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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DavesM who wrote (11135)	11/22/2001 10:42:47 AM
From: Hawkmoon	Respond to of 281500

Dave, We know the US had broken the Japanese diplomatic codes, and there have been reports that we had a certain amount of success with the Naval codes, although only a limited quantity have been officially declassified by the NSA. And the Japanese Naval cipher was changed on Dec 4th, 1941, with an extra rotor and became JN-25 (the code we later went on to break and led to our knowing about the pending attack upon Midway). But the signs of Japanese preparations were more evident in previous months and I've heard explanations from historians claiming that the US may have received such warnings, but because of the complexity of the decoding process, it was not available in time to be reported to Roosevelt. So, lacking evidence to the contrary, I can "accept" that (although I doubt it) But the British CLEARLY had been able to decipher Japanese codes in near real-time, just as they had been doing with with Enigma (using their "bomba" configuration of 6 enigma copies in a quasi brute force attack, they were obtaining the daily "keys" within 2 hours). Here's a fascinating link on the Polish contribution to breaking Enigma: ieee.org Now the crux of this is that the Japanese Purple machines were based upon the German Enigma machines. And both the Germans and Japanese believe they were impervious to code breaking given the complexity of their keying and encrypting mechanisms. So what we're left with Dave, is a VERY LOGICAL, and damn near compelling, theory that Churchill knew of the attack (given the speed of British decryption), and that either he didn't tell Roosevelt, or the more controversial conclusion that supports the prevailing conspiracy theory about Roosevelt actually knowing about Peal Harbor (because Churchill told him so). Here's a link that claims that the Nazis had actually broken the scrambing encryption used by the US and Britain when their leaders spoke: home.att.net However, I put very little credence in the above theory since I believe all conversations between England and the US were via undersea cable, and I don't see where the Nazis could have directly tapped into that cable (unless through Ireland) to obtain access to such message traffic between Churchill and Roosevelt. And for that reason, it's difficult to implicate Roosevelt with regard to any foreknowlege of the impending attack. But WE KNOW from the historical record that Churchill was a voracious consumer of signals intelligence and there was little chance that such message traffic about the plans to attack Pearl Harbor would have escaped his attention. But there is ample evidence that Roosevelt perceived that the US would eventually become involved in the war against Hitler, as displayed by increasing military spending in 1940 up to December 7th. The handwriting was on the wall, just as it has been with regard to Islamic extremism and western values have been on a collision course for years now. Hawk Hawk