Aldrich,
Richard J. The Key to the South: Britain, the United States, and Thailand During the Approach of the Pacific War, 1929-1942. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1993. Aldrich,
Richard J. The Key to the South: Britain, the United States, and Thailand During the Approach of the Pacific War, 1929-1942. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1993.
According to Surveillant 3.2/3, Aldrich "examines the accelerating Western struggle with Japan for control over 'independent' Thailand.... Many clandestine aspects of this struggle are explored for the first time." Kruh, Cryptologia 18.1, notes that "[a]lthough this excellent, meticulously researched study ... does not focus on espionage or other types of intelligence, it contains numerous references to clandestine activities."
Alvarez, David. Secret
Messages: Codebreaking and American Diplomacy 1930-1945. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2000.
According to Erskine, AFIO WIN 7-00 (19 Feb. 2000), this work "focuses on the history of American diplomatic (as opposed to military) codebreaking and its influence on American foreign policy.... It covers in detail cryptanalytic operations against friends, foes and neutrals during WWII (with a chapter on work against Russian traffic)" and "contains a lot on the origin and evolution of Anglo American SIGINT collaboration."
Seamon, Proceedings, Nov. 2000, notes the author's conclusion that for all the success of U.S. cryptanalysis before and during World War II, it seems to have "had little effect" in Washington. "For example, there is almost no evidence that President Franklin Roosevelt paid any attention to it." Kruh, Cryptologia 24.4, calls this an "excellent work." It is "the most complete account to date of the U.S. Army's top-secret Signal Intelligence Service (SIS): its creation, struggles, rapid wartime growth, and its contribution to the war effort."
For Bath, NIPQ 16.3, this is an "insightful and well documented study." This sentiment is shared by Benson, I&NS 15.4, who sees Secret Messages as a "brilliantly written and argued account." To Winn, Parameters, Winter 2001-02, Alvarez' work serves as "an operational history" of the U.S. Army's Signal Intelligence Service (SIS). The author "does not address codebreaking in the military or naval spheres."
Andrew, Christopher.
"Codebreaking and Foreign Offices: The French, British and American
Experience." In The Missing Dimension: Governments and Intelligence
Communities in the Twentieth Century, eds. Christopher Andrew and David Dilks, 33-53. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1984.
Petersen: "Good summary of U.S. Codebreaking 1919-1939."
Angevine, Robert G.
"Gentlemen Do Read Each Other's Mail: American Intelligence in the
Interwar Era." Intelligence and National Security 7, no. 2 (Apr.
1992): 1-29.
The author makes the case that the "decrease in US intelligence activities [in the inter-war period] was neither as drastic nor as random as is commonly thought. Instead, US intelligence policy was a logical result of US national security policy in the interwar period."
Barker, Wayne G., ed.
The History of Codes and Ciphers in the United States during the Period
between the World Wars. 2 vols. Laguna Hills, CA: Aegean, 1979. [http://carlisle-
www.army.mil/usamhi/RefBibs/ intell/crypto.htm]
Borg, Dorothy, and
Shumpei Okamoto, eds. Pearl Harbor as History: Japanese-American Relations,
1931-1941. New York: Columbia University Press, 1973.
Sexton calls this a "[m]assive study of the political, economic and psychological background of the Pacific war."
Burns, Richard D. "Inspection
of the Mandates, 1919-1941." Pacific Historical Review 37 (Nov.
1968): 445-462. [Petersen]
Campbell, Kenneth J.
"Truman Smith: American Military Attaché." Intelligencer
9, no. 3 (Oct. 1998): 16-17.
Smith was military attaché in Berlin from 1935 to 1939. He "sought to alert the American military to the menace of a rapidly rearming Nazi Germany. Although he met incredulity among some American military officers, he continued to report what he perceived."
See Truman Smith, Air Intelligence Activities: Office of the Military Attache, American Embassy, Berlin, Germany -- August 1935-April 1939 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Library Holdings, 1954-1956). See also Robert Hessen, ed., Berlin Alert: The Memoirs and Reports of Truman Smith (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1984).
Challener, Richard
D., ed. United States Military Intelligence, 1917-1927. 30 vols.
New York: Garland, 1977.
Petersen: "Photo reproduction of documents."
Cryptologia. Editors. "From the Archives: Compromise of a Navy
Code." 13, no. 4 (Oct. 1989): 378-381.
Petersen: "1925 document on a lapse of security."
DeFalco, Ralph Lee, III. "Blind to the Sun: U.S. Intelligence Failures Before the War with Japan." International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence 16, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 95-107.
"U.S. intelligence collection [in the interwar period] was better than generally supposed. Despite the numerous obstacles..., much was known about the Imperial Japanese Navy. But American intelligence ... was basically a patchwork effort, and largely uncoordinated.... Personal feuds and personality conflicts in the peacetime armed services undercut the cooperation needed.... [A] certain national and technical arrogance and presumed racial superiority biased both reporting and analysis."
Denniston, Robin. "Yardley
on Yap." Intelligence and National Security 9, no. 1 (Jan. 1994):
112-122.
The case for the contribution of the Black Chamber "can be better made round the Yap question arising in the course of the communications conference and settled within days of the opening of the Washington Conference, rather than the naval ratios, which have hitherto attracted the attention of historians."
Denniston, Robin. "Yardley's
Diplomatic Secrets." Cryptologia 18, no. 2 (Apr. 1994): 81-127.
This is an important piece of the great puzzle represented by Herbert Yardley, and should be read by anyone interested in American history of the interwar period or in cryptologic matters generally. The author focuses on the Yardley who wrote the unpublished manuscript, "Japanese Diplomatic Secrets," completed in 1933 and discovered by David Kahn in 1968.
Denniston views Yardley as "a clever operator and an original man, whose inherent characteristics made him his own worst enemy.... [H]is absence from cryptanalytical progress in America in the 1930s ... stemmed from the flaws in his own character. By publishing The American Black Chamber, with its false claims and dangerous revelations..., he threw away his longterm credibility."
Dorwart, Jeffrey M. "The Roosevelt-Astor Espionage Ring." New York History (Jul. 1981): 307-322.
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