W. D. Leahy, Admiral,
USN Chief of Staff to the President
"Turn it over, General," Rickabee said. Pickering did so.
TOP SECRET
OFFICE OF THE CHIEF OF STAFF TO THE PRESIDENT
Washington, D.C. 24 September 1942
1st Endorsement
1. The following personnel of my personal staff are engaged in carrying out the mission assigned to the undersigned by the Chief of Staff to The President.
Dillon, Major Homer J USMCR 17724
McCoy, 1st Lt Kenneth R USMCR 489657
Moore, 2nd It John M USMCR 20043
Hart, Sgt George F USMCR 2307887
2. All provisions regarding travel priorities, logistical support and access to classified materiel specified in the basic order apply to the personnel listed hereon.
3. Any questions regarding the listed personnel or their mission will be referred to the undersigned.
Fleming Pickering
Brigadier General, USMCR
TOP SECRET
"Very impressive, Rickabee," Pickering said. "You think this will do it, so far as getting them on airplanes, et cetera?"
Rickabee handed Pickering a typewritten copy of the endorsement and a fountain pen.
"When you sign that endorsement, General," Rickabee said, we'll photograph it, reduce it, and heat-seal the whole thing in plastic, like an ID card. With that White House stationery, it should be a very impressive document. In any event, it's my best shot at getting done what has to be done without people all over Washington asking questions." Pickering signed it and handed it back.
"Thank you," Pickering said. "Considering your overall objections to the whole idea, I'm grateful to you."
"General, your deputy felt obliged to make you aware of his best judgment," Rickabee said. "This Marine hopes you get away with it."
Chapter Thirteen
[One]
SUPREME HEADQUARTERS
SOUTH WEST PACIFIC OCEAN AREA
(FORMERLY, COMMERCE HOTEL)
BRISBANE, AUSTRALIA
27 SEPTEMBER 1942
Five people in Australia were cleared for classified TOP SECRET-MAGIC: the code name assigned to what was then regarded as the most important secret of the war. Navy cryptographers at Pearl Harbor had broken some-but not all-of the codes used by the Imperial General Staff to communicate with the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy.
In theory, of those at SWPOA, only General Douglas MacArthur and his intelligence officer, Brigadier General Charles A. Willoughby, were authorized access to MAGIC messages.
Neither General MacArthur nor General Willoughby, however, had the cryptographic training or the time to decode such messages. Consequently, two others at SWPOA administered the MAGIC program. After Navy cryptographers at Pearl Harbor had decoded and analyzed an intercepted Japanese message, both the message and its analysis were encrypted using an American code (which was restricted to MAGIC) and transmitted to SWPOA. There the analysis and message were decoded and placed before General MacArthur and General Willoughby.
The people who did this were First Lieutenant Hon Song Do, Signal Corps, U.S. Army Reserve, and Mrs. Ellen Feller, a civilian employee of the Navy Department who was accorded the assimilated rank of a lieutenant commander. In addition, Major Edward F. Banning, USMC, Commanding Officer of USMC Special Detachment 14, was cleared for access to MAGIC. Banning knew enough about cryptography to operate the cryptographic machine.
"Pluto" Hon, as he was known, was a very smart young man. He held a Ph.D. in mathematics from MIT and he was a trained cryptographer. That is to say, he was familiar with the esoteric theories of that craft and not just a man who knew how to work the code machine. That wasn't all that made Lieutenant Hon impressive: Hon, whose ancestry was Korean, read and spoke Japanese fluently, and understood Japanese culture better than practically anyone else you were likely to find in the United States Armed Forces. And he was as good an analyst and cryptographer as anyone you were likely to meet at Pearl Harbor. Indeed, he'd been stationed there before being sent to General MacArthur's headquarters.
Another of the best-kept secrets of Supreme Headquarters, SWPOA, was that Hon was a regular at General and Mrs. MacArthur's after-dinner bridge parties. Most often Hon and General MacArthur were partners. The General liked to win.
Of the three people who administered the MAGIC program at SWPOA-Banning, Feller, and Hon-Major Banning was senior. He was of course senior in grade to Lieutenant Hon.
And as a serving officer of equivalent grade, he was senior to Mrs. Feller. All the same, Major Banning was very much aware that the one person of the three who really knew what he was doing was Lieutenant Hon. In other words-and the irony wasn't lost on Banning-the one real expert was the lowest ranking member according to military hierarchy.
This rarely posed problems for him or for Lieutenant Hon.
Or rather, this rarely posed problems between them. The problems were caused by the third member of the team, Mrs. Ellen Feller.
Mrs. Feller rather liked her role as a senior civilian.
Mrs. Feller came to Australia over a long and convoluted route. Her husband was the Reverend Glen T. Feller, of the Christian and Missionary Alliance. Before the war Reverend Feller had brought Jesus to the heathen of China and Japan. As a result of this experience, Mrs. Feller spoke Japanese and Chinese-though not nearly as well as she believed she did.
When the Reverend Feller decided to pass the war years bringing the word of Jesus to Native American Heathen in the American Southwest, Mrs. Feller (who didn't like her husband very much) sought and found employment as an Oriental Languages Translator in the Navy Department in Washington.
When Fleming Pickering was commissioned into the Navy as a captain, he needed a secretary with the necessary clearances, and Mrs. Feller proved acceptable to him. Later, shortly after the fall of Corregidor, Pickering came to Australia. Once there, he realized that Lieutenant Pluto Hon, as brilliant and competent as he was, couldn't handle the tremendous work load on his own. As a result, he dispatched an URGENT radio to Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox requesting immediate reinforcement. Secretary Knox dispatched Pickering's former secretary.
It didn't take Major Ed Banning and Lieutenant Pluto Hon long to learn to detest Mrs. Feller, though of course each man kept his opinion private. The lady was a three-star bitch... no, a four-star bitch. Of that neither had any doubt.
In fact, she was worse than that; she was dangerous-and they had little doubt of that either.
For one thing, as far as Lieutenant Hon was concerned virtually all of Mrs. Feller's analyses of MAGIC intercepts failed to catch the point of the Japanese originals. Hon credited this failure to her remarkably shallow knowledge of Japanese culture and modes of thought. Though she was shallow, that didn't mean she wasn't clever. She was as aware as Hon was that her work was weak. So she simply used his, much of the time. Often, when his own analyses disagreed in one way or another with the ones from Pearl Harbor, she "appropriated" Hon's and passed them off as her own. Thus, the analyses Mrs. Feller brought to the attention of Generals MacArthur and Willoughby were frequently not hers but his. Indeed, she had a General Willoughby convinced that she was not only a very attractive lady, indeed, but a brilliant one.
It didn't take Major Banning long to pick up on Mrs. Feller's dishonesty; his contempt for the lady had its source there. But his contempt went further than that. When Captain Fleming Pickering was in Australia, he showed an outrageous disdain for the proper security of classified documents. He left them lying all over the houses he rented.
In consequence, Banning arranged for agents of the Army's Counterintelligence Corps to sweep Captain Pickering's quarters whenever he left them. Since he didn't trust Mrs. Feller on general principles, he kept the sweep in operation after Captain Pickering's departure.
At the end of his stay in Brisbane, Pickering rented a house near the racetrack called Water Lily Cottage. After Pickering left Australia, Mrs. Feller and Sergeant John Marston Moore occupied the cottage.