East Wind, Rain: Treason at Pearl Harbor

by Kevin Alfred Strom

IF YOU WANT to understand why the American government supports Communists in Haiti and South Africa — if you want to understand why neither Democrats nor Republicans will protect our borders from alien invasion — and if you want to understand why we are rapidly losing our freedoms that our fathers and their fathers fought to defend — then you must gain an understanding of the events that took place over a few days’ span over a half century ago.

The truth about this incident of treason against the American people and betrayal of our fighting men is so shocking — and so revealing — that once heard, it will forever alter your view of our world and the forces that shape it. After hearing this broadcast, you will never be able to trust the controlled media again; and you will see with crystal clarity the hand of America’s enemies as they guide our government from disaster to disaster.

In the early morning of December 4th, 1941, at a US Navy shortwave monitoring station in Cheltenham, Maryland, a half-hour drive southeast of Washington, DC, senior radio operator Ralph Briggs was just coming on duty. Briggs was 27 years old, had been with the Navy since the age of 20, and had worked with Naval Intelligence monitoring foreign shortwave broadcasts for four years. He had been an amateur radio operator, callsign W9NCM, since he was a teenager.

It seemed like an ordinary morning, as he tuned his receiver to the station and began transcribing what he heard. At 8 a.m. he received the message he had been waiting for. It seemed to be nothing more than a regional weather forecast, the kind that the stations he monitored transmitted every day during their news broadcasts. But Briggs, alone among the radio operators at Cheltenham, knew what the three words meant. They meant that the world was going to change in unpredictable but cataclysmic ways. They meant that many of his friends and countrymen would soon be dead. They meant that America would never be the same again. The three words were casually spoken during the regular news and weather feature from Radio Tokyo, Japan. The words were “East Wind, Rain.” Briggs immediately teletyped the message to Washington.

“East Wind, Rain” was one of three possible “execute” messages which Japanese diplomats around the world had been alerted to begin listening for on November 19th. They were told to monitor the regular news and weather broadcasts from Tokyo, just as they always did, but to pay especially careful attention to the phraseology employed to describe the weather.

If they heard the words “North Wind, Cloudy,” it meant war with the Soviet Union.

If they heard the words “West Wind, Clear,” it meant war with the British Empire.

And if they heard the words “East Wind, Rain,” it meant war with the United States.

Just a few miles away from Cheltenham, in Washington, DC, at the Japanese embassy, Chief Petty Officer Kenici Ogemoto also was listening to the weather report. When he heard those fateful words, he immediately rushed into the office of the naval attache, Captain Yuzuru Sanematsu, and shouted “the winds blew.” Sanematsu ran with Ogemoto back into the radio room just in time to hear the Radio Tokyo announcer repeat the weather forecast, “Higashi no kaze ame” — “East Wind, Rain.” Instantly workers at the embassy began destroying their cryptographic equipment and codebooks, while others took the secret documents from their files, piled them in huge heaps in the garden, and burned them. The Japanese diplomats knew that their embassies and consulates in the United States and its territories would soon be seized; and they themselves would soon be interned as enemy aliens pending their exchange for American diplomats in Japan. All their code-making and code-breaking hardware and software, and all their secret papers, had to be destroyed immediately.

The regime governing the United States at that time was that of Franklin Roosevelt. It was the first presidential administration in the United States of which it can definitively be said that it was fully under alien control. Never before had so many subversive aliens and traitors, many of them out-and-out Communists, been ensconced in powerful positions; never before had the federal government increased its power over the states and the people to such an extent; never before — but often since.

To give you an idea of the true atmosphere of those times, which is assiduously hidden from you by establishment historians and was covered up by the controlled media of the time, let me relate a little incident recounted in John T. Flynn’s book, The Roosevelt Myth.

In 1939 a Communist youth group calling itself the “American Youth Congress” was being investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee, headed by Congressman Martin Dies. A group of Communists from the “Congress,” including their leader Joseph P. Lash, Joe Cadden, and Abbot Simon, staged a series of protests against the investigation, at one point marching into the Committee room and attempting to disrupt the proceedings. They jumped over tables, shouted at the Congressmen, tossed Communist pamphlets about, and at one point Joseph Lash even began singing a foul and insulting song directed at Dies. Present at the time, and leading the assembled Communists in their protests, was none other than the wife of the President of the United States, Eleanor Roosevelt. Not only that, but the Communists had been chauffeured to their demonstration in official White House cars, and one of them, Lash, was living full-time at the White House, while Cadden and Simon were often boarders there.

A member of Congress, who had been an ardent Roosevelt supporter, visited the White House one morning. While there, he was amazed to see Abbot Simon, a board member of a well-known Communist front organization, emerge from one of the bedrooms. He asked the White House usher if he had really seen what he thought he had seen. The usher assured him that he had indeed, and that Simon had been occupying the bedroom for two weeks, sleeping each night in a bed formerly used by Abraham Lincoln.

In such an atmosphere it is not surprising that the Roosevelt government was anxious to enter the war on the side of the Soviets. Nor is it surprising that Jewish interests, which also figured large in the Roosevelt regime (and in all administrations since), were also zealous in their efforts to involve the United States in the war against Germany, which by that time had removed organized Jewish interests from their former positions of power in that country. Also, it should be noted that in the 1930s and 1940s, the Jewish and Communist power structures were largely congruent, there being large numbers of individuals belonging to both groups simultaneously. Two overlapping interest groups, both very influential in the White House, were pushing for war.

But the American people were solidly against war — so much so that when campaigning for his third term in November, 1940, while World War II raged in Europe and America was officially neutral, Roosevelt told the American people in a speech in Boston carried by radio and by wire services around the nation:

“I say to you fathers and mothers and I will say it to you again and again and again. Your boys will not be sent into foreign wars.”

As we have already mentioned on a previous American Dissident Voices broadcast, Roosevelt’s Secretary of War, Henry L. Stimson, entered in his diary two weeks before the attack on Pearl Harbor the fact that FDR had stated to his cabinet that his plan was to maneuver Japan into war without America firing the first shot. And that is exactly what he did. Among many other things, he instituted a trade embargo against Japan, starving that resource-poor nation of vital industrial materials.

The Roosevelt government knew the meaning of the “East Wind, Rain” message. They knew it because American and British intelligence were able to read the Japanese diplomatic code, and they had intercepted and read the message from the Japanese foreign ministry of November 19th, 1941, which instructed Japanese embassies and consulates to be listening for the “winds” execute messages on their shortwave receivers, and which explained the meaning of the messages in no uncertain terms.

The powerful transmitters of Radio Tokyo broadcast the “winds” execute message several times that day, and it was heard and understood not only by Naval Intelligence in Cheltenham, Maryland, but also by other US monitoring stations around the nation; by the monitoring station of the Australian Special Intelligence Organisation located near Melbourne, Australia; by the British Intelligence intercept station on Stonecutter’s Island, Hong Kong; and of course by Japanese diplomats around the world.

After Ralph Briggs had teletyped the “winds” message to Washington, it was quickly transmitted to Army Signals Intelligence and to the White House. The teletype equipment then in use at Cheltenham produced an original and a copy at the sending end, and two copies at the Washington end. Briggs also typed out another original and two carbon copies on a regular typewriter. These were all carefully filed.

Briggs was scheduled for weekend leave in Ohio the following Sunday, December 7, 1941. It was there that he received the initial news of the Japanese surprise attack on the US Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. He, and the rest of the staff at Cheltenham, knew that war was imminent, but felt that America was forewarned and well prepared. He felt certain that the Japanese had fallen into a well-laid trap. In fact, the first and heavily censored news reports of the attack claimed that the Japanese had sunk only one “old battleship” and one destroyer, and that the Japanese had suffered heavy casualties. It was not too long before the truth came out, however, and Briggs and everyone else came to know what the Japanese commanders knew as they radioed back “Tora! Tora! Tora!,” meaning “Tiger! Tiger! Tiger!,” their signal indicating that the attack was successful and had been a complete surprise.

Ralph Briggs’ immediate superior was Chief Petty Officer Radioman Daryl Wigle. In a recent interview, Briggs says:

“When I came off of that weekend I had a chance to talk with Wigle, and I said ‘What happened?’ And he said, ‘I don’t know, all I can say is nobody’s talking,’ and that was the end of our conversation. No one knew anything. So I let it rest, as by then with war declared we were very busy. But in the next month, as we began to hear the real facts about our losses, that’s when I started looking back through our records for that ‘execute’ intercept and to see what I’d done with it.”

But Ralph Briggs found nothing in the files. Every copy of the “winds” message had mysteriously vanished.

On the 24th of September, 1941, the Army’s shortwave radio monitoring station at Oahu, Hawaii, intercepted a message from Tokyo to the Japanese consul, Nagao Kita, in Honolulu. This monitoring station’s job was to intercept all traffic to the Japanese consul there, and also all traffic on the Tokyo-Berlin and Tokyo-Moscow radio circuits. But none of the radio operators or codebreakers in Hawaii were cleared to decode the material — it was all sent on to Washington in encrypted form, exactly as received.

The message to Nagao Kita divided Pearl harbor up into several numbered target areas for an aerial attack and requested him to make a twice-weekly report to Tokyo on the vessels at anchor in Pearl Harbor and their exact locations. Never before had the Japanese asked for such attack plan information about any American military installation. The codebreakers in Washington knew the significance of this message — they even called it “The Bomb Plot Message.” Yet Washington did not pass this information along to the Army and Navy commanders in Hawaii. At least three messages about the bomb plan for Pearl Harbor passed between Tokyo and the Japanese consulate in Hawaii. All of them were read by Washington, the last that we know of on December 3d. None were passed along to the American commanders at Pearl Harbor.

The Roosevelt government not only were reading the Japanese diplomatic code, they were also reading the Japanese naval code. A strange twist of fate helped the American codebreakers just a few days before the attack. The Japanese naval code was normally changed every six months. After each change, it took the British and American codebreakers a few weeks to crack the new code. The next change date was December 1st, but due to the fact that some Japanese naval communication units had not yet received their new code books in time, the date for the code change was pushed back to December 4th, thus giving our codebreakers valuable extra days of Japanese naval intelligence.

The Japanese also made the error after December 4th of communicating with some units, who still hadn’t received their code tables, in the old code while at the same time sending the same messages to others in the new. Slips like this are a codebreaker’s fondest dream, and greatly speeded the process of cracking the new code.

Washington knew through reading the Japanese naval traffic that all Japanese merchant vessels were to return to their home waters by December 7th. This information was not given to the commanders at Pearl Harbor. Washington knew through reading the Japanese naval traffic that a huge task force, including a large group of aircraft carriers, was sailing into the Pacific on November 26th for an eight-day voyage and was to reach its standby position and refuel on December 4th. Washington also knew that there was no possible target in the Pacific that required the use of carrier-borne aircraft except Pearl Harbor. This information was not given to the commanders at Pearl Harbor.

On the 27th of November, Washington learned through the Dutch attaché in Washington (who had also received a decrypt of the Japanese naval message ordering the task force to sea from his own intelligence men in the Dutch East Indies) that the task force’s most likely direction was east and that its most likely target was Pearl Harbor. This information was not passed along to the American commanders at Pearl Harbor.

And on December 2d, the day after which the naval code would normally have been changed, Washington intercepted and read the message giving the date for the attack. “Climb Mount Niitakayama 1208.” Mount Niitakayama was then the highest mountain in the Japanese Empire and was the code word for the attack, and 12-8 Japanese time is 12-7 Hawaiian time. This message was also intercepted and read by British intelligence, who concluded, according to one of their number, W. W. Mortimer of the British Far East Combined Bureau, that since no task force had been sighted in waters south of Japan, the only target that fitted the length of voyage, midocean refueling, and the inclusion of aircraft carriers was Pearl Harbor, and that an attack on Sunday, December 7, (the date given in the Japanese message) would offer the greatest element of surprise there. This information was passed along to Washington, who, once again, did nothing to warn the commanders at Pearl Harbor.

Ladies and gentlemen, only in the last few years has the information obtained by the breaking of the Japanese naval codes been available to the public. But even the limited knowledge we had earlier of the decryption of the diplomatic codes was enough to indicate to any reasonable man that Franklin Roosevelt and the men around him should have been tried for treason and for the betrayal of every American fighting man — not only those who died on that fateful day of December 7th, 1941, but every one who died or was maimed for life in that entire suicidal and fratricidal conflict called World War Two.

Until 1990, the United States government refused to admit that the Japanese naval code even existed, much less had been broken. But now leaks uncovered by diligent researchers have finally thrown aside the curtain. The governments of the US and Britain still keep a tight lid of secrecy on important aspects of the Pearl Harbor story. Many documents are missing from the records of the period. Some have been altered. What we do have is so damning, though, that no further confirmation of the essentials is necessary. When a patriotic administration takes power someday in Washington, the declassification of all records of the treason of the Roosevelt regime will fill in the details of this story, and no doubt other crimes will be uncovered. But on this we are certain: the administration knew, at the very highest level, what was going to happen at Pearl Harbor. They wanted it to happen, because they wanted America to go to war against Germany. Since Germany would not do anything to justify an American declaration of war, despite Roosevelt’s secret war against Germany in the Atlantic and his multiple provocations and violations of American neutrality, Roosevelt was forced to provoke Japan, which was Germany’s ally. Roosevelt and his henchmen cared so little for the lives of American soldiers, and so much for their plan to get us into the war, that they chose not to warn our commanders at Pearl Harbor. Roosevelt wanted the Americans at Pearl Harbor to suffer a horrible defeat so that the outrage of the American people at Japan would induce the 75 per cent. of the American people who had been against the war to willingly become cannon fodder in a war against the interests of America and the West. And in this he was entirely successful.

I have only been able to relate to you a tiny portion of the story of Pearl Harbor in this half hour. The events of December 7th, 1941 were pivotal to the subsequent history of our nation and civilization. An understanding of those events will deepen your understanding of our nation’s current plight.

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For further reading on the subject of the betrayal of Pearl Harbor, see Infamy by historian John Toland and Betrayal at Pearl Harbor by British intelligence experts Rusbridger and Nave. For an excellent synopsis of the causes of America’s decline see What We Owe Our Parasites by Dr. R. P. Oliver.

© 1999 Kevin Alfred Strom, All Rights Reserved.