Blackmail

70 AIEA, HAWAII

In the fall of 1941, Takeo Yoshikawa stood in the grassy knolls of Aiea Heights overlooking Pearl Harbor and took notes. Assigned to the Japanese consulate in Honolulu, Yoshikawa left the consulate around 10 a.m. each day, returning to his office after lunch to review the product of his reconnaissance. In mid-November, he answered ninety-seven questions from Japan’s Foreign Ministry, including:

In the early morning hours of Sunday, December 7, 1941, his efforts culminated in a succinct message sent to Vice Admiral Chūichi Nagumo, which he read in the darkened Bridge of the Japanese heavy aircraft carrier Akagi:

In the foothills of Aiea, not far from where Yoshikawa stood while surveying Pearl Harbor, is Camp H. M. Smith, home to the United States Pacific Command. Within Camp Smith, accessing satellite surveillance is the Cruise Missile Support Activity, Pacific, providing precision targeting, route planning, and strike management for Tomahawk cruise missile missions. Today, in the early morning hours, the men and women at their workstations were busy reviewing the product of their reconnaissance.

Red icons had populated their displays, and each mission planner, assigned a small section of Iran’s southern coast, was busy transmitting GPS coordinates. Thirty minutes earlier, three guided missile submarines, each loaded with a full complement of 154 Tomahawk missiles, had launched a fraction of their ordnance. However, the eighty missiles had been launched without destination coordinates. The missiles were circling just above the surface of the Arabian Sea, not far from the Iranian coast, waiting.

The Tomahawk missiles fired by the three guided missile submarines were Block IV Tactical Tomahawks, or TacToms, which could loiter after launch, doing doughnuts in the air while awaiting targeting information. Although Tomahawk missiles were extremely accurate, it took hours for launch orders to be generated, transmitted, and loaded aboard older variants prior to firing. During that time, enemy units could reposition, resulting in the Tomahawk destroying a vacant building or deserted patch of dirt. The TacTom missile overcame this deficit, already launched and loitering nearby while it waited for its final GPS coordinate, reducing the time between target identification and ordnance-on-target from hours to mere minutes.

The Tomahawk mission planners were busy sending coordinates of the Russian missile batteries that had fired on the incoming waves of F/A-18 fighters, which had been used as bait. They worked quickly, hoping each TacTom reached its target before the missile battery repositioned. For those that moved or hadn’t opened fire yet, the mission planners had several hundred more TacToms at their disposal.