Who Was Responsible for Pearl Harbor?

Because the FBI failed to share a German questionnaire with U.S. military leaders, Britain inadvertabtly provided a blueprint for Japan's December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. During World War II, Japan joined the Axis by signing a Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy on September 27, 1940. Less than two months later, outdated British airplanes took off from naval carriers and launched a successful night time bombing raid on Italy's well-fortified Mediterranean naval base at Taranto. According to Larry Loftis' account in his book, Into the Lion's Mouth, Japan repeatedly asked Germany to provide details of Britain's surprise Taranto attack. Berlin had different priorities: aerial bombing Britain into submission while pressure from Senator Arthur Vandenberg's isolationists kept the United States out of the war. Nonetheless, Japan's persistence paid off. In the German questionnaire a spy carried to the United States, Taranto morphed into Pearl Harbor. The airfields, airplane hangars, wharfs, submarine stations, ammunition dumps and oil supply depots Britain destroyed in Italy became the targets Tokyo wanted to identify in Hawaii. Posing as a wealthy playboy, Kusko Popov, said to be one of Ian Fleming's inspirations for the James Bond character, served as a double agent spying for both Germany and Britain. London knew what he was doing and helped furnish Germany with useless and false information. Hitler was not in on the charade. When Germany sent Popov to the U.S. to replace its inept Hawaiian spy, Loftis recounts how he came to New York in August, 1941, carrying the Japanese-inspired, German questionnaire requesting him to collect detailed information about Pearl Harbor. Along with an English translation of the questionnaire were telegrams ontaining photographically-reduced information embedded in microdots the size of periods. A period containing the German version of the Pearl Harbor questionnaire could be read under a microscope. Popov turned over the German questionnaire, English translation and telegrams with microdots to FBI representatives on August 19, 1941. London mistakenly believed the FBI would welcome counterespionage assistance from a trusted British spy like Popov and that helping William "Wild Bill" Donovan set up a new Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency, would reinforce the Anglo-American bond and help encourage President Franklin D. Roosevelt to provide the military assisatnce Britain urgently needed. At the FBI, although J. Edgar Hoover received an English translation of the Pearl Harbor questionnaire by August 19, 1941, on September 3, 1941, he only shared information about the microdots with the President's military secretary. Furthermore, he gave the impression Germany's new system for transmitting information by microdots was discovered during an FBI investigation. Although the FBI had pledged to counter Axis espionage by cooperating with miltiary intelligence, Hoover was not about to allow the new OSS to threaten his agency's investigative authority and budget. Loftis concludes, none of the eight, pre-1948 investigations of intelligence failutes prior to December 7, 1941, mentioned the FBI had received, ignored and failed to share the German questionnaire Dusko Popov delivered to the United States nearly four months before Japan's surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.