Pearl Harbor: The Seeds and Fruits of Infamy - Ludwig von Mises ...

Foreword
On October 28, 1944, in Washington, D.C., I attended a
birthday party given by a friend of mine, the Russian-born
foreign correspondent, Isaac Don Levine, 1 for his wife, Ruth.
October 28 is my birthday too. So it became a double birthday
party.
At that party, a loquacious colonel, assuming apparently that
he was speaking “off the record,” confi ded that the United States
had decrypted the Japanese diplomatic code a year or so before
the attack on Pearl Harbor. From that time on, the top U.S.
administration and military offi cials had been intercepting and
reading many of the confi dential messages that passed between
the Japanese government in Tokyo and her emissaries in the
United States and other countries. Th anks to this source of intelligence,
the administration in Washington had been privy before
the attack on Pearl Harbor to many Japanese secrets.
Republican presidential candidate Th omas E. Dewey had
also learned this administration secret. But, out of patriotism, he
was not exploiting it during the election campaign that was then
under way. It could be that the Japanese were still using the same
1 Levine later founded and edited the anticommunist journal Plain Talk, a forerunner
of Th e Freeman and National Review.
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