The Purple Code, on the other hand, was issued only to certain key Japanese Embassies and Consulates throughout the world. Consequently, in order to get their war warning message–that is, destruct classified files, and so forth–to all concerned, they resorted to employing this lower level code for expeditious dissemination.
There still exists some confusion concerning the various alleged weather intercepts prior to, during the attack and following my interception of the key message of 4 December 1941. The FCC, for example, testified before the Roberts Commission to the effect that they had received some three Japanese language weather broadcasts from 4 December, one on 5 December, and the last one on 8 December from three different stations. Now, two of these messages seemingly contained key words of the winds code. The second message on 5 December itself with and quoted the phrase HIKAN KAZI KOMURO repeated three times, which signified Japanese–USSR relations. In their last message, which they claimed to have intercepted on 8 December, read NISHI NO KAZE HARE, West Wind Clear, signifying a break with the British. That was repeated twice.
Now, not withstanding the foregoing, my intercept on 4 December appears to remain the single and only intercept of the true Winds execute message signifying a break between the United States and Japan prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor. It should be noted that after the attack had commenced at 0730 a.m., Honolulu time, at 0800 precisely on schedule, Tokyo came up on its regular news broadcast and inserted the same winds execute code that I had previously intercepted on 4 December as part of their routine news broadcast. This was repeated twice.
This has been confirmed during an interview in 1960 or 1962, somewhere in that period, between Takao Yoshikawa who was then 46 years old–he was a former espionage agent who worked under cover as a vice consul at Honolulu. Now, both he and Consul General Kita began to destroy all classified material on that date. Local police and Bureau agents descended on the consulate about 35 minutes after the attack had commenced and carted off what residue remained.
Back to the date of the interception of the Winds execution message. I immediately called in Wigle, who said “Get it on the circuit right away to downtown Washington’s 20G terminal,” which I did. In addition to the original message, I had copied two carbon copies of the entire weather broadcast and a log sheet entry was also made by me.
That was the last time I ever saw either the weather broadcast messages or my log sheet until 1960 through 1962.
At that time I was assigned as Officer in Charge of our Communication Unit at Crane, Indiana and had control over all our World War II communications intelligence crypto archives. In searching through this voluminous material, I finally located my log sheet on the date in question.
I had recorded the key words of the winds execute message and, of course, it bore my sine, “RT”. No one else in the organization had used RT except me. And incidently that stood for two things, take your choice:
Rough and Tough or Right Tender.
Everybody knew RT.
Station HYPO 
18 August 2022 at 02:17
I take issue with CWO4 Briggs on the Japanese consulate’s destruction of codes and secret documents in Honolulu. He claims codes and such were being destroyed by the consulate on Sunday, 7 December 1941. A similar claim was made to support him by Robert L. Shivers, the FBI agent in charge in Hawaii after 7 December 1941..
The fact is that at 2103, 2 December 1941, Consul General Kita in Honolulu delivered a one word telegram to RCA’s Honolulu office. That telegram read: “HARUNA.” It was signed “KITA.”
The meaning of the HARUNA telegram meant that the embassies and consulates that had been previously ordered to destroy their codes and secret papers had complied with that order. Obviously, the Japanese consulate in Honolulu had thus destroyed his most secret crypto systems and his secret documents by 2103 (Hawaiian time) on 2 December 1941.
This telegram was transmitted by RCA’s Honolulu office to the foreign ministry in Tokyo at 2123, 2 December 1941 (Honolulu time).
A photostatic copy of Consul General Kita’s HARUNA telegram is published on page 43 of David Kahn’s THE CODEBREAKERS: THE STORY OF SECRET WRITING, Macmillan Company, 1967, fifth printing, September 1969.
It may be that the Honolulu consulate was burning some coded messages and perhaps the PA-K2 code on Sunday, 7 December 1941. The fact is, however, that the bulk of Kita’s secret material and higher level codes were destroyed by 2103, Honolulu time, 2 December 1941.
The United States had previously intercepted the Foreign Ministry’s orders to the Japanese embassies in Washington and London ordering them to destroy their codes and secret papers. This was prior to the broadcast of the winds execute message, HIGASHI NO KAZE AME. Without looking at notes, I believe the Signal Intelligence Service intercepted 18 different “HARUNA” telegrams between 2 and 7 December 1941. The HARUNA telegram was to be sent after these embassies and consulates had destroyed their codes and secret documents.
One may ask why does it matter when the Honolulu consulate had destroyed its various cryptographic systems and secret documents? The reason is there is testimony in the Pearl Harbor Attack Hearings that American law enforcement personnel broke into the Honolulu consulate on Sunday, 7 Dec. 1941 when they saw smoke coming out of a chimney on the roof of the consulate. The story claims that the unburned code book(s) were used by Navy cryptanalysts to then decode some of Consul General Kita’s unburned telegrams. There are major problems with these claims. It is a known fact that the Navy’s combat/communications intelligence unit on Oahu was in possession of the same Japanese cryptographic systems that were possessed by the Navy Department (OP-20-G) and by Station CAST. While no book or article I’ve read has mentioned this particular fact, when Admiral Kimmel went before the Roberts Commission less than a month after Pearl Harbor, he had with him decrypted copies of some of Consul General Kita’s communications with Tokyo. This issue did not come up in 1946 during Admiral Kimmel’s JCC testimony.
Should anyone wish to know my sources on the above, I may be reached at amckane@reagan.com or at my post office box listed below.
Andy McKane, P.O. Box 166, Maunaloa, Hawaii, 96770; 1615 (Hawaiian time), Wednesday, 17 August 2022.
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