A Tale of Two Subs Read online

  In those years, Honolulu was a small town. The road leading to the naval station at Pearl Harbor was just a two-lane dirt road. There was only one beauty parlor worth noting, because it had exclusive European products, and because the young woman who ran it, Susie “Ruth” Kühn, charged very reasonable rates. Everybody seemed to know the wealthy, amiable, and somewhat odd Kühn family, who had immigrated from Germany in August 1935. Ruth’s father, Bernard, was a physician, but he didn’t run a practice, and when it came to speculation about the source of their prosperity, he gave vague explanations about coming into an inheritance, or profitable investment instruments. If so, they weren’t local because he wasn’t doing business in the islands and he wasn’t trading stocks with the local brokers. But no matter, business was booming at the salon, so much so that Kühn’s wife, Friedel, often helped Ruth when there was a rush. Ruth was a pretty and gregarious young woman who dated mostly sailors, and would eventually become engaged to a sailor. Her salon catered to the wives of high-ranking naval officers. “They talked so much that it was a relief when they left the place,” she said.

  Her mother, Friedel, also accompanied Dr. Kühn to the hills surrounding Honolulu or on his little sailboat around the harbor to conduct research for a history of the islands. Whether in the boat or on the hills, they examined the geography, took pictures, and made extensive mental notes. Dr. Kühn would also take his inquisitive young son, Hans, to the docks for a look at the Navy ships. Hans dressed in a Cracker Jack suit with a little Navy hat and charmed the sailors all along the waterfront. Though the good doctor couldn’t go on the men-of-war for security reasons, the sailors often took Hans on a tour of the boat where he could admire all the neat-looking gadgets and ask all manner of questions.

  But as the 1930s drew to a close, the docks became more restricted. Europe teetered closer to war when Hitler conducted a hostile annexation of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia and flouted the Treaty of Versailles by remilitarizing the Rhineland along the border with France. In the Pacific, the British, American, Dutch, and Australian governments reacted to Japan’s Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere and war atrocities in Manchuria with tighter trade restrictions. Unfortunately, their Pacific fleets couldn’t enforce those policies if hostilities began as a result of the restrictions. In anticipation of a possible war with Germany and Japan, the U.S. Navy started calling reservists into active duty and started courting retired officers like Jasper Holmes.

  Holmes demurred. His premature retirement from the Navy had caused not a small amount of anxiety, and he didn’t want to risk his new career at the University of Hawaii. In any event, war wasn’t a foregone conclusion for the United States in 1940, which was also a presidential election year. Even as France fell to the Nazis in June 1940, the country was opposed to fighting a war in Europe or anywhere else for that matter, and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt campaigned with a pledge not to send our boys to Europe. Late in 1940, however, the nation started the first peacetime draft, and shortly after he won the election, FDR announced the Lend-Lease program with Britain and the Soviet Union, whereby FDR could get around existing law to provide ships and war matériel to those important allies.

  By mid-1941, the devastating war in Europe had been in full swing for nearly two years. Hitler’s U-boats were choking off Britain’s vital lifelines to war matériel, and now that Hitler had conquered continental Europe, he redirected his armies to the Eastern Front, where the Soviet Union staggered under the assault. While FDR’s administration was otherwise occupied with the situation in Europe, diplomatic tensions with Japan waxed and waned down a path that led closer to war. In June 1941, commandant Admiral Claude C. Bloch called on Jasper Holmes to consider taking on a position as a combat intelligence officer for the Fourteenth Naval District, which was based in Hawaii. Holmes accepted, though neither man had an understanding of intelligence as it pertained to naval operations, let alone what a combat intelligence officer would do. Both took the arrangement to be a situation where the arthritic Holmes would do bureaucratic scut work, but as it turned out it would be a privileged vantage point to observe and participate in the secret, behind-the-scenes decision making at the highest levels that would win or lose the war.

  Earlier that year in March, a twenty-nine-year-old diplomat named Tadashi Morimura came to the islands to act as chancellor at the Japanese consulate. He took up residence at a cottage on the grounds there and set about the task he’d been sent to accomplish, though not by Japan’s Foreign Ministry. Morimura had studied English for several years and kept up on naval developments and the shipping news with the Honolulu Star-Bulletin and the Honolulu Advertiser.

  He began to familiarize himself with Honolulu and the surrounding area, and although he’d previously had health issues that had very nearly destroyed his career, he spent time at a Japanese teahouse drinking heavily and chasing skirts with the U.S. Navy sailors. He particularly enjoyed talking to the geishas, who told him about their customers. The second floor had a telescope to take in the sights of Pearl Harbor, where the U.S. fleet lay anchored. At that time, this included the USS Sculpin and her sister ship, the Sailfish. In retrospect, Morimura and his superiors might have paid more attention to the submarine fleet, which for now was just an afterthought. Instead he gave the battleships and cruisers particular scrutiny, noting their comings and goings. For instance, they arrived to stay at harbor for the weekend and went back out to sea on Monday, though he had yet to discover where they went.

  Morimura was not given to frequenting one place for too long, however. Constantly in motion, he might take some girlfriends for a ride around Oahu in a tourist boat, or go on long drives in a taxi or chauffeured consular car. Alternatively, having taken aeronautics training several years ago, he would rent a plane at John Rodgers Airport and fly around the area. He would also sometimes take a bus, dressed as a workman. He never took photographs, and saved his note taking for later. His evenings were spent writing reports and encoding them. Consul General Nagao Kita and Vice Consul Otojiro Okuda were likely the only ones in the Hawaiian Islands to receive his reports, and perhaps not even them. Couriers at the consulate took the encoded versions to the RCA offices in Honolulu so that they could be transmitted back to Japan as radiograms. “The Americans were very foolish,” Morimura would say, years later.

  Jasper Holmes also found himself busy, but unlike Morimura, he seemed to be spinning his wheels. District Intelligence (as distinct from the Fleet Intelligence) concerned itself mainly with counterintelligence—the detection of foreign intelligence operations. The main office was in downtown Honolulu, but they had a satellite office at the Navy Yard, where Holmes reported. His immediate superior there seemed to have no need of him to the extent that there was literally no place to put him. At a loss, he asked Bloch for direction and was told that he could “write my own ticket.” At the time, the Navy didn’t have a comprehensive program to plot the location and progress of merchantmen to and from the various ports across the Pacific. Sensing that this information would be valuable at the outbreak of war, Holmes busied himself by reading the shipping news and picking up gossip about the comings and goings of the various vessels at the shipping offices.

  Holmes realized that many ships at sea transmitted a daily weather report that included temperature, wind speed, and barometric pressure. These reports were forwarded to the weather service to make forecasts for the West Coast of the United States, but more important to him, the radio transmissions included the longitude and latitude of the ships. Deciding to leave no stone unturned, he went down to the same local RCA office that the Japanese consulate used, to inquire whether he could get a daily rundown of these reports. The representative there said that he might help Holmes if there were some sort of emergency, but that the transmissions were technically a private matter, and that they couldn’t provide what he needed as a matter of routine. Holmes was disappointed, and thinking that the matter was over, he consoled himself that at least he might have a good s
ource of information should the need arise.

  But it wasn’t over. The next day he received a call from the office of Captain Irving Mayfield, who was the Fourteenth Naval District’s intelligence officer. They’d learned that Holmes had been illegally seeking unauthorized information that was protected by a law passed in 1934, and whose penalties included serious jail time and thousands of dollars in fines. Holmes hadn’t intended to stir up a hornet’s nest and didn’t pursue it further; he’d only wanted accurate information for his plot. A close reading of the act would have led him to the conclusion that he could be authorized by the carrier, in this case RCA, and that Captain Mayfield’s peculiar interest in law enforcement had nothing to do with upholding the privacy of radio communications.

  War seemed imminent that fall when negotiations between Japan and the United States came to an impasse. The State Department insisted on terms that FDR and Secretary of State Cordell Hull knew would be unacceptable to the Japanese. For their part, the Japanese Foreign Ministry increased the number and severity of vague consequences should diplomatic efforts come to naught. The Army and the Fourteenth Naval District under Admiral Claude Bloch were responsible for the security of Pearl Harbor and the associated naval and army installations around the islands, and they took measures to increase security and war preparedness.

  Admiral Thomas Withers was the ComSubPac at the time, and Jasper Holmes would likely have heard from his old sub force friends that they were drilling relentlessly with torpedo firing practice, crash dives, and airpower demonstrations. The skippers had assumed that their subs were invisible at a depth of sixty-five feet from the surface to the keel,* or periscope depth. Withers had Navy pilots drop “firecracker” bombs on all such subs, which harmed nothing but the skippers’ confidence in the subs’ stealth. Withers also held maneuvers where destroyers would use sonar to locate and make a mock attack on participating subs. One prewar destroyer division commander boasted that he could detect and depth-charge 70 percent of the submarines in a given area. Most of the sub skippers were older and had risen to command as a result of superior paperwork skills and adherence to sub fleet orthodoxy. If a destroyer or airplane caught the skippers while making an attack approach during fleet exercises, the staff officers were quick to reprimand them. The effect of the airplane, destroyer, and sonar approach drills was to scare the hell out of the already overcautious skippers, which among other things would cause serious harm to their effectiveness at the beginning of the war.

  Holmes was also learning that his new job would soon have grave consequences for his friends in the sub force. Its proportions would extend to the breadth and depth of the U.S. Navy’s entire war effort, and it would be no exaggeration to say that his work wasn’t a matter of life or death but rather a matter of the lives and deaths of hundreds of thousands on both sides of the Pacific. Although he had no way of knowing that what he did would determine the outcome in the Pacific theater, he got his first hints about the job when his superiors detached him to the Combat Intelligence Center (or CIC), though what that entailed was never really clear. He moved his notes to the basement of the Administration Building, under the harbor director’s office, in August 1941. It was a secure area, so he could put up the maps tracking the merchantmen. In the confusing bureaucratic scrum, he remained part of District Intelligence but was detached to the CIC’s commander, Joe J. Rochefort.

  Although there was much more to each man than met the eye, neither particularly impressed the other. Rochefort needed personnel, but a long-absent reservist whose background didn’t suit his purposes might prove to be more of a hindrance. Holmes did have one thing going for him, though: the organizational title Combat Intelligence Center, a bureaucratic handle that Rochefort needed to conceal his activities. Still, he didn’t know if Holmes could be trusted.

  For his part, Holmes described Rochefort as “a tall, lean commander with a conciliatory smile that nullified his habit of caustic speech.” And although Holmes’s career had been cut short by physical infirmity, Rochefort and the officers who reported to him didn’t have the rank that their classmates at the Naval Academy had attained; to Holmes this seemed to suggest that they might be second- or third-rate officers filling undesirable billets. His initial impression of them was that “there was no large outcropping of genius.” But Holmes was mistaken, and would come to learn that their line of work required skill, dedication, and long periods of uninterrupted time, which came at the exclusion of sea duty. The selection boards held up their promotions because of their lack of experience aboard vessels.

  Rochefort was at one time the intelligence officer to then Commander of the Pacific Fleet Admiral Joseph Reeves. Most of his time was spent doing background checks on the attendees of meetings with the admiral. He had also taken the Japanese language course and had studied radio intelligence, and when the spy case of Harry T. Thompson came up in the 1930s, he made arrangements that resulted in Thompson’s conviction, as well as the identification of Thompson’s handler, a Japanese naval attaché who was posing as a student. Thompson got fifteen years in the clink; his handler fled the country.

  Before arriving to command the decryption shop, Rochefort’s second-in-command, Lieutenant Commander Thomas H. Dyer, had actually set up Hypo, as it was called; Hypo was the real operation concealed behind the more innocuous-sounding Combat Intelligence Center. Tommy had the air of a likable, absentminded professor with a good sense of humor. A photograph of him from that period shows him in uniform at his desk with wild hair, as though he’d just woken up. Given the long hours he worked, this wouldn’t have been unusual. On the messy, cluttered desk are illustrations of hula girls, and behind him is a sign warding away any unnecessary cleaning help. His face is grim, almost despairing. Dyer’s past in the Office of Naval Intelligence included an assignment to investigate a dead end in the Lindbergh baby kidnapping case. A woman had sent a collection of objects that might yield tantalizing clues, and though Dyer scrutinized every aspect in the gathering of junk, in the end he correctly concluded that the woman was delusional.

  Heavy steel doors separated Holmes from Rochefort, Dyer, and the rest of their crew. They didn’t talk to him about what they were doing, and he didn’t inquire. His first clues about the organization came in dribs and drabs. They had unusual equipment: an IBM punch card machine and collators to sort the cards. Knowing that Holmes had a good assortment of resources, Signalman Anthony Ethier would sometimes pop out from behind the closed doors and ask Holmes bizarre cartographical questions about obscure coral atolls and place-names across the Pacific. Holmes probably learned from Ethier that the Coast Guard intercepted merchantman weather traffic—the very information he’d tried to get from the RCA station. He also learned that the weather codes had changed recently to deny the Japanese navy that information, and that the personnel behind the steel doors decrypted the signals, which would aid Holmes’s ship plotting. And oh, by the way, Ethier was decrypting the much more complicated Japanese merchant marine weather codes, if he wanted the positions of their ships, too.

  Holmes immediately realized that Ethier and his recently arrived assistant, Petty Officer William Livingston, were probably conversant in Japanese. Enough, at least, to crack codes. For Holmes, Hypo’s activities were confirmed to him when Wesley “Ham” Wright, another of Rochefort’s crew, found out that Holmes had taught mathematics at the University of Hawaii, and asked if Holmes could help create an equation to manipulate series of five-digit numbers. The solution, if one existed, was far beyond Holmes’s capabilities.

  Since Rochefort had an insatiable need for personnel, he took delivery of a handful of students from the Japanese language class in Japan. As war tensions increased, the Navy abandoned the school and started bringing personnel back to U.S. territory. In turn, the Japanese were also evacuating from the United States and its territories. Since the State Department was trying to find a diplomatic resolution of its tensions with Japan, the government loosened some of the restrictions on Japan
ese shipping. The Tatsuta Maru, a transpacific Japanese luxury liner, came to Honolulu to pick up Japanese expatriates. The Japanese naval officials took diplomatic packages to and from the consulate. These may have included instructions and specific questions for consulate chancellor Tadashi Morimura, whose true name was Ensign Takeo Yoshikawa. On October 20 or 21, 1941, he bought a ticket on a tourist plane and happily snapped photographs of the naval installations at Ford Island and the ships berthed in Pearl Harbor. Ensign Yoshikawa’s activities would doubtless stop after the planned attack on Pearl Harbor, but the Third Division of the Japanese Naval General Staff, for whom Yoshikawa worked, wanted an uninterrupted flow of intelligence after the attack. The ideal spy would be an inconspicuous Occidental. Their allies, the Germans and Italians, had already withdrawn their consular staff from Hawaii, however, and in any case, Germany and Italy would probably soon be at war with America. Luckily, they had already groomed Yoshikawa’s replacement and his family during the past six years with tens of thousands of dollars. The naval officials aboard the Tatsuta Maru now carried thousands more in cash and instructions for Dr. Bernard Julius Kühn.

  Kühn, as it turned out, had been a high-placed official in the Nazis’ secret police apparatus. His station put him in the same circles as Joseph Göbbels, Hitler’s grotesque propaganda minister, who along with his wife had raised Germany’s “ideal family” of six children.* Göbbels liked children so much that he took Kühn’s teenage daughter, Ruth, as a mistress. Since Kühn was too high on the Nazi Party pecking order to dispose of when the romance cooled, Göbbels needed to find a way to get rid of the entire family. In the mid-1930s, the Japanese were looking for a non-Japanese spy in Hawaii, and Göbbels suggested the junket to Kühn.