A Failure of Policy: How U.S. Leaders Neglected to Shape, Lead, and Leverage Intelligence Concerning Japan During the Interwar Period, 1918-1941

This dissertation explores the perspective and performance of U.S. intelligence professionals and the intelligence organizations in which they served concerning Japan during the interwar period, the timespan ranging approximately from the conclusion of World War I in November 1918 through the entry of the United States into World War II in December 1941. Research for this dissertation focused predominantly on official and other primary documents, including U.S. intelligence reports and memoranda; intercepted, decrypted, and translated Japanese cablegrams; personal letters by and concerning U.S. intelligence professionals; and other primary source materials related to intelligence professionals and services available via the U.S. National Archives in College Park, Maryland. Some of these official and other primary documents were available from a number of online repositories providing access to U.S. intelligence documents concerning Japan during the interwar period. The published memoirs of particular key intelligence professionals, who focused particularly on Japan, and other actors, also proved important primary resources to completing this dissertation. Secondary sources augmented and occasionally corroborated the events related in the primary documents and memoirs. U.S. intelligence professionals produced intelligence informing U.S. civilian and military leaders of the increasing competition between U.S. and Japanese national interests and commercial objectives in the Asia-Pacific region, in addition to Japan’s perspective concerning the growing impasse. Particular intelligence professionals, whose exploits and experiences focusing particularly on Japan during the interwar period, provided an important foundation for this dissertation. These intelligence professionals took seriously the increasing threat that Japan posed to U.S. interests. For approximately two decades, they acquired intelligence from Japanese counterparts; defended U.S. interests against Japanese counterintelligence threats; and endeavored to influence their Japanese counterparts, often intelligence professionals and officers in Japan’s armed services, into reducing their concern regarding U.S. objectives in the Asia-Pacific region, particularly regarding Japan. In the end, war arrived in the form of a widespread and shocking series of Japanese attacks and invasions by sea, air, and land, reaching as far east as the waters just off of the California coast and targeting U.S., British, and Dutch military bases and colonies. The most famous aspect of the Pacific War’s start was the multiple air and sea attacks against Pearl Harbor and other U.S. military installations in the Hawaiian Islands, which sank of the U.S. Pacific fleet, claimed 2,403 lives, and caused the United States to declare war against Japan. Although some U.S. civilian and military leaders realized that war was increasingly likely as negotiations with Japan failed to yield solutions to U.S.-Japanese disagreements, the United States remained unprepared for war with Japan. Ultimately, the failure of U.S. leaders to use intelligence resources at their disposal and to empower intelligence collectors, in order to prepare the United States for a war with Japan, constituted a comprehensive leadership failure, rather than an intelligence failure

Breaking Japanese Diplomatic Codes: David Sissons and D Special Section during the Second World War

During the Second World War, Australia maintained a super-secret organisation, the Diplomatic (or `D’) Special Section, dedicated to breaking Japanese diplomatic codes. The Section has remained officially secret as successive Australian Governments have consistently refused to admit that Australia ever intercepted diplomatic communications, even in war-time. This book recounts the history of the Special Section and describes its code-breaking activities. It was a small but very select organisation, whose `technical

The Cryptographic Imagination

Originally published in 1996. In The Cryptographic Imagination, Shawn Rosenheim uses the writings of Edgar Allan Poe to pose a set of questions pertaining to literary genre, cultural modernity, and technology. Rosenheim argues that Poe's cryptographic writing—his essays on cryptography and the short stories that grew out of them—requires that we rethink the relation of poststructural criticism to Poe's texts and, more generally, reconsider the relation of literature to communication. Cryptography serves not only as a template for the language, character, and themes of much of Poe's late fiction (including his creation, the detective story) but also as a "secret history" of literary modernity itself. "Both postwar fiction and literary criticism," the author writes, "are deeply indebted to the rise of cryptography in World War II." Still more surprising, in Rosenheim's view, Poe is not merely a source for such literary instances of cryptography as the codes in Conan Doyle's "The Dancing-Men" or in Jules Verne, but, through his effect on real cryptographers, Poe's writing influenced the outcome of World War II and the development of the Cold War. However unlikely such ideas sound, The Cryptographic Imagination offers compelling evidence that Poe's cryptographic writing clarifies one important avenue by which the twentieth century called itself into being. "The strength of Rosenheim's work extends to a revisionistic understanding of the entirety of literary history (as a repression of cryptography) and then, in a breathtaking shift of register, interlinks Poe's exercises in cryptography with the hyperreality of the CIA, the Cold War, and the Internet. What enables this extensive range of applications is the stipulated tension Rosenheim discerns in the relationship between the forms of the literary imagination and the condition of its mode of production. Cryptography, in this account, names the technology of literary production—the diacritical relationship between decoding and encoding—that the literary imagination dissimulates as hieroglyphics—the hermeneutic relationship between a sign and its content."—Donald E. Pease, Dartmouth Colleg

SECRET LIAISONS- A GROUNDED THEORY STUDY OF UNITED STATES INTERAGENCY INTELLIGENCE COOPERATION

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Decryption Failure Attacks on Post-Quantum Cryptography

This dissertation discusses mainly new cryptanalytical results related to issues of securely implementing the next generation of asymmetric cryptography, or Public-Key Cryptography (PKC).PKC, as it has been deployed until today, depends heavily on the integer factorization and the discrete logarithm problems.Unfortunately, it has been well-known since the mid-90s, that these mathematical problems can be solved due to Peter Shor's algorithm for quantum computers, which achieves the answers in polynomial time.The recently accelerated pace of R&D towards quantum computers, eventually of sufficient size and power to threaten cryptography, has led the crypto research community towards a major shift of focus.A project towards standardization of Post-quantum Cryptography (PQC) was launched by the US-based standardization organization, NIST. PQC is the name given to algorithms designed for running on classical hardware/software whilst being resistant to attacks from quantum computers.PQC is well suited for replacing the current asymmetric schemes.A primary motivation for the project is to guide publicly available research toward the singular goal of finding weaknesses in the proposed next generation of PKC.For public key encryption (PKE) or digital signature (DS) schemes to be considered secure they must be shown to rely heavily on well-known mathematical problems with theoretical proofs of security under established models, such as indistinguishability under chosen ciphertext attack (IND-CCA).Also, they must withstand serious attack attempts by well-renowned cryptographers both concerning theoretical security and the actual software/hardware instantiations.It is well-known that security models, such as IND-CCA, are not designed to capture the intricacies of inner-state leakages.Such leakages are named side-channels, which is currently a major topic of interest in the NIST PQC project.This dissertation focuses on two things, in general:1) how does the low but non-zero probability of decryption failures affect the cryptanalysis of these new PQC candidates?And 2) how might side-channel vulnerabilities inadvertently be introduced when going from theory to the practice of software/hardware implementations?Of main concern are PQC algorithms based on lattice theory and coding theory.The primary contributions are the discovery of novel decryption failure side-channel attacks, improvements on existing attacks, an alternative implementation to a part of a PQC scheme, and some more theoretical cryptanalytical results

The navy as the ultimate guarantor of freedom in 1940?

Merged with duplicate record 10026.1/2211 on 07.20.2017 by CS (TIS)The widely held public view that Britain was saved from invasion during 1940 because the RAF denied the Luftwaffe control of the air is challenged here. Although the heroism of `the few' is not in question, the ability of Fighter Command to act as a serious physical barrier to German plans is refuted with the Luftwaffe holding the initiative between 24 August and 6 September and its ability to bomb Britain by night for months virtually unopposed. Archival and other evidence show that even without adequate fighter cover, the Royal Navy retained considerable potential to resist German air attacks on the Home Fleet and local flotillas. The traditional importance of `seapower' is strongly reasserted with evidence from American newspapers and German admirals revealing preoccupations with the Royal Navy's control of the sea in the summer of 1940. Britain's negotiating position with Germany was therefore stronger than generally assumed. The relative position of Sir Hugh Dowding and Sir Charles Forbes in the British national pantheon is revised with the relatively unknown Admiral Forbes emerging as a forgotten hero. An undue focus on the air campaigns of 1940 only emerged as an Anglo-American media construct after American fears over Axis naval domination began to ease. As Churchill wished to fight-on, he glamorised the exploits of `the few' and allowed the suffering of bombed civilians to be paraded in front of a cautious American public. Churchill's desperation ensured some British technological achievements overwhelmingly connected with the air campaigns were exaggerated in order to `buy' sympathy and vital logistical support. This new narrative of victory distributes the credit more fairly among participants and calls for Battle of Britain monuments to recognise the sailors' contributions, especially those of the Merchant Navy whose human losses far exceeded those of `the few' at this crucial period

HM 32: New Interpretations in Naval History

Selected papers from the twenty-first McMullen Naval History Symposium held at the U.S. Naval Academy, 19–20 September 2019.https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/usnwc-historical-monographs/1031/thumbnail.jp

Constructing Cassandra: The social construction of strategic surprise at the Central Intelligence Agency 1947-2001

This dissertation takes a post-positivist approach to strategic surprise, and examines the identity and internal culture of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) through the lens of social constructivism. It identifies numerous social mechanisms that created and maintained four key, persistent attributes of the CIA’s identity and culture between 1947 and 2001. These features are: 1) homogeneity of personnel; 2) scientism and the reification of a narrow form of ‘reason’; 3) an overwhelming preference for ‘secrets’ over openly-available information; and, 4) a relentless drive for consensus. It then documents the influence of these elements of the CIA’s identity and culture in each phase of the intelligence cycle (Tasking, Collection, Analysis, Production and Dissemination), prior to four strategic surprises: the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Iranian Islamic Revolution of 1979, the collapse of the USSR, and al-Qa’ida’s terrorist attacks on September 11th, 2001. It concludes that these key aspects of the CIA’s identity and culture created the antecedent conditions that allowed these four strategic surprises to occur, and thus prevented the CIA from fulfilling its mandate to ‘prevent another Pearl Harbor’. This conclusion is supported by contrasting the majority views at the CIA prior to these events with the views of ‘Cassandras’ (i.e. individuals inside or outside the Agency who anticipated the approximate course of events based on reasoned threat assessments that differed sharply from the Agency’s, but who were ignored or sidelined). In so doing, this work shifts the burden of proof for explaining strategic surprises back to the characteristics and actions of intelligence producers like the CIA, and away from errors by intelligence consumers like politicians and policymakers. This conclusion also allows this work to posit that understanding strategic surprise as a social construction is logically prior to previously proposed, entirely positivist, attempts to explain or to prevent it