The Midway victory also set in motion one of history’s great bureaucratic backstabbings. Joseph Wenger and John Redman, two of the top intelligence officers in Washington, had believed the attack would happen a week later than it did. Joe Rochefort and the team in Pearl Harbor had gotten the date right. To cover their mistake, the Washington bigwigs (who feared Rochefort was building a unit to compete with theirs) let it be known that they were the ones who had pinpointed the correct date, and Pearl Harbor had gotten it wrong. This shocking lie found its way all the way up to Ernest King,
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