West Wind Clear: Cryptology and the Winds Message Controversy--A Documentary History

4.10. The Winds Execute: The Final Casting

There was a Winds Execute message. But it did not occur, as Captain Safford believed. We have seen that the message and the circumstances surrounding its "intercept" was fabricated. Safford could not recall the text of the illusory message, so he appropriated the three phrases of the Winds instructional message of 19 November and presented them as the authentic text of the Execute message. Of course, this manufactured message left him with a contradiction concerning the coded phrase for the Soviet Union, which he then tried to explain away with a convoluted reading of the original Japanese instructions.

At the same time, his claim that the navy site at Cheltenham, Maryland, intercepted the Execute message ...