Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [75]
Immediately after the attack, Edgar began trying to lay the blame on others – anyone other than the FBI. In a report to the President, five days later, he claimed that the Army in Hawaii had previously been sent warning of the ‘entire plan’ and timing of the Japanese attack by intelligence colleagues in Washington. There is no evidence that the military received any such warning, and the rest of Edgar’s outburst was packed with inaccuracies. Fortunately for him, the memorandum remained hidden in the Roosevelt papers until after his death.
In the same report, Edgar told how – some thirty-six hours before the attack – the FBI had intercepted a telephone call between Mrs Mori, a dentist’s wife on Hawaii, and a caller in Japan. Their conversation, which lasted forty minutes at a cost of $200, had included discussion about weather, searchlights, and what type of flowers were presently in bloom. Agent in Charge Shivers, said Edgar, had decided the conversation was suspect the moment he saw the transcript on Saturday afternoon. He at once informed the Navy and the Army, but the military response had been woefully inadequate.
It is true that General Short, the Commanding General in Hawaii, failed to give the Mori call the attention it deserved. But new research raises a question as to how well the FBI itself performed after intercepting the mysterious conversation. A check of the record and with surviving witnesses reveals a discrepancy in dating. Edgar told the White House the intercept was made on the afternoon of December 5, translated and transcribed, and passed to the Navy and the military on the evening of Saturday, December 6, the eve of the attack. Agent in Charge Robert Shivers also said the call came in on the fifth.
The official transcript, however, dates the call as having taken place on Wednesday, December 3. Two of four surviving FBI staffers interviewed in 1990 were sure the intercept was made as early as Wednesday. A third thought Thursday, and only one agreed with Edgar and Shivers, that the call came in as late as Friday. One of the witnesses, former agent George Allen, was the ‘sound man’ who installed the tap that picked up the Mori call. He said in 1990 he was certain the call came in on Wednesday evening, and that the transcript went to Washington the next morning. ‘I’m as clear as a bell on that,’ he recalled. ‘We worked on it Wednesday night, and finished it up Thursday morning.’
Did the Mori call, then, come in earlier than the official inquiries were told? Though its meaning remains obscure to this day, scholars agree the call was a coded conversation with a Japanese spy. If the call was known to FBI headquarters four days before the attack, was it passed as promptly as it could have been to the military authorities? Given more time, intelligence officers might have found a way to follow through – perhaps with a fruitful interrogation of Mrs Mori.
Another clue suggests that, before the Mori call, the FBI possessed some specific intelligence – something indicating where and when the Japanese onslaught would occur – that was not acted upon. The head of the Honolulu Police Espionage Bureau, John Burns, never forgot a visit he received from Shivers a week before the raid. Evidently upset, the FBI man told Burns to close his office door, then confided, ‘I’m not telling my men this but I’m telling you … We’re going to be attacked before the week is out.’ He was so upset, Burns recalled, that there were tears in his eyes. Burns got the impression Shivers’ information had come from headquarters in Washington. Shivers had served with the FBI since 1920, was close to Edgar and in direct touch with him at the time.
A month after Pearl Harbor, when the Roberts Commission of inquiry was holding hearings in Hawaii, Shivers made more strange comments: ‘You will be one of the ones to be called before the investigation,’ he told Burns. ‘What are you going to tell them?’ Burns said he would tell the truth.