4.4. Safford Tells His Story

Captain Safford appeared before the Joint Congressional Committee on 1 February 1946. He introduced his position by entering into the records of the hearings a prepared statement, which represented his most articulate narrative of his version of events. It detailed his assertion that the Winds execute message had been intercepted and reported to the government. [Exhibit #40]^[] It began with these short, dramatic sentences: "There was a Winds message. It meant War – and we knew it meant War."

Safford's version of the intercept and handling of the Winds Execute can be summarized as follows. On 28 November 1941, OP-20-G had tasked numerous navy monitoring stations in the continental United States and its possessions in Hawaii and the Philippines to listen for the Winds Execute message. Safford expected that if such a message was to be heard by the navy sites, that it would be heard on a Morse code not voice news broadcast.

Shortly before 9:00 AM (EST) on 4 December 1941, a teletype message (TWX) from the intercept site at Cheltenham, Maryland (Station "M" in correspondence), arrived at the operations center of the Navy's code-breaking and translations section, OP-20-GY. It was a transcription of a news broadcast, in Morse, by station JAP (Tokyo) transmitted on frequency 11980 kilo-hertz. The broadcast had been heard at Cheltenham at about 8:00 AM and forwarded over the wire to OP-20-GY some thirty to forty-five minutes later. The intercept, on yellow TWX (teletype) paper, was about two hundred words long. According to Safford, all three of the expected Winds code phrases appeared in the middle of the text. Safford said these phrases equated to "War with England," "War with the United States," and "Peace with Russia." In the last case, he claimed that the coded phrase for Russia, which translates as "North Wind Cloudy" was in "the negative form," though Safford did not elaborate on how he reached that conclusion.

Safford reported that then Lt. Alwin Kramer and the GY duty watch officer, unnamed in his statement, had brought him the TWX. When he entered the office, Kramer told Safford that "This is it." Safford says he interpreted Kramer's exclamation to mean that the intercept indeed was the Winds Execute message that everyone had been listening for and that it was the "tip-off that would prevent the U.S. Pacific Fleet being surprised at Pearl Harbor the way the Russians had been surprised at Port Arthur."^[] Safford noted in his prepared statement that Kramer had underlined all three phrases in the text and had penciled (or crayoned) in the translations. He added that he was not certain of the order and perhaps the phrase for England appeared first and maybe there was written "No War" for Russia.^[]

Safford continued his story and said that he next made sure that the "'original' of the Winds Message (sic)" was sent to Rear Admiral Noyes, the Director of Naval Communications. (Recall that OP-20-G was part of the Naval Communications (OP-20), not the Office of Naval Intelligence or ONI). Safford ordered an unnamed officer to deliver the paper to Noyes in person. He was to "track down" Noyes and not to take "no" for an answer. In due course, Safford said he received a confirmation that Noyes had the message. After that, he recalled that Noyes had telephoned the "substance" of the message to the War Department, to the "Magic" distribution list in the Navy Department, and to the Naval Aide to President Roosevelt. Six or seven copies of the message/translation were "rushed" over to the War Department as soon as possible. Here, he says, the navy's responsibility ended. He added that the "smooth" or final translations (presumably with both army and navy serial numbers like all other such translations) were distributed at noon that same day to the authorized Navy Department officials and to the White House. Safford added that he had no reason to suspect that the Army would not make a prompt distribution of the translations of the Winds message.^[]

In earlier testimony to the Hewitt Inquiry, Safford maintained that the intercept from the morning of 4 December was not to be confused with the FCC intercept of the "false" or mistaken Winds intercept from the evening of 4 December. The FCC had phoned in a report of this broadcast to the OP-20-GY watch center about 9:00 PM (EST) on 4 December. Safford added that on the morning of 5 December, Kramer had been shown this particular FCC intercept. When he read it, Safford observed, he knew it was not the Execute message. He crumbled up the paper and "threw it in the waste basket."^[]

Safford went on to aver that more proof of the existence of the Winds Execute Message came on 15 December when he, along with Kramer, viewed the contents of a folder of "Magic" material that Admiral Noyes was to present to the Roberts Commission, which included the same Winds translation. He said that he and Kramer had checked over the contents of the folder for completeness. Safford reported that Kramer had discussed "these messages" with then Assistant Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal for some two hours around 10 December while Secretary Knox was at Pearl Harbor. Safford wrote in his statement that he believed that the translation of the Winds Execute message had been given the Navy serial number JD-1 #7001, because this serial number was missing from the files of correspondence and translations for that period. Safford's last comment on the matter of the distribution of the translation was that it was the responsibility of the Office of Naval Intelligence. He made the odd statement that he, Safford, had no responsibility in the matter after he forwarded the original message to Admiral Noyes and later made sure that Kramer's "folder" had the translations and that they were in order.^[]

Safford then added a new twist to the story that upped the ante for the importance of the Winds Execute message as a warning mechanism for U.S. intelligence. He stated that the message also served as a "Signal of Execute" of some sort. He believed this "theory" was confirmed when the Japanese navy had changed the cipher system of the General Purpose Fleet Code system – notated as AN-1 at the time – on 4 December some seven and one-half hours before [our italics] the Winds execute was transmitted. Safford added that there was only one station JAP broadcast for the European region that day and that it coincided with change.^[]

Safford claimed that, as a result of the intercept of the Winds Execute message, a number of messages were sent out late on 4 December to various U.S. naval facilities ordering them to destroy excess cryptographic material. [Exhibit #40, page 244] In later testimony before the Congressional Committee, he also stated that Captain Arthur McCollum from ONI had drafted a multipage warning message for CNO to send out. In this draft was a reference to the warning contained in the intercepted Winds message.^[]

In testimony the next day, Safford expanded his allegation. He offered another memorandum that he had prepared for the Hewitt Inquiry on 14 July 1945, but that he had withdrawn at the "suggestion" that Inquiry's counsel, Lieutenant Commander John Sonnett. In this second memo, Safford claimed that Sonnett had tried to get him to change his testimony to reconcile "all previous discrepancies."^[] Safford's memo added that Admiral Hewitt had told him that there was no evidence of a "Winds Execute" message beyond his unsupported testimony. But Safford believed that Sonnett had "succeeded in pulling the wool over his [Admiral Hewitt] eyes."^[]

This memo contained another inflammatory section: a list of officers "who knew, in December 1941, that the Winds Execute message had been broadcast on (or about) 4 December 1941... although some of them did not learn about it until after the attack on Pearl Harbor." Among those named were eleven army officers and thirteen navy officers and one navy enlisted man. The list included watch officers, linguists, and cryptanalysts like Lt. Colonel Frank Rowlett, who headed the team that solved the Japanese diplomatic cipher machine known as Purple, as well as senior officers such as Admiral Harold Stark, Chief of Naval Operations at the time, and General George C. Marshall, Chief of Staff, United States Army.

Oddly, Safford restricted his list to officers from the Army and Navy and excluded the civilian leadership from the War or Navy Departments, or the White House. He also left off many individuals who had testified at any of the earlier hearings and who had heard of the Winds Execute message such as William F. Friedman. It did it not include anyone who might have been at the intercept station at Cheltenham where Safford believed the message had been copied. When questioned further, Safford then named more individuals who, at the time, were junior navy officers, any one of who he believed might have delivered the Winds translation to Admiral Noyes that morning.^[]

One more part of Safford's charge surfaced the afternoon of 2 February when he was questioned about what happened to all of the copies of the Winds message translation and the original Japanese text. In response to separate questions about what happened to the copies of the Winds Execute translation and any associated records, Safford stated that material had disappeared. He added that there was the "appearance" of a conspiracy between the Navy and War Departments to destroy all of the copies.^[] As to who issued the order to do so, Safford backed off from his earlier assertion before the Hewitt Inquiry that the destruction was carried out under the direct order of General Marshall. When asked by the congressional inquiry whether he believed that Marshall had ordered the papers destroyed, Safford declined to answer.^[]