Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [76]
As it turned out, the Commission did not question Burns. It did call Shivers, but nothing in his testimony reflected his prophetic talk with Burns. Incredibly, although he was responsible for domestic security, Edgar himself was never questioned about Pearl Harbor by any official inquiry. The Army Board asked him to appear in August 1944, but he declined, on the grounds that ‘absence from the city … will make it impossible.’
The record shows that Edgar was indeed away, taking a four-week vacation with Clyde. He got away with sending in an affidavit instead, and never did submit to questioning about Pearl Harbor by any of the official inquiries.
The findings of the most thorough probe, conducted for the Secretary of War by Henry Clausen, remained unpublished until 1992, when Clausen published his book Final Judgment. Its litany of interservice follies includes an explanation of how and why, just five days before Pearl Harbor, Naval Intelligence abruptly stopped monitoring the phones of the Japanese Consul in Honolulu. The decision, Clausen disclosed, was the result of a ‘childish dispute’ between FBI Agent Robert Shivers and Captain Irving Mayfield of Naval Intelligence. Shivers had exacerbated a liaison problem, testimony revealed, by playing the bureaucrat and sending a formal complaint to telephone company officials. ‘I could not help asking myself,’ Clausen recalled, ‘what might have happened if Mayfield and Shivers had simply hung in there, discussed the matter calmly and kept the Navy’s phone taps in place.’ If the bugging had been continued, Clausen believed, it might have yielded vital last-minute clues to Japanese intentions.
For his part, Edgar kept up his recriminations against others, not least by suggesting that he had proposed the bugging of Tokyo’s diplomats in Hawaii and had been ignored. The Japanese consul had sent most of his reports over commercial circuits operated by RCA and Mackay Radio. Unlike the overseas telephone link, which was bugged with the authority of the Attorney General, neither the FBI nor the military had had authority to tap those circuits. By demanding the right to do so, Edgar had collided with an old adversary, Federal Communications Chairman James Fly.
The record shows that Edgar had wanted the FCC to monitor all telephone and cable traffic between the United States and Japan – along with Germany, Italy, France and the Soviet Union – and to supply the FBI with the results. Fly and his officials repeatedly refused, explaining that such eavesdropping was against the law. The only way he could cooperate, said Fly, would be if the law was changed, or in response to a direct order from the President.
According to The FBI Story, the history of the Bureau as authorized by Edgar, Fly was still resisting when Pearl Harbor was attacked. The implication was that, had it not been for Fly’s obstinacy, the disaster could have been averted. Fly offered a very different account.
‘The Radio Intelligence Division of FCC,’ he said, ‘did monitor foreign and potential enemy traffic, particularly the enciphered messages on the Tokyo/Berlin circuit … We did not have cryptologists. The RID picked up the pre-Pearl Harbor traffic and funneled it to the FBI, Army and Navy intelligence and the State Department. Finally Hoover requested that we discontinue this service for the stated reason of the FBI’s inability to break the code. But the FCC at my instructions continued to send the traffic to the FBI. In this line of monitoring, the RID picked up the crucial coded “winds” messages. These messages were on the desks of the Federal Bureau of Investigation on Sunday, December 7, when Hoover was in New York for the weekend. And the fleet went down.’
The ‘winds’ messages were the basis of a Japanese contingency plan, sent to diplomatic missions on November 19, advising them that in the event of normal communications being severed, the order to burn their codes would be transmitted