"STRANGE COINCIDENCES"

What you watch for in intelligence is "strange coincidences." You want to watch coincidences, for example: There was supposed to be a crisis in a country and somebody scheduled a crisis in the organization simultaneously and key executives were gone during the critical period.

The Japanese lost the whole Pacific war because they were too stupid. The US command was slightly less stupid than the Japanese command. Murder was just out in an intelligence book that has recently been published. After World War I, at the disarmament conference with Japan in the twenties with Stimson, the US cracked the Japanese code. And Stimson refused all decoded messages as part of his negotiation because, he said, "Gentleman don't read each other's mail." And so they, of course, set up a war with Japan.

The Japanese were sending their traffic in code and the one thing you do not do is transmit in code—don't ever transmit information broadly and don't transmit it in code. Because I know of no code that has not been broken.

The US had actually analyzed the Japanese code machine. They had basically a machine in World War II and the Japanese were using it exclusively on all cipher Germans device, which was why the United States used one of these. It was of its war machine fighting the Germans—that's a good reason. The US detected this code.

The Japanese lost the famous Battle of Midway by failing to synthesize. They sent a message referring to Midway, their target, as "AF." They called it AF all the time. The whole Japanese fleet was descending on it and the US didn't know which base "AF" was. There were about three or four places they could be attacking.

So they had the Commanding Officer of Midway send a coded message, in clear, to Honolulu, saying he was perilously short of water. The Japanese coded messages immediately afterwards said that there was a situation on AF that it was perilously short of water. So the United States fleet met the Japanese and completely destroyed their fleet and that was the end of the war for the Japanese.

Yamamoto, the famous admiral who engineered the attack on Pearl Harbor, who was the only top quality naval officer they had, forecast his visit to the bases that he was going to inspect. He was being flown to these three bases and three Japanese used their machine and they informed him by radio. This was picked up, instantly deciphered and Yamamoto and his staff's two transport planes rose up into the sky and thirty miles from the airport were suddenly met by one squadron of US planes which took away their escort and another squadron which hit them. Yamamoto kicked the bucket.

The Japanese just considered these freak coincidences and they never discovered, throughout the entire war, that everything they said on the air was instantly decoded.

So, you must depend on codes and don't depend on lines. As far as dissemination of information is concerned, you are not justified in failing to inform people of actions which they don't undertake, but the rule is: Where the guy does not need the information, don't tell him.