THE INTELLIGENCE JUNGLE - WORLD WAR II AND TODAY

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000504440002-6
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: January 3, 2012
• Sequence Number: 2
• Publication Date: December 29, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

STAT
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/01/03: CIA-RDP90-00965R000504440002-6
AKTICLE APPEARED BALTIMORE SUN
ON } PAG 29 Dec-? b1985
And I Was There": Pearl Harbor and Midway -
Br=king the Secrets.- Rear Adm. Edwin T. Layton.
USN (Ret.), with Capt. Roger Pineau. USNR (Ret) and
John Costello. Morrow. 598 pages. 819.95.
"A World of Secrets: The Uses and Limits of Intelli-
gence." Walter Laqueur. Twentieth Century Fund.
404 pages. 821.95.
itseedy has a book righted an old wry even before
to published, but the memoirs of Adm. Edwin T.
R
Layton. who died in 1984, have accomplished
this remarkable feat. Undoubtedly influenced by the stir
' likely to be created by this fascinating and significant'
book, the Navy Department eupnounceda few weeks ago
.that one of the great injustices of World War II was to be
orrected.
The case involved Capt. Joseph J. Rochefort, the man
most responsible for. the victory at the Battle of Midway,
the turning point of the war in the Pacific. Outgunned,
outnumbered but not outfat, the U.S. Navy won an
incredible victory, primarily because of the work of the
radio intelligence operation - Station Hypo - headed
by then Commander Rochefort.
Hidden away behind locked doors in the windowless
basement of an office building at Pearl Harbor, the Hypo
codebreakers broke the supposedly impregnable Japa-
nese JN 25 code and not only predicted that the Japa-
nese would strike Midway, but also the exact date on
which the attack would occur. In contrast, Hypo's oppo-
site number in Washington forecast an attack on John-
ston Island or on the West Coast of the United States to
take place a week later.
The Navy's treatment of Rochefort was shabby In the
extreme, however. Adm. Chester W: Nlmitz recom-
mended him for the distinguished Service Medal, one of
the nation's highest awwaarddes for noncombat service, but
it was turned down by the Chief of Naval Operations,
Adm. Ernest J. King. And Rochefort spent most of the
rest of the war in command of a floating drydock in San
Francisco Bay.
. Admiral Layton. Rochefort's close friend and col-
league as the Pacific fleet's intelligence officer, reveals
that Rochefort was the unwitting victim of an interne-
`clne struggle within the Navy for control of radio intelli-
gence. The victors in this battle for bureaucratic turf
were the very same men who had misjudged Japanese
intentions before Midway, but had convinced Admin
King that they rather than Rochefort deserved credit for
the Several postwar attempts to award the DSM to
,Rochefort were thwarted. including a request by Admiral
Nimttz in 1958. But the Navy Department finally relent-
ed last month, just as word of Layton's forthcoming book
began to c"te. Unfortunately, Rochefort died in
1978.
Although the book gives little comfort to conspiracy
theorists who claim "President Roosevelt promoted a war
with Japan in order to enter the stride against Hitler
through the back door." it adds fresh fuel to the long-
running controversey about who should bear the re-
aponsiblllty for the Peal Harbo
di
t
r
sas
er Unlike Cordon
. W. Prange, whose best-selling "At Dawn We Slept"
placed the blame'tg-. military commanders in Hawaii,
mm"A
THE INTELLIGENCE JUNGLE -
WORLD WAR II AND TODAY
Adm. Husband W. Kimmel and Gen. Walter C. Short,
Layton argues convincingly that they - Admiral Kim-
mel in particular - were made the scapegoats for errors
of commission and omission by political and military
leadels in Washington.
Layton. who was Kimmel's intelligence officer, indicts
Washington for failing to provide commanders on
the scene with the information gleaned from intercept of
Japanese diplomatic traffic and other communications
that were of vital concern to their commands. For exam-
ple, Kimmel was never told that the Japanese consulate
in Honolulu had been ordered to keep dose tabs on ship
movements at Pearl Harbor and to divide the anchorage
into zones that would make it easier to locate targets.
Further afield, Layton and his collaborators assert
that Roosevelt entered a secret agreement at the time of
the "Four Freedoms" meeting with Winston Churchill in
which he agreed that the U.S. would enter the war if the
J>lcpanese attacked British territory In the Far East. And
they contend the Russians may have had advance warn-
Iii of the Impending surprise attack on Hawaii.
Much of this remains controversial, but one need not
subscribe to all the intriguing hypotheses presented here
to recognize the overall importance of the book. It con-
tains much that is fresh, fascinating and vital to the
study of World War U.
In the 40 years since the war, intelligence gathering
has undergone a revolution, of which Rochefort and
Station Hypo were forerunners. Rather than depending
on trench-coated secret agents armed with minature
cameras, as Walter Laqueur points out in "A World of
Secrets." modern intelligence agencies now gain most of
their data through careful analysis of open sources, such
as newspapers, trade journals, government documents
and radio broadcasts as well as such technical means as
codebreaking and electronic snooping by satellites.
Intelligence has become a vital part of the fore
policy-making process and Mr. Laqueur, a professor at
Georgetown University, asks important questions about
it In this study of how well the various U.S. Intelligence
agencies are doing their jobs. How good is our intelli-
gence? And how well has it been evaluated?
American policymakers confront no shortage of Intel-
ligence. if anything, they are literally drowning in it. The
problem is to find what is important, to evaluate the data
properly and to make use of it. For example, Mr. Laqueur
points out that In the case of Iran, U.S. intelligence had a
formidable array of information, but completely misread
the situation there. As late as August 1978, a CIA as-
sessment held that "Iran is not in a revolutionary or even
a pre-revolutionary situation."
Scholarly, but lucid, Mr. Laqueur's book is a far cry
from the "gee whiz" school that dominates most writing
about intelligence, and is highly recommended to read-
ers with an interest in intelligence and the making for
foreign policy.
~Wparrriors: The Hidden History of A rican Espio-
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/01/03: CIA-RDP90-00965R000504440002-6