| 26 June 2006 Leaks The rains were horrendous rains yesterday. The moisture the News had been warning us about finally arrived Sunday morning, and dropped sheets of water like the monsoons I remember from Northeast Asia. I liked the monsoon season. I am used to the rain the American Midwest: brusque storms, hurtling from west to east, dump the rain, here and gone. Michigan got a lot of rain, surrounded by the Lakes, but nothing like the implacable sheets that poured down on the tin roofing for weeks. It made me grateful for the covered walkways between the buildings, the function of which I had not understood before the rains came. Yesterday morning it was sheets, and then a break in the afternoon long enough to make me think the storms had passed. I got in the pool, and had a decent swim. The sun peeked out momentarily. The Boys stopped by for dinner, and making the biscuits, stuffing the flank steak and mashing the potatoes occupied my attention for an hour or more. Once they were fed and the dishes done, I sat down with them as they plotted what to do with the evening. The rumble of thunder began once more, and I worried as they rose and departed into the night. I watched the lightning and listened to the rain pouring down, thankful for the floors above me to protect me from leaks. Lightning everywhere, and the drumming of rain against the windows. I hoped the Boys were ok, out there in the flood, and I was thankful the power stayed on at Big Pink until I no longer needed it and surrendered to oblivion. When I rose, the sky was barely gray and grew darker. More storms to come through the day, and the flood warnings have been extended through tomorrow. The litany of disaster began on the radio. The Beltway was closed both ways at the Wilson Bridge. The subway's cofferdams had been penetrated by the inexorable flood, and trains were not running from Metro Center, near the Bus Station where I work, and the Amtrak trains have been halted on the busy corridor to New York. Traffic lights are out, shorted by leaks, and the commuter trains from the wilderness of Virginia are stilled, since the track-bed has been undermined and washed away in some places. The consequences are that people who normally commute by mass transit will not be able to do so, and will be forced back into their cars, to pile up at the traffic lights that do not work. The radio claims the Government will open on time, but “liberal leave” policies will be in place, just like when it snows. I curled up with the electronic version of the New York Times to see if there were other disasters to contemplate. The old Gray Lady did not let me down. Sure enough, there were. Insurgents in Iraq are taking advantage of the cell phones used by the foreign armies and are calling the home numbers to make rude calls. That has got to be unsettling, I thought, a voice barely speaking English on the phone, intruding into what should have been a place of safety. It was a little like the latest revelation of secret government programs in the Times. Leaking secrets seems central to the editorial policy of the paper. The most recent one is a breathless disclosure of a program to use the electronic tracing records of a financial transfer company called SWIFT. Apparently the Treasury spooks had struck a deal with the company to track suspicious transfers from middle east to Europe and the United States. The Times was considering the matter to be an outrage, another assault on privacy already weakened by the NSA monitoring program. I sighed. There is nothing in the world of espionage that is not tinged with ambiguity. A powerful tool for good can often be twisted into an instrument of great evil in the wrong hands. I did not know what to think, since I oppose terrorism and support the Constitution as the only bulwak between me and tyranny. I left the Times and clicked through the long list of messages from my professional association I saw that most were engaged in a back-and-forth discourse on the Constitutional underpinning s of an independent press, and whether the Times had committed an act of patriotism or treason. One note even posed the rhetorical flourish about the consequences of the papers leaking the news that we had broken the German and Japanese codes in World War II? Would it not have contributed to the deaths of thousands, and extended the war for years? It was a relief to find something laughable. Such a disclosure actually had happened, and in bold print on the front page of the Chicago Tribune. The battle of Midway is often considered to be the tipping point in the Pacific War, since before that the Allies had never won a decisive engagement, and thereafter they never lost one. The Japanese attack had been disclosed by brilliant cryptologic work by a small group of officer in a Navy basement at Pearl Harbor. Fleet Admiral Nimitz had based his strategy on their informed guesswork. Knowing the real target, derived by a brilliant ploy by the cryptologists, Nimitz was able to ignore a diversion toward the Aleutian Islands, and concentrate his three remaining carriers on the main Japanese force approaching Midway atoll. There were not newspaper correspondents at Midway, but there had been one at the battle of the Coal Sea a month before. That encounter had been a draw, and the loss of the carrier USS Lexington potentially a strategic disaster. But the Japanese had been stopped. The Tribune had a correspondent on board when the Lady Lex went down. He was a colorful Australian named Stanley Johnston, and he acquitted himself well on the dying ship, joining in the rescue of burned crewmen from the lower decks. He was an athlete and a bona fide WW I hero, and was immensely popular with the ship's company when the survivors were picked up and transferred to other ships for the trip back to America. On the long trip home, he happened to spend time in the quarters of Lexington's former XO, CDR Mort Seligman. There is no suggestion that Seligman leaked anything to Johnston, but doubled up on space, the reporter wrote his account of the Coral Sea battle at a typewriter on Seligman's desk, In the piles of papers was a report with the text surrounded by a blue border- the very same highlighting that is used today to graphically remind the reader that the information is to be protected and not left in a stack of papers at a desk shared by a newshawk. The report contained the order of battle for the Japanese fleet. Johnston knew he was on to something, and copied the list for use when he got to America. That is what reporters do. When he got back to Chicago, he reported to editor Pat Maloney. He was interested in an account of the battle at Coral Sea, and the high drama of the loss of an American carrier. But with the breaking news of the possibly decisive battle at Midway, there was news to be reported. And if there was not actually a corresponded on the scene, there was at least Johnston who could provide texture and context. Maloney asked Johnston to write a side-bar on what Japanese ships might have been in the latest battle. Johnston complied, using the list that he had purloined from CDR Seligman. In the finest tradition of journalism, he would not reveal his source, since that might mean jail time for espionage, but he assured Maloney that the information was of the finest quality. He had even checked it against the same authoritative reference that all of us have used in editions down through the years, the venerable British publication "Jane's Fighting Ships." A list is just a list, and nothing might have resulted unless someone who had actually participated in the battle read it. The problem was the cover story for the article, and the headline that Maloney created for it: “NAVY HAD WORD OF JAP PLAN TO STRIKE AT SEA” Maloney did not clear the story with censors, and to cover Johnston's source, he attributed the information to "reliable sources in naval intelligence," which it was, of course, and slapped on a fake Washington dateline. When the early editions hit the streets, the phone lines to DC hummed with the news. The Navy Department was stunned. If the Japanese read the newspaper, there was only one possible conclusion: their Naval Codes had been compromised. Chief of Naval Operations Earnie King briefed President Roosevelt. FDR was inclined to send in the troops, shut down the paper, and try the publisher for treason. The penalty for that, in wartime, was hanging. But close advisors changed the President's mind. The Navy was concerned that a hotly contested trial would only reveal more sources-and-methods, and further compromise cryptologic operations against the Japanese. A grand jury, whose deliberations were sealed, declined to indict Publisher McCormick, editor Maloney or reporter Johnston. The Japanese did not notice, not even when legendary columnist and radio commentator Walter Winchell accused the Tribune of basing the story on a decoded Japanese message. The Navy held its breath, and although the Japanese periodically changed their code procedure, there was no indication that they knew the Americans had a pretty good grip on how their system worked. The disclosure that the Tribune exploited to sell newspapers was not precisely a leak, since they essentially made up a story to fit a little bit of information they did not really understand. Which brings us around to the war on terror and the New York Times. If Maloney had called the Navy and asked for clarification, would he have cooperated if he was told what the consequences of this story might be, and how many lives it might cost? The Times is quite forthright about what they are doing. They are getting leaks, and they are publishing them. Whether crashing around in the Secret World will have consequences or not, the editors of the Times have made their decision. The Public needs to know. And apparently, so does the enemy. All I can say is that I'm glad the Japanese did not read the Chicago papers, or listen to Walter Winchell. My Dad was a Navy pilot who flew Dauntless Dive-bombers, the very same ones that struck the Japanese carriers at Midway. I'm pleased that he lived. Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra |