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DEC 9: ROBERT B. STINNETT  who is the author of Day of Deceit - a book on Pearl Harbor, served in the United States Navy under Lieutenant George Bush from 1942 to 1946, where he earned ten battle stars and a Presidential Unit Citation. He worked as a photographer and a journalist for the Oakland Tribune until 1986, after which he resigned as a full-time employee to devote himself to Day Of Deceit. 

It has now become the most successful of Pearl Harbor revisionist books.

Stinnett is a consultant on the Pacific War for the BBC and Asahi and NHK Television in Japan. He divides his time between Oakland and Hawaii.

His view is that then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt, along with many other key people, conspired to deprive the US military commanders in Oahu (Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, commanding the Pacific Fleet, together with Lieut. General Walter C. Short, commanding the Army ground and air forces in the Hawaiian Islands) of highly specific warnings regarding the Japanese Kido Butai or First Air Fleet and its approach to Hawaii. Specifically, he contends that the Japanese transmitted a number of messages which were intercepted and decrypted by various agencies, who on presidential orders buried the information. He identifies at least eight senior naval officers (most of whom went on to distinguish themselves in World War II) as having betrayed their nation and service in this fashion.

Yet even having found what he calls the "terrible truth," Stinnett is still inclined to forgive. "I sympathize with the agonizing dilemma faced by President Roosevelt," he writes. "He was forced to find circuitous means to persuade an isolationist America to join in a fight for freedom…. It is easier to take a critical view of this policy a half century removed than to understand fully what went on in Roosevelt's mind in the year prior to Pearl Harbor."

He says Pearl Harbor was not an accident, a mere failure of American intelligence, or a brilliant Japanese military coup. It was the result of a carefully orchestrated, design, initiated at the highest levels of our government. He cites a key memorandum to highlight eight steps that were taken to make sure we would enter the war by this means, he writes. Pearl Harbor was the only way, leading officials felt, to galvanize the reluctant American public into action.

Americans were told of U.S. cryptographers' success in cracking pre-Pearl Harbor Japanese diplomatic codes, but not a word has been officially uttered about their success in cracking Japanese military codes, Stinnett observes.

During the 60 years, the truthful answers were secreted in bomb-proof vaults, withheld from two congressional Pearl Harbor investigations and from the American people. As recently as 1995, the Joint Congressional Investigation conducted by Sen. Strom Thurmond and Rep. Floyd Spence, was denied access to a naval storage vault in Crane, Indiana, containing documents that could settle the questions.

"In the mid-1980s I learned that none of the hundreds of thousands of Japanese military messages obtained by the U.S. monitor stations prior to Pearl Harbor were introduced or discussed during the congressional investigation of 1945-46. Determined to penetrate the secrets of Pearl Harbor, I filed Freedom of Information (FOIA) requests with the US Navy. Navy officials in Washington released a few pre-Pearl Harbor documents to me in 1985. Not satisfied by the minuscule release, I continued filing FOIAs.

Finally in 1993, the U.S. Naval Security Group Command, the custodian of the Crane Files, agreed to transfer the records to National Archives in Washington, D.C. In the winter of 1993-94 the files were transported by truck convoy to a new government facility built on the College Park campus of the University of Maryland inside the Washington Beltway, named Archives II. Mr. Clarence Lyons, then head of the Military Reference Branch, released the first batch of Crane Files to me in the Steny Hoyer Research Center at Archives II in January 1995.

Apparently, the pre-Pearl Harbor records had not been seen or reviewed since 1941. Though refiled in pH-safe archival boxes by Lyons' staff, some of the Crane documents were covered with dust, tightly bunched together in the boxes and tied with unusual waxed twine. Lyons confirmed the records were received from the U.S. Navy in that condition.

It took me a year to evaluate the records. The information revealed in the files was astonishing. It disclosed a Pearl Harbor story hidden from the public. I believed the story should be told to the American people. The editors of Simon & Schuster/The Free Press published Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1999."

This great question of Pearl Harbor--what  did we know and when did we know it?--has been argued for years, he writes.

"At first, a panel created by FDR concluded that we had no advance warning and should blame only the local commanders for lack of preparedness. More recently, historians such as John Toland and Edward Beach have concluded that some intelligence was intercepted. Finally, just months ago, the Senate voted to exonerate Hawaii commanders Admiral Kimmel and Lieutenant General Short, after the Pentagon officially declared that blame should be "broadly shared." But no investigator has ever been able to prove that foreknowledge of the attack existed at the highest levels."

Until now. Whereas previous investigators have claimed that the government did not crack Japan's military codes before December 7, 1941, Stinnett offers cable after cable of decryptions. He proves that a Japanese spy on the island transmitted information--including a map of bombing targets--beginning on August 21, and that government intelligence knew all about it. He reveals that Admiral Kimmel was prevented from conducting a routine training exercise at the eleventh hour that would have uncovered the location of the oncoming Japanese fleet. And contrary to previous claims, he shows that the Japanese fleet did not maintain radio silence as it approached Hawaii. Its many coded cables were intercepted and decoded by American cryptographers in Stations on Hawaii and in Seattle.

The evidence is overwhelming. At the highest levels---on FDR's desk--America had ample warning of the pending attack. At those same levels, it was understood that the isolationist American public would not support a declaration of war unless we were attacked first. The result was a plan to anger Japan, to keep the loyal officers responsible for Pearl Harbor in the dark, and thus to drag America into the greatest war of her existence.

Mr. Stinnett offers those who are swayed by the negative reviewers the following:

"Two questions about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor have ignited a controversy that has burned for 60 years: Did U.S. naval cryptographers crack the Japanese naval codes before the attack? Did Japanese warships and their commanding admirals break radio silence at sea before the attack?

If the answer to both is "no," then Pearl Harbor was indeed a surprise attack described by President Franklin D. Roosevelt as a "Day of Infamy." The integrity of the U.S. government regarding Pearl Harbor remains solid.

But if the answer is "yes," then hundreds of books, articles, movies, and TV documentaries based on the "no" answer-and the integrity of the federal government-go down the drain. If the Japanese naval codes were intercepted, decoded, and translated into English by U.S. naval cryptographers prior to Pearl Harbor, then the Japanese naval attacks on American Pacific military bases were known in advance among the highest levels of the American government."


Day of Deceit is the definitive final chapter on America's greatest secret and its worst military disaster.

Day of Deceit was well received by media book reviews and the on-line booksellers, Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.com, earning a 70 percent public approval rating. Day of Deceit continues among the top ten bestsellers in the non-fiction Pearl Harbor book category, according to Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.com.

Immediately after Day of Deceit appeared in bookstores in 1999, NSA began withdrawing pre-Pearl Harbor documents from the Crane Files housed in Archives II. This means the government decided to continue 60 years of Pearl Harbor censorship. As of January 2002, over two dozen NSA withdrawal notices have triggered the removal of Pearl Harbor documents from public inspection.

The number of pages in the withdrawn documents appears to be in the hundreds. Among the records withdrawn are those of Admiral Harold R. Stark, the 1941 Chief of Naval Operations, as well as crypto records authored by Commander Joseph J. Rochefort, the chief cryptographer for the Pacific Fleet at the time of Pearl Harbor. Under the Crane File transfer agreement with National Archives, NSA has the legal right to withdraw any document based on national defense concerns.

About 1,000 intercepted Japanese naval radio messages formed the basis of each Daily Summary written by Rochefort and his staff. The Japanese communication intelligence data contained in the messages was summarized and delivered daily to Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Fleet. Rochefort's summary of November 25, 1941 (Hawaii time). It revealed the Commander Carriers of the Imperial Japanese Navy were not observing radio silence but were in "extensive communications" with other Japanese naval forces whose admirals directly commanded the forces involved in the Pearl Harbor attack. Because of the International Dateline, the "extensive communications" mentioned in the summary took place on November 26, 1941, Japan time, the exact day the Japanese carrier force began its journey to Hawaii.

In its entirety the Rochefort summary reads: "FOURTH FLEET-CinC. Fourth Fleet is still holding extensive communications with the commander Submarine Fleet, the forces at Jaluit and Commander Carriers. His other communications are with the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Base Forces."

The meaning of the summary is unequivocal: The commanders of the powerful Japanese invasion, submarine, and carrier forces did not observe radio silence as they maneuvered toward U.S. bases in Hawaii, Wake, and Guam Islands in the Central Pacific. Instead they used radio transmitters aboard their flagships and coordinated strategy and tactics with each other.

The summary corroborates earlier findings by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian John Toland. In the late 1970s, Toland interviewed personnel and obtained U.S. naval documents from San Francisco's Twelfth Naval District that disclosed that the "extensive communications" were intercepted by the radio direction finders of the U.S. Navy's West Coast Communications Intelligence Network. Doubleday published Toland's account in 1982 as Infamy: Pearl Harbor and its Aftermath.