This recent government publication investigates an area often overlooked by historians: the impact of the Holocaust on the Western powers' intelligence-gathering community. A guide for researchers rather than a narrative study, it explains the archival organization of wartime records accumulated by the U.S. Army's Signal Intelligence Service and Britain's Government Code and Cypher School. In addition, it summarizes Holocaust-related information intercepted during the war years and deals at length with the fascinating question of how information about the Holocaust first reached the West.The guide begins with brief summaries of the history of anti-Semitism in the West and early Nazi policies in Germany. An overview of the Allies' system of gathering communications intelligence follows, along with a list of American and British sources of cryptologic records. A concise review of communications intelligence notes items of particular relevance to the Holocaust's historical narrative, and the book concludes with observations on cryptology and the Holocaust. Numerous photographs illuminate the text.

Eavesdropping on Hell: Historical Guide to Western Communications Intelligence and the Holocaust, 1939-1945 (Dover Military History, Weapons, Armor)

History

Hanyok, Robert J.

Military

Dover Publications

For historians and many members of the informed public, the Japanese attack on Hawaii provoked “the never-ending story.” Multiple official investigations and private historical inquiries into the attack and its background have generated enormous stocks of information about both the American and Japanese sides. It may well be that we know as much about December 7, 1941, as we do about any event in the last century, the Kennedy assassination possibly excepted. However, even with this virtual mountain chain of data, information gaps still exist, and many important questions remain under discussion or debate. The discussions and debates are not simply the province of conspiracy buffs. Academics and other researchers interested in World War II have a serious stake in settling the issues of the U.S.-Japan conflict; definite answers to many of the controversies would either confirm or refute theories of the war’s origins and its meaning. This assemblage of documents, supplemented by the author’s clear guide to their meaning, places the reader, as it were, right in the middle of the behind-the-scenes events and helps the scholar and researcher to follow them closely.

West Wind Clear: Cryptology and the Winds Message Controversy - A Documentary History

Agency, National Security

Mowry, David P.

CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

The Vietnam War continues to cast a long shadow over American history and the world's understanding of international relations. The debate about its origins and how it escalated has raged for decades, fueled by conflicting narratives and a lingering distrust of official accounts. This document, a declassified and previously un-published account of the Gulf of Tonkin Incident of 1964, goes deep inside the National Security Agency's (NSA) signals intelligence (SIGINT) operation during the crisis, revealing a shocking truth: the second attack, which was used to justify a congressional resolution granting President Johnson a blank check for military intervention in Vietnam, never happened. This report, drawing on an unprecedented amount of newly-released and previously unavailable SIGINT data, and originally published in the NSA's Cryptologic Quarterly, analyzes the events that transpired between August 2-4, 1964, revealing how analytic errors and deliberate misrepresentations of intercepted communications ultimately led to a tragic escalation of the conflict. Using detailed analysis of the raw SIGINT reports, this document exposes a previously hidden dimension of the Tonkin Gulf Incident, highlighting the complexities and potential pitfalls of signals intelligence analysis. It is a must-read for researchers, policymakers, practitioners, and anyone interested in understanding the origins and dynamics of the Vietnam War. This document offers a rare and compelling glimpse into the inner workings of the NSA, revealing the potential for human bias and error within even the most advanced intelligence agencies.

Skunks, Bogies, Silent Hounds, and the Flying Fish: The Gulf of Tonkin Mystery, 2-4 August 1964 (AI Lab for Book-Lovers)

Nimble Books

Did the American Government and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt have advance information about Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor and was this fact later suppressed, either to conceal incompetence or because the President wanted an act of aggression to force America into war with the Axis Powers? For decades, professional and amateur historians alike have scrutinized the voluminous and sometimes contradictory trail of evidence surrounding this historic and tragic event to find an answer. One of the most written-about pieces of this historical puzzle is the so-called “West Wind Execute” message, Japan’s code phrase to advise its diplomats abroad that an attack on America was imminent. In “West Wind Clear: Cryptology and the Winds Message Controversy – a Documentary History”, the U.S. National Security Agency’s Center for Cryptologic History has tackled the complex history of this message, when it was sent, and why its existence or non-existence has exercised the imaginations of academics, amateur historians, and conspiracy buffs since the 1940s. Crucially, this book includes many key documents, some never before published, dealing with the voluminous Japanese signals traffic leading up to the Pearl Harbor attack and the timing of signals interception and decoding. The authors state that the main source of continuing debate over the “who knew and when” question resulted from a number of contradictory statements by a well-respected American cryptographer, Captain Laurence Safford, USN, whose reliability as a witness was undermined during the hearings of the 1946  Joint Congressional Committee investigation of the Pearl Harbor debacle. Despite these findings, the West Wind controversy has persisted in popular accounts that lent credibility to the stories of Safford and Ralph Briggs, a radio operator who many years after the fact claimed to recollect a West Wind Execute message before the attack. “West Wind Clear” makes a strong and well-documented case against a suppressed warning of war, although perhaps no account of the run-up to the Pearl Harbor debacle may ever lay to rest the many conspiracy theories bruited about since 1941. For anyone interested in the continuing debate, this book is an indispensable research and reference work.

Military Bookshop

Eavesdropping on Hell: Historical Guide to Western Communications Intelligence and the Holocaust, 1939-1945 (Second Edition)

Center for Cryptologic History

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