4.9. The Winds Controversy Resurfaces: Ralph Briggs' Claim
The Winds controversy virtually disappeared after the conclusion of the Joint Congressional Committee hearings. Some of Safford's supporters kept alive his version, but the general trend for histories of Pearl Harbor written during the next three decades tended to relegate the matter of the Winds message to the role of a curiosity or a mistake on the part of Safford. But this was to change in the late 1970s with the appearance of another source that claimed there had been a Winds Execute message prior to Pearl Harbor, and, furthermore, this source actually had copied it. Within a few years the Winds controversy returned as part of a renewed interest in the charge that the Roosevelt administration conspired to cover up the disaster at Pearl Harbor.
The source behind this new charge about the Winds execute was a former OP-20-G intercept operator by the name of Ralph Briggs. Briggs was a veteran radio intercept operator, one of the first trained to copy Japanese Morse communications as part of the legendary OP-20-G "On The Roof Gang" (OTRG). In December 1941 he was a Morse intercept operator stationed at the navy monitoring station in Cheltenham, Maryland, about fifteen miles east of Washington, D.C. One of the targets he copied was Japanese Morse commercial and merchant marine broadcasts.[]
In 1977 a navy historian interviewed Briggs. In the interview Briggs said that "On watch on the evening of the mid-shift of 4 December [which means he had begun work late on the evening of 3 December and finished his shift sometime between 4 and 6:00 AM on 4 December.]...I picked up [tuned in on his radio] on schedule the Orange [Japanese] weather BAMS broadcast circuit [merchant ship broadcast]... I soon discovered that I had copied HIGASHI NO KAZEAME, which in Japanese means "East Wind Rain." And also meant a break between the United States and Japan."[]
Briggs stated that the intercepted message had been forwarded to the operations center (GY) at OP-20-G Headquarters in Washington via leased teletype line (TWX). Briggs added that he had sent the intercept to headquarters after telling his shift supervisor, whom Briggs never identified in his interview but referred to him only as "DW," had agreed to Briggs' decision over the phone.
In a 1986 article in a navy cryptologic veterans newsletter, Cryptolog, Briggs embellished his original story from the interview nine years earlier with more telling and provocative details. Briggs claimed that just a few days after he had intercepted the Winds message, Captain Safford had sent a "huge bunch of roses" with an attached note that read "Well Done." Attached to this bouquet was an envelope that contained a classified note from Safford that expressed his appreciation of the station's work.[]
Briggs stroked the fires of conspiracy by claiming that in 1960, while stationed at the Naval Security Group (a successor organization to OP-20-G) records center in Crane, Indiana, he had reviewed the files of the Cheltenham station. When he checked the files for 4 December, he found they were missing. He said that he wrote a note on the daily intercept log for 4 December that, "all transmissions intercepted by me between 0500 (5:00 AM) and 1300 (1:00 PM) on the above date [of the log sheet for 4 December] are missing from these files & that these intercepts contained the Winds message warning code..." [Exhibit #48][]
Briggs' claim was fresh fodder for the Pearl Harbor conspiracy advocates. When his story was added to Safford's old narrative, the result suggested that perhaps the Winds Execute message had been intercepted, processed, and disseminated throughout the Roosevelt administration. The lack of records could be credited to the conspiratorial cover-up performed by unnamed individuals at the behest of unknown leaders. Whatever gaps existed in the narrative of conspiracy could be filled in with insinuation and questions. It took only a few years for the books to appear with Briggs' story a new feature.
Two books appeared in the early 1980s that featured Briggs' story. These were John Costello's The Pacific War, 1941–1945 (1981) and John Toland's Infamy: Pearl Harbor and its Aftermath (1982).[] Costello discussed the Winds controversy in an appendix to his book. He averred that Safford's failure to convince people of the cover-up was due largely to his inability to get "backing of powerful [naval] flag officers."[] Costello also referred to Briggs' statement that he had copied the Winds message in question. In the end, though, Costello backed off from claiming that a full conspiracy existed, adding that there was little evidence that the message had been sent, just the testimony of Safford and Briggs. But Costello left the matter tinted with a hue of suspicion when he wrote that the issue of the purported missing warning message suggests "the lengths most senior level officers in Washington might have been prepared to go to cover up what could be construed as a fatal omission in not passing on vital intelligence."[] It is not clear if Costello meant the missing "Winds" message or the warning message Admiral Noyes was prepared to send to Kimmel, but did not send.
Toland, in his narrative of events, similarly rehashed all of Safford's charges, cloaking them in the fabric of a massive government-wide conspiracy. Toland added Briggs' dramatic wrinkles to the story, treating them as a major part of his narrative. In Toland's version, Briggs stated that he had been in contact with Safford during the congressional hearings. He had admitted he had copied the Winds message, and then offered to testify to this effect. However, according to Briggs, his commanding officer intervened and ordered him not to get involved. Briggs said that this order had originated from "someone" on the JCC staff.[]
Seaman Briggs' story simply was too full of holes to hold up to much scrutiny. For one thing, he could not pin down the circumstances of his intercept of the Winds Execute message. In his interview, he said that he had worked the midnight shift from 3 to 4 December. Such a shift would have begun late on the evening of 3 December, probably 9:00 or 10:00 PM, or even as late as midnight. It would have ended around 5:00 or 6:00 AM on the morning of 4 December. Yet a few pages later in his interview, he says that all transmissions copied by him between 5:00 AM and 1:00 PM on 4 December were missing. This statement suggests that he worked sixteen straight hours across two shifts. Now, it was not unusual for navy intercept operators to work two eight-hour shifts in one day, but they were separated by a break of eight hours.[] In fact, Briggs was working eight-hour shifts at Cheltenham, according to the log he supplied Toland.
Interestingly, for someone who claimed to have copied such an important message, he could recall no details of it. He could not explain at what time he copied the Execute code phrase, how long the transmission was, what station (callsign) sent it, or what frequency he heard it on. Briggs tried to claim that the station was transmitting somewhere between 13 and 15 Megahertz (MHz). Yet this is not near Safford's claimed frequency of 11 MHz and quite far from the 9 MHz on which the FCC heard the actual broadcast.
Briggs did say he heard the weather broadcast on what he called the "Orange" weather BAMS broadcast. BAMS was an acronym for the Broadcast to Allied Merchant Ships, a broadcast message system intended for all Allied merchant ships. What he really meant to describe what he was monitoring was the MAM. The MAM was a term U.S. Navy operators used to describe the Japanese merchant ship broadcast, which was similar in some ways to the "BAMS" system. One of the distinguishing characteristics of the Japanese system was that the trigraph "MAM" was used often as the general callsign for all Japanese merchant ships. The MAM system was a worldwide broadcast for Japanese merchant ships, which carried encrypted traffic, as well as shipping information such as notice to mariners and weather reports. There may have even been regular transmission of short news programs in Morse sent to the ships.
However, Briggs' intercept story is contradicted by the Winds instruction messages. The code phrases and words were to be sent in a strict format. If they were to be sent in Morse, they would appear on the overseas commercial news broadcasts and only as a single word sent five times at the beginning and end of the broadcast. If the code phrases, such as HIGASHI NO KAZAME, were to be used, they would appear only in the voice broadcast. Most importantly, there was no provision in the instructions for transmission over the merchant shipping broadcast.
In his 1986 article, Briggs claimed that the mysterious "DW" could substantiate his claims. However, "DW" was no mystery man after all. He was D.W. Wigle, who, at the time in December 1941, was Cheltenham's radioman-in-charge of operations at the site. As mentioned previously in regards to Safford's claim that he had sent tasking to Cheltenham, Wigle had contributed a statement to the congressional hearings in which he stated that he had never received any tasking from OP-20-G to monitor for a Winds Execute message and that Cheltenham had no assignment to copy Japanese Morse news broadcast except on an opportunistic basis. Cheltenham's primary missions were German naval and European diplomatic communications. The lowest tasked mission was Japanese merchant marine broadcasts.[]
The major problem with Briggs' statement was that, since he claimed to have copied just the one phrase, "East Wind Rain," this would have contradicted Safford's claim that all three phrases had been part of the broadcast. It would have been difficult to have Briggs testify, as Briggs' claimed Safford wanted him to do, if his story did not match Safford's. As for being ordered not to testify, the truth was that, if the committee had known of his story, it would have subpoenaed him to appear. The Republican members of the committee, especially, would not have let the opportunity slip by. The committee got whomever it wanted to appear. In fact, in one case, a former naval aide to President Roosevelt who was serving at sea aboard the USS Indiana at the time of the hearings was subpoenaed. He was flown back to Washington to testify.[]
Finally, the fact that Briggs discovered that Cheltenham files were gone was not extraordinary at all. Most of the site's papers had been destroyed in 1942 as part of the standard destruction procedures for all noncurrent records.[] In fact, all navy field sites had performed periodic destruction of noncurrent records during the war. Cheltenham's files from late 1941 had been burned in December 1942 [Exhibit #49][] (Since 1941, the copies of the intercepted messages used in histories and as exhibits for the JCC Hearings have come from files located in OP-20-G headquarters in Washington. These files had been sent to Washington from the field sites. Station logs and other papers that were to be retained were shipped to the Navy's record facility at Crane, Indiana.)
Whatever Briggs had in mind when he came forward with his claim, in the end he could not support it with any concrete evidence. During his interview, he had stated that he had located the Cheltenham intercept log for 4 December at the Crane records facility. He said he had handwritten a statement about the missing files on the log. However, the log sheet he wrote on was the one for 2 December 1941. That log indicated that he had worked the morning/day shift at Cheltenham from 5:00 AM to 1:00 PM that day. The log noted that he (identified by operator sign "RT") had copied press broadcast for the entire day and not the Japanese MAM broadcast as he had claimed. [Exhibit #50][]