Piercing the Fog - Air Force Historical Studies Office

Building an Air Intelligence Organization
American airmen before their entry into the war, and those like aerial photore-
connaissance, whose operational applications had received little attention before
the war. New uses for standard peacetime procedures found application in
technical analysis of downed enemy aircraft or captured equipment.
Pearl Harbor and Implications for Air Intelligence
Perhaps no single event in American history has been the subject of as much
analysis and hindsight judgment than has the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
The apparent failure to interpret the content of Japanese diplomatic messages
(MAGIC) seems to make Pearl Harbor a classic case of the failure of intelligence.
But to focus exclusively on MAGIC is to ignore other factors equal to, if
not more important than, the events that led to December 7th. For at its core,
Pearl Harbor was not a failure of intelligence so much as it was a failure of
command. The circumstances surrounding the surprise attack on American
forces at Hawaii and the Philippines offer an almost endless detailing of how
not to prepare for war. In implications for air intelligence, and for planning and
operations, these insights can be considered within two broad categories:
organization (including the structure of intelligence agencies and the collection
and dissemination of intelligence) and evaluation.
Neither the War nor the Navy Department was organized to take advantage
of the information MAGIC and other sources provided. By tradition and practice,
intelligence was a junior, and neglected, branch of the services. Neither service
had a central organization for evaluating such intelligence as was available.
Within the WDGS, the chief of the MID, Brig. Gen. (then Col.) Hayes A.
Kroner, admitted that development of a central evaluation capability was still
in “the planning stage” in 1941 .’ Any coordination that did occur was at best
informal. Although a Joint Intelligence Board had been created in the fall, it had
met only once by December 7, and that was late in November. The lack of a
central analysis capability meant that no group had the responsibility or the time
to reflect on bits of intelligence nor to ponder the possible links among
seemingly disparate fragments of information. Consequently, the several critical
and potentially decisive signals that flowed into infant intelligence analysis
channels were subjected only to fragmented, often isolated, review.
The most obvious instance of this fragmentation was the excessive control
imposed on access to intercepted high-level Japanese message traffic. Rightly
concerned with the consequences of losing this unique look into Japanese
decision making, senior American military leaders imposed rigid controls not
only on the source, but on the information itself. This well-intentioned restraint
was achieved at the expense of exploiting what that information might offer. A
number of people in key positions did not have access to this essential
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