Conspiracy theorists have one less reason to suspect the United States’ complicity in allowing Pearl Harbor to happen with the debunking of the so-called ‘winds execute’ message which was broadcast to Japanese diplomats in the U.S. in advance of the attack. The code was a covert instruction which ensured that Japanese diplomats on foreign soil would destroy sensitive documents and codes in preparation for war with the U.S.

Conspiracy wierdos have long contended that the U.S., looking for a reason to enter WWII, knew the Japanese were planning on attacking Pearl Harbor and allowed the Japanese fleet to act as a means of gaining public support for the war.

A Japanese message intercepted and decoded on Nov. 19, 1941, at an American monitoring station on Bainbridge Island, in Washington State, appeared to lay out the “winds execute” situation. If diplomatic relations were “in danger” with one of three countries, a coded phrase would be repeatedas a special weather bulletin twice in the middle and twice at the end of the daily Japanese-language news broadcast.

“East wind rain” would mean the United States; “north wind cloudy,” the Soviet Union; and “west wind clear,” Britain.

In the history, “West Wind Clear,” published by the agency’s Center for Cryptologic History, the authors, Robert J. Hanyok and the late David Mowry, attribute accounts of the message being broadcast to the flawed or fabricated memory of some witnesses, perhaps to deflect culpability from other officials for the United States’ insufficient readiness for war.

A Congressional committee grappled with competing accounts of the “winds execute” message in 1946, by which time the question of whether it had been broadcast had blown into a controversy. The New York Times described it as a “bitter microcosm” of the investigation into American preparedness.

“If there was such a message,” The Times wrote, “the Washington military establishment would have been gravely at fault in not having passed it along” to military commanders in Hawaii. If there was not, then the supporters of those commanders “would have lost an important prop to their case.”