Hartford Van Dyke and the Truth About Pearl Harbor

The opening line to a rare 1975 document entitled The Skeleton in Uncle Sam's Closet reads, "I am Hartford Van Dyke, a Non Union lawyer. I have become sensitive to political situations because my family was involuntarily involved in the treasonous murder of 4000 men¹ at Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941. My relatives knew it was going to happen beforehand."

In a letter to Paranoia dated December 17, 2003, Hartford Van Dyke provided a history of the publication of this important document, writing, "In about October 1967, I asked my father about a vague memory of something I had heard him say about an aircraft being shot down in our neighborhood in Honolulu. As he told me about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, he broke down in grief. I don’t recall ever seeing my father cry before that incident."

Hartford's father, Lyle Hartford Van Dyke, Sr., had promised his uncle, Gerald Mason Van Dyke, that he would not publish anything about the Pearl Harbor incident until after Mason's death. Hartford obeyed his father's wishes for two years, he writes, but the Mi Lai massacre in Vietnam and government lies about it pressed him to publish the truth about Pearl Harbor. In 1970, Hartford mailed a copy of his first work on the Pearl Harbor story to every U.S. senator and congressman - 535 copies in all.

As Hartford tells the story, he included his father in that mailing and phoned him for a criticism of the text. He connected a tape recorder to the telephone line and "got a tape recording for posterity about the real history of the Pearl Harbor attack." He sent out a second print run to Congress, House and Senate, another 535 copies. He also recorded conversations with people his father had mentioned, and sent the cassettes through the mail. He was on a mission to tell the world what really happened at Pearl Harbor. Would the world listen?

In October 1972, Hartford received a copy of the book None Dare Call It Conspiracy by Gary Allen. This book, he states, inspired him to write his own book about Pearl Harbor. Completed in August 1973, he again sent a copy of his final book, The Skeleton in Uncle Sam’s Closet (hereafter, Skeleton), to every US senator and congressman. In 1975, he printed a newspaper edition, which is the edition being quoted here.

Van Dyke's Pearl Harbor Story
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, writes Van Dyke, was instigated by the U.S., Britain and Holland, when they cut off all shipping into and out of Japan, threatening its people with starvation. Hartford's great uncle, Gerald Mason Van Dyke, was an Army Intelligence officer in Hawaii at the time of the attack.

According to Skeleton, Mason Van Dyke had foreknowledge of the Pearl Harbor attack and sent his warning to Washington DC at 2:00 p.m. on December 4, 1941. His message was received in Washington at about 7:00 p.m. (due to the time difference) by Rear Admiral, Paulus Prince Powell. As Van Dyke tells the story, Powell notified Secretary of the Navy, Frank Knox, who then contacted Secretary of War, Henry Stimson. Stimson contacted President Roosevelt, and Roosevelt reported to Naval Intelligence in Washington.

As Skeleton claims, Secretary of the Navy, Frank Knox, wanted to move the Navy out and set up a defense perimeter around the islands. James Vincent Forrestal, Undersecretary of the Navy, also wanted to act defensively. According to Skeleton, what happened next is a claim that has never been made before (to my knowledge). President Roosevelt put Powell, Knox and Forrestal under armed Marine guard until after the Pearl Harbor attack. He sent a message to Lt. Col. Clifford M. Andrew, Intelligence officer at Army Intelligence in Hawaii, which read: "The Japanese will attack, do not prepare defenses, we need the full support of the American Nation in a war time effort by an unprovoked attack upon the Nation."

A Distinguished Gentleman
Van Dyke Sr. testifies in Skeleton that at a political conference about twenty years after the event (date not written), he sat beside "a distinguished gentleman" with whom he began a discussion of his experience in Honolulu during the Pearl Harbor attack. He testifies: "This gentleman acted very interested in what I had to say and started to question me about the details." Finally, he said, "Mr. Van Dyke, do you know who I am?" He pulled out his personal card and said, "I am Admiral Paulus P. Powell, United States Army Retired. Do you know what I did during World War II?"

Powell then divulged that he was the one who had received Mason Van Dyke's message at the Naval Intelligence office in Washington. He asked, "Would you like to know what happened in Washington DC when your uncle's message was received by my office?" Van Dyke Sr. replied that he had not "heard a logical explanation in the last nineteen years."

Van Dyke Sr. claims, "I was utterly amazed at the remarks he made about President Roosevelt being responsible for the Pearl Harbor attack; about Roosevelt making Admiral Kimmel and General Short scapegoats so that he [Roosevelt] would come out looking like a hero." Admiral Powell said, "Mr. Van Dyke, when I die it will be the most pleasant thing that has happened to me because I have died thousands of times, especially when I think of all the officers and enlisted men, many of them my personal friends, being killed, and I could not do a thing to save their lives."

According to Skeleton, Admiral Powell stated, "Here I was on Saturday morning, Washington time. … I grieved; you don't know how I grieved. And yet I couldn't do anything because I was under guard." He revealed, "If I had ever sent a message to Pearl Harbor, I would have been shot on the spot." Powell declared it was one of the most treacherous acts committed by any president. Indeed, he added, "It was one of the most dastardly things any president or king has ever done in the history of the world. And there's no way to keep it from happening again."

On Friday evening at about 5:00 p.m., December 5, Mason Van Dyke warned his nephew that the Japanese would attack, most probably on Sunday. He told him the Intelligence Department in Washington had been warned, but America would stand down. Hartford's father prepared his family for the attack as best he could.

Forty Top Secret File Cabinets
As Hartford writes in Skeleton, in 1949 James Vincent Forrestal's knowledge became a threat to those in power, and he was thrown out of a seventh floor window of a Bethesda hospital. Less well known, on May 15, 1966, Lt. Col. Clifford M. Andrew, who had received FDR's stand down order at Military Intelligence in Hawaii, was murdered in his home in Tigard, Oregon, by a bullet in the back of the head.

Roger A. Stolley worked in a civilian capacity for Clifford Andrew. Stolley testifies in Skeleton that, "A limited number of personnel were directly involved with the events behind the Pearl Harbor incident. Information directly concerned with the attack was labeled TOP SECRET, held in approximately forty file cabinets of the Army Intelligence Office." The file cabinets, which were situated in Honolulu, he writes, was taken out and burned - another claim not made elsewhere (to my knowledge). All personnel with knowledge of them were subject to military court martial if they revealed their contents.

Stolley further testifies that Lt. Col. Clifford Andrew confided in him, on several occasions, part of the contents of those files. Stolley paraphrases Andrew's words, "We knew well in advance that the Japanese were going to attack. It was a lie that we didn't have direct radio communication with Washington DC. Not only did my office have direct radio communications, but so did the territorial government and the FBI." Stolley concludes, "The responsibility for Pearl Harbor rests upon five men: Franklin D. Roosevelt; Gen. George C. Marshall; Harold R. Stark (Chief of Naval Operations); Lt. Col. Kindall J. Fielder, G-2, under General Short; and Clifford M. Andrew." The extract is signed and witnessed by Roger A. Stolley, dated May 25, 1975.

In a 1992 article in the Journal for Historical Review ("Pearl Harbor Attack No Surprise"), Stolley reiterated the information given to him by Clifford Andrew: "We knew well in advance that the Japanese were going to attack. At least nine months before the Japanese attack upon Pearl Harbor, I was assigned to prepare for it." Andrew claimed he was under direct orders of President Roosevelt. He also claimed he was ordered to withhold from commanders in Hawaii vital intelligence relating to the location of the Japanese fleet. Stolley concludes: "Pearl Harbor is an example of how a small group of men in control of government has the power to destroy the life, property and freedom of its citizens."

The Infamous Seaman Z
Many of the first- and second-hand witness statements contained in Skeleton can be supported by sources published decades later, which rely on many more witness testimonies. In fact, while most books on Pearl Harbor purposely avoid the above conclusions, at least two crucial books buttress its assertions.

In his 1986 book, Infamy: Pearl Harbor and its Aftermath, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, John Toland, reveals a letter from Col. Carlton Ketchum, who informed Toland that warnings from various sources began in early fall of 1941. The sources of these warnings included the Dutch Embassy, Dutch Secret Service and British Secret Service. Indeed, Roosevelt had received a warning from "some government agency in Japan, I cannot recall who that was." Ketchum claimed the warnings were passed on to "Secretary Knox, and I think Secretary Stimson," but was sure they were not passed on to commanders in the Pacific. He added, Hoover was told by Roosevelt not to pass on the information to the FBI or to their men stationed in the Pacific. (Toland, 343)

At an October 1990 Institute for Historical Review conference (ihr.org), Toland stated that Stolley's testimony (in "Pearl Harbor Attack No Surprise") rings true. Toland relayed a personal story at this conference. He stated that after writing, The Rising Sun, he received many letters from naval officers who informed him that Roosevelt did know the Japanese were moving in to attack Pearl Harbor. In fact, Toland received so many letters that he began work on Infamy in order to correct the record.

After a two-year search for witnesses, Toland located a Dutch admiral named Ranneft, who in 1941 had been a captain serving as the Dutch naval attaché. Ranneft wrote that he was frequently allowed into the Naval Intelligence Office in San Francisco. On December 3, he went into the office and was informed that they had tracked the locations of two Japanese carriers from their radio emissions. When he returned on the 6^th and asked where the carriers were, a man went up to the chart and "pointed to an area two hundred miles from Pearl Harbor."

As the story goes, Toland discovered the identity of the man who had located the Japanese fleet in the Pacific. This man did not want to disclose his name because he was marrying a fabulously wealthy California woman, so Toland referred to him as "Seaman Z." When Infamy was published in 1986, the Washington Post, true to form, claimed Toland had invented Seaman Z. About a year later, this witness went public and confirmed the information, but the media did not respond. The man's name is revealed as Robert Ogg in a crucial 2001 book, Day of Deceit. While on assignment in San Francisco, Ogg confirms, he began to plot the location of the Japanese fleet on a chart of the North Pacific on or about November 30, 1941.

This claim contradicts the sanctioned version of history, which declares that, "Nagumo's task force sailed from the Kuriles on 26 November and arrived, undetected by the Americans, at a point about 200 miles north of Oahu at 0600 hours (Hawaiian time) on December 7, 1941." (www.worldwar2history.info/Pearl-Harbor/)

The Purple Machine
Hartford Van Dyke has been trying to tell the world about Pearl Harbor for more than 35 years. He was undeniably vindicated in 2001 with Robert Stinnett's bombshell book, Day Of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor, which is based on documents from the National Archives as well as Naval Intelligence files acquired through persistent FOIA requests beginning in 1983. The Navy finally declassified these records in 1994. Day of Deceit provides overwhelming evidence that FDR and about thirty members of his administration knew well in advance that Japanese warships were heading toward Hawaii. In fact, Stinnett uncovered a Naval Intelligence memo, dated October 1940, which outlined eight steps to provoke such an attack.

For the past sixty years, a majority of historians have put forth the deception that the Japanese maintained strict radio silence on their war path to Pearl Harbor. Even as late as 1999, historian Stephen Ambrose echoed the official line in a Wall Street Journal editorial saying, "American intelligence was terrible." Stinnett exposes the transparency of this fabrication, writing, "After sixty years it is clear that the US Navy, the Army, and the press were all wrong. … Overwhelming evidence [from the National Archives] proves that Yamamoto, as well as commanders of the Task Force warships, broke radio silence and that their ships were located by American communication intelligence units." (Stinnett, 162)

The radio stealth exhibited by the Japanese is consistently overstated in official accounts. The truth is, "[t]here was no escaping the electronic surveillance." Beginning on April 22, 1941, Stinnett reveals, "Six US Navy monitor stations from Dutch Harbor, Alaska, Samoa, Hawaii, Corregidor and two from San Francisco followed every move of Nagumo and the Akagi." (Stinnett, 262)

In a deep underground Army/Navy base known as Corregidor, situated west of Manila, Japanese kata kana message codes were intercepted by 63 operators working round the clock in eight-hour shifts. Navy analysts unscrambled the complex codes. "We had the Purple machine and the means to intercept, decode and translate messages," stated one radio operator. "Since we were so near to Japan and its naval operation area we were in an excellent position to intercept radio broadcasts." (Stinnett, 186)

These dispatches should have been sent to Admiral Kimmel, the commander in Hawaii who would have been able to avert, or at least minimize, the tragedy. However, the unscrambled messages never made it to their proper destination in order to save American lives at Pearl Harbor, simply because saving the lives of American servicemen was not the name of the game. The name of the game was more succinctly stated by Lt. Com. Joseph Rochefort when he proclaimed, "It was a pretty cheap price to pay for unifying the country." (Stinnett, 203)

This was likely the mad logic bestowed upon distinguished representatives of the American press when they were invited to a "secret press briefing" at 10:15 a.m. on November 15, 1941, where Gen. George C. Marshall revealed one of America's most vital secrets: the U.S. could read Japan's coded radio messages. Inconceivably, Marshall did not request the presence of General Short or Admiral Kimmel, the two officers in charge of naval operations in Hawaii, nor did he give them a separate briefing.

Instead, according to Marshall’s own papers, the General called seven news correspondents to his office in the Munitions Building in Washington, and forthwith provided an exit opportunity to anyone unwilling to button his lips over the information he was about to reveal. Stinnett, who remains flummoxed as to the reason for the meeting, writes: "Though the function of the press is to publicize, none left. They kept Marshall's secret from their readers, who included many of the officers and sailors manning the warships on Pearl Harbor's Battleship Row." (Stinnett, 158)

Now we find out why the major media has obstructed the truth about Pearl Harbor for the past sixty years. As Stinnett discloses, four news media and three major wire services were "let in on secrets denied to General Short and Admiral Kimmel." No radio news reporters were invited to the secret conference, where the print news media learned that the Japanese would attack some time in the first ten days of December. The select members of the media who were present and who complied with the secrecy rule were: Robert Sherrod, Time; Ernest Lindley, Newsweek; Charles Hurd, New York Times; Bert Andrews, New York Herald Tribune; Lyle Wilson, United Press; Edward Bomar, Associated Press; and Harold Slater, International News Service. (Stinnett, 361) (Note, Simon & Schuster hides this bombshell in the back of the book among copious endnotes in tiny font.)

Stinnett suspects the messages containing this time-sensitive information were intercepted between November 5 and November 13, 1941, in time for the General's unfathomable leak to the media. In 1979, President Jimmy Carter released to the National Archives a small portion of the messages sent between September 3 and December 8, 1941. However, as of 2001 an estimated 143,000 Japanese messages remained "cloaked in American censorship" in spite of many FOIA requests.

In fact, Stinnett reveals that Naval Intelligence had cracked the Japanese codes as early as fall of 1940, fifteen months before the attack. He also reveals that Admiral Nagumo's first radio broadcast was intercepted on April 22, 1941, eight months before the attack. (Stinnett, 362) He concludes, "A systematic plan had been in place long before Pearl Harbor … to arouse the United States from its isolationist position." (Stinnett, 259) This corroborates Clifford Andrew's claim in Skeleton that he had been assigned to "prepare for the attack" at least nine months prior.

Inexplicably, it was not until November 25, according to the diary of Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, that FDR announced to his War Cabinet that "an attack was expected perhaps as soon as next Monday (December 1)." With great American ingenuity, radio interceptors and analysts deciphered an obscure secret language, and assumed their dire warnings would travel up the proper command route; however, Washington war mongers chose to keep it from the one person with an unequivocal need to know: Admiral Kimmel. Indeed, writes Stinnett, "None of the nine Pearl Harbor investigations examined the TESTM dispatches or questioned why their crucial data were cut from Kimmel's intelligence loop." He traces Kimmel's severance from the intelligence loop to "numerous directives issued from Washington." (Stinnett, 186)

On November 25, 1941, a full ten days after the press was secretly briefed, Admiral Kimmel finally received a briefing to the effect that a massive Japanese force of fleet subs and long-range patrol aircraft would reach Hawaii in the beginning of December. Kimmel received explicit orders on November 28 from Admiral Stark stating, "Undertake no offensive action until Japan has committed an overt act." Because he followed these orders he would later take most of the blame.

Stinnett proves that both Pacific Fleet commanders, Admiral Kimmel and Lt. Gen. Walter Short, were purposely kept in the dark and were later blamed for "failing to anticipate" the attack. In 1999, the Senate finally exonerated Kimmel and Short of charges of "dereliction of duty." However, throughout nine official investigations of Pearl Harbor over a span of nearly sixty years, no radio broadcasts were ever brought forward. Even Congressional hearings had not the luxury of these documents.

Two weeks after Pearl Harbor, Stinnett shows, the Navy classified all documents TOP SECRET. All radio operators and cryptographers were gagged on threat of imprisonment and loss of all benefits. Navy Director of Communications, Rear Admiral Leigh Noyes, sent a memo ordering all commanders to "destroy all notes or anything in writing." (Stinnett, 256) This backs up Skeleton's assertion that Army Intelligence in Honolulu burned forty file cabinets full of documents.

In addition, Stinnett tells of a crucial 15-hour time delay where no action was taken. In a 1944 Army investigation, he notes, "Three Army generals determined that the delay began Saturday night, December 6, and ended at 11:00 the next morning." (Stinnett, 235) Coincidentally, John Toland asks in Infamy, "Was it to be believed that the heads of the Army and Navy could not be located on the night before Pearl Harbor? Or that they would later testify over and over that they couldn't remember where they were?" (Toland, 335) According to Toland, the cover-up began the very morning after, when General Marshall said, "Gentlemen, this goes to the grave with us."

Could this curious lapse of time and memory cloak a still tightly fortified secret, described in Skeleton, that any military commanders in Washington who had the presence of mind to alert Hawaii were put under military house arrest from Saturday morning "until after the blitz"? I have been unable to verify this extraordinary claim, but under the circumstances of this vast sixty-year conspiracy and cover-up, it isn't as preposterous as it might seem. Indeed, it might explain the astonishingly persistent suppression of Pearl Harbor documents, which continued up to Janet Reno's administration in 1994 - an invisible wall that Robert Stinnett ran into again and again while researching his book.

When all the (available) facts are studied, the conclusion is palpable: Pearl Harbor was a planned event that opened wide the path leading to the deaths of millions of people. The United States taunted Japan into a World War that led to the first and only nuclear bombing of a sovereign country and its people.

Pearl Harbor is a case study of an archetypal conspiracy and cover-up for those naïve enough to think it can't happen because there are too many people involved. This is how it's done. Here is the model.

The Ghost of Pearl Harbor
Hartford Van Dyke warns prophetically in Skeleton: "Every phase of deception and maneuvering which was used by the US government in order to engineer and guarantee the Japanese 'surprise' attack on Pearl Harbor is still being used in full force by the government today. Present national and international events make this crystal clear. Observe the actions of the president, and the content and control of the United Nations Charter."

As Hartford writes, the Roosevelt administration used the "back door" of Japan to enter a world war. The attack, and Roosevelt's "Day of Infamy" address, "jolted the American people to the proper frame of mind to accept war, commit to it, and make the long sacrifice to pursue its successful conclusion." This scenario should be familiar to us today as George Bush and the government-controlled media refer to the terror attacks of September 11 as the "New Pearl Harbor." Now that we know Pearl Harbor was an experiment in government/military censorship, does this not illuminate the dark shadows surrounding the events of 9/11? Did the Bush administration have clear foreknowledge of the attacks? Was it Bush's "back door" to US occupation of the Middle East? Was the intent of 9/11 to lead us into World War III?

As Hartford writes in Skeleton, "Every year like a ghost, Pearl Harbor intrudes upon us again and haunts us. … The story is repeated because everybody knows the whole story was never told." The truth about Pearl Harbor is a public possession, he declares. Yet, over sixty years later the public still does not have adequate possession of the truth. Thus, the association of 9/11 with the annual phantom of Pearl Harbor puts the 'wink' in hoodwink. Not only are we being controlled, but we're being taunted with that control.

Addendum
After working tirelessly to collect and disseminate the testimony in Skeleton in Uncle Sam's Closet, Hartford began work on another prescient document, completed in May 1979, entitled Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars. This infamous tract begins: "This publication marks the 25th anniversary of the Third World War, called the 'Quiet War,' being conducted using subjective biological warfare, fought with 'silent weapons.' This book contains an introductory description of this war, its strategies, and its weaponry." In this anonymously written document, Hartford explained:

Social engineering (the analysis and automation of a society) requires the correlation of great amounts of constantly changing economic information (data), so a high-speed computerized data-processing system was necessary which could race ahead of the society and predict when society would arrive for capitulation.

In the interest of future world order, peace and tranquility, it was decided to privately wage a quiet war against the American public with an ultimate objective of permanently shifting the natural and social energy (wealth) of the undisciplined and irresponsible many into the hands of the self-disciplined, responsible, and worthy few. In order to implement this objective, it was necessary to create, secure, and apply new weapons, which were a class of weapons so subtle and sophisticated in their principle of operation and public appearance as to earn for themselves the name 'silent weapons.'

Hartford Van Dyke is now in federal prison in Waseca, Minnesota. Many readers of his letters (at www.paranoiamagazine.com) want to know why. Hartford's situation is not easy to comprehend, but I will try to explain as succinctly as possible. (See detailed explanation "The Commercial Principles Governing the Engineering of Public Wealth Rebate Banks, a.k.a. Robin Hood Banks," posted at website.)

Hartford got into trouble by circulating something called Public Wealth Rebate Notes (PWRN's). Hartford insists his issuance of PWRNs was lawful. As he explains, "Public Wealth Rebate Banks engage in the lawful altruistic/charitable disbursement of public malpractice default judgments to the Public, by generating a Commercial Lien Assignment Currency known as Public Wealth Rebate Notes, establishing thereby a lawful method for the Public to lay claim to the real and moveable property of the Lien Debtor party(ies). … A Public Wealth Rebate Note is a Reversed Party Promissory Note, a Demand Note made by a creditor or claimant against a debtor based on the Debtor's promise to pay or to perform."

Hartford further claims that his case was filed in the U.S. District Court - an administrative, not criminal, court. The case was set as "United States of America vs. Hartford Van Dyke." He explains that the term "United States of America" is a legal fiction. Since it's not a flesh and blood person, it can neither accuse nor bring a criminal case. It has to be brought ex rel. (ex relation), he explains, which is the relation of a person telling the story to the prosecuting attorney. The accuser's name must appear under the United States of America, he explains, otherwise the case is a fraud.

It is safe to presume that Hartford Van Dyke is a political prisoner. He's in federal prison in Minnesota for an attitude adjustment. His insistence on abiding by commercial law infuriates insider lawyers and judges. His political knowledge threatens the shadow government. In the winter of 2004, he was placed in solitary confinement in a cold stone cell with a ration of two blankets. He shivered uncontrollably. His weight dropped to 127 pounds. He padded his blankets with a layer of toilet paper. His letters tell of being covered with rashes and boils, which he attributes to toxins placed in his food. His treatment can only be described as torture.

Why is a non-violent individual treated in this manner in the American prison system? How many political prisoners is the United States holding in its torture chambers? Please keep Hartford in your prayers and call attention to his plight in whatever way you can.

Remember Pearl Harbor: Japanese And American Survivors Tell Their Stories

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