The attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, marked a turning point in the history of U.S. intelligence. Hoover Senior Fellow Amy Zegart explains the crucial lessons learned in Washington in the wake of the surprise attack. Drawing on once top secret communications in the papers of State Department official Stanley Hornbeck at the Library & Archives, Zegart describes how the intelligence failures that led to Pearl Harbor inspired a fundamental restructuring of the US intelligence apparatus.
Featured in this video are documents from the Stanley Hornbeck papers and Poster US 6034 from the Poster Collection housed at the Hoover Institution Library & Archives at Stanford University.
Also featured is Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence (Princeton University Press, 2022) by Amy Zegart.
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The following video includes brief imagery of human violence and of historical language viewers will find offensive. Viewer discretion is advised.
>> Amy Zegart: In the history of US Intelligence, Pearl Harbor was a watershed moment. In fact, you could say the attack on Pearl Harbor changed everything.
On December 7th, 1941, Japan launched a massive surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. It was a devastating attack that killed more than 3,000 Americans, decimated the Pacific Fleet, and destroyed more than 200 aircraft.
After the attack on Pearl Harbor, there was moral outrage. This wasn't just a massive attack. It was a massive surprise attack. There were recriminations, there was tremendous finger pointing, and there was anger. It's a very similar moment in many ways to 911, where there's that shock, that horror, the innocents being killed and this sense that something must be done.
Pearl harbor was a seminal event in US History and in the evolution of American intelligence. It was an extraordinary failure, and it was a failure of coordination. At the time of Pearl Harbor, there were all sorts of signals that Japan was going to attack, and they were gonna attack at Pearl Harbor.
But those signals got lost because there was too much noise, too many other signals that were deceptive or leading intelligence analysts astray. And most importantly, there was no organization that brought all the pieces of intelligence together, no Central Intelligence Agency, and that's what ended up being created after Pearl Harbor.
Ambassador Joseph Grew was an old Japan hand, and he kept sending messages to Washington that the Japanese looked like they were headed toward war. Grew's communications, which we have in the Hoover library and archives, warned about a possible war between Japan and the United States and even speculated at one point that the Japanese would target Pearl Harbor.
So Grew was seeing things on the ground, but we have to remember, there was a lot of other stuff going on around the world. The Americans were concerned mostly about Europe. There were all sorts of other conflicting reports about what the Japanese might or might not do. There were multiple false alarms about Japan preparing to attack Pearl Harbor.
So Grew ended up being right about a lot of things, but there were plenty of other signals and false alarms in the mix. Grew's communications exemplify what we call an intelligence, the signals-to-noise problem. Whenever there is a massive intelligence failure, usually there are signals of the true event before it happens, but they're surrounded in all sorts of noise, deception, and other information that lead analysts to look in the wrong places.
The biggest lesson from Pearl Harbor was the need to coordinate intelligence across the US government in a much more continuous and systematic way. Before Pearl Harbor, there was no peacetime permanent civilian intelligence agency, never. In the history of the United States, we tended to create intelligence capabilities in war and then let them atrophy in peacetime.
That completely changed after Pearl Harbor. The attack on Pearl Harbor eventually gave rise to the Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA. And that was a massive change in American history. Pearl Harbor is affecting US Intelligence agencies today, decades after the event happened. The number one mission of the CIA is preventing another Pearl Harbor, stopping strategic surprise.
I research spies. I research spy agencies and why they have a hard time adapting, even when we know what the threats are. And so my most recent book, Spies, Lies, and Algorithms, is really trying to explain how emerging technologies, from AI to commercial satellites, are transforming every aspect of the intelligence enterprise in the United States.
Today, that includes preventing cyberattacks of great consequence. It means combating nation state actors like China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, and it means preventing terrorist attack as well.
