MIDWAY BETRAYAL
Early in the morning of June 7, 1942, Admiral Ernest J. King had every reason to be pleased. He’d just received the best news of the war since he’d assumed command of the U.S. Navy, right after the disastrous Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor the previous December. Three days earlier, on June 4, carrier-based warplanes of his Pacific Fleet, commanded by Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, had destroyed four Japanese fleet carriers in the distant waters of the central Pacific, near Midway Atoll—the core elements of an Imperial Japanese Navy striking force—in what would soon be regarded as one of the epochal campaigns of the Pacific War: the Battle of Midway.
King had another reason to feel pleased. Nimitz’s intelligence: a supersecret unit of navy cryptanalysts based at Pearl Harbor, later known as Station Hypo, had decoded intercepted Imperial Navy messages. From Hypo, Nimitz had learned the strength and makeup of most Japanese forces advancing on Midway, including the names of key warships arrayed to attack the remote coral atoll.
Later that morning, however, as King sat reading a story in Sunday’s Washington Times-Herald in his large, no-frills office on the third deck of the old Navy Department, his mood darkened and he suddenly exploded in anger. The story that distressed him, as it turned out, was also on the front page of the Chicago Tribune, under the headline “Navy Had Word of Jap Plan to Strike at Sea.”
The headline was bad enough. Even more infuriating, the identical content of the two stories paralleled almost precisely a secret radiogram that Nimitz had sent to King eight days earlier. Circulated to only a handful of senior officers, that information was now prominently displayed in two major newspapers. The stories contained the same list of ships in Nimitz’s May 31 dispatch, and in roughly the same order. It seemed clear to King that somehow, somewhere, there had been a horrendous, potentially catastrophic leak.
King, who liked to be called COMINCH (for commander in chief), assembled his top aides to assess the damage. Most of them held the same view: While the article didn’t explicitly state that U.S. Navy code breakers had cracked the Imperial Navy’s cryptographic system, it nevertheless implied as much. King and his staff believed the leak would eventually find its way to the Japanese and cause them to change their naval code—a development that could set back U.S. code breakers many years. Nimitz’s capabilities would be weakened, his drive against Japanese naval forces slowed, and the war in the Pacific Theater grimly prolonged.
But if that much seemed clear, more was not: Where did the story come from, and who leaked the information in it? Who wrote the story? (Both papers had printed the story without a byline.) There were what appeared to be vital clues to the first two questions. For starters, the Tribune’s version of the story carried a Washington dateline, suggesting that it had originated in the nation’s capital. And both versions of the story attributed the information disclosed to “reliable sources in Naval Intelligence,” suggesting that the leaker resided in King’s own bailiwick. Suspicion fell immediately on the Office of Naval Intelligence.
King’s people wanted to talk first to Commander Arthur McCollum, the chief of the Far Eastern Section of the Office of Naval Intelligence. (“I came down to the Navy Department,” McCollum would later recall, “and my goodness, the place was shaking.”) He was told to report right away to King’s chief of war planning, Rear Admiral Charles M. “Savvy” Cooke Jr. As he entered Cooke’s office, McCollum was immediately?” McCollum replied that he did not know anyone at that newspaper. Cooke wasn’t satisfied: “Mac, you’ve been talking to reporters some damn place.” Then he flashed a copy of the ’s front page at McCollum and barked, “What do you think of that?”
