Under Friedman’s direction, the SIS cryptanalysts, and primarily the people from the Rowlett team, by 1940 achieved, with the help of their mathematical “magic,” truly great success in deciphering Japan’s secret correspondence. The main success was the massive breaking of a system codenamed Purple, a new Japanese cipher machine for diplomatic correspondence. And although the corre- spondence of the Japanese armed forces was decoded much worse and slower, the volume and efficiency of decrypting the Japanese Foreign Ministry materials gave intelligence analysts every reason to believe that the U.S. authorities were fully aware of plans and intentions of a potential enemy.
In particular, shortly before the disaster at Pearl Harbor, such an episode took place. Here it is reconstructed according to the per- sonal testimony of its participant, military linguist John Hurt (John Hurt. “The Japanese Problem in the Signal Intelligence Service”. NSA William F. Friedman Collection, Document A58132.
https://www.nsa.gov/news-features/declassified-documents/friedman-documents), who translated those encrypted telegrams from the Japanese For- eign Ministry that were decoded by Friedman’s analysts.
In November 1941, 10 days before the attack, while Hurt and Friedman were visiting a mutual friend in a sanatorium, the cryp- tographer asked the interpreter how he assessed the current state of relations between the United States and Japan from decrypted dis- patches. Hurt replied that the negotiations between Tokyo and Washington seemed to be over. In turn, he asked Friedman what, in his opinion, such an escalation of relations meant. Friedman an- swered very briefly it meant war. Shocked by these words, Hurt emotionally asked the cryptographer, who was much closer to the high authorities, whether the United States was ready for such an escalation of hostility. “I hope so,” Friedman replied…
About what happened to Friedman on the day of the disaster, on Sunday, December 7 1941, his wife Elizebeth told this (Ronald Clark. The Man Who Broke Purple: The Life of Colonel William F. Friedman,
Who Deciphered the Japanese Code in World War II. Boston, MA: Little Brown, 1977):
Friedman himself, hearing the news of the Pearl Harbor attack on the radio, at first found it difficult to believe. For some while, his wife recalls, he could do no more than pace back and forth across the room, muttering to himself over and over again: “But they knew, they knew, they knew.” But the most striking thing about this dramatic story is that a decade and a half later, William Friedman managed to change his views on what happened literally exactly the opposite. He wrote an analytical work where he very competently, authoritatively and ar- gued began to prove that in fact “they did NOT know.” Because this matter, you see, is far from straightforward..
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