For a week and a day in December 1941 two separate dramas, both combining volatile mixtures of journalism and intelligence, played out in close proximity in and around the National Press Building. One involved a Japanese reporter who watched helplessly as his secret efforts to help prevent war between his country and the United States went up in flames. The other was an all-too-public and equally futile plot by two American journalists who hoped that by exposing closely guarded secrets they could stop America's slide into war with Germany. Instead of preserving peace, Chesly Manly, the Capitol Hill reporter for the Chicago Tribune, and Frank Waldrop, political editor for the Washington Times-Herald, handed Hitler's generals a roadmap to America's plans for fighting an unavoidable war.

Manly and Waldrop met for dinner at the National Press Club on the evening of December 3, 1941, to discuss the pros and cons of publishing a story they knew would define their careers—and they believed could change history. A few hours earlier Manly had been handed the biggest and potentially most damaging leak of military secrets any American reporter had ever received.1

By the time Manly and Waldrop finished their meal, neither had even the slightest doubt that the story should be published. The revelations would be a kick in the teeth to President Roosevelt that could, the two journalists believed, stymie his efforts to push the nation into what from their perspective was an unnecessary and unwinnable war.²

The next morning the Tribune's headline stretched across the front page, screaming, “F.D.R.'s War Plans! Goal Is 10 Million Armed Men.”³ The timing was especially satisfying for Manly: the Tribune's world-class scoop hit the streets just in time to dim the glow of the inaugural issue of the Chicago Sun, a paper that had been created to diminish the influence of the isolationist, Roosevelt-hating Tribune.

Main Lounge, National Press Club. In 1945, the widow of Manuel de Oliviera Lima, the Brazilian ambassador to the United States, donated a painting of the Greek courtesan Phryne, adorned in nothing more than slippers and a smile, to the club. The painting became the subject of controversy after women were admitted to the club in 1971. In 1998 the Press Club's board of directors decided to remove the painting. In 2005 Phryne was auctioned for $80,000.

Credit: National Press Club archives

A cartoon next to Manly's story showed men in trenches with the words “Illinois,” “Chicago,” “Indiana” and “Ohio” written on their jackets and hats. They were standing in front of a fortress labeled “The Middle West” and were looking to the east, where the words “War Propaganda” were stenciled in the sky above the Capitol dome in Washington. The caption heralded the Midwest as “The Stronghold of Peace.” The sketch illustrated the reality that even though isolationism had been infiltrated, corrupted, and discredited by anti-Semites, fascists, and racists, the movement was alive and well in the heartland.

Manly's story played on the fears of Americans who believed FDR was plotting a massive, disastrous war. “A confidential report prepared by the joint army and navy high command by direction of President Roosevelt calls for American expeditionary forces aggregating 5,000,000 men for a final land offensive against Germany and her satellites,” Manly reported. “It contemplates total armed forces of 10,045,658 men.”4 The story, which had a December 3 dateline, added, “One of the few existing copies of this astonishing document, which represents decisions and commitments affecting the destinies of peoples thruout the civilized world, became available to the Tribune today.” The Washington Times-Herald also ran the story, ensuring that military officers who would have risked their lives to prevent the information from reaching America's enemies read it as they choked down their scrambled eggs and toast.

Manly had gotten his hands on the War Department's “Rainbow Five” report—so named because it consisted of five contingency plans for war, each assigned a different color. The report revealed that America's small, ill-equipped military was completely unprepared to fight a major war. It outlined the Army and Navy's plans for building up the nation's fighting capacity and pointed out precisely where and when troops would be sent if the US military was called on to intervene in the wars that were raging in Europe and Asia.

As Manly reported, one of the plans assumed that “Germany and her European satellites cannot be defeated by the European powers now fighting against her.” This, he told readers, led to the military planners’ conclusion that “if our European enemies are to be defeated it will be necessary for the United States to enter the war, and to employ a part of its armed forces offensively in the eastern Atlantic and in Europe and Africa.” The “report assumes that Germany, Italy, all German occupied countries cooperating with Germany, Vichy France, Japan, Manchukuo, and possibly Spain and Portugal are potential enemies. It calls for continuation of the war against this assumed combination of enemies even tho the British commonwealth and Soviet Russia should be completely defeated, and predicts that Russia will be militarily impotent by July 1, 1942.”

The Tribune reporter cherry-picked portions of the report calculated to offend Midwestern isolationist sensibilities. For example, he plucked out a few sentences that made it seem that America's principal war aims included “prevention of the destruction of the British empire,” a goal for which few American mothers were willing to sacrifice their sons. Manly also crowed that Rainbow Five proved that Charles Lindbergh, “who has been maligned as a defeatist, an appeaser, and a Nazi sympathizer by administration war propagandists and the interventionist press,” was correct when he said the British and Soviets alone were not capable of defeating Germany.

Manly was right when he wrote that the document was astonishing, but its contents were not as astonishing as the Tribune's decision to make them public. It was obvious at a glance that knowledge of the Rainbow Five plans would be of immense value to Hitler's Germany, Mussolini's Italy, and Tojo's Japan; it didn't take a military genius to understand that publication of the nation's most sensitive military plans would put the lives of American soldiers at risk. The Tribune disregarded the threat to national security because the paper's publisher, Colonel Robert McCormick, along with a large segment of public opinion, believed, as Waldrop put it, that Roosevelt was “lying us into a war with Germany and had to be stopped.”5 Manly and Waldrop felt they were fulfilling journalism's highest duty: to hold government accountable by illuminating its darkest recesses.

For isolationist politicians the Rainbow Five plan was clear proof of the president's duplicity. They immediately cited it as evidence that even as he was promising American mothers that he wouldn't send their sons to fight a foreign war, Roosevelt was privately ordering plans for just such a war. Isolationists who considered themselves patriots and who had been vilified for months as traitors and Nazi dupes were not swayed by White House press secretary Steve Early's observation that all countries engage in contingency planning and that doing so did not commit the United States to a particular course of action.6

A few hours after Manly's story hit the newsstands, Rep. George Holden Tinkham waved it around on the floor of the House of Representatives, shouting that the Rainbow Five plan was a “betrayal of the American republic.”⁷ Tinkham wasn't a know-nothing isolationist; a Republican from Massachusetts, he was known for his staunch defense of the rights of African Americans. Tinkham sought and received unanimous consent to have Manly's story printed in full in the Congressional Record. The report proved that “the President of the United States has assumed the position of being a dictator in this land and he is enjoying it,” Kansas Republican congressman William Lambertson told his colleagues. The Rainbow Five story had landed in the middle of—and almost derailed—a ferocious debate over an $8 billion military spending bill. After a couple of hours of fulmination, however, the bill was nonetheless passed.⁸

Axis agents in the United States immediately grasped the significance of Rainbow Five. Unlike the overheard conversations, private assessments, and whispered confidences that were the raw material for most intelligence reports, the Tribune story, if accurate—and America's enemies didn't doubt its authenticity—was an account of the US military's actual plans for war. Within hours of its publication verbatim copies of Manly's story were cabled to Rome, Tokyo, and Berlin. Axis armies learned vital elements of America's plans, such as the number of ships that would be required to transport American soldiers to fight in Europe, how long it would take to build them, the number of airplanes American industry was expected to produce, and plans for constructing new airfields in England to serve as bases for bombing Germany.

Most crucially, German war planners, who had very little knowledge of American military strength or doctrine, learned that the United States had no intention of staying out of the war even if Britain and the Soviet Union fell. The United States was starting on a course of enlisting, training, and equipping a massive army that would by July 1943 be capable of taking on Axis forces in Europe. The information in Manly's story was far more valuable, specific, and actionable than any information Hitler's spies had learned about the United States through years of espionage.9

In a cable to Berlin, Hans Thomsen, the chargé d'affaires at Germany's embassy in Washington, wrote that Manly's story was “doubtlessly” based on an authentic report. Thomsen warned that the secret document confirmed that America's military and political elite believed that “Germany can be conquered neither by dollars, American bombers, nor by American subversive propaganda, [but] only by an American expeditionary force of several million men.”¹⁰ He noted that American military measures against Japan would be of a defensive character, so Japanese policymakers were “justified in concluding that America will, in the event of a two-ocean war, make its main offensive effort in the direction of Europe and Africa.”

Manly's story was immediately translated and sent to Germany’ top military officers. General Alfred Jodl, chief of the operations staff of Germany's Armed Forces High Command, along with Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel and Admiral Erich Raeder, dropped everything and started at once on an analysis of the Rainbow Five plan as revealed in the article. The Nazi military planners realized that in the face of a potential invasion of the scale described in Rainbow Five, the ongoing Russian campaign was a distraction they could not afford. All of Germany's resources must urgently be diverted to fending off America. On December 6, only two days after publication of Manly's scoop, they sent the analysis and a set of recommendations to Hitler at the Eastern front.

The plan, which Hitler quickly agreed to implement, detailed steps Germany would take to immediately and dramatically change its military priorities to counter the threat from North America. Formalized as “Führer Directive Number 39,” the plan was designed to take full advantage of the time it would take the United States to move its forces into Europe. It called for Germany to halt its invasion of the Soviet Union, establish a strong defensive line in Russia and redeploy one hundred divisions to occupy the entire Mediterranean coastline and Iberian Peninsula. Britain would be isolated and then crushed, and all possible routes for an American invasion hardened. The idea was to deny America any opportunity to mass soldiers and weapons within striking distance of Germany or German-occupied Europe.11

Thomsen's conclusion that Manly's story would have a soothing effect on Japanese leaders and strategists was correct. The knowledge that defeating Germany and Italy were America's top priorities and that it planned to devote minimal forces to the Pacific reinforced the logic behind the planned attack on Pearl Harbor and simultaneous attacks on the Philippines, Dutch East Indies, Malaya, and Singapore. Rainbow Five indicated that the United States wouldn't attack the Japanese fleet for five long years, taking advantage of its immense industrial superiority and the buffer provided by the Pacific ocean to construct an invincible Navy. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, commander of the Japanese Navy, believed that he could win only a short war with the United States, and that he could not prevail in the prolonged war of attrition outlined in Rainbow Five. Manly's leak reinforced Yamamoto's conviction that dealing the US Navy a rapid, humiliating and crippling defeat was Japan's best hope.¹²

As America's adversaries were analyzing the Tribune's account of the Rainbow Five report, in Washington a massive effort to find Manly's source was underway. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover personally interrogated suspected leakers, including Navy secretary Frank Knox, and rumors of plots and plotters swirled around the city. At a cabinet meeting FDR wondered if Tribune publisher McCormick's status as a reserve officer made it possible to court-martial him. Cabinet members discussed prosecuting Manly and Waldrop for violation of the Espionage Act or bringing some kind of conspiracy charge. Publicly, however, White House officials said that Manly and the Tribune hadn't violated any laws.

Decades later, Manly's source was revealed to be Senator Burton Wheeler, a Montana Democrat who was among the most ardent isolationists in Congress—and one of the first to demand an investigation into the leak. It turned out that since June 1940 Wheeler had been getting secret briefings from an Army Air Corps captain who claimed the Roosevelt administration had been lying to Congress by exaggerating the readiness of the American military.13

On December 3 the captain, whom Wheeler never identified, brought to the senator's home a document as thick as a novel, wrapped in brown paper and labeled “Victory Program.” It was the full Rainbow Five report. Wheeler asked the officer if he was afraid to deliver the most closely guarded secret in Washington to a senator. “Congress is a branch of the government,” he replied. “I think it has a right to know what's really going on in the executive branch when it concerns human lives.”¹⁴

Writing later in his memoir, Wheeler recalled that, as he scanned the document, “My blood pressure rose. I felt strongly that this was something the people as well as a senator should know about. It would awaken the public to what was in store for them if we entered the war and the fact that we probably would. The document undercut the repeated statements of Roosevelt and his followers that repeal of the neutrality acts, lend-lease, the destroyer deal, and similar measures, would keep us out of the European conflict.”¹⁵

Wheeler also deduced that no Army captain could on his own obtain and borrow such a sensitive document. The source of the disclosure, he felt, must have been much higher in the military chain of command.

After skimming the report, Wheeler called Manly, who he knew shared his distaste for Roosevelt, at the Tribune's Press Building office and invited him to come to his house. Wheeler also summoned one of his secretaries. The senator and reporter took turns that evening reading the most important sections to the secretary, who furiously scribbled their words in shorthand. The captain returned the report to its home in the War Department before its absence could be detected, and later that evening Manly and Waldrop dined together at the Press Club.

The FBI and military investigators never determined who had ordered the Rainbow Five leak. Wheeler believed that General Hap Arnold, the head of the Army Air Corps, authorized the leak because he was peeved that the plan didn't allocate sufficient resources to ramping up the production of airplanes. This theory doesn't seem plausible: the plan didn't stint on air power, and it is almost inconceivable that Arnold would commit what amounted to treason to advance his military career. It is a testament to the deviousness and inscrutability of Franklin D. Roosevelt that some historians believe he ordered the leak as part of an elaborate strategy to goad Hitler into declaring war.16

Manly and Waldrop quickly came to hope that a story that had seemed like the hottest scoop of their lives would be forgotten—or at least forgiven. Waldrop said that he became so disturbed by his role in making the Rainbow Plan public that “I felt like slitting my throat.”¹⁷

The biggest leak of military secrets in American history had been overshadowed by the most devastating military intelligence failure in the nation's history. Three days after Manly's scoop hit the newsstands, Japanese bombers blasted the search for its source off the FBI's priority list.

The attack also marked the end of Masuo Kato's tenure as Washington bureau chief for Domei, Japan's official news agency.

On the morning of December 7, 1941, Kato slept late and cooked himself a breakfast of griddle cakes smothered in butter and maple syrup. Breakfast is the last meal a foreigner gives up in a new country, so Kato's fondness for pancakes and especially for butter—a food abhorred by many Japanese at the time—was a mark of his integration into American society. Still, no matter how well he assimilated, no Japanese citizen could feel comfortable in Washington in the winter of 1941. The hostility of former friends prompted Kato to work that morning from his home, an apartment on 16th Street near Dupont Circle, instead of traveling to his office in the Press Building or to the Press Club, where he often monitored the newswires and used the typewriter room as an informal office.18

For months American newspapers had been seething with hostility toward Japan. The press stoked anger over Japan's refusal to retreat from China and its invasion of French Indochina. The papers were full of predictions that Tokyo was planning to bomb the Panama Canal, invade the Philippines, or pivot to bite off a piece of Siberia.

Isolationist newspapers were determined to prevent war with Germany and Italy, but there were few voices calling for restraint when it came to Japan. In the popular imagination Japanese troops were short, buck-toothed runts who wouldn't be a match for American soldiers, and even top military planners in the United States and Britain believed that Japanese were incapable of flying airplanes or prevailing in combat against European or American soldiers.¹⁹

Months of speculation about war in the Pacific had turned the convivial atmosphere of the Press Club frosty for anyone identified with Japan. Reporters who for years had bantered with Kato turned their backs when he approached the bar. Word had circulated around the club that the talented and affable Domei editor was only pretending to be a newspaperman, that he was actually a commander in the Japanese Navy who was using journalism as a cover for spying.²⁰

In fact, Kato wasn't a covert military officer, but, by American standards, nor was he an ordinary reporter. Journalism and espionage were tightly coupled in pre-war Japan. The link was so close that the Japanese government and public found it inconceivable that foreign reporters in their country were not spies. As a result, American journalists who had the misfortune to find themselves in Japan or a place under Japanese occupation during the war were treated brutally.²¹

A fluent English speaker, Kato had attended university in the United States and, starting in 1937, had served a three-year stint as Washington bureau chief of Domei. At a time when Japanese were exotic and unusual in Washington, he blended in, living at the University Club, playing golf at the Kenwood Country Club, and drinking with American reporters.22

Kato had returned to Japan in 1940 with no expectation of returning to Washington. He was at the dock in Yokohama on January 23, 1941, when Admiral Kichisaburo Nomura, Japan's newly chosen ambassador to Washington, and its last hope for averting war with the United States, departed in the Kamakura Maru ocean liner. Soon Kato followed in his wake, assigned to cover Nomura's negotiations with the US government.

Six feet tall, sporting a ready smile, an amiable manner, and a glass eye—a memento of a Chinese nationalist's assassination attempt—Nomura was the opposite of the stereotypical Japanese diplomat. He was known to be fond of America and a personal friend of President Roosevelt.

While Nomura hoped to prevent war with the United States, it wasn't clear at the time and still isn't certain whether this was really possible. Japanese politics was a byzantine swirl of intrigue and assassination. No one, including Nomura, knew if his appointment was a grand gesture on the part of a Foreign Ministry seeking to avert war or a cynical ploy intended to buy time while the imperial Army created new facts on the ground.²³

Starting with his first meeting with Roosevelt, on February 14, Nomura's mission to Washington was extraordinary. FDR greeted the admiral like a long-lost friend and Nomura spoke frankly, declaring that he had come to try to find peace with the United States and confiding that the biggest obstacles to success were chauvinistic militarists in his own country.²⁴ The president suggested that Nomura enter into secret, informal discussions—the word “negotiations” was assiduously avoided—with Secretary of State Cordell Hull. Nomura was assured that he could meet with Roosevelt if the need arose and was shown a side door to the White House that he could use to avoid detection by the press.²⁵

A drama worthy of a Kabuki performance played out over the coming months. Nomura and Hull had fifty or sixty secret meetings, many held in Hull's apartment, and Nomura and Roosevelt met secretly eight times in the White House. At their first meeting, Nomura and Hull vowed that they would never lie to each other. After every meeting Hull dictated a short memorandum for the State Department's files summarizing the encounter, and Nomura sent an encrypted report with his impressions to the Foreign Ministry in Tokyo. The Foreign Ministry sent Nomura a continuous stream of messages instructing him how he should conduct the negotiations.

The Kabuki aspect came into play as a result of one of the few effective intelligence operations conducted by the American government prior to World War II, the breaking of the Japanese diplomatic code. Hull and Roosevelt were reading translations of intercepts of Nomura's secret messages to Tokyo the day he sent them—and they were often able to read copies of the Foreign Ministry's messages to Nomura before he was. Hull was privy to Nomura's candid assessments of their talks, and he knew just how far his counterpart could go in making concessions to American demands. Nomura was in the dark both about America's intentions and about the intentions and plans of his compatriots.

English translations of the decrypted Japanese cables were stamped “Top Secret MAGIC,” an allusion to the US Army Signal Intelligence Service chief's habit of calling his cryptanalysts “magicians.” Circulation of Magic decrypts was limited to ten people: the president; the secretaries of War, Navy, and State; the chief of staff; the chief of naval operations; the chiefs of the two services’ war plans divisions; and the chiefs of their intelligence organizations. The highly restricted distribution list protected the secrecy of a vital intelligence tool, but it also ensured that no one who read the cables had a deep knowledge of Japanese history or culture.26

Because of the Magic decrypts, Hull and Roosevelt knew Nomura's private assessments of their discussions, and because they had read his instructions they could be ready with well-considered responses to the ambassador's proposals the instant he made them. It gradually became clear to the Americans that Nomura was playing a desperate game, shading the truth or omitting details in his reports to the Foreign Ministry in an effort to avoid stirring up anti-American feelings in Tokyo. At the same time, when he thought he could get away with it, he ignored explicit instructions to deliver messages to Hull or Roosevelt that could have antagonized the American side.

Kato watched closely as Nomura attempted to outmaneuver the militarists and prevent war. Like every other Japanese enterprise operating in the United States, the news service was subject to close supervision by officials in the Japanese embassy. Kato spent as much time at the embassy as he did at the Press Building, much of it with Hidenari Terasaki, the embassy's press secretary.27

For a press secretary, Terasaki kept an almost comically low profile, rarely if ever communicating with American reporters, shunning the Embassy Row social scene, and managing to almost completely avoid having his name mentioned in American newspapers.²⁸ Despite his passion for anonymity, Terasaki was well known to American counterintelligence officers. A March 14, 1941, Magic decrypt revealed that Terasaki had been put in charge of coordinating Japanese intelligence and propaganda operations in North and South America.²⁹

The day after Nomura presented his credentials to Roosevelt and the secret discussions with Hull were started, a Magic decrypt revealed priorities for Japanese intelligence operations in the United States. These included determining America's political, economic, and military strength. Tokyo also tasked its spies with identifying potential agents and collaborators by conducting “investigations of all persons or organizations which either openly or secretly oppose participation in the war,” and of “anti-Semitism, communism, movements of negroes, and labor movements.”³⁰

If war broke out between Japan and the United States, the cable stated, “our intelligence set-up will be moved to Mexico, making that country the nerve center for our intelligence net.”³¹ It ordered Terasaki to “set up facilities for a US-Mexico international intelligence route.” Terasaki was instructed to cooperate with the German and Italian intelligence organs in the United States.

Given his broad mandate, reclusive nature, and limited resources, Japanese reporters who spoke good English and understood American society were a valuable force-multiplier for Terasaki. They didn't have to steal secrets, or even personally favor Japanese imperialism, to be useful. Kato and most of the handful of other Japanese reporters in Washington occupied a gray area between independent journalism and espionage. At the most basic level they helped Terasaki by providing insight into the thinking of government officials, picking up gossip at the Press Club, and identifying sympathetic or vulnerable Americans who might spy for Japan.

White House and congressional credentials allowed Japanese reporters to attend press conferences and roam the halls of government buildings. Kato mingled with top Roosevelt administration officials, for example, attending Secretary of State Cordell Hull's seventieth birthday party.32 American reporters who weren't happy about having a “Jap” in their midst kept a close eye on Kato and his colleagues.

The mood was reflected in a June 1941 column by Tom Treanor, a Los Angeles Times correspondent. Treanor set up the story by recalling an incident that had occurred in the State Department press room immediately after Hull had made sharp remarks about Japan at a press conference and stipulated that they were off the record. “Little Kato went to a typewriter in an adjoining office and started a story to this effect: ‘Secretary Hull today in an off-the-record press conference said, etc., etc., etc.’”³³ Treanor continued: “He left the paper in the machine where all could see it and went to wash his hands.” The column noted that “correspondents here think he's too smart to have done it through carelessness. It must have been some sort of diplomatic swordplay for Mr. Hull's benefit.” Interviewing Kato at the Press Club, Treanor asked if anyone had told him he “should get out of Washington or that you are a spy.” Kato replied, “One man told me I should get out once, but I say to him: ‘That is a matter for governments to decide, not persons like you.’”

Although it did not restrict his access to press briefings, the State Department included Kato on a list of Japanese agents it provided in November 1941 to Colonel William Donovan, President Roosevelt's Coordinator of Information. The list was probably based on a secret cable sent from the Japanese consulate in New York on December 17, 1940, and decrypted by Army magicians three weeks later. Both the cable and the roster provided to Donovan included the representatives of Domei in the United States, as well as reporters for the newspapers Asahi Shimbun and Yomiuri Shimbun as possible Japanese intelligence sources.34

Fukuichi Fukumoto, a Japanese reporter who had been working in New York as a representative of the Osaka Mainichi and Tokyo Nichi Nichi newspapers, was also on the list. In March 1941 his employers had ordered him to return to Tokyo. In April American codebreakers learned that Terasaki had managed to have the order rescinded and to get Fukumoto posted to Washington, where he joined other reporters at the Press Building. After an American reported to the FBI that Fukumoto had offered to pay him $2,300 for drawings of an exhaust supercharger used in airplane engines, the State Department, anxious to avoid a public quarrel with Japan, quietly arranged for Fukumoto's repatriation.³⁵

Japanese reporters in Washington were industrious collectors of information, but much of their work never made it into print. Domestic newspapers and radio were censored and rather than getting to read the meticulously collected reports from Japan's large contingent of international journalists, the population was subjected to relentless propaganda. Many of the cables Kato sent to Tokyo in the months prior to the Pearl Harbor attack were circulated only to a small circle of government officials that included the emperor. Aware of his elite audience, Kato tried to leverage access to leaders on both sides of the Pacific to suggest ways Tokyo could find common ground with Washington.³⁶

Both sides were anxious to avoid publicity about the discussions between Nomura and Hull. Roosevelt feared that if word leaked he would be branded an appeaser, and Nomura knew that publicity prior to a peace agreement would give the militarists in Japan the opportunity to scuttle the talks. It is a mark of Kato's status as a semi-official actor that Nomura confided in him about the ongoing discussions, including Tokyo's reluctance to take steps to come to an accommodation with the United States.37

Kato tried to support Nomura's efforts, for example by suggesting in stories ostensibly written for publication—but in fact intended for circulation in government circles—that Japan should stop demanding that Washington cut off aid to the Chinese government because the United States would never abandon Chiang Kai-shek. He even sent a cable recommending that General Hideki Tojo be replaced with a prime minister who was less inclined to lead Japan into war with the United States. Kato, who didn't realize how brutal the Kempeitai military police had become since his departure, lived to tell his story because colleagues at Domei destroyed that cable before anyone in government saw it.³⁸

In the last week of July 1941 developments in Washington, Tokyo, and on the ground in Southeast Asia made it impossible to continue to defer forever decisions about whether war would break out between the two nations. On July 24 Japan invaded French Indochina. In response, two days later Roosevelt froze Japanese assets in the United States, and the United States, Britain, and the government of the Dutch East Indies imposed an embargo on oil sales to Japan. FDR calculated that this would force the Japanese, who had no domestic sources of petroleum, to make concessions to the United States. If Roosevelt had a deep understanding of Japanese society, or had been advised by someone who did, he would have realized that for Japan's military leaders backing down in the face of a public threat was unthinkable.

As the cool autumn in Washington turned to a cold winter, Hull, Roosevelt, Nomura, and Kato all watched as the thin tendrils of peace the Japanese ambassador had been clutching were snatched from his fingers.

By the first week of December it was obvious to Kato and anyone else paying attention that at a minimum Japan was planning to break off diplomatic relations with the United States, and that in all probability war was just around the corner. Nomura was kept in the dark about Japan's plans, as were American policymakers who relied heavily on decrypted Japanese diplomatic cables. Although war seemed inevitable, the conventional wisdom, which Kato shared, was that it would begin with an incursion into the Dutch Indies. Japan, American leaders believed, would try to secure the oil its military needed to survive and stop short of provoking a strong American response.39

When Kato received a cable on December 2 ordering him back to Tokyo, he replied that he wanted to continue to work in Washington “to the end, whatever happened.”⁴⁰ A few days later he learned that embassy staff were burning documents, a clear signal that a break in relations with the United States was expected.

On December 3, Roosevelt was briefed on a Magic decrypt of a cable the embassy in Washington had received ordering it to destroy all but one of its code machines. He understood its significance immediately: war was imminent. The only reason for scuttling the machines was to prevent them from falling into the hands of the enemy. Embassy staff disassembled two electromechanical code-making machines, smashed them with hammers, and dissolved the remaining bits in vats of acid. Some of this frenetic activity took place in the embassy garden, where an Office of Naval Intelligence officer observed it.⁴¹

At noon on December 6, Kato attended a going-away party at the Mayflower Hotel for Terasaki, who was being transferred to Rio de Janeiro. Other embassy officials had already departed for Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina.⁴² Kato must have realized that Terasaki's departure was yet another sign that war was close. It was a clear signal to American intelligence analysts that Tokyo was putting in place the contingency plan for moving its intelligence operations to Mexico and South America that had been mentioned in the January cable.

That evening Kato dined with two Japanese reporters at a Chinese restaurant and shared gallows humor about how they would pass their time in an American prison after war broke out. Kato said he would write a book.43

In his reports Kato grasped at any sign that war could be avoided, but by the morning of December 7, there wasn't much hope to cling to. The smell of pancakes was still in the air when he handed the text of a story—his last dispatch from the United States—to a Western Union messenger at 2:00 p.m. The cable reported on the American public's reaction to the breakdown in negotiations between Washington and Tokyo and concluded that “there is still a thirty percent hope for peace.”⁴⁴ Kato walked out of his apartment on 16th Street half an hour later, just missing the first radio broadcasts that would have forced him to revise his estimate.

The Domei reporter was literally dressed for a funeral—a senior Japanese officer had died in Washington a few days earlier and the service was slated for 3:00 p.m.—as he strolled down 16th Street, passed the White House, and turned right. He had almost arrived at the State Department when he hailed a taxi, oblivious to the tense drama unfolding a few blocks away in Hull's office. Japanese diplomats who, like Kato, were unaware of the Pearl Harbor attack were handing the furious secretary of state, who was all too aware of the attack, a note cutting off diplomatic relations.

As he settled into the backseat of the taxi, Kato caught the tail end of a news bulletin on the radio—something about Japanese forces bombing Manila. “God damn Japan,” the driver declared, apparently unaware of the nationality of his passenger. “We'll lick hell out of those bastards now.”⁴⁵

Kato ducked out of the funeral with another Japanese reporter and headed to the Japanese embassy on Massachusetts Avenue. They were greeted by an angry crowd that had gathered on the sidewalk. The two reporters, who were well known to the embassy guards, were admitted at once.

Inside, Kato learned that the bombs hadn't fallen just on Manila and that his initial suspicion—that rogue elements of the Japanese military were to blame—was wrong. Officers in Tokyo might have imagined that they could push the Americans out of Asia with a single decisive blow, but men like Kato who had lived in the United States did not share this delusion. “There was no excitement evident in the faces of those gathered there that afternoon,” Kato remembered in a memoir published after the war. “There was more of a disheartened sense of failure. Everyone spoke in hushed, expectant tones. There was no cheering or speech-making. The atmosphere was more like that of the funeral from which I had just come than that of an embassy drawing-room on the first day of war.”46

Kato spent about an hour in the embassy. As he stepped out of a side exit he smelled smoke, looked up, and saw white puffs drifting into the clear sky. He ran inside to raise the alarm, unintentionally provoking the only laughter heard in the embassy that afternoon; embassy staff told him they were torching papers to keep them out of the hands of the Americans. There wasn't much left to get rid of: the bonfire had been burning for five days.

When Kato reached the sidewalk, he saw that the crowd had grown larger and angrier. “You,” a man told him, “are the last son of a bitch we're going to let out.” Kato's first instinct, like that of many other reporters, was to head to the Press Club. If he had followed through on the impulse, he would have been astonished by the scene—and the presence of a representative of Japan's news agency would have caused a stir. Hundreds of reporters had crowded into the club, seeking the company of comrades and competitors, all scrambling for information about the worst military disaster in American history. The bells on the wire service teletype machines were ringing like fire alarms, ten bells on the United Press machine, a dozen bells on the AP printer preceding one urgent bulletin after another. Seven floors below, a Japanese reporter on temporary assignment in Washington spent the evening in the United Press bureau bowing, weeping, and apologizing.⁴⁷

Instead of heading to the Press Building, Kato sought sanctuary in the home of an acquaintance who worked for the State Department. When he returned home, two FBI agents were waiting in the lobby. They told him to stay in his apartment. A short time later Thomas Qualters, a Secret Service agent who served as FDR's personal bodyguard, knocked on Kato's door. He had been sent by the president, not to make an arrest but rather to confiscate Kato's White House Correspondents Association card.48

The next morning, Kato and other Japanese citizens were interned at a makeshift detention center near Philadelphia. Germans and Italians joined them after Hitler declared war on the United States.

In his December 11 speech to the Reichstag announcing the declaration of war, Hitler blamed the United States and claimed that Germany was defending itself against American aggression. “With no attempt at an official denial there has now been revealed in America President Roosevelt's plan by which, at the latest in 1943, Germany and Italy were to be attacked in Europe by military means,” Hitler said.⁴⁹ He was referring to Manly's story about the Rainbow Five report.

The Wehrmacht was already laying plans to implement Führer Directive Number 39, the strategic pivot from trying to conquer the Soviet Union to focusing on defeating America's Rainbow Five plans. The directive might have worked; in any case, its implementation would have immensely complicated America's invasion of Europe and changed the course of the war in the East, altering the fate of millions of people.

The directive was never put into effect because Hitler, enraged by reverses on the eastern front, ripped it up on December 16, took personal command of the army, and ordered an irrational and disastrous continuation of the Russian campaign. Just as the German army's path into the Soviet Union had been smoothed by Stalin's insistence that warnings from his intelligence services of impending invasion were provocations, Germany's best shot at avoiding defeat was scuttled by a dictator's decision to reject recommendations based on an accurate assessment of his adversary's capabilities and strategy.

A similar failure led America to stumble into a war with Japan as a result of a devastating attack that could have been avoided or thwarted. The Pearl Harbor disaster was not the result of a lack of intelligence, but rather of the lack of a coordinated system for synthesizing and analyzing all of the nation's intelligence.

It was obvious in November and December 1941 that war with Japan was both inevitable and imminent. The American government had several separate streams of intelligence suggesting the Japanese were planning a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. These weren't detected because they were embedded in a blizzard of intelligence reports, and there was no mechanism in place to sift through these reports or even to systematically analyze them. The Army and Navy didn't share intelligence with each other. Rather than solving the problem Roosevelt dithered and put up with it. As his relationship with John Franklin Carter demonstrated, FDR also believed that methods that had served George Washington and Thomas Jefferson—sending friends and acquaintances abroad to spy on foreign powers and having the president personally evaluate their reports—were sufficient to cope with the risks posed by a much more complex world.