Was Pearl Harbor a false flag operation?

…by Jonas E. Alexis and Mark Dankof

Mark Dankof is the former 36th District Chairman of the Republican Party in King County/Seattle. He was an elected delegate to Texas State Republican Conventions in 1994 and 1996 and entered the United States Senate race in Delaware in 2000 as the nominated candidate of the Constitution Party against Democratic candidate Thomas Carper and Republican incumbent William Roth. Dankof has been disturbing the Zionist party for many years through his podcast (The Ugly Truth) and political activism. 

Jonas E. Alexis: The Pearl Harbor debacle was indeed a catastrophic moment in American history. Numerous historians have written on this issue. Historians Thomas Fleming and Charles A. Beard have written fairly balanced accounts on Roosevelt’s duplicitous maneuvering and the event leading up to World War II.[1] Fleming documents that Roosevelt deliberately lied to the American people in order to get America into a bloody conflict with Japan.

Fleming even points out that Harry Dexter White, a Soviet communist spy in the Roosevelt administration, had a negative influence on the Roosevelt administration. But that’s where Fleming stops. He doesn’t point out that White was indeed a Jewish communist who wanted to essentially destroy Japan during World War II.

John Koster’s Operation Snow: How a Soviet Mole in FDR’s White House Triggered Pearl Harbor goes into great details about how White single-handedly pushed America into a bloody and unnecessary conflict with Japan.[2] M. Stanton Evans’ Stalin’s Secret Agents: The Subversion of Roosevelt’s Government also offers a riveting account of the widespread infiltration of the federal government by Soviet commies.[3]

Robert Stinnett’s Day Of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor provides another facet of this important issue.[4] Stinnett does not mention Harry Dexter White’s covert activity in the Roosevelt administration at all. I contacted him and asked him why the blatant omission. He responded by saying:

“Day of Deceit concerns the United States Navy and its success in breaking the Imperial Japanese Naval military codes of Japan in 1941. My principal source is National Archives and Record Group 38, ‘The Crane Files’ at Archives II, College Park, Maryland, plus extensive interviews with the US Naval military code breakers including the Traffic Chief of Station ‘H’ located on Oahu, Territory of Hawaii. I am the only author of Pearl Harbor non-fiction books who conducted interviews with the USN military code breakers.

“The momentous records of the Crane Files, plus my interviews with USN cryptos did not disclose any information on Mr. White or Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau. I am aware of Mr. White and his association with the Civil War in China and Mr. Morgenthau as a member of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Cabinet. As far as I can determine, neither White or Morgenthau were cleared for the Military Top Secret information involving Japan and were not engaged in military cryptology.”[5]

Stinnett’s point here is understandable. But perhaps that is one weak point in Day of Deceit. To me, Talking about the conflict between Japan and the United States during World War II without mentioning Harry Dexter White is like writing a lengthy book about World War II without mentioning Nazi Germany.

In any event, unpack this multi-layered story for us, Mark Dankof. You were the one who encouraged me to read Operation Snow more than a year ago. Some historians like Samuel Eliot Morison did perpetuate the claim that the Pearl Harbor attack was a “surprise.”[6] Is that true? Unpack this sotry for us and tell us why FDR was a duplicitous man.

Mark Dankof: The event which tells you more about who I am now involved one Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the infamous Japanese Attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. I was not born until 1955, of course, but in the 1960s and 1970s, two different Air Force tours on Oahu with my father enabled me to develop an extreme interest in the subject.

The event that involved my life with Roosevelt’s legacy, and the tragedy of December 7th, 1941, occurred in late 1971 or early 1972, during my sojourn in high school at Iolani School in downtown Honolulu, near the Ala Wai Canal, Diamond Head, and Waikiki Beach.

There was a fantastic American history teacher at Iolani in those days, the late, salty retired American Navy Captain R. C. Sleight. He had been a destroyer skipper in World War II. His politics were Right of Center, but he had plenty of room in the class for anyone who disagreed with his views with their own academic and political perspective, if it was credible.

His sardonic humor, Sea Captain’s expressions, and wit would be ruled out-of-bounds in American education today. His brute frankness which cut through canards, shoddy thinking, and superficial analysis, would be intolerable to the Minions of Political Correctness (Jewish Political Correctness) that control what passes for education in the United States now.

It was my privilege to have one last conversation with him by telephone, when visiting Honolulu for my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary in 1991, 20 years after I left Iolani School as a student.  I shall never forget him. I have thought of him many times in all the years since.

When we got to the subject of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and World War II one morning at Iolani School, Sleight became especially serious. He made it clear that he did not agree with the Establishment Consensus on FDR, or the events that led up to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

His reasons for this statement were not entirely elaborated upon with the class, but I noticed that the bibliography he distributed on these subjects included a section entitled Revisionist History Books on Roosevelt and Pearl Harbor.

When I returned to my home at Hickam AFB in Honolulu on the Pearl Harbor Channel Entrance on Julian Avenue that evening, I began looking at this particular section of the bibliography. The titles told me something about the contents of the books. (I have recently gone back into this fine but dated bibliography, at the suggestion of Dr. Paul Sheldon Foote of Cal State-Fullerton, to add the Hamilton Fish volume entitled “Tragic Deception:  FDR and America’s Involvement in World War II.”

Did President Franklin Delano Roosevelt really know in advance that the American Pacific Fleet was going to be attacked at Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 7^th, 1941?  Was that information deliberately withheld from the American Commanders at Pearl Harbor, Admiral Husband Kimmel and General Walter Short?  If so, why?  The mere thought of something like this alternated in my mind between the preposterous and the monstrous.  Could anyone really seriously entertain this idea who was sane?

I could not sleep in my bedroom at Hickam AFB that night. My night thoughts would not allow my mind a nocturnal peace, despite the Pacific Ocean breeze and the sound of rustling palm trees outside my window. The American Air Force planes that constantly overflew my home on Julian Avenue, headed toward a landing strip at Hickam’s Military Airlift Command (MAC) terminal, also punctuated a sleepless night.

I made a private appointment to see Captain Sleight in his academic office at Iolani School. When I arrived, he pointed to a chair in front of his desk. He had the same demeanor as other military men I had grown up around in the Air Force, when serious conversation was imminent. He told me to sit down.

Sleight asked me why I had come in, what the nature of my concern was. I was just as much to the point. Basically, I indicated I’d like to know what Revisionist History was. And whether or not he thought there was any truth to what I was picking up on in the bibliography he had passed out to the class, regarding President Roosevelt having advance knowledge of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the American Pacific Fleet.

He lit his infamous pipe and looked at me with a seriously piercing examination I had never quite seen before.  His question to me, before proceeding, was one I have heard a thousand times, as the son of a military man, a Lutheran pastor, an activist, and a journalist:

“Are we speaking totally off-the-record here?“

I indicated that we were.

Sleight then proceeded. I will never forget what he said, and how clearly and powerfully he said it, while continuing to pierce me with the penetrating focus he always had when zeroing in on something that was pivotal. What he said was simply this:

“Roosevelt not only knew about the attack in advance, he deliberately provoked it, from October of 1940 onward.  And the United States not only had the capability to intercept Japanese diplomatic communications, as the Tora! Tora! Tora! movie (1971) depicts, but had the network and the active Naval Intelligence operation going on throughout the Pacific, to intercept Japanese military communications. 

“We were listening in constantly on [Admiral] Yamamoto’s radio communications with [Admiral] Nagumo, after Nagumo departed from Hitokappu Bay in Japan in late November of 1941 with the six (6) aircraft carriers which comprised the task force which ended up 200 miles north of here, launching the attack on Pearl, Wheeler, Schofield, Hickam, Shafter, and Kaneohe on December 7^th. If you want to know why, you have to find out about the [Arthur] McCollum memorandum to Roosevelt in October of 1940.  That’s the Rosetta Stone.“

How, I asked, do I find this stuff?  Answer:

“Presently, you won’t. I know about it from classified Naval Intelligence materials I’ve seen, and my conversations with a couple of the guys doing the cryptology and the intercepting in the project which was intercepting Japanese military communications.  That stuff, and the very existence of the program, is still top secret.  Maybe in your lifetime, you’ll be able to see the evidence on paper.”

My last remark was that I had just seen a documentary film on Roosevelt’s speech to the 1940 Democratic National Convention, assuring Americans he would keep their kids out of any European, or foreign war, period.

Captain Sleight cut to the chase:

“Roosevelt was a duplicitous, lying son of a bitch. He lied this country into a war that was totally avoidable. If he’s the model of the American Presidency in the world we live in now, God help us.  The Mythology that surrounds this guy is enough to make you puke.  And don’t ever forget it.“

I never did forget it. And yes, thanks to Robert Stinnett, author of Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor, and his Freedom of Information Act law suit against the Federal Government of the United States, the evidence is now in for all to see.

Stinnett was one of those secret cryptographers in the network that was intercepting Japanese military communications in the Pacific, and the specific conversations between Yamamoto and Nagumo that Captain R. C. Sleight had told me about in Honolulu decades before.  His book includes the infamous McCollum Memorandum of October 1940 and its so-called Eight (8) Point Action Memo“designed to provoke Japan into an overt act of war.”

The complete text of the McCollum Memorandum is presented in Appendix A of the Stinnett book, which provides a photographic copy of what Stinnett discovered personally in Box 6 of a special U. S. Navy collection in RG 38 in the Military Reference Branch of Archives II, January 24, 1995.

Lieutenant Commander Arthur H. McCollum, fluent in Japanese as one who grew up in Japan as the son of American Baptist missionaries there, was the head of the Far East desk of the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI). His office was an element of Station US, a secret American cryptographic center located at the main naval headquarters at 18^th Street and Constitution Avenue N. W., about four blocks from the White House.

As Stinnett freely admits it in Day of Deceit, the Eight (8) Point Action Memo called for “virtually inciting a Japanese attack on American ground, air and naval forces in Hawaii, as well as on British and Dutch colonial outposts in the Pacific region.”

The Eight (8) Points are as follows:

1. Make an arrangement with Britain for the use of British bases in the Pacific, particularly Singapore.
2. Make an arrangement with Holland for the use of base facilities and acquisition of supplies in the Dutch East Indies [now Indonesia].
3. Give all possible aid to the Chinese government of Chiang Kai-shek.
4. Send a division of long-range heavy cruisers to the Orient, Philippines, or Singapore.
5. Send two divisions of submarines to the Orient.
6. Keep the main strength of the U. S. Fleet, now in the Pacific, in the vicinity of the Hawaiian Islands.
7. Insist that the Dutch refuse to grant Japanese demands for undue economic concessions, particularly oil.
8. Completely embargo all trade with Japan, in collaboration with a similar embargo imposed by the British Empire.

It is critical that we understand the exact timing of this Eight (8) Point Action Memo of Lieutenant Commander Arthur McCollum, as Stinnett explains it to us:

 “[Admiral] Richardson’s removal [as CINCPAC, or Commander in Chief Pacific] on February 1^st, 1941, strengthened the position of McCollum.  Only five months earlier, in mid-September 1940, Germany and her Axis partner, Italy, had signed a mutual-assistance alliance with Japan.  The Tripartite Pact committed the three partners to assist each other in the event of an attack on any one of them. 

“McCollum saw the alliance as a golden opportunity. “If Japancould be provoked into committing an overt act of war against the United States, then the Pact’s mutual assistance provisions would kick in.  It was a back-door approach: Germany and Italy would come to Japan’s aid and thus directly involve the United States in the European war.”

Thus, the roadmap for what Stinnett terms “FDR’s Back Door to War” was set. Perhaps the greatest indication of the mindset of both Arthur McCollum and Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the former’s “Action D,” which involved the deliberate deployment of American warships within or adjacent to the territorial waters of Japan.

We now know that FDR personally took charge of secret White House meetings where Action D was discussed and implemented. The President termed these illegal and reckless provocations “pop-up” cruises. These cruises were opposed by Admiral Husband Kimmel (CINCPAC commander) who objected to Action D as “. . . ill-advised and will result in war if we make this move.”  Stinnett notes that:

 “From March through July 1941, White House records show that FDR ignored international law and dispatched naval task groups into Japanese waters on three such pop-up cruises.  One of the most provocative was a sortie into the Bungo Strait southeast of Honshu, the principal access to Japan’s Inland Sea.  The strait separates the home islands of Kyushu and Shikoku, and was a favored operational area for the warships of the Imperial Japanese Navy in 1941.”

Footnote 11 for chapter 2 of Day of Deceit clinches how deeply involved Franklin Roosevelt was in these reckless, illegal, provocative, and un-Constitutional actions embodied in Action D.  Stinnett’s footnote states:

 “Documentation that directly links FDR with McCollum’s Action D–sending US Navy cruisers in provocative moves against Japan includes the following: the first discussion in the White House February 10, 1941. Present were President Roosevelt; Secretary of State, Cordell Hull; Secretary of War, Henry L. Stimson; Secretary of the Navy, Frank Knox; General George Marshall, Army Chief of Staff; and Admiral Harold R. Stark, Chief of Naval Operations.  Stark warned FDR that the cruises “will precipitate hostilities.” PHPT 16-2150 and PHPT 33, p. 1203.  FDR advocated the cruises, says Stark in PHPT 33, p. 1203.”

This article was first published in the fall of 2017.

• [1] Thomas Fleming, The New Dealers’ War: FDR and the War Within World War II (New York: Perseus Books, 2001); Charles Beard, President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, 1941: Appearances and Realities (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948).
• [2] John Koster, Operation Snow: How a Soviet Mole in FDR’s White House Triggered Pearl Harbor (Washington: Regnery Publishing, 2012).
• [3] M. Stanton Evans and Herbert Romerstein, Stalin’s Secret Agents: The Subversion of Roosevelt’s Government (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012).
• [4] Robert Stinnett, Day Of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor (New York: Touchtone, 2000).
• [5] Correspondence on file.
• [6] See for example Samuel Eliot Morison, The Rising Sun in the Pacific 1931 – April 1942 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2001).

Jonas E. Alexis, Senior Editor

Jonas E. Alexis has degrees in mathematics and philosophy. He studied education at the graduate level. His main interests include U.S. foreign policy, the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict, and the history of ideas. He is the author of the book, Kevin MacDonald’s Metaphysical Failure: A Philosophical, Historical, and Moral Critique of Evolutionary Psychology, Sociobiology, and Identity Politics. He teaches mathematics in South Korea.

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