The Pearl Harbor fiasco need never have happened

It is sometimes said that intelligence failures are often failures of assessment rather than collection. This is especially so when the intelligence is unwelcome or unfashionable. MI6’s first report of prewar Germany’s secret U-boat building programme was withdrawn from circulation at the request of the Foreign Office, reluctant to alarm Whitehall’s appeasers.

Action Likely in Pacific exemplifies that tendency in spades. Here we have explicit, documented warnings of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor which brought the Americans into the second world war, of the construction of Japanese super-submarines, of the Japanese attack on Nationalist Chinese and American forces, of the subsequent Sino-Soviet coalition, of the Soviet atomic bomb programme and of the Korean war, the latter some five months before Soviet tanks rumbled across the 38th Parallel. All from one man and all ignored by the American government he strove to serve.

The man was Kilsoo Haan, a Japanese–American and a Korean patriot who campaigned tirelessly against Japan’s annexation of his country.