Mrs. Motokazu Mori and a Tokyo Newspaper

On December 5, 1941, two days before the Pearl Harbor attack, Robert Shivers, an FBI agent in Honolulu, Hawaii, alerted a military intelligence officer, Colonel George W. Bicknell, to a suspicious incident. The FBI had been watching a local Japanese dentist and his wife, Mr. and Mrs. Motokazu Mori, for some time, suspecting them of passing along information about U.S. military installations on Oahu to the Japanese. Their phones were tapped, and that afternoon Shivers had recorded an ominous conversation between Mrs. Mori and someone at a Tokyo newspaper, Yomiuri Shimbun. Shivers felt that the conversation indicated something important was about to happen, and Bicknell agreed. But when Bicknell approached his superiors, they dismissed his concerns, which history has shown were very well founded. The incident is only one of several cryptic warnings about the impending...