of foreign governments in order to read their secret correspondence and
to make their own more secure. The State Department established the
“Black Chamber” in New York City for such a purpose, and this opera-
tion managed to decode or decipher more than 45,000 telegrams from
19 countries over a period of 12 years. Secretary of State Henry Stimp-
son was informed of the operation in 1929, upon which he ordered the
closure of the Black Chamber, claiming that gentlemen do not read each
other’s mail. This assertion has become part of American intelligence
folklore, and intelligence officials today often allude to Stimpson’s
claim as an illustration of the politicians’naiveté and folly. After Stimp-
son closed the Black Chamber, its director, Herbert O. Yardley, wrote a
book revealing the secrets of American code-breaking operations,
prompting the Japanese—who were deemed the main threat to the
United States—to change their codes.
The army and the navy surreptitiously continued interception pro-
grams despite the closing of the State Department’s cryptologic pro-
gram, and they successfully broke the Japanese codes once again. The
U.S. government gave the acronym MAGIC to the intercepted Japanese
material. In 1941, MAGIC provided information that a Japanese attack
was imminent, but did not say where or when. The ensuing Japanese
surprise attack on Pearl Harbor and the failure of U.S. intelligence to
detect it ahead of time shocked the American people and provided the
impetus for the establishment of a centrally organized civilian intelli-
gence organization after the war.
However, before the Japanese attack, the British had persuaded Pres-
ident Franklin D. Roosevelt to establish the Office of the Coordinator of
Information (COI), which was to carry out “when requested by the
President, such supplementary activities as may facilitate the securing
of information important for national security not now available to the
Government.” The president appointed William Donovan to be COI,
whose mandate was to gather intelligence information, but Donovan
considered analytical work only a “cover” for secret operations. In early
1942, soon after America’s entrance into the war, President Roosevelt
established the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and designated
Donovan to head it. Donovan employed the OSS principally for opera-
tions like infiltrations and sabotage, although he also commissioned
some notable analytic efforts that were later published and made avail-
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