Piercing the Fog - Air Force Historical Studies Office

Early Intelligence Organization
potential military value. Italy, France, and England all had far more stringent
secrecy measures than did the United States. The Japanese imposed particularly
severe constraints on the acquisition of military and naval information, and they
limited access strictly to what they wanted foreign representatives to see. One
reason for this militant secrecy may have been their knowledge that in the 1920s
the United States had been intercepting and translating Japanese messages to
their negotiators at the Washington Naval Disarmament Conference. In 1929,
when the new Secretary of State, Henry L. Stimson, learned of this accomplishment,
he reputedly reacted strongly. Such interceptions of foreign governmental
communications, he was said to have decried, were “highly unethical.” In
reaction to the secretary’s order that such activity cease, Herbert 0. Yardley,
former head of the War-State Cipher Bureau, published a book in 1931 that
revealed the extent of U.S. code breaking. The Japanese quickly changed their
cipher system and reacted coldly to American requests for air information.”
While the State Department no longer participated in cryptanalysis, the War
and Navy Departments continued to do so, each on its own. In the War
Department, however, code interception was handled as a communications
function within the Signal Intelligence Service of the Chief Signal Officer, and
was thus outside the purview of the MID and other military intelligence
channel^.^"
Developments concerning accessibility to military information from other
nations occurred at the same time other modifications of relevance to air
intelligence were happening within the United States itself. One of the most
important of these was a shift in thinking about strategic war plans, the results
of which had clear implications for air planning and intelligence. When the
United States began to prepare strategic war plans in 1904, they were color
coded by nation: RED for Great Britain, BLACK for Germany, GREEN for
Mexico, and ORANGE for Japan. The development of Japanese militancy in the
1920s engendered an ongoing review of ORANGE plans and a continuing
estimate that Japan was the most likely future adversary for the United States.
Although a combined British-Japanese (RED-ORANGE) attack on the United
States was not likely, it did assume an important role in American war planning
in the 1930s as a worst-case situation.
The Army Reorganization Act of 1920 had confirmed the U.S. Army’s
traditional mission of defense of the coasts and sea frontiers of the United
States. Several years later the Air Corps Act made a distinction between air
service aviation (observation) and a GHQ Air Force that would probably be
committed against an enemy before the surface forces engaged. Responsibility
for coastal defense and the potential requirement for GHQ Air Force to strike
before ground forces were employed assumed additional significance in 1922.
In that year the Washington Naval Treaty imposed a quota upon American,
British, and Japanese capital ships that would have given the latter two nations
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