• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Four and a half thousand miles away, at the FBI office in Honolulu, a young radio technician named Duane Eskridge was testing equipment. Eskridge, the Bureau’s first such expert, had been hired four months earlier to set up a new Bureau communications system. His first weeks on the job, in Washington, had been spent attending to the headquarters radio – call sign WFBI – which then consisted of only FBI1, Edgar’s limousine, and one other car. Eskridge had to be on duty early in the morning to respond when Edgar announced ‘FBI1 in service’ on his way to work. There were no other messages, so Eskridge simply sat around all day waiting for Edgar to call in again on his way home at night. On December 7, in Hawaii, such foolishness was abruptly forgotten.

‘I was making test transmissions when the Jap planes came in,’ Eskridge recalled. ‘I went up on the roof to see what was going on, and I could see them flying overhead. They were real low, you could see the pilots with their helmets on. In fact I went and got a .45 automatic from the vault and started shooting at them. It didn’t do any good, of course, but that was my reaction.’

Eskridge remembered he was a radio operator, not a sharpshooter, and hurried back to his transmitter to begin sending what he believes may have been the first news of the attack. ‘I sent the news in Morse code, in clear text, to San Diego,’ said Eskridge. ‘The operator there thought I was kidding, and I had to repeat it. Then he immediately called his Agent in Charge, who called the weekend duty supervisor in Washington. I have always assumed he called Hoover, and that Hoover called the White House. No one could have got through much faster.’

In fact the first news of the catastrophe reached the President within half an hour, through the Navy communications network. For all Eskridge’s efforts, it was nearly an hour before headquarters staff patched a call through to Edgar, from the Agent in Charge in Honolulu, Robert Shivers. Then Edgar moved quickly. Long before the final toll was in – 2,400 dead, 1,300 wounded, eleven ships sunk and 118 planes destroyed – he was on his way by air to Washington.

Back at headquarters, Edgar issued a torrent of orders. Guards were placed on Japanese diplomatic missions, ports and airports closed to Japanese travelers, mail and telephone links severed. Warrants were issued for the arrest of hundreds of suspect Japanese.2 Edgar reported to the White House that night that all these measures, planned in advance on a contingency basis, had been efficiently carried out.

For a week or so after America’s declaration of war, Edgar acted as government censor. The White House asked him to intervene on December 12, when it learned that columnist Drew Pearson was about to publish details of the scale of the naval disaster. ‘I got a phone call from J. Edgar Hoover during dinner,’ Pearson recalled, ‘in effect threatening to put me in jail unless we killed the story giving the real story on Pearl Harbor. I told Edgar that he was nuts, that there was no law by which he could put me in jail, and that he was not the man to interpret the law. He admitted all this, said that Steve Early at the White House had called him up and asked him to throw the fear of God into me.’

That story was killed, and Pearson soon had cause to ponder the extent of Edgar’s penetration of the media. On the orders of the Chief of Staff, two generals visited NBC to ask that both Pearson and Walter Winchell be taken off the air. The odd thing, Pearson recalled, was that Edgar later revealed in a phone conversation that he had a ‘transcript of what happened at the meeting.’ This could mean only that the NBC office had been bugged.

What the ‘real’ Pearl Harbor story was, of course, remains the subject of fierce debate. Only two things are certain. American intelligence failed because of an inability to extract what really mattered from a mountain of incoming data and draw the correct conclusion. Then, after the disaster, there was a rush to cover up and to pass the