https://jamesperloff.net/false-flag-at-sea/



fαℓѕє fℓαg at Sea
The Lusitania, Woodrow Wilson, and the Deceptions that Dragged America into World War I

• May 21, 2014
• Conspiracy, History

This is a long article. But World War I – which was the first global war, and claimed as many as 65 million lives – has nearly been forgotten about. This article contains many suppressed facts, and I hope you come away from it with a better understanding of how the present connects to the past.

(Note: For those who would prefer to read this post in hard copy, it is Chapter Two of my book .)
As discussions crop up of a Third World War possibly arising from tensions in the Middle East or Ukraine, it is apt to examine the First World War, whose 100th anniversary falls this year. America’s entanglement in that war, like so many others, was engineered through a fαℓѕє fℓαg.
In 1915, Britain was at war with Germany. The United States was still neutral. On May 7, the Lusitania, a British ocean liner en route from America to England, was sunk by a German submarine some 12 miles off Ireland’s southern coast. There were 764 survivors, but nearly 1,200 people, including 128 Americans, lost their lives. The Lusitania – which had been the world’s largest ship when launched in 1906 – went down in just 18 minutes after a single torpedo hit. Survivors reported there had been two explosions – a smaller one followed moments later by an enormous one. This was affirmed by the log of the U-20, the submarine which sank her.
The tragedy was portrayed to the public as the wanton slaughter of women and children. It became the subject of a relentless propaganda campaign, including a fabricated claim that German children were given a holiday from school to celebrate the sinking. The Lusitania was the most important in a series of pretexts used to generate the eventual U.S. declaration of war on Germany.



Understanding Germany’s U-boat Policies
After the war began in 1914, Britain immediately began a naval blockade of Germany, intercepting merchant ships and strewing the North Sea with mines. Since the British classified even foodstuffs as “contraband,” the Germans had to ration food. By all estimates, several hundred thousand people ultimately died of starvation due to the blockade.
Germany’s decision to blockade Britain was retaliatory. Since the British possessed naval superiority, Germany’s only means of blockade was through its U-boat force. Although the U.S. media characterized sub warfare as barbaric, British mines were just as lethal as German torpedoes. Furthermore, while the Germans normally only targeted ships of belligerent nations (sparing neutrals), the British blockade was indiscriminate, barring neutral as well as belligerent ships.
In the war’s early stages, U-boats observed the “Cruiser Rules” that had been established under international law (e.g., at the Hague Conventions). Before sinking a merchant vessel, they would surface, and allow the ship’s crew to evacuate in lifeboats.
This changed, however, thanks to new rules unilaterally instituted by the British Admiralty, then headed by Winston Churchill. The British began arming their merchant ships. As Colin Simpson notes in The Lusitania:

From October 1914 onward a steady stream of inflammatory orders were issued to the masters of British merchant ships. It was made an offense to obey a U-boat’s orders to halt. Instead masters must immediately engage the enemy, either with their armament if they possessed it, or by ramming if they did not. Any master who surrendered his ship was to be prosecuted, and several were.¹

One British merchantman was paid a bounty of $3,300 for ramming a submarine. Thus both a carrot and stick goaded merchantmen to engage subs.
The Germans faced an inescapable dilemma. As warships, subs were fragile. One shot from even a low-caliber cannon could sink a U-boat. By the time of the Lusitania incident, merchantmen had sunk several. Walter Schweiger, commander of the sub that sank the Lusitania, had already narrowly escaped an attempted ramming. Although U-boat captains continued to exercise discretion, they were usually unwilling to surface and risk destruction by observing the Cruiser Rules which Britain herself had abandoned.
Schweiger; Churchill as head of Admiralty
Why Churchill Broke the Rules
Prior to the Lusitania’s sinking, Winston Churchill wrote to Walter Runciman, President of the Board of Trade, that it is “most important to attract neutral shipping to our shores, in the hope especially of embroiling the United States with Germany.”² In his postwar book The World Crisis, Churchill wrote: “The maneuver which brings an ally into the field is as serviceable as that which wins a great battle.”³

The first British counter-move, made on my responsibility in 1915 was to arm British merchantmen to the greatest possible extent with guns of sufficient power to deter the U-boat from surface attack. . . . As the U-boats were forced by the progressive arming of the British Mercantile Marine to rely increasingly on under-water attacks, they encountered a new set of dangers. The submerged U-boat with its defective vision ran the greatest risk of mistaking neutral for British vessels and of drowning neutral crews, and thus of embroiling Germany with other great Powers.⁴

To Churchill’s disappointment, however, U-boat captains scrupulously avoided attacking American ships. The next best thing, therefore, was to have a British ship sunk with American passengers on board. Churchill had Commander Joseph Kenworthy, of the Political Section of Naval Intelligence, submit a report on what the political results would be of such a sinking. The Lusitania became the fulfillment of Churchill’s objectives. This fαℓѕє fℓαg involved coordination on both sides of the Atlantic. The political background requires us to digress from the Lusitania momentarily.
The Bankers’ Handmaiden
Woodrow Wilson had been elected President in 1912. Given that the former Princeton professor had only one year of political experience (as governor of New Jersey), this was a miracle that only the American “Establishment” (less politely called Illuminati) could have pulled off. Among Wilson’s top financial angels were munitions manufacturer Cleveland Dodge (National City Bank/Rockefellers) and banker Jacob Schiff (Kuhn, Loeb Bank/Rothschilds).
“Wall Street” Republicans had ruled the White House for 16 years, but with a vociferous reform movement growing within the party, under the auspices of men like Senator Robert La Follette and Congressman Charles Lindbergh, Sr., the bankers were content to let the Republican Party cool off and put their trust in Wilson. With J. P. Morgan’s backing, former Republican President Teddy Roosevelt was trotted out as the candidate of the short-lived “Bull Moose” Party. His candidacy split Republican votes between himself and incuмbent President William Howard Taft. This allowed Wilson, the Democratic Party candidate, to win the election with only 42 percent of the popular vote. Since Roosevelt spoke loudly (though with tongue in cheek) about “reform,” he also helped derail La Follette’s attempt to secure the Republican nomination.
According to Curtis Dall (President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s son-in-law), Wilson pledged to banker Bernard Baruch to do four things if elected President:

• lend an ear to advice on who should occupy his cabinet;
• support creation of a central bank (i.e., the Federal Reserve);
• support creation of the income tax;
• lend an ear to advice should war erupt in Europe.⁵

How swiftly Wilson fulfilled these pledges! These were still the days, of course, before the – chief recruiting ground for Presidential cabinets over the last century – existed. Wilson’s cabinet was said to have been handpicked by “Colonel” Edward Mandell House, CFR founder. He was a Wall Street front man who lived in the White House, wielding such influence that Harper’s Weekly called him “Assistant President House.” (His role paralleled that of Harry Hopkins, who later lived in the White House during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Presidency, acting as the liaison to Bernard Baruch.)
Wilson & House; Bernard Baruch
1913 – Wilson’s first year in office – saw establishment of both the Federal Reserve and income tax (the latter was ratified the month before his inauguration). The [url=https://www.thenewamerican.com/culture/history/item/4749-our-monetary-mayhem-began-with-the-fed]Federal Reserve gave the bankers the authority to set interest rates (and thus toggle the stock market at will) and to create money from nothing, which would flow into their multinational banks and corporations. Colonel House’s official biographer, Charles Seymour (Skull & Bones), called House the “unseen guardian angel” of the Federal Reserve Act.⁶
Income tax (which the banksters had no intention of substantially paying themselves) gave them a lien on Americans’ earning power, to pay for (among other things) the interest the bankers would collect on loans to the government. Both the original central bank legislation, as well as the income tax amendment, were introduced in Congress by Senator Nelson Aldrich, whose daughter married John D. Rockefeller, Jr.; he was the maternal grandfather of CFR chairman David Rockefeller.
Once the Federal Reserve and income tax were in place, only one thing was still needed: a significant reason for America to borrow. In June 1914, six months after the Federal Reserve Act passed, Archduke Franz Ferdinand was αssαssιnαtҽd, triggering the start of World War I. America participated; as a result, our national debt grew from a manageable $1 billion to $25 billion.
The war would not only yield billions in profits for the Illuminati, but would, with the League of Nations, incipiently fulfill their dream of a world government. But how to entangle America in the war? Here the interests of the British and American Establishments coincided in the Lusitania’s sinking.
A fαℓѕє fℓαg Foreknown
Our ambassador to England under Wilson was the militantly pro-British Walter Hines Page. During his tenure, he received a private annual stipend of $25,000 (well over a half-million in today’s dollars) from munitions magnate Cleveland Dodge, so that he could live in “proper ambassadorial style.”⁷ (In realpolitik, this is normally called a “bribe.”)
On May 2, 1915 – five days before the Lusitania was sunk – Page wrote to his son: “If a British liner full of American passengers be blown up, what will Uncle Sam do? That’s what’s going to happen.”⁸
Edward Mandell House was in England at this time as Wilson’s emissary. On the morning of the fateful 7th, House met with Edward Grey (left), Britain’s foreign minister. House recorded: “We spoke of the probability of an ocean liner being sunk, and I told him if this were done, a flame of indignation would sweep across America, which would in itself probably carry us into the war.”⁹ Later that day, House and Grey met with King George V at Buckingham Palace. House wrote: “We fell to talking, strangely enough, of the probability of Germany sinking a trans-Atlantic liner. . . . He [the king] said, ‘Suppose they should sink the Lusitania, with American passengers on board?’”¹⁰ (These quotes appear in Houses’s official biography, The Intimate Papers of Colonel House.)
These remarks betrayed foreknowledge that cannot be dismissed as coincidences chanced upon in casual conversation.
That evening, a splendid dinner was given honoring House; numerous British dignitaries attended, including Grey, and – at House’s request – Lord Mersey, the Wreck Commissioner, who would later oversee the inquiry regarding the Lusitania. During this dinner the news arrived of the great ship’s sinking. House announced to the assembled guests that America would enter the war within the month.
The following day, Ambassador Page cabled Wilson: “The freely expressed universal opinion is that the United States must declare war or forfeit European respect. So far as I know this opinion is universal. If the U.S. does come in, the moral and physical effect will be to bring peace quickly and to give the U.S. a great influence in ending the war and in so reorganizing the world as to prevent its recurrence. . . .”¹¹ This remarkable cablegram reveals that the postwar restructuring of the world – which really occurred four years later at the Paris Peace Conference, where Wilson proposed the League of Nations – was envisioned from the outset. In Berlin, without even waiting for instructions, the American embassy began preparing to shut down.
As we will, see however, the Wilson-House-Page clique had overestimated Americans’ willingness to go to war over the Lusitania. But first: How was this fαℓѕє fℓαg engineered? How did British and American officials know, in advance, that a submarine would likely target the ship? And that the attack would result in its being “blown up” and sunk? Why did the 32,000-ton ship vanish beneath the waves in just 18 minutes?
From Luxury Liner to Warship
The Cunard Line built the Lusitania and her sister ship Mauretania with loans from the British government, which also bestowed annual subsidies on Cunard for operational costs. In return for this, the Admiralty required that the ships be designed as auxiliary cruisers, available in wartime.
In February 1913, Winston Churchill informed Cunard chairman Alfred Booth that war with Germany was expected, estimating the outbreak as September 1914.¹² (He was only off by a month.) In accordance with instructions, the Lusitania, like other British liners, was refitted to carry guns. There is dispute over whether she actually had cannon, but some testimony exists that she did, concealed on her lowest deck, where passengers were not allowed. The Lusitania was listed as an auxiliary cruiser in Jane’s Fighting Ships, a copy of which U-boat commanders kept on board to identify targets.
More importantly, the British used the Lusitania to ferry heavy loads of munitions from America to Britain. Since the U.S. government disallowed shipment of most munitions on passenger ships, the British got around this by submitting falsified manifests for the Lusitania. Wilson had appointed Dudley Field Malone as collector of customs for the port of New York. Malone rubber-stamped the manifests, knowing full well what was going on.
As submarine warfare increased, the situation became too much for the Lusitania’s captain, David Dow, who informed Cunard he could no longer mix carrying passengers with munitions. As a result, for the final voyage he was replaced by William Turner.
On that fateful crossing, the Lusitania was transporting six million rifle cartridges and more than 50 tons of shrapnel shells. But there were other items that provide possible clues to the mysterious second explosion that sank the ship after a single torpedo hit. One was guncotton, an explosive the British used in their mines (it was called gun“cotton” because in its manufacture, the chemicals were soaked in cotton).
In the U.S. Justice Department’s archives is an affidavit signed by Dr. E. W. Ritter von Rettegh, a chemist employed by Captain Guy Gaunt, the British naval attaché in Washington. Ritter von Rettegh stated that Gaunt called him to his office on April 26, 1915, and asked what the effect would be of sea water coming into contact with guncotton. The chemist explained that there were two types of gun cotton – trinitro cellulose, which sea water would not affect, and pyroxyline, which sea water could cause to suddenly explode, as a result of chemical changes that he explained in technical detail.¹³
The following day, Gaunt visited the Du Pont munitions plant in Christfield, New Jersey, and Du Pont thereupon shipped tons of pyroxyline, packaged in burlap, to the Cunard wharf in New York City, where it was loaded onto the Lusitania. It quite evidently accounts for the item on the ship’s manifest of 3,813 40-pound containers of “cheese,” which were shipped along with 696 containers of “butter.” That these packages were not butter and cheese is clear: they were not shipped in refrigerated compartments; their destination was listed as the Royal Navy’s Weapons Testing Establishment; and no one filed an insurance claim for the lost “butter and cheese.”¹⁴
Captain Turner (left); Guy Gaunt
Placing thousands of burlap containers of guncotton in the Lusitania’s hold would sharply increase the chances that a torpedo would make the ship – as Ambassador Page predicted – “be blown up.” Considering that the ship also carried tons of shrapnel shells and cartridges, the potential for devastation became even worse. One of the Lusitania’s survivors, Joseph Marichal, stated he had distinctly heard cartridges exploding, a sound he was familiar with as a former officer in the French army.
While Captain Gaunt’s interview with Dr. Ritter von Rettegh might have an innocent explanation, it is noteworthy that after submitting his affidavit, the chemist was arrested and charged with making “utterances prejudicial to the peace of the Nation.” He was tried in camera and sentenced to prison. Gaunt, on the other hand, was promoted to rear-admiral and knighted.
Other mysterious items appeared on the Lusitania’s manifest. One was 323 bales of “furs.” The furs originated from depots employed by Du Pont; the cargo was destined for the British company of B. F. Babcock, which was never involved in importing furs, but did import cotton used in making guncotton.¹⁵ Like the butter and cheese, no one ever filed an insurance claim on the “furs.”
Patrick O’Sullivan, in The Lusitania: Unravelling the Mysteries, advanced a theory that the explosion was touched off by aluminum powder, a highly combustible explosive; 46 tons were aboard, destined for the Woolrich Arsenal. Also stored with the cargo were 18 cases of percussion fuses consisting of mercury fulminate, which a torpedo could also have caused to explode.
Regardless of which item ignited first, the massive detonation which sank the ship did originate in the forward area holding her munitions.
German Warnings

 
The Germans had little choice but to try to stop the Lusitania’s munitions from reaching England. But neither did they wish to provoke America by harming its citizens. On April 22, they ordered a conspicuous warning placed in fifty newspapers near the Cunard sailing notices, alerting potential passengers to the danger. This would have given the public a week’s notice. However, a State Department officer ordered the warning’s publication suppressed. On April 26, George Viereck, representing the Germans, obtained an audience with Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan. Bryan immediately cleared the notice for publication, and also urged President Wilson to warn Americans. Wilson, however, always on the bankers’ puppet strings, declined to do so.
Setting the Trap
There was no guarantee, of course, that this fαℓѕє fℓαg would occur, since it depended on a U-boat commander’s unpredictable actions. There were, however, probabilities. The British had broken Germany’s naval codes. While they could not pinpoint a sub’s exact location, intercepted radio signals provided abundant information about U-boats’ activities, destinations and general areas of operation. They were also well aware of the U-20’s presence in the Irish Sea that May, from reports of the sub sinking vessels.
On May 5 – two days before the tragedy – Winston Churchill met with Admiral Fisher (First Sea Lord), Admiral Oliver (Chief of Naval Staff), and Commander Joseph Kenworthy (Naval Intelligence), in the Admiralty’s map room. Here a great grid showed locations of British ships and hostile ships, marked with pins. The map showed the Lusitania and U-20 on a collision course. What was said is unrecorded, but Kenworthy wrote in his postwar book The Freedom of the Seas: “The Lusitania was deliberately sent at considerably reduced speed into an area where a U-boat was known to be waiting and with her escorts withdrawn.” However, the publisher deleted the word “deliberately” at the Admiralty’s insistence.¹⁶
Churchill with Admiral Fisher; Kenworthy
The Admiralty could have safeguarded the Lusitania by rerouting her around the north of Ireland, where it knew no U-boats were operating. Especially damning was the failure to provide escorts. On previous voyages, destroyers had accompanied the Lusitania where submarines threats existed. On May 7, however, no destroyers were designated to protect her, even though four were lying idle in the nearby port of Milford Haven,¹⁷ and despite the U-20’s known presence in the south Irish Sea, where it had sunk two steamers the previous day. The only warship assigned to meet the Lusitania was an aging cruiser, the Juno. However, even the Juno was ordered back to the port of Queenstown on Ireland’s southern coast – on the justification that she was vulnerable to submarine attack!
Yet the Lusitania received no instructions to divert to Queenstown. On the evening of the 6th, Captain Turner assured his increasingly nervous passengers that, on entering the war zone the next day, they would be securely in the Royal Navy’s care. But when dawn broke, the Royal Navy was nowhere in sight. Turner was alone in the Irish Sea with a U-boat on the prowl. It is a matter of record that there were wireless communications with the Lusitania, but these messages’ transcripts have always been missing from the Admiralty’s files. Some suspect Turner requested permission to reroute the ship and was refused. Vice-Admiral Henry Coke, commanding defenses in this sector from his Queenstown headquarters, requested permission from the Admiralty to divert the Lusitania. He received no decision.
The U-20
Patrick Beesly was considered the leading authority on the history of British Naval Intelligence, in which he was long an officer. In his book Room 40, Beesly wrote:

Nothing, absolutely nothing was done to ensure the liner’s safe arrival . . . . I am reluctantly driven to the conclusion that there was a conspiracy deliberately to put the Lusitania at risk in the hopes that even an abortive attack on her would bring the United States into the war. Such a conspiracy could not have been put into effect without Winston Churchill’s express permission and approval.¹⁸

The Cover-up
As soon as Vice-Admiral Coke received the report of the Lusitania’s SOS, he ordered the Juno to its rescue. The cruiser was in sight of the survivors in the water when it was recalled to Queenstown on the Admiralty’s orders – the pretext being that it, too, might be sunk by the submarine (which was now gone). Although this concern was legitimate, it undoubtedly cost considerable loss of life, for it was much longer after the Juno’s recall that other rescue craft – fishing smacks and patrol boats – began arriving.
Hundreds of bodies washed up on the Irish shore or were recovered by vessels. Another instruction the Admiralty sent Coke was “to ensure that bodies selected for the inquest had not been killed or mutilated by means which we do not wish to be made public.”¹⁹ What “means” could this have referred to, other than mutilation from the ship’s munitions?

Orders were also given to try to halt the inquest held by the local coroner, John Horgan, for fear that the Irish – whose rapport with England was tenuous – might render an unfavorable verdict. (This fear proved unfounded.)

In Britain, a formal inquiry into the sinking was to be held before Lord Mersey, who had also overseen the Titanic inquiry. However, well before it got underway, the Admiralty resolved to scapegoat the ship’s captain, William Turner:

• Within a week of the sinking, Richard Webb, director of the Admiralty’s Trade Division, issued a report which said of Turner that “one is forced to conclude that he is either utterly incompetent, or that he had been got at by the Germans.”²⁰
• Admiral Lord Fisher concurred, saying that Turner “is not a fool but a knave. I feel absolutely certain that Captain Turner of the Lusitania is a scoundrel and been bribed. . . . I hope that Captain Turner will be arrested immediately after the Inquiry, whatever the verdict or finding may be.”²¹ And, he added, in his notations on Webb’s report: “Ought not Lord Mersey to get a hint?”²²
• Churchill responded that “we shall pursue the Captain without check.”²³
• Webb then wrote Lord Mersey: “I am directed by the Board of Admiralty to inform you that it is considered politically expedient that Captain Turner the master of the Lusitania be most prominently blamed for the disaster.”²⁴

Thus, in violation of the traditions of justice, Lord Mersey was asked to render a verdict before the inquiry even began. The request came from the men responsible for denying the Lusitania protection.
Comparison to Pearl Harbor is apt. In that event, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and select officials had complete foreknowledge of the attack, which they denied to the commanders in Hawaii, Admiral Kimmel and General Short. Roosevelt then appointed an investigative body, the Roberts Commission, which laid all blame on Kimmel and Short. Roosevelt thus followed the example set 26 years earlier by his distant cousin Churchill. It bears mentioning that when the Lusitania sank, Franklin D. Roosevelt was Assistant Secretary of the Navy, the same position held by another of his cousins, Theodore Roosevelt, when the USS Maine exploded in 1898, triggering the Spanish-American War.
At the inquiry, held partly in camera, Lord Mersey (left) quashed all evidence of the Lusitania’s munitions. Captain Turner was never even asked what his cargo was. Mersey relied on a letter from Dudley Field Malone saying items on the ship’s manifest “were permitted to be shipped on passenger steamers under the laws of the United States.” Malone’s letter was unsworn (he declined to make a statement under oath) and referred only to the first one-page manifest, not its 24-page supplement.
Mersey’s report concluded that “the loss of the ship and lives was due to damage caused to the said ship by torpedoes fired by a submarine of German nationality whereby the ship sank.” However, Mersey was unwilling to crucify Captain Turner. There seem to have been two factors in this: (1) no substantive evidence was produced in court incriminating Turner, an able and veteran seaman; and (2) by the time of the verdict, Churchill had been dismissed from the Admiralty due to the disastrous Dardanelles (Gallipoli) campaign, so there was no longer any need to placate him.
Following the hearing, Mersey waived his fee for his work on it, asked to be excused from further justice duties, and told his children: “The Lusitania case was a damned dirty business.”²⁵
In the United States, a separate hearing on the Lusitania was held much later under Judge Julius Mayer. The nature of the ship’s cargo had become increasingly known. Senator Robert La Follette publicly stated:

Four days before the Lusitania sailed, President Wilson was warned in person by Secretary of State Bryan that the Lusitania had 6,000,000 rounds of ammunition on board, besides explosives; and that passengers who proposed to sail on that vessel were sailing in violation of a statute of this country, that no passengers shall travel upon a railroad train or sail upon a vessel that carries dangerous explosives.²⁶

American families who had lost loved ones sued the Cunard Line for allowing passengers to sail with contraband munitions. Dudley Field Malone was named as codefendant and, if convicted, could have been indicted for involuntary manslaughter. However, no evidence concerning the illicit cargo was heard at the hearing. Judge Mayer, relying in part on Mersey’s findings, ruled in favor of Cunard and against the claimants.
The Mayer hearing was missing a critical piece of evidence: the Lusitania’s original manifest. President Wilson personally sealed it in an envelope, marked it “Only to be opened by the President of the United States,” and had it hidden in the archives of the Treasury Department (which oversees the customs service). We know this because President Franklin D. Roosevelt later had it retrieved, and it turned up among his papers. (To see it, click here.)
The fαℓѕє fℓαg Falters
Although Colonel House and Ambassador Page had seemed confident the U.S. would declare war over the Lusitania, the American people didn’t share their zeal. They were upset by the sinking, but not enough to send their sons to European battlefields.
The case for war was baseless:

• That the British were the first to violate the “Cruiser Rules” was not lost on everyone, especially German-Americans;
• The effort to conceal the truth about the Lusitania’s munitions was only partially successful; many recognized that the British were using women and children to protect arms shipments – as State Department solicitor Cone Johnson put it, mixing “babies and bullets.”
• Americans wishing to travel to England safely could easily do so by using U.S. ships or those of other neutral countries. Americans boarding British ships traveled at their own risk; they could no more claim immunity from German attack than an American who chose to ride on a British gun carriage on a battleground in France.

With the nation’s mood insufficient for war, Wilson and House began what would be a long series of diplomatic jousts calculated to provoke Germany into rupturing relations. After the Lusitania, Wilson demanded that Germany halt submarine warfare. The Germans replied that the Lusitania was an auxiliary cruiser carrying contraband munitions, and that Britain’s Admiralty had ordered all merchantmen to fire upon or ram surfaced submarines (they provided Wilson with copies of the British orders, which a U-boat crew had found on a captured vessel). Wilson’s reply denied the charges, asserting the United States had “enforced its statues with scrupulous vigilance through its regularly constituted officials and it is able therefore to assure the Imperial German Government that it has been misinformed.”
Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan refused to sign this reply. He had long striven with the President over the latter’s double-standard policy: tolerating England’s naval blockade of Germany and violations of “Cruiser Rules,” while excoriating Germany for reciprocation. Now Bryan was being asked to sign a note that was glaringly false – for Dudley Field Malone had already told Wilson that “practically all of her [the Lusitania’s] cargo was contraband of some kind.”²⁷ Bryan chose to resign, for which the press excoriated him; the New York World accused him of “unspeakable treachery.”
Left to right: Bryan; cartoon depicts Kaiser applauding Bryan; Dudley Field Malone. Interestingly, Malone would oppose Bryan again as an attorney assisting Clarence Darrow in the 1925 Scopes Trial; and in 1944 he portrayed Winston Churchill in Mission to Moscow, perhaps the most flagrantly pro-Communist movie Hollywood ever made. It would probably be reasonable to say Malone was “connected.”
Bryan’s resignation was gold to the Illuminati, for he possessed something they couldn’t stomach: integrity. He’d been made Secretary of State in return for helping secure Wilson’s nomination at the 1912 Democratic Convention. In his place was appointed Robert Lansing, a pro-war State Department legal adviser who’d already proven useful in circuмnavigating Bryan. Lansing’s nephews, Allen Dulles and John Foster Dulles, would become two of the most powerful insiders of twentieth century politics.
Newspapers and books began stirring hysteria about the imminence of a German invasion. The film The Battle Cry of Peace depicted a Hun-like army devastating New York City and Washington. A well-financed national “preparedness” movement was birthed; J. P. Morgan’s daughter served as treasurer for the women’s section of the “Movement for National Preparedness.”
Foreign invaders assault the virtuous maidens of New York City in The Battle Cry of Peace (1915)
Wilson meanwhile awaited another pretext for war, but the Germans were careful not to give him one, having no desire to see American troops swelling Allied ranks. They ordered U-boat captains not to torpedo another passenger ship without warning. However, sooner or later, a mistake was bound to occur. On March 24, 1916 in the English Channel, a U-boat commander, looking through his periscope, mistook an odd-looking ship for a minelayer, and fired a torpedo. The ship turned out to be a French passenger steamer, the Sussex. The damaged ship was towed to port; there were Americans on board; none were killed, but four were injured.
Wilson and his controllers hoped they now had their pretext for war. The President sent a hostile ultimatum to the Germans, demanding they halt “present methods” of submarine warfare (go back to “Cruiser Rules”) or face a rupture in relations. The Germans wisely responded that they would comply, provided the United States require Britain to likewise observe international law.
Once again, Germany had parried war – and Wilson now had to focus on reelection.
The 1916 Elections
Despite the anti-Germany media campaign, Americans remained overwhelmingly opposed to entering the European war. Wilson’s belligerence had not been lost on many, and as a result, the Republican nominee – Charles Evan Hughes – held a large lead in polls.
The American Establishment was very satisfied with the services the obedient Wilson had provided, and preferred him to the untried Hughes (similar to the Obama-Romney paradigm of 2012). Hughes’s public relations director  later became a pioneering exposer of the CFR and Illuminati.
Hughes and Fagan
To ensure Wilson’s reelection, Teddy Roosevelt was brought out to do just what he’d done in 1912: betray his own party.²⁸ Roosevelt traveled the country making militant speeches, attacking Germany and denouncing pacifists as “mollycoddles.” These speeches greatly annoyed Hughes, as the public started believing, by proxy, that Hughes was pro-war. Taking the cue, the Democrats made Wilson’s campaign slogan “He kept us out of war,” even though Wilson had done everything possible to get us into it. The ploys worked. Hughes’s polls lead evaporated. Wilson won one of the closest Presidential elections in history, and did so, ironically, because voters wanted to avoid war.

The Zimmerman Note
Once reelected, Wilson shed the “peace” pretenses, and again sought justification for war. After Germany – pressing for victory to end the gruesome conflict ­– announced resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare, Wilson terminated relations, claiming Germany had broken its pledge. (He ignored that the pledge had been conditional on Britain’s reciprocal observance of international law, something the British government never did.)
But Wilson still needed another provocation to push the war button. Ever-reliable British intelligence produced just what he needed: their decoding of the “Zimmerman telegram.”
Arthur Zimmerman (left) was Germany’s foreign secretary. In January 1917 he had cabled the German ambassador in Mexico, instructing him that, if the U.S. entered the war, Germany should propose a military alliance with Mexico. (Wilson had antagonized Mexico in 1914 by having U.S. forces occupy Vera Cruz, a move undertaken for the benefit of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company, which had extensive oil interests in Mexico.) The Germans reasoned that having Mexico as an ally might keep U.S. troops pinned in North America. The Zimmerman telegram rather naively suggested that, in the event of victory, Mexico could recover territories previously lost to the United States: Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.
Such proposals were actually “par for the course” in the international deal-making of World War I. For example, Britain had brought Italy into the war as an ally by promising the Italians new territories. The Mexicans considered the German proposal quite unrealistic. Nonetheless, when Wilson released the Zimmerman telegram to the wire services, it was used to renew “German invasion hysteria.”
On April 2, Wilson convened Congress and requested a declaration of war, which came four days later. Despite the orchestrated media furor, most Americans still opposed war, but the financial powers had lined up both parties’ machines; only a handful of courageous senators and congressmen opposed the declaration.
Agenda of the First World War
Americans were told this would be “the war to end all wars.” Though it failed utterly in this purpose alleged for public consumption, it succeeded in the purposes that were hidden:
(1) Europe was restructured in accordance with Illuminati wishes, in preparation for their “nєω ωσrℓ∂ σr∂єr.” As foreign affairs analyst Hilaire du Berrier noted of World War I: “Three empires, six monarchies and twenty-three duchies and principalities disappeared because leaders who had a stake in nationhood had been carried along in a losing tide.“²⁹ The Illuminati have always opposed any monarchies they could not compromise because kings symbolized nationhood, and were figures behind whom a nation’s people would rally and unite. The Illuminati wanted monarchies replaced by “democracy,” because democracy splinters a nation into parties; a divided country is weaker, and easier to absorb into world government. This is the “divide and conquer” principle, and the true reason Wilson said the war would “make the world safe for democracy.” This catchphrase really meant “make the world safe for Illuminati,” for the latter knew that in a democracy, wealth combined with media control would ensure their handpicked candidates received over 50 percent of the vote. The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion (10:5) called voting “the instrument which will set us on the throne of the world.”
(2) The first formal world government – the League of Nations – was established. It was the 14th of the famous “Fourteen Points” Wilson brought to the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, which settled the war’s aftermath through the Versailles Treaty.
To head the American delegation to the conference, Wilson appointed Paul Warburg – whom he’d also named vice chairman of the Federal Reserve. As his chief economic advisor, he brought banker Bernard Baruch. And as always, Wilson was under the eye of the bankers’ front man, Edward Mandell House. Wilson didn’t invite a single congressman or senator of the Democratic Party to the conference – only the bankers and their entourage.
Many people think Wilson invented the League, but it originated with House and the bankers. Ray Stannard Baker, Wilson’s official biographer, said that “practically nothing – not a single idea in the Covenant of the League – was original with the President.”³⁰ Charles Seymour, House’s official biographer, said Wilson “approved the House draft almost in its entirety, and his own rewriting of it was practically confined to phraseology.”³¹
Ironically, though the American President proposed the League, the United States did not join. The U.S. Constitution stipulated that no President could single-handedly make a treaty; the Senate had to ratify it. The Senate rejected the Versailles Treaty. Americans had helped win the war, but saw no reason to join an organization that might infringe on their sovereignty. When news of the Senate vote reached Paris, the bankers reacted swiftly. They held a series of meetings, culminating with a dinner at the Majestic Hotel, at which they resolved to form a new organization in the United States. Its purpose would be to change the climate of American opinion so that the nation would accept world government. In 1921, that organization was incorporated in New York City as the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).
(3) The first communist state, the Soviet Union, was birthed from the war’s chaos. Students of realpolitik know the Illuminati established the USSR. Jacob Schiff, one of Wilson’s financial angels, ran Kuhn, Loeb – the Rothschilds’ New York banking satellite – along with Federal Reserve founder Paul Warburg. In 1917 Schiff supplied $20 million in gold to Leon Trotsky, who sailed from New York with 275 other terrorists. The Canadians detained Trotsky at Halifax, Nova Scotia, because they knew he intended to foment revolution in Czarist Russia – our ally in the raging World War. The Bolsheviks (communists) had promised to pull Russia out of the war if the revolution succeeded. The Canadians realized what that meant: Germany would shift its troops from the Eastern to Western front, where they could kill more British, Canadians, and Americans. But at the bankers’ behest, Wilson personally intervened, and requested that Canada release Trotsky. The President thus placed communism’s success above the lives of American soldiers.
When Wilson went to the Paris Peace Conference, the Bolsheviks had taken over Russia, and one of his assigned tasks was to ensure they kept it. Here is the long-forgotten sixth of Wilson’s “Fourteen Points”:

VI. The evacuation of all Russian [Soviet] territory and such a settlement of all questions affecting Russia as will secure the best and freest cooperation of the other nations of the world in obtaining for her [the communists] an unhampered and unembarrassed opportunity for the independent determination of her own political development and national policy and assure her of a sincere welcome into the society of free nations under institutions of her own choosing; and, more than a welcome, assistance also of every kind that she may need and may herself desire. The treatment accorded Russia [the communists] by her sister nations in the months to come will be the acid test of their good will, of their comprehension of her needs as distinguished from their own interests, and of their intelligent and unselfish sympathy.

In his book The Secret World Government, Czarist General Arthur Cherep-Spiridovich expressed the opinion that United States entry into the war was delayed until it was certain Czarist Russia collapsed.  (In other words, a premature U.S. commitment might have bolstered the Czar’s position in Russia, thwarting the revolution.) Wilson requested the declaration of war just 18 days after the Czar abdicated.
(4) The war dramatically advanced the cause of Zionism, whose secret agenda is to establish, in Jerusalem, the throne of the Antichrist. In 1916, leading Zionists assured the British government they would bring Wilson and America into the war provided that Britain secure the Jєωιѕн people a national homeland in Palestine. The British consented, resulting in the Balfour Declaration, named for its purported author, Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour.
This declaration was addressed to Walter Rothschild, a private banker holding no government position. It pledged the British would “use their best endeavours” to found a Jєωιѕн homeland in Palestine, even though Britain had no position or authority there whatsoever. Palestine had been under Ottoman (Turkish) control for 400 years. During World War I, the Ottoman Empire was a German ally; on this pretext, the British invaded Palestine, though it had little strategic significance. The famous film Lawrence of Arabia portrayed the exploits of T. E. Lawrence, the British officer who led the Arabs against the Turks. The Arabs were promised Palestine in return for helping Britain defeat the Ottoman Empire. They – and Lawrence himself – did not know that, behind their backs, the Balfour Declaration would secretly pledge the land to the Zionists.
The Balfour Declaration was issued on Nov 2, 1917. Five days later, Lenin and the Bolsheviks overthrew the Provisional Government under Kerensky in Russia. This assured that Russia would no longer participate in the war. Since this cost Britain a military ally, it might be argued that Lenin’s Zionist-banker controllers instructed him to delay his seizure of power until Britain had formally committed to the Balfour Declaration.
(5) The war gave the banksters an unprecedented opportunity to loot America. Prior to the declaration of war, J. P. Morgan & Co. acted as the official agent for all British munitions purchases. Morgan also loaned over $2 billion to the Allies during this period. Needless to say, Morgan had a vested interest in Allied victory. After the war declaration, Americans were urged to fund the war by buying government bonds in a series of “Liberty Loans.”  Out of the first Liberty Loan, $400 million was paid directly to J. Morgan & Co. to satisfy debts owed it by Britain.³²

Wilson appointed Bernard Baruch to head the War Industries Board, whose function was purchasing munitions for America’s military. After the war, Congress’s Graham Committee conducted an investigation that revealed the public had been defrauded out of billions for war-related items that were unnecessary, or undelivered, or never even produced. Here is an excerpt from the Committee’s report:

We had 53 contracts for 37-millimeter shells, on which we expended $9,134,592. None of these shells ever reached our firing line. We had 689 contracts for 75-millimeter shells, on which we expended $301,941,459. Of these shells, we fired 6,000. We had 142 contracts for 3-inch shells, on which we expended $44,841,844. None of these shells reached the firing line. We had 439 contracts for 4.7-inch shells, on which we expended $41,716,051. Of these shells 14,000 were fired by our forces. We had 305 contracts for 6-inch shells, on which we expended $24,189,085. None of these shells ever reached the firing line. . . .³³

I spare the reader the full quote, but it continued as above for six more shell calibers. The Committee listed similar frauds in production of howitzers, artillery of all calibers, and gun carriages. A billion dollars was spent on aircraft never delivered. Comparable reports were made on other articles of war.
Hundreds of millions were invested in companies which used the money to build factories that contributed nothing to the war effort. House Report no. 998 of the 66th Congress stated:

The committee finds that there has been expended for construction upon the Government’s nitrates program to the present time the sum of $116,194,974.37, and that this expenditure produced no nitrates prior to the armistice, and contributed nothing toward the winning of the war. The nitrates program originated with the War Industries Board of the Council of National Defense, and is directly traceable to Mr. Bernard M. Baruch, chairman of the board . . . .³⁴

Many industries, such as copper and steel, charged the government inflated prices. Needless to say, the Rockefellers’ Standard Oil enjoyed skyrocketing war profits.
While the banksters pocketed billions, American soldiers earned $30 per month risking their lives. Although the Graham Committee conducted three years of investigations and published a 21-volume report, not a single banker or industrialist was jailed. As Ferdinand Lundberg noted: “The basis for many prosecutions was laid by the Graham Committee, and there were indictments of various minor figures. But there were no convictions. By November, 1925, the last of the indictments was quashed.”³⁵ You won’t even find a Wikipedia entry for the Graham Committee. It’s been long flushed down one of Orwell’s memory holes.
(6) The war inflicted political as well as military casualties. One effect of the 1898 Spanish-American War had been to undermine the Populist Party, a grassroots movement of dissatisfied voters who opposed Wall Street’s domination of politics, and perceived increasingly fewer differences between the Democratic and Republican parties, many of whose bosses were beholden to the bankers. After the war distracted Americans with a new enemy (Spain) the Populist Party never ran another Presidential candidate.
World War I exerted a parallel effect. A reform movement, spearheaded by Senator La Follette (who might, in some respects, be described as the Ron Paul of his day), had attempted to wrest the Republican Party away from the Rockefeller-Morgan interests controlling it. But with America preoccupied with war and another new enemy (Germany), the reform movement all but died; the monopolists emerged from the war with tighter party control than ever before.
Spain (left) depicted as a murdering ape, trampling the American flag, in 1898. In World War I, the ape became Germany. It is easier to kill an enemy if he is considered sub-human.
(7) Civil liberties were crushed after Congress passed the Espionage Act of 1917, extended by the ѕєdιтισn Act of 1918. While these measures decreed punishment for authentic crimes such as passing military secrets to foreign governments, Section 3 of the ѕєdιтισn Act criminalized opposing the banksters’ plan of plunder:

Whoever, when the United States is at war, shall . . . say or do anything except by way of bona fide and not disloyal advice to an investor or investors, with intent to obstruct the sale by the United States of bonds or other securities of the United States or the making of loans by or to the United States . . . or shall willfully by utterance, writing, printing, publication, or language spoken, urge, incite, or advocate any curtailment of production in this country of any thing or things, product or products, necessary or essential to the prosecution of the war . . . shall be punished by a fine of not more than $10,000 or imprisonment for not more than twenty years, or both.

It provided the same penalties for anyone who “shall willfully utter, print, write or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States.” This broad language gave great leeway in suppressing the First Amendment.
In 1917, Robert Goldstein produced a movie about the Revolutionary War called Spirit of ’76. Because it portrayed Britain negatively, the film was seized as seditious. Goldstein was prosecuted under the Espionage Act and sentenced to 10 years in prison. Louis Nagler, assistant secretary of state for Wisconsin, refused to contribute to the YMCA and Red Cross (whose war council was headed by J. P. Morgan partner Henry Davison). Nagler remarked in a letter that “There is too much graft in these subscriptions . . . . Not over ten or fifteen percent of the money goes to the soldiers.” Nagler was sentenced under the Espionage Act to 20 years in prison (his sentence was commuted in 1920).³⁶ Historian Walter Karp notes: “The son of the chief justice of the New Hampshire Supreme Court became a convicted felon for sending out a chain letter that said the Sussex Pledge [made by Germany] had not been unconditional.”³⁷ Congressman Charles Lindbergh, Sr., one of the Federal Reserve’s bitterest opponents, wrote a book entitled Why Is Your Country at War? The printing plates were seized to curtail publication. For opposing the war, hundreds of less prominent citizens were imprisoned, and innumerable publications were censored or lost mailing privileges.
Left: Congressman Charles Lindbergh with his son Charles, Jr., who became the courageous aviator. Right: “Fighting Bob” La Follette, running for President as a third-party candidate in 1924, shortly before his death.
Ironically, no enemy spies were convicted under the Espionage Act – only dissenting Americans. In a major coup, the banksters had made opposing their agenda illegal. It therefore begs some comparison to today’s Patriot Act. Although many Americans long for “the good old days,” those days were often uglier than commonly realized.
The past is prologue. Woodrow Wilson served his masters well. So would Franklin D. Roosevelt three decades later. Whereas Wilson allowed the sacrifice of over 1,000 lives on the Lusitania, Roosevelt sacrificed over 2,000 at Pearl Harbor. Whereas Wilson and the First World War produced the Federal Reserve, the League of Nations, the Bolshevik Revolution, and Balfour Declaration, Roosevelt and the Second World War produced The World Bank, the United Nations, spread communism over half the globe, and birthed Zionist Israel. Both wars produced billions in war plunder, and suppressed civil rights. It is not difficult to envision what a Third World War might lead to.


 

Especially recommended for further reading: The Lusitania by Colin Simpson and The Politics of War by Walter Karp. A 1981 docuмentary, In Search of the Lusitania, is on YouTube. Though it incorrectly states that over 1,000 Americans died when the Lusitania sank (“passengers” would have been correct), it contains much relevant footage.
NOTES
1. Colin Simpson, The Lusitania (Boston: Little, Brown, 1972), 36.
2. Donald E. Schmidt, The Folly of War: American Foreign Policy, 1898-2005 (New York: Algora Publishing, 2005), 72.
3. Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis, 1911-1918 (1931; reprint, New York: Free Press, 1959), 294.
4. Ibid., 738-39.
5. Curtis B. Dall, FDR: My Exploited Father-in-Law (Washington: Action Associates, 1970), 137.
6. Charles Seymour, ed., The Intimate Papers of Colonel House, Vol. 1 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1926), 160.
7. Ferdinand Lundberg, America’s Sixty Families (New York: Citadel Press, 1937), 142.
8. Burton J. Hendrick, The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Vol. 1 (New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1923), 436.
9. Seymour, 432.
10. Ibid.
11. Simpson, 191.
12, Ibid., 25.
13. Ibid., 95-96.
14. Ibid., 105-10.
15. Ibid., 107.
16. Ibid., 131. (Note: It has been brought to my attention that the quote which Simpson attributed to Kenworthy does not appear in Freedom of the Seas. I obtained a copy and have been unable to find it there myself. However, I do wish to point out that Simpson did much archival research, and may have accessed an early edition not readily accessible today. As Simpson is no longer with us to elaborate, I am leaving the quote with the understanding that it is unverified. The quotation referenced by note 18 from Patrick Beesly, who, like Kenworthy, was in British Naval Intelligence, is actually far more damning.)
17. Patrick Beesly, Room 40: British Naval Intelligence 1914-1918 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), 105.
18. Ibid., 122.
19. Simpson, 180.
20. David Ramsay, Lusitania: Saga and Myth (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), 120.
21. Ibid.
22. Diana Preston, Lusitania: An Epic Tragedy (New York: Walker Publishing, 2002), 318.
23. Simpson, 189.
24. Ibid., 190.
25. Ibid., 241.
26. Speech of Senator Robert M. La Follette (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1917), 109.
27. Simpson, 180.
28. Walter Karp, The Politics of War: The Story of Two Wars which Altered Forever the Political Life of the American Republic (1890-1920) (New York: Franklin Square Press, 2003), 294-95.
29. “As Summer Came in 1988,” H du B Reports, July-August 1988, 5.
30. Ray Stannard Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, Vol. 1 (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1923), 214.
31. Seymour, Vol. 4, 38.
32. Lundberg, 141.
33. Ibid., 199.
34. Ibid., 197.
35. Ibid., 201.
36. Andrew P. Napolitano, Theodore and Woodrow: How Two American Presidents Destroyed Constitutional Freedoms (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2012), 229.
37. Karp, 333-34

Pearl Harbor: Roosevelt’s 9/11
https://jamesperloff.net/pearl-harbor-roosevelts-911/

• November 6, 2014
• History

(Note: For those who would prefer to read this post in hard copy, it is Chapter Four of my book .)
On the morning of December 7, 1941, Japanese planes, launched from aircraft carriers, attacked the American fleet at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, sinking or heavily damaging 18 ships (including eight battleships), destroying 188 planes, and leaving over 2,000 servicemen killed.



The next day, President Franklin D. Roosevelt denounced this “day of infamy” before Congress, from whom he secured an avid declaration of war.



Up until then, however, Americans had overwhelmingly opposed involvement in World War II. They had been thoroughly disillusioned by the First World War:

• although they had been told they would be fighting for “democracy” in that previous war, taxpayers learned from the postwar Graham Committee of Congress that they’d been defrauded out of some $6 billion in armaments that were never manufactured or delivered¹;
• atrocity tales about German soldiers (such as cutting the hands off thousands of Belgian children) had turned out to be fabrications;
• the sinking of the Lusitania – the central provocation that ultimately led to the U.S. declaration of war – had been committed by Germany not to kill women and children (as propaganda claimed), but to prevent tens of tons of war munitions from reaching the European front. (Click here for a debunking of the Lusitania myth.)

When the Maine sank, the proactive Assistant Secretary of the Navy had been Teddy Roosevelt. After the 1898 Spanish-American War he became governor of New York, and by 1901 was President of the United States. When the Lusitania sank, the Assistant Secretary of the Navy was his distant cousin Franklin D. Roosevelt – who likewise went on to become governor of New York and then President.
Just as coincident: during the Lusitania affair, the head of the British Admiralty was yet another cousin of Franklin D. – Winston Churchill. And in a chilling déjà vu, as Pearl Harbor approached, these two men were now heads of their respective states.
In a 1940 (election-year) speech, Roosevelt stated typically: “I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.”² But privately, the President planned just the opposite: to bring America into the World War as Britain’s ally, exactly as Woodrow Wilson had done in World War I. Roosevelt dispatched his closest advisor, Harry Hopkins, to meet Churchill in January 1941. Hopkins told Churchill: “The President is determined that we [the United States and England] shall win the war together. Make no mistake about it. He has sent me here to tell you that at all costs and by all means he will carry you through, no matter what happens to him – there is nothing he will not do so far as he has human power.”³ William Stephenson, who ran British intelligence operations in the U.S., noted that American-British military staff talks began that same month under “utmost secrecy,” which, he clarified, “meant preventing disclosure to the American public.”⁴

The President offered numerous provocations to Germany: freezing its assets; occupying Iceland; shipping 50 destroyers to Britain; and having U.S. warships escort Allied convoys. Roosevelt and Churchill hoped to duplicate the success of the Lusitania incident. But the Germans gave them no satisfaction. They knew America’s entry into World War I had shifted the balance of power against them, and they shunned a repetition of that scenario.
As Admiral Karl Doenitz, commander of Germany’s U-boat fleet, stated during the Nuremburg trials:

A 300 mile safety zone was even granted to America by Germany when international law called for only a three mile zone. I suggested mine fields at Halifax and around Iceland, but the Fuehrer rejected this because he wanted to avoid conflict with the United States. When American destroyers in the summer of 1941 were ordered to attack German submarines, I was forbidden to fight back. I was thus forced not to attack British destroyers for fear there would be some mistake.⁵

After being pursued by the destroyer USS Greer for more than three hours, the German submarine U-652 fired at (but did not hit) the Greer. President Roosevelt bewailed this to the American public as an unprovoked attack:



But most Americans were unmoved. Not even another Lusitania would have motivated them to send their sons to die in another European war.

It was going to take a whole cluster of Lusitanias, and since this would not come from the cautious Germans, it could only come from Germany’s Axis partner, Japan. As Interior Secretary Harold Ickes put it in 1941: “For a long time I have believed that our best entrance into the war would be by way of Japan.”⁶ This required three steps: (1) build anti-Japanese sentiment in America; (2) provoke Japan to the flashpoint of war; (3) set up an irresistible target to serve as a fαℓѕє fℓαg.
Demonizing Japan
Americans were subjected to a stream of propaganda depicting Japan as bent on “world conquest” even though it is smaller than Montana. In the wartime government-produced film, Our Enemy: The Japanese, narrator Joseph Grew (CFR) told the public the Japanese believed it was the “the right and destiny of Japan’s emperors to rule the whole world . . . to destroy all nations and peoples which stand in the way of its fulfillment. . . . [Their] national dream is to see Tokyo established as the capital of the world . . . . world conquest is their national obsession.”



Grew neglected to mention that Japan had been a closed isolationist country until Commodore Perry compelled them to sign a trade agreement under threat of U.S. naval bombardment. Perry was the father-in-law of August Belmont, the Rothschilds’ leading financial agent in America during the 19th century.⁷
As proof of “Japan’s plot to conquer the world,” the American press played up Japanese troops entering Manchuria in the 1930s. But the fact that the Soviets had first seized Outer Mongolia and China’s northwestern province of Sinkiang drew no notice.  As Dr. Anthony Kubek, chairman of the history department at the University of Dallas, wrote in How the Far East Was Lost:

It was apparent to Japanese statesmen that unless bastions of defense were built in Manchuria and Inner Mongolia, Communism would spread through all of North China and seriously threaten the security of Japan. . . . But the Department of State seemed not to regard Japan as a bulwark against Soviet expansion in North China. As a matter of fact, not one word of protest was sent by the Department of State to the Soviet Union, despite her absorption of Sinkiang and Outer Mongolia, while at the same time Japan was censured for stationing troops in China.⁸

Dr. Kubek’s remarks highlight a policy consistent throughout the Second World War: condemn “fascist aggression” while tolerating – without limit – communist aggression. For example, when the Germans invaded Poland in September 1939, Britain and France declared war on Germany. Yet when the Soviet Union invaded Poland that same month, the West . . . yawned.
Japanese tank crew rests during 1939 fighting against the Soviets near Mongolia.
To those who might contend Japan had no right to enter China to oppose communism, let’s remember that the United States sent its troops around the globe to Vietnam on the principle that stopping communism was in its national interests. By what logic, then, could Japan not oppose communism on its doorstep? A glance at a map shows how close communism was drawing to Japan, having methodically enslaved all the nations embodying the Soviet Union, and it was now boring southward into China. In sending troops to Manchuria and China, Japan was invoking her own version of the Monroe Doctrine.

The Soviets, for their part, wanted war between the United States and Japan, knowing that with Japan neutralized, Communism would engulf Asia. In 1935, U.S. Ambassador to Moscow William C. Bullitt sent a dispatch to Secretary of State Cordell Hull:

It is . . . the heartiest hope of the Soviet Government that the United States will become involved in war with Japan. . . . The Soviet Union would certainly attempt to avoid becoming an ally until Japan had been thoroughly defeated and would then merely use the opportunity to acquire Manchuria and Sovietize China.⁹

Benjamin Gitlow, founding member of the U.S. Communist Party, wrote in I Confess (1940):

When I was in Moscow, the attitude toward the United States in the event of war was discussed. Privately, it was the opinion of all the Russian leaders to whom I spoke that the rivalry between the United States and Japan must actually break out into war between these two.¹⁰

Roosevelt Provokes Japan
On June 23, 1941, Interior Secretary Ickes wrote in a memo to Roosevelt:

There will never be so good a time to stop the shipment of oil to Japan as we now have. . . . There might develop from embargoing of oil such a situation as would make it, not only possible but easy, to get into this war in an effective way. And if we should thus indirectly be brought in, we would avoid the criticism that we had gone in as an ally of communistic Russia. ¹¹

The memo’s date is significant: the day after Germany and her allies (Italy, Hungary, Romania, Finland and Croatia) launched Operation Barbarossa: the invasion of the Soviet Union.
Why did Ickes say an oil embargo would make it “easy to get into this war”? The answer lies in an eight-point plan of provocation toward Japan which had been previously drawn up by Lt. Commander Arthur McCollum of Naval Intelligence. The eighth of the eight-step plan was: “Completely embargo all U.S. trade with Japan, in collaboration with a similar embargo imposed by the British Empire.” McCollum’s next sentence was: “If by these means Japan could be led to commit an overt act of war, so much the better.”¹²
Ickes; McCollum
What McCollum, Ickes and Roosevelt envisioned was antagonizing Japan to the point that it would attack the United States. And thus – in the tradition of the Maine and Lusitania – America, as the “innocent victim of unprovoked aggression” – would go to war. Here is how War Secretary Henry Stimson (CFR, Skull and Bones) phrased it in his diary, after meetings with the President that autumn: “We face the delicate question of the diplomatic fencing to be done so as to be sure that Japan is put into the wrong and makes the first bad move – overt move.”¹³ “The question was how we should maneuver them [the Japanese] into the position of firing the first shot….”¹⁴
Between July 26 and August 1, 1941, FDR seized Japanese assets in America, closed the Panama Canal to Japanese shipping, and enacted the sweeping trade embargo that McCollum and Ickes had urged. Britain and the Netherlands followed suit with similar embargoes. For the Japanese, this constituted a death threat. Japan heavily depended on imports for raw materials, for 88 percent of its oil and 75 percent of its food.
The timing of these measures was again significant. In July 1941, all reports indicated the Germans and their allies were crushing the Red Army. Hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers were surrendering; as they did, many shouted “Stalin kaput!”  Stalin himself was nearly paralyzed with fear. He had only fought wars of aggression and was unprepared for defense. If Japan, Germany’s ally, joined Operation Barbarossa from the East, Stalin would be trapped in a vise, and communism – which was an Illuminati creation – destroyed.
Roosevelt’s trade embargo guaranteed that Japan would not join Operation Barbarossa, but would instead turn its attention south. No nation can prosecute war without oil. Tanks, trucks, ships and aircraft require it. If Japan attacked Russia through Siberia, there would be no oil to be confiscated. But there was abundant oil to the south, in the Dutch East Indies. And Southeast Asia held many other resources the embargo denied Japan, such as rubber, tin and iron ore.
Why Did Japan Go to War with America?
British historian Russell Grenfell, a captain in the Royal Navy, wrote In 1952:

No reasonably informed person can now believe that Japan made a villainous, unexpected attack on the United States. An attack was not only fully expected but was actually desired. It is beyond doubt that President Roosevelt wanted to get his country into war, but for political reasons was most anxious to ensure that the first act of hostility came from the other side; for which reason he caused increasing pressure to be put on the Japanese, to a point that no self-respecting nation could endure without resort to arms. Japan was meant by the American President to attack the United States.¹⁵

Grenfell; Lyttelton
On June 20, 1944, Oliver Lyttelton, Britain’s minister of production, said before the American Chamber of Commerce in London: “America provoked Japan to such an extent that the Japanese were forced to attack Pearl Harbor. It is a travesty on history ever to say that America was forced into war.”¹⁶ Why did Lyttelton make this startling accusation (for which he was later compelled to apologize)?
Following the U.S. embargo, Japan’s representatives in Washington earnestly negotiated for the embargo’s repeal, to no avail.  On November 26, 1941, the State Department delivered an ultimatum to Japan: sanctions would only be lifted if all overseas Japanese troops were withdrawn to Japan. Although the ultimatum or “Hull note” was officially credited to Secretary of State Cordell Hull, it is now known that it was drafted by Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Harry Dexter White, a Soviet operative.
Harry Dexter White
The White/Hull ultimatum was a deliberate catch-22. If the Japanese refused it, the embargo would continue, and they would collapse from economic strangulation. If they complied, and withdrew all troops from the mainland, communism would sweep Eastern Asia (exactly as happened after the war, resulting in Communist China, and the Korean and Vietnam wars). The Japanese were thus given a two-headed coin: die by starvation, or die by communism. They decided to reject both options, and fight instead.
To have any hope of success in a war against the mighty USA, Japan would need an edge. Franklin D. Roosevelt made sure they got one in the form of attractive bait.
The Decision to Base the Fleet at Pearl Harbor
In 1940, President Roosevelt decided that the Pacific Fleet should be based indefinitely at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, instead of its usual berths on the U.S. West Coast. This was a bad idea for many reasons:

• In the middle of the Pacific, Hawaii is surrounded by uninhabited waters, making it susceptible to surprise attack from 360 degrees. By contrast, no surprise attack could have been launched if the fleet was kept on the West Coast; assailants would have encountered innumerable commercial vessels before reaching it.
• At Pearl Harbor, the fleet was boxed together like sardines, making them ideal targets for bombers.

• In Hawaii, oil and others supplies had to be brought across 2,000 miles of the Pacific.
• Pearl Harbor lacked adequate fuel and ammunition storage facilities, dry docks, and support craft (such as tugs and repair vessels). The fleet could have been maintained on a superior war footing if kept on the West Coast.
• 37 percent of Hawaii’s population was ethnically Japanese, rendering the fleet vulnerable to espionage and sabotage.
• Basing the fleet in Hawaii would separate sailors from their families, creating morale problems.

U.S. Fleet Commander Admiral J. O. Richardson was outraged by Roosevelt’s decision and met with him on October 8, 1940 to protest it. Richardson presented the President with a list of logical reasons why the fleet should not be based in Pearl Harbor. Roosevelt could not rebut these objections and simply said that having the fleet there would exert a “restraining influence on the actions of Japan.”¹⁷
Richardson said: “I came away with the impression that, despite his spoken word, the President was fully determined to put the United States into the war if Great Britain could hold out until he was reelected.”¹⁸

On February 1, 1941, Richardson was relieved of his command without any explanation. Richardson met with Navy Secretary Frank Knox to inquire about it, and related: “When I saw the Secretary, I said, ‘In all my experience in the Navy, I have never known of a flag officer being detached in the same manner as I, and I feel I owe it to myself to know why.’ The Secretary said the President would send for me and talk the matter over.” However, Roosevelt never sent for Richardson; the only explanation the admiral ever received were these words from Secretary Knox: “The last time you were here you hurt the President’s feelings.”¹⁹
Roosevelt’s sole pretext for basing the fleet in Pearl Harbor – that it would deter Japanese aggression – was resoundingly discredited on December 7, 1941. Nevertheless, as we shall see, Roosevelt was never held accountable for his action. All blame was instead leveled at the Navy, especially Richardson’s successor as Pacific Fleet Commander, Admiral Husband Kimmel, who accepted the position believing Washington would notify him of any intelligence pointing to a threat.
This trust proved misplaced. As Washington watched Japan prepare for the attack, it kept Kimmel and his army counterpart in Hawaii, General Walter C. Short, well out of its intelligence loop.
Kimmel; Short
The fαℓѕє fℓαg Foreknown (1): “Magic”
The Japanese used a code called “Purple” to communicate to their embassies and major consulates throughout the world. Its complexity required that it be enciphered and deciphered by machine. The Japanese considered the code unbreakable, but in 1940 talented U.S. Army cryptanalysts cracked it and devised a facsimile of the Japanese machine. As the result, U.S. intelligence was reading Japanese diplomatic messages, often on a same-day basis.
U.S. Purple decoding machine
Copies of the deciphered texts, nicknamed “Magic,” were promptly delivered in locked pouches to select individuals, including President Roosevelt, Secretary of State Cordell Hull, Secretary of War Henry Stimson, Army Chief of Staff General George Marshall, and the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Harold Stark. Copies also went to Harry Hopkins, FDR’s shadowy advisor who held no cabinet position.²⁰

(It is worth digressing for a paragraph about Hopkins, who lived in the White House; he has been aptly compared to Woodrow Wilson’s Wall Street controller, Edward Mandell House, who also lived in the White House. Like House, Hopkins acted as a special emissary, paying visits to Churchill and Stalin. After the war, it was revealed that as head of Lend-Lease, he secretly shipped both the materials and blueprints for the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union. This was docuмented by Lend-Lease expediter George Racey Jordan in From Major Jordan’s Diaries. Some may find interesting John T. Flynn’s remarks in The Roosevelt Myth on the favors bestowed upon Hopkins by British press tycoon Lord Beaverbrook and bankster Bernard Baruch on the occasion of Hopkins’s third wedding.)

Although Hopkins had access to “Magic” intercepts, our commanders in Hawaii did not. And what did these intercepts reveal?

• that Tokyo had ordered its Consul General in Hawaii to divide Pearl Harbor into five areas and, on a frequent basis, report the exact locations of American warships there. Nothing is unusual about spies watching ship movements – but reporting precise whereabouts of ships in dock has only one implication.
• that on November 29th (three days after the U.S. ultimatum), Japan’s envoys in Washington were told a rupture in negotiations was “inevitable,” but that Japan’s leaders “do not wish you to give the impression that negotiations are broken off.”
• that on November 30th Tokyo had ordered their Berlin embassy to inform the Germans (their allies) that “the breaking out of war may come quicker than anyone dreams.”
• that on December 1st, the Japanese had ordered all of their North American diplomatic offices to destroy their secret docuмents.²¹ (Once war breaks out, the offices of a hostile power lose their diplomatic immunity and are seized.)

In the 1970 movie Tora, Tora, Tora, a Hollywood depiction of the events surrounding Pearl Harbor, Japan’s ambassadors are shown presenting their message breaking relations (meaning war) to Secretary of State Cordell Hull, after the attack on Hawaii, and Hull reacts with surprise and outrage.

In reality, however, Hull was not shocked at all. On the previous day (December 6), he had already read the translated intercept of Japan’s declaration – 13 parts of the 14-part message – as had President Roosevelt.
The fαℓѕє fℓαg Foreknown (2): East Wind, Rain
An additional warning came via the so-called “Winds” message. A November 18th intercept indicated that, if a break in U.S. relations was forthcoming, Tokyo would issue a special radio warning. This would not be in the Purple code, as it was intended to reach consulates and lesser agencies of Japan not equipped with the code or one of its machines. The message, to be repeated three times during a weather report, was “Higashi no kaze ame,” meaning “East wind, rain.” “East wind” signified the United States; “rain” signified diplomatic split (war).
This prospective message was deemed so significant that U.S. radio monitors were constantly watching for it, and the Navy Department typed it up on special reminder cards. On December 4th, “Higashi no kaze ame” was broadcast and picked up by Washington intelligence.
The fαℓѕє fℓαg Foreknown (3): Personal Warnings
During 1941, the Roosevelt administration also received several personal warnings regarding Pearl Harbor:

• On January 27th, our ambassador to Japan, Joseph Grew, reported to Washington: “The Peruvian Minister has informed a member of my staff that he has heard from many sources, including a Japanese source, that in the event of trouble breaking out between the United States and Japan, the Japanese intended to make a surprise attack against Pearl Harbor with all their strength. . . .”²²
• Brigadier General Elliott Thorpe was the U.S. military observer in Java, then under Dutch control. In early December 1941, the Dutch army decoded a dispatch from Tokyo to its Bangkok embassy, forecasting an attack on Hawaii. The Dutch passed the information to Thorpe, who considered it so vital that he sent Washington a total of four warnings. Finally, the War Department told him to send no further warnings.²³
• The Dutch Military attaché in Washington, Colonel F. G. L. Weijerman, personally warned U.S. Army Chief of Staff George Marshall about Pearl Harbor just days before the attack.²⁴
• Dusko Popov was a Yugoslavian double agent whose true allegiance was to the Allies. Through information furnished by the Germans, Popov deduced the Japanese were planning to bomb Pearl Harbor. He notified the FBI; subsequently FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover warned Roosevelt.²⁵
• Senator Guy Gillette of Iowa received information from Kilsoo Haan of the Sino-Korean People’s League that the Japanese intended to assault Hawaii “before Christmas.” Gillette briefed the President, who said the matter would be looked into.²⁶
• U.S. Congressman Martin Dies of Texas came into possession of a map revealing the Japanese plan to attack Pearl Harbor. He later wrote:

As soon as I received the docuмent I telephoned Secretary of State Cordell Hull and told him what I had. Secretary Hull directed me not to let anyone know about the map and stated that he would call me as soon as he talked to President Roosevelt. In about an hour he telephoned to say that he had talked to Roosevelt and they agreed that it would be very serious if any information concerning this map reached the news services . . . I told him it was a grave responsibility to withhold such vital information from the public. The Secretary assured me that he and Roosevelt considered it essential to national defense.²⁷

Thorpe(on the left), Popov & Martin Dies
The fαℓѕє fℓαg Foreknown: (4) Naval Intercepts
In his book Day of Deceit: The Truth about FDR and Pearl Harbor (2000), Robert Stinnett proved, from docuмents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, that Washington was not only deciphering Japanese diplomatic messages, but naval dispatches also.

It had long been presumed that as the Japanese fleet approached Pearl Harbor, it maintained complete radio silence. This was not the case. The fleet observed discretion, but not complete silence. U.S. Naval Intelligence intercepted and translated numerous dispatches, which President Roosevelt had access to through his routing officer, Lieutenant Commander McCollum, who had also authored the original eight-point plan of provocation. The most significant message was sent by Admiral Yamamoto to the Japanese First Air Fleet on November 25, 1941:

The task force, keeping its movement strictly secret and maintaining close guard against submarines and aircraft, shall advance into Hawaiian waters, and upon the very opening of hostilities shall attack the main force of the United States fleet and deal it a mortal blow. The first air raid is planned for the dawn of x-day. Exact date to be given by later order.²⁸

Here is more on the interception of this message:

Maximizing the Risks
MSM historians have traditionally censured the Hawaiian commanders, Admiral Kimmel and General Short, for failing to detect the approaching Japanese carriers. What goes unsaid: Washington denied them the means to do so.
During the week before December 7th, naval aircraft searched more than two million square miles of the Pacific²⁹ – but never saw the Japanese force. This is because Kimmel and Short had only enough planes to survey less than one-third of the 360-degree arc around them, and intelligence had advised (incorrectly) that they should concentrate on the southwest.
There were not enough trained surveillance pilots. Many of the reconnaissance craft suffered from lack of spare parts. Repeated requests to Washington for additional patrol planes were turned down. As George Morgenstern noted in Pearl Harbor: The Story of the Secret War: “While the Hawaiian air commanders were clamoring for planes to safeguard the base, 1,900 patrol planes were being lend-leased to foreign countries between February 1 and December 1, 1941. Of these, 1,750, or almost ten times the number which would have rendered Oahu safe, went to Great Britain.”³⁰
Rear Admiral Edward T. Layton, who served at Pearl Harbor, stated: “There was never any hint in any intelligence received by the local command of any Japanese threat to Hawaii. Our air defenses were stripped on orders from the army chief himself. Of the twelve B-17s on the island, only six could be kept in the air by cannibalizing the others for spare parts.”³¹
Radar, too, was insufficient. And when General Short attempted to build a radar station on Mount Haleakala, Harold Ickes’ Interior Department withheld permission, stating that it would harm the beauty of the landscape.³²
Advance Damage Control: the “War Warning”
It was clear, of course, that once disaster struck Pearl Harbor, there would be demands for accountability. Washington seemed to artfully take this into account by sending an ambiguous “war warning” to Kimmel, and a similar one to Short, on November 27th. This has been used for years by Washington apologists to allege that the commanders should have been ready for the Japanese.
Indeed, the message began conspicuously: “This dispatch is to be considered a war warning.” However, it went on to state: “The number and equipment of Japanese troops and the organizations of naval task forces indicates an amphibious expedition against the Philippines, Thai or Kra Peninsula, or possibly Borneo.” None of these areas were closer than 5,000 miles to Hawaii (that is further than the distance from New York to Moscow). No threat to Pearl Harbor was hinted at. It ended with the words: “Continental districts, Guam, Samoa take measures against sabotage.” The message further stated that “measures should be carried out so as not repeat not to alarm civil population.” Both commanders reported the actions taken to Washington. Short followed through with sabotage precautions, bunching his planes together (which hinders saboteurs but makes ideal targets for bombers), and Kimmel stepped up air surveillance and sub searches. If their response to the “war warning” was insufficient, Washington said nothing. The next day, a follow-up message from Marshall’s adjutant general to Short warned only: “Initiate forthwith all additional measures necessary to provide for protection of your establishments, property, and equipment against sabotage, protection of your personnel against subversive propaganda and protection of all activities against espionage.”³³
Short testifies before Congress after the war:

On December 1, Naval intelligence sent Kimmel its fortnightly intelligence summary entitled “The Japanese Naval Situation.” It stated: “Major capital ship strength remains in home waters, as well as the greatest portion of the carriers.”³⁴ Contrast that to the diary of Captain Johann Ranneft, the Dutch naval attaché in Washington, who was awarded the Legion of Merit for his services to America. Ranneft recorded that on December 2nd, he visited the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI). Ranneft inquired about the Pacific. An American officer, pointing to a wall map, said, “This is the Japanese Task Force proceeding East.” It was a spot midway between Japan and Hawaii. On December 6th, Ranneft returned and asked where the Japanese carriers were. He was shown a position on the map about 300-400 miles northwest of Pearl Harbor. Ranneft wrote: “I ask what is the meaning of these carriers at this location; whereupon I receive the answer that it is probably in connection with Japanese reports of eventual American action. . . . I myself do not think about it because I believe that everyone in Honolulu is 100 percent on the alert, just like everyone here at O.N.I.”³⁵
Admiral Kimmel testifiying after the war:

Strange Activity on December 7
On the morning of the Sunday the 7th, the final portion of Japan’s lengthy message to the U.S. government (rupturing relations, effectively declaring war) was intercepted and decoded. Tokyo added two special directives to its envoys. The first, which the message called “very important,” was to deliver the statement at 1 PM. The second directive ordered that the last copy of code, and the machine that went with it, be destroyed. The gravity of this was not lost in the Navy Department: Japan had a long history of synchronizing attacks with breaks in relations (e.g., in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5, it had attacked Port Arthur on the same day it notified Russia that it was declaring war). Sunday was an abnormal day to deliver diplomatic messages — but the best for trying to catch U.S. armed forces at low vigilance; and 1 PM in Washington was shortly after dawn in Hawaii.
Admiral Stark, Chief of Naval Operations, arrived at his office at 9:25 AM. He was shown the message and important delivery time. One junior officer pointed out the possibility of an attack on Hawaii; another urged that Kimmel be notified. But Stark refused; he did nothing all morning. Years later, he told the press that his conscience was clear concerning Pearl Harbor because all his actions had been dictated by a “higher authority.”³⁶ As Chief of Naval Operations, Stark had only one higher authority: Roosevelt.

In the War Department, where the statement had also been decoded, Colonel Rufus Bratton, head of Army Intelligence’s Far Eastern section, understood the message’s terrible significance. But the head of intelligence told him nothing could be done until Chief of Staff General Marshall arrived. Bratton tried reaching Marshall at home, but was repeatedly told the general was out horseback riding. The horseback ride turned out to be a very long one. When Bratton finally reached Marshall by phone and explained the emergency, Marshall said he would come to the War Department. Marshall took 75 minutes to make the 10-minute drive. He didn’t come to his office until 11:25 AM – an extremely late hour with the nation on the brink of war. He perused the Japanese message and was shown the delivery time. Every officer in Marshall’s office agreed these indicated an attack in the Pacific at about 1 PM EST. The general finally agreed that Hawaii should be alerted, but time was running out.
Marshall had only to pick up his desk phone to reach Pearl Harbor on the transpacific line. Doing so would not have averted the attack, but at least our men would have been at their battle stations. Instead, the general wrote a dispatch, which was not even marked “priority” or “urgent.” After it was encoded it went to the Washington office of Western Union. From there it was relayed to San Francisco. From San Francisco it was transmitted via RCA commercial radio to Honolulu. General Short received it six hours after the attack. Two hours later it reached Kimmel. One can imagine their exasperation on reading it.

Despite all the evidence accrued through Magic and other sources during the previous months, Marshall had never warned Hawaii. To historians – ignorant of that classified evidence – it would appear the general had tried to save Pearl Harbor, “but alas, too late.” Similarly, FDR sent a last-minute plea for peace to Emperor Hirohito. Although written a week earlier, he did not send it until the evening of December 6th.³⁷ It was to be delivered by Ambassador Grew, who would be unable to receive an audience with the emperor before December 8th. Thus the message could not conceivably have forestalled the attack – but posterity would think that FDR, too, had made “a valiant, last effort.”
Marshall BUSTED
As for Marshall’s notorious “horseback ride” which allegedly prevented him from warning Pearl Harbor in time, that cover story was unintentionally blown by Arthur Upham Pope, in his 1943 biography of Maxim Litvinoff, the Soviet ambassador to the United States. Litvinoff arrived in Washington on the morning of December 7th, 1941 – a highly opportune day to seek additional aid for the Soviets – and, according to Pope, was met at the airport that morning by General Marshall.
The Coverup
Pearl Harbor’s secrets had been successfully preserved before the fact – but what about after? Many people around the nation, including some vocal congressmen, demanded to know why America had been caught off guard.
President Roosevelt said he would appoint an investigatory commission. Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts – a pro-British internationalist friendly with FDR – was selected to head it. Also appointed to the group: Major General Frank McCoy, General George Marshall’s close friend for 30 years; Brigadier General Joseph McNarney, who was on Marshall’s staff and chosen on his recommendation; retired Rear Admiral Joseph Reeves, whom FDR had given a job in Lend-Lease; and Admiral William Standley, a former fleet commander. Only the last seemed to have no obvious fraternity with the Washington set.
The Roberts Commission. L-R: McNarney, Standley, Roberts, Reeves, McCoy
The commission conducted only two to three days of hearings in Washington. Admiral Standley, arriving late, was startled by the inquiry’s chummy atmosphere. Admiral Harold Stark and General Marshall were asked no difficult or embarrassing questions. Furthermore, all testimony was taken unsworn and unrecorded – an irregularity that, at Standley’s urging, was corrected.
The commission then flew to Hawaii, where it remained 19 days. When Admiral Kimmel was summoned, he brought a fellow officer to act as counsel. Justice Roberts disallowed this on grounds that the investigation was not a trial, and the admiral not a defendant. Because Kimmel and General Walter Short were not formally “on trial,” they were also denied all traditional rights of defendants: to ask questions and cross-examine witnesses. Kimmel was also shocked that the proceeding’s stenographers – one a teenager, the other with almost no court experience – omitted much of his testimony and left other parts badly garbled. Permission to correct the errors – other than adding footnotes to the end of the commission’s report – was refused.³⁸
The Roberts Commission laid all blame for Pearl Harbor on the Hawaiian commanders: they had underestimated the import of the November 27th warning; they had not taken sufficient defensive or surveillance actions; they were guilty of “dereliction of duty.” On the other hand, it said, Stark and Marshall had discharged their duties in exemplary fashion. Remarkably, the report’s section declaring this was first submitted to Stark and Marshall for revisions and approval. Admiral Standley dissented with the findings but did not write a minority opinion after being told that doing so might jeopardize the war effort by lowering the nation’s confidence in its leaders. Standley later called Roberts’s handling of the investigation “as crooked as a snake.”³⁹ Admiral Richardson, Kimmel’s predecessor as Pacific Fleet commander, said of the report: “It is the most unfair, unjust, and deceptively dishonest docuмent ever printed by the Government Printing Office.”⁴⁰
Roberts brought a final copy of the report to FDR. The President read it and delightedly tossed it to a secretary, saying, “Give that in full to the papers for their Sunday editions.”⁴¹ The words “dereliction of duty” were emblazoned in headlines across the country. America’s outrage fell on Kimmel and Short. They were traitors, it was said; they should be shot! The two were inundated with hate mail and death threats. The press, with its ageless capacity to manufacture villains, stretched the commission’s slurs. Even the wives of the commanders were subjected to vicious canards.
There was great outcry for courts-martial – which was exactly what the two officers sought: to resolve the issue of Pearl Harbor in a bona fide courtroom, using established rules of evidence, instead of Owen Roberts’s personal methods. The Roosevelt administration, of course, did not desire that – in an orthodox courtroom, a sharp defense attorney might start digging into Washington’s secrets. So the issue was sidestepped by again invoking security concerns due to the war effort. It was announced that courts-martial would be held – but postponed “until such time as the public interest and safety would permit.”
Sufficient delay would also cause the three-year statute of limitations that applied in such cases to elapse. But that was the last thing Kimmel and Short wanted; court-martial was their only means of clearing themselves. Thus they voluntarily waived the statute of limitations.
Their Day in Court
By 1944, the Allies were clearly winning the war, and national security would no longer wash as a barrier to courts-martial. A joint Congressional resolution mandated trials. At last, the former Hawaiian commanders would have their day in court.
In August, the Naval Court of Inquiry opened. A source inside the Navy Department had already tipped Kimmel and his attorneys about the scores of Magic intercepts kept from the admiral in 1941. One of the attorneys, a former Navy captain, managed to get at the Department’s files, and authenticated the existence of many. Obtaining their release was another matter. Obstruction after obstruction appeared – until Kimmel tried a ploy. Walking out of the courtroom, he bellowed to his lawyer that they would have to tell the press that important evidence was being withheld.
By the next day, the requested intercepts had been delivered – 43 in all. The admirals on the Court listened to them being read with looks of horror and disbelief. Two of the admirals flung their pencils down. More than 2,000 died at Pearl Harbor because those messages had been withheld. Navy Department officers gave additional testimony. After nearly three months, the inquiry finished. The verdict of the Roberts Commission was overturned. Admiral Kimmel was exonerated on all charges. Admiral Stark — who had rejected pleas of juniors to notify Hawaii on the morning of the attack – was severely censured.
The Naval Court of Inquiry
News of the intercepts leaked to the Army Pearl Harbor Board, convening at the same time. The Board secured copies of Magic from War Department files. The Board’s conclusions still expressed modest criticism of General Short, but found overwhelming guilt in General Marshall and his Chief of War Plans, General Gerow. Its report bluntly concluded: “Up to the morning of December 7, 1941, everything that the Japanese were planning to do was known to the United States.”⁴²
Direct criticism of the President was forbidden to these proceedings as beyond their jurisdiction. But FDR held ultimate responsibility for Pearl Harbor, and the warnings he had received – some of which only later came to light – far exceeded anything they might have dreamed.
The verdicts wrought dismay in the Roosevelt administration. But a solution was swiftly concocted. It was announced that, in the interest of national security, the findings would not become public until the war’s end. (This would give Washington time to conduct “new” investigations.) Navy Secretary Knox told the press that the Naval Court of Inquiry had marked its conclusions “secret,” and therefore nothing could be published. A stunned Admiral Orin Murfin, who had presided over the Court, protested to the Secretary. It was true that the breaking of Japan’s diplomatic code was not for public knowledge – but, he pointed out, the Court had only marked part of its determinations secret. Charles Rugg, Kimmel’s attorney, telegrammed Knox demanding to know how the “innocent” verdict granted the admiral could be deemed classified. Nevertheless, the reports were suppressed.
Damage Control
Washington now explained that it would conduct additional investigations supplementing the courts of inquiry. Henry Stimson picked Major (later Lieutenant Colonel) Henry Clausen – known to disagree with the Army Board findings – to carry out the War Department’s investigation. The Navy Secretary appointed Admiral W. Kent Hewitt. Hewitt’s role, however, was largely titular; most of the operation was carried out by Lieutenant Commander John F. Sonnett.
The ventures were without precedent: a major was to investigate (and overturn) a verdict rendered by generals; a lieutenant commander was to challenge a verdict of admirals.
The game rules were reminiscent of those of the Roberts Commission. Kimmel and his attorneys were refused permission to attend the Hewitt Inquiry, which operated under this directive: “Except that the testimony you take should be taken under oath so as to be on equal status in this respect with the testimony previously taken, you will conduct your examination in an informal manner and without regard to legal or formal requirements.”⁴³
Not surprisingly, witnesses who had testified against Washington now reversed themselves. Colonel Rufus Bratton had informed the Army Pearl Harbor Board that on December 6, 1941, he had delivered the first 13 parts of Japan’s terminative message to General Marshall via his secretary, and to General Gerow, Chief of the War Plans Division. Now in Germany, Bratton was flagged down on the Autobahn by Clausen, who handed him affidavits from Marshall’s secretary and Gerow denying the deliveries were ever made. Confronted with denials from the Army’s highest levels, Bratton recanted, signing a new affidavit.⁴⁴
Other officers, their memories similarly “refreshed,” retracted their statements about seeing the “Winds” message; now, it seemed, the message never existed. These individuals faced a dilemma. They were career military men. They knew telling the truth would pit them against the Army Chief of Staff and end all hope of promotion.
But one man wouldn’t bend – Captain Laurance Safford, father of naval cryptography. Safford had overseen that branch of naval intelligence for many years. He personally invented some 20 cryptographic devices, including the most advanced used by our armed forces. For his work, he was ultimately awarded the Legion of Merit.

Safford, who had testified before the Naval Inquiry that he had seen the “Winds” message, was confronted by Sonnett. Safford wrote of this meeting: “His purpose seemed to be to refute testimony (before earlier investigations) that was unfavorable to anyone in Washington, to beguile ‘hostile’ witnesses into changing their stories. . . .” In a memorandum written immediately after the encounter, Safford recorded some of Sonnett’s verbal prods, such as: “It is very doubtful that there ever was a Winds Execute [message]”; “It is no reflection on your veracity to change your testimony”; and, “It is no reflection on your mentality to have your memory play you tricks – after such a long period.”⁴⁵ Safford realized a colossal coverup was underway, but was not surprised. He had already discovered that all copies of the “Winds” message in Navy files, along with other important Pearl Harbor memos, had been destroyed. Just four days after Pearl Harbor, Rear Admiral Leigh Noyes, director of naval communications, told his subordinates: “Destroy all notes or anything in writing.”⁴⁶ This was an illegal order – naval memoranda belong to the American people and cannot be destroyed except by Congressional authority. Stories circulated of a similar information purge in the War Department. Some files, however, escaped destruction.
The Clausen and Hewitt inquiries pleased Washington. Equipped with fresh sophistries, the administration produced highly revamped versions of the Army and Navy inquiry findings. The dual Army/Navy announcement came on August 29, 1945 – the very day American troops arrived in Japan, when a rejoicing public was unlikely to care about Pearl Harbor’s origins. The War Secretary’s report shifted the blame back to Short, while saying of General Marshall that “throughout this matter I believe that he acted with his usual great skill, energy, and efficiency.”⁴⁷ It admitted the Army Board had criticized Marshall, but said this was completely unjustified. The Navy Secretary’s statement again imputed guilt to Kimmel, while asserting that Washington had not been negligent in keeping him informed. It did acknowledge that Admiral Stark should not be given a future position requiring “superior judgement.”
Consequently, Americans didn’t learn what the original inquiries had determined. Of course, anyone wanting to find out for himself could do so when the government released the official record of the hearings connected with Pearl Harbor – if he didn’t mind wading through 40 volumes.
Congress Enters the Act
Only one obstacle remained to burying Pearl Harbor. Congress had long made noises about conducting its own investigation; with the war over, it was sure to do so.
To nip any threat in the bud, the administration sent a bill to both the House and Senate forbidding disclosure of coded materials. It was promptly passed by the Senate, whose members had never heard of Magic and had no idea that the bill would hamstring their forthcoming investigation.
Admiral Kimmel read about the bill in the papers. He and his attorneys notified the press and congressmen about the measure’s implications. As a result, the House voted it down and the Senate rescinded it.
Capitol Hill’s Pearl Harbor probe began in November 1945, when the Joint Congressional Committee assembled. It comprised six Democrats and four Republicans. A split along party lines quickly emerged. The Democrats knew that, even though Roosevelt had recently died, a Pearl Harbor scandal could devastate them at the ballot box. But so long as all six Democrats maintained unswerving party loyalty, a majority decision favoring the administration was inevitable.
Admiral Richardson testifies before Joint Congressional Committee
The Democrats used their edge to jockey things their way. The counsel chosen for the committee was a Democrat who previously served with Henry Stimson; his assistant was a former New Dealer working for the law firm of Dean Acheson, the Under Secretary of State. A majority vote determined what evidence the committee would review. Several witnesses Kimmel wanted introduced were never called.
Coercion prevented others from testifying. Major Warren J. Clear, who had warned the War Department in early 1941 that the Japanese were planning to attack a series of islands including Hawaii, was ordered not to appear before the committee.⁴⁸ So was Chief Warrant Officer Ralph T. Briggs, the man who had originally intercepted the “Winds” message at a United States monitoring station. He was summoned before his commanding officer, who forbade him to testify. “Perhaps someday you’ll understand the reason for this,” he was told. Briggs had a blind wife to support. He did not come forward as a witness.⁴⁹
The treatment of Lieutenant Commander Alwin Kramer was cruder. Kramer, who had been in charge of the Navy Department’s Translation Section at the time of Pearl Harbor, and had once testified to having seen the “Winds” message, was confined to a psychiatric ward at Bethesda Naval Hospital. Representative Frank Keefe, a committee Republican, learned of this and vigorously protested.⁵⁰ Kramer was told that his testimony had better change or he’d be in the ward for the rest of his life. The officer went before the committee, but gave a confusing narrative that essentially denied existence of the “Winds” message.
Captain Laurance Safford, however, remained fearless in his revelations. A campaign to “nail” him was soon evidenced among committee Democrats. Congressman John Murphy, a former assistant DA, put him through a wringer of cross-examination. Safford’s personal mail was read aloud before the committee in an effort to humiliate him. Artful polemics made the captain – naval cryptography’s most eminent man – look forgetful on one hand, vindictive toward superiors on the other.
Safford was accused of being the only one to believe in the “Winds” message. In fact, no less than seven officers had acknowledged seeing it before having their memories “helped.” Perhaps the browbeating of Safford helped inspire Colonel Otis Sadtler of the Signal Corps. During the Clausen investigation, Sadtler had recanted his testimony about the message. Now he came forward and corroborated Safford. (Any doubts about the “Winds” affair have since been dispelled. As historian John Toland reported, both Japanese assistant naval attachés posted at the Washington embassy in 1941, Yuzuru Sanematsu and Yoshimori Terai, have verified that the message was transmitted on December 4th, exactly as Safford said.)⁵¹
Sadtler
The Congressional investigation battled on for over six months. In the end, all six Democrats held to the party. One Republican (Congressman Bertrand Gearhart) signed the majority report, reportedly for political reasons,⁵² and a second, Representative Frank Keefe, signed in exchange for modifications in the findings. An 8-2 majority decision was handed down on Pearl Harbor assigning most of the blame to the Hawaiian commanders, some blame to the War and Navy departments, and none at all to Roosevelt and his civilian administration.
That was the last major official inquiry into Japan’s attack. The lie of Kimmel and Short’s guilt was perpetuated and Washington’s secrets sealed. Congress did conduct a “mini-probe” in 1995, at the urging of the families of General Short (died 1949) and Admiral Kimmel (died 1968). The families hoped to restore the ranks of their libeled, demoted fathers. The 1995 probe requested that the Pentagon reinvestigate Pearl Harbor in light of new information. However, on December 1, 1995, Undersecretary of Defense Edwin Dorn concluded his own investigation with these comments: “I cannot conclude that Admiral Kimmel and General Short were victims of unfair official actions and thus I cannot conclude that the official remedy of advancement on the retired list is in order.”⁵³
Collaboration Pays
Those who cooperated with the Pearl Harbor coverup were generously rewarded. As to the men who served with Owen Roberts on the Roberts Commission:

• Though he had been retired since 1936, five months after signing the commission’s report Rear Admiral Reeves was advanced to full admiral for “eminent and conspicuous service in the Spanish-American war,” his gallantry discovered by Roosevelt 44 years after the fact.⁵⁴
• In January 1942, the same month that he signed the commission’s report, Brigadier General McNarney was promoted to major general, and subsequently lieutenant general, full general, and after the war commanding general of American occupation forces in Germany.
• After signing the report, Admiral Standley received the Distinguished Service Medal, and the following month (April 1942) was appointed ambassador to the Soviet Union.
• Retired General Frank McCoy became chairman of the Far Eastern Commission.

As to other major figures in the coverup:

• General Marshall was made America’s first five-star general (no such designation had previously existed). Subsequently he enjoyed stints as Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense.
• Brigadier General Gerow was made a lieutenant general and commander of the 15th U.S. Army.
• Lieutenant Colonel Henry Clausen, who oversaw the inquiry that revamped the findings of the Army Pearl Harbor Board, went on to spend 16 years as the Sovereign Grand Commander of the Scottish Rite in the Southern Jurisdiction, same position Albert Pike held. In other words, he became the highest-ranking Freemason in America. (Given that President Roosevelt was a 33rd degree Freemason, and that Marshall was a Freemason as well, it is perhaps not surprising that Clausen’s report absolved Roosevelt and Marshall of any wrongdoing. One would not be unjustified in wondering if Masonic handshakes and countersigns preceded the launching of the Clausen investigation.)
• Secretary of State Cordell Hull received the 1945 Nobel Peace Prize.

As to men who sought to tell the truth about Pearl Harbor, such as Captain Laurance Safford, Colonel Otis Sadtler, and Colonel Rufus Bratton, their careers did not advance.
Some postscripts
On May 25, 1999, the U.S. Senate approved a resolution that Kimmel and Short had performed their duties “competently and professionally” and that our losses at Pearl Harbor were “not a result of dereliction of duty.” “They were denied vital intelligence that was available in Washington,” said Senator William V. Roth, Jr.  Senator Strom Thurmond called Kimmel and Short “the last victims of Pearl Harbor.”⁵⁵
Former Justice Dept. official Daryl Borgquist discovered from examination of the drafts of Roosevelt’s “Day of Infamy” speech that work on it was begun on December 6, the day before the actual attack. And from Helen E. Hamman, daughter of Don Smith, who directed the Red Cross’s War Service before World War II, we have the following quote which appeared in the June 2, 2001 Washington Times:

Shortly before the attack in 1941, President Roosevelt called him [my father] to the White House for a meeting concerning a top‑secret matter. At this meeting, the president advised my father that his intelligence staff had informed him of a pending attack on Pearl Harbor, by the Japanese. He anticipated many casualties and much loss; he instructed my father to send workers and supplies to a holding area. When he protested to the president, President Roosevelt told him that the American people would never agree to enter the war in Europe unless they were attacked within their own borders. . . . He followed the orders of his president and spent many years contemplating this action, which he considered ethically and morally wrong. I do not know the Kimmel family, therefore would gain nothing by fabricating this situation, however, I do feel the time has come for this conspiracy to be exposed and Admiral Kimmel vindicated of all charges. In this manner perhaps both he and my father may rest in peace.

Pearl Harbor and 9/11
Pearl Harbor begs comparison to 9/11:

• Both events were carefully orchestrated fαℓѕє fℓαgs (although Pearl Harbor differed in that the attack itself was genuinely undertaken by a provoked foreign power);
• Both involved massive death and violent destruction;
• Both resulted in war and transformed American society;
• Both were followed by official commissions that concealed the truth;
• Both inspired “truthers” who were ridiculed by mainstream media because, “after all, our own government would never do that to us.”

History is largely a continuum. This is because most of the world’s wealth is concentrated in a few hands: a satanic oligarchy that has progressively gained control over banking, industry, media and governments. This consolidation of power has enabled the oligarchy to generate geopolitical events which have served its agenda over many decades. For a comprehensive picture of the continuum that Pearl Harbor and 9/11 fit into, see my new book .
Recommended Reading on Pearl Harbor
George Morgenstern, Pearl Harbor: The Story of the Secret War (1947).
Robert A. Theobald, The Final Secret of Pearl Harbor: The Washington Contribution to the Japanese Attack (1954).
Husband E. Kimmel, Admiral Kimmel’s Story (1955).
John Toland, Infamy: Pearl Harbor and Its Aftermath (1982). (my personal favorite)
Robert B. Stinnett, Day of Deceit: The Truth about FDR and Pearl Harbor (2000).
George Victor, The Pearl Harbor Myth: Rethinking the Unthinkable (2007).

NOTES

• Ferdinand Lundberg, America’s Sixty Families (New York: Citadel Press, 1937), 190-201.
• Robert Dalleck, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 250.
• Winston Churchill, The Grand Alliance (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950), 23.
• William Stephenson, A Man Called Intrepid (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), 157.
• George Morgenstern, Pearl Harbor: The Story of the Secret War (New York: Devin-Adair, 1947), 94.
• John Toland, Infamy: Pearl Harbor and Its Aftermath (New York: Doubleday, 1982), 318.
• Deanna Spingola, The Ruling Elite: The Zionist Seizure of World Power (Trafford, 2012), 337.
• Anthony Kubek, How the Far East Was Lost: American Policy and the Creation of Communist China, 1941-1949 (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1963), 3, 25.
• Ibid., xiv.
• Benjamin Gitlow, I Confess (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1940), 485-86, as quoted in Kubek, 24.
• Harold Ickes to Franklin D. Roosevelt, 23 June 1941, https://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/faculty/trachtenberg/methbk/ickes.pdf.
• Robert Stinnett, Day of Deceit: The Truth about FDR and Pearl Harbor (New York: Touchstone, 2000), 8-9, 275.
• Toland, 262.
• George Victor, The Pearl Harbor Myth: Rethinking the Unthinkable (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2007), 257.
• Russell Grenfell, Main Fleet to Singapore (New York: MacMillan, 1952), 107.
• Morgenstern, 116.
• Ibid., 58.
• Stinnett, 18.
• Morgenstern, 63-64.
• Ibid., 261.
• For a summary of transcripts of these and many other relevant intercepts, see Robert A. Theobald, The Final Secret of Pearl Harbor: The Washington Contribution to the Japanese Attack (Old Greenwich, Conn.: Devin-Adair, 1954) 42-74.
• Theobald, 43.
• Victor, 48; Toland, 281-82; 290-91; interview with Thorpe, Sacrifice at Pearl Harbor, produced by Roy Davies (London: BBC, 1989); 41:48-42:56.
• Toland, 317.
• Victor, 35-36, 50-51.
• Toland, 261; see especially the paperback edition (New York: Berkley Books, 1982), which contains an additional postscript, pp. 349-50.
• Martin Dies, “Assassination and Its Aftermath,” American Opinion (April 1964): 33.
• Stinnett, 46.
• Husband E. Kimmel, Admiral Kimmel’s Story (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1955), 65.
• Morgenstern, 77.
• Edwin T. Layton, with Roger Pineau and John Costello, “And I Was There “: Pearl Harbor and Midway – Breaking the Secrets (New York: William Morrow, 1985), 217.
• Morgenstern, 71.
• Percy L. Greaves; Bettina Greaves, ed., Pearl Harbor: The Seeds and Fruits of Infamy (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 2010), 174.
• Kimmel, 51.
• Toland, 282-83, 298.
• Theobald, 26.
• Stinnett, 179.
• Kimmel, 147-48; Toland 33-35.
• Toland, 321.
• Stinnett, 255.
• Toland, 37.
• “Top Secret Report, Army Pearl Harbor Board,” Hearings before the Joint Committee on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack (Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office), 230. https://www.ibiblio.org/pha/pha/army/tsreport.html.
• Kimmel, 165.
• Toland, 141-42.
• Ibid., 135-36.
• Stinnett, 255.
• Greaves, 609.
• Toland, 261.
• Ibid., 197-98.
• Greaves, 764; Toland, 153.
• Toland, Infamy, postscript to paperbound edition, 346-47.
• Toland, 241.
• Edwin Dorn, “Memorandum for the Deputy Secretary of Defense,” stamped Dec. 15, 1995, https://www.ibiblio.org/pha/pha/dorn/dornmemo.html.
• Morgenstern, 399.
• “Walter Short,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Short; Philip Shenon, “Senate Clears Two Pearl Harbor ‘Scapegoats,’” New York Times, May 26, 1999, https://www.nytimes.com/1999/05/26/us/senate-clears-2-pearl-harbor-scapegoats.html.