Editor’s Note: I hope things go well tomorrow. I have a commitment in town this evening- the ‘town’ being on the more pleasant side of the Potomac- and then will flee to the countryside where, with a little luck, nothing at all will happen. There being no alternative, I suppose we will just see how it goes.
– Vic
Gag Rule
There are a whole bunch of good reasons why the memo came down saying that I could not comment on the subject. You know what I am talking about, though I am not talking. That is why some of the middle part of Mac’s narrative is going to get short shrift. There are still gate-guards out there protecting the past against the future.
I thought the matter that I was directed not to talk about was a fairly reasonable bit of coverage, considering how classified the project had been, back in the day. Mac had some great stories about it, and I knew I had to speak confidentially with him about the real deal. He had been in the middle of it in couple different commands, due to the complexities involved. We had been pointedly reminded that we were still sworn to secrecy about it, though I suppose it was probably something the public ought to be aware of. According to the stark terms of the memo, I can’t even say what it is.
I support the memo, and I support the right of the Press to talk about whatever they want in this enduring constitutional Republic. I remember the last time I got a memo like that. A book about the submarine force was issued, and some retirees had let their tongues wag fiercely about the things they did and the places they did it.
The Brass was alarmed, and told us that secrets remained secrets. Even though the stories were out there in black and white, we were supposed to not talk about anything in the book. I bought it, of course, just to see what the authors had right and what they had wrong. I was impressed by the level of detail they had accumulated and dumped out on the prim white pages.
What the account lacked in strategic context it attempted to make up in sensation, just like what I am not supposed to talk about did, not that I am commenting on it.
Heaven forbid. Mac would understand perfectly well. We live in an elliptical world. Much of what we talk about at Willow, and will talk about again next week, was once fiercely classified. A friend of my parents had been a Navy WAVE oficer, and in discussion over dinner one evening, we talked about her life in Wartime Washington- the usual banal details of finding a socially acceptable place to live, and how the mores of dating and such worked in wartime. I asked specifically where she lived, and she mentioned Ward Circle, at which point I asked if she had been at the Nebraska Avenue complex where the Navy broke codes.
She literally went white, and refused to speak further. She had been informed at her demobilization at the end of the War that if she ever breathed a word of what she and her shipmates had done, the Feds would come aftr her and throw her in jail.
So there is that, and the various landmines in Mac’s career, including some programs and events that remain classified. The Great War against the Fascist powers forced all sorts of innovation. If you want to understand our world today, it is simple enough to go back to the secrets of yesterday and take my assurance that not a great deal has changed. I made a farily succesful career about going back and seeing how real highly motivated people can make things happen when the matter at hand is one of life and death, just like Mac’s generation.
Sources and methods evolve, of course, but the way we work and the way we attempt to keep things secret do not. The article I am not talking about at the moment is clear enough about that, and even if the topic seems to be startling and sinister, the secrets are not nearly as big as other things.
I got a note, for example, from a colleague who wanted to know about the Redman Brothers. Who were those guys, he asked, and what did they do? I sighed when I wrote back. Joe Redman was a Rear Admiral and Director of Naval Communications twice, I wrote, and his little brother John was a Navy Captain. They both made their careers on the great victory at Midway in 1942, and they stole the credit from Joe Rochefort.
Then they had the real hero relieved in the manner of an NYPD Detective in Manhattan who is put back in uniform and sent to walk a beat on Staten Island. Imagine it; the best Japanese linguist and code-breaker in the Navy dismissed from his post, and placed on a drydock for the duration!
The perfidy of the Brothers was concealed by the 25-year gag rule on ultra-top secret of the ULTRA program. It was not until 1970 that the archives were cracked open on the now-ancient war, and while the historians were agog, the rest of the world had moved on.
Here is how the Redman brothers did it.
In separate memoranda to the Director of Naval Communications on 20 June 1942, less than three weeks after the victory at Midway, each of the Redmans criticized the work of Joe Rochefort and Eddie Layton. “Remember,” said Mac, “these were the guys who said the Japanese attack would come against Dutch Harbor in Alaska. If Admrial Nimitz had believed them, we would have lost Midway Island, and the Japanese would have consolidated an island perimeter that would have been hard to crack.”
The senior Redman’s memo snuck up on the real issue. After several paragraphs justifying why Radio Intelligence (the unclassified euphemism for ULTRA) should remain under Communications control rather than in the Office of Naval Intelligence, Joe Redman got to the heart of the matter, and it was about careerists and careerism rather than simply winning a war.
Joe Redman wrote this about Rochefort and Layton: “… they just don’t speak our language. The intercept material must be obtained by operators trained in the Kana code. The source of the operators is Naval Communications. . . the intercept equipment belongs to Communications … the question of traffic analysis involves personnel and only those familiar with radio communications can properly administer this work.”
You would have to have dealt with the folks at NSA to see just how entrenched that view was, and for just how long it had been that way.
Captain Redman then got down to the real business of his memo, which was the personal destruction of the men who cracked the Japanese battle plan. “(Rochefort and Layton) are not technically trained in naval communications, and my feeling is that radio traffic analysis, deception and tracking, etc., are suffering because the importance and possibilities of the phases of radio intelligence are not fully realized. … I believe that a senior officer trained in radio intelligence should head up (a Radio Intelligence unit) rather than one whose background is Japanese language.”
To put the finishing touches on the matter, Joe Redman’s baby brother John signed a letter that pounced on a formal request from Admiral Nimitz letter of 28 May 42 addressed the “inadequacy of the present intelligence section of (my) staff.”
Admiral Nimitz wanted additional resources to be placed under the intelligence department he already had, and he fully supported Eddie Layton, Jasper Holmes and Joe Rochefort. But he gave Washington the chance to twist his words. Rochefort did not get the medal he earned by handing Nimitz the greatest victory of the Pacific war.
No one could talk about what happened for twenty-five years, due to the gag order on the Big Secret of Radio Intelligence. Mac looked over at me the other night at the Willow and said that Captain Goggins showed up to replace Joe Rochefort in the Dungeon after Joe was summoned back to Washington to answer to the headquarters..
“Goggins was one of the Redman Brothers home-boys, wasn’t he?” I asked.
“Yep.”
“How did you work for him under those circumstances?” I said. “That was outrageous, and the office politics in Washington cost American lives!”
“We had to go on. There was a war to win,” said Mac, a little wistfully. “Layton and Holmes survived the coup, and Joe Rochefort was the sacrificial lamb to the Redman Brothers ambition. By the time Eddie Layton could talk about what happened, the history was already written and considered old news. There is a building named for Joe Redman over at the Nebraska Avenue complex. I used to see it when I worked there after the war, and all I could do was mutter under my breath.”
That is all I can do about the other thing that I am not talking about, which is to talk about what I can. But I am a good sailor, and I can follow orders with the best of them. I guess in this case, I suppose I will.
Copyright 2017 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com