West Wind Clear: Cryptology and the Winds Message Controversy--A Documentary History

Chapter 3. The Hunt for the Winds Execute Message, 28 November – 7 December 1941

As soon as both translations of the instructions that set up the two Winds Execute messages were available to Army and Navy cryptologists and intelligence officers, they went about tasking monitoring stations to search and intercept them. The search for these messages, more precisely the appearance of the code phrases and words within either a voice or Manual morse Japanese news broadcast, was conducted against a background of increasing diplomatic and political tension between the United States and Japan. While at the time it might have been presumptive to predict the certain outbreak of war between the two nations, in the last weeks of November and into December ...