I found this reader review interesting:
A Navy Cryptologic Veteran's Review of Day of Deceit
Reviewer: Philip H. Jacobsen from San Diego November 25, 1999
The author made a thorough search of many repositories and contacted numerous persons to justify his long held belief that President Roosevelt actively fomented war with Japan as a pretext to aid Britain in its fight with Hitler. The book further alleges that through conspiracies continuing today FDR not only kept the Hawaiian commanders from obtaining information on the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor but ordered or had ordered actions that prevented those commanders from discovering the attacking force and adequately defending Pearl Harbor. In the book, FDR's co-conspirators include General Marshall, Admirals Stark, Ingersoll, Captain Turner and Commander McCollum and by implication Admiral Noyes, Captain Redman, Commander Rochefort and many others even though these persons are long dead and cannot defend themselves. The book misinterprets several new documents including then Lt. Cmdr McCollum's response to the enactment of the Tripartite Pact and two well established documents of the Pearl Harbor arena. For the first time, it claims one well known message was sent part in code with the location Hitokappu Wan (the sailing port of the Pearl Harbor attack force) being sent in the clear within the message even though its decrypt clearly shows JN-25B code was used and such an anomoly in the super encipherment JN-25B system is absurd and unprecidented. No authority for such claim is provided. Next, the book implies the famous message "Climb Mt. Niitaka 1208" was sent in the clear from one Japanese historian's report while Yamamoto's biographer says it was encoded in a five numeral code and the decrypt in the National Archives clearly has the code designation JN-25B on the face of the document. The book misleads the uninitiated reader by lumping the relatively simple JN-25A code and cipher system that took 14 months to read with the much more complicated JN-25B system together as "Code Book D." Thus, the final successes of JN-25A are imputed to JN-25B even though the first significant reported decrypt of the latter much more complicated code and cipher system was in early 1942. The book omits the fact that the November and December 1941 raw intercepted messages from Corregidor, Guam and Hawaii on which so much is relied were actually enroute to Washington DC by ship and rail on 7 December 1941 and thus were not decrypted until 1945-46 and the most promising of those decrypts were translated in 1946-47 and are available in the National Archives today. Also not discussed is the fact that Station Hypo in Hawaii under Rochefort was only permitted to work on the unproductive Admiral's code system before Pearl Harbor and was not given the go ahead to work on JN-25B until a week or so after the attack. It is claimed that unkown censors are holding back vital decrypts in the National Archives or elsewhere because certain Station Message Serial (SMS) numbers and original versions of messages appearing on Japanese naval broadcasts are missing. However, the so called "missing" messages can be attributed to the fact that less than 60 percent of Japanese naval messages were intercepted and many were originally sent by land-line, cable or visual means when tied up at docks or anchored in a Japanese harbor. To the book's credit it does not repeat the old revisionist conspiracy theory that the Winds Execute message was received and covered up. However, it does regurgitate the old story of Seaman Robert D. Ogg's report of commercial operators hearing transmissions from the North Pacific. However, when deposed by Commander Newman, Ogg was not sure whether such transmissions were Japanese or Russian. Similar hearsay reports by dead Dutch cryptographers of signals in the North Pacific are repeated although now the book says they came from the Kuriles. Nevertheless, this book will sell well among Roosevelt haters, many Admiral Kimmel and General Short supporters as well as dedicated revisionist conspiracy theorists.
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