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

226 Pearl Harbor: The Seeds and Fruits of Infamy
kinds of phrases Briggs had often picked up when searching various
radio spectrums at random to practice interception and to see
what kind of traffi c was being transmitted.
Briggs wondered why Navy intelligence was all of a sudden
targeting weather reports, and, being on good terms with
his station chief, he asked why. Wigle was reluctant to explain,
but he fi nally showed Briggs the card with the three phrases and
their hidden coded meanings. Wigle couldn’t give Briggs all the
details, “but [he said] it’s important that we get those. . . . [I]f you
get any of them, if any of those shows up in any broadcast, be sure
and transmit them immediately to OP-20-G,” Captain Saff ord’s
offi ce in Washington, D.C.
Th e only broadcast on which such weather phrases might
appear was the “Tokyo scheduled weather and news broadcast,”
transmitted at diff erent hours of the day and on diff erent frequencies
to Japanese ships and stations worldwide. Th e Cheltenham
communication intelligence trained radiomen began to monitor
that broadcast. To each of the fi ve watch sections Wigle assigned
at least one operator who was qualifi ed in Katakana, the diffi cult
written form of squarish Japanese characters based on Chinese
ideographs, as contrasted with the simpler Kanji.
On December 4 Briggs had the “mid-watch,” from midnight
to 8:00 a.m. Some time after midnight, probably between
3:00 and 8:00, when he was to be relieved, Briggs intercepted in
Japanese Morse code a message containing the phrase “Higashi
no kaze ame.” He excitedly rushed down the corridor to the
OP-20-G teletype terminal and sent the message off immediately
to OP-20-G in Washington. He then phoned Wigle, who
lived on the station, got him “out of the sack,” and told him what
had happened. When Wigle checked the log sheet and the station
copy of the intercept later, he confi rmed to Briggs that he
had gotten “the real McCoy.” 17
17 Th ese three paragraphs based on Bettina B. Greaves’s interview of Ralph
T. Briggs in Las Vegas, Nevada, August 14, 1988. See also John Toland’s