The Prime Minister's Secret Agent Read Online Free PDF Page A

Harbor. “And Kita and Yoshikawa also sent these.”
    The officer handed over a packet of postcards, which Yamamoto flipped through.
Greetings from Pearl Harbor!
read one.
Aloha!
exclaimed another.
Wish you were here!
Yamamoto’s lip twitched at the irony. All the postcards had glossy color photographs showing a clear aerial view of Pearl Harbor.
    “I want every pilot to have one of these,” Yamamoto ordered, raising his voice to carry over the wind. “They should all have one taped to the dashboard of their planes.” He looked at the young man. “Tell Kita we’ll need more.”
    The officer saluted, his cheeks flushed from the cold. “Yes, sir!”
    Yamamoto looked through the binoculars again. “I wish the General Staff could see this,” he muttered.
    “Sir?” The young officer hesitated, unsure whether to stay or go.
    “They think that naval engagements are won by whoever has the most battleships. The war in Europe is being fought by theLuftwaffe against the RAF. Ships have nothing to do with it anymore.”
    “They won’t have a chance against our pilots at Pearl Harbor, sir.”
    Yamamoto lowered the binoculars. The young man’s ears turned red; he knew he’d spoken out of turn.
    “I hope our differences may be resolved through diplomacy—peace is always better than war. Always. And anyone ignorant enough to want to go to war with the United States should think about that—especially General Tōjō and his Army hotheads!”
    The young man cringed. “Yes, sir.”
    “It’s the Army leaders who are at fault—a bloodthirsty lot.” The Admiral looked at the young sailor. “Take a message from me to Commander Fuchida when he lands, saying congratulations on a brilliant drill.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    The young man left and once again Yamamoto peered through his binoculars. “Genda’s mad plan is a gamble,” he muttered, watching the planes. “Six aircraft carriers, planes with modified shallow-water torpedoes, an attack on a Sunday at dawn … Refueling, weather … If we achieve a surprise attack …”
    The Admiral shook his head. “No, it is up to the diplomats to prevent all this. They
must
prevent this.”
    What Yamamoto didn’t know was that the reports they were sending from Honolulu to Tokyo were being decoded in Washington, DC. And not just by the Japanese Embassy, but by the Americans, as well. The Americans had broken the Japanese diplomatic code, which they called “Purple.”
    At the U.S. Navy headquarters, an anonymous limestone office building on DC’s National Mall, Lieutenant Commander Alvin D.Kramer was also reading Kita’s reports, sometimes decrypting them faster than the Japanese Embassy did. A tall, thin man with the gaunt face of an ascetic, he was responsible for evaluating the intercepts and distributing them to the Navy’s higher-ups. His dark-blue uniform was spotless, the white of his collar matched the white of his hair, and the gold bars and stars of his epaulets glinted under the office’s fluorescent ceiling lights.
    Kramer’s fiefdom was in the Main Navy and Munitions Buildings on B Street: a large airless, windowless room where men translated intercepted messages and women typed, the clatter of keys punctuated by the occasional shrill ring of one of the many telephones. The scent of ink and correction fluid hung in the stale air. The walls were lined with shelf upon shelf of files containing untranslated Japanese diplomatic decrypts, stacked so high that some could only be accessed by ladder. There just wasn’t enough interest, or enough manpower, to translate all of them as they poured in.
    And so most of the messages from Consul Kita in Honolulu waited to be translated, often for weeks, sometimes for months. Above the heads of the workers was a line of clocks with black hands, ticking away the hours, minutes, and seconds in Tokyo, Washington, London, Moscow, Berlin, and Rome.
    Colonel Rufus Bratton was two minutes late for his meeting with Kramer. In a sea