The grimmest part of the World War II was the Holocaust. Following the war, a number of histories, memoirs, and specialized studies about the Holocaust were published. One element that was largely missing, however, was the records of the various Western intelligence agencies, such as the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and Britain's M.I.6. Also absent was the intelligence gathers by wartime Allies communications intelligence (COMINT) agencies. Beginning in the mid-1970's, scholars of the Holocaust who had wanted to utilize the archived material of the wartime code-breaking agencies focused their research on records at the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration and the United Kingdom's Public Record Office. It was not until a number of further significant releases of information and wartime records that the amount of information made available to researchers of the Holocaust dramatically increased. This guide focuses on the two major COMINT agencies that produced intelligence about the war the British GC&CS and the U.S. Army's SIS.

For historians and many members of the informed public, the Japanese attack on Hawaii provoked "the never-ending story." Multiple official investigations and private historical inquiries into the attack and its background have generated enormous stocks of information about both the American and Japanese sides. It may well be that we know as much about December 7, 1941, as we do about any event in the last century, the Kennedy assassination possibly excepted. However, even with this virtual mountain chain of data, information gaps still exist, and many important questions remain under discussion or debate. The discussions and debates are not simply the province of conspiracy buffs. Academics and other researchers interested in World War II have a serious stake in settling the issues of the U.S.-Japan conflict; definite answers to many of the controversies would either confirm or refute theories of the war's origins and its meaning. This assemblage of documents, supplemented by the author's clear guide to their meaning, places the reader, as it were, right in the middle of the behind-the-scenes events and helps the scholar and researcher to follow them closely.

This recent government publication investigates an area often overlooked by historians: the impact of the Holocaust on the Western powers' intelligence-gathering community. A guide for researchers rather than a narrative study, it explains the archival organization of wartime records accumulated by the U.S. Army's Signal Intelligence Service and Britain's Government Code and Cypher School. In addition, it summarizes Holocaust-related information intercepted during the war years and deals at length with the fascinating question of how information about the Holocaust first reached the West.
The guide begins with brief summaries of the history of anti-Semitism in the West and early Nazi policies in Germany. An overview of the Allies' system of gathering communications intelligence follows, along with a list of American and British sources of cryptologic records. A concise review of communications intelligence notes items of particular relevance to the Holocaust's historical narrative, and the book concludes with observations on cryptology and the Holocaust. Numerous photographs illuminate the text.

Did the American Government and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt have advance information about Japan s attack on Pearl Harbor and was this fact later suppressed, either to conceal incompetence or because the President wanted an act of aggression to force America into war with the Axis Powers? For decades, professional and amateur historians alike have scrutinized the voluminous and sometimes contradictory trail of evidence surrounding this historic and tragic event to find an answer.One of the most written-about pieces of this historical puzzle is the so-called West Wind Execute message, Japan s code phrase to advise its diplomats abroad that an attack on America was imminent. In West Wind Clear: Cryptology and the Winds Message Controversy a Documentary History, the U.S. National Security Agency s Center for Cryptologic History has tackled the complex history of this message, when it was sent, and why its existence or non-existence has exercised the imaginations of academics, amateur historians, and conspiracy buffs since the 1940s. Crucially, this book includes many key documents, some never before published, dealing with the voluminous Japanese signals traffic leading up to the Pearl Harbor attack and the timing of signals interception and decoding.The authors state that the main source of continuing debate over the who knew and when question resulted from a number of contradictory statements by a well-respected American cryptographer, Captain Laurence Safford, USN, whose reliability as a witness was undermined during the hearings of the 1946 Joint Congressional Committee investigation of the Pearl Harbor debacle. Despite these findings, the West Wind controversy has persisted in popular accounts that lent credibility to the stories of Safford and Ralph Briggs, a radio operator who many years after the fact claimed to recollect a West Wind Execute message before the attack. West Wind Clear makes a strong and well-documented case against a suppressed warning of war, although perhaps no account of the run-up to the Pearl Harbor debacle may ever lay to rest the many conspiracy theories bruited about since 1941. For anyone interested in the continuing debate, this book is an indispensable research and reference work.