Warren Kozak: Pearl Harbor, Iran and North Korea

Mr. Kozak is the author of LeMay: The Life and Wars of General Curtis LeMay (Regnery, 2009).

On Dec. 7, 1941 the United States suffered the worst intelligence failure in its history—before or since—when Japanese planes destroyed much of the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor.

The most astounding aspect of the Pearl Harbor attack was that the U.S. had already broken the Japanese code and was listening to its communications. The U.S. had hundreds of cryptologists and linguists, mostly from the Navy, listening to Japanese wireless communications. But it wasn't enough.

"We knew something was going to happen on Sunday, December 7th at around noon Washington time," Henry Kissinger said at a speech I attended two years ago in New York City. "The problem is that nobody knew that when it's noon in Washington, it's around 7 a.m. in Hawaii."

In other words, despite being on a war footing with Japan and knowing from intercepted communications that the Japanese were planning for a significant event to affect Japanese-U.S. relations that Sunday, our government couldn't conceive of—and didn't defend against—an attack on its largest Pacific naval facility, Pearl Harbor...