I'm starting a new thread to address the Pearl Harbor issues Turbonium has brought up in the Canadian take on 9-11 thread. This regards the presence of decrypts of Japanese message traffic presumably being held by the National Archives and not available for release to the public. The last post on that subject by Turbonium was as follows.
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by turbonium
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Eta C
'Uh, there are no pre-Dec 7 decrypts of JN-25. JN-25b was not broken until about March or April of 1942, in time to help with the battles of Coral Sea and Midway, but not to give any warning of Pearl Harbor.
|
Your view, which agrees with the "official" position, actually makes my main argument even more valid - because it admits to the fact that JN-25 messages have long been decoded, and makes the release of all these documents no "threat to national security" whatsoever. Your link also details the cryptoanalytical methods used to break the code, so the techniques themselves are not a secret.
The US Navy has admitted that..."Between early September and 4 December 1941, U.S. COMINT units at Pearl Harbor, Corregidor, and Guam intercepted and forwarded to Washington many thousands (26,581) of Japanese naval messages in the fleet general-purpose system (JN-25).."
http://www.history.navy.mil/books/comint/ComInt-4.html
However, the NSA has still only released 2,413 of these 26,581 JN-25 messages. Again, why should the Government refuse to release the remaining 24,000+ long-since decoded JN-25 messages? Whether they were decoded before or after the attack is irrelevant. Their "official" reason is "possible threats to national security." But that position is untenable.
Apologies for the diversion from the main thread topic..... |
First off, there is no secret left to the method used to decode JN-25. It was a superenciphered code. While not sophisticated, such a code is difficult to break, sometimes harder than a mechanical cipher such as Purple or Enigma. So, nothing is being held back for reasons of "National Security." More than likely any unreleased messages were either never decoded, possibly lost, or maybe no-one ever asked for them. Even if we did have them I doubt that they would reveal anything about the Pearl Harbor attack we don't already know.
Turbonium is implying that there is some great secret hidden in these messages. Frankly, I'm doubtful. What proof do we have that they are being witheld so far besides his assertion?
Anyway, the issue of the messages is irrelevant to the history of the Pearl Harbor attack. Even though these 25,000+ messages had been intercepted and sent to Hawaii and Washington there was no way to read them as JN-25 had not been broken before the attack (and Hawaii was the more important site. CDR Rochefort's group at Pearl, called Hypo, was responsible for attack that system and was the team that ultimately broke JN-25.) So there was no way that they could have provided any warning that the attack was on the way. Unless, of course, turbonium is subscribing the the CT that the nefarious folks in DC had actually already broken JN-25 and were witholding the info so the attack would succeed. Is that your thesis? If so, it's most definitely not one any historian of the subject would take seriously. Again, let me refer you, and others, to Kahn's book "The Codebreakers" for a history of the breaking of JN-25, and other codes and ciphers of the WWII era.