saddam was saved for decades thanks to the Western pusillanimity.  Let us not forget that it is at the request of Saudi Arabia and Egypt that George Bush Senior refused to invade Baghdad and to finish Saddam Hussein.  

In that decade, Baghdad turned a blind eye to several camps, that of Salman Pak in particular, where terrorists simulated taking passengers of aircraft hostage -- we have all seen the captured video tapes of similar practice sessions. Abu Nidal, one of the most wanted terrorists in the world, was given safe haven in Baghdad. Close connections were maintained between Qaeda and Iraq through several emissaries abroad, for instance the Iraqi ambassador in Turkey, Farouk Hijazi, who met Usama Bin Laden in Kandahar, Afghanistan in December 1998, reportedly to propose asylum for bin Laden in Iraq.

During World War II, the conspirators of Schwartz Kapelle remained convinced that Germany was ripe for an insurrection. Especially after the defeats of Stalingrad and El-Alamein. The unconditional surrender preached by Roosevelt shocked them and forced them to take action least they all go under when the allies came to call. Similarly, before September 11, Donald Rumsfeld also thought that Iraq was ripe for a revolution. Colin Powell had even pled in the United Nations for a lightening of the sanctions against Iraq in hopes to inspire revolt from within..

If September 11 did not change the attitude of certain diplomats in Washington, it certainly changed those of the President.  Not to mention his foreign policy. During World War II Hitler could freely declare the "all-out war". Goebbels invited the German people to face the exceptional dangers of the situation. In his opinion, the allies wanted to reduce the Germans to slavery, therefore the only solution was to fight to the death. The Germans busied themselves with their work, convinced of the victory of the Reich. To propose unconditional surrender was to force the enemy to use the most desperate strategies to arrive at victory. Roosevelt had also left only one choice for his staff as well: to undertake one of the most daring gamble of the military history: the D-day invasion.

The Bush doctrine has not generated more terrorists.  It has simply driven the militants of Islam and the states subsidizing international terrorism to make a choice: to cease their activities or to face the American led forces intent on removing them from the planet. Consequently, to strike the terrorists within their sanctuaries, it was necessary to go to the states which sheltered them in order to reduce their numbers and training grounds. 

During the Second World War, General Marshall, who knew very well the history of Antiquity, knew better than most that the information on the battle field is often incomplete. If you wait until you have sufficient battle intelligence, it is usually too late to use that knowledge. The case of Iraq will remain a military strategy mystery until someone in the Bush Administration writes his or her memoirs.  For now it appears that much of the intelligence was manipulated by a few Iraqi nationals focused on getting rid of Saddam at the expense of the truth.  In any case, the best intelligence at the time left little choice for a duty bound President." Most military and political analysts across the world, including many who denied the concept publicly, will be forced to admit that it is Iraq which posed a clear and present danger to the Middle East and provided a perfect entry point for western intervention.

August Hanning, the chief of the B.N.D., (German service of information) declared in a The New Yorker, article in Autumn of 2001 written by Jeffery Goldberg:
"It is our estimate that Iraq will produce an atomic bomb in three years."  3
The article covers much, much more, it is truly worth reading Yet, in a frightening parallel to Europe's appeasement in 1938, Chancellor of German Gerhard Schroder refused to support U.S intervention in Iraq despite his own intelligence organization's conclusions.
 

Our road starts in Baghdad


Inarguably, a change is taking place in the arabo-Islamic world. At the time George W. Bush took office, the national politic of the U.S. was still based upon taking a "humbler attitude towards the world."  This isolationist attitude died a mean death on September 11, 2001.  On that day, President George W. Bush joined  Harry Truman, John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan in adopting a vision internationalist.

In the state of the Union on January 21 George W. Bush declared that Iraq, Iran and the North Korea were part of an "Axis of the Evil". The Iraqi question irritated the Clintonien democrats particularly because Bush was clearly going to break the policy of the status quo.

It should be remembered that after the Second World War, Churchill was also criticized, in particular because of the means used in the secret war to overcome Germany. Many intellectuals and German historians considered it regrettable that the allies did not grant more time or of assistance to the Schwarze Kapelle to remove Hitler. Some even stated that D-day had been a gross error. Their theory was that the Allies in their hatred of the Axis refused to see an enemy even larger and more threatening: Soviet Union. For them, democratic and anti-bolchévique Germany would have been an excellent adversary to counter the Russians.

This analysis was done in a particular context. However today, the pact with the Soviet Bear to demolish Germany proved to be a necessary strategy. The emergence of Japanese and Germany peaceful coexistence proves the point.  Churchill was perfectly conscious of concluding a pact with the "Evil" by introducing Russia into the coalition against the Axis. This was an strategic measure, and certainly not one of mutual ideology. To negotiate this pact, a co-operation between British and Soviet intelligence agencies was fundamental. Thus, Churchill sent two very important principals to Moscow  to conclude the agreement with the Russian military and intelligence services.  They were Anthony Eden, Foreign Minister and inspiring future leader of the Arab League and Alexander Cadogan, Under-Secretary to the Foreign Office,  They left for their most important mission on December 7, 1941, the day of the attack of Pearl Harbor. They arrived in Moscow at the time even where the German army attacked the western edge of the city.   How could the two not find common ground with their Russian counterparts at such a time.  Yet Great Britain was also to discover another ally at the time of these secret negotiations: the United States.

The dilemma which currently shakes many diplomats in Washington in this Fourth War is the attitude to adopt toward Saudi Arabia. As at one time with the USSR, the question is whether Saudi Arabia is a reliable ally in the present war. Is it possible to make a pact with the Evil to demolish the terrorists throughout the world? To some the answer is a clear no.  Saudi Arabia is rapidly approaching the limits of its political elasticity.   The existence even of Al Saoud is threatened inside the country's borders. Soon, the pressures from within that nation will force the balloon to pop, and it will be an explosion heard the world over.  Many believe that it will soon be time for  the Al Saoud family to release their country, perhaps fleeing to another Islamic nation.   Jordan who was dispossessed of Mecque and Médine before creation of the Saudi kingdom, could, if this scenario appeared imminent, become a state Palestinian with the whole share, of land and Palestinian people.

But if during the Second War, Eden and Cadoga could find in Moscow an ally in the person of Lavrenti Beria, the frightening Master of the Russian secret service, it is not the same with Prince Turki Al-Fayçal, the chief of the Saudi secret service?  From the beginning, many believe the Saudis have played the double game. Apart from people like Philby, Burgess, Maclean and Aldrich Aimes, the pro-Soviet traitors  were not so numerous. In the case of Saudi Arabia,  after visits to Ryhad, various diplomats return very often with remarks more than dithyrambic on Saoud.

There are a number of vocal politicians and media faces who were opposed to an American intervention in Iraq, voices and faces who thought the U.S. would have better off to intervene in Saudi Arabia. History has shown how indirect action may often be more useful.. For instance, during World War II, when the Allies finally began their attacks against the Axis, Berlin was not the initial target. It was necessary first to start with attacks in North Africa and the Mediterranean. In Eastern Europe, the Allies chose to occupy German forces with a defense of their positions in the Balkans.  This Churchill called the "soft Belly of the Axis".   Against Japan, a similar approach was taken by the U.S. when they launched attacks against Japanese strongholds in the Pacific Islands before finally moving to attacking the island nation itself.  In the same way, Iraq is the "soft belly" in the Middle East, with perhaps the U.S. looking at an entry point into the region rather than directly attacking the real target.  Clearly a democratic Iraq will put tremendous pressure on Syria, Iran, and especially Saudi Arabia.

America and Churchill faced the same criticisms, as we have illustrated in this analysis. However, we must not forget that Churchill was also one of the first to perceive the Soviet enemy on the horizon, even if that nation was an important ally against the Axis. One can hope that President Bush is aware of the Saudi problem, and that his administration's strategy will suffice.

George W. Bush said that the history of his Presidency would be understood within 50 years, but "that neither you nor me we will be there to read it".  Possible... But perhaps not. Churchill died in 1965 while still being accused of having used untried and risky stratagems - strategies that produced the eventual allied victory.  Cited were the cases of Fortitude, Bodyguard, the episodes of Coventry, Ultra and Neptune, where British intelligence and Churchill agreed to hide the fact that the British had broken the German codes by allowing cities to be bombed with little if any warning.   It would not be until 1974 that the New York Times, on the anniversary of D-Day would pay homage to his genius:

"But what a Man! The familiar sound of his voice... it reminds us that at rare times in the history, a man of courage, vision and eloquence, can make all the difference, not only for Great Britain but for the world...where and when Great Britain, or any among our countries, will we find such an inspiration? " 3

- New York Times, February 30, 1974  4
It is quite probable that America found it in the person of George W. Bush on and after September, 11, 2001.
*  The breaking of the Japanese Purple code was a huge triumph in intelligence circles.  Purple was essentially a code generated by a machine, much like the enigma machine used by the Germans. Yet, just like Churchill's decision to allow the bombing of some cities in England without scrambling fighters to intercept in order to safeguard the secret, it became clear that U.S. leaders had to be extremely careful in reacting to messages contained in the broken Japanese cipher.  Roosevelt and Truman both made similar decisions as Churchill and his staff -- opting to allow relatively minor operations by Japan to go ahead without Allied reaction.

However, despite the conspiracy therorist's beliefs, there is no evidence that the U.S. or Britain (the best code breakers in their era) had broken the code in time to warn Pearl Harbor's commanders.  Given communications capabilities of that era, it could take up to 48 hours to make shortwave contact, and using the undersea cable was most likely impossible as well (both for security and  availability) as the U.S. did not have the  wartime priority for communcations in effect.   In any case, the actual warning was the culmination of communications rather than a "you are going to be attacked at 6:00 am, Sunday", much like the modern "chatter" analysis we have heard existed prior to 9/11.

We should also note that the product of Purple decodes were classified MAGIC by U.S. policy makers, and the number of people who had MAGIC clearances could probably have been counted on perhaps your hands and feet.   (it was well above top secret -- today this kind of classification would be Special Compartmented Information codeword material).  The rationale for MAGIC traffic being so highly classified should be obvious -- the U.S. did not want the Japanese to know their most recent code had been broken.  And they had reasons to worry -- a previous code breakign activity was the subject of a book written by the code breakers leader! 

A rare exception to the  use of MAGIC traffiic for tactical purposes was the intercept and downing of Admiral Yamamoto's transport during the War in the Pacific.

 - MILNET



  1. Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision, Roberta Wohlstetter, Stanford University Press, June 1, 1962, ISBN: 0804705984
  2. Roosevelt and Hopkins, Robert E. Sherwood, Enigma Books, December 1, 2001, ISBN: 1929631049
  3. The Great Terror, Jeffery Goldberg, The New Yorker, 3/25/2002
  4. The New York Times, February 30, 1974 (online archives not available for articles published before 1/1/1996)
  5. The Fourth World War, Doug Sanders, GlobeAndMail, 9/6/2003
  6. Ex-CIA Director:  'U.S. Faces World War IV', Charles Feldman and Stan Wilson, CNN online, 4/3/2003
  7. The Making of MAGIC, The History Department of the University of San Diego, not dated
  8. A Convention in Wartime,  Opinion Journal, The Wall Street Journal Online, 9/4/2004

Copyright ©, 2004, Mohamad Ibn Guadi and MILNET