Abstract
Quite a few years ago, prodded by Andy Marshall and some other friends with a close and long-term interest in intelligence, I looked into the question of why we were surprised at Pearl Harbour. I examined the signals available to us that pointed to an attack on Pearl Harbour and the background of ambiguities in which they were embedded. I looked at what we wanted to believe Japanese intentions to be, as well as what these intentions actually turned out to be. I found it useful to use some distinctions familiar to practitioners of the mathematical theory of information, although I did not and do not pretend to travel in the rarefied atmosphere even of the somewhat lower reaches of this theory. I have been, rather, a fellow traveller, with lots of friends.
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Notes
Webster, Sir Charles and Frankland, Noble, History of the Second World War. The Strategic Air Offensive against Germany: 1939–1945, Vol. I: Preparation (London, Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1961), p. 57.
McLachlan, Donald, Room 39: Naval Intelligence in Action. 1939–45, (London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968), pp. 135–48.
Robinson, Richard H., ‘Some Logical Aspects of Nagarjuna’s System’, Philosophy East and West, Vol. VI, No. 4 (January 1957), p. 297.
Merton, Robert K., Social Theory and Social Structure (Glencoe, Ill., The Free Press, 1949), p. 121.
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© 1981 Robert L. Pfaltzgraff, Jr and Uri Ra’anan
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Wohlstetter, R. (1981). Slow Pearl Harbours and the Pleasures of Deception. In: Pfaltzgraff, R.L., Ra’anan, U., Milberg, W. (eds) Intelligence Policy and National Security. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-05828-0_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-05828-0_2
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